A Mayan calendar.
Apocalypse 2012?
February 1, 2007
If global warming and movies like The Day After Tomorrow weren’t enough to frazzle you about the future, maybe prophecies for the year 2012 will do the trick.
Citing the Mayan calendar, Vedic mythology, cryptic Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Hopi Indians and other reputable sources, some amateur history detectives think mankind really is approaching an "end times" scenario. Aided by shamanic visions, these cultures managed to plot calendar cycles encompassing thousands of years, often dividing the time into world epochs, each with a primitive beginning and a fairly horrific end. Just like the end we may be approaching now.
A growing camp of researchers also believe the ancients knew about a 26,000-year cycle called the precession of equinoxes. This is the time it takes for the earth to wobble slightly on its axis in a single elliptic revolution, causing the 12 zodiac constellations to change positions in the night sky. Like a top, the earth’s axis tips a little as gravitational forces from the moon and sun act on it. Hence, the stars populating the celestial dome nudges their way backwards over time, which changes key alignments on the equinoxes and solstices. In astrological terms, we are currently moving out of the Age of Pisces and into the Age of Aquarius.
However, what's causing the most buzz of late is the 5126-year cycle which the Maya called their "long-count" calendar. It started at the dawn of their civilization (and ours), and ends on the winter solstice of 2012. At that time, the sun will be directly aligned between earth and the center of the Milky Way. In 1987, New Age guru Jose Aguelles first drew attention to these coincidental events, initiating a gathering he dubbed the Harmonic Convergence. Thousands of erstwhile supporters flocked to sacred sites around the world - including Mt. Shasta in Northern California - and spent the day meditating for peace and planetary redemption.
Soon after that, a profusion of books appeared on the shelves, introducing readers to the discipline of archaeo-astronomy. One of the most popular titles was Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995, which revived the argument about the existence of ancient astronauts popularized by Erich Van Daniken in the 1970s. Other works included Arguelles’ Mayan Factor, Patrick Geryl’s The Orion Prophecy and John Major Jenkins’ two books, Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 and Galactic Alignment. More recently, counter-culture icon Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012: Return of Quetzalcoatl has been described by the Village Voice as a "spiritualist manifesto" which extolls a generation weaned in cyberspace to nurture their inner capacity for mental telepathy and shamanism.
Pinchbeck was featured in a segment of the History Channel's Decoding the Past, a series exploring doomsday prophecies that has been airing since late 2006. Last spring, an independent documentary called 2012 - The Odyssey started making the rounds at film festivals.
(Be sure to check out the links and a reading list at the end of this article.)
Deadline with Destiny
For nearly two thousand years surrounding their heyday in 500 A.D, the classical Mayan Indians of Mexico and Central America pre-occupied themselves with the art of timekeeping. It started with their predecessors, the Olmecs, who date back to around 3000 B.C., when the Egyptians were building their own Great Pyramids halfway around the planet. Pinchbeck says that in order to crack the meaning of time, consciousness and synchronicity, Mayan calendar-makers developed astrological models of the starry universe, calculating the orbits of the earth, sun, and moon, and devising calendars for each. Among other feats, this ancient culture could predict eclipses hundreds of years in advance.
According to novelist Benjamin Anastas, writing in the New York Times Magazine last July, “Like most pre-modern societies, the Maya conceived of history not as the linear passage of time but as a series of cycles — they called them “world age cycles” — that would repeat over and over. To capture these cycles, the Maya employed what scholars call the long-count calendar, a five-unit computational system extending forward and backward from their mythical creation day...
"All the current hoopla is due to the mathematical fact that the current world-age cycle on the long count, which began in Aug.[13th] 3114 B.C., is about to reach its end, 5,126 years later, on a date given in scholarly notation as 13.0.0.0.0 — which falls, not quite exactly, on Dec. 21, 2012.”
Without the aid of telescopes or high-tech observatories, the Maya identified a place at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy they called the Black Rift, or Black Road. The location marked the home of the Cosmic Mother, whose birth canal was represented by the rift. According to Mayan cosmology, this is the place where people go after they die.
Incredibly, in October, 2002, astrophysicists identified a black hole in the same area of the sky. Some 26,000 light years from the sun, hovering inside a dense concentration of gases and stars called the nuclear bulge, the black hole was named Sagittarius A*, after the constellation in which it was found. (The asterisk indicates a dark spot rather than a star or planet.) Scientists now believe that most galaxies revolve around black holes, which act like recycling centers and garbage disposals for dying stars and those new ones that form from the leftover material.
Just as the Mayans held that we "enter the road" at life's end, modern astrophysicists assert that all living things are made up of stardust. The dust either rode to earth inside a comet or arrived long before that, in the direct aftermath of the Big Bang.
In addition to their long-count calendar, the Maya also kept track of even larger periods of time. According to Carl Johan Calleman, author of The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness, the nine levels of major mesoamerican pyramids represent different intervals of history dating back to creation. For instance, the lowest level, calculated in Mayan code as beginning 13 “hablatuns”, or 16.4 billion years ago, marks the formation of the universe.
The subsequent time periods in the nine-level scheme are calculated using the number 13. Going up the pyramid, each represents an acceleration of evolution - by a factor of 20 - compared to the interval preceding it. For instance, the second lowest level covers a time period beginning 13 “alautuns”, or 820 million years ago. That's ostensibly when animals first appeared. The third unit begins 41 million years ago (primates), the fourth 2 million years ago (Homo Sapiens), the fifth 102,000 years ago, and the sixth about 5,000 years ago. The seventh period began around 1755 and ended in 1999, coinciding with the industrial revolution and rise of high technology.
Calleman is a biologist and former consultant for the World Health Organization. Unlike other amateur history detectives, he doesn't think the precession of equinoxes played a role in the development of Mayan cosmology. Instead, he cites the culture's holy book, the Popol Vuh, as a key source for his calculations. Of course, the idea of time speeding up echoes an argument presented by sociologist Alvin Toffler in his 1970 bestselling book Future Shock. Toffler blamed mass technology for a faster-paced culture that has caused alienation and other psychological fallout that could ultimately our survival.
If Calleman's math is correct, we are now residing at the second highest level on the pyramid, one that will last just under 13 years. After that, a final interval of 260 days will culminate in a date he maintains is October 28, 2011.
In Maya Cosmogenesis 2012, former software developer John Major Jenkins insists the correct end date for the long-count calendar is the 2012 winter solstice. “The December solstice sun shifts along the constellations very slowly, and for thousands of years it has been proceeding backwards through the sidereal constellations of Aquarius, Capricorn, and into Sagittarius. The Milky Way crosses through the zodiac in early Sagittarius, forming the Maya Sacred Tree or 'crossroads' in the sky.”
Jenkins is credited with fleshing out the occult meaning of several obscure images that appear on Mayan monuments. He has also provided an explaination for the ritual of a sacred ball game played on the solstices. A combination of basketball and soccer, the object of the sport is to get the ball through a ring protruding sideways from a stone wall. The ring, according to Jenkins, represents the center of the Milky Way.
How the Maya were able to identify the black hole Sagittarius A* is still unknown. It may have been a coincidence, but Jenkins theorizes that the ancients were capable of “shamanically invoking a ‘wormhole’ in local space-time," one that allowed them to make the 26,000 light-year journey. A wormhole is a hypothetical time tunnel or shortcut through space.
In their book Maya Cosmos, Three Thousand Years on the Shamans' Path, archaeologists David Freidel and Linda Schele suggested that the telepathic connection served as an umbilical cord that anchored the Maya to the larger universe. Unfortunately, this cord was cut by the Spanish invaders, and in one of the more perplexing mysteries of mesoamerican antiquity, the Maya's densely populated southern cities were already deserted by the time Hernando Cortez arrived in 1519. It was exactly the year the calendar-makers predicted.
Other Ancient Prophecies Not Exactly Light Reading
According to the History Channel, members of the Hopi Indian tribe in the southwest United States predicted in the 1940s that the Fourth World – our current age - would end shortly. Shamans within the tribe believed only a few more signs were left to glean before the sun would turn frightfully hot. Then the seas would rise, another world war would commence, and massive earthquakes would rock much of the earth. One of those signs preceding the hour of doom, according to the shamans, is the appearance of a great spider web crisscrossing the earth.
In Frank Waters’ classic Book of the Hopi, written in 1963, Hopi legends describe what happened to the three previous worlds of man. With remarkable parallels to Hesiod’s poem The Works and Days, the three worlds are referred to as the Golden, Silver and Bronze ages.
Waters recounts the myth of how God destroyed the First World when mankind sunk into a state of material decay, bickering and general depravity. Aware that the end was near, a small group of intuitive souls received instructions from the higher power to evacuate, following a star by night and a cloud by day until they reached a large cavern in a mountainside. At that point, “He rained fire upon [the world]. He opened up the volcanoes. Fire came from above and below and all around until the earth, the waters, the air, all was one element, fire, and there was nothing left except the people safe inside the womb of the earth.”
The Second World was destroyed by a different means, according to the legend. “Stuknang commanded the twins, Pojanghoya and Palongawhoya, to leave their posts as the north and south ends of the world’s axis, where they were stationed to keep the earth properly rotating," Waters explains. " The twins had hardly abandoned their stations when the world, with no one to control it, teetered off balance, spun around crazily, then rolled over twice. Mountains plunged into seas with a great splash, seas and lakes sloshed over the land; and as the world spun through cold and lifeless space it froze into solid ice.” Again, a small group of evacuees waited it out inside the same granite refuge.
Finally, the Third World of the Hopi ended in a manner consistent with the biblical account of a great flood. Variations of the Noah’s Ark tale are told by nearly 200 cultures dispersed around the planet. In the Hopi version, a water-tight vessel built from hollow reeds and vines deposited the survivors and their livestock on a small island that was once the highest peak of a continent.
According to Plato, the deluge sunk the utopian civilization of Atlantis, an event he dated at 9000 B.C. Although no one has ever proven the island's existence, British author Graham Hancock and Belgium investigator Patrick Geryl think the survivors of Atlantis founded the civilization in Egypt. The Mayans and Hopis may also have descended from the same culture. The theory is backed by hieroglyphs and other evidence found at the Sphinx, Great Pyramids, and Macchu Pichu. There are also remarkable similarities in some of the artwork depicting the Cosmic Mother in the various civilizations. Although a definitive translation of the Egyptian glyphs remains elusive, Geryl insists in The Orion Prophecy that the writings forecast a present-day catastrophe on the same scale.
While astrology is thought to have originated in Babylonia, some experts believe its true origins lie farther east, either in China or the Indus Valley. Both cultures pre-date Mesopotamia and Egypt. In particular, the Vedics (from whom the Hindus evolved) plotted a 12,000-year interval that may loosely represent half a precession cycle. Moreover, this duality-driven culture offers an explanation for the collapse of morality that proceeds the destruction of each world age. A celestial obstacle of some sort drifts into the path between the earth, sun and the Cosmic Mother (i.e. Sagittarius A*), blocking spiritual enlightenment.
In Galactic Alignment, Jenkins quotes a Hindu yogi of the late 19th century, Sri Yukteswar, who explained, “After 12,000 years, when the sun goes to the place in its orbit which is farthest from Brahma, the grand center… [then] dharma, the mental virtue, comes to such a reduced state that man cannot grasp anything beyond the gross material creation.” Tangential though it may seem, the idea calls to mind the lyrics of a Cat Stevens song from the 70s: "I'm being followed by a Moonshadow...")
The good news, according to Jenkins, is that beginning around 2012, that obstacle will be removed. Writers like Arguelles, Pinchbeck and Calleman also believe that a transformation to a higher consciousness is inevitable. Other New Age philosophers are not so sure. Barbara Marx Hubbard has argued that the human race must consciously redeem its ways to avoid the dreary specter of apocalypse. Consequently, the Hindu Goddess Kali may make a curtain call at some point, Jenkins suggests, “wisely trampling under her dancing feet the fragmented remnants of degenerate humanity so that earth’s flowering can start anew.”
Other Predictions
Among the better known Greek and Roman prophets, a female psychic known as the Sibyl predicted during the first century B.C. the birth of Jesus, a feat that earned her a place in the Sistine Chapel. As for longer-range prophecies, the Sibyl calculated a timespan for mankind that incorporated nine generations of 800 years each, ending with the tenth. By some estimates this last generation began in 2000 A.D. In her fourth volume of predictions, she’s quoted as saying “The earth shall be shaken by a great earthquake that throws many cities into the sea. There shall be war. Fires shall come flashing forth from the heavens and many cities burn.”
Nostradamus, the French prophet of the 16th century, wrote about equally dramatic events slated for the future. Born in Provence, France, he switched occupations from medical doctor to prophet at the age of 45, ingesting nutmeg to stimulate his visions. Both he and the celtic shaman known as Merlin made a startling forecast about a shift of the earth’s axis that would disrupt the earth’s rotation.
“The planets will run out of their appointed paths,” the Merlin figure warned, while Nostradamus predicted, “in the month of October, a massive movement of the globe, such that there will be those who will think that the planet has lost its gravity, being plunged into the abyss of darkness.” Elsewhere, the Frenchman writes, “There will be omens in the spring, and extraordinary changes thereafter, reversals of nations and mighty earthquakes.”
Applying Science to the Equation
Just how the precession of equinoxes, the solstice sun crossing the galactic equator, the end of the long-count calendar or any of the prophecies mentioned above will impact us remains a mystery. Because of the sun’s diameter, the alignment with the galactic plane lasts about 35 years and began around 1980. Orbiting the center of the Milky Way, the sun is located in one of the galaxy's outer spiral arms, where it oscillates up and down through the disc-shaped, nebula-shrouded plane.
Like most of his academic peers, archaeologist Friedel believes the end of the Mayan calendar means very little from a practical perspective. December 21, 2012, he alleges, will pass like an odometer turning over to zero and beginning anew. Of an estimated two million Maya Indians still inhabiting the earth today, there’s no indication that any are bracing for an apocalypse. Some Mayan civic organizations have even accused Arguelles and others of misrepresenting their ancestors in order to sell books and DVDs.
Regardless, red lights have lit up in spades across the apocalypse warning panel in recent years. Among our more pressing worries are climate change, toxic levels of metals and phthalates in children (one in 150 is autistic), drug-resistant viruses like MRSA, and a widening cultural morass throughout the world that includes corrupt government and the subjugation of women. All these developments appear to be converging into a perfect storm.
In December, NASA announced that the polar ice caps were melting much faster than expected and that the overall volume of ice in the Artic sea is half of that measured in 2004. Last year, University of Washington climatologist Cecilia Bitz and Marika Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research calculated that the arctic will be free of all its sea ice by 2040. Others predict ice--free summers beginning in 2012. That's when the Kyoto Treaty expires.
While most climatologists don't expect the rising oceans to submerge San Francisco, Miami or any other American coastal city for at least another century, they do seem to keep revising their estimates. CNN reported recently in its Planet in Peril series that 5,500 square miles of rainforest continue to be clear-cut annually in the Amazon basin alone, releasing millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The world's tree canopy is responsible for converting carbon dioxide into oxygen, but when cut or burned, that filtering function ends and much of the carbon contained within the trees is released. Logging operations in Indonesia, Africa and South America are contributing an estimated 25 percent of the new CO2 rising into the atmosphere annually. The Greenhouse Effect has in turn sparked a decade of unprecedented mega-wildfires across Europe and North America, further aggravating the carbon accumulations. Summers now last an average of three weeks longer than in previous centuries.
And those concerns are just the tip of the melting ice berg. An increase of just a few degrees may generate the release of deadly methane gases locked in ice on the bottom of the ocean floor. According to Mark Maslin of the London Environmental Change Research Centre, "Research already exists to suggest that the release of [methane] hydrates increased global temperature 18,000 years ago, and we now face a similar threat as our global temperature continues to rise." Maslin explains in a 2005 paper presented to the Royal Geographic Society that scientific models anticipate a temperature increase of 5.8 degrees centigrade by A.D. 2100.
Atmospheric methane is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Like oil, huge deposits can also be found deep in the earth’s crust. A sudden explosive release through the ocean floor could initiate a continental slope failure and slam the coasts with tsunamis 15 meters high. Less dramatic examples of geyserlike plumes have been discovered off the coast of Santa Barbara. With concentrations measured in the air above at 5,000 parts per million, at 40,000 parts per million, the gas becomes combustible. That’s why oceanographers have asked the federal government to invest more money into exploring this little understood threat.
A sea temperature rise might also destroy marine plankton, the green stuff that produces about half the world's oxygen. The Greenhouse Effect, incidentally, means that CO2 trapped in the atmosphere prevents the sun's heat from rising back up into outer space. The process of global warming accelerates as the ice caps disappear, since dark ocean surfaces absorb heat. By contrast, the white ice deflects it.
Some experts as well as amateur earth science buffs have proposed that the loss of those ice caps could also produce significant shifts in the earth's plate tectonics. What amazed geologists about the 9.3 earthquake-triggered tsunami of 2004 was not only the momentary wobble in the earth's rotation, but the extreme lateral and vertical movements of land masses - up to 30 meters in some places. The quake struck near the island of Sumatra on December 26th and lasted three minutes. Over a quarter million people were killed in Indonesia, Thailand, India and Sri Lanka.
One of the less talked about threats to modern civilization is the rapid decline of the earth's magnetism. Chinese acupuncturists discovered long ago that the magnetic currents moving through meridians in the body are responsible for the vigor in human as well as animal life. Thought to be generated from the convection of molten iron circulating deep inside the mantle, part of the earth’s electromagnetic field is stored in upper part of the atmosphere.
NASA
Charged particles that comprise the solar wind are visible as the Aurora Borealis (a.k.a. Northern Lights).
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The so-called Van Allen Belts, which are also magnetically charged, block out harmful nuclear radiation from the sun and outer space. Yet since the reign of dinosaurs, the total strength of earth's magnetic field, which is measured in gauss, has decreased by 80 percent. Rock samples indicate a magnitude of 2.5 gauss 65 million years ago. Today, the figure hovers between 0.3 and 0.6 gauss. Geophysicists concede that this dwindling field strength may be a portent of a coming field effect reversal, which means a compass would point south instead of north.
Wikimedia Commons
Artist's rendition of Earth's magnetosphere as it blocks the sun's radiation. The planet is the small orb surrounded by the light blue magnetic waves.
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On a related note, Galactic Alignment author Jenkins cites the work of Oliver Reiser, an associate of Einstein who hypothesized that biological evolution on earth was stimulated by spurts of high-frequency cosmic rays breaking through the ionosphere. This would happen, Reiser theorized, at intervals determined by the precession cycle. In addition to solar radiation, our current position within the galactic plane could make us more vulnerable to cosmic rays emanating from the Saggitarius A* black hole. Although such spurts are viewed as advantageous from an evolutionary perspective, they may also account for the mass extinction of species recorded in our fossil records.
According to science writer Mary-Sue Haliburton, in the event of a field effect reversal, "Electronic devices would all be at risk: there may be damage to, or complete loss of, all near-earth-orbiting satellites and possibly the space station itself. Effects on life forms could range from migrating birds losing their sense of direction to immune system decline and even widespread die-off from radiation-induced cancers." The earth's magnetic field, Halliburton notes, has dropped five percent in just the last century.
However, in her 2005 article for Pure Energy Systems News, an online hub for alternative energy companies, she countered this grim appraisal with NASA's assessment that the earth's magnetic field will likely not drop to zero and any decrease in the field strength will be manageable.
BBC
The position of the magnetic pole is constantly changing. Notice that the geographic poles, which mark the ends of the earth's invisible axis, are not the same as the magnetic poles, which are determined by the flow of electromagnetic currents.
In addition to its other concerns, NASA is closely monitoring the sun as it starts a new sunspot cycle in early 2008. Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado have projected a 30-50 percent hike in solar eruptions - called "corona mass ejections" - compared to the last 11-year period. The ejections show up as black spots on the sun and can be as powerful as a billion hydrogen bombs. To keep tabs on these nuclear emissions, NASA launched the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) in 1995. A number of earth-based sites also monitor the sun. (See websites below.)
High-Tech Stock Watcher Turns from Profit to Prophet
Speaking of sun signs, a computer-based, modern soothsayer called the Web-Bot Project began telling fortunes a few years ago. Business consultant George Yor developed the software application to predict stock futures, but has since moved on to bigger fish. Interviewed by the History Channel, Yor said his mini-programs, or spiders, scan millions of web pages daily in search of recurring themes. In June of 2001, an employee monitoring the results forecast that within 60-90 days, there would be a major international incident, one that would forever change the way Americans live. Three months later, terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
The Web-Bot Project has made a number of other successful predictions, according to its creator, including the tsunami in 2004. Asked about what’s in store for the future, Yor would only say that his spiders were indicating the strong possibility of “an extraordinary solar event”.
--Rosemary Regello
Reading List
"The Final Days". Article by Benjamin Anastas, New York Times Magazine 7/1/07 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/magazine/01world-t.html
"Earth Magnetic Field Reversal". Article by Mary-Sue Haliburton, Pure Energy Systems News 2/27/05 http://www.pureenergysystems.com/news/2005/02/27/6900064_Magnet_Pole_Shift/
Methane gas articles from UC Santa Barbara http://news.mongabay.com/2006/0718-ucsb.html
2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (2006) by Daniel Pinchbeck.
Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 (1998) and Galactic Alignment (2002) by John Major Jenkins
The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness (2004) by Carl Johan Calleman
Fingerprints of the Gods (1995) by Graham Hancock
The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology (1987) by Jose Arguelles.
Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman's Path (1995) by David Friedel, Linda Schele, and Joy Parker.
The Orion Prophecy (2001) by Patrick Geryl and Gino Ratinckx.
Nostradamus (1961) by Edgar Leoni. (Includes all the quatrains and historical references for those predictions which have already come true.)
Book of the Hopi (1963) by Frank Waters.
Hamlet's Mill (1969) by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend. Text available online at http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/hamlets_mill/hamletmill.htm
The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt (2003) by Jane B. Sellers.
Homer's Secret Iliad (1999) by Florence and Kenneth Wood (based on the research of Edna Leigh).
The Intent of Creation (1978) by Oliver Reiser.
Links:
The History Channel http://www.history.com
Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) http://www.nasa.gov/soho
CHANDRA Space Observatory http://www.nasa.gov/chandra
Space Weather Information http://www.spaceweather.com/ or http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/
U.S. Geological Survey (latest reports of earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, etc.) http://www.usgs.gov/
Graham Hancock http://www.grahamhancock.com/
John Major Jenkins http://www.alignment2012.com/
Patrick Geryl http://www.howtosurvive2012.com/
Carl Johan Calleman http://www.calleman.com/
Copyright 2007 TheCityEdition.com