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Want to make a Mayan calendar for yourself or as a gift to someone who appreciates the fascinating manner which these ancient people independently came up with to measure time and the different ways they used to measure it? We’ve got your means and methods here that we’ll pinpoint shortly. We’ve got a bevy of other
standard calendar making resources as well.
The ancient Mayans of present day South America were quite an extraordinary people with keen insight into the ways of the world and indeed the sprawling universe at large. Far removed from technological advances which make recording and predicting the seasons and astrologically significant meanings, the Mayans were surprisingly accurate.
Of course, their particular calendar has gained a recent notoriety because some people believe their predictions of either the end of the world or a vast leap in the collective consciousness of its inhabits will take place on December 21, 2012. That date happens to be the winter solstice, and 11:11 AM Universal Time marks the end of the 5,125 Great Cycle of the Ancient Maya Long Count Calendar.
So folks believe alternatively that this date will signify doom or some sort of collective bloom. Perhaps if the Y2K fanatics expecting Armageddon had a Doomsday GPS back in 2000, it would have announced “recalculating” to head for 2012. But the fact that the Mayans were far-sighted enough to extend their calendar so many centuries ahead of when they lived in the third century A.D. is fascinating in itself.
By the way, there are many intriguing aspects of Mayan architecture. They used their calendar to plan for agriculture, track and predict astronomical occurrences, and to mark when their seasonal festivities would take place. They used their complex knowledge of mathematics and astronomy to make two significant calendars; one for an astronomical 365 day year called the Haab and one for a ritual year of 260 days known as the Tzolkin. There were others as well.
