The Meaning of the La Corona Monument

In his analysis of the La Corona Monument, renowned epigrapher David Stuart characterizes the reference to Dec 21, 2012, as “a literary device.”

I agree that the reference to 13.0.0.0.0 is a literary device. However, the language used – especially the word “device” – seems intended almost to trivialize the reference, to render it somehow unimportant – a “device” in contrast to a “fact.”

I can understand why Dr. Stuart employs such language – he has been among the most vocal of scholars in attempting to correct our misapprehensions of the 2012 date as some sort of Christian apocalypse or “end time” (a construct of our Western civilization which would have made no sense whatsoever to the Classic Maya). But to describe the reference to 13.0.0.0.0 as a mere “device” obscures a philosophical paradigm of major importance.

On the La Corona Monument, the visit of the Calakmul monarch to La Corona, which occurred on January 29, 696, is compared to the renewal of the world on 13.0.0.0.0. An event which occurred in “real” or “historical” time becomes endowed with a cosmic significance which is comparable to the events of “mythic time” or “sacred time.”

This “device” – if that’s what you want to call it – is common enough among the Classic Maya. The three temples of Palenque’s upper acropolis link the actions of historical Maya rulers with various events in Mayan creation mythology, as if they were somehow equivalent or in “magical correspondence” to one another. This is roughly the same thing as saying that your struggle to control your credit card debt is precisely the same thing as Hercules struggling to slay a Hydra whose heads just keep growing back.

Some Mayanists, notably Linda Schele and David Freidel back in 1990, have gone so far as to suggest that the linking of historical events with mythic ones is a clever piece of political propaganda intended to impress common folk by drawing parallels between the actions of “sacred kings” and the actions of the gods.

Maybe so. But it doesn’t matter what your own brand of political propaganda may be; propaganda only works if people BELIEVE in it. Drawing parallels between the lives of kings and the lives of gods is only effective if people believe that there is, in fact, a link between the lives of human beings and the cosmological dimensions of myth. Statements like the ones carved in the Palenque temples or upon the La Corona Monument would be entirely ineffectual unless the Classic Maya had believed that our lives are part and parcel of the eternal truth which is embodied in cultural myths.

Among aboriginal Australians, myth is all around us. We never cease to participate in the rhythm of sacred time. The original moment of creation, the “Dreamtime,” is constantly re-created in ritual and ceremony because EVERY moment is the moment of creation. Ritual serves simply as a reminder that the Beginning Time or Dreamtime is present at every moment.

We are always living in sacred time, in mythic time. The monotonous routines which constitute so much of our daily existence may cause us to forget that each of our lives is a myth, a dance in the rhythm of sacred time, a moment of cosmic importance.

This is what inscriptions such as the one on the La Corona Monument were intended to remind us. This is why it’s important.