This Religious Eclipse Calendar Would possibly Nonetheless Work

One’s destiny is linked with the date of their start, based on an historical astrological calendar created by the Indigenous Maya individuals that’s nonetheless adopted by some communities. This calendar enabled the Maya to foretell eclipses for practically a millennium, based on new analysis, illuminating a thriller that has lengthy puzzled scientists.

Researchers took a detailed take a look at the Dresden Codex, a Maya bark paper e book courting again to the eleventh or twelfth century—among the many oldest surviving books from the Americas—for clues. It included a desk detailing 405 lunar months, which scientists beforehand thought was solely for eclipse prediction. But the precise workings behind the desk have remained murky.

Now, researchers from the University at Albany and SUNY Plattsburgh recommend that this desk emerged from a lunar calendar that corresponded with the Maya’s 260-day astrological calendar, based on a paper printed within the journal Science Advances. After crunching the numbers, the researchers demonstrated that the desk’s 405-month cycle—containing 11,960 days—corresponds with 46 cycles of the 260-day calendar, permitting the Maya individuals to comply with when rituals coincided with eclipses.

By round 500 BC, Maya calendar specialists often known as daykeepers related their ritual calendar with their observations of the moon. Then, round 453 AD, they might have skilled sufficient passes by the 405-month cycle to glean the patterns behind photo voltaic and lunar eclipses.

But how have been the Maya eclipse predictions so spot-on? To get issues proper for 700 years, authors John Justeson and Justin Lowry notice, the Maya relied on overlapping tables. Once they reached the top of a cycle, as a substitute of merely beginning a brand new one, they reset the depend at exact intervals—223 and 358 lunar months earlier than the conclusion of the earlier desk.

The researchers in contrast the Maya lunar desk with pure eclipse cycles, that are related to the time it takes for the Earth, solar, and moon to bounce into an almost straight line. They discovered that resetting their desk at such intervals allowed the Maya to precisely predict each eclipse that occurred between the years 350 and 1150 AD as a result of the tactic was in a position to “correct for small astronomical errors that accumulate over time,” based on a statement.

This spirituality-infused approach would possibly nonetheless maintain robust, based on the paper, and the calendar system could possibly be maintained to work “indefinitely.”

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Lead picture: Linear77 / Wikimedia Commons.

• Molly Glick

  Posted on October 27, 2025

  Molly Glick is the publication editor of Nautilus.