Year 2012

Originally published in the Dec-Jan '95 issue of Mountain Astrologer.

Why did the ancient Mayan or pre-Maya choose December 21st, 2012 A.D., as the end of their Long Count calendar? This article will cover some recent research. Scholars have known for decades that the 13-baktun cycle of the Mayan "Long Count" system of timekeeping was set to end precisely on a winter solstice, and that this system was put in place some 2300 years ago. This amazing fact - that ancient Mesoameri- can skywatchers were able to pinpoint a winter solstice far off into the future - has not been dealt with by Mayanists. And why did they choose the year 2012? One immediately gets the impression that there is a very strange mystery to be confronted here. I will be building upon a clue to this mystery reported by epigrapher Linda Schele in Maya Cosmos (1994). This article is the natural culmination of the research relating to the Mayan Long Count and the precession of the equinoxes that I explored in my recent book Tzolkin: Visionary Perspectives and Calendar Studies (Borderlands Science and Research Foundation, 1994).

The Mayan Long Count: Just some basics to get us started. The Maya were adept skywatchers. Their Classic Period is thought to have lasted from 200 A.D. to 900 A.D., but recent archeological findings are pushing back the dawn of Mayan civilization in Mesoamerica. Large ruin sites indicating high culture with distinctly Mayan antecedents are being found in the jungles of Guatemala dating back to before the common era. And even before this, the Olmec civilization flourished and developed the sacred count of 260 days known as the tzolkin. The early Maya adopted two different time keeping systems, the "Short Count" and the Long Count. The Short Count derives from combining the tzolkin cycle with the solar year and the Venus cycle of 584 days. In this way, "short" periods of 13, 52 and 104 years are generated. Unfortunately, we won't have occasion to dwell on the properties of the so-called Short Count system here. The Long Count system is somewhat more abstract, yet is also related to certain astronomical cycles. It is based upon nested cycles of days multiplied at each level by that key Mayan number, twenty...

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Twentytwelvology. You won’t find it in Webster’s dictionary. Not yet. But believe me, before this decade is out, we’ll have that as well as plenty of 2012 -isms and -ographies. The 2012 Phenomenon” was recently the subject of a paper written by anthropologist Robert K. Sitler.1 The sub-title of his paper brings focus to his approach: “New Age Appropriation of an Ancient Mayan Calendar.” In his assessment of the writings and statements of popular writers, New Age teachers, and independent researchers (including myself), he sorts the wheat from the chaff and exposes “merely tangential connections to the realities of the Mayan world.” To his credit, he distinguishes the serious work done by myself and Geoff Stray2 from the wild and unfounded speculations of other writers.Sitler’s area of focus is the Long Count calendar and its 2012 end-date, which is the subject of growing interest and controversy – not so much among academicians, who dismiss it as irrelevant, but among spiritual seekers and people interested in the wisdom attained by ancient civilisations. So, what’s all the clamour and confusion about? What is the Long Count calendar?

The Long Count Calendar: An archeological site that’s been known about for decades preserves an open secret about the culture that invented the Long Count calendar. Izapa, in southern Mexico a few miles from the Guatemala border, was the chief ceremonial observatory of “the Izapan civilisation.”3 It was the transitional culture between the older Olmec civilisation and the emerging Maya, and enjoyed its heyday between 400 BCE and 50 CE. My investigation of Izapa’s carved monuments and the site’s astronomical orientations have revealed a great deal about how they understood the Long Count calendar.4 The earliest monuments carved with Long Count dates were found in the region of Izapa and have been dated to the 1st century BCE. The Long Count notation uses bars to represent 5 and dots to represent 1. Five place values are almost always used, representing the following periods of days...

Just in the past two years, there have been two great earthquakes that have devastated populated areas and many other smaller ones that have also done great damage, the Amazon has virtually dried up, the Arctic has begun to melt, the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps have become unstable, and the weather has turned into a complex monster.What is so interesting about this is that our planet is not the only one in the solar system that appears to be affected. There have been signs of unusual weather on Saturn, and Mars appears to be experiencing polar cap decline not dissimilar to our own.Now a scientific paper has been published suggesting that increased solar activity over thepast decade has resulted in the sun contributing anywhere from ten to thirty percent of the additional heat that's going into global warming. In fact, it doesn't just suggest this, it goes a long way toward proving it.

This will be taken by some people to mean that we needn't bother about global warming because it's the sun's fault. But, of course, it's not ALL the sun's fault and we can and must do something about the part that's our fault. The truth is that the added impact of solar heating makes the problem incredibly urgent. This planet's whole natural process is about to go into chaos, and when it does potentially billions of us are going to die, and the most vulnerable areas are the United States, Europe and China, so we Americans cannot expect to sit on the sidelines while the rest of the world suffers for our sins. Anybody who doesn't burn to do something about the global warming problem is insane, and leaders who won't address it are in the process right now of committing the greatest crime against humanity that history has ever known. When I worked on Superstorm, there were no models that factored in increased heating from the sun. But it's there all right, and therein lies the making of a catastrophe not unlike that prophesied as the end of the age, according to Jose Arguelles, by Pacal Votan, a Mayan ruler of the sixth century A.D. I am beginning to see around me evidence that this man's prophecy was correct. Why that would be so is another matter entirely, and one that I cannot address except with speculation, but I can say that, if things keep deteriorating at the present rate, there are going to be environmental disasters of unprecedented ferocity ina fe......

Repeatedly throughout history people have imagined that the end of the world, or at least the end of the present age, was nigh. This is particularly true in times of plague, famine, unrest, tyranny, and war, which pretty well covers most of human history.Supposedly people were panicking in the eleventh century, and, more recently, prophets have convinced their naive followers to give up all their worldly goods or even committ mass suicide. But this time is different. We are nearing the winter solstice, 2012 date forecast as the end of this age by the Mayas, who had remarkably accurate lunar and solar calendars, and fairly advanced mathematics, including thezero concept.The last 100 years or so has been the bloodiest, the most tragic, in all of history, and that is saying a lot.

Never before have we had weapons of mass destruction that can virtually wipe out humanity: nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. These weapons are proliferating into the hands of terrorists and those states that support them, and recombinant DNA technology can potentially create even more deadly germ warfare agents. Never before have we had space flight. Never before have we had anything like the United Nations, which has done absolutely nothing to prevent or even reduce war, terrorism, and democide (its stated purpose) but which serves as the foundation for the dreaded global fascism of the New World Order. And the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 seems to fulfill an ancient Biblical prophecy; when Biblical and Mayanprophecy appear to coincide perhaps we need to take notice. Yet another Biblical prophecy was the so-called “mark of the beast’” without which men could not buy or sell; proposed computer chip implants, the ultimate convenience in a cashless society seem to fit this one pretty well, and can serve, at the very least, to track people if not to control them. And the timing, the date, and the place of many recent events orchestrated by the global elite seem to point to the end. David Icke has remarked that even if we choose not to believe in sacred geometry and numerology, we should at least understand that the elite take all of this very seriously. If nothing else, such an understanding helps us to predict their next move, and they are becoming increasingly predictable. So let us take a look at the basics of the subject. The Mayans, andma......