Rather then the plot for a blockbuster Hollywood summer movie, this is the way the world could end according to Western interpretation of the Long Count calendar, one of several created by the Mayan Indians who populated the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico hundreds of years ago. While many Mayans still exist today, the classical period of their culture ended around 900 A.D. They studied the stars and the movements of the moon and sun, developing several calendars including the Long Count, which measures huge periods of time, along with a calendar to mark the passing of a year.

The exact date of the ending of the Long Count calendar is Dec. 21, 2012. On that date the Last Great Cycle will come to a close. The Sun God will rule the sky, the ninth Lord of the Night. The Moon will be eight days old, and it will be the third lunation in a series of six. But what does this fascinating document actually mean? How accurate is the calendar and should we pay attention to it? Many religious aficionados predicted the end of creation to be December 31, 1999, and that story had a happy ending. Do we need to prepare for an astronomical event the equivalent of Armageddon?

The Long Count Calendar measures time in cycles of years. The current cycle, or baktun, is scheduled to end in the northern hemisphere on the winter solstice in 2012. This cycle will have lasted about 394 years, and is the last in a series of 13 baktuns, the first of which started in 3114 B.C. No one knows why the Maya marked the beginning of creation on that particular date. Every year the Sun, Earth and the Milky Way galaxy align in a particular manner in the days leading up to the winter solstice. What is special about 2012 is for the first time in 26,000 years this alignment will occur on December 21, the actual date of the winter solstice. This has led to rampant speculation that the Maya believed something catastrophic will happen. The problem is that none of these predictions were made by actual Mayans, only individuals from the West who have interpreted the calendar themselves, according to Dr. Robert Sitler, the Latin American Studies director at Stetson University in Florida.

“All of that speculation is by modern Western people who are unfamiliar with the Maya culture,” Sitler said. “If you talked to 1000 Mayans about 2012, they wouldn’t know about it.

“The (classic) Mayans simply never mentioned it once. I’m dissuaded from (the end of the world theory) because they never wrote it down anywhere”

While the Maya were accurate in charting the movements of the heavens without the benefit of telescopes, Sitler said the Long Count calendar has nothing to do with astronomy but more to do with the Maya’s theory on creation. In fact, the Maya believed in multiple creations, one of which ended with the great flooding of the Earth.

While Sitler says the dire predictions of apocalypse in 2012 are off-base, he does believe that the current state of society is in a downturn. “Will all that crazy stuff happen? No,” he said. “I think there is cause for concern when you look at the environmental situation we are in. The current lifestyle on planet Earth is unsustainable.”

In fact, Sitler said the Maya people currently living in places like Guatemala, Mexico, and Belize are learning about the 2012 prediction like other people: through the media. This has led some Maya to interpret the calendar to mean their people will return to autonomous rule. Other Maya resent what they consider to be another example of the white man taking over their culture by interpreting their own documents for them. Sitler believes nothing extraordinary will occur specifically in 2012.However, he does warn that unless changes are made regarding toxic dumping, pollution and the way we treat the environment, the end is not far off.

“The trajectory is in place and we are already in this disaster,” he said. “It will collapse, it has to. It has no choice. We desperately are trying not to see the writing on the wall. I think we’re kind of in a collective delusional state.”

Dr. Vern Scarborough is a Mayanist and professor of anthropology at the University of Cincinnati. He also warns not to read too much in the doomsday prophecy of the Long Count Calendar. “This was a society governed by rules that were very different than ours,” he said. “I think you have to be very careful when you drum up support for the end of the world just because the Maya say so.”

Scarborough said that the astronomy predictions made many years ago were often used in what today would be termed “playing politics.” Only a select group of Mayan elders studied the sky, enough to predict certain events like eclipses and the movements of planets. If an elder said an eclipse would happen and he was correct, he would then use that to his advantage when pushing for additional powers or longevity. “If things didn’t happen the way they predicted, they made them happen,” Scarborough said. “When you begin predicting eclipses, that’s a pretty heavy-duty statement. You then indicate that you are responsible for shutting out the sun. It’s a power play.”

One problem with studying the Mayan writings is many people fail to place them in the context of the time. The Maya had no way of knowing certain events like modern scholars can.

“We can be more rational because we can afford to be,” he said. The Maya couldn’t, they lived in a different world. I’m not taking away from their ability to construct this marvelous calendar. There are lessons to learn from their relationship with the landscape.

“As for myth and religion, why would you think a culture over 1,000 years ago would have a better understanding about the end of the world then we do today?”

The Maya were truly a unique civilization of people. They developed their own system of writing, and were expert mathematicians and astronomers. They lived for thousands of years in an area very difficult for human beings to inhabit. They built impressive cities, the ruins of which went undiscovered for centuries buried beneath the canopy of the jungle in Central and South America. The most famous of these cities, Chichen Itza, is located about 100 kilometers west of Cancun and visited each year by thousands of tourists who marvel at the exquisite stone construction of buildings, including the Great Ball Court, The Temple of the Warriors, and the Castillo. The Maya believed a great god, Quetzalcoatl (or “birdsnake”) resided in the city and the Castillo was a monument to the feathered serpent. Each year, during the spring and autumn equinoxes, carvings of feathered serpents located on the Castillo’s northern stair create an illusion that draws thousands of worldwide tourists. The late afternoon sunlight brings these carvings to life and as the day goes on a pattern of light and shadows gives one the impression that great diamond-backed rattlesnakes are writhing up the great stairs of the Castillo.

The progressiveness of the Mayan culture convinced a certain sector of their fan base that the Maya were actually not human at all. This line of thinking follows the concept that the Maya are in fact aliens from another planet who traveled by the light of the stars. The belief is that the Mayans will return on December 21, 2012 to transform reality. One of the curators of this theory is Jose Arguelles, author of “The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology.” Arguelles believes the Maya actually are from the star Arcturus in the Pleides cluster and materialized in Mesoamerica as “galactic agents.”

Reviews of the Pleidian theory range from polite snickering to outright dismissal. Kenneth L. Feder, author of “Frauds, Myths and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology”, writes “there is no reference to archaeological evidence or any sort of scientific testing for the speculations made by Arguelles. The claims may seem laughable, but at this time in genuine human history, the joke isn’t funny. The specter of thousands of people waiting hopefully for some ‘planetary synchronization’ or ‘harmonic convergence’ to cure all of the ills that afflict us and our planet is ultimately, desperately sad.”

While many Mayan scholars dismiss the end of the Last Great Cycle as pop hysteria, the fact is mainstream culture has slowly began to discover the Mayan civilization. The popular TV series the “X-Files” ended with Mulder and Scully not being abducted by predatory aliens, but because the producers deemed the Long Calendar as the ultimate X-File. The last episode depicts the end of the world in 2012, in accordance with the end of the last cycle. Mel Gibson’s new movie “Apocolypto” will hit theaters later this year, and deals with the downfall of the classic Mayan society. The characters will speak entirely in Mayan, the same language still spoken by the remaining Mayans today. Surprisingly, Scarborough is looking forward to the movie. He believes the film could have educational value if it encourages just one person to open a book about the history of the Maya and do some research.

“My colleagues might go crazy, but I’m a little more open to things,” he said. “The Maya were amazing, there’s no doubt about that. We have to be careful how far we take their beliefs.” As for what will happen on December 21, 2012, we know the planets will align and for sure, there will a lot of individuals proclaiming the end of days. But as Michael Coe, professor emeritus of anthropology at Yale University, puts it: “No one really knows what is going to happen.”

However, if we continue to turn a blind eye to such issues as pollution and global warming, we will not need a calendar to tell us the world is ending. All we will need to do is look out our window.

Comments

biased, selective, and inaccurate Written by Guest on 2006-12-01 12:35:51 Brett Koppen's piece engages in the typical survey of 2012 theories, and a bias toward the doomsday angle. Although he mentions other researchers, writers, and scholars, my name and book are not mentioned, even though Koppen summarizes my theory in the fourth paragraph. Why someone's original thesis should be summarized and then not attributed to them, is baffling. Readers should know that my work, as published in my pioneering 1998 book Maya Cosmogenesis 2012, is not making a case for doomsday, but attempts to reconstruct the original cosmology associated with the 2012 date. --continued--

biased, selective, and inaccurate Written by Guest on 2006-12-01 12:37:00 --continued-- ... cosmology associated with the 2012 date. That goal necessitates examining the early Maya site of Izapa, which no one else has pursued. As anyone who reads my books or articles can judge for themselves, the results are worth noting --- accurately and with proper credit. Even brief online pieces like this one should take note of how the carved monuments of Izapa encode the astronomical alignment that culminates in era-2012. This has value for how we understand 2012, from the vantage of the creators of the 2012 calendar. Imagine that!

biased, selective, and inaccurate Written by Guest on 2006-12-01 12:39:47 Imagine that! By going to Izapa, the source of the 2012 revelation, we can circumvent all the misinformation, self-styled gurus, doomsday noise, and crap that is being spewed. Robert Sitler recognizes that my work is compelling and needs a fair hearing. Did you read his piece in Nova Religio? If so, then why wasn't his positive assessment of my work mentioned? And the idea that the Long Count end-date has nothing to do with astronomy is patently absurd, as any conscious person can easily notice, since it does fall on a winter solstice. In addition, the rare solstice-galaxy alignment occurs, in fact, during the 2012 end date. Is that a coincidence? Or a focus for closer investigation? ---continued--

biased, selective, and inaccurate Written by Guest on 2006-12-01 12:40:59 --continued--- Or a focus for closer investigation? Closed-minded scholars say coincidence. My investigation since the late 1980s --- unfunded and unsupported by the people and institutions that are supposed to figure these things out --- lays out evidence to show that the ancient creators of the Long Count calculated the future alignment of the solstice sun and the galactic equator (which de facto occurs between 1980 and 2016 AD). You cite other authors whose work plays into the New Age doomsday angle, or scholars who chuckle and smugly say "the world isn't going to end"; my work is an interdisciplinary synthesis that pioneers a progressive new interpretation of ancient Maya astronomy. Why can't that goal be respected and recognized? Why must your essay waffle between New Age goofballs and smugly dismissive scholars? By the way, according to the Maya World Age doctrine, cycle endings are always about transformation and renewal --- never about final ends. Western culture, rooted in a linear time concept thanks to Christian doctrine, tends to misinterpret Maya time philosophy by projecting it's own biases and assumptions. (I addressed that one decades ago.) My debates and exchanges with scholars, as well as educational intros and contextual essays and excerpts from my articles and books, are on my website: Alignment2012.com   Thank you,  John Major Jenkins

i second the words of John Written by Guest on 2006-12-01 13:23:24 congratulations for your work    John, Terence for beeing honest    and mel gibsons for how it shows it

Really? Written by Guest on 2006-12-01 19:14:25 Do you really think he took the doomsday angle? I think it's a fairly balanced look at the idea. More of a what if look at things instead of a thumping, "This is the way" view. Whatever, I thought it was interesting, and a nice insight into an upcoming film, and an area most people wouldn't be interested. Kudos to Mr. Koppen, and as for Mr. John Major Jenkins, you are reading an entertainment magazine, not a scholarly journal, try not to confuse the two.

Author response Written by Guest on 2006-12-01 19:42:10 This piece was not meant to endorse the doomsday theory nor imply the Mayans thought the world would end, just that some scholars have interpreted the calendar as saying precisely that. As for your charge that I summarized "your" theory, this information was found in several books I consulted. Frankly, I have never heard of you before. Brett Koppen

Entertainment Magazine World Written by Guest on 2006-12-02 10:54:35 Thanks to the earlier guest comment for clearing up the confusion. It's easy to forget that we live in an age where ideas are supposed to be evaluated based on entertainment value rather than truth or rigorous analysis. I also note that the author responded to John Jenkins with "your" theory put in quotes, as though it were aJohn falsely attributed to himself a theory to be found in many places. But if Mr. Koppen did his homework he would find that the theory does, in fact, originate with John Jenkins, even if many shoddy books also fail to attribute it to him.

Written by Guest on 2006-12-02 12:05:02 Brett, the last Guest comment pretty much sums up the problem, and how you can research and write a piece on 2012, encounter my theory unattributed in other books (I see that time and time again), and yet not be able to trace it back to the source. The issue is not so much the "doomsday angle" which Gibson's badly named film implies as the false framing of the discussion. as I said, between the two poles of goofball New Agers and dismissive scholars. My work falls into neither of these categories, so my work is appropriated and misquoted. Check out my website and you'll see what you missed. BTW, I have three books in print with Inner Tradtions and have been on recent History Channel and Disxovery Channel documentaries. The 2012 solstice-galaxy alignment thesis that I present evidence for in my books is a theory that did not exist before my work in the mid-1990s, although some claim to have made the vague assertion that there may be a connection between 2012 and the alignment. Alignment2012.com  John Major Jenkins

Written by Guest on 2006-12-05 00:35:41 I wonder if your issue, Mr. Jenkins, is with Mr. Koppen's relatively minor infringement in his lack of citation (is it so difficult to believe that maybe some books don't have as high an opinion of Jenkins' work as he seems to have?) or with self-promotion?

nick Written by Guest on 2007-03-14 15:26:20 Excellent article w/common sense logic

The future is unwritten Written by Guest on 2007-07-15 12:01:12 So how will WE write it? We certainly have the elements in place to destroy ourselves. The planet has experienced cataclysmic events in its history - polar shifts, ice ages, etc. No one really knows. SOooo let's write it like we want it. That is what Chris Fenwick did in the #1 Visionary Novel: "the 100th human." You choose...

geography 101 Written by Guest on 2008-02-02 16:50:08 mayan ruins are located in north and central america. if you really wanted to be pedantic, you could say only "north america" for central america is a province within north america, not a continent by itself

sdrfefrt Written by Guest on 2008-02-24 21:56:03

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