The Sacred Calendar and Venus

Thompson J. Eric S. , Maya hieroglyphic writing (2nd edn, Norman, 1960).

In fact, it is not universally accepted that the 360-day period originated as an approximation to the solar year: Thompson (ibid. 151), for example, disputes this. For what follows, however, the origins of the 360-day period are irrelevant. It is enough that there is no question of its existence within the Maya schemes of day counting.

Ibid. 150.

Ibid. 217ff.

Flandes Sieck Robert , “The Sun Stone or Aztec Calendar”, paper read at XXVII International Congress of Americanists (Mexico City, 1939).

Thompson , op. cit. 208ff.

Paul Ahnert , “Die Erscheinungen der Venus”, in Kalender für Sternfreunde 1953 (Leipzig, 1953), 97ff.

Aveni Anthony F. , “Archaeoastronomy in the Maya region: A review of the past decade”, Archaeoastronomy, no. 3 (JHA, xii (1981)), S1–16.

Raul Noriega , “El eclipse del 7 de marzo y la astronomia del México Antiguo”, México en la cultura, no. 1093, 3a epoca (Mexico City, 1 March 1970); Gordon Brotherston , “Astronomical norms in Mesoamerican ritual and time-reckoning”, in Archaeoastronomy in the New World, ed. by Aveni A. F. (Cambridge, 1982), 109–42.

The archaeological evidence bears this out: See Marcus J. , “Origins of Mesoamerican writing”, Annual review of anthropology, v (1976), 35–68.

See Aveni A. , Skywatchers of ancient Mexico (Austin, Texas, 1980), 144–53, for a discussion.

On the notion that the gestation period of the human female may have been one such non-astronomical cycle, see Earle D. Snow D. , “The origin of the 260-day calendar: The gestation hypothesis reconsidered in light of its use among the Quiché Maya”, Palenque Round Table Series, vii, ed. by Fields V. (Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute, San Francisco, 1985), 241–4.

Though in fairness some of the alleged Stonehenge alignments can be tied to eclipse predicting.

See, e.g., Townsend R. , “State and cosmos in the art of Tenochtitlan”, Dumbarton Oaks, Studies in pre-Columbian art and archaeology, no. 20 (1979), 1–78, esp. pp. 63–70.

For example, why is there no Venus symbolism on the stone?.

See De Solla Price D. , Science since Babylon (New Haven, 1971), 53.