Kenneth Johnson speaks about the Tzolkin of the Mayas and the "empirical science"

"Jaguar Wisdom"

"Mr. John Major Jenkins and Dr. Carl Johan Calleman follow the same count as the Maya. There is no question about it. Half of Guatemala celebrates the ancient Calendar on 8 Chuen. People come in bus loads to Momostenango for the celebration. When Jose Arguelles tried to tell the Maya that they didn't even understand their own calendar, they tossed his butt right out of Guatemala due to his blatantly racist attitude. If someone show up in a Mayan town using Jose's count, you're going to miss the fiesta!" *
"Empirical evidence." The term that Calleman used when confronted by people who wanted an explanation for why he came up with his weirdo end-date. He just puffed himself up like a blowfish and said, "It should be obvious from empirical evidence because I am a scientist!" I guess he was talking about the same "empirical sceince' which brought us such wonders as Hiroshima, Chernobyl, and Agent Orange. One person's "empiricism" is another person's "fantasy." Arguelles just got loaded as all hell on mushrooms and tried to work out the current date using a pocket calculator and a copy of Diego de Landa's Cosas de Yucatan. He forgot about the ten-day change in the Calendar which occurred in 1756 and he messed it up on leap years as well. He didn't have the human dignity to admit that he had goofed. That's all there is to it." *
"I saw some of Jose's lectures in Sedona in the late 1980s. It was a sad thing to watch. His eyes kept drifting around the room. He couldn't focus. He went completely blank and Lloydine had to finish his sentences for him. At one time he was a gifted academic. His descent into mental illness was a terrible, terrible tragedy. I was deeply pained at the loss of such a good mind. He even claimed to be channeling "Pacal Votan" -- a mythical character from Chiapas folklore who never even existed. The real name of the Mayan king who was mistaken by New Age "channelers" for "Pacal Votan" was K'inich Janaab Pakal (603-683). The Maya always say that if you mess around with the naguales, they will drive you mad. Jose was a truly tragic example. My book "Jaguar Wisdom" was written with the assistance of Martin Prechtel and Don Alejandro. My forthcoming "Mayan Calendar Astrology" was written with the assistance of Rigoberto Itzep Chanchavac, Roberto Poz, and other daykeepers." *
"I do wish that Mr. Calleman and samelikes would also invent a different name for their personal calendars. To describe them as "Mayan" when they are not so is deeply offensive to those who were schooled in the indigenous tradition of the Sacred Calendar." *
"Carl Calleman arbitrarily decided that the Mesoamerican World Tree had a geographical reality, which he placed by "empirical evidence" in his own home town of Goteborg, Sweden. Creating his own cycles, he then proceeded to re-define a Mesoamerican knowledge system as a vast epic depicting the rise of monotheistic religions, even though his supposedly "empirical" and "objective" stance was openly favorable to Christianity and hostile to Islam -- a thoroughly" subjective" bias. He never applied his cycles to such civilizations as India, China, or even Mesoamerica -- and with good reason, since they don't work at all in these instances. While the term "empirical evidence" may be applicable to replicable experiments in a laboratory, I fail utterly to see how any consideration of sociology, history, or religion can be other than purely subjective, conditioned by the perception of and response to these factors as experienced by the person. In what sense, then, can any exploration of the tzolk'in's role in these matters be "empirical" by any standards?" *
"There is the traditonal Mayan count, upon which the standard Goodman-Martinez-Thompson (GMT) correlation is based. There is another count, sometimes known as the Lounsbury Count, which is different by two days. Some academics favor it and are not always as clear as they should be when it comes to stating which count they use in their publications; also, they are unable to explain how all the Maya, speaking 30 different languages and not always in contact with each other, all managed to "lose" the same two days across the board. Then there is of course the Arguelles count, too often mistaken for a "Yukatek" count, which is ridiculous in the sense that Thompson established the GMT by correlating a date from Diego de Landa (Yukatek) with contemporary practice in the Guatemalan highlands (K'iche'), thus demonstrating that the count had never changed. In the 1920s, a fellow named Spinden had another correlation, but this is no longer used by anyone." *