[Aztlan] Ma: Halley's Comet, 834AD

[Sam Edgerton]

	Hey! Thanks to FAMSI, AZTLAN is back to its old feisty self again. New 
listeros should know that Lloyd Anderson and I are among the earliest 
contributors to this listserv, and while we remain in mutual respect and 
admiration for one another, we also have a history of sharp differences. 
Indeed, his comments to me now about thinking like a "kook" remind 
nostalgically of old times, and I love it. Yes, Lloyd you are right, I was 
thinking like a kook, and deliberately so. Because I believe the ancient 
Maya, like ancient peoples everywhere before the Age of Enlightenment 
likewise thought as kooks. In fact, "Western thinking" generally before the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was quite similar to the Maya in that 
both peoples believed that mankind was governed absolutely by divine 
authority, and it was up to "science," as interpreted in those "medieval" 
times to reason why certain unusual apparitions should suddenly  occur, and 
then explain by whatever kooky manipulations of traditional logic what they 
might prognosticate for human destiny.
	Halley's Comet of 1066, for instance, is featured prominently in the 
contemporaneous Bayeux Tapestry because King Harold's Anglo-Saxon soldiers 
saw it as a clear signal that God wanted them defeated, hence their morale 
deteriorated, while King William's Normans read it as a propitious sign and 
swept to divinely predicted victory - and England was forever changed, as 
much by an ideological interpretation as by any material factor.  If Halley 
837 was such an especially spectacular  apparition that the Japanese 
emperor even hid in terror from it, wouldn't the Maya have reacted 
similarly? Lloyd would have it that just because the event didn't occur on 
the exact dates when it might have been foreseen according to then current 
eschatological rationale, the Maya should have dismissed the belated comet 
as simply having no relevance. That to my mind is pure post-Enlightenment 
secular reasoning. Lloyd, GET UNREAL!
	I believe the Maya would very much have liked to predict when comets would 
appear just as they had with eclipses and the Venus cycle. Remember that 
k'atun-ending date 9.17.0.0.0 is the most recorded of all on Maya stele, 
for one reason because they had figured that a total eclipse with possible 
dangerous consequences should happen on that unique day. When it didn't (it 
did actually, but could be seen only elsewhere in the world), they 
celebrated, as on stele E at Quirigua. One might well a imagine a ruling 
lord somewhere in Mayadom, terrified after having witnessed the comet of 
837, calling in his astrologers and calendar calculators to explain why 
they hadn't been able to forewarn him. "Why didn't you connect the dots!", 
he would have screamed, "why couldn't you see all those menacing 52 signs 
and realize what was about to happen?" Then, one of his mavens dared to 
stammer, "But my lord, when we examined X and Y and saw that 52 were just D 
days and therefore not to worry...." WHAT!!!." screamed the lord again, 
"Guards, take this kook away, and post his head on the skull rack!"

Sam Edgerton