Mayans Insist 2012 Isnt the End of the World
Oct
11, 3:58 AM (ET)
My Way
By
MARK STEVENSON
Or is it?
Definitely not, the Mayan Indian elder insists. "I came back
from
It can only get worse for him.
Next month
At
"It's too bad that we're
getting e-mails from fourth-graders who are saying that they're too young to
die," Martin said. "We had a mother of two young children who was
afraid she wouldn't live to see them grow up."
Chile Pixtun, a Guatemalan, says the
doomsday theories spring from Western, not Mayan ideas.
A significant time period for the Mayas does end on the date, and
enthusiasts have found a series of astronomical alignments they say coincide in
2012, including one that happens roughly only once every 25,800 years.
But most archaeologists,
astronomers and Maya say the only thing likely to hit Earth is a meteor shower
of New Age philosophy, pop astronomy, Internet doomsday rumors and TV specials
such as one on the History Channel which mixes "predictions" from
Nostradamus and the Mayas and asks: "Is 2012 the year the cosmic clock
finally winds down to zero days, zero hope?"
It may sound all too much like other doomsday scenarios of recent
decades - the 1987 Harmonic Convergence, the Jupiter Effect or "Planet
X." But this one has some grains of archaeological basis.
One of them is Monument Six.
Found at an obscure ruin in
southern
It's unique in that the
remaining parts contain the equivalent of the date 2012. The inscription
describes something that is supposed to occur in 2012 involving Bolon Yokte, a
mysterious Mayan god associated with both war and creation.
However - shades of Indiana
Jones - erosion and a crack in the stone make the end of the passage almost
illegible.
Archaeologist Guillermo Bernal
of Mexico's
Spooky, perhaps, but Bernal notes there are other inscriptions at Mayan sites for
dates far beyond 2012 - including one that roughly translates into the year
4772.
And anyway, Mayas in the
drought-stricken
"If I went to some
Mayan-speaking communities and asked people what is going to happen in 2012,
they wouldn't have any idea," said Jose Huchim, a Yucatan Mayan
archaeologist. "That the world is going to end? They wouldn't believe you.
We have real concerns these days, like rain."
The Mayan civilization, which reached its height from 300 A.D. to
900 A.D., had a talent for astronomy
Its Long Count calendar begins in 3,114 B.C., marking time in
roughly 394-year periods known as Baktuns. Thirteen was a significant, sacred
number for the Mayas, and the 13th Baktun ends around Dec. 21, 2012.
"It's a special anniversary of creation," said David
Stuart, a specialist in Mayan epigraphy at the
Bernal suggests that
apocalypse is "a very Western, Christian" concept projected onto the
Maya, perhaps because Western myths are "exhausted."
If it were all mythology,
perhaps it could be written off.
But some say the Maya knew
another secret: the Earth's axis wobbles, slightly changing the alignment of
the stars every year. Once every 25,800 years, the sun lines up with the center
of our Milky Way galaxy on a winter solstice, the sun's lowest point in the
horizon.
That will happen on Dec. 21,
2012, when the sun appears to rise in the same spot where the bright center of
galaxy sets.
Another
spooky coincidence?
"The question I would ask
these guys is, so what?" says Phil Plait, an astronomer who runs the
"Bad Astronomy" blog. He says the alignment doesn't fall precisely in
2012, and distant stars exert no force that could harm Earth.
"They're really
super-duper trying to find anything astronomical they can to fit that date of
2012," Plait said.
But author John Major Jenkins
says his two-decade study of Mayan ruins indicate the Maya were aware of the
alignment and attached great importance to it.
"If we want to honor and
respect how the Maya think about this, then we would say that the Maya viewed
2012, as all cycle endings, as a time of transformation and renewal," said
Jenkins.
As the Internet gained
popularity in the 1990s, so did word of the "fateful" date, and some
began worrying about 2012 disasters the Mayas never dreamed of.
Author Lawrence Joseph says a
peak in explosive storms on the surface of the sun could knock out
While pressing governments to
install protection for power grids, Joseph counsels readers not to "use
2012 as an excuse to not live in a healthy, responsible fashion. I mean, don't
let the credit cards go up."
Another History Channel
program titled "Decoding the Past: Doomsday 2012: End of Days" says a
galactic alignment or magnetic disturbances could somehow trigger a "pole
shift."
"The entire mantle of the
earth would shift in a matter of days, perhaps hours, changing the position of
the north and south poles, causing worldwide disaster," a narrator
proclaims. "Earthquakes would rock every continent,
massive tsunamis would inundate coastal cities. It would be the ultimate
planetary catastrophe."
The idea apparently originates
with a 19th century Frenchman, Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, a
priest-turned-archaeologist who got it from his study of ancient Mayan and
Aztec texts.
Scientists say that, at best,
the poles might change location by one degree over a million years, with no
sign that it would start in 2012.
While long discredited, Brasseur de Bourbourg proves one thing:
Westerners have been trying for more than a century to pin doomsday scenarios
on the Maya. And while fascinated by ancient lore, advocates seldom examine
more recent experiences with apocalypse predictions.
"No one who's writing in now seems to remember that the last
time we thought the world was going to end, it didn't," says Martin, the
astronomy webmaster. "There doesn't seem to be a lot of memory that things
were fine the last time around."