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I know what you’re thinking. How the fuck can we know that something happened on August 11 over five thousand fucking years ago? Simple: because the calendar says so. What calendar? The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar. August 11, 3114 BCE is when it began.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: August 11, 3114 BCE--
This doesn’t mean that someone in the Americas over five millennia ago said hey let’s start a calendar. It was created a couple thousand years later and they backdated that shit. Why? Because the one third of United States of Americans who believe Earth is only 6,000 years old are nothing new. The date corresponds to when the Maya serpent gods Kukulkán and Tepeu started creating shit. Apparently, they tried making humans out of mud and that didn’t work out so well. So they said to some other gods “Lil help?” and they tried making people out of wood and that worked better but they had no souls, kind of like Republican senators. Finally they said corn? Yeah, fuck it. Let’s try corn. And voila! Humans. Later on, Kukulkán got a shopping plaza in Cancun named after him.
There were other Mesoamerican calendars, but it was the Maya located in what is now southeastern Mexico and Guatemala who really got that shit wired tight. They marked down lunar and solar eclipses, moon phases, planet movements, solstices, and all that shit. It actually became a tool of control for the ruling classes. They used the calendar to know when planting season started, but said it was the gods who told them and those gods only talked to them so you better stay in line and do as we say or y’all gonna fuckin’ starve.
Because the calendar was non-repeating, that’s why it had the fixed start date; it’s what allowed them to mark important historical events in reference to that start date, allowing modern scholars to know what shit went down on which particular day.
The cycle came to an end on December 21, 2012, which some modern dumbfucks interpreted as the world was totally going to come to an end. For real, I knew a couple of people who quit their jobs, gave away their possessions, and went on some debaucherous world tour in anticipation of aliens or some fucking comet blowing everything to shit. But the Mayans never said the world was going to end. It was just the end of a cycle and an opportunity to celebrate the start of a new one. And Obama had just been re-elected, so it was going to be a bit before everything went to total dogshit. Mayans celebrated the end of the cycle on the 2012 winter solstice, with festivities held in the ancient cities of Tikal and Chichén Itzá.
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