History and Culture as it pertains to the novels

A capsule summary of ancient Mayan history

The ancient Maya, the only native culture to develop a system of writing in the New World, began as an offshoot of the Olmec civilization around 1300 B.C. They grew into an advanced society of scientists, scholars, astronomers and artists who revered the sea and the sky.

They believed that a dark spot in the center of the Milky Way galaxy, barely visible to the naked eye, was the entrance to the underworld. On earth, they believed the underworld could be reached through cenotes, circular holes leading to the subterranean rivers that flowed beneath their lands, which encompassed parts of present-day Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize and El Salvador.

In order to appease the gods of the sky and the dark lords of the underworld, the Maya tossed sacrifices into the cenotes, ranging from pots and jewelry to prisoners of war and even their own children. They also built intricate pyramids and temples that rose high above the rainforest canopy; these were used both as landmarks for travelers, and as astronomical tools for charting the movements of the stars in the night sky.

Maya civilization reached its first apex circa 600-900 A.D. (the Classical period), when the empire consisted of millions of inhabitants gathered in and around hundreds of cities, each ruled by a different king, with these hegemonies loosely connected by a shared religion. Something happened around 1000 A.D., however (war, pestilence, etc.), and the population and technology level fell off sharply.

Over the next few hundred years, the Maya rebuilt a somewhat more bloodthirsty version of the empire (the Post-Classical period); the increased violence was likely due to the growing influence of the warlike Aztecs and Toltecs to the north. Human sacrifice became far more common, and the once-scattered hegemonies were centralized under a single government. During this period, the Maya flourished, accumulating wealth and knowledge beyond imagining and growing to a population of several million.

All this changed in 1519, when Hernando Cortez arrived in the New World.

Believing him to be Hun Hunaphu (First Father), a white-skinned, bearded god who had long been prophesized to return to ‘from the east, across the sea’, the Maya welcomed Cortez and his men into their midst rather than defending their lands. By the time they realized their mistake, it was too late.

Over 90% of the Maya disappeared over the next 50 years. Some were killed by European diseases, while others were slaughtered as part of the Conquistadors’ efforts to ‘convert’ the savages to Christianity. Believing human sacrifice to be the work of the devil, the Spanish missionaries sought to eradicate all traces of Maya religion. As part of this, they executed the scribes and shaman-priests, and collected and burned every scrap of text they could find.

Rediscovering the ancient Maya

Out of the tens of thousands of Maya books (codices) that once existed, only four were saved and smuggled out of Mexico. One of these was called the Dresden Codex, because it resurfaced in the 1600s in Dresden, Germany.

Made from the inner bark of the fig tree, the codex was formed of a long strip of bark approximately 20 feet in length. The bark surface had been painted with limestone as a preservative, folded accordion-style into a booklet, and covered with the beautiful pictographic glyphs the Maya used to represent syllables, words and numbers.

However, although versions of the ancient Mayan language were still spoken in isolated villages (and still are to this day), the key to the Maya glyph writing had perished with the scribes and shaman-priests. It wasn’t until the 1880s that a cryptographer named Ernst Fosterman finally began to decipher the Dresden Codex.

Its translation, along with the subsequent decipherment of thousands of temple inscriptions over the next hundred years, revealed that the Maya worshipped time, which they measured by tracking the paths of the sun and stars.

The Mayan calendars

Almost all of their buildings and rituals were based on astronomical calculations. They believed that time was cyclical, and that the events of a given time period would repeat, at least in essence, during the same period of the next cycle. These cycles were tracked by three interacting and cyclical calendars, the haab, the tzolkin and the Long Count.

The haab was a 365-day solar calendar used for everyday life. It consisted of 18 months of 20 days each, plus a 5-day ‘unlucky’ period at the end of each year (corresponding to the end of December in the Gregorian calendar). The tzolkin was a ceremonial calendar of 260 days that was used for everyday prophesizing, such as determining a child’s name or identifying propitious times for war, marriage, coronations, rituals and etc. The haab and tzolkin were synchronized into a larger, 52-year cycle called the Calendar Round, which was culturally equivalent to our century. Other sacred periods included increments of 20 years called katun and 400-year periods called bakun. These periods were each associated with prophecies that have proven eerily correct.

The Mayan prophecies

The katun prophecies deal with the nature of events occurring within each two-decade period. For example, katun 13 is said to be associated with ‘total collapse, the judgment of the gods, terrible epidemics and governments lost.’ The last two occurrences of katun 13 included the years 1519 (Cortez’s arrival in the New World) and 1776 (the American Revolution).

The last occurrence of katun 5, when the Maya prophets predicted that ‘rulers and subjects will separate, and leaders will be hung,’ saw the American Civil War and the assassination of President Lincoln. This katun is also associated with famine, and its most recent occurrence includes the 1970s, when famine devastated large portions of Ethiopia.

katun 8, which is said to bring ‘cultural breakdown and social problems, demolition and destruction of governments’ corresponded to the fall of the last Maya kingdom in the 1690s, as well as the years of the Vietnam War and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy in the 1960s.

Within each katun there are smaller day-to-day prophecies that have also held true with disturbing regularity. Cortez landed on 1 ahu, which priests over a thousand years earlier had described as ‘a bleak and terrible day.’ The day 6 imox was called a ‘day of large events and great change’, while 6 kiej was considered a ‘day to settle the balance’. These dates correspond, respectively, with September 11, 2001, and the day the U.S. declared war on Afghanistan in retaliation for those terrorist attacks.

On the larger scale, each bakun (400-year period) had its own set of prophecies. We are currently in bakun 13 (1618 to 2012 A.D); more than 2000 years ago, the Maya shaman-priests described this period as the ‘Triumph of Materialism, a time in which mankind turns away from nature and hurts the earth.’

The Long Count Calendar and the end-time

Superimposed over the haab and tzolkein was a spiritual calendar called the Long Count, which began at 5,125 years and counted down to zero, then restarted at 5,125 years and began counting down again.

The Maya believed that mankind would persist for five such cycles, or roughly 26,000 years. The present age, which they called the ‘Age of the Jaguar’ or the ‘Age of Mankind,’ began on August 13, 3114 B.C., which is eerily close to the emergence of writing in Egypt, half a world away from the Maya shaman-priests. This age is scheduled to end on December 21, 2012. On this day, known as the ‘End Times’ or the ‘End of Days,’ the Maya prophesized a ‘great and terrible change, destruction, the loss of all things.’

Some researchers interpret the Doomsday Prophecy as predicting a transition to the next age, a time of huge technological advances and a shift in world thinking to a new and unified context focused on harmony and ecological conservation.

Others, however, believe that the end of the Long Count signals the end of the world. In a horrifying parallel, several lines of scientific evidence suggest that a major, potentially cataclysmic event will rock the earth during the winter solstice of 2012.

Unless a hero- or group of heroes- intervenes…

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- To see a timeline of Mayan history compared to that of the Nightkeepers, click here.