The Chilam Balam books

After the Monument 6 glyphs carved by a Mayan scribe at Tortuguero in the seventh century, the next explicit unambiguous reference to the 2012 date and the completion of thirteen pik (b’aktun) cycles, may have been a minor footnote added by Vassar astronomy professor Maud Worcester Makemson to her 1951 translation of a colonial period Mayan holy book known as the Chilam Balam of Tizimin. Dr. Makemson wrote that “The completion of a great cycle of thirteen baktuns would indeed be an occasion of the highest expectation .” 

According to Makemson, the Tizimin text states that:

“Presently Baktun 13 shall come sailing, figuratively speaking, bringing the ornaments of which I have spoken from your ancestors. Then the god will come to visit his little ones .”

More than three decades later, working in a context of far more informed academic understanding of Mayan culture, Tulane University anthropology professor Munro Edmonson’s expertly elaborated 1982 translation of the same passage yields a more reliable, and radically different text: 

“Then his fleet is raised: It is of thirteen sails. When the katun is raised Havana is its country, for there is also opposition to the word of the lord in Havana. And so it was borne to the ears of the lord ”

Makemson’s prescient insight into the potential significance of the 2012 date clearly did not carry over into her translation. Edmonson’s text provides a side by side translation with an exhaustively reconstructed version of the original Yukatek language greatly facilitating analysis. While our knowledge of Yukatek Mayan is quite limited, it is clear in the original passage that the crucial term “baktun” is never explicitly mentioned. The text reads simply “oxlahun (13) bak.” While “bak” can be a reference to the number 400, and potentially 400 “tun” periods of 360 days each, its context here does not suggest in any way that it is a temporal statement. The term “b’aktun,” a modern replacement for what the ancient Maya probably called “pik,” seems to have been the invention of the early Mayanist William Gates in 1921 which he refers to in a 1931 book to describe the Mayan Long Count unit of 144,000 days . 

Curiously, there does exist at least one use of the ancient terms “13 pik” in one of the Chilam Balam books, specifically the Chumayel version. There we find a reference to “oxlahun (13) pik  tz’ak.” Edmonson translates this as “13,000 steps” but agrees with the early Mayanist Juan Martínez that this may be a reference to the “13 pik” date (13.0.0.0.0) in 3114 BCE . If that is the case, the term “oxlahun pik” may implicate the “13 pik” date on December 21st of 2012 as well.  The explicit mention of “13 pik” in the Chumayel text is particularly interesting because it comes in a section of the book focusing on renewal and completion. According to Edmonson’s translation, this section of the text states explicitly that “these are millennial words.”  One also finds repeated references to numerous deities including Oxlajun (13) ti Ku and B’olon (9) ti Ku, description of the layers of the heavens, a reference to a destructive deluge, famine, and even an entity descending on the back of “white alligator tree .” In any case, the deliberately esoteric and highly metaphorical nature of the Chilam Balam prevents us from any definitive reading.

Arguably the most pertinent potential references to 2012 from the Chilam Balam texts are those referring to k’atun periods ending on the day 4 Ahaw. The Chilam Balam books provide oracular associations with a series of successive k’atun periods, each slightly less than twenty years in length. Edmonson’s translation of the Chilam Balam of Chumayel provides three separate accounts referring to 4 Ahaw k’atun periods . He places the first one in the eighth century, a second in the fifteenth century and a third in the eighteenth century. Not surprisingly, these three 4 Ahaw k’atun prophecies share some elements in common since the associations and tendencies of a given k’atun were thought to repeat themselves every 13 k’atun periods when the cycle again returned to 4 Ahaw k’atun. Since we are currently in a k’atun cycle that will end on a day 4 Ahaw on the 2012 date, one might also expect that the present 7,200-day period would share similar qualities with earlier periods of the same name.

With that in mind, the text referring to the fifteenth century states that:

“Come is the quetzal, come is the blue/green  bird. Come is the spirit of yellow death, come is blood vomit. Come is K’uk’ulkan afterward for the second time. ”  

It seems likely that this text refers primarily to the arrival of a historical figure known with the name K’uk’ulkan in the Yucatan in a far earlier 4 Ahaw k’atun that ended in November 987 CE. Presumably, since the December 21, 2012 date closes at the completion of a 4 Ahaw k’atun, the text implicitly could refer to the current k’atun cycle, even though its more obvious connections to earlier k’atun periods in Maya history are significantly stronger. In the contemporary context, these colonial Maya references to violence and sickness plus the green renewal image of the transforming Feathered Serpent, K’uk’ulkan echo the cataclysmic and regenerative motifs at the heart of the 2012 phenomenon.