The 2012 Story (15 page)

In writing his book on the Mexican calendar, Waters practiced something that has been, in recent years, winnowed out of books on 2012 as a kind of irrelevant annoyance. He actually researched and studied the Maya tradition. Based on his general knowledge of indigenous cultures, tempered with specific details on the Maya gathered from his studies, Waters drew some insightful conclusions about the Long Count and its cycle ending. For example, it was patently clear to him that the 13-Baktun cycle was part of a World Age doctrine. This is a clear conclusion to draw, and Maya scholars such as Gordon Brotherston and Eva Hunt supported and explored the idea, but in more reactive and defensive quarters my emphasis on the idea has drawn an incredible amount of scholarly backlash.

Waters also concluded that the importance of the 13-Baktun cycle must involve astronomy. He thus presents an astrological interpretation of the cycle-ending date, based on a planetary horoscope for the date and an astrologer’s assessment of it. Unfortunately, Waters’s academic source for the end date (Coe’s book
The Maya
) contained a flaw, resulting in a mistaken calculation for the end date that he used. Strangely, in
Mexico Mystique
Waters cited the book
Hamlet’s Mill
but didn’t seem to catch the oblique reference to a precessional alignment model. Waters’s book was the first one dedicated to the end-date question, and he can be considered the man who launched the 2012 phenomenon. It planted a seed but did not spawn a great legacy of followers, as Shearer’s book drew attention away from the Long Count to the 1987 date while the 2012 meme morphed in other directions in the hands of McKenna and Argüelles. A later edition of Coe’s book provided a corrected end date, which for all intents and purposes must have rendered Waters’s theory irrelevant, although as late as 1990 I attended a talk by an astrologer in Boulder, Colorado, who utilized Waters’s horoscope charts.

Efforts to track early references to 2012 reveal a lack of coherence and agreement. Peter Tompkins’s 1976 book
Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids
makes a wry reference to “2011” in the final pages, reporting that “sensitives say the Serpent People are due to return to earth in 2011 to help create a world government.”
⁹
Peter Balin, an artist and traveler, published a book in 1978 called
Flight of the Feathered Serpent
and put another astronomical observation for 2012 on the table, setting the stage for seeing the Maya calendar as a teaching game and oracle. Balin’s book is a well-illustrated poetic treatise, somewhat after the fashion of Shearer’s books, that presents a tarot-like game/oracle that spiritual seekers could engage and learn from. The artistic presentation of the system anticipates and resembles the Dreamspell game created by Argüelles in the early 1990s.

Balin also mentioned, briefly, the Venus transits of the sun that were to occur in 2004 and 2012—an idea taken up later by Swedish author Carl Calleman. Good diagrams of the Venus transit are provided, along with a brief discussion of the facts that such a transit occurs roughly once every 130 years and one will happen in June of 2012. It’s interesting that Balin points out this fact, but the next step would be to demonstrate how the Maya were aware of Venus transits and how Venus transits evoke a known theme in Mexican cosmology. For example, the myth of Quetzalcoatl involves the morning star rebirth of Venus from the sun, which takes place after the inferior conjunction of the sun and Venus. This event occurs once every 584 days. The Venus
transit
is a much more precise, and therefore rare, version of inferior conjunction, such that the planet Venus actually transits across the disk of the sun. Balin listed Waters’s
Mexico Mystique
in his bibliography, and he states that the end date falls on December 21, 2011—a partial correction of Waters’s erroneous sourcing from Coe. With these examples, by 1980 there were clearly several books in print that mentioned or explored more fully the cycle ending.

In my own process of encountering and studying all things 2012, I can’t help notice that my life has been interwoven with these authors and the 2012 meme from an early age. I have a vivid memory from 1976 of my friend Joe’s dad reading
Mexico Mystique
. It was described as a book about the Indians in Mexico who invented a calendar that will end in 2011. That encounter stuck with me, and I recognized Waters’s book years later when I began my studies. I spent the summer of ’76 at my uncle’s campground in Colorado, helping out and camping under the shooting stars of the Rocky Mountains. We would sometimes congregate around an old hippie storyteller’s campfire at night and listen to legends and ghost stories. One day as I was emptying garbage cans for my uncle, the old hippie called me over and gave me a copy of Shearer’s
Quetzalcoatl, Lord of the Dawn
. After moving to Colorado in 1985, I read
The Invisible Landscape
by the McKenna brothers (both of whom were born and raised in Colorado). I encountered Argüelles’s
Earth Ascending
book in 1986 and then the more informative and fulfilling
Time and the Highland Maya
by Barbara Tedlock.

All along, the books of Frank Waters were with me:
Masked Gods
,
The Book of the Hopi
,
Pumpkin Seed Point
,
Mountain Dialogues
. I loved the guy and wanted to meet him. In getaways from Boulder every summer I used to hike and camp in Bandelier National Monument, near Taos, New Mexico. The Mesa Verde cliff dwellings and Chaco Canyon were close by, and so was Frank Waters’s home in Arroyo Seco above Taos. On a whim I tried to visit Waters at his home near Taos in August 1988. I spoke with his wife, Barbara, and hung out in the courtyard for a while, but he was out of town. His
Mexico Mystique
book, despite the one glaring mistake that renders it obsolete, remains an important early exploration of what we now call the 2012 phenomenon.

By 1980, lots of changes were happening in the cultural landscape of America. The 1960s breakthrough into liberal exploration of sex and drugs was accompanied by explorations of esoteric teachings and Oriental mysticism. The 1970s brought the shock of a gas shortage, the end of the Vietnam War, and a presidential debacle. As the ’70s closed, disco set the tone while more conservative life strategies emerged as the hippies prepared to turn into yuppies. It was the beginning of the twelve-year Reagan-Bush era, which would see an assassination attempt and a recession (in 1982) and end with the Gulf War.

The landscape of the spiritual marketplace would be changing too. Deep yet popular studies of profound ideas that were all the rage in the 1960s, such as Alan Watts’s
Way of Zen
, gave way to dumbed-down self-help books and trendy (and expensive) encounter groups. Good books come out in every decade, but the general trend throughout the 1980s was clear—market ancient wisdom teachings by figuring out how to make it palatable to people on the go; the intellectual equivalent of fast food at a drive-thru. One way to do this was signaled by Shirley MacLaine’s spiritual biography
Out On a Limb
in 1981. Spiritually themed personal-growth books could sell very well if driven by a famous and popular personality. Eventually, it was realized that the popularity could come from scandal or outrageous claims—it didn’t matter, it just had to draw attention.

The era of Argüelles coincided with this rise of New Age spiritual materialism, a trendy self-help approach to ancient perennial wisdom that appealed to the boomer generation and typified books of this genre written in the 1980s. Admittedly, Argüelles is very much a unique breed of visionary writer and his legacy combines the qualities of a Carlos Casteneda, the channeled Seth material, the mystic art of Robert Fludd, and the incomprehensibil ity of a Buckminster Fuller on LSD, with a dash of Merlin playing the pipes of Pan for good effect.
¹⁰
José Argüelles, one-half of a dyad with his twin brother Ivan (a poet), started his career with a fascinating PhD thesis from the University of Chicago, which became the book
Charles Henry and the Formation of a Psychospiritual Aesthetic
. That was followed by an artistic compilation called
Mandala,
which did so well he was able to buy a house in Oakland with the royalties.
¹¹
The evolution of this artist-mythmaker can be traced in his books, and his recent autobiography provides many more details. His ideation changed rapidly after 1979, when “he was at the peak of his alcoholism, and his marriage of 13 years was about to collapse, along with his entire life as he knew it.”
¹²
His well-documented and intriguing book
The Transformative Vision
(1975), which he considered his seminal text, was a far cry from the cosmic diagrams and inventive speculations of
Earth Ascending
(1984).

Along the lines of Buckminster Fuller’s integrative vision,
Earth Ascending
wove connections between DNA, the I Ching, and the Maya sacred calendar. While Argüelles was teaching at the University of Colorado in Boulder in 1985, he invited a Maya day-keeper from Mexico named Hunbatz Men to come and speak. That friendship set the stage for later developments, including the spread of Argüelles’s ideas to Mexico. Something opened up in the mid-1980s as Shearer’s old Harmonic Convergence date approached. The stage was prepared, the curtain rose, and Argüelles walked on. Shearer himself did his own thing with the Harmonic Convergence date, involving a presentation he gave near Denver.
¹³

The up-and-coming New Age publisher Bear & Company got strategic with the Maya material and collaborated with Argüelles for his 1987 book
The Mayan Factor
. Bear & Company was cofounded by radical Christian theologian Matthew Fox. When Barbara Hand Clow stepped up to run Bear in the mid-1980s, it became a conduit for popular Native American teachings as well as books on Pleiadian channeling—Clow’s own métier, as we can see in her various books, an exception being her less overtly channeled
Pleiadian Agenda
(1995), which presented a smorgasbord of 2012 ideas. The
Native American Medicine Cards
oracle was a huge hit for Bear & Company, as was Barbara Marciniak’s
Bringers of the Dawn
.

An idea called the Photon Belt appeared in Marciniak’s book, which was a vaguely defined mystical concept that visualized the earth passing through a photon beam, or belt of energy, that supposedly emanates from the Galactic Center. As earth travels through space it would enter this zone of increased energy, connecting us to the Pleiadian interdimensional superhighway, and all kinds of speculations were offered as to what it would mean. (The beam was also sometimes described as sweeping through space.) The topic merged nicely with UFOs and crop circles. Communications or visits with extraterrestrials, enlightenment of the race, lizard alien takeovers—the Photon Belt’s extended family of scenarios was large and creative.

A variation of this Photon Belt idea became a major component in Argüelles’s
The Mayan Factor
book, which he connected with 2012 and called “galactic synchronization.” In Brian Swimme’s introduction to
The Mayan Factor
, we find an explanation of what the galactic beams are, astronomically speaking:

Galactic synchronization, “synchronization with the beyond,” is, according to Argüelles, “to surpass all fantasy and all of our wildest dreams.”
¹⁵

This idea eventually morphed into a concept involving the orbit of our solar system around the Galactic Center, in an up-and-down motion above and below the galactic plane over some 240 million years. Our solar system is in this way thought to enter different “density sectors” in its passage through space (see the figure on page 234). Argüelles believed that our passage through the “synchronization beam” was linked to the 5,125-year Great Cycle of 13 Baktuns. It was an evolutionary beam, which he philosophized with artistic finesse in his book, and 2012 represented the critical emergence point, our last chance for “getting on the beam” before we left its transformative presence.

The only thing I need to emphasize here, which I’ll clarify later, is that these concepts have nothing to do with the “galactic alignment” astronomy that is demonstrably embedded in the Maya Creation Mythology and other traditions. The galactic alignment and galactic synchronization are not at all the same thing. I was adamant about the distinction from the get-go, and for more than a decade have clarified the issue in my books, on my website, and in interviews.
¹⁶
Unfortunately, today the concepts are still frequently confused, to the detriment of understanding a key concept of ancient Maya cosmology that demonstrably relates to 2012. In addition, the galactic alignment concept as I have defined it has been retroactively adopted by or applied to Argüelles and others, even though there is no mention of it in their previous books.
¹⁷

In a 1991 article I wrote (reprinted in my 1992 book
Tzolkin: Visionary Perspectives and Calendar Studies
), I took an open-minded position on the larger visionary work that Argüelles was doing and defended the role of the mythmaker in our society, especially at critical ideological junctures like the one we find ourselves in: