The Mayan Calendar and Astrology

The ancient Maya civilization flourished in Mesoamerica, a region now split up into Central America as well as Mexico, about two thousand years after comparable high civilizations rose in Asia and Europe. As with any other civilizations of the yesteryear, the Maya had advanced astrology since the beginning, which went on to progress over ages. Check out mayan pyramids here.

The Ancient Maya had no tremendous amount of outside influence, but still its folks were able to prosper and achieve the heights of its civilization. Right until five hundred years ago, during the Spanish came and the Aztec reigned as being the prevalent empire, the Mayan calendar was one of the most recognized astrological traditions held in Mesoamerica.

Mayan Astrology

The knowledge of time is central to the Mayan civilization, and thus, its people held on to astrology as a symbolic tradition. More than just being a symbol, the Mayan calendar made way for the folks to have a significantly better grasp of time as well as space. In Mesopotamian astrology, time and space were held in evenly high regard, but both of them are viewed as spatial. The combination of time and space was what the Greeks used to evaluate distances between planets, the meridian and the horizon. In Mesoamerica, nevertheless, the Mayan people evaluated time as a sign, whereby the basic unit is one day. They measured the day by one full rotation of earth, and utilized it as a basis of yet several other signs in the Mayan astrology. The image on the right presents the sky observatory in Chichen Itza

Twenty-day Signs

If today's Western seven-day calendar grouped days in weeks, the Mayan people counted their days in repetitive sets of twenty. This is what both the Maya and Aztec called the 20-day signs. Just like our calendars at this time, the Mesoamerican people also provided symbolic representations for each day. Readers of astrology will tell you that the day you were born holds the key to understanding your personality. In much the same way, the Mayan calendar talks the type of character a person will have based on the day she or he was born. It's just like putting a stamp on a person. The difference is that Mesoamericans adhered to their belief with more veneration as compared to modern astrologers do.

260-day Astrological Calendar

The Mayan calendar fuses the twenty-day signs to generate a thirteen cycle, referred to as tzolkin. The tzolkin is a sacred 260-day astrological calendar that is followed not merely by the Mayan, but the rest of the Mesoamerican civilizations.

For as long as 2000 years, Mesoamerican astrologers devoted themselves to monitoring each 260-day cycle. The tracking of every day was made consistent throughout Mesoamerica; if it was the very first of twenty days in Tenochtitlan, the main city city of Aztec, then it was also the very first of twenty days in isolated territories of Maya. That permitted trade plus economy, and politics and government to prosper more fruitfully.

Ancient Mayan astrology helped all civilizations in Mesoamerica get to the pinnacle of greatness. Even after Maya's downfall five hundred years back, Mesoamerica held securely to the custom and handed down the fantastic history of the Mayan people.