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Apocalypse 2012?

Jumping back a further 7,000 years, researchers believe the sprawling Clovis population of 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.

Hancock and others have argued pretty adamantly for the last decade that the Sphinx may date back as much as 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.

Along with other anomalies occurring at the end of the last ice age in 10000 B.C., the discovery of hundreds of thousands of mammoth carcasses found in Siberia and northern Canada with warm weather foilage in their stomachs led Hapgood to his 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.

Vedic Tradition Offers Good News and Bad News

Surprisingly little western scholarship has gone into unraveling the discipline of astrology, despite the rather immense deference that archaic man attached to it. It was closely tied to precession, since the zodiac involves constellations specifically plotted along the ecliptic. And while most historians erroneously trace the origin of this occult science to Babylonia, the artifiacts and legends indicate that it emerged earlier in China and the Indus Valley, where thriving prehistoric cultures appear to have handed down a legacy, rather than inheriting one from the Near East. 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), turns out to have charted the world ages in ponderous detail several millenia before Hesiod wrote his famous poem.

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 in the sky will be removed.

Like the Hopis, Yukteswar refers in his writings to four world ages (as do some 30 other cultures, according to Hamlet's Mill). There's still debate, however, about when the current Iron Age epoch known as Kali Yuga 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 begins. 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 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..."

Such ancient commentary appears to anticipate both the political intrigue and economic malaise consuming much of the world in the present day. New Age commentators like Barbara Marx Hubbard have drawn from these sacred books in cautioning the human race to redeem its evil ways in order to avoid a mass extinction. In a similar vein, Jenkins speculates in his book that the Hindu Goddess Kali may make a curtain call on Earth at some point, “wisely trampling under her dancing feet the fragmented remnants of degenerate humanity so that earth’s flowering can start anew.”

Biblical Proportions

On slightly more familiar turf, the Bible's Book of Revelation remains the most famous scripture on apocalypse in the western world. Originally penned by John of Patmos, the youngest apostle of Jesus, Revelation derives from visions he had while in exile on the island of Patmos during the first century A.D. John talks about seeing seven seals broken on a scroll which holds a detailed prophecy for the future. Having just referred to a written document, the story strangely shifts gears, with John watching a docu-drama play out before his eyes, as four horsemen ride into civilization sequentially, bringing a heap of trouble with him to vex floundering humanity. The first horse carries the infamous anti-christ, dressed in white and initially endearing himself to his subjects before taking over the globe on behalf of Satan.

The second horseman wears red, and according to some scholars, is the harbinger of pestilence and plague. Others identify him as a relentless warmonger. The third horseman of Revelation wears black and totes a balance in one hand. In his wake, John hears a voice hollering "A day's wages for a loaf of bread," thought to be a reference to economic collapse and worldwide famine. The fourth horseman, dressed in pale garments, is followed by Hades, the god of the underworld, ostensibly packing super-volcanoes, tsunamis and massive earthquakes. John refers to such cataclysmic events a little later in the story, when the sixth seal of the scroll is broken and the battle of Armageddon queues up.

Finally, Revelation states that prior to the return of Jesus on Judgment Day, a new nation of Israel emerges and that Herod's temple is rebuilt in its original location at the Temple Mount. Currently, a historic mosque occupies the site and there are no plans for replacing it anytime soon.

Other Prophecies

The History Channel's 2012: End of Days features several other sages western history who have predicted an end to the world in our time. The Cumean Sybil, for instance, forecast in the sixth century A.D. that civilization would continue for another nine intervals of 800 years each, ending with the tenth, which began in 2000 A.D. According to the fourth book of the Sibylline Oracles:

Centuries later, around 500 A.D. the Celtic shaman known as Merlin (a.k.a. Myrddin Wyllt) apparently envisioned a shift of the earth's geographic poles, similar to the Hopi myth about the demise of the second world. His prophecy states:

"At that time shall a man standing on the shore of England speak instantly to a man standing on the shore of France through a speaking stone...The seas shall rise up in the twinkling of an eye.  The winds shall fight together with a dreadful blast…  The planets will run out of their appointed paths and the earth shall run riot through the sky.”

A lesser known English oracle, Mother Shipton (a.k.a. Ursula Southeil), made an even darker prediction. Shipton warned:

"When pictures look alive with movements free.  When ships like fishes swim beneath the sea.  When men outstripping birds can soar the sky, then the world, deep-trenched in blood, will die."

Like the elusive Merlin figure, authorship of the Mother Shipton prophecies has never been authenticated. Yet both books correctly describe modern inventions (like submarines and airplanes) hundreds of years in advance. In the 16th century, the French prophet Nostradamus predicted that in five hundred years the full impact of his own recorded visions - known as quattrains - would be realized. Among the thousand or so verses he penned are these two:

In addition, like John of Patmos, Nostradamus warned readers to beware of the anti-christ. In fact, he described three such characters who would terrorize the world in the future. While Napolean and Hitler are thought to represent the first two figures, the third is still anyone's guess. Some Republican opponents in the United States think that President Ronald Wilson Reagan was the third anti-christ because the letter count of his name is 6-6-6.

Scientists Forecast Geologic Upheaval

Just how the Precession of Equinoxes, the solstice sun crossing the galactic equator, the end of the Long Count calendar or any of the dire prophecies for the present day will impact us is still unclear. 

Like most of her academic peers, University of Florida astronomer Susan Milbrath has attacked amateur history detectives like Jenkins and Calleman for what she contends is the exploitation of Mayan culture to advance personal agendas. December 21, 2012, she alleges, will pass like an odometer turning over to zero and starting anew at 13.0.0.0.0. A few years ago, Mayan archaeologist David Friedel said that of an estimated two million Maya Indians still inhabiting the earth today, there was no indication that any are bracing for the end of the world.

But sometimes reality bites. In 2005, a 5.8 earthquake rocked Central America, Hurricane Stan ravaged the region a week later, and El Salvador's Llamatepec volcano began erupting for the first time in a hundred years. In the Mayan highlands area of Guatemala, dozens of villages vanished entirely under mudslides, claiming more lives those lost in Hurricane Katrina. Before the disaster, Lawrence Joseph had visited the Guatemala to interview Gerardo Barrios, a co-author The Maya Cholqij: Gateway to Aligning with the Energies of the Earth. According to Barrios and his brother Carlos, western archaeologists are not high on the list of confidantes for Mayan spiritual leaders and shamans. In fact, many of the Quiche Indians who descend from the Maya do believe that 2012 marks a time of epic upheaval on the planet.

On the global warming front, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab reported in January, 2008 that the rate of ice melt in the Antarctic had increased 75 percent in the last decade. At the other end of the planet, University of Washington climatologists Cecilia Bitz and Marika Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research calculated that the Arctic Circle will be free of all its sea ice by 2040. Others predict ice-free summers beginning in 2012, when the Kyoto Treaty expires.

The world's tree canopy, meanwhile, is responsible for converting CO2 into oxygen, yet intensive logging operations in Indonesia, Africa and South America persist. The extraction of virgin forests is contributing an estimated 25 percent of CO2 emissions in the world today. And those trees aren't coming back anytime soon. CNN reported in its Planet in Peril series that some 5,500 square miles of rainforest are clear-cut annually in the Amazon basin alone.

The Greenhouse Effect refers to CO2 trapped up in the atmosphere, which prevents the sun's heat from reflecting off the earth's surface and back into space. Since a dark ocean absorbs heat, while white ice repels it, the continued loss of sea ice has created a positive feedback loop responsible for the exponentially increasing glacier melt. Longer summers and higher temperatures have in turn sparked a decade of unprecedented mega-wildfires across Europe and North America. Summers now last an average of three to six weeks longer than in previous centuries. Forest experts in California and Montana say these fires are damaging the topsoil to such an extent that, in many cases, seedlings won't sprout up from the ashes.

And the Earth is losing our oxygen-filtering capability from another source as well. The rise in sea temperature is destroying marine plankton, which transforms CO2 into about half the world's oxygen. An estimated 400 dead zones - areas depleted of oxygen, plankton and sea life - were identified in 2008 in estuaries and coastal waters around the globe.  That’s twice the number charted just a few years earlier.

One Nobel laureate, Revenge of Gaia author James Lovelock, believes the current warming trend will trigger a homeostatic response by the earth, possibly leading to the new ice age others have predicted. The movie The Day After Tomorrow dramatized the theory that huge amounts of fresh water entering the oceans from the arctic and antarctic zones may cause the Gulf Stream and other themohaline circulation to simply shut down. Without the warmer water flowing up from the south, the North Atlantic Ocean will get colder, generating a mini-ice age in Europe, as well as the United States north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

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