Posted on 10/21/2009 11:40:24 AM PDT by AreaMan
Oct. 12, 2009 -- Apolinario Chile Pixtun is tired of being bombarded with frantic questions about the Mayan calendar supposedly "running out" on Dec. 21, 2012. After all, it's not the end of the world.
Or is it?
Definitely not, the Mayan Indian elder insists. "I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff."
It can only get worse for him. Next month Hollywood's "2012" opens in cinemas, featuring earthquakes, meteor showers and a tsunami dumping an aircraft carrier on the White House.
At Cornell University, Ann Martin, who runs the "Curious? Ask an Astronomer" Web site, says people are scared.
"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.
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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 Mexico during highway construction in the 1960s, the stone tablet almost didn't survive; the site was largely paved over and parts of the tablet were looted.
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 National Autonomous University interprets the last eroded glyphs as maybe saying, "He will descend from the sky."
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 Yucatan peninsula have bigger worries than 2012.
"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 University of Texas at Austin. "The Maya never said the world is going to end, they never said anything bad would happen necessarily, they're just recording this future anniversary on Monument Six."
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.
"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."
Quotation attributed to G.K. Chesterton.
Right, lets listen to the Mayan’s. Just because you can stack stones on top of each other and have fire doesn’t make you a scientific genius. They didn’t even have radio but they could predict what happens hundreds of years in the future.
Well, darn...now I am thinking twice about that Royal Furniture deal with no payments until 2013.
I have a close relative who is deep into End-Of-The-World and Armageddon beliefs, and he started warning me in '06 about 2012. And I'm sure it's going to become frantic as that date approaches.
Their calendar was round..it figures they would run of room on it at some point ...duh
My calendar goes up to 11. Uh wait a minute....isn’t that next month? My doom is earlier than yours!!!
With any luck, we’ll see scads of idiots pull a Jim Jones/Marshall Applewhite for the occasion.
Y2k turned out to be an escuse to:
1. jack up IT spending and
2. start inflating the hell out of the money supply.
Not sure the reason for 2012...yet
yeah, but I worry about the idiots who will decide to do in their family first to save them the horrors.
They are making this way too complicated. There’s a simple way to tell if the world will indeed end on Dec. 21, 2012: If I win the lottery on Dec. 20, 2012, then it’s game over.
My company and I did quite well during Y2K, even though I told my clients it was a bunch of nothing.
True dat
OMG. My checkbook calendar stops at 2012. Coincidence? I THINK NOT!!!
All I know is that if we have to depend on John Cusack to save the world, we are all in deep Shyte.
Nothing wrong with leveraging opportunities when they emerge.
Doomsday actually began this past January with the inauguration of The One. We have been doomed ever since...
Amazing how superstituous people are.
It’s as almost as if we collectively FORGOT that a Messiah went to a cross to pay for our sins, resurrected on the 3rd day as proof of acceptance of that payment, then ascended back up to heaven— all in full view of history and everyone else.
I’m hitching my trailer to Revelation 20, over the Mayan calendar, manufactured by the evil Mayan society.
lol - Good point. I’ll go see it just ‘cause I’m a disaster movie junkie. Even the really lame ones they show on Saturdays on SciFi - sorry, SyFy.
The world ended January 20, 2009.
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