For those of us who hate Christmas, it’s kind of comforting to hear that the world is going to end on December 21. If the jig truly is up, there’s no need to go through the tedious holiday rituals of shopping, making
For those of us who hate Christmas, it’s kind of comforting to hear that the world is going to end on December 21. If the jig truly is up, there’s no need to go through the tedious holiday rituals of shopping, making travel arrangements and festooning the boughs of doomed evergreens.
What a wonderful life that would be. But alas, the apocalypse is not coming on the third Friday in December.
To be fair, most of the originators and/or perpetuators of the 2012 prophecy, widely publicized by movies, books, TV documentaries and of course the Internet, don’t claim the world is going to end December 21. Their contention is that the ancient Maya, who were great prognosticators of the future and just possibly in communication with supremely intelligent extraterrestrials, predicted an apocalyptic transformation of humanity on or around that date. The world’s people, or maybe just a select few enlightened ones, would elevate themselves from this corrupt, materialistic existence to a state of harmonious enlightenment.
This is all complete hogwash. But how anyone came to believe it does tell us a lot about the need of all humans, ancient and modern, to mark the passage of time.
Our tale begins way back in the middle of the 20th century, when some serious scholars did indeed hypothesize that the Maya believed the world would end in 2012. The Maya were excellent astronomers and prolific calendar makers, with different systems used to schedule day-to-day affairs, religious rituals and so on. One of their more sacred calendars, the Long Count, was made of nested cycles: 20 days made a winik, 18 winik made a tun, 20 tun made a k’atun and 20 k’atun made a bak’tun.
Thirteen bak’tun made a Great Cycle, a period of roughly 5,125 years. Maya creation myth could be interpreted to suggest that we are living in the fourth Great Cycle, the first three having resulted in failed worlds. More than a century ago, scholars were able to calculate that the Maya put the beginning of the present Great Cycle at August 11, 3114 B.C. Which puts