Mesoamerican creation accounts
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Mesoamerican creation accounts are the collection of creation myths attributed to, or documented for, the various cultures and civilizations of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.
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[edit] The Mayan creation of the world story
The polytheistic Mayan gods included Kukulkán (also known by the Aztec name Quetzalcoatl) and Tepeu. The two were referred to as the Creators, the Forefathers or the Makers. According to the story, the two gods decided to preserve their legacy by creating an Earth-bound species looking like them. The first attempt was man made from mud, but Tepeu and Kukulkán found that the mud crumbled. The two gods summoned the other gods, and together they decided to make man from wood. However, since these men had no soul and soon lost loyalty to the creators, the gods destroyed them by rain. Finally, man was constructed from maize, the Mayans staple and sacred food.
[edit] The Calendar
The Maya calendar 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. Theoretically, 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.
