SCIENCE science.org 3 JUNE 2022 • VOL 376 ISSUE 6597 1039On a deeper level, modern scholars argue
that Classic Period rulers used their astro-
theologians to project legitimacy. These rul-
ers presented themselves as cosmic actors,
even performing occasional rituals thought
to imbue time with fresh momentum that
would keep it cycling smoothly. Their dynas-
tic histories, inscribed in stone, appear to in-
clude mythic figures and celestial bodies as
forerunners and peers. Narratives of the lives
of kings, for example, might harken back to
the birth of a deity on the same date multi-
ple cycles ago in the distant past. Many sto-
ries also open with descriptions of the exact
phase of the Moon.
“What we’re doing now,” Stuart says, “is
realizing that Maya history and Maya astron-
omy are the same thing.”THE FOUR SURVIVING codices—housed in
Dresden, Madrid, Paris, and New York
City—offer a glimpse of a still-later period of
Maya civilization, between the Xultún work-
shop and the last centuries before Spanish
conquest. These books were likely painted
around the 1400s in Yucatán. But researchers
think they contain much older records chart-
ing exactly how the Sun, Moon, and planets
had appeared in the sky centuries before,
from the eighth through the 10th centuries,
according to Long Count dates in the Venus
table and a table of solar eclipses.
After the Maya script was deciphered in
the 1980s and ’90s, scholars began to probe
the Venus table’s larger cultural purpose.Epigrapher Gabrielle Vail at the University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Tulane Uni-
versity archaeologist Christine Hernández
argued in 2013, for example, that the table
recounts battles between Venus and the Sun,
in a fusion of creation stories from the Maya
and what is now central Mexico.
The table traces how Venus oscillates
through its morning star-evening star routine
almost exactly five times in 8 years, alongsideillustrations that depict meetings between
Venus in deity form and other godlike figures.
Armed with this table, Vail says, a forerun-
ner of today’s daykeepers could anticipate on
what dates in the 260-day calendar such ap-
pearances might fall, and what omens they
might hold.
Even the “almost” in Venus’s schedule
was considered: An additional set of correc-
tion factors, provided on another page in the
Dresden Codex, helps correct for how the
cycle slips by a few days per century.
In a book published in March, Gerardo
Aldana, a Maya scholar at the University
of California, Santa Barbara, builds a case
that the astronomer who devised the “cor-
rection” for the Venus predictions was a
woman working around 900 C.E. He points
to a figure depicted in a carving on a struc-
ture interpreted as a Venus observatory at
Chichén Itzá, who wears a long skirt and a
feathered serpent headdress—iconography
imported from central Mexico and associ-
ated with Venus that took over in that city
around that time. In another mural, a simi-
larly dressed figure with breasts walks in a
massive procession rich with feathered ser-
pent ideology.
After the arrival of the Spanish in the early
16th century, colonizers destroyed countless
codices as well as the Maya glyph system, and
the long-term, quantitative sky tracking it en-
abled. Yet the Maya and their culture persist,
with some 7 million people still speaking one
or more of 30 Mayan-descended languages.On the spring equinox at Chichén Itzá in Yucatán state in Mexico, the Sun casts a rattlesnake pattern of light and shadow down the great staircase.Roberto Poz Pérez serves as a daykeeper in his
PHOTOS: (TOP TO BOTTOM HUGO BORGES/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; SERGIO MONTÚFAR/PINCELADASNOCTURNAS.COM/ESTRELLAS ANCESTRALES “ASTRONOMY IN THE MAYA WORLDVIEW” Zunil community, keeping the sacred 260-day count.