Tag: Teotihuacan

Origins of the Olmec/Maya Number Sciences

ABOVE: Stela C from Tres Zapotes roughly rebuilt by Ludovic Celle and based on a drawing by Miguel Covarrubias.

Introduction

The policy of archaeology regarding the Maya and their root progenitor the Olmec (1500 BCE onwards) is that its cultural innovations were made within Mexico alongside an agrarian revolution of the three sisters, namely squash, maize (“corn”), and climbing beans. This relationship of agriculture to civilizing skills then reads like the Neolithic revolution in Mesopotamia after 4000 BCE, where irrigation made the fertile loam able to absorb agricultural innovations from the northern golden triangle leading to writing, trade, city states, religion, arithmetic and so on. However, the idea that the ancient near east or India could have been an influence through ocean conveyors, of currents and trade winds, has never been accepted when proposed. Yet there are good reasons to think this since the astronomy and monumentalism of the pre-Columbian Mexican civilizations has precedents in the ancient near east and other locations.

The timing of the Olmec and the strangeness of immediately building sacred cities with an almost captive population of around 10,000 people, such as La Venta and San Lorenzo, with strong Jaguar imagery and practices, implies a cultic basis was present from the beginning. And it is now looking likely that the ancient near east was similarly prefigured, not just by agriculture but also by know how involving numbers for the building of sacred buildings with astronomical aspects – a tradition that goes back at least to the megalithic of the Atlantic seaboard of Europe.

Since Columbus, the native populations of North and South America have been largely displaced or marginalized. It may be for this reason that the notion that people from an advanced population had initiated the Olmec civilization requires a high, possibly impossible, level of proof. This Isolationism***, perhaps to avoid “adding insult to injury”, is against the Olmec having derived from the Old World, where the historical records are not that much better. The Olmec origin date is around the time of the quite sudden collapse of the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean around 1200 BCE. And the Olmec, Maya and Aztec appear to have had a definite myth concerning someone called Quetzelcoatl bringing civilizing skills to found their culture, though their culture was also seen as arising from a group of seven underground caves.

***The opposite of Diffusionism: Diffusionism is an anthropological school of thought, was an attempt to understand the distribution of culture in terms of the origin of culture traits and their spread from one society to another. Versions of diffusionist thought included the conviction that all cultures originated from one culture center (heliocentric diffusion); the more reasonable view that cultures originated from a limited number of culture centers (culture circles); and finally the notion that each society is influenced by others but that the process of diffusion is both [subject to chance] and arbitrary . read more

Long Counts and The LUNAR Calendar

Having sketched this background, this article will explore a strange coincidence between the calendrical origins of the Megalithic in Brittany, of a 36 lunar month, 3 lunar year calendar, and the 18 month calendar found in the some of the later Olmec Great Counts, called after the Supplementary Glyphs appended to record the local time in an 18 lunar month calendar. The correlation between long counts and the supplementary data has been invaluable since the long counts can be ambiguous between one or more possible dates but we can predict the sun and moon that far back can compare the glyphs with the alternative dates. Counts have also been found that were eclipses of the sun or moon, resolving a given long count date. It is therefoe interesting to compare the two calendars using the geometrical fact that 36 lunar months is both 2 x 18, 4 x 9 and 3 x 12 since 36 is 4 x 3 x3.

The implication is that the megalithic calendar over three years, which was based upon noticing that three solar years was the diagonal of a four square triangle whose side length is three lunar years, appears to have resulted in an Olmec/Maya calendar in which each square is 9 lunar months. As was noted in previous books (2004, 2016, 2018), the range 9 to 18 years contains a single lunar month {12}, the Jupiter synod {13.5}, the Saturn synod {12.8} and the Uranus synod {12.5}. This octave range between 9 and 2 x 9 = 18 was therefore possible to manifest as a Mexican city design (Teotihuacan) and as the Parthenon of Athens. A number of other examples can be found as one of the proposed major models used from the megalithic onwards, as discussed in Sacred Number: Language of the Angels (2021).

A Mexican Triple Square at Teotihuacan

image: Ricardo David Sánchez for Wikipedia 

This article is from June 2012 on my past Matrix of Creation site where it was read 548 times at the time of last backup. It led to another article and so I repeat it here.

The late Hugh Harleston Jr revealed the famous Mexican pyramids at Teotihuacan as being the manifestation of a very advanced megalithic culture, the Olmec as a root culture for New World Megalithism of Mexico and South America (that led to the Maya nearly a millennium later, the Aztec and the Inca) . The Teoti city-building culture started around 200 BCE but it is not exactly clear when the great city started to be built or what it represented. However, Carnac’s megalithic geometries, its day-inch counting within monuments and evident use of circumpolar astronomy suggests important new clues in the interpretation of this sacred city’s design.

So I will open a new thread here to look at the Teotihuacas and the Maya. What better way to start than by immediately identifying the more formal part of the city as following the outline of a triple square, the geometry that in the old world linked the solar year to the eclipse year. Harleston’s web site had a very detailed site plan encoded in special units, called STUs or Hunabs which themselves appear derived from the metre but are also very close to the an Egyptian double royal cubits in length, in its Standard Geographical form (using John Neal’s classification). Harleston’s actual length for the Hunab is exactly the twelfth root of two metres, but that is another story.

Figure 1 Harleston’s time map view of Teotihuacan using his established unit measure of 1.0594 metres, based upon many distances between designed points in the complex. Note that the diagonal of the triple square passes through the two large pyramids that dominate the site, generally called Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramind of the Moon. The triple square has been offset to the North to run through the end of the northerly viewing platforms of the plaza terminating the “solar highway” before the Pyramid of the Moon. [taken from Mayan Treasure]

The triple square is shown defining North with its diagonal but the sides follow the bearing of the “solar highway” (sometimes also known as The Path of the Dead), which is about fifteen and a half degrees east of north rather than the 18.43 degrees of a triple squares diagonal. However the diagonal runs through the two pyramids west of north by about three degrees minus two minutes even though the diagonal was NOT made to point directly North for reasons that may emerge. Instead, the principle axis of the triple square could be pointing to a circumpolar star at maximum eastern elongation and in fact, the behaviour of circumpolar stars could be responsible for the wide range of alignments found in Mexican pyramids over many centuries.

In the case of Teotihuacan, the triple square eems to point at the ex-pole star Thurban around 168 BCE, which could therefore be the date of foundation for the building of the city, since all else proceeds from this alignment of the road. Thurban, in this epoch, was rapidly moving away from the pole due to the precession of the north pole (and equinoxes), from its “reign” as the pole star when the Great Pyramid was built at Giza, whose northern “air shaft” pointed to Thurban. What could be happening is that when megalithism is practiced between 10-20 degrees latitude, the residual circumpolar region is shrunk but can nonetheless form part of the symbolic astronomy towards which megalithic structures are defined.

The long road structure at Teotihuacan pointed directly towards
the maximum elongation of Thurban to the east, in 170 BCE.

Figure 2 The Google Earth view of Teotihucan’s “ceremonial complex”, showing how its triple square pointed towards the circumpolar star Thurban in the epoch 170 BCE. The most significant astronomical reason for using a triple square is to represent the Metonic and Saros periods as a day count so that the pyramids of the Sun and Moon then lie on the metonic period of nineteen solar years whilst the triple square is both oriented to Thurban whilst signifying the controlling periodicity for Eclipses which is nineteen eclipse years. The day length of 0.365 metres would then point to the division of one day into 365 parts, a division quite natural for circumpolar astronomy with 365 days in a year.

At Lochmariaquer, the triple square pointing north was employed to count time in day-inches and even though the units seem different, the subject of such counts are the relations found between the solar and eclipse year. The epitome of this is found in the completing cycle of the sun and moon over nineteen years, called the Metonic period. The Saros period that dominates eclipse phenomena is nineteen eclipse years long, the difference between 19 eclipse years and 19 solar years exactly one lunar year of twelve lunar months.

Figure 3 The north facing triple square at Locmariaquer used the Tumulus d’Er Grah to mark a day-inch count for the Saros period, leaving an implicit metonic period count to the direct north.

Figure 3 The north facing triple square at Locmariaquer used the Tumulus d’Er Grah to mark a day-inch count for the Saros period, leaving an implicit metonic period count to the direct north.

At Locmariaquer (circa. 4500 BCE), its tumulus ended, in similar fashion, one Saros period from the starting point at Er Grah and this can be equated with the length of the triple square at Teotihuacan, making the diagonal equal to the length of the Metonic period of nineteen years. At this scaling, each day would be 365 millimetres long – showing how large megalithic monuments have to be if each millimeter is to represent just the four minutes that it takes for the earth’s rotation to catch up with the sun’s movement in a day, on the ecliptic.

The parallelism between Lochmariaquer and Teotihucan is striking as a mode of astronomical symbolism that naturally makes monuments of different epochs a unique statement within a continuing tradition that is best called Megalithism. Megalithism has its roots in astronomical symbolism and rituals strongly tied to astronomical periods, many of which have been sublimated or dropped within modern calendars.

Chapter 9: Quetzalcoatl’s Brave New World of Harmonic Origins of the World describes some of the number sciences of the Olmec and their derivative New World civilizations.