The 2012 Story (7 page)

It was a chance meeting with Dr. Eisen in 1882 that led Goodman right to the best source material for studying the glyphs—Maudslay’s high-quality photographs that Eisen had secured copies of. Maudslay did great fieldwork but made little effort to interpret and decipher the corpus of glyphs he was documenting. Maudslay recognized the pioneering nature of Goodman’s work on deciphering the Maya script and invited him to contribute an appendix to the multivolume work he was preparing for the Peabody Museum. This was a boon for an independent researcher like Goodman, and it forced professional scholars to take seriously his analysis. His contribution, called
The Archaic Maya Inscriptions,
appeared in 1897 as Volume 5 of Maudslay’s
Biologia Centrali-Americana
.

When I was researching my book on the Maya Venus Calendar, it was essential to have the correct correlation. I studied the literature on the topic, weighed and tested the issues involved, and read of Goodman. I became interested in his efforts, much like my own, as an independent investigator trying to push back the fringes of scholarly consensus.

I wanted to see for myself Goodman’s appendix to Maudslay’s opus. The only place that had it was the rare-book archive up at CSU in Fort Collins. I called ahead and made the appointment. It took about an hour to drive to Fort Collins, and soon the book was placed in front of me. Goodman’s “appendix” was in truth a full-scale book, more than two hundred pages of text, charts, graphs, tables, and illustrations. I read it through and took notes. He graciously included Eisen as a companion in his ongoing study of the mysterious glyphs, developing his own conviction that the glyphs were strictly numerical and calendrical. He believed to the end of his life that they had little to do with mythology or astronomy, writing that “the Maya calendars, like all modern scientific creations, were godless affairs.”
²²
This limiting bias perhaps prevented Goodman from seeing a larger field of operation for the glyphs, namely astronomy, that we now know is there to be seen. Maya writing is also deeply involved with mythology, religion, history, and mathematical computation.

The Long Count calendar is intimately involved in these disciplines, and was used on hundreds of carved monuments and ceramic vessels for almost a thousand years (from roughly 36 BC to 909 AD). Mathematically, it is a system of counting days that uses five place values: the Kin (1 day), the Uinal (20 days), the Tun (360 days), the Katun (7,200 days), and the Baktun (144,000 days). A Long Count date begins with the Baktuns on the left. For example, the date 9.16.4.1.1 indicates that 9 Baktuns, 16 Katuns, 4 Tuns, 1 Uinal, and 1 Kin (day) have elapsed since the “zero date,” written 0.0.0.0.0. The following sequential list of dates helps to understand how the Long Count toggles forward as days are counted:

Almost every place value level in the Long Count uses a base-20 system (toggles to zero when reaching 20). Notice, however, that the Uinal level (second from the right) contains 360 days and therefore toggles to zero when it reaches 18. Likewise, the 13-Baktun cycle can be thought of as toggling back to zero when 13 Baktuns are completed.

When exactly the zero date occurred has been the subject of the correlation debate (how the Maya calendar is correlated with our own Gregorian system). Goodman’s greatest contribution to Mesoamerican studies is that he solved this problem. Knowing the correlation, we can calculate exactly when the end of the 13-Baktun cycle occurs (13.0.0.0.0).

Goodman’s preface admits his status as an independent scholar but asserts the merit of his work for one simple reason: his “years of servitude to the glyphs.”
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With a bit of discreet sarcasm, he advises scholars and scientists to not be surprised if they “find themselves pushed rudely from their stools by irreverent outsiders,” because

I was amazed to read such a modern-sounding critique of academia. Through the years I encountered confirmations of Goodman’s prescient words, time and time again, as I confronted rejections and casual dismissals from scholars who were completely unwilling, or unable, to rationally investigate the 2012 topic.

In an effort to decipher the script, Goodman made some solid contributions that many years later were acknowledged by Mayanists. He identified the full-figure glyphs for the place values of the Long Count, decoded the “head variant” glyphs, and recognized the importance of the 13-Baktun cycle. In an obituary, Sylvanus Morley praised his breakthrough work and noted that his calendar tables continued to serve as a valuable reference for scholars.

Goodman apparently had learned of, but evaded crediting, Ernst Förstemann’s insights that were being published in Germany in the 1880s. Förstemann, another great independent trailblazer, working single-handedly with the Dresden Codex, had decoded the eclipse tables, a Venus almanac, how the 260-day calendar operated within the codex, the 20-base system, and the Long Count’s base date on 4 Ahau 8 Cumku.

Goodman may have discreetly drawn from Förstemann, or perhaps he had hit on the same insights independently but had no way to prove it. J. Eric S. Thompson, who idolized Förstemann, believed he found a smoking-gun indication in Goodman’s own words to the effect that he had read Förstemann. Perhaps he did. But we just don’t know whether or not Goodman had already figured out what he was reading.

In any case, as often happens when a new discipline is being pioneered, valuable insights were presented side by side with wrong convictions. For example, in his book Goodman notes many Long Count dates from Palenque that are dated in the late 12th Baktun, before the current era dawned at the close of the previous 13-Baktun cycle. He thus was convinced that Palenque must be a very ancient site. But we now know that these texts at Palenque were in fact written in the eighth century AD and they were theological and calendrical back calculations, speculations about the birth of their deities prior to the beginning of the current Creation Era. The texts at Palenque are unusual expressions and help us understand how Pakal, the great king of Palenque, cast himself into the story of the Creation Deities.

For Goodman, the numbers were inviolable and should be read at face value. Those numbers from Palenque must have been recorded before the current era began, he reasoned, many thousands of years ago. Strangely, he noted an era-base date at Quiriguá, the famous Stela C Creation Monument that is dated 13.0.0.0.0 in the Long Count—the end of the previous 13-Baktun cycle—but he didn’t seem to apply the same logic to the site of Quiriguá. This era base is documented by Goodman in his book as the beginning of a great cycle, a period of 13 Baktuns. He knew how many days one of these Creation cycles would consist of, because he figured out the values the Maya ascribed to the five place values in the Long Count. A great cycle of 13 Baktuns would thus consist of 1,872,000 days, or 5125.36 years.

But the big question that remained unsolved in Goodman’s 1897 book was the correlation. All of the Long Count periods in his charts were free floating—no one knew how the Long Count dates should be correlated to a time frame we, with our Gregorian calendar, could relate to. Goodman had noted that many of the dates occurred during the period of the 9th Baktun, but when was this? Before Christ? After Christ? Fifth century AD or fifteenth century BC? Archaeologists did not yet have carbon-14 dating at their disposal, so the challenge of figuring out the correlation had to begin by drawing from historical documents compiled during the Conquest.

Goodman, like other investigators of the correlation question, drew from the
Historia
of Diego de Landa, where Katun periods in the Long Count were recorded. Charles Bowditch, in a 1901 article, made use of another Yucatec document, the
Books of Chumayel,
translated by Daniel Brinton. Bowditch’s attempt to fix the correlation was inconclusive, but suggested that the earliest date from Copán would probably correspond to 34 AD—hundreds of years earlier than what is now accepted.

Goodman determined that the important Great Cycle period must consist of 13 Baktuns, not 20, based on the 13.0.0.0.0 date recorded at Quiriguá. This assertion rankled scholars such as Cyrus Thomas, who wanted to preserve an elegant symmetry in the Long Count system, which operated on a base-20 principle. It was thus believed that the Baktun level should toggle to zero after 20 Baktuns were completed, rather than 13. Goodman, surely, must be fooling himself. In the end, archaeology has proven Goodman correct, for we have no Creation Texts dated with 20 Baktuns, but many dated with 13. This illustrates how scholars sometimes invoke the appearance of logic to oust the facts of the matter and dismiss the better-informed conclusions of an outsider.

By 1905 Goodman had published an innocuous paper called “Maya Dates” in
American Anthropologist.
The correlation he worked out placed the beginning of the current 13-Baktun cycle in August of 3114 BC, though this wasn’t explicitly stated. In fact, his conclusions are strangely obscure and could be noticed only by those few scholars who were familiar with the language and issues of the correlation debate. This could very well be one reason why Goodman’s contribution sank into obscurity and was easily upstaged by Sylvanus Morley’s paper of 1910, which presented a correlation 260 years earlier than Goodman’s. Maya archaeologist Herbert Spinden became a supporter of Morley’s correlation, which added more fuel to that fire. The issue is, of course, essential to the 2012 topic because it determines the placement of the 13-Baktun cycle-ending date. December 21, 2012 (the 13-Baktun cycle-ending date), is a consequence of Goodman’s work. In terms of the Long Count calendar and the Maya Creation Mythology, the date is important because it signifies the end of a World Age, a chapter or phase of humanity.

Other proposed correlations had the backing of consensus and Goodman, although correct, did not engage the debate to advance his insight. There is no defense by Goodman on record that I know of. In the Peabody Archive of his papers, an unpublished manuscript of 1908 called “Annual, perpetual, chronological calendar analyses” may provide charts for the Long Count anchored to his correlation. We might find there the very first conscious recognition that the 13-Baktun cycle would end around the solstice of 2012. Goodman died in 1917, harboring the mistaken notion that the glyphs were exclusively computational—a kind of pure mathematics that had no relation to astronomy or history. He also died not realizing that his contribution to the correlation question would soon find a champion. Attention to Goodman’s work was revived by the Mexican anthropologist Juan Martínez Hernández in 1926, who wrote two important papers that verified and expanded Goodman’s arguments. Then a young J. Eric S. Thompson joined the effort and in 1927 fine-tuned the correlation by a few days, resulting in what is now known as the original Goodman-Martínez-Thompson (GMT) correlation.

The story of J. Eric S. Thompson is essential for understanding the vicissitudes of Maya glyph decipherment as well as a polarizing bias that sometimes hobbles Maya studies to this day. Thompson occupied an unusual position in academia. He was, in a sense, the ultimate independent researcher, the archetypal free agent—he never taught classes, never had students or held decision-making board positions at research institutions. His background involved fighting in World War I as a teenager, and perfecting Spanish while living on his family’s ranch in Argentina. Returning to England, he studied anthropology at Oxford and graduated in 1925.