“Ritual Bundling” and a 300,000 Year Epoch Calendar: The Maya Legacy
The Maya and Olmec civilizations are sometimes called the “mother culture” for the Western Hemisphere because of the reach and influence they achieved in the New World pre-Columbus. Time science and ritual “bundling” were critical parts of that.
Considered the oldest known Mesoamerican civilization, the Olmec people pre-dated the Maya and lived about 3000 years ago. We don’t even know what they actually would have called themselves — olmec records and cultural insights are largely lost to history, and the title “Olmec” is a word borrowed from a later tribe
We do know, however, that the Olmecs practiced a spiritual, heavily cosmos-oriented form of ritualistic “bundling” — -literally, the wrapping, binding, and/or subsequent unwrapping of sacred stuff. This usually involved heavy use of cords and rope — symbols of a connection between the cosmos and man, a bridge to space. This practice, and indeed the view of a connected, bound, woven world — one bundled by naturally occurring cords and ties — lasted far longer than Olmec culture did.
This brings me to the spiritual descendants of the Olmec civilization: the Maya of what is now southern Mexico and Central America. Mayan civilization advanced to a level only matched in places like Egypt or Rome — Mayan calendar/counting efforts and their skills in math and astronomy both contributed to huge advances for the western Hemisphere. These time and space spiritualists were mathematicians, counters, cosmologists simultaneously — scientist-priests.
Mayan scientists believed the universe had already been destroyed, newly established, and re-earned not once but FOUR times. The history of the cosmos was cyclical and eternal, dipping out of existence only to return when sacrifices from gods brought the world back
The Maya had 4 calendars, including the Long Count, which continues to be the most robust Epoch-esque date format we have — the Long Count measures days since the universe was most recently destroyed and reborn. It can go three hundred THOUSAND years without repeating a value.
(That date is August 11, 3114 BC, if you’re curious. Literally, they saved the date and counted days since last apocalypse, like the world’s most brutal OSHA board. Meanwhile, we fucked up the year part of our dates around 1960, then faced “Y2K” not four decades after).
Anyway. Back to Mesoamérica. A astronomy and math based calendar — one based on cycles of recurring, non linear time bundles — persisted. Many other mesoamerican cultures viewed spacetime the same way, despite substantial differences elsewhere. They also shared the “connected”, woven, cord-centric view of life. A twisted rope in art remained a well known metaphor for the cosmological umbilical cord, lashed between us and God. Aztec art sometimes depicts a twisted intestine, pulled from a newly sacrificed stomach, emerging upwards to the heavens; this offers the same message as other images of twisted ropes or cords —or even snakes — in other mesoamerican art.
The shape of the universe was thought to be a stack of woven fabric. Cotton blankets, then, represented the ultimate in both material means and connection to the heavens— taking time and effort to weave, and culturally considered a valuable form of currency, above gold dust and caco. Kings often made their thrones from expensive, cotton (folded) blankets; to sit on these stacks conjured the image of seating oneself on something akin to the universe itself.
Mesoamerica was different than Europe. Their fabric worldview and obsessive counting was thoroughly unfamiliar to the Europeans. Now, the contemporary north American zeitgeist pushes out most of this pre-hispanic science/spirituality . We don’t think of the world as a network of connecting nodes and strings.
This was the mother culture of our hemisphere. These concepts, whether we share the indigenous blood or not, are our heirloom to ponder and unearth.