Table Of ContentCALCULATING BRILLIANCE
CALCULATING
BRILLIANCE
An Intellectual History of
Mayan Astronomy at Chich’en Itza
G E R A R D O A L D A N A Y V I L L A L O B O S
The University of Arizona Press
www.uapress.arizona.edu
We respectfully acknowledge the University of Arizona is on the land and territories of Indigenous peoples. Today,
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© 2021 by The Arizona Board of Regents
All rights reserved. Published 2021
ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-4220-8 (hardcover)
Cover design by Leigh McDonald
Cover illustration by Gerardo Aldana
Typeset and designed by Sara Thaxton in 10/14 Warnock Pro with Landa and Blakely
Unless otherwise noted, all maps, tables, diagrams, photographs, and drawings are by the author.
Publication of this book is made possible in part by the proceeds of a permanent endowment created with the assis-
tance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Aldana y Villalobos, Gerardo, author.
Title: Calculating brilliance : an intellectual history of Mayan astronomy at Chich’en Itza / Gerardo Aldana y
Villalobos.
Description: Tucson : University of Arizona Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021021352 | ISBN 9780816542208 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Codex Dresdensis Maya. | Maya astronomy—Mexico—Chichén Itzá Site. | Venus
(Planet)—Observations
Classification: LCC F1435.3.C14 A4285 2021 | DDC 972.81/016—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021352
Printed in the United States of America
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Introduction 3
1. Ernst Förstemann and the Dresden Codex Venus Table 33
2. B’ahlaj Chan K’awiil and Celestial Warfare in the Late Classic Period 79
3. ‹e Books of Chilam Balam and the Quest to Correlate Calendars 115
4. Molecular Biology, Jasaw Chan K’awiil, and Radiocarbon Dating 157
5. Processions and Precontact Time-Space Ritual Activity 181
6. Incensarios and the Public Life of the Venus Table 219
7. Oracular Science 259
8. Discovering K’uk’ul Ek’ Tuyilaj’s Discovery at Chich’en Itza 295
9. Venus, Quetzalcoatl, and the K’uk’ulkan Sodality 335
10. ‹e ‹ird Correction Interval, Mayapán, and Tawiskal Uwoojil 367
11. Science, Astronumerology, and an Abstraction of Capital-ism 397
References 419
Index 435
PREFACE
T
obacco filled the cab, enveloping us as we chain-smoked on our trip across
town. The chassis of the old Toyota pickup danced as we bumped along the
cobblestone streets to a small, relatively new-looking building in the western
part of the village. In 2004, I was in the Mazatec highlands of Oaxaca working on a
small reforestation project led by a local indigenous herbalist, Adriana and her Catholic
priest collaborator. In her own work, Adriana was exploring the “backyard” cultivation
of medicinal plants that traditionally were harvested from the forest. The priest was him-
self of an indigenous background, and I learned in a later discussion that he maintained
inclinations to indigenous ritual ideologies alongside his Catholicism. Our countless
conversations were rich, broad in scope, and lively, generally occurring at breakfast in
the church rectory or in the evening over dinners of tacos in the street. After one long
day of constructing seedbed planters for an elementary school, the priest invited me to
accompany him to a mass he was presiding over at a local church. That invitation put us
in his pickup for the short but corporeally demanding trip.
A local artist had been commissioned to paint the new-looking church in bright
colors, with a mural depicting community life and an idealized reliance on maize agri-
culture. I smiled at the imagery as we entered and walked up the main aisle. The priest
directed me to the pews with a toss of his chin, and he went around back to get dressed
and prepare for the ceremony. Sitting in a pew, I was comfortable, having been raised
by strict Catholic parents who brought their Mexican heritage to engage the major-
ity Euroamerican demographic of the Southern California community we lived in. I
felt a strong familiarity with the church and the practices it housed, but there was
also a visceral difference. In this highland indigenous community, Catholicism had
been appropriated into local lifeways over centuries to take on distinctly Mesoamerican
forms (cf. Carlsen and Prechtel 1991; Clendinnen 1989; Farris 1984). The architecture
viii ✦ Preface
was somewhat modern, but the celebration was very traditional, ossified against the revi-
sions of the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s and newer Mormon and Evangelical
Christian pressures. Most notably local to the Mesoamerican highlands was the heavy
reliance on copal—an incense derived from a tree (Protium copal) found throughout the
Mayan region. This incense had been used ritually long before contact with the Catholic
Church throughout Mesoamerica, and it is recorded in Mayan hieroglyphic inscriptions,
as we will see in later chapters of this book.
The priest used a censer swinging from a long chain to fill the center aisle of the church
with a cloud of fine white smoke, which dissipated into the pews around me and the
other parishioners. The scent of copal was thick in the air as the ceremony in this church
ended, at which point several elders moved in concert to the altar and removed a statue
from its resting place. Dressed with fresh flowers, the statue’s throne was lifted up and
carried down the main aisle and out the front door with great reverence. Parishioners
filed out of the pews to initiate a procession, meeting members of another community
in the street in front of the church. Combining to form one large crowd, community
members accompanied the statue as it was transported through the streets on its way
to a much larger and older church—this one more traditionally colonial in architecture.
As I walked along near the tail end of the procession, taking care not to trip on the
cobblestones, I was reminded vividly of a documentary that I have used repeatedly in my
classes: The Tree of Life, directed by Pacho Lane. This 1976 film records the felling of a
ten-meter tree by a rural community in Puebla for use as the main post in a ritual, which
itself appears to have gone back to Precontact times. Community members raised this
post in front of their highland Catholic Church and watched as four voladores, hanging
from their feet, spiraled from its top to the ground. Lane’s film does a provocative job of
visually tracking the means by which ritual was woven into daily life in that community.
He allows the viewer to follow the construction of elaborate candelabras, which relies
on both the expertise of an individual and the helping hands of apprentices. Children
play with their parents to imitate the roles they would take on as voladores themselves
when reaching the appropriate age, laughing as they learn. I recalled that the voladores
ceremony, too, was accompanied by ritual processions, and as documented in Lane’s
film, these processions served their town’s patron saint. In both cases, in Puebla and in
the procession I was a part of in the Mazatec highlands—and as is familiar to tourists
and anthropologists alike who travel through Mexico and Central America—the move-
ment of a sacred statue from one location to another symbolized far more than mere
transport.
These processions also bring to mind the records left by colonial Europeans, by
sixteenth-century antecedents of my Mazatec highland Catholic priest host, capturing
native religiosity in written words—albeit with a clear intent to subvert them and con-
vert their practitioners to Christianity. Such documents describe the Precontact ritual
processions of ceramic deity effigies—religious statues—around circuits through cities
to and from symbolic structures. These records take me to the scenes painted on ceramic
chocolate-drinking cups excavated from Classic Mayan royal burials. Polychrome pot-
Preface ✦ ix
tery pieces painted by expert scribes depict processions to and from sacred bundles,
which wear masks and sit on altars. As I walked along the cobblestone streets in the
Mazatec procession, I suspected some underlying continuity across these ritual expres-
sions, although I could not readily reduce that continuity to a formula or anthropological
conceptual tool.
What did snag my heavily biased attention was that these colonial and modern rituals
were all timed according to the Gregorian calendar. They represented ritual weavings
of space and time, but during an era in which time itself was prescribed by a calendar
imposed on indigenous communities by the Spanish priests of the sixteenth century.
Ancient Mesoamericans, of course, had different ways of accounting for time before
contact with Europe. As we will review in more detail in the chapters of this book, Mayan
communities across regions and eras used a ritual calendar of 260 days in conjunction
with other cycles, which meant that not all ceremonies had to be tied to the cycle of the
solar year. In fact it is this responsibility of constructing ceremonial time, combined with
the people charged with that responsibility and the processions that facilitated ritual
events, that serves as the primary content of this book.
Over the now several years I’ve worked on it, I’ve tried often to imagine one member
of that intellectual genealogy of ritual timekeepers—the author of the ancient Mayan
hieroglyphic codex at this book’s core. Now known as the “Dresden Codex,” at its time
it was one of many codices dedicated to preserving temporally driven ritual knowledge.
And this author was far from alone as a ritual specialist with vast calendric knowledge.
She or he was part of a community of intellectuals, charged with guiding the moral
bearing of the community in which they lived. Accordingly, all manner of questions
have crossed my mind. What kind of family was this woman from—if indeed she were
a woman? How many brothers or sisters did she have? Was she young when she penned
the pages of my particular interest—adding to the list of genius youth in human history?
Did she walk through cornfields to the edges of the rainforest in her free time, or did she
prefer the crowded walkways of the marketplace, smelling foaming chocolate as it was
poured by vendors, or chatting with relatives trading chili peppers? How similar were her
markets to the ones I had strolled through in Highland Guatemala or in Oaxaca? Was
she actually a he? A bookworm, happiest in a library of stacked screen-fold, bark-paper
books? Or a recluse during the day, only to find joy in staying up all night to observe the
residents of the celestial realm?
We do know something about our author’s intellectual genealogy even if we don’t
have access to his personal experiences. Because he lived in the Mesoamerican Postclas-
sic period (AD 1000 to 1500) and studied the movements of the planet Venus, we can be
sure that some of the scholars from whose work he drew would have come from Chich’en
Itza. At that great Terminal Classic Yucatec city (AD 800 to 1000), as covered deeply
in the later chapters of this book, we will encounter a specific member of our author’s
intellectual genealogy whose image was preserved in stone (figure P.1).
The Caracol Disk is a large carved circular stone that adorned the upper façade of the
structure at Chich’en Itza known as the Caracol, or sometimes as “the Observatory.” On
