Mesoamerican creation accounts
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Mesoamerican creation accounts are the collection of origin beliefs attributed or documented for the various cultures and civilizations of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.
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[edit] Creation of the World
The Maya were a polytheistic people, meaning they believed in many gods and deities. One of which was Kukulkán, whom we know by the Aztec name of Quetzalcoatl. Another was Tepeu. Together they were referred to as the Creators, the Forefathers, or even the Makers. These were the first beings to exist and, therefore, said to be the wisest of the gods. The two gods decided that their legacy needed to be preserved. From this decision, came the attempts to create an earth-bound species that looked like them. The first attempt was man from mud, but Tepeu and Kukulkán found that the mud just crumbled away. Needing an answer to their problem, the two gods summon the others. Their solution is to make man from wood, but he had no soul and quickly lost loyalty to his creator. For this, the gods brought down a black, sinuous rain on man's head. Finally, man was constructed from maize, the Mayans staple and sacred food.
[edit] The Calendar
The Maya calendar, known to most who see it, is a complex system of ceremonial and civil days and months. It is a set of distinct calendars and almanacs all used to determine what day it was (ceremonial and civil), what god ruled that day, and how well the crops might grow for the year. This complex calendar did not originate from the Maya. It most likely came from their "ancestors" the Toltec and it shares an extraordinary resemblance to calendars of the Aztecs, Mixtecs, Zapotecs, and Olmecs. The deity Itzamna is credited to being the creator of the calendar along with creating writing.
The divine or ceremonial calendar had 260 days and was prevalent across Mexico in its use. It is the oldest version of the calendars and is still used today by people living in Oaxaca. This "divine" calendar is called the Tzolk'in by scholars today. The Tzolk'in combined with the civil calendar of 365 days. This calendar is called the Haab. The two together form a synchronized cycle that lasts for exactly 52 years. Both together was called the Calendar Round.
Another type of calendar was used to show the relation of events to dates and was called the Long Count. The Long Count system was based on the number of elapsed days past a mythical starting point. It was capable of referring to any date far into the future, such as the End of the Fifth World, with great accuracy. The whole counting system was founded on a base-20 system, as opposed to our base-10 system today.
In conjunction with the Tzolk'in, the Haab, and the Long Count; the Maya also kept track of lunar cycles and a Venus Cycle to track the phases of the moon and the comings and goings of Venus respectively.
[edit] Time
Along with the Long Count system, the Maya developed an intricate system within which events could be tracked in a linear relationship to one another with respect to the calendar itself. Theortically, the system could be extended to include any point in time simply by adding to the number of higher-order place markers used. By doing so, it generated an ever-increasing sequence of multiples. Each day in the sequence was identified by its Long Count number. Most Mayan Long Count inscriptions confined themselves to only noting the first five coefficients in the system (a b'ak'tun-count), since this was more than enough to express any historical or current date. This impressive calendar system had an equivalent span of approximately 5125 solar years. Even with this immense length of time to work with, inscriptions have shown that the Mayans understood that time progressed well beyond that field of time.
