Welcome to 2012

2012, the year of the London Olympics, Euro Nations football in Poland ….....and the doomsday phenomenon of major galactic alignment, the opening of Stargates, and a world ending catastrophe. 

An apocalyptic view of 2012, the Armageddon year with predictions of the end of the world and human civilisation, is held by many Western cultures, a belief bordering on paranoia amongst some religious sects. It is an obsession that kicked off in the 1960s with authors of the new age of 'alternative history' such as Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, Robert Charroux and Erich von Daniken writing of lost episodes of mankind's past, claiming a suppressed 'real' history of the human race. The notion of previous civilisations ending abruptly due to some catastrophic event continues to grow with there now being more than 200 books currently listed on Amazon dealing with doomsday 2012, the year of the end of the Maya 'Long Count'.

Did the Ancient Maya Predict the End of the World in 2012? 

Chichén Itzá Maya observatory
(Wikimedia Commons)

The Maya kept time on a scale few other cultures have considered, although the 'Long Count' was most likely invented by the first major civilization in Mexico, the Olmec (fl. c.1500 BC to c.400 BC). During their heyday the Maya adopted the Long Count, an already ancient lengthy circular calendar that commenced way back with the creation.

The Maya were obsessed with time, indeed, there are so many Calendar dates and time-intervals in their inscriptions, that some scholars believed that the ancient Maya worshipped Time itself.

According to archaeologists the Maya calendar does not signify the end of the world in 2012, as some have said, but 21 December 2012 was nonetheless momentous to the Maya. 2012 is the year when the largest grand cycle in the Maya calendar (872,000 days or 5,125.37 years), comes to an end  and a new cycle begins.

The current era of the Long Count calendar began at what the Maya saw as the dawn of the last creation period, August 11, 3114 BC. The Maya called that date, which preceded their civilization by thousands of years, as Day Zero, or 13.0.0.0.0. This era ends on 21 December 2012 and a new one begins; the cycle goes on.

This brings to a close the 13th b'ak'tun, an almost 400-year period in the Maya Long Count calendar, and rather than moving to the next b'ak'tun, the calendar will reset to Day Zero again at the end of the 13th cycle and the cyclical calendar will roll over, beginning another enormous era.

World Ages
There is a strong tradition of "world ages" in literature of the Maya, but the record has been much distorted by popular writers of pseudo-science leaving several possibilities open to interpretation. According to the mytho-historical sacred book 'Popol Vuh' the gods first created three failed worlds followed by a successful fourth world in which humanity was placed. We are currently living in the fourth world. The Long Count's "zero date" was set at a point in the past marking the end of the third world and the beginning of the current fourth world, i.e. its 13th b'ak'tun was on 11 August 3114 BC. The fourth world will have reached the end of its 13th b'ak'tun, or Maya date 13.0.0.0.0, on 21 December 2012.

The Maya did not predict the end of the world in 2012. It is simply the end of an era of the Long Count representing the end of the old cycle and the beginning of the new one. Scholars have widely dismissed the notion that when the Long Count "ends" it will result in cataclysmic events occurring in 2012. Professional Mayanist scholars state that predictions of impending doom are not found in any of the extant classic Mayan accounts and misrepresents their history and culture. On such scholar Mark Van Stone says the notion of a "Great Cycle" coming to an  cataclysmic ending is completely a modern invention. There is no significant astronomical event tied to the Long Count's start date. It is Western cultures that are obsessed with a doomsday event in 2012, not the Maya.

Ancient Prophecy
In all there are about fifteen stone inscriptions in ancient Mayan referring to the “Creation” date 13.0.0.0.0 in 3114 BC. One book, the 12th century Dresden Codex, famous for its Lunar and Venus tables of outstanding accuracy, actually refers to this date more times than all of the stone inscriptions combined but fails to record an event of any note on that date. In other words, it is just a date.

There are few written accounts of the end of b'ak'tun 13 and just one stone tablet on Monument 6 at Tortuguero in southern Mexico's Tabasco state refers to that date. However, the glyphs on the tablet are partially damaged making the precise meaning of the tablet a mystery. Nevertheless, scholars have made several interpretations of a translation.

Tortuguero Monument 6, closing passage. The last 6 glyphs on this long text are the only surviving ancient Maya mention of the date December 21, 2012. ( From the cover of Mark Van Stone's book, "2012: Science and Prophecy of the Ancient Maya". Photos by Elisabeth Wagner and Donald Hales, photo collage by Paul Johnson. http://markvanstone.com/glyphs-evidence-for-2012-apocalypse/ )

One such interpretation made in 1996 by Stephen Houston  from Brown University and David Stuart  of the University of Texas suggests that the glyphs indicate that a god will descend at the end of b'ak'tun 13. What precisely happens next is uncertain, although the scholars suggest this might have been a prophecy of some sort. The 'prophecy' analysis was quickly seized upon by many 'alternative history' websites, 'New Age' discussion forums and 'pseudo-science' books as evidence that the Maya calendar had predicted the end of the world. It hadn't. 
But it didn't stop books like Graham Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods, which basically recycled the Charroux and von Daniken concept of a lost civilisation ending in some catastrophic event, becoming a best seller in the same year.

Houston and Stuart revisited the glyphs recently and concluded that the inscription may actually contain no prophetic statements at all about 2012, with the mention of the end of  b'ak'tun 13 as more likely to be a forward-looking statement that refers back to the main subject of the inscription; the dedication of Monument 6. They insist that even if the inscription is a prophecy of a god coming down at the end of b'ak'tun 13 and starting of a new cycle it isn't a statement about the end of the world.

Should we have much faith in the so-called Maya 2012 prophecy of popular culture? 

The ancient Maya once occupied a vast geographic area in Central America, their empire peaked between 250AD and 900AD in what is now Mexico and Central America. Maya civilization produced awe-inspiring temples and pyramids, highly accurate calendars, mathematics and hieroglyphic writing with a complex social and political order.

In the ninth century AD temple building suddenly stopped and became swallowed up by the jungle; Maya wisdom and knowledge was lost to mankind for centuries. The Collapse of the Classic Maya culture is one of the biggest mysteries in history. And yet they failed to predict it themselves.

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