The 2012 Story (28 page)

The Nibiru (Planet X) idea comes from Zecharia Sitchin, author of the Lost Chronicles books now running up to some thirteen volumes, who based his radical ideas on ancient Babylonian astrological tablets.
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He believes that cuneiform references to an “invisible planet” that comes around (“appears”) every once in a while to cause havoc is proof that an unknown planet, Nibiru, orbits the sun with a great eccentricity, swinging far out beyond Pluto for millennia before it swings in again. He ties his theory to another idea—that beings on Nibiru meddled with human genetics in the distant past. In recent years, the timing of Nibiru’s return has been spuriously connected to 2012.

An examination of Sitchin’s work reveals an unfortunate
literalized
interpretation of ancient doctrines. The “invisible” planet that one finds often mentioned in ancient astrological texts is widely known to signify the moon’s node. This is an intangible (invisible) point defined by the intersection of the lunar and solar orbits. It defines where eclipses may occur and it precesses slowly around the ecliptic. When it swings around to conjunct the position of sun or moon in the sky, an eclipse will occur. All the factors are there to make Sitchin’s interpretation seem valid. The “invisible” point is made manifest after a long hiatus. Eclipses were fearful occurrences during which the sun was disrupted and earthlings were cast into darkness, changed forever. It’s scary. In regard to Sitchin’s notion of ancient gene splicers altering the species, eclipses symbolize the transcendence of opposites, which in many esoteric teachings triggers spiritual transformation, a new being coming into existence.

I read Sitchin’s theory with openness and discernment, and this is what I found. Sitchin offers a literalized interpretation of esoteric teachings, which appeals to the modern materialist mind-set as well as the tendency of modern Occidental religions to interpret scripture, and reality, literally. Sitchin’s work typifies the trap of the modern scientist interpreting ancient esoteric doctrines through the lens of materialism. So, instead of insights into the metaphysical teachings connected with the lunar nodes, eclipses, and transcendence, we get Niburian Annunaki fiddling with our genes whenever the Maya calendar says so. The situation is both absurd and hilarious.

For science-oriented researchers, the galactic alignment is a topic of interest but has often been conflated with the orbit of our solar system around the Galactic Center. This confusion indicates a breakdown of rational processing. Furthermore, despite the ideology of proactive spiritual transformation and renewal that the Maya applied to cycle endings, 2012 in the hands of pseudoscience fatalists becomes a literalized doomsday assaulting us from the outside. Spiritual self-actualization is replaced by materialist determinism. Reality gets inverted, concretized, in precisely the same way that Sitchin literalized the ancient astrological doctrine of the lunar nodes.

This unfortunate state of affairs is intimately related to what psychologist and rebirthing expert Stanislav Grof calls “the feeling of cosmic engulf ment and no exit” (Basic Perinatal Matrix II in his system).
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For the person under the influence of this matrix, life appears meaningless and cruel, absurd, dangerous and frightening. Impending doom is perceived as an unavoidable certainty. The fatalistic fear and anxiety that are retained in the body and psyche as a terrifying birth memory gets displaced and projected onto the world, where it sticks on cycle endings because they are conceptually analogous to the intrauterine birth crisis. The dark rift in the Milky Way, instead of being a liberating portal to a new world, becomes the death-dealing receptacle of nefarious killing forces. Choose your metaphor wisely.

Patrick Geryl, a Belgian writer, published a book in 2005 provocatively titled
World Cataclysm in 2012
, followed by
How to Survive 2012
in 2006. His work is about as reliable in terms of factual grounding in Maya tradition as the earlier
Mayan Prophecies
book by Cotterell and Gilbert. And it’s unrelent ingly, unapologetically alarmist, filled with doomsday visions stated matter-of-factly with absolute certainty. “At the end of 2012, an all-destroying pole shift is waiting for us,” he writes on his website. He describes a pole shift in 2012, and how he “came to the staggering conclusion that the Earth will soon be subjected to an immense disaster. The cause: upheavals in the sun’s magnetic fields will generate gigantic solar flares that will affect the polarity of the entire Earth. The result: our magnetic field will reverse all at once, with catastrophic consequences for humanity.”
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All of these statements confirm Geryl as the preeminent
“
predictator” of 2012ology (a predictator is one who asserts their predictions like a dictator).

Like so many other books, Geryl’s barely scratch the surface of what the Maya tradition is really about, but liberally reference solar sunspot theories and a veritable grab bag of doomsday scenarios and tack them on to 2012; the details don’t matter. The point is: Head for the hills! One might suspect, rightly so, that a book styled in such a way should be taken with a large grain of salt. But it’s the kind of thing that the media and scholarly critics love. It provides the easy straw man target, the thing to hold up and say, “See, this whole 2012 thing is a goofy joke.” As of 2008, Geryl is spending all his time forming survival groups and leading the call for everyone to leave Belgium and other lowland countries, for the seas will be quickly rising. You could buy the offered survival kits as well as land in South Africa. Hurry up, supplies are limited.

No less alarmist is The Horizon Project™, run by Brent Miller. According to its mission statement, The Horizon Project “relies on multiple sources for each piece of information from resources past and present. If any information does not agree with the rest, it is resolved by scientific committee with all known information. Never before has a research team with this level of effectiveness and capability been utilized solely for discovering answers to life’s most crucial questions.”
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The website offers a series of DVDs for sale, and lists Brent Miller, Dr. Brooks Agnew (a physicist), and Michael Tsarion (a “researcher with over 20 years of expertise in the study of lost civilizations and technologies”) as The Horizon Project’s primary researchers/experts.

Brent Miller, the host of the DVD series, is described as an “expert in ecommerce systems” who has “held executive positions in several New York- based Fortune 500 companies.” The first DVD in the series, released in August of 2006, was called “Bracing for Tomorrow.”
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A four-minute trailer offers a teaser statement that the DVD “provides a conclusion that will realize humanity’s ultimate fear.”
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The summary states that the DVD “begins with a frightening bang. Newly discovered scientific evidence shows that the world as we know it is about to come to an unexpected end; however, knowing what’s coming over the horizon is only the tip of the iceberg; understanding WHY presents a picture far greater than you could have imagined.”
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As it turns out, an astronomical phenomenon that they call “the galactic alignment” is the reason behind this frightening “unexpected end.” They refer to the lost knowledge of ancient civilizations, and how they left behind “major clues that have just been recently discovered” and they “knew of the upcoming inevitable catastrophe . . . The knowledge that was once lost is the missing link that provides a clear understanding of how our world truly operates. Ironically, these clues also inform us that time is running out; sooner than you may believe.” The Horizon Project Research Team “will identify some of the signs that are scattered all over our planet and reveal a shocking truth!”
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A clip of a Horizon Project DVD hosted by Brent Miller can be viewed on YouTube under the heading “Galactic Alignment in 2012 is Feared to Cause Pole Shift by 2008-2015.”
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The term “galactic alignment” is used repeatedly, as is the “dark rift in the Milky Way,” the key centerpiece of my galactic alignment theory. Unfortunately, Miller defines the galactic alignment incorrectly, as being caused by the physical orbit of our solar system around the Galactic Center, above and below the galactic plane over millions of years. This process has nothing to do with the precessional basis of the galactic alignment, as defined on Wikipedia and in my book (which came out in 2002 and was titled
Galactic Alignment
). For many years I’ve had a page on my website called “What is the Galactic Alignment?”
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If you Google “Galactic Alignment,” the first result is this page. I discuss the distinction between the galactic alignment and Brent Miller’s scenario in my book
Galactic Alignment
, on my “Misconceptions” web page, and in an interview I did that is posted on YouTube.
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The Horizon Project provides a list of resources used in their research, but, oddly, the book called
Galactic Alignment
(published in 2002, long before The Horizon Project was founded) is not listed. One would think that comprehensive research into the galactic alignment would have included a careful study of the one and only book called
Galactic Alignment
. In fact, none of their sources could provide clear information on the galactic alignment and only one dealt with the Maya calendar (an obsolete 1904 study by Cyrus Thomas). I’m starting to wonder if scientists were really at all involved in the supposedly science-based Horizon Project.

In the DVD, after wrongly defining and describing the galactic alignment, the narrator says: “The Mayans state that the end of each Age, which brings about worldwide devastation, is defined by the world sitting on the dark rift. . . . [I]t is very clear that we are talking about the same event, an event where the earth passes through the galactic equinox.”
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It’s frustrating to see the defining terms of my galactic alignment reconstruction being co-opted and distorted in this way. (Not to mention that “galactic equinox” is a meaningless term, apparently meant to indicate the galactic equator.) These distorted appropriations have been the cause of hundreds of accusatory e-mails I’ve received from people who believe that I, like The Horizon Project, preach a doomsday message.

“How can we know for sure,” the narrator asks, “when you should be bracing for tomorrow?” Brent Miller sternly answers: “Computer simulations utilizing the collection of knowledge we have amassed through decades of galactic models and satellite data tell us that our solar system will
definitely
begin passing through the galactic plane in the very near future. The most severe effects that will cause worldwide devastation and a pole shift are most likely to occur, beginning sometime between the years 2008 and 2015.”
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Although the orbital oscillation above and below the galactic plane is a real process, the scientific model actually places us, right now, fifty light-years above the galactic plane and heading out, as the following Cambridge University publication reports:

The Horizon Project uses hyperbole-filled alarmist language, engages in bad science while giving the impression of being scientifically rigorous, and distorts the galactic alignment information already defined and published. While their efforts may be overlooked as the expected exploitation of fear in the marketplace, the real effects on people who trust “experts” and have little time to fact-check and dig out the truth for themselves are troubling. I’ve received dozens of e-mails from people exposed to The Horizon Project’s misinformation, including distraught mothers of young children, who were beside themselves, not knowing what to do.

Many readers and researchers have apparently been hoodwinked by the astronomical confusions and pole shift rhetoric proffered by Brent Miller, multiplied
ad nauseam
through the Googlesphere. In e-mail exchanges with Gregg Braden I explained how the orbital idea was taken up by various popular writers, from the murky Photon Belt concept of Marciniak in the mid- 1980s, to José Argüelles’s slightly less murky “galactic synchronization” as defined by him and Brian Swimme in
The Mayan Factor
, to more recent conflations by Michael Tsarion, Brent Miller at The Horizon Project, and others. The earlier sources, including Argüelles, were not presenting the galactic alignment concept but instead something akin to the physical orbit idea, in which our solar system orbits around the Galactic Center and passes through different energy sectors of the galaxy. The later authors often make a loose association between our solar system’s up-and-down motion above and below the galactic plane and 2012, the dark rift in the Milky Way, and other elements from my pioneering work. I find it all disappointing, for several reasons:

None of this has any valid basis in Maya traditions and concepts.
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