QuoteI heard a comedian say that if the Mayans were so great at seeing into the future, why didn't they see what the Spanish were going to do?
Off the original topic, but I think this is interesting (and I quote from
In Search of the First Civilizations by Michael Wood from the chapter about the Spanish conquest of Central America): "Cortes had arrived in the Aztec year 'one reed', when their ancient prophecies said the God Quetzalcoatl would return from exile in the east. For the Aztecs, whose confidence in the recurring cycles of history, the burden of time, was no less than that of the Maya, the coincidence drained away their will to resist. If the Spanish historians of the time are to be believed, the Aztecs immediately understood that these mysterious outside powers would be fatal to their own universe. On the terrible final night when Tenochtitlan fell, an omen appeared to the Aztecs which for them symbolized the break-up of their mythic and cosmological order. (...) Then suddenly the omen appeared, burning like fire in the sky. It wheeled in huge spirals like a whirlwind giving off light in showers of sparks like red hot embers. It made loud noises rumbling and hissing like metal on a fire. It circled above the walls near the lake shore. (...) No one cried out when the omen came into view. The people knew what it meant and they watched in silence."
The fall of Tayasal: "It was a hundred and fifty years after the Conquest that the last independent kingdom in Central America fell. In the remote jungles of northern Guatemala stood the island fortress of Flores, in native speech Tayasal. Here the late Mayan population was a mixture of Mayan and Mexican, which we call Yucatec. The prophetic books of the Yucatan Maya foretold that catastrophe would revisit them every cycle of thirteen
katuns, 256 or 257 years. The next cycle was due to begin in 1697. Armed with that knowledge the Spanish force attacked on 13 March of that year. (...) The last independent kingdom of the Maya had fallen. The locals here seemed to have accepted this almost fatalistically, as an inescapable result of their view of the repeating cycle of time. For three times since the tenth century, the cycle of 256 or 257 years had brought them catastrophe. In Maya eyes this was the true burden of time. And today the old count still continues. The greatest catastrophe of modern Guatemalan history, the US-backed coup which overthrew their democracy in 1954, happened exactly 257 years after the fall of Tayasal."