The name for Mars shares a common source across much of the Mediterranean and south Asian world. In most cases, the name for Mars starts with the syllable 'ma' and often it contains the letter 'r'. It is hard to know how the name spread, but some examples are a little surprising, like Malay. And its spread was not universal. For example, in Tamil the name 'servaai' comes from a different root and in Sumerian the name for Mars is simud.
Malaysian Nepali Sanskirt Persian Hebrew ancient Egyptian Turkish Greek Roman Spanish |
Name for Mars Marikh Maja Mangala Bahram Ma'adim Harmakhis Merih Ares Mars Marte |
Neolithic humans had special relationships with a number of stars and planets, including Sirius, Venus, and Jupiter. But at least one group of neolithic humans, the pre-Mayas - and by definition the pre-Lencas, figured out a very special characteristic of Mars: its cycle (synodic period) was 780 days, which is divisible by 20, the counting base that they used.
This meant that it took 39 20-day weeks, on average, for Mars to make one complete cycle - 780 days for it to repeat as a rising star, 780 days for it to repeat as a morning star, 780 days for it to repeat its retrograde (backward) motion compared to the stars behind it. The pre-Mayas assigned god status to Mars because the synodic period was evenly divisible by 20, the number of fingers and toes of humans.
Mars was the basis of the first pre-Mayan calendar and as such, was a very important heavenly body. Specifically, the 260-day tzolkin calendar is based on the synodic period of Mars. There are three 260-day periods within the 780-day Mars cycle. And there are twenty 13-day weeks within the tzolkin. At some point the pre-Mayas switched from 20-day weeks to 13-day weeks - most likely when ocean fishing became common between 8000 BC and 6000 BC and they noticed that the tidal diurnal range (difference between high and low tides) repeated every 13 to 14 days along Central America's Pacific coast.
The pre-Mayas, who were astute planet watchers, began to notice that when Mars turned retrograde near the Milky Way, in Scorpio in the tropical zodiac, it occurred earlier in the tzolkin than when it turned retrograde elsewhere in the sky. Every 15 to 17 solar years Mars turned retrograde near or in the Milky Way. They tracked the earliest day of Mars retrograde and found that it occurred one day earlier than the previous earliest date about every 40 to 60 solar years (averaging 52 years during that time period). This became the basis for the Mars long-count calendar. It took about 1000 tzolkin years or 670 solar years for the Mars calendar to cycle backward through each 13-day week. And it will take almost 12,000 years for it to make one complete backward cycle through the tzolkin.
Today it is easy to explain this phenomena by noticing that the Mars synodic period is slightly less than 780 days. During the neolithic era it was 779.96 days. Then due to a change in either Mars' or earth's orbit, declined to about 779.94 days sometime around 500 BC. This change in the synodic period caused the Mars calendar to cycle through each 13-day week in only about 450 years, throwing off the accuracy of the calendar in measuring time over thousands of years. Thus it caused the Mayas to abandon the Mars long-count calendar and to adopt the solar-based long-count calendar that is well-recorded in Mayan writing.
Very early in the pre-Mayan experience Mars became important and became part of the spirituality, as did the center of the galaxy, what seems to be a hole or void. In fact, it is a black hole. So important is the center of galaxy that one of the four founders of the Mayan people is named for the spot, Balam Ik', which means 'wind jaguar' or 'void jaguar'. Ik' is the same word to describe the center of the galaxy. The galaxy was known as a tree by the Mayas. The symbol or glyph of the day sign Ik' is a 'T' or tree of life.
The language tells us a lot, in Ch'orti', the oldest Mayan language. In Ch'orti' mar means 'open space'; te means 'tree'. So marte is the open space in the tree and refers to the void in the galaxy. As noted in the table above, marte is Mars in Spanish.
Two other clues support the arrival of the word Mars to the Middle East/Mediterranean. The first is a linguistic clue: the prefix 'mal' in Latin. It would appear that 'mal' (bad or evil) came directly with 'mar' (Mars). Just as now, Mars also had negative connotations in many early Middle Eastern and European astrologies. The arrival of 'ma' or 'mal' seems to have arrived with the Maya. In Ch'orti' ma is a negative prefix; ma uh means 'evil'. The Mayas associated layers of meanings to words based on the meanings of words that sounded like that word. In this case, Mars gained a negative sense because of sounding like the word for 'bad' or 'evil'.
The second clue comes from the zodiac symbol for Aries in Sumer-Babylonian. Mars is the ruler of Aries. The name of Aries in Sumer is Hun.ga. In English Aries signifies a Ram. However, in Sumer Aries signifies "the Agrarian Worker". Among the Quiche Maya, the first founder is Masa Manix or Artisan Deer. Manix also translates, in Ch'orti', as Agrarian Worker or, literally, "worker of the earth". It is not a stretch to believe that Masa Manix is associated with Mars, as both parts of the name begin with the same syllable as Mars.
The last step in making the case that the name Mars has a Mayan origin is to show that the Maya were traveling across the Pacific ocean at this time. The full case for Mayan ocean travel will be taken up in a later post. I have no doubt that the pre-Mayas were crossing the Pacific by 3000 BC if not before. It caused one group of pre-Mayas to migrate to Peru where the ocean currents were better.
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