Happy Maya Tzolk'in!

In case you missed it, Sunday marked the new year 5124 in the Mayan Tzolk’in calendar, according to Sunday’s edition of the Prensa Libre. Mayan priests marked the holy day with fires and ceremony across Guatemala.

The much-revered 260-day Mayan calendar, or Sacred Round, is based on a repeating cycle of numbers 1 to 13, multiplied by 20-day periods, each with different names. Each of the 20 days corresponds to a different god in Mayan mythology, such as “Night House,” “Snake,” “Maize,” “Death,” “Rabbit,” “Jaguar,” etc.

The Tzolk’in, “count of days,” had religious and practical uses. The number 20 comes from the number of fingers and toes; 13 symbolized the number of Upperworld levels of Mayan gods and the number of body joints (ankles, knees, hips, shoulders, elbows, wrists and neck), which, when multiplied together equal 260.

“Once a Maya genius may have recognized that somewhere deep within the calendar system lay the miraculous union,” says Anthony Aveni, in Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks, and Cultures, cited on Wikipedia’s entry on the Tzolk’in, “the magical crossing point of a host of time cycles: 9 moons, 13 times 20, a birth cycle, a planting cycle, a Venus cycle, a sun cycle, an eclipse cycle. The number 260 was tailor made for the Maya.” It also corresponds to the basic agricultural cycle here in the Guatemalan highlands.

Some suggest the 260-day period came from the length of human pregnancy. This is close to the number of days between the first missed menstrual period and birth.

Mayan calendars, science, art, architecture and religion fascinate many people seeking wisdom, peace and beauty in the world today. Search the Internet for things Maya and you’ll find your computer screen runneth over.

The Apostle Paul mentions time in Ephesians 5:15,16, “See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time because the days are evil.” Whether there's a notion of evil in Mayan concepts of time, I don't know.

Moses, acknowledging God’s sovereignty over earthly lives, seems to urge counting days, but for a different reason. He says God see all our “secret sins” and has powerful wrath: “So teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom,” Psalm 90:12.

Paul’s letter to early Greek followers of Jesus in Galatia pointed them to the Son of God, urging them not to serve things “which by nature are not gods. But now after you have known God, or rather are known by God, how is it that you turn again to the weak and beggarly elements, to which you desire again to be in bondage? You observe days and months and seasons and years,” Gal. 4:8-10.

Paul had nothing against calendars. He may have been fascinated by mathematical genius of the Mayan Sacred Round. But he would have abhorred attaching religious significance or superstition it as he did the Greek practice, to gain religious “points,” divine favor or guidance. He called the Galatians to a life of faith in the Son of God’s gracious, substitutionary sacrifice, warning them to “stand fast” in the freedom Christ alone can offer (Gal. 2:16, 5:1,6).