The 2012 Story (20 page)

The practical coordination of Lounsbury’s proposal is virtually inconceivable, requiring a coordinated effort between regions separated by thousands of miles. Also, it would be highly uncharacteristic of the pre-Conquest day-keepers to allow such a dislocation of their sacred count, which was treated as an inviolable sacred rhythm. Such proscriptions against sacred day-sign fiddling can be observed in other calendar traditions. The Gregorian reform of 1582, for example, skipped ten days but preserved the sequence of the seven weekdays, which were named after planetary deities. Thursday, October 4, 1582, was followed by Friday, October 15, 1582, in the new Gregorian calendar.

And here’s the biggest snafu of all. If we accept Lounsbury’s defense of his theory (his wildly improbable suggestion that a pre-Conquest two-day shift was achieved), then all post-Conquest dates must, in practice, conform to the December 21, 2012, correlation! According to his own revised theory, Lounsbury places the cycle ending on December 21, 2012, not December 23 as reported by Coe, Schele, and others. The problem here is a lack of attentiveness to the factual details of the correlation question. If a proposed correlation does not allow 13.0.0.0.0 to equate with 4 Ahau according to the surviving, authentic, tzolkin day-count, that proposal has some serious explaining to do. Scholars, not wanting to rock the boat and jeopardize their standing, often align themselves with the consensus opinion, nodding to authority, and ignore logic and facts.
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In a nutshell, the unassailable final word on the correlation issue can be summed up very concisely, with what I call “the equation of Maya time”: 13.0.0.0.0 = 4 Ahau = December 21, 2012.

This, again, is where independent scholars play a vital role, because they can point out that
“
the king is wearing no clothes” without fear of getting fired. My early research delved into the correlation issues deeply and formed a major portion of my 1992 book
Tzolkin
. I also critiqued Lounsbury’s second article of 1992 and found it to engage in a curious bit of mathematical circular logic.
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For anyone who was willing to study and understand the details of the correlation debate, this faux pas could easily be exposed—not to mention the even more egregious misconceptions of the correlation that have occurred in New Age books.

Luckily, scholars who understand these issues quietly support the correct correlation, rarely wanting to be vociferous enough to bruise egos or otherwise make waves. The Tedlocks, the Brickers, John Carlson, Prudence Rice, and Susan Milbrath all use the correct correlation. Lounsbury was a brilliant linguist and epigrapher who pioneered many important decipherments, insightfully connecting certain glyphs with planetary motions. His work to support December 23, however, doesn’t withstand critical analysis.

The devil is in the details, and if you’re willing to dance with the devil the truth can be teased out. The use of the surviving day-count as a litmus test for any proposed correlation should be considered a breakthrough, and my “Equation of Maya Time” is the formal expression of that underappreciated test, allowing us to be perfectly precise in understanding when the 13-Baktun cycle ending happens—the solstice of 2012. This precision therefore highlights the importance of asking the question:
Doesn’t the solstice placement of the end date strongly suggest that it was intentionally calculated?

At least one Maya scholar took this question seriously, albeit briefly. Insightful work on the calendar systems of Mesoamerica appeared with Munro Edmonson’s
Book of the Year
in 1988. In it he wrote that every date in his book confirmed the GMT-2 correlation, placing the 13-Baktun cycle ending on December 21, 2012. He also noted the solstice placement of the cycle ending in 2012, and concluded it was unlikely to be a coincidence. When I began asking this question of other scholars in 1990, the response was always “coincidence” and, in my rather thorough experience with this item of contention, remained so until Susan Milbrath’s statement in an Institute of Maya Studies newsletter in 2008.
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Because the cycle ending falls on a solstice, Edmonson believes the creators of the Long Count must have been employing a method for accurately calculating the tropical year (365.2422 days). He suggested that somehow they must have known that 1,508 haab (of 365 days) equal 1,507 tropical years (of 365.2422 days). This is known as the “year-drift formula,” and it, or something like it, must have been used to accurately calculate future solstice dates. And it must have occurred at the very inception of the Long Count, which was 355 BC according to Edmonson, but certainly by 36 BC at the latest. The tropical year is not very easy to get a handle on; our own calendrical methods to adjust for the extra partial day have resulted in a fairly convoluted “leap year” method for keeping the seasons on track with our calendar. In our Gregorian calendar, a year that is divisible by 4 is a leap year unless it is also divisible by 100, but not by 400.

The simple implication of the solstice 2012 placement is that the people who invented the Long Count possessed scientific abilities and knowledge on par with what was achieved at the pinnacle of ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, and Greek astronomy.

General shifts of approach have been breaking through in Maya studies since the beginning, but especially since the 1970s. An important new approach to ancient Maya cosmology gained acclaim with the work of University of Texas art history professor Linda Schele. Her work can be stated simply: There is a deep connection between Maya mythology and astronomy. Beyond this general principle, Schele and other scholars pieced together the astronomical basis of inscriptions that tie Maya Creation Mythology to the zero date of the 13-Baktun cycle, in 3114 BC. The whole picture came together at the Maya Meetings in March 1992, and was published in the 1993 book Schele wrote with David Freidel and Joy Parker called
Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path
.

One of the key ideas in the book was based on the discoveries of Barbara MacLeod, whose 1991 essay “Maya Genesis” noted that the three hearthstones that were raised into the sky at the Creation event in 3114 BC were connected with the three stones that form a triangle under Orion’s belt. The Ak turtle constellation is located just north of Orion, in parts of Gemini, which is significant because one of the crossing points formed by where the Milky Way crosses over the ecliptic is located there. The ecliptic is the path of the sun, moon, and planets, perceived as a “road” in the sky. It crosses over the bright band of the Milky Way in two places, Gemini and Sagittarius. Schele found this relevant because crosses designate cosmic centers and creation places in Maya astro-mythology. The Maize God is often depicted in Maya art as being reborn from the cracked back of the earth-turtle (when the sun passes through the Ak turtle constellation in summer). Thus, the summertime growth of corn was reflected in sky mythology.

In the center of the hearthstone triangle of stars, the Orion nebula can be seen, diffuse and glowing much like the fire in a hearth. Maya women placed three stones in the hearth as a base for the cooking plate. Schele checked the astronomy of mid-August, 3114 BC, and found a compelling night-sky picture of the Milky Way standing upright, just as the texts described the World Tree being raised into the sky.

Maya scholar Matthew Looper defined the astronomical image-complex connected to the August 11, 3114 BC, Creation date in this way: “the critical event was the appearance of a turtle constellation (in Orion and/or Gemini) at zenith at dawn.”
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The passage of Orion or Gemini through the “zenith at dawn” on that date defines a precession-specific era, which will be worth recalling when it becomes clear that my 2012 alignment theory is tied to a precession-specific era of alignment to the Milky Way. Scholars have come to see the three hearthstones as an archetypal structure that is suspected to refer to the 3114 BC Creation date anywhere it appears—in architectural arrangements of buildings, in non-date-containing inscriptions, or in sculptural assemblages.
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For example, Looper sees the three-hearthstone Creation paradigm of 3114 BC replicated at the site of Naranjo, in three groups of sculptures associated with three triangulated temples.
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The cosmic Crossroads of the Milky Way and the ecliptic is clearly a reference point for Maya Creation events. Scholars such as Karl Taube have noted that the cross symbol is used on thrones to designate the idea of “center,” and it has an additional connection with birth places.
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The connection of the cross symbol with the Milky Way-ecliptic cross in the sky is demonstrated among the modern Quiché, Yucatec, and Chortí Maya. It has been traced back to the Olmec, is present at Izapa, manifests in Sacred Tree symbolism in the Classic Period, and occurs in the
Popol Vuh
Creation Myth as the Crossroads. All of this demonstrates the deep interconnectedness of Maya astronomy and mythology. Some of Schele’s work has come under scrutiny and has undergone revision, but this one insight can be considered unassailable. It doesn’t in fact originate with her. It has a long history in Maya studies and is still accepted by many scholars, but she was its most recent and most compelling champion.

Other researchers took for granted connections between mythology and astronomy. In 1977, Eva Hunt examined a Maya myth from Zinacantán called “The Hummingbird” and traced its iconography back to the ancient doctrine of the four Tezcatlipocas, deities of World Ages who dance around the northern Pole Star. Since Tezcatlipoca was connected with the Big Dipper constellation, which revolves around the Pole Star, the myth thus preserved an ancient understanding of shifting seasonal positions of the Big Dipper caused by the precession of the equinoxes.
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In books and articles from the 1980s, Maya scholar Gordon Brotherston summarized his belief in a deep connection between the precession of the equinoxes and Creation mythologies, writing: “The great year of equinoctial precession emerges as the missing link between the local and political chronology of our era and the vast evolutionary philosophy so vividly testified to in the Popol Vuh.”
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In his intriguing book
The Inner Reaches of Outer Space
, mythologist Joseph Campbell explored number systems used in many World Age traditions, including Hindu chronology, Old Testament patriarch lists, and Norse mythology, and repeatedly found key precessional numbers. The comparative mythologist in him couldn’t help but draw a connection, and after extensive research he took it as a basic truism that whenever you found a World Age doctrine in an ancient tradition you could bet that precession was lurking in the shadows.

These ideas are, in fact, found at a very early stage in Mesoamerican studies. In 1901, anthropologist Zelia Nuttall published a massive opus called “Fundamental Principles of Old and New World Civilizations” in the prestigious Peabody Museum Papers. She writes that she found “one, totally undreamed-of conclusion, concerning the law governing the evolution of religion and civilization. This leads me to think that, as I groped in the darkness, searching for the light, I unwittingly struck the key-note of that great universal theme which humanity, with a growing perception of existing, universal harmony, has ever been striving to seize and incorporate into their lives.”
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She was alluding to none other than the precession of the equinoxes, as the “key theme” that illuminated Mesoamerican civilization. She believed that the Pole Star was a key reference point for Mesoamerican cosmology, and its shifting position through the seasons, caused by precession, was recognized by Mesoamerican astronomers and defined, for them, the World Ages. Her insights inspired and informed Eva Hunt’s work much later.

Astro-mythology, astro-theology, archaeo-astronomy, mytho-astronomical ideation—however you phrase it, the connection between celestial cycles and cultural ideas on earth defines the highest insight of Mesoamerican religion, which can best be described with the Hermetic principle “as above, so below.” Sky and earth, subjective and objective realities, are interrelated, two sides of the same coin. We see this very tangibly in astronomically timed rites of Maya kingship. We also see it in city names and city planning, in which cities were oriented to astronomically significant horizons and reflected the structure of the cosmos.

The precessional basis of these profound philosophical ideas has, unfortunately, been misconstrued as a latter-day echo of Panbabylonianism, an interpretation of ancient mythology that arose among German historians of science in the early twentieth century. Alfred Jeremias was the best-known proponent of this school of thought, which believed that ancient civilizations knew about the precession of the equinoxes and all mythologies and religions are rooted in that knowledge. The claims of the most vociferous exponents of this doctrine met with the criticisms of a scientific community that couldn’t accept such sophistication in ancient cultures.

The Panbabylonians overstated their case and were duly chastised by consensus academia, but the core idea has proven resilient. In the 1940s it reemerged in Hertha von Dechend’s work with Polynesians who navigated by the stars. She found many pieces of evidence from many cultures that indicated an awareness of the shifting skies, and later teamed up with science historian Giorgio de Santillana to explore this neglected area. Together they wrote the book
Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time
, published in 1969. Even before the book was released, Santillana, who was terminally ill as the book was being completed, wrote: “Whatever fate awaits this last enterprise of my latter years, and be it that of Odysseus’s last voyage, I feel comforted by the awareness that it shall be the right conclusion of a life dedicated to the search for truth.”
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