Mayan Calendar: Foreword to the book Solving the Greatest Mystery of Our Time - THE MAYAN CALENDAR

The Foreword to the book: Solving the Greatest Mystery of Our Time - THE MAYAN CALENDAR

Carl Johan Calleman has a Ph.D. in Physical Biology from the University of Stockholm (1984) and has served as a Senior Researcher of Environmental Health at the University of Washington in Seattle and as an expert on cancer for the World Health Organization. He is recognized as one of the world's foremost experts on the Mayan calendar based on the books Maya-hypotesen (in Swedish, 1994), The Mayan Calendar (Garev, 2001) and Enlightenment (Bear and Co, 2004).

An Enigmatic Culture and Calendar
The Maya are mysterious. This is how this ancient culture has always been portrayed, and in the recent surge of interest a long row of documentaries has presented a picture of a people with practices and a view of the world that is very difficult for modern people to understand. One of the enigmas that have been highlighted is the advancement of their science and above all the calendar. The Maya have often been described as a people obsessed with time, and this obsession was encoded in their enigmatic calendar where the gods seem to be playing an often ominous role.

And yes, to a civilization such as our own which has institutionalised a sharp division line between religion and science – the priest has for instance no authority to speak in matters of science and the university scientist has no authority to speak in matters of religion – a unified world view such as that of the Mayan sages can only appear as mysterious. But maybe it is really we who live today in a civilization that has lost most of its contact with the living cosmos and divine reality that are the mysterious and enigmatic. And maybe it is for this reason that we can not avoid the Maya altogether. It is a people that tends to return - probably until we learn what there is to learn from them, and intuitively many people sense that the solutions to many of the riddles of the human existence will originate from the Maya. Hence we have in the past few decades seen a rise in interest in the Mayan calendar.

It seems that there is something in the very word ”Maya” that tells us of its importance. Maya was the name of the mother of Buddha. It, Maia, was the name of the Roman goddess of spring from which the month of May has gained its name, and, with a small stretch, it was the name of the mother of Jesus, Maria. Almost as if the sound of the word Maya had some universal meaning implanted in the human consciousness so that different cultures have given it the meaning of ”Mother of light”, ”mother of spirit” or ”mother of knowledge”. Maybe not the knowledge itself, but the origin, a deeper female origin, of knowledge. And so I understand the search for the Maya as a search for the origin of knowledge, and have come to understand this search for the origin as a means of retrieving a world view from which our lives may be understood as meaningful, a new world view which is unified and where no division line between science and spirituality exists.

Given that the ancient Maya lived in a universe of Holy Time it seems that the key to retrieving this world view lies in understanding, and in fact solving, the calendar in which their knowledge about holy time was encoded. What it means to solve the riddle of the Mayan calendar will however depend on the particular perspective you have. Obviously, to the ancient Maya there was nothing to solve. What it means to me is to translate the meaning of the Mayan calendar so that it can be understood by other traditions than its own. To make such a translation is to solve the Mayan calendar and this is the goal that I have set for my research

.

What prompted my interest in the Mayan Calendar
Given this background I am at one level surprised when I am asked the question what created my interest in the Mayan calendar. ”How can you not be interested in the Mayan Calendar?” I think silently, and I have sometimes felt that the reason the person is asking is to somehow put a lid on the tremendous explanatory power of the Mayan calendar and the shake-up of anyone’s world view that this results in. My verbal response to the question has usually been to point out that the Mayan, and ancient Mexican, civilization generally was very advanced and significant in the history of our planet. While London was only a village, Tikal and Teotihuacan each had some 100,000 inhabitants or more, meaning that it displays a great arrogance on the part of today’s global culture to simply ignore the contributions these cultures may have made. There is really no reason for us who live today to find the only roots to our science in old Greece.

Yet, most people seem dissatisfied by such an impersonal answer. They sense that there is something more to it. And yes, I have to admit, not everyone of today’s scientists has been going to the jungles of Guatemala in their search for the truth, and especially not those from remote Sweden. I also have to admit that significant contributions to the study of the Mayan calendar have often come from very unlikely sources - oddballs - from a standard academic perspective. In the history of Mayanism there are many examples of this: Förstemann, the librarian from Danzig who by his studies of the Dresden Codex provided the key insights to how the Mayan calendar was structured; Goodman, Mark Twain’s newspaper boss who discovered the correlation between the Long Count and the Gregorian calendar; Knorozov, the Leningrad ethnologist who cracked the Mayan script without ever having visited the Land of the Maya; Waters and Argüelles, historians with esoteric leanings, who have outlined ways of interpreting the Mayan calendar that go way outside of the predominating materialist world view. Even the late Linda Schele, Professor at the University of Texas, seems with her ”redneck” background have viewed herself as an outsider in the world of academics.

And maybe this is the way it has to be. If the understanding of the Mayan calendar is something that implies not just a scientific breakthrough, not just another ”paradigm shift”, but a complete revision of our understanding of the world and what it means to be a human being, then we can not expect those embarking on its study to walk the beaten path, and I suppose this has not been true for myself either. Events of a mystical nature has to guide everyone going into the study of the Maya.

The most extraordinary example in the history of Mayanism of such a mystical event is probably that guiding Knorozov to the translation of the Mayan glyphs and it is worth recounting: During World War II Yuri Knorozov was a young student in Leningrad until he was drafted to the Red Army, where he was part of the units that seized Berlin and set an end to Hitler’s rule in Germany. In the final assault on Berlin he saw the National Library in flames and so rushed in and at random grabbed a book to save it. The book turned out to be a facsimile of the only three surviving Mayan Codices that were known at the time, a book that was hardly available in any book store in Stalin’s Russia. Back in Russia he was encouraged to take on breaking the Maya code, the Mayan script, and seven years later he published the solution in a Russian journal of linguistics. That it took some thirty additional years for this solution to be accepted in the West is a different matter. I can only imagine that he must have himself have decided that grabbing this very book was a mystical event that was pointing out his mission in life.

So there seems to be an invisible universe providing guidance for the course of events although most scientists will not readily talk about such matters. Nothing of such an extraordinary character has guided my own search for the Mystery of the Maya, but then again there may not have been any need for it to get me going. I have been naturally attracted and free to travel. My first contact with Mexico was in 1971 as I crossed the border from California into the Sonoran desert. I felt the urge to go further South to see the pyramids. The quality of our car in those freewheeling days however hardly encouraged such a trip and so we turned back to the US. But the attraction to Mexico stayed with me. Being raised in an intellectual European environment and quite familiar with its own history the very fact that those pyramids existed in the New World posed an enigma to me.

And it is truly an enigma although most people do not stop to think about it: If both continents have been inhabited by human beings for some 30,000 years or so, how come they independently started to develop civilizations only in the most recent 5000 years and seem to have done so in parallel. At this first crossing of the border into Mexico I only went deep enough to ponder the enigma, and as I went back to Sweden and took up training as a graduate student in Toxicology other things came to the forefront of my mind.

But something urged me to go back and so I decided to learn some Spanish and stay in a Mexican family in November of 1979, following which a third class train took me down to Mérida, the Yucatàn and Guatemala. And something happened to me there. I fell in love with the Mayan people, who with small little signs seemed to tell me that I was somehow special there. They seemed to have seen something in me I did not see myself. So I went back to Sweden with a happy inner knowledge that I had a purpose in life, although I yet did not know what it was and so I clad my room in beautiful Mayan textiles to keep this sense of purpose alive.

But also this second, much more extensive, contact with Mexico posed an enigma. As a biologist and medical scientist I was trained to think that life was an accident, but how come then I got this sense that life had a purpose given to me by something greater than myself? This seemed like a contradiction that demanded a resolution. Especially as I moved to take up work in Seattle in the beginning of 1986 experiences of remarkable synchronicities became the rule rather than the exception in this heyday of the American New Age movement. And the very fact that the relatively widespread celebration of the Harmonic Convergence had been based on Mayan calendrics - the days 1 Imix and 2 Ik in the Classical tzolkin count - made me realize that I was not the only one being inspired by the Maya.

An empirical approach to solving the Mayan Calendar
Several spiritual pilgrimages to the land of the Maya then entrenched me deeper in their way of thinking. But it was only as I moved back to Sweden in 1994 that I started to work with their calendar full time and set as my goal to solve it, to somehow translate its meaning to modern people. And there was a reason that I went back to do this work. The geo-spiritual placement of Sweden was very favorable for it. And maybe, there has also in this sense been a reason for me to receive a thorough scientific training. This has given me a truly deep appreciation for the scientific method and its insistence on accurate facts and logic. I am not implying that my interpretations can not be questioned, only that throughout, this book is based on facts and datings accepted by today’s science. Thus, civilizations and worlds for whose existence there is no proof are, in contrast to in most current esoteric attempts of unifying science and spirituality, not part of the picture presented here.

Yet, despite this empirical approach this book is not meant primarily for scientists and so I have avoided making large number of references or presenting long complicated arguments to back up my reasonings. Ultimately the reader will thus have to base her judgement as to whether there is any truth to my ideas on a more or less intuitive reading. Most facts can however easily be verified in a recent standard encyclopedia. A more thorough presentation, with references and detailed reasonings and descriptions of all the various creation cycles involved has instead been given in an as yet unpublished manuscript of mine, The Theory of Everything – the Evolution of Consciousness and the Existence of God proved by the time science of the Maya, that I hope one day will reach the public.

Since unfortunately Mayan calendrics are only rarely taught in modern school I have to assume that the overwhelming majority of readers are as yet unfamiliar with it. For this reason, and not to unnecessarily burden the presentation with too much detail, I have placed the discussion of the tzolkin and some articles regarding hotly debated areas in the Appendices. It is my hope that eventually most people will enter the reach treasure of Mayan calendrics, apply it to their own lives and use the Mayan calendar at least as a complement to our present. Yet, the bulk of the book is intended to present an overall perspective on its meaning, rather than calendrical detail.

Finally I would like to say that I have never seen it as my mission to speak the Mayan view of things or to bring the Mayan Message to Humanity. I feel the Maya are best equipped to do this themselves. For my own part I have in this book sought to extract what is universal in the Mayan calendar. So this is not a book by the Maya or a book claiming to see things the Maya see them. I am alone responsible for these thoughts.

Nor is this a book about the Maya. I am not an anthropologist studying the Maya or their calendar from some purported outside position. It is a book partly inspired by the Maya, but also many other sources as well. I have seen it more as my task to convey to modern people what the Mayan calendar means to us and our own present civilization, because what we need to realize today, above all, is that the Mayan calendar is a universal calendar of potential value for all of humanity regardless of religion, race, gender or political ideas. The Calendar may have been invented by the Maya, but the phenomena that it describes occur today mainly in other parts of the world - only most people do not know it. Hence comes its potential for unifying, not only the religious traditions of the world, but the various fragmented disciplines of modern science as well and in the process unifying all of science with religion. Correctly understood the Mayan Calendar is thus a tool for unifying humanity and its various traditions of thought and making it realize that there is a purpose to our life on this earth as part of a larger plan. Above all, it is a tool for transcending borders and promoting a higher common perspective among all human beings. I hope you will agree and so want to participate in the dissemination of such a perspective in whatever way you chose.

Carl Johan Calleman,
Sundborn, Sweden, on the burner day 4 Ahau,
1.3.0 of the Galactic Underworld