The 2012 Story (3 page)

 

 

John Major Jenkins
May 31, 2009
4 Ahau
Long Count 12.19.16.7.0

PART ONE

THE 2012 STORY

CHAPTER ONE

RECOVERING A LOST WORLD

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The story of the human presence in Mesoamerica is an epic journey, stretching over at least 10,000 years with intermingling boundaries between the Olmec, Izapan, Maya, Toltec, and Nahuatl cultures. It flowered in the Classic Maya civilization (300 AD to 900 AD), whose most important cosmological artifact (the Long Count calendar) pointed beyond its own demise to a great cycle ending: December 21, 2012. The Maya’s knowledge of that date was lost centuries ago, but was recovered from the barest fragments by explorers and iconoclasts, rogues and scholars, who all contributed in their own ways to the realization, achieved only recently, that the end date of a cycle of 13 Baktuns was an intentional forward calculation. This chapter unfolds the process by which this most intriguing date, and the profound paradigm connected to it, was rediscovered right on the cusp of the cycle’s conclusion.

Something incredible occurred in the center of the Americas that has persistently intrigued and baffled European colonizers. The discoveries and achievements of American Indian civilizations reveal an unparalleled genius. A demonstration of this genius is found in the early domestication of corn, which occurred in Central Mexico’s Balsas River Valley roughly 8,700 years ago.
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Decades, centuries, of persistent interbreeding was required to tease juicy corn kernels out of teosinte, a skinny wild grain. As their civilizations developed, the trailblazers of the Western Hemisphere attained profound achievements in mathematics, medicine, philosophy, and astronomy, and gave to the modern world essential staples such as corn, chocolate, tobacco, and potatoes. Without their discoveries, the modern world would be stripped of many of its best possessions.
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In Mesoamerica, the land stretching between central Mexico and Honduras, a native genius unfolded itself through the centuries, producing insights about the cosmos while building huge stone cities and creating unique calendars. A curiously advanced worldview is encoded into these calendars, one that saw the processes of earth and sky interwoven. Seasonal cycles of rain and heat, sowing and growing, blended with a creation mythos centered on maize. The life cycle of a human being and the astronomical cycles above were seen to be integrated as one majestic symphony. For the ancient Meso americans, life was essentially a mystery that could never be completely figured out in the definitive sense that Western science seeks to achieve. But for the ancient Maya, gazing into the night sky from their lofty temples, alive to the mingling rhythms of the sky and their own beating hearts, it was a mystery that could be experienced.

In the rise and fall of the human enterprise, the Maya achievement had already passed by the time Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1519. The Classic Maya civilization was long gone. What the invaders found instead was a new, upstart Aztec empire sprawling over the high plateau of Central Mexico, far to the west of Maya dominions. After long peregrinations searching for a new homeland, the Aztecs had stumbled upon the central Mexican plateau. There they saw an eagle land on a nopal cactus with a snake in its mouth. This was the fulfillment of the prophecy, a sign that they had found their new homeland. They built what would later become Mexico City, and by 1500 AD their capital, Tenochtitlán, was a bustling metropolis.

The Aztecs inherited fading echoes of long-gone kingdoms and cosmologies, including fragments of a pan-Mesoamerican calendar of 260 days developed more than two millennia earlier by the Olmec civilization. Although the Aztecs appeared five centuries after the collapse of the Classic Maya civilization (which developed in eastern Mexico and parts of modern-day Central America), certain traditions, such as the idea of a succession of World Ages experienced by humanity, were shared. The end of each World Age was thought to signal a transformation. And for the Aztecs their world would indeed soon come to an end. The dramatic events that transpired between Cortés’s small but determined army and the people of Moctezuma in Central Mexico define what we consider to be the conquest of Mexico. But Mexico is a big place. It would be several more years before the Spanish invaders pushed their way far enough into the lands of the Maya to realize that another ancient civilization once flourished in the decaying jungle cities of the east.

Although the old stone cities of the Maya were crumbling and forgotten, the tribes found by the Spanish were engaged in a thriving new phase of cultural activity. From the hot lowlands of the Yucatán Peninsula to the highlands of Chiapas and Guatemala, the Maya were deeply involved with the business of civilization. Trade networks stretched for hundreds of miles from seacoast to high volcanic peaks. City-states expressing new architectural styles, including the Quiché Maya kingdom, arose in the Guatemalan highlands. As with the Aztecs far to the west, an upsurge in cultural growth had spiked in the early 1500s, but was cut short by the strange foreigners riding beasts like deer and wearing invincible coats of metal.

Pedro de Alvarado defeated the Quiché king Tecun Uman in 1524, Cortés defeated Moctezuma and subjugated the Aztecs, and the Yucatec Maya were tortured and their books were burned in Inquisitorial bonfires. Franciscan missionaries targeted Maya religion as a heresy that must be stamped out, and Maya leaders were often tortured and put to death for practicing their traditional ways. In a letter of 1563 sent to the king of Spain, a citizen of Mérida named Diego Rodríguez Bibanco, who had received a royal appointment as “Defender of the Indians of Yucatán,” documented the “irregularities and punishments” inflicted on Maya people accused of practicing idolatry:

Millions of indigenous citizens of the New World also died of diseases brought by Europeans, and by 1600 the native population of Mesoamerica had been reduced to a fraction of its former number.

It was a clash of civilizations unlike anything the world had ever experienced, as strange for the Maya as an armada of spaceships from Antares landing on the White House lawn, bringing alien beings hungry for megatons of gold, or copper, or soil. Most cultures would have become dust in the wind, but the Maya, ever resilient, having the adaptable strength of the willow tree, received and allowed the invaders to wash over them so that now, five hundred years later, they still stand. In certain important respects, mainly in the preservation of spiritual beliefs and calendar ceremonies, the Maya have never been conquered.

To emphatically clarify a common misconception, the Maya didn’t simply vanish in some intergalactic recall of the ninth century. After the great cities of Copán, Palenque, Tikal, and Yaxchilán faltered and fell some eleven hundred years ago, succumbing to greed, plague, and drought, different Maya groups split and dispersed, embarking on long journeys looking for new homelands. They carried their cultural identities and accomplishments with them like burdens on their backs, eventually setting up house in new regions, such as the crenellated ravines and plateaus of the Guatemalan highlands.

But by 900 AD the end of the Maya Classic Period had come, signaling the end of a style of civilization that crumbled under the weight of its own hubris, much in the way that our own crumbles now. Cultures rise and fall as day follows night, and a plethora of Maya groups multiplied as new generations played ever-evolving variations on the theme of Mesoamerican civilization. The history of Mesoamerica is as complex as any other region of the world, perhaps more so due to the tumultuous landscape of earthquakes and eruptions in which the Maya have traditionally lived. But core beliefs and traditions, such as the old mythologies and ceremonies, have withstood the erosions of time.

In 1700, a Dominican friar named Francisco Ximénez took up his orders in the highland town of Santo Tomás Chichicastenango. The domain was still called New Spain, as Guatemala would not come into being as an independent republic until 1821. He discovered among the Maya people of his parish a strange book penned in an alphabetic script in the native Quiché language. It was closely guarded as a sacred text, handed down for generations from one elder to the next, and now it was placed into his hands. Sensitive to the plight of his Maya flock, and how people in his world harbored so many mistaken notions about them, he decided to translate it. In the foreword to his work he wrote:

And so
The Popol Vuh (Book of Council, Book of the Dawn of Life)
was copied for posterity and translated into Spanish. Father Ximénez, an accomplished linguistic and student of Mayan grammar, was well suited to the task. The original manuscript that he worked from was written in the 1550s. Some scholars believe that the Maya elders who did it were drawing from an older hieroglyphic book.
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Certain mythological scenes and deities found in
The Popol Vuh
are also portrayed on ancient carved monuments at early Maya sites dating back more than 2,100 years, suggesting that an ideological gold mine of great antiquity was preserved in the ancient text.

But metaphorical gold is not real gold. As so often happened with the treatment of native wisdom, Ximénez’s offering to the outside world slipped into the shadows and was not published until 1857. By then, intrepid explorers had already delved into the jungles of Central America and were finding evidence of a forgotten civilization—people who, a thousand years prior to Ximénez, were painting the stories of
The Popol Vuh
on vases and in their books. In those pages the gods and planets danced to the tune of the sacred 260-day calendar, a system of divination and timekeeping that survives today in the remote villages of Guatemala. But not all areas inhabited by the Maya have retained this continuity of the ancient calendar traditions.

During the conquest of the Maya in the Yucatán, the 260-day calendar was still being followed. Franciscan friars were streaming off the boats, arriving armed with the mandate of the Catholic auto-da-fé, the jihadlike Inquisition, their heads loaded with deep prejudices against pagans who were ignorant of the One Holy Faith. Bishop Diego de Landa was one of these early evangelicals, hell-bent on converting the heathens. His intent was to curtail idolatrous devil worship, and the result was the destruction of native genius.

De Landa’s book burning in the Yucatec Maya village of Mani in 1562 largely succeeded in this endeavor of unbridled zealotry. Hundreds of Maya books were heaped in piles and destroyed. Today, only four known examples survive: the Dresden, Madrid, Paris, and Grolier codices. In time, the native calendars in Yucatán were likewise stamped out. This kind of act was nothing new for Christianity, whose champion Emperor Theodosius likewise ordered “pagan” temples destroyed in 391 AD, including the Alexandrian Museum and the Serapeum that housed major parts of the Alexandrian library. The dearth of direct evidence about what the ancient Maya knew and believed has caused prejudices and misconceptions to multiply. An embedded bias within Western assumptions, installed by both religious and scientific training, that the Maya were unscientific has continued to today and often prevents a clear assessment of Maya culture on its own terms.