Yesterday’s summer solstice represented the end of a long cycle of 13 b’ak’tuns or 5125 years in the Mayan calendar. Some people misinterpreted the meaning of the long cycle to the Mayans as well as modern science to suggest disasters such as the Earth crashing into the black hole at the centre of the Galaxy. But they were wrong.
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While we know a lot about what the Mayan calendar ISN’T (despite what the media is feeding us about “Mayan prophesy”), I was wondering if the Mayan calendar has any relationship to any other known cycles in nature and/or the cosmos. We know the Maya were excellent mathematicians (they calculated the length of the year with much higher precision than even their european contemporaries), so I can’t help wondering if the 5125 years might still have some sort of significance… not so much mystically, but scientifically?
While the Mayan calendar never foretold the end of the world, does it hold any mathematical or scientific truth behind it?