Luke Caverns
speaker
1,858 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 27 May
Luke Caverns’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Can you imagine how many generations it takes to do that? You have to have astronomers that are watching the stars daily, recording these things and then handing it down for generations. Not for this part.
One part's human and one part's just the sun. These are the low-hanging fruit. The astronomy comes in when they make their next calendar. Sure, sure, sure. They make a lunar calendar.
The long count is the really weird one. And my friend Chris Powell did his... dissertation or master's, looking at that long count calendar and trying to figure out, is there an astronomical foundation?
And really, as you go forward in it, all of the cycles of all the celestial objects they're looking at, the five planets and the moon and the sun, the amount of synchronicities that happen in the long count are crazy. The farther you go up, well, even very early is the surprising part, you start getting these cycles that they're noticing, like the number 584. It keeps coming up and up and up.
That's the synodic period of Venus. The number 780 is Mars, but that's three times 260. So that's a frustrating one to me. I can see the number 780, but I can never really say whether that's just three times the calendar or are they really looking at Mars. In the Dresden Codex, we have proof because – It goes in a bunch of groups of 780 days.
And the guy that we identify as what my teacher called the Mars beastie is hanging off of a sky band. So it's really like a blatant, this is my number. What is this? The Mars what? There's a Mars. He's got kind of – he looks kind of dragon-like. He's got kind of a crocodile face with an upturned nose. But he shows up as the hieroglyph of Mars in a number of contexts.
And in some of those contexts, it's not clear that he's Mars, but in the – Dresden Codex, they make a whole almanac dedicated to Mars and showing it going 10 times in increments of 780 days. Oh, wow. Can you find this, Steve? Yeah.
Google Dresden Codex Mars.
I think we'll find a picture. Probably. Any luck, Steve? Anyway, the long count's weird. Because it's their linear count of days. And they're really not linear people. They think in cycles. Right, right. There he is. On the top left. That's him. This? That one right there, yeah. There he is. See his funny little face hanging off? And he's got hooves, too. But he's hanging off of sky bands.
And the numbers over there to the left... Keep counting in increments of 780 days, 10 times. And they bracket him, and even his face is in there somewhere. Yeah, that like right above the first of the hoofed guys hanging down, all three of them, the top right glyph is his face.
That is Mars, yep. He's identified in a bunch of other texts as well, but they don't always say, and he's associated with the number 780. So this gives us the context of who that guy is, and then we understand it better. Like the text of Palenque talk about Mars, and when you go to the astronomy programs, he's actually sitting in the sky where – On the dates that they're talking about.
Palenque did this crazy thing where the two farthest out planets, Jupiter and Saturn, they don't really work with the Maya or our calendar systems because they're exterior planets to us. Venus and Mercury are interior and they're you know in a tighter orbit than us around the Sun.
Yeah Mars just by weird coincidence if if that's what it is is three times 260 so it was easy for them to play the numerical games of adding Mars in they kind of double dipped him every three times they went around their main calendar but the other two are
were hard the math didn't work because they do that retrograde motion as we see them that there's a time where we're passing them that they actually look like they're going backwards in the sky night by night they do a kind of zigzag but palenque figured out how to incorporate them into the calendar by making kind of a parallel system we call the 819 calendar and it's apparent that that was developed during the time of a king named khan balam the son of pakal
And he puts together these numbers. He's the first one to show us the 819 cycle in the cross group. And there's a date that shows up again and again and again in the texts of the cross group. That's not the day that the temples are inaugurated. They're inaugurated like a year and a half later. But if you look at the date they keep talking about,
Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are in a really tight cluster in the sky that night, and all three of the temples of the cross group can see it. So it appears that his math before he built the temples was like, this is the perfect day to inaugurate this, this, this. new calendar that incorporates those. And we need to make our opening date that day.
But then just like in modern times, his contractors failed him. They were like, Oh, but King, there's been so many days of rain. And have you seen the price of wood lately? We just can't, we can't do it. And so a year and a half later, is the inauguration date, but they keep talking about that date. And for a while we were like, why are they talking about that date?
Until guys like me got access to modern astronomy software and we could actually run the numbers and go, well, what's happening on that day?
I think that there were certain people that were more than 100 years ago that had access to ephemerises and knew how to use them, those big, ugly tomes, and like, oh, I'll do the math here. People like Voisterman did it in the early 1800s.
Nowadays, I guess it's the 1980s is when we started getting software that we could actually use on computers that wasn't just some guy in a little office somewhere with no access to each other or to tell people what he had found. Floyd Lounsbury of Harvard was doing – oh, he might be Yale. I loved Floyd. I hope I didn't missay that. Shout out to Floyd.
Showing 1321–1340 of 1,858 · page 67 of 93
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