The 2012 Story (25 page)

With the nuts and bolts of the astronomy identified, we can consider the deeper spiritual ideas and beliefs connected with 2012. Transformation and renewal were facilitated by sacrifice, but what does this mean? And do these teachings have meaning for us, for all humanity? Are they simply quaint, culturally relative beliefs of a forgotten people, or are they perennial wisdom teachings that speak to the crisis we in the modern world are experiencing? These questions are important, perhaps much more important than the reconstruction of the 2012 paradigm that I’ve just offered. And they’ll be taken up in Part II. Before we do that, we need to get up to date on how the 2012 topic has been faring in the first decade of the third millennium. It’s not that surprising to find that in the pop culture it has become a hot topic, but in academic circles it’s been subject to cold dismissals.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE 2012 EXPLOSION

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The third millennium opened inauspiciously, with Y2K fizzling. If 2012 was at all on anyone’s radar at the time, it probably became entangled with Y2K as just another hoax that would need to be dealt with when its time came. As the first decade of the new millennium unfolded, 2012 was often dismissed as a hoax. To even frame one’s approach to 2012 in this way is patently absurd and reveals a superficial understanding of the topic. For 2012, whatever you think about it, is a true artifact of the ancient Maya calendar system. It is simply a fact of that system, as much as the century marker 1900 is a true artifact of the Gregorian calendar. To presume to prove that 2012 is a hoax is much like trying to prove that sex is a hoax. Sex is a fact of biology, so how can one prove it is a hoax? It baffles common sense. Unfortunately, much of the 2012 discussion as it unfolded between 2000 and 2010 has been littered with similarly ridiculous approaches and assumptions.

“That’s the end of the world, right?” The grinning young man looked to me hopefully for confirmation. It was late January of 2000 in downtown Denver, and I was sitting at a card table in a corner of the Barnes & Noble bookstore. Stacks of my book
Maya Cosmogenesis 2012
were piled next to me. People occasionally glanced over, on their way to a movie or dinner, killing time at the bookstore. “No, in fact the Maya material doesn’t indicate that 2012 is about the end of the world.” He looked at me quizzically, as if I was raining on his parade.

As a 2012 author, I’m often thought to be a sci-fi wordsmith spinning out fantastic scenarios, and plenty of readers are happy to play along. Horror fictioneers like Whitley Strieber have strategically placed 2012 in their book titles. Sci-fi writers like Steve Alten have adapted my end-date alignment theory to frame fast-paced narratives with doomsday overtones. My bookstore appearance was not strategically arranged, blessed by neither the stars nor the weather. It was Super Bowl Sunday, a freezing snow blew outside, and Y2K had just made fools of many prophets of doom. Never mind that I’ve never taken that position on 2012; people sneered and rolled their eyes as they walked by. I could tell it was going to be a long decade.

Things were astir in distant corners of the 2012 meme. In the first five years of the new millennium, a bevy of books appeared. They indicated, if nothing else, that the 2012 meme was gaining ground as a hot topic. In 2000, a documentary called
The Fifth Gate
was released in Europe and the United Kingdom. It focused on American Indian prophecies for the new millennium and included coverage of the Maya, the Hopi, and the Native American Church’s efforts to legalize their sacraments, such as peyote. I was impressed with the producer, Bente Milton, and her serious and detailed treatment of the subject matter.

Another documentary opportunity occurred that summer. The Discovery Channel contacted me, and after some long discussions with the producer I was able to convey the key ideas of my work on 2012. Although they had contacted me as a go-to guy for some standard clichés on the Maya (such as “why did they disappear?”), the script was adapted to present my reconstruction work on the Maya’s awareness of the galactic alignment in era-2012. I’d been on national radio shows, but this would be the first place in which my work received prime-time mainstream media coverage. I was hoping for some dynamic digital workups of the galactic alignment astronomy that could be easily conveyed visually, but instead they used a primitively animated portrayal of a diagram from my book. (An earlier documentary I was in, called
Earth Under Fire
, used me saying something about the Galactic Center, but the galactic alignment itself went unreported.)

Nevertheless, the two Discovery Channel “Places of Mystery” programs—one on Copán and one on Chichén Itzá—aired in October of 2000 and depicted my galactic alignment work more or less accurately. Any author should expect such treatment, but over the next eight years my work was consistently distorted and abused in the nefarious doomsday agendas of the History Channel and other production houses. Likewise, my interviews for many indie film producers were selectively edited to bolster perspectives that I don’t agree with. It’s a trick of the trade, and I was tricked many times. In a supreme catch-22, Maya scholars note these distortions and conclude I’m a willing architect of the mass media’s stupefactions. There have been a few exceptions, which I’ll mention as we move through a decade that has seen an explosion of 2012-related manifestations, far more intense and busy than the period 1970-2000.

In January of 2000, I learned of a prophecy for 2012 offered by Don Alejandro Cirilo Perez Oxlaj, a Quiché Maya leader and day-keeper from the highlands of Guatemala. It was reported in a piece by journalists Patrisia Gonzales and Roberto Rodriguez called “The Mayan Worldview of the Universe”:

I’ve always agreed with the idea that, if any causal effects are to be credited to the astronomical basis of the Maya calendar, we should think of the 2012 end date as being a “zone” stretching over a period of decades. I don’t, however, agree with the above view that the end date is simply about an astronomical event. The interview continues:

Thus, beginning on December 20, as stated, the events stretch over almost three full days (“60 or 70 hours”) through to December 22. The earth’s passage “inside the center of a magnetic axis” is a striking description that sounds much like the way I described the alignment in the last chapter of
Maya Cosmogenesis 2012
:

“Darkened with a great cloud” sounds very similar to how one might imagine the sun passing through the dark rift in the Milky Way. Notice, however, the difference between the prophetic conception of the earth being cast into darkness and my alignment description—where I describe it as
the sun
passing through the dark rift, as viewed from earth. I suppose Don Alejandro’s wording works fine; it’s just an interpretation that emphasizes where the “effect” is believed to be felt (on earth, ultimately).

This all sounded eerily familiar, like a folksy retelling of my galactic alignment theory, complete with references to a dark cloud (the dark rift), the sun’s passage through this dark cloud, and a magnetic axis (the Milky Way’s equator). I remembered that Don Alejandro had been interviewed by Morton and Thomas for their 1997 book
The Mystery of the Crystal Skulls
, but didn’t recall his saying anything like this. My friend in England, Geoff Stray, had been tracking the 2012 phenomenon for a number of years, and I asked him for his comments. He had already assessed the
Crystal Skulls
book and noted that Don Alejandro’s comments were an echo of the ideas Argüelles had published in
The Mayan Factor
and in his Dreamspell system.

I then recalled that an acquaintance of mine, Ian Lungold, had traveled to Guatemala to meet with Don Alejandro in the fall of 1998. We had spoken on the phone several times at odd intervals since 1997, and Ian would occasionally send me e-mail updates on his travels and plans to market a day-sign place mat for restaurants. A skilled jeweler, he was producing fine miniature pendants of Maya art. In early 1999 he related to me how he had met with Don Alejandro and showed him a copy of my book,
Maya Cosmogenesis 2012
, which had been released the previous year. He had had certain passages read to Don Alejandro by a translator.

Ian was inquiring about whether any of my work jibed with anything Don Alejandro knew about 2012, an inherently difficult approach for two reasons. First, as previously discussed, the Long Count system has been lost to the modern Maya. Second, Maya leaders are often threatened that foreigners are interpreting their lost tradition. A consequence of this is the uncomfortable position they are forced into when they are asked about 2012, not wanting to cite others on what should be a knowledge transmitted through ancestral lineage, but not having any real information at hand. A tendency to adopt and reimagine pieces of what comes before their consideration is a tactic of syncretism that the Maya have been engaged in for their entire history. It’s not just a response to the Conquest, or modern writers, but is a characteristic of flexible adaptation to new ideas and needs. It’s actually a sign of strength and fosters longevity, much as the willow tree flexes and survives the storm.

Ian told me that Don Alejandro received the information from my book with interest. Ian was also there to confirm, for himself, the correlation of the 260-day tzolkin count that I had presented and defended. He, like Swedish author Carl Calleman, had come out of the Argüelles camp, which supported a day-count placement that was at odds with the authentic surviving day-count in the highlands. The day-count Ian found in the highlands, verified by Don Alejandro, was indeed the traditional day-count I’d been advocating since my early books, especially in my 1992 book
Tzolkin: Visionary Perspectives and Calendar Studies
.

After Ian’s visit with Don Alejandro, an international gathering of indigenous elders happened in Arizona. It was a meeting of elders from many indigenous nations, and Don Alejandro was present. That’s when the reporters from Albuquerque interviewed him and received the oddly familiar prophecy for 2012.

If one suspects that Don Alejandro’s words represent an ancient lineage teaching, then we must account for his earlier interview with Morton and Thomas, which clearly echoed Argüelles’s work. These are complicated and sensitive issues, but I believe that truth and accountability are necessary if we are to stay as clear as possible with 2012 and its multifarious tentacles. We’ve already seen a tendency, in the connections between José Argüelles, Hunbatz Men, and Aluna Joy Yaxkin, for a reinforcing interplay to develop between writers and Maya elders, especially when a popular movement driven by temple tours and New Age gatherings is at work. But the truth does often surface, if given a chance. In fact, there eventually came a time in the late 1990s when, after many e-mail exchanges with Aluna Joy Yaxkin, she switched to the authentic day-count (the “True Count”) and began organizing tours to the Guatemalan highlands with Don Alejandro.

I was bemused as I reconstructed the sequence of events and reread my e-mails with Ian. It was clear that something of my alignment work had been adapted by Don Alejandro. I felt conflicted, because on one hand I imagined that if my work were indeed an accurate reconstruction of the ancient Maya’s understanding of 2012, then it should somehow be reintegrated into contemporary Maya consciousness. But for an outsider to offer this was difficult for the modern Maya to accept, having been betrayed by relations with outsiders in the past. If I played up Don Alejandro’s statement as independent confirmation of my work by an elder, my handlers at Marketing Central would be pleased but it would also be a deception. Nevertheless, the marketing world preferred that the galactic alignment prophecy for 2012 should be delivered by the Maya, as subsequent events made very clear.

As a result of Don Alejandro’s statements, I began thinking hard about the fact that the Maya lost their connection to the details of the ancient 2012 calendar system. I recalled my travels in the highlands, hanging out at the altar shrines of Momostenengo, reading of the Year Bearer ceremonies at year’s end, and I realized that the Maya still retained core beliefs about cycle endings, generally speaking, and these were very important. The fire ceremony and the sweat bath were both beautiful traditions that the Maya still retained, and they both involved the themes of sacrifice, transformation, and renewal central to ancient spiritual teachings for cycle endings.