The 2012 Story (38 page)

He stated that there was no evidence that the ancient Maya thought anything about the next creation (in 2012). Although this assertion was presented in no uncertain terms, it is a demonstrably false statement because of the text on Tortuguero Monument 6, which references 2012 as a Creation event and evokes the deities present at that 13-Baktun shift to consecrate a local building dedication. The building’s birth was anointed with a symbolic nod to the cosmos’s future rebirth. That is
something
!

Did the Maya know abut precession, about the galaxy? Aveni takes a scientific definition of the galaxy and says no. This is like saying ancient people didn’t know about sex because they didn’t know about the genetic code. He requires that they had a spiral dynamic visual concept of the galaxy on par with modern scientific models. He describes and defines the galaxy’s center and midplane (equator) with scientific concepts and terms, and assumes a much greater need for precision than my theory requires. He has said that the alignment could be seen to be valid for five hundred years; ignoring the more precise dark rift and the middle range of the Milky Way’s width that could indeed be extrapolated.

At one point, Aveni showed a composite photograph of our Milky Way and asserted that the nuclear bulge of the Galactic Center was not compelling at all for anyone looking up at it. He seemed to ignore the fact that the nuclear bulge region was already demonstrably significant for the ancient Maya, due to the fact that the Crossroads and the southern terminus of the dark rift are located within the bulge and play a significant role in the Creation Mythology. He also used a fairly poor photograph of the Milky Way to illustrate his point, which was quite apparent and should have insulted the intelligence of his highly intelligent audience—if they were willing to see through his ruse. His interest in dismissing the visual significance of the Galactic Center was revealed in this ploy. In the clear night skies near the equator, the Milky Way explodes with distinction and definition, many dark cloud features are readily apparent, and the nuclear bulge looks even more like a puffy, bulging, and pregnant serpent or other animal than it does when viewed from temperate latitudes. That’s why the Inca see a mother and baby llama in that area. Furthermore, Aveni did not entertain or apparently consider that the ancient Maya probably had a greater acuity of vision than do modern humans. Progressive Maya scholars such as Barbara MacLeod now see inscriptional evidence for the ancient Maya tracking Uranus, which the majority of modern people would not be able to pick out with the naked eye even if they were shown exactly where it is. The boundaries of the Milky Way, much wider in the nuclear bulge than on the opposite side of the sky, would have been obvious to them.

There are other good examples that reveal Aveni’s dismissive attitude toward 2012 and 2012 authors.
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The real clincher came at the end of his talk, in an exchange we had during the Q & A. After almost an hour, he had failed to address the most compelling first step that a rational investigator would take in examining 2012 (one that I had included in the six points I had sent to him and that he acknowledged receiving). I was surprised and disappointed, and realized I’d have to make a stand so that, at least in a thumbnail sketch, the audience members would have a chance to work with the facts of the matter.

Aveni completed his talk with a quote from Shakespeare, to the effect that we should look within for the solution to our problems, not to the stars. Eric Thompson used quotes from classical philosophers as epigrams in his books, a habit that bothered Michael Coe. I think it’s nice to use thoughtful philosophical sentiments to change the pace of thought. The similarity between Aveni and Thompson, however, is more than epigram deep. It seems to me that Aveni is the new Thompson, the new gatekeeper who will always insist on more evidence and never believe you have enough.

After the applause died down, the crowd was invited to speak. I asked my question: “Well, that was a lot funnier than I thought it was going to be [
laughter
]. Apart from all the millenarian distractions, I think the most pressing question in this whole 2012 thing is:
Is the 2012 cycle ending an intentional artifact of the calendrical tradition?
And in one of your very first slides, you showed that the end date is December 21, 2012, which is an accurate December solstice. I’m surprised you didn’t revisit the idea first put forward by Munro Edmonson over twenty years ago in his
Book of the Year
, where he wondered, ‘Hmm, the 13-Baktun cycle ends on an accurate solstice . . . I really doubt that that’s a coincidence.’ So it suggests that there is some kind of intentionality built into the placement of the end date, and so how should we go about exploring how that manifests in Maya ideology and eschatology?”

The placement of the zero date in 3114 BC on an accurate zenith passage date at a specific latitude does not require much in terms of astronomical calculation—it’s simply the observation of no shadows at high noon, and it doesn’t shift with precession. The end date’s location on the solstice, however, implies an accurate knowledge of the tropical year, to at least an impressive several decimal places.

Izapa is the only ballcourt that points right at the December solstice sunrise, and Izapa is the only site that contains a coherent fugue of carved monuments that can be read with a high degree of comprehension as to their intended mythological and astronomical meaning. Aveni referred to a paper he wrote in 1990, which wasn’t published until 2000, which he said showed how the pre-Classic period “was the beginning of the calendar.” But in it he never stated that the solstice alignments of the early sites he examined made them a likely locus of the Long Count calendar’s origin.
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He claims that some have accused him of “dumbing down the ancestors” and admits that he is “employing an idea [of the galaxy] that comes from Western science that doesn’t have anything to do with the Maya.”

As for the ancient Maya conception of the nuclear bulge of the Galactic Center as being, in fact, a center, my “Open Letter to Mayanists and Astronomers” of 1999, which I had posted on the Aztlan discussion board, presented the evidence for this concisely:

I had one more important point to make.

My own theory, in its basic form, doesn’t require that they were aware of the full 26,000-year cycle. However, both MacLeod’s work with the 3-11 Pik formula in the inscriptions and Michael Grofe’s work on the Serpent Series provide evidence for an accurate knowledge of long-range precessional intervals. But Aveni skimmed over brief mentions of their work. They are nothing more than “a coincidence with the numerology of 72 years.” He believes those intervals and dates were probably relevant as stations but “doesn’t get” MacLeod’s connection of those precessional stations to the base date. Okay, progress—he simply doesn’t understand what MacLeod has found.

My turn was up and he went on to other audience questions. It should be pretty clear that Aveni’s comments are well presented, but he didn’t really offer a serious consideration of the evidence that 2012 was meaningful to the ancient Maya, and that meaning revolves around the alignment of the solstice sun with the dark rift. That’s the bare-bones scenario. Perhaps a public talk is not the appropriate place for such information, although that’s what the Tulane 2012 conference organizers promised.

I followed up on his invitation to speak with him “outside” on Sunday, during the break in the panel discussion session. His gregarious nature made it difficult to have a calm conversation, and he began getting upset when I talked about the unique nature of the Izapan ballcourt’s alignment to the solstice horizon. He was, however, very generous in offering me the citation for the article he published on solstice alignments at Izapa and other pre-Classic sites, called “Water, Mountain, Sky.”

After the conference I went to Tulane’s library and found it in an obscure volume, and xeroxed it. Sure enough, he had been to Izapa in 1990 and measured the horizon orientation. He had the hard data on Izapa and other sites, and concluded that a solstice-oriented calendrical cosmology was prevalent during the pre-Classic in southern Mesoamerica. And, it should be added, these solstice-oriented sites belonged to the Isthmian cultural sphere that gave rise to the earliest Long Count dates. He stated specifically that the ballcourt was aligned to the solstice.
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His data corresponded well with my own data and measurements.
⁶⁵
It is important to now have the published measurement data to refer to, but his observation that Izapa was oriented to the solstice is, after all, implied in the maps from the Brigham Young University studies.
⁶⁶
His data nevertheless lend support to my work, especially in consideration of the unique arrangement of monuments in the Izapan ballcourt.

I have said for years that scholars mistrusted my own measurements and observations at the site, and that no one seemed to have previously noted it. Aveni apparently did in 1990, but his paper wasn’t published until 2000, two years after my book
Maya Cosmogenesis 2012
was published. He began his essay with a statement I really liked, which implies a sensitivity to taking into account the entire environment, including astronomy, when interpreting the conceptual factors that the ancient Maya embraced when designing their towns: “Much of Mesoamerican ceremonial architecture is interpretable as an ideological ‘text’ that makes manifest in the work of humankind the observed principles of cosmic order that the people acted out in their religious temples.”
⁶⁷
If this attitude was carefully applied to Izapa’s monuments, and how they are oriented to solstices, volcanoes, and celestial features (which are indeed part of the “environment”), Aveni would see that my work is based in the same interpretive strategy that he subscribes to.

My overall experience of the conference was very positive. I can’t recount all the personal discussions with the Tedlocks, Harvey Bricker, Matthew Looper, David Stuart, and other speakers; it was abuzz with intriguing and exciting ideas. Dennis Tedlock answered my correlation question in no uncertain terms with full-throttle support for the December 21 correlation, saying, “We wouldn’t even be having this conversation if Lounsbury hadn’t made that mistake.”
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