Go to page listing all Mayan Downloads

Accession Dates at Site Q = La Corona:
Venus at Maximum Elongations as Evening Star?

At La Corona, dates of important accessions have a strongly skewed distribution of positions of planets, towards those where Venus is at or extremely close to maximum elongation as evening star. The table of data showing this is here.

By contrast, dates where Venus is only moderately close to a maximum do not show that pattern. These last pattern more like the remainder where Venus is not at all close to a maximum.

It is possible to do statistical studies with moderately small numbers of cases, as here for the correlation between accessions and Venus at maximum elongations.  I think "binomial distributions" is the right terminological category for a method of estimating chance in such situations. But I do not think my time would be well spent making such computations precise. Someone else may wish to do it. The skewing of the data pattern reported seems in my experience entirely strong enough to adopt the hypothesis, as long as it is provisional only.
Since the hypothesis is derived from the very data we have, one cannot "test" the hypothesis without new data. At another site or during a very different time range at the same site, the people of the time might not have been as interested in the same kind of symbolism (as Floyd Lounsbury pointed out many years ago).

In this data, there are also one birth and two "other" events where Venus is at or near maximum elongation as morning star, but two few examples to draw any conclusions in the case of births. For all events other than accessions, Venus is normally not at maximum elongation. This includes births and deaths.
 
Births and deaths are supposedly not manipulable (though records could be falsified). Floyd Lounsbury used this kind of contrast to make a highly plausible case that events in the life of the Palenque ruler Chan Bahlum were scheduled to take place around a dozen days after Jupiter's second stationary point, just when it would first be observed to begin forward motion again.

In the table of dates from Site Q, "other" events may be a grab-bag, so the hypothsis which this data suggests to me would not predict much about positions of planets at dates of "other" events until we know much more about the nature and symbolism of those events.

We would expect a skewing of the kind just described if there were a deliberate attempt to have accessions on dates with Venus at maximum elongations, perhaps specifically as evening star, at site Q during these years for which we
have records. 
If I now were to speculate (as distinct from describing the data patterning), perhaps this reflected a cultural idea about success in warfare, That does not mean most warfare was actually conducted when Venus was at a maximum as evening star, or at first rising as evening star (that last has I think been statistically refuted when all relevant examples are included, not just selected ones). So the maxima of Venus would be just a symbol.