At last, science and ancient prophecy appear to be on the same page.
January 15, 2008 (Updated 5/15/09) ----------------- See also: 2012 Survival GuideBY ROSEMARY REGELLO TheCityEdition.com
Note: Adjust your browser window for optimum viewing or print out a copy. This artice is divided into two parts.
If global warming and the meltdown of the economy weren’t enough to frazzle you about the future, maybe prophecies for the year 2012 will do the trick.
Citing the Mayan calendar, the ancient Egyptians, Nostradamus and many other sources, several documentaries airing recently on the History Channel make a compelling case for an "end times" scenario playing out soon. Now that geologists have deduced that the legendary "Great Flood" and other mass extinctions followed the rise of human civilization, the idea of an apocalypse seems like less of a stretch than it once did. In fact, when Hesiod proclaimed in The Works and Days that the earth had "gathered over" at least three generations of men prior to his own, he may have been speaking the literal truth.
Percolating much anxiety of late, the 5126-year Mayan "Long Count" calendar is scheduled to end on December 21, 2012. Thought to constitute a single world age, this intricately calibrated, five-millennia timepiece first caught people's attention in 1987, when New Age guru Jose Arguelles organized the Harmonic Convergence . The event attracted thousands of erstwhile supporters to sacred sites around the world — including Mt. Shasta in Northern California — where they spent the day meditating for peace and planetary redemption. Arguelles picked 8/16/87 because it represented the end of another Mayan cycle, the 462-year period called the Nine Darkness. That epoch began with the Spanish conquest in 1519 and ended (by some coincidence) around the time the Reagan Administration abandoned its disastrous proxy war in Central America.While the prayer fest may have fallen short of its objective, in the 1990's it spawned numerous books on a new discipline known as archaeoastronomy. One of the more popular works, Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods, revived Erich Van Daniken's argument about the presence of astronauts (or some form of advanced civilization) in antiquity. Other publications included Arguelles’ The Mayan Factor, Robert Temple's The Sirius Mystery (originally published in 1976), Patrick Geryl’s The Orion Prophecy and John Major Jenkins’ two books, Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 and Galactic Alignment. In 2006, Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012: Return of Quetzalcoatl was described by the Village Voice as a "spiritualist manifesto" extolling Generations X and Y to put away the I-pods and nurture their powers of mental telepathy before it's too late.
Pinchbeck was among the authors interviewed for the History Channel's 2012: The End of Days, which first aired in 2007. That same year, Lawrence E. Joseph's riveting, if sardonic Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation Into Civilization's End raised the anxiety level of doomsday trackers even higher. Former Hubble Space Telescope investigator Philip Plait published his Death from the Skies!: These Are the Ways the World Will End in 2008, perhaps a little too cute given the circumstances. Not wanting to be left behind, movie director Roland Emmerich recently wrapped on his latest apocalyptic thriller, 2012, which stars John Cusick and Amanda Peet. The movie is scheduled for release in November 2009.
(Be sure to check out our compilation of 2012 articles, books, blogs and websites.)
A Mayan calendar. -------------------------------
Optional quick skim this article:
Mayan Calendar and Prophecy
Precession of the Equinoxes
Ancient Mythology
Other Prophecies
Geologic Upheaval on Tap
Yellowstone and Other Tipping Points
For nearly a thousand years surrounding their heyday in 500 A.D, the classical Mayan Indians of Mexico and Central America preoccupied themselves with the art of timekeeping. In order to crack the meaning of time, consciousness and synchronicity (to use Pinchbeck's words), Mayan astronomers developed models of the universe, calculating the orbits of the earth, sun, moon, and other planets. Among their astonishing feats, they predicted the day Hernando Cortez would arrive in South America, several hundred years in advance.
“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," novelist Benjamin Anastas wrote in a 2007 article for the New York Times Magazine. "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. 13, 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 ancient Mayans also apparently identified the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, an area they called the Black Rift, or Black Road. This spot marked the home of the Cosmic Mother, a place where people go after they die.
The "Black Road" of the Mayans.
--------------------------------------------
If that sounds familiar, it's because a black hole was charted in the same area of the sky in October, 2002. Dubbed Sagittarius A* (after the constellation in which it was found), this center point of the Milky Way spiral resides 26,000 light years away and is surrounded by the "galactic bulge", a dense array of newborn stars.
Modern astronomers have since deduced that most galaxies revolve around black holes. The holes serve as recycling centers — powerful vaccuums that swallow up old stars — leaving the younger ones to forage through and collect the gases left behind. That's partially why the word around the planetarium these days is that all of us are composed of stardust. Regardless of whether our amino acids traveled here on the back of a a comet or in the process of the Solar System's birth, this idea mirrors the Mayan belief that ultimately we "enter the road" of the Black Rift.
Accelerating, Aligning, Wobbling and Waning
Besides their long-count calendar, the Mayans kept track of even larger periods of time. Carl Johan Calleman, author of The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness, believes the nine levels of major mesoamerican pyramids represent different intervals of history dating back to creation. Each higher step represents an acceleration in evolution by a factor of 20, symbolized by its shorter length. A biologist and former consultant for the World Health Organization, Calleman is not exactly an authority on mesoamerican culture and art. His theory, however, is fascinating. He derived it after reading the Popol Vuh, the Mayan bible, and by observing the prominence of the numbers 13 and 20 in Mayan time schemes. Besides a 365-day solar calendar, many mesoamerican cultures observes a sacred calendar comprised of 260-days — 13 weeks, each with 20 different days.
Calleman's first epoch in Mayan code begins 13 “hablatuns”, or 16.4 billion years ago, This represents the formation of the universe and therefore the lowest level of the pyramid. The next level covers a time period beginning 13 “alautuns”, or 820 million years ago. Ostensibly, that's when animals first evolved on earth. The third pyramid step 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 (when the long-count calendar commenced). The seventh period began around 1755 and ended in 1999, which coincides with the industrial revolution in the West and rise of high technology. Thus, if the math is correct, we're now residing at the second highest level on the pyramid, one that will last just under 13 years and equal the amount of change generated in the previous 144 years. After that, a final interval of 260 days will culminate in a date Calleman maintains is October 28, 2011.
Each pyramid step upward represents an acceleration of evolution.
(Incidentally, Alvin Toffler made a similar case about time speeding up in his 1970 bestseller, Future Shock. Toffler blamed mass technology for the modern era's hyper-driven pace, resulting in high suicide rates, increased violence and ecological mayhem.)
alignment2012.com
Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that. Because of the sun’s diameter, the alignment lasts about 35 years and began back in 1980. (The Sun crossed dead center with the "galactic equator" in 1998.) Jenkins believes that the Maya also knew about an astronomical 25,920-year cycle called the precession of equinoxes, which figures into the alignment equation. This cycle represents the time it takes for the earth to wobble clockwise on its axis in one elliptical revolution, causing the 12 zodiac constellations to make a 360-degree circuit around the night sky along a path called the ecliptic. What causes the stars to "recess" is the changing angle of our view of them from Earth. (Incidentally, there were originally 13 zodiac constellations.)
So what causes precession and why is it important? Like a top, the earth’s axis tips a little off its normal tilt as gravitational forces from the Moon and Sun act on it, slowing down the orbit very, very slightly. As a result, approximately every 72 years, each constellation appears to recede one degree backward on the Zodiac carousel as it crosses the night sky.
lunarplanner.com
While that may not seem like a big deal to us, before the clock was invented, civilizations relied on celestial navigation for their survival. Calculating the positions of heavenly bodies at different times of the year allowed the first settled communities to schedule their crop growing activity, anticipate the rainy season and stockpile provisions for winter. Monuments like Stonehenge most likely served the purpose of timekeeping (although there's some debate about this), with the equinox or solstice sun rising (or setting) between two columns, an arch, inside a shaft or over a carefully placed stone to mark the occasion.
That's why precession may have become an issue over time, since the position of the Sun and constellations inevitably strayed out of sync. Suddenly, the cosmic door to perception appeared to be falling off its hinges. That so many cultures went to great lengths to account for the problem in their mythology has presented something of a mystery to scholars. In their groundbreaking 1969 book, Hamlet's Mill, history of science professors Giorgio de Santillana (M.I.T.) and Hertha von Dechend (University of Frankfurt) were first to tie legends from antiquity to the precession phenomenon. Edna Leigh followed up with a look at the use of astronomically significant numbers in Homer's Iliad. Maine-based Egyptologist Jane Sellers uncovered still more evidence of recurring precession computations in her 2003 book, The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt.
Robert Bauval, who has investigated the astrological alignments of the Great Pyramids and the Sphinx, explained in the 1996 documentary The Mysterious Origins of Man (narrated by Charlton Heston), that the reason ancient civilizations were so keen on tracking the earth's wobble may have involved a first-hand knowledge of its connection to global mega-disasters like the Great Flood. If this is the case, it's possible that the pyramids and other megalithic architecture were specifically designed to track precession, which would allow mankind to predict the next cataclysm in advance. Perhaps even an ice age might be triggered at a certain point in the cycle, Graham Hancock speculates in his opus, Fingerprints of the Gods. To support the contention, he cites a study by John Imbrie in 1976 called "Variations in the Earth's Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages". More recently, astronomers have determined that our orbit around the Sun veers far enough over the course of millenia to generate the periods of intense cold responsible for ice ages.
larspeterson.com
And now here's the rub. Most academics dispute the notion that primitive peoples knew about the precession of equinoxes prior to the Greek astronomer Hipparchus "discovering" it in the second century B.C. After all, they say, 72 years is a long time for anyone to notice constellations shifting a mere one degree, and 2,160 years incomprehensible for a more substantial 30 degree slide backward. In a study published by the journal Nature, University of Cambridge Egyptologist Kate Spence went further than that, claiming the ancient Egyptians were poor astronomers who simply misaligned the Great Pyramids at their cardinal points.
In addition to the who-knew-what-when controversy, Jenkins' galactic alignment argument merits two other clarifications. First, the constellation that dominates the eastern sky on the morning of the March 21st equinox, just before the sun rises in the same spot, identifies our "astrological age" within the precession sequence. This is different from the constellation that's dominant when the December solstice sun rises. Currently, we're in the process of inching out of Pisces and entering the astrological Age of Aquarius.
Second, a solstice alignment with the galactic equator doesn't mean our solar system has actually lined up on the disc of the Milky Way galaxy. To the contrary, we're thought to be several light years above the galaxy's plane right now, and rising. Like a merry-go-round, the stars revolve clockwise around the black hole Sagittarius A*, bobbing up and down like horses, and only once every 26 to 33 million years do we line up on the disc. Several studies by astrobiologists suggest mass extinctions on earth may coincide with this cycle, although the data is inconclusive. (For more on the science of apocalypse, follow the link to Part 2 of this article below.)
Ancient Mythology 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 – the present world age - would end shortly. Shamans within the tribe believed only a few more signs were left to glean before the sun turns frightfully hot, the seas rise, another war starts and massive earthquakes rock the earth. One of those signs foreshadowing the hour of doom is the appearance of a blue star. Another omen is that of a great "spider web" crisscrossing the earth.
In his classic Book of the Hopi, first published in 1963, FrankWaters recounts the culture's ancient myths and a prophecy for the future compiled from interviews with 30 leading elders of the tribe. In the oral legends, God destroyed the First World after mankind had sunk into endless bickering, spiritual emptiness and a general state of depravity. Aware that the end was near, a small group of intuitive souls received were told by the god Stuknang to evacuate their homeland. They followed a designated star by night and a cloud by day until they arrived at a large ant mound (perhaps symbolozing a mountain or underground chamber). Once they were safely tucked away:
“[God] 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 Hopis believe the Second World was destroyed by an entirely different means. “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. 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 apparently survived the ordeal by hiding in the ant mound.
The Third World of the Hopi ended in a manner consistent with the biblical account of the Great Flood. Variations of the tale of Noah’s Ark are told by at least 200 cultures worldwide, including the Eskimos. According to Plato, the flood also submerged the utopian civilization of Atlantis, an event he dates at 9000 B.C.
A theory presented by Columbia University Professors Walter Pittman and William Ryan in their book Noah's Flood connects the flood myths to the catastrophic flooding of the Black Sea basin at around 6000 B.C. However, a group of geologists known as the Holocene Impact Working Group believe the Great Flood resulted from a comet striking the Indian Ocean in 2800 B.C. A mega-tsunami followed the strike, wiping out 80 percent of humanity and dispersing the rest in all directions.
Jumping back 7,000 years, researchers believe a sprawling population of Clovis hunter-gatherers in North America disappeared as the result of either the Younger Dryas climate shift (circa 10000 B.C.) or an asteroid exploding above the Laurentide Ice Sheet, north of the Great Lakes. No definitive cause for the extinction has been determined, but British geologists in January 2009 claim that a five-degree hike in global temperatures spawned mega-wildfires. That would account for the ash layer escavated at numerous sites where Clovis artifacts have been unearthed.
And while no one has ever proven the existence of Atlantis, British author Graham Hancock, Belgium investigator Patrick Geryl and others think the survivors of that culture may have founded the later civilization in Egypt, as well as the Mayan, Hopi and other mesoamerican traditions. Time-wise, their premise dovetails nicely with the Indian Ocean comet strike theory, since Ancient Egypt is dated to around 3000 B.C.. However, this counters Plato's 9000 B.C. date for Atlantis.Hancock and others have argued pretty adamantly for the last decade that the Sphinx may date back 15,000 years. In his book, the author of Fingerprints of the Gods suggests that Antarctica might have been the original Atlantis, dislodged from its perch in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean at the time of a sudden geographical pole shift. The event likely took place at about the time Plato identifies in Timaeus, when the continent supposedly surfed 2,000 miles to its present spot on the South Pole. The theory, known as earth-crust displacement, was first advanced by a college science teacher in New Hampshire named Charles Hapgood.
The discovery of hundreds of thousands of mammoth carcauses found in Siberia and northern Canada with warm weather foilage in their stomachs, along with other anomalies occuring at the end of the last ice age in 10000 B.C. led Hapgood to this revolutionary hypothesis. He proposed that North America had dropped down out of the Arctic Circle and into its present location during the same tumultuous shift that pushed Atlantis southward. Although the scientific establishment rejected the theory outright, Albert Einstein wrote the forward for Hapgood's 1958 book, Earth's Shifting Crust, explaining how a heavy build-up of ice on the poles could trigger a reorientation of the north-south axis. A Princeton study released in 2006 bolstered the premise after finding equatorial flora and fossils in present-day Alaska.
Good News and Bad News
In hammering out what transpired over the course of multiple millenia, there's also the ancient science of astrology to consider. Most history books trace this occult discipline back to Babylonia in 3000 B.C. Yet a review of ancient texts suggests it may have actually got its spark in China or the Indus Valley, where thriving "pre-historic" cultures pre-date both Mesopotamia and Egypt. In particular, the Vedics plotted a 12,000-year interval that may loosely represent half a precession cycle. This duality-driven tradition (i.e. yin-yang, hot-cold, dark-light, male-female) has not only charted the different world ages for us in detail, but attempts to account for the moral decay preceding the destruction of each epoch. According to one Vedic philosopher, a celestial obstacle drifts into the path between the earth, sun and the Cosmic Mother (i.e. Sagittarius A*), impeding the spiritual connection.
In Galactic Alignment, Jenkins quotes a Hindu yogi of the late 19th century, Sri Yukteswar, who postulated, “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." The good news, according to Jenkins, is that beginning around 2012, this impediment will be removed.
Like the Hopis, Yukteswar refers in his writings to four world ages. In his own research, Hamlet's Mill author de Santinella discovered that an estimated thirty cultures around the world identify a Golden, Silver, Bronze/Copper, and Iron Age. There's still debate, however, about when the current Iron Age epoch known as Kali Yuga ( or "Degenerate Age") will end. Some Hindu spiritual leaders expect it to last another 400,000 years, while others concur with Jenkins that a transformation to another "golden age" is in the works. Interestingly, the Kali Yuga kicked off in 3102 B.C., just eleven years before the Mayan Long Count calendar began. The source of this date is the Surya Siddhanta, an ancient astronomical treatise that's the basis for Hindu and Buddhist calendars.
A second text, the Vishnu Purana, says (at least, according to internet sources) that in Kali Yuga ,"The leaders who rule over the Earth will be violent and seize the goods of their subjects... Those with possessions will abandon agriculture and commerce and will live as servants, dependent on their various possessions. The leaders, with excuses of financial need, will rob and despoil their subjects and take away private property. Moral values and the rule of the law will lessen from day to day until the world will be completely perverted..."
That cheery depiction should strike a nerve. No wonder New Age commentators like Barbara Marx Hubbard have argued the human race must redeem its evil ways in order to avoid a mass extinction. Jenkins also muses on the prospect, speculating in his book that the Hindu Goddess Kali may make a curtain call at some point, “wisely trampling under her dancing feet the fragmented remnants of degenerate humanity so that earth’s flowering can start anew.”
Article continues.... Part 2
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2008 -2009 TheCityEdition.com