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Clark, Fay Marvin – Into the Light – The early Mayan concepts of creation, the creator, and the origin and destiny of the Nagual
Identifier
023276
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Into the Light – Fay Marvin Clark
I have spent portions of twelve years in Yucatan in an effort to gain a fuller understanding of the early Mayan concepts of creation, the creator, and the origin and destiny of the Nagual.
My good friend, Frank Campos, a highly educated Mayan, provided me with most of the material for … this.
The Mayan people were deeply religious, worshipping a creator whom they called "Hunabku." To Hanabku they gave no description, for he was, according to their belief, incorporeal and beyond human comprehension. The mother of all things was Earth, who gave fruition to all living things, both plant and animal life. Corn, being the Mayan staff of life, constituted the main theme in all the religious and cultural trends of thought.
Developing their knowledge throughout the ages and undisturbed by any foreign influence, the Mayans worked out a system of counting, including the use of the zero, centuries before this cipher was incorporated in Old World arithmetic.
With their naked eyes they followed and plotted the courses of the planets, including dim and elusive Mercury. So accurate were the measurements of those ancient Mayan astronomers, that they differ only slightly in degrees and minutes from those of our present day astronomers, who are aided by powerful telescopes and advance mathematical formulas. They were fully aware of a three hundred sixty-five and one-fourth day year, and they developed a calendar of an eighteen-month year of twenty days each, plus a five-day week at the end of each year. To take care of the remaining one-fourth day, they made corrections for a leap year at proper intervals. This they computed and put into daily practice long before the Julian calendar was adopted in Rome, and centuries before Pope Gregory XIII called a conference in 1582 when our present calendar was created.
It is interesting to note that the Mayan calendar is two tenthousandths of a year more accurate than our present calendar.
The old Mayan astronomers did not stop with their observations of the movements of the Sun, the Moon, and the known planets, but they compiled tables of lunar eclipses and predicted these with amazing accuracy.