The 2012 Mayan Calendar Cult Makes Its Mainstream Debut
When Nostradamus Meets The Da Vinci Code
The idea that the Mayan calendar somehow predicts the End Of The World, come December, 2012, when the calendar's unique method of marking time ends, is a relatively new concept. There is no history of Mayans, millions of who still live in South American, citing 2012 as the End Times, or even that much scholarly work examining such a prediction.
Like the widely believed idea of The Rapture - that when Jesus Christ returns he will suck up the living bodies of all the believers and the innocent (even unborn foetuses) and leave the unbelievers to burn in a living hell on Earth - the growing cult of 2012 is a modern day creation, making use of old writings to capitalise on very modern fears and anxieties, and consumer guilt.
Let's face it. An entire genre of very popular movies and books and video games, and the mind-boggling success of the American Evangelical movement (70 million strong and reportedly still growing), proves that many Westerners secretly love the idea that we're all about to cop it in the neck, in a mega-apocalyptic sense.
If not next year, then 2012. If not then, maybe 2032, when yet another comet is set to slam into the Earth and end all life as we knew it.
The Mayan 2012 Armageddon Cult is perhaps more of a cult by hype than any kind of growing or widespread set of beliefs. Like Al Qaeda in Iraq, there was no such thing as a cult of true believes in the 2012 calendar until the media began reporting that there was, and then it grew. Or least, the claims of its existence and popularity and credibility grew after all the media reports.
There's a surge of new books and websites pumping the myth that the end of the Mayan calendar marks the demise of our time, and there are plenty of academics willing to get down and have a bit of a brawl over the fascinating history of the Maya and their once incredibly advanced society and historically unique concepts of time and cosmology. But the academics are mostly getting involved to smack down the myth-makers and to argue through their own knowledge. Many academics treat myth-busting the 2012 Armageddon Cult as intellectual wrestling, followed out by a sleeper hold.
But one thing the growing surge of interest in the Mayan 2012 Armageddon Cult does show is that the media always loves a good apocalypse story. Almost as much as it loves to do stories on people who have belief systems seemingly dipped in Wacky which they then help to let loose upon the world.
To prove that point, here's a few excerpts from a long feature published in New York Times Magazine recently. It's worth a read in full, if you've got the time. And according to the Mayan 2012 Armageddon Cult you don't have much of that left :
Personally, I dread the 2015. Mostly because I had a long series of dreams when I was nine years old that 2015 is the year a full blown nuclear war breaks out between the United States and Russia. The dreams continued for nearly three weeks, almost every night, unrolling like a 15 or 16 part long TV miniseries, each dream picking up from where the last one ended, packed full of people I didn't know, living in towns I'd never visited, talking of life experiences I'd never had.Far from its origins, divorced from its context and enlisted in a prophetic project that it may never have been designed to fulfill, the Mayan calendar is at the center of an escalating cultural phenomenon — with New Age roots — that unites numinous dreams of societal transformation with the darker tropes of biblical cataclysm. To some, 2012 will bring the end of time; to others, it carries the promise of a new beginning; to still others, 2012 provides an explanation for troubling new realities — environmental change, for example — that seem beyond the control of our technology and impervious to reason. Just in time for the final five-year countdown, the Mayan apocalypse has come of age.
Light and darkness — heavenly forces and a corrupted earth — are the twin engines of apocalyptic movements. For Christians awaiting rapture or Shiites counting the days until the Twelfth Imam appears, the trials and injustices of the known world are a prelude for the paradise that we can imagine but can’t yet achieve. Judging by the sheer number of predicted end dates that have come and gone without the trumpets blowing and angels rushing in, we are a people impatient to see our world redeemed through catastrophe — and we are always wrong. Gnostics predicted the imminent arrival of God’s kingdom as early as the first century; Christians in Europe attacked pagan territories in the north to prepare for the end of the world at the first millennium; the Shakers believed the world would end in 1792; there was a “Great Disappointment” among followers of the Baptist preacher William Miller when Jesus did not return to upstate New York on Oct. 22, 1844. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have been especially prodigious with prophetic end dates: 1914, 1915, 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, 1975 and 1994. Any religious movement with an end-time prophecy is certain to attract followers, no matter how maniacal or fringy (witness the Branch Davidians).
For those who want to go online and get the latest tally of bad news, there is a nuclear Doomsday Clock and the Rapture Index. If you remember living through Y2K, that was another millenarian moment — except our computer systems were redeemed by the same code writers who corrupted them in the first place.
Who dreams of the apocalypse? Why do they dream of it? Polls indicate that up to 50 percent of Americans believe that the Book of Revelation is a true, prophetic document, meaning they fully expect the predictions of “Rapture,” “Tribulation” and “Armageddon” to be fulfilled. There is a paradox built into end-time theologies in that imminent catastrophe often brings comfort; according to Paul S. Boyer, an authority on prophecy belief in American culture and an emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the apocalypse is an appealing idea because it promises salvation to a select group — all of whom share secret knowledge — and a world redeemed and delivered from evil. “The Utopian dream is a big part of the Western tradition,” Boyer told me, “both the religious and secular forms. But the wicked have to be destroyed and evil has to be overcome for the era of righteousness to dawn.” This is as true in the New Age as much as in any other one. Rumors of global crisis, the distrust of institutional authority, the ready availability of esoteric lore, the existence of individuals drawn to abstruse numerical schemes, the urge to assuage anxieties with dreams of social transformation — wherever these elements exist, apocalyptic thinking is likely to flourish.
If the Mayan calendar seems like an unlikely timing device for our salvation — whether it arrives through global catastrophe or telepathic rainbow around the earth — its animating role in the 2012 phenomenon is entirely consistent with popular notions of the “mysterious” Maya that have persisted for over a century. The Maya were just one of the peoples to thrive in Mesoamerica before the Spanish conquest of the 16th century, but the civilization’s florescence — spanning the period called the Maya Classic, between 300 and 900 A.D. — was especially bright and spectacular. After growing into a loose confederation of rival city-states that spread across the Yucatan peninsula and extended as far as Chiapas in the west and Honduras in the east, the Mayan civilization fell into a rolling decline that ended with the almost complete abandonment of their cities. The so-called Mayan collapse is a continued source of speculation and a major reason why the Maya have captured the imagination of 19th-century travelers, 20th-century archaeologists and generations of popular fantasists who have connected the Maya to everything from intergalactic colonies to the lost island of Atlantis to Teutonic gods from fire-breathing spaceships. The Mayan sites attract small armies of New Age pilgrims every year, hoping to plug into a stone socket of timeless indigenous wisdom; tens of thousands gather for the spring equinox at Chichén Itzá alone to watch the shadow of a snake slither down the steps of the Temple of Kukulcin.
The Maya calendar keepers are known to have charted the cycles of the moon, the sun, Mars and Venus with an accuracy that wouldn’t be duplicated until the modern era. Like most premodern societies, the Maya conceived of history not as the linear passage of time but as a series of cycles — they called them “world age cycles” — that would repeat over and over. To capture these cycles, the Maya employed what scholars call the long-count calendar, a five-unit computational system extending forward and backward from their mythical creation day, which is calculated to have fallen on either Aug. 11, 3114 B.C. or Aug. 13, 3114 B.C. All the current hoopla is due to the mathematical fact that the current world-age cycle on the long count, which began in Aug. 3114 B.C., is about to reach its end, 5,126 years later, on a date given in scholarly notation as 13.0.0.0.0 — which falls, not quite exactly, on Dec. 21, 2012. Enter the apocalypse.
It is a splendid, human-size dream, that an ancient people revered for unearthly wisdom could climb aboard a calendar ship and redeem us from our troubled world and the confines of our vexing natures. Dec. 21, 2012, is already here — long before the date arrives — and perhaps it has always been. End dates are not the stuff of fantasy, after all; each and every one of us has a terminal appointment inscribed in our calendars. And the end might just arrive sooner. Perhaps that is why we need to imagine a supernatural force with one eye on a ticking clock, waiting to make everything new again.
After the first week, I came to kind of enjoy these mini-mind movies. Some nights I couldn't wait to go to sleep to see what was going to happen next. Of course, the more I wanted to get into those dreams, the longer it took me to fall asleep and get there.
When I was nine and ten years, 2015 seemed an impossibly long time away. Here in 2007, well, it's just around the corner.
If you're interest is piqued by the Mayan 2012 calendar 'controversy', you will find your time far better spent if you pick up a couple of good books on the history of the Maya and their remarkable culture. A book on Mayan sculpture and art is usually a thing of beauty, and will blow away any idea you've ever had that 'advanced society' is something unique to our times.
The books on the 2012 calender guff I've flicked through don't provide much more info than what you'll find in the full article I've excerpted from above. If you read the full article, you'll know as much about the supposed 2012 Mayan Armageddon as any of the dozens of books that are going to be published in the next four years will offer. In that I mean that there is only so much historical info on all this, and most of it is mentioned in the New York Times Magazine article.
Expect the Mayan 2012 Armageddon Cult to get an absurd amount of media coverage in the next few years. There will be more books, documentaries, no doubt a feature film, or five, lecture tours and lots of pontificating twits chewing up TV news magazine time.
Now if the Mayans had actually written down some detailed predictions of what we can expect to happen come 2012, then it would be very interesting indeed to see what they get right, and wrong, if you're into that sort of Nostradamusing. But the Mayans didn't do that. They created an advanced system for cataloguing the passage, the history, of time and the calendar cycles they created expire in the year 2012. That's about it.
The Mayan 2012 Armageddon is a creation of the past three decades, and nothing more.
Consider yourself fully warned. And enjoy the remarkable sculpture and art of the Mayans if you ever see such a book on a shelf somewhere.
It is for their fantastic art, sculpture, culture and cosmology the Mayans should be respected and remembered and honoured. Not because a bunch of publishers decided that the 2012 Mayan Armageddon was going to be the new Da Vinci Code Meets Nostradamus publishing phenomenon.
