The 2012 Story (27 page)

The brilliant and profound wisdom of the ancient Maya was getting distorted. Professional Maya scholars didn’t bother to point out the errors in Calleman’s and Argüelles’s books. If anything, they simply cast them aside as nonscholars. But the fact is that both Calleman and Argüelles have PhDs. They technically belong in the ivory tower, so why weren’t the gatekeepers of academe taking them, their degreed colleagues, to task? Why did it fall to an outsider, who doesn’t have a PhD, to call out the errors and expose bad research and flawed models? Why was I doing the scholars’ jobs for them? Most annoyingly, I found in my dealings with scholars that they were happy to toss me into the same category as Argüelles and Calleman, unable or unwilling to make any distinction between my work and theirs.

What I actually found in my dealings with professional Mayanists is that they harbored huge assumptions and misunderstandings about the Maya calendar, almost as egregious as those found among popular writers. Few scholars I communicated with understood the correlation debate, or the site of Izapa, or how the Long Count and Calendar Round relate to each other. Likewise, the concept of the galactic alignment has been co-opted and misunderstood. As mentioned earlier, the tendency is for my galactic alignment theory to be received best only if it is delivered through the mouth of a Maya elder. It just makes for better ad copy that way. We saw this in how an interviewer in 2002 framed the collaboration between Erick Gonzalez and me. As if some new viral meme was forcefully trying to insert itself into the 2012 discussion, an identical fiasco occurred a short time later when Stephen McFadden interviewed Maya teacher Carlos Barrios.

This one has produced far-reaching ripples with disastrous effects, mainly because I decided to take the high road and ignore it. But it festered, morphed, and returned after several years to bite me on the butt. It’s both annoying and hilarious that such things happen. The interview expresses the following position regarding “anthropologists” and “other people” who write “about prophecy in the name of the Maya”:

And angry they should be. I’ve been shouting since day one that 2012, like any cycle ending, is about transformation, a new beginning, not a final apocalyptic end. It says so in
The Popol Vuh
. So I’m in complete agreement with Carlos on this. But since many people see my books as being scholarly and me as an (albeit independent) anthropologist or archaeologist, I can’t help feeling that the first part of the quote is leveled at outsiders like me who “read the signs.” This seems to be the implication, whether it was intended or not; the interviewer’s wording is insufficiently clear. In this light, the next passage is all the more distressing:

The emphasized passages are almost direct paraphrases from my books and web pages. A phrase like “the solar meridian crossing the galactic equator” provides an accurate description of what the 2012 alignment is, and I have offered this exact terminology as a clear definition. To what can we attribute this material appearing in McFadden’s interview with Barrios, apparently paraphrasing the words of Barrios himself?

One version of the interview contained some source citations. A website called “Great Dreams” was referenced, and I immediately recognized the web page. It was one that appeared around 1999, and its treatment of 2012 included diagrams and direct cut-and-paste sections from an article I had posted on my website in 1995, called “Mayan Cosmogenesis: Cosmic Mother Gives Birth.” This article summarized my work on the galactic alignment, showing how it was encoded into Maya traditions like the Creation Myth. I concluded the piece as follows:

The problem with the appearance of my work on the Great Dreams website is that there were no links to the original source (my website) and my name did not appear. At one point I tried to e-mail the webmaster to seek a clarification, but I never received a response after several attempts. It was only years later when I described the situation as plagiarism, on the 2012 Yahoo Group, that the designer of the Great Dreams website piped up and defended herself, saying that my name and website appeared elsewhere on the website and thus their free use of my work wasn’t really plagiarism. Today their 2012 web page has been corrected, but for many years the galactic alignment information on the Great Dreams website seemed to be a general Maya “prophecy” of unknown origin.

As a result, I suspect that either Carlos Barrios or his interviewer, Stephen McFadden, had lifted the idea without, perhaps, being aware of its true source. I confirmed this later on, and communicated with McFadden about the situation. He said he was aware of my work, apologized for the omission of correct citation, and graciously corrected the official version of the interview that is posted on his website.
⁹
Nevertheless, uncorrected versions of the interview still occasionally sail around the Internet.

Barrios, like Erick Gonzalez, has perhaps inadvertently been accomplice to a way of framing my work in the marketplace that prefers to deliver it through the mouth of an elder. However, Barrios thereafter adopted the galactic alignment scenario as a true expression of one of the so-called Maya prophecies for 2012. He included it in his 2004 book
¹⁰
and shared it with author Lawrence Joseph, whose book
Apocalypse 2012
propagated and amplified the McFadden-Barrios debacle. Furthermore, as if unaware of the source of the idea he adopted, he said, “Many outside people writing about the Mayan calendar sensationalize this date, but they do not know. The ones who know are the indigenous elders who are entrusted with keeping the tradition.”
¹¹

Lawrence Joseph began writing a book about John Lennon within hours of his tragic murder. He boasts on his website that this book was “written, typeset, printed and distributed twelve days after John Lennon’s assassination.”
¹²
To such an enterprising soul, 2012 must have been irresistible. How would one begin a book on 2012? Talk to Maya elders, of course. Joseph recounts in the early pages of his book how he flew to Guatemala to receive the Maya prophecy about 2012 directly from Maya teachers, the Barrios brothers, learning that “on 12/21/12 our Solar System, with the Sun at its center, will, as the Maya have for millennia maintained, eclipse the view from Earth of the center of the Milky Way. This happens only once every 26,000 years. Ancient Maya astronomers considered this spot to be the Milky Way’s womb.”
¹³
Except for the fact that the Maya have not retained a continuity of this knowledge “for millennia,” this is a fairly accurate paraphrase of my theory, including my interpretation that the Galactic Center was mythologized by the ancient Maya as a cosmic womb, a creation place.

Armed with the Maya prophecy for 2012, handed to him by Real Maya Teachers, the author of
Apocalypse 2012
then proceeds to concur with said Teachers to excoriate clueless outsiders, who don’t know how to read the symbols. I am mentioned by name as a “cultural imperialist.”
¹⁴
While my book
Maya Cosmogenesis 2012
was mentioned and wanly dismissed, its primary thesis (that the ancient Maya intended 2012 to target the rare alignment of the solstice sun and the Galactic Center) was left unsaid. Obviously, to mention it would have created a conflict of interest, as Joseph wished to give the impression that the goods were delivered to him by a Maya teacher. This
contretemps
reveals either a shoddy research ethic or intellectual dishonesty in a book that presumes to be “a scientific investigation.” I’ve now had the dubious honor of being plagiarized and excoriated at the same time.
¹⁵

Lawrence Joseph subscribes to the old idea, put forward by Cotterell and Gilbert in
The Mayan Prophecies
, that solar flares will be going berserk in 2012. He frequently points to outdated scientific projections that 2012 will be a year of solar max, never clarifying that such solar sunspot maximums occur every 11.3 years and the one now projected for May 2013 will not be any larger than the one in the 1950s. He’s latched on to an alarmist interpretation of the galactic alignment, which he claims came from Barrios, in which the galactic alignment “cuts us off” from the life-force energy of the Galactic Center, like “the power being cut off from homes.”
¹⁶
This interpretation, however, ignores the rebirth imagery that is associated with the alignment at Izapa. Joseph claims his book is not a doomsday book, that his publisher insisted on the title,
¹⁷
yet writes the following in his book:

Although he tries to conceal it when it is deemed inappropriate, his unequivocally nihilistic position is very common in the 2012 discussion, and shares company with Brent Miller’s Horizon Project
^TM
, which I’ll assess in a moment.

This chapter could easily be expanded into a book-size treatment of these various manifestations, but space prohibits more than a mention of many of them. I can’t possibly treat them all in this book, and I’m not implying that all of these researchers play fast and loose with 2012 in the way that others have, nor am I endorsing them. The books of Sri Ram Kaa and Kira Ra, William Henry, Jay Weidner, and Vincent Bridges (
The Mysteries of the Great Cross of Hendaye
), Sharron Rose, Christine Page, Dr. Willy Gaspar, Gregg Braden, Patricia Mercier (just to name a few)—it’s a cornucopia. Geoff Stray’s website, Diagnosis 2012, is a comprehensive resource for reliable assessments. For our purposes here, I will discuss a few representative examples.

My book
Galactic Alignment
was published in 2002. The book’s very title presented a still vaguely understood concept to the public eye. Within the decade many books, theories, websites, and pseudoscience doomsday models would appropriate the concept, often confusing it with other ideas. David Wilcock began publishing his research and writings online around 1998. His treatment of the Maya calendar mentioned the galactic alignment as occurring in 1999, and drew from the work of Maurice Chatelain and many other writers, from Richard Hoagland to Edgar Cayce. Wilcock integrated many threads of science and ancient metaphysics into his work, and explored spiritual and paranormal phenomenon. As a dream analyst, he has asserted and tracked his own mystical connection to American prophet Edgar Cayce, resulting in a book published in 2004 which asserted that he was Cayce reincarnated.

Wilcock also developed a highly elaborated system of hyperdimensional physics, which he explained during the Global Shift conferences that I also spoke at. His system utilized many ideas, including the galactic alignment and material from the Ra channelings, to explain changes happening in our solar system and the consciousness of humanity. By 2005 he was working with author Richard Hoagland, a regular on the late-night radio program
Coast-to-Coast A.M
. Hoagland adopted much of Wilcock’s work and organized several conferences under the banner of 2012.

Hoagland, like Wilcock, draws heavily from hard science—physics, atomic theory, quantum mechanics, and so on—but he was not particularly concerned with the ways that an ancient culture such as the Maya discovered and calculated the galactic alignment and incorporated the concept into their cosmology and teachings. His current 2012 rap involves a belief that secret forces inside the government are aware of 2012’s doomsday potential. Hoagland collaborated on a book with Mike Bera about dark matter in the universe. At a conference venue I shared with Bera in 2008, he claimed he and Hoagland were devising an experiment that would test the galactic alignment. He seemed to think, however, that the galactic alignment was an alignment of planets somehow connected to the idea that a lost planet, Nibiru, would be returning into visibility within our solar system in 2012. I asked Mike to elaborate on his work more clearly, but he has yet to send me anything and our e-mail exchanges became locked into a holding pattern. This may seem like hearsay, but I mention it because much in the 2012 discussion is built upon hearsay. Rumor goes down the New Age telephone line and, instead of degrading into even more nonsense than it was when it began, it gets elevated to the status of theory and, finally, Truth. For example, let’s look at the Nibiru-2012 connection.