The 2012 Story (9 page)

The second reason is, I believe, the real culprit, and it involves a conceptual bias in how scholars tended to treat the Maya calendar. The bias would have had all the support of the conventional attitudes of Western science and the Judeo-Christian worldview. Science says that time flows from past to future, that all events are the effects of previous causes. This model of causality rejects the idea that future states might define the events that are being drawn toward that future state. This is called teleology, anathema to scientific causality. It’s more welcome in the discourses of philosophy, and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead is the best-known proponent of the idea, which was adopted by Terence McKenna.

Judeo-Christian time philosophy is linear; Creation happened a long time ago. An inherently different time concept, which is evident in Mesoamerican calendars and cosmology, has been largely overlooked by scholars: the cyclic time philosophy that sees past and future Creation events being analogically united during cycle endings. The idea that ancient Maya calendar makers were projecting into the future, to target a future event, is also supported by two observations: In Maya thought the important event, such as birth, happens at the end of a time process—in this example, the end of a 260-day interval during which embryogenesis occurs. Second, end naming is used in the Long Count such that a given period is named by its last day. For example, we are currently in the 4 Ahau Katun because its last day falls on 4 Ahau.

These considerations apparently mattered little to scholars of the 1930s and ’40s, for other challenges were demanding their attention. Ethnographic opportunities, for example, were opening up in Mexico and Central America. Anthropologists such as Oliver La Farge, J. Lincoln, and Maud Oakes were spending lots of time in remote Maya villages documenting survivals of calendar rites thought to have been long forgotten. And, of course, the decipherment of the ever-enigmatic Maya hieroglyphic script came to be of primary importance. But Thompson resisted what promised to crack the whole thing wide open.

When the brilliant independent linguist Benjamin Whorf decoded, in the early 1930s, phonetic elements in the glyphs, Thompson pounced. He craftily critiqued the weak details of the arguments yet evaded the overall importance of the new perspective. After Whorf died at the young age of forty-four, Thompson flayed Whorf’s work. It was a difficult and revealing chapter for both Thompson’s and Whorf’s legacy. In retrospect, Thompson was very right about the errors in Whorf’s work. However, Whorf’s overall hunch was correct—the glyphs did contain phonetic elements. Unfortunately for Thompson, two more pioneer figures were soon to appear, and they hailed from a country that he had a personal problem with: Russia. Like many people, Thompson adopted a hatred of Communism after World War I and harbored bad feelings toward Russians throughout his life.

Russian artist Tatiana Proskouriakoff belonged to a sector of humanity that is often overlooked but has made some of the most important breakthroughs in Maya studies. That category is: woman. When she worked on the Maya site of Piedras Negras as an artist, she naturally became intrigued with Maya writing. Copying the glyphs over and over again, she became familiar with repeating patterns. Soon she identified what she believed to be historical events and glyph names for rulers. This, from Thompson’s ahistorical viewpoint, was not acceptable. And yet, as he himself had to eventually admit, almost on his deathbed, she was right.

Yuri Knorosov, the second Russian of note, experienced the epitome of what happens when an outsider advances a new insight. The insight was shocking to the establishment because it came about not by amassing more and more data until the correct interpretation appeared; no, the data had been lying around for decades, waiting for the right person to come along and reframe the material in such a way that the right interpretation clicked into place. This was especially true for the breakthroughs in hieroglyphic decipherment advanced by Knorosov in the 1960s. There was a key, long present, that had gone unrecognized for many years. That key, as Benjamin Whorf had proposed decades earlier, was that the glyphs were both phonetic and logo-graphic (representing a spoken word). Thompson resisted Knorosov’s work as if it heralded a Communist invasion, and the avalanche of epigraphic progress really got under way only after Thompson’s death in 1975.

All these players in the evolution of Maya studies contributed in their own ways to the key issue for the 2012 discussion: the correlation question. Despite Thompson’s confirmation of Goodman’s neglected work, the correlation question continued to tug at scholars. When ethnographic information was gathered in the 1930s and ’40s, it became apparent that the surviving 260-day count did not jibe with the proposed original GMT correlation. It was two days out of joint. Thompson took another look at the historical documents and realized that two leap days had been overlooked in the de Landa material. Thus, as of 1950 the modified GMT-2 became the final correction, which brought all the criteria into congruence.

In 1946, elder archaeologist Sylvanus Morley published his magnum opus,
The Ancient Maya
. It offered a curious table as Appendix 1, in which Katun and half-Katun endings were correlated with their Gregorian equivalents. But the table ended with 12.5.0.0.0, 8 Ahau 3 Pax, April 4, 1717 AD. As with Thompson’s chart of 1927, however, the sharp reader could track the Baktun endings given and easily extrapolate that the 13th Baktun would end just about on December 23, 2012. But the entire table was calculated with the original GMT correlation. The third edition of
The Ancient Maya
(1956) corrected the table two days, to the new value of the GMT-2 correlation, but the table, as in the first edition, remained incomplete. Nevertheless, the table provided a convenient resource that could have been easily extended out to the cycle ending in 2012. In fact, Maya epigrapher Barbara MacLeod told me that, as a Peace Corp worker in Belize in 1973, she did just that. It wasn’t until the fourth edition of
The Ancient Maya
(1983) that the tables were extended out to the end of the 13-Baktun cycle: 13.0.0.0.0, 4 Ahau 3 Kankin = December 21, 2012.

By that time, Michael Coe’s 1966 book,
The Maya,
had already offered what was to be the first documented mention of the 13-Baktun cycle ending. But there was a problem. Although Coe knew and followed the correct GMT correlation, the date reported (December 24, 2011) was in error. It’s not exactly clear how Coe arrived at this date, especially when the reference table in Morley’s book was so easily available. Coe’s error was corrected in a later edition, but the damage was done. By 1971 other developments in the popular appreciation of the ancient calendar were astir. Tony Shearer published his poetic treatise that year,
Quetzalcoatl: Lord of Dawn
, in which he suggested that 1987 would be a great cycle ending prophesied by the ancient Aztecs. Soon afterward Frank Waters came out with his book on the Maya cycle ending,
Mexico Mystique
, using Michael Coe’s date. A watershed moment occurs here in the transmission of obscure academic machinations out into the public arena. The first wave in a growing tsunami of popular books on 2012 was about to begin.

CHAPTER TWO

THE LONG CAREER OF THE LONG COUNT

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Time doesn’t have an end, but it does have a middle—so say the mod ern Quiché Maya.
²
And that middle, always, is located right dead center in the Now. A calendar, however, is not time, in the same way that a map is not the territory. As philosopher Ken Wilber said, “It’s fatal to confuse the two.”
³

The 13-Baktun cycle of the Long Count calendar has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Its beginning or “zero date” (August 11, 3114 BC) does not indicate when the system was invented. That date was a back calculation made thousands of years later by the creators of the Long Count. Similarly, the end date in 2012 was a forward calculation. Together, the alpha and omega of Maya time philosophy delineate a World Age lasting 5,125.36 years. That’s 1,872,000 days, to be exact.

The Maya doctrine of World Ages is found in
The Popol Vuh
, a document recorded in the 1550s by Quiché Maya elders. In it, we read that humanity has passed through a sequence of World Ages, and each time one of these World Age cycles comes to completion, a transformation and renewal of humanity occurs. Right away, it’s clear that the 13-Baktun cycle of the Long Count and the World Age doctrine in
The Popol Vuh
are linked. They are both expressions of an underlying World Age doctrine.

At San Bartolo, Izapa, and Calakmul archaeologists have found murals, sculptures, and carvings depicting very early scenes from
The Popol Vuh
that are more than 2,100 years old—right around the time that Long Count dates began to be carved on monuments. Why did the ancient people of Mesoamerica create the Long Count? Who were they, where was it done, and when? These are important questions to explore if we really want to understand the 2012 story.

When my investigation of the Maya calendars began some twenty-five years ago, there was no context in academia for studying 2012, and the scant references in the literature were completely unconcerned with trying to reconstruct the original intentions of the Maya. (Waters’s book
Mexico Mystique
is the exception, which I’ll discuss in Chapter 3.) In an effort to pierce the many layers of disinformation that accrete around the 2012 topic, we should consider these four guiding questions to be paramount to understanding 2012, indispensable if we care at all about the authentic perspective on the meaning of the cycle-ending date in 2012: What is the Long Count calendar, how does it work, where was it developed, and when?

It’s a bizarre fact that the vast majority of current commentaries on 2012 (including popular books, academic appraisal, and mass media documentaries) do not concern themselves with these questions. It’s as if approaching 2012 through the tradition that created it is anathema, is irrelevant, is a distraction from the juicier hype that is supposedly “what the public wants to hear.” Why this incredible disregard for the most obvious, and clearest, approach to 2012? The best I can surmise is that 2012 has gained the status of an icon, a cultural symbol, to be used and often abused for purposes that have nothing to do with its origins and the intentions of its creators.

It’s important to hold up a mirror to what is happening in the 2012 discussion, which I’ve observed gaining steam for two decades, and identify this one overarching circumstance. Doing so will help us understand why the 2012 discussion is such a mess and difficult for newcomers to navigate. And yes, gaining a good working knowledge of the Maya calendar system takes some commitment and study. But by sweeping the Maya source of the 2012 topic under the carpet, the way has been cleared for a smorgasbord of underinformed writers and market-driven hypesters to pillage 2012 on their way through to the next trendy topic. The solution? Well, it’s simple: Ask the four questions and go right to the heart of the 2012 calendar. We’ll undertake this first, and later we’ll look at the wider implications of the 2012 cultural meme (a meme is an idea complex that takes on great meaning and spreads).

Approaching the thing in itself, it must be said, is not necessarily easy. Not as easy as spinning out clever designer interpretations, recycled doomsday prophecies, or relabeled ascension techniques. What is really at stake, and what will be meaningful after 2012, is the accurate recovery of a lost paradigm, a forgotten cosmology. The problem is that the answers to the four questions are, on one level, not that clear cut. The precise “when and where” of the origins of the Long Count are not laid out in some hieroglyphic text. On the other hand, investigators of 2012 (“2012ologists,” as I’ve called them) should be willing to work harder than that. After we’ve made some informed deductions about the Long Count’s purpose and origins, we will be able to identify some very clear answers.

Several reconstructions of the origin point of the Long Count have been offered by scholars. Despite the complex relationships between the Long Count, the 260-day tzolkin (pronounced zol-KEEN), and the 365-day haab, scholars have attempted to track the calendars backward to when all the various cycles met at a seasonal quarter, such as the summer solstice. With this methodology, Munro Edmonson proposed that the Long Count was inaugurated on the June solstice of 355 BC, when all the cycles came together.
⁴
Other scholars suggested other dates, and it’s hard to really know for sure which criteria defined the procedure for the ancient calendar makers. There’s no direct evidence.

It’s certain, however, that by 36 BC the Long Count was being carved in stone, because on Stela 2 from Chiapa de Corzo in Mexico we find the date 7.16.3.2.13, corresponding to December 6, 36 BC. Five years later, the famous Stela C from Tres Zapotes was carved with the date 7.16.6.16.18 (corresponding to September 1, 32 BC). On both these monuments, the full Long Count date could be reconstructed. An incomplete Baktun 7 date is recorded on Stela 2 from Tak’alik Ab’aj, meaning it must have been carved before the commencement of Baktun 8 in 41 AD. The Baktun number is clearly 7, but the Katun could be 6, 11, or 16, meaning possibly as old as 236 BC, 137 BC, or 39 BC. If it represents the last possible date in the 16th Katun of the 7th Baktun, it would correspond to July of 19 BC. There’s a fair chance it is the oldest Long Count monument known.