by MEXICO CITY – 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.
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.
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 North America's power grid for years, triggering food shortages, water scarcity — a collapse of civilization. Solar peaks occur about every 11 years, but Joseph says there's evidence the 2012 peak could be "a lulu."
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."
So, it hardly needs stating that the apocalypse is nothing new. Every generation reinvents the end of the world according to whatever material is available or seems otherwise pertinent to the time. Now, I suspect possibly thanks to Terrance McKenna, it's the turn of the Maya to supply the source material. Without wishing to appear overly disparaging about a body of writing with which I am blissfully unfamiliar, I would suggest that Terrance McKenna is a twat... in fact a real twat's twat; the sort of twat that other twat's look at and say "what a twat!" It's all to do with telepathy, or energies converging around 2012, or something of that sort. I don't know. I tried to read the article and found my brain trying to shut itself down after a couple of paragraphs. I heard him speaking on the radio but his voice was far too reminiscent of Beavis & Butthead's teacher, the one who sang 'Lesbian Seagull'. I am unable to take a man with such a voice seriously, regardless of what he may choose to say with that voice.
Anyway, painfully accurate character assessments aside, is the world going to end on the 22nd of December 2012? I don't know, but maybe a better question would be is the world going to end on the 22nd of December, 2012 - this being the termination date of the last Mayan Baktun?
I'm actually greatly more familar with the calendrical systems of central Mexico as used by the various Nahua people (commonly referred to as Aztecs although the term is not entirely accurate) - the Tonalpohualli and Xiuhpohualli cycles. These cycles record shorter time spans roughly equivalent to Gregorian years and months and comprise the most basic units of the otherwise more complex Mayan calendar. As the two systems are identical, and it is the Nahua-Mexica variant with which I am most familiar, I will refer it in general illustration of preColombian Mexican timekeeping.
Most familiar to us will be the solar year as described in the Xiuhpohualli calendar. This comprises 18 ilhuitl periods (each lasting 20 days) and the 5 day Nemontemi at the end of the year amounting to 365 days. A little more complicated is the 260 day Tonalpohualli divinatory cycle which repeats over and over during the Xiuhpohualli years. It takes 52 years for a full cycle of both systems, that is to say 52 years before a given Xiuhpohualli day will realign to a given Tonalpohualli day. The longest period of time recorded by the Nahua is a 104 year Xiuhmolpilli or 'Great Age'. The system is complex and not easily described, although its precise workings are not of direct relevance here so I shall move on. The Mayan claendar employs identical units of time (365 and 260 day calendars, 18 divisions of 20 day periods and so on) but expands upon this to incorporate much larger cycles - the tun (360 days), the katun (20 times 360 days) the baktun (400 years), pictun (8,000 tuns), calabtun (160,000 tuns) and so on.
The crucial point we are thus far missing is that neither 360 (plus the 5 days of Uayeb analogous to Nemontemi) nor 365 days represent a true solar year. No Mesoamerican calendar appears to record any means of correlating the date to actual solar time as does our own leap year system. However, such a system clearly existed for the accuracy of the Mayan calendar is well established even if the means by which it was corrected remains obscure. Numerous theories exist, although the main contenders appear to be a period of 13 non-calendrical days added at the close of each 52 year period, or a system very much like that of our own leap year which remains unrecorded. It is possible that either of these may have been used in different regions of Mesoamerica, although Gordon Brotherston has identified elements of comically obscure Nahua codices clearly describing the familiar device of every fourth year enduring for 366 days. Gordon Brotherston by the way is hard as fucking nails when it comes to this calendar, so if you're going to pick an argument with him you'd better bring some mates.
Okay, so there was a leap year. Why was the mechanism not recorded, or at least why was it not recorded in the great majority of indigenous sources dealing with this subject? I've already described 260 and 365 day cycles. In addition to these were 9 day cycles applied only to the hours of darkness (the Yohuallitecuhtin for the Nahua), a cycle referring to the planet Venus, and for the Maya, so many other related cycles that frankly I get a headache just thinking about them. These cycles did not occur willy nilly. All were closely related creating a great, mathematically ornate, and faithfully repeating rhythm. Not the sort of thing where one can just throw in an extra day every so often without sending all subseqent alignments into disarray. Imagine it as interlocking cogwheels - Tonalpohualli - continually cycling and aligning until all possible combinations have produced a single 260 day divinatory year. Now apply this to the larger, more complex cycles of the Maya, wheels with much greater numbers of teeth but working in much the same way. An extra tooth added to any one wheel, or a number of wheels, or to all of them screws up the whole thing just as an extra day would screw up a calendar where each day has a specific symbolic import derived from each combination of points on the cycles involved.
So the solution was to suspend the calendar for one day every four years, then allow it to resume after one day had passed without any canonical designation in the context of the recorded cycles. It is not a well-understood system for the obvious reason that it deals with infrequent units of time which, by their very nature, could not be recorded in the calendar as a whole. The only instance of a Tonalpohualli intercalary day being recognised appears to be on page 9 of the Mexicanus text presently held in Paris. As for the Maya equivalent, I'm not even sure I'd know where to begin.
Okay, deep breath.... Mayan calendar.
The Mayan calendar as we understand it correlates to a base date of either 2nd or 13th of August, 3114bce depending on your source. I'm using the latter as it appears to be more commonly accepted from what I can tell. A Mayan world age lasts 13 Baktuns, a period of 1,872,000 days. Therefore 22nd December, 2012 must necessarily be the 1,872,001st day after the Mayan base date. Unfortunately though, it doesn't quite work out.
The sum of 1,872,000 days after the base date calculated without compensating for either Mayan intercalary days or Gregorian leap years represents a period of 5,128 years and 280 days bringing us to the 19th May, 2015.
The sum of 1,872,000 days excluding Mayan intercalary days (thus preserving the mathematical integrity of the same) but including related systems within both Julian and Gregorian calendars represents a period of 5,312 years and 102 days bringing us to 19th August, 2019.
The sum of 1,872,000 days including Mayan intercalary days as thogh they were a part of the calendar (which they patently were not) and related systems within both Julian and Gregorian calendars represents a period of 5,125 years and 94 days bringing us to 15th November 2011.
I have no idea where 2012 came from. I guess some clever fucker just pulled it out of their arse one day.
As a point of interest to me (and probably no-one else) the Nahua-Mexica universe should have ended in 1697 - each of the four suns (standing in for a distinct age of the world) in the original Nahua universe was held to endure for 676 years (13 times 52). Around 1506, Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin's govenment revised the four sun model to incorporate five suns - numerically more consistent with other aspects of the Nahua view of the mechanism of the universe, though neccessitating one previous sun to be subdivided into two shorter ages of 312 and 364 years respectively. Leyenda de los Soles (the last section of Codex Chimalpopoca) describes each of these ages of the world and provides a useful date, claiming that the sum total of these ages was 2513 years as of 22nd May, 1558.
Jerome is to blame for persuading me to dig this out. I actually wrote it around ten years ago and I must stress I am no longer absolutely convinced of the mathematics involved. I'm fairly certain that my figures are closer than the supposed 2012 date but maths was never my strong point. Hopefully it's made for interesting reading even though I wouldn't necessarily defend this as something worth quoting, even if I had made a better job of communicating the basic ideas. The important point is that 2012 is derived from a Mayan calendar treated as a Gregorian calendar, which doesn't really work.
