"DISORDERED TIME" — THE REAL MAYA PROPHECY

Quite a ruckus erupted last week over a tweet that suggested the Maya end of the world prophecy was off by eight years. That, dear reader, catapults us right into the cross hairs of—gulp—2020. The prediction, however, was not made by an eminent Maya academic or even a calendar researcher, but by plant biologist and Fulbright scholar at the University of Tennessee, Paolo Tagalogquin. His Twitter account has since been deleted. 

With recent global events, that very fear—the world ending—may have already entered your mind. 

You no doubt remember the 2012 Maya calendar kerfuffle. As a Mayaphile and long-time student of Maya culture, I wrote a book titled Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, to quash false information about the end date of their Long Count calendar, one of twenty-eight in the time-obsessed Maya system.

CALENDAR CONVERSION

Let me explain how the Maya 2012 end of the world "prophecy" made waves in June 2020 news. Even the New York Post took a shot at it. Apparently Tagalogquin did a math check between the Julian calendar, that dates back to 8 CE, and the Gregorian or Christian calendar that first came into being in 1752. After his re-calculations, he came up with this tweet:
"Following the Julian Calendar, we are technically in 2012. The number of days lost in a year due to the shift into Gregorian Calendar is 11 days. For 268 years using the Gregorian Calendar (1752-2020) times 11 days = 2,948 days. 2,948 days / 365 days (per year) = 8 years.” With his calculations, the date is June 21, 2020, summer solstice.

The subtext: I assume you have your affairs in order.

END OF THE WORLD?

Back in 2012, some believed December 21, 2012, might be the end. The media blared non-stop that this was when the Maya Long Count Calendar completed a 5,125 year cycle known as the 13th baktun. The ancient Maya, an advanced culture of mathematicians (they invented zero) and naked eye astronomers, viewed this moment as consequential.

Why is this even important? If the Maya code had not been deciphered a few decades ago, we wouldn’t even have known that an end date to the Long Count calendar existed.

In researching the Maya end date, I realized that converting both Julian and Gregorian calendars to the Maya calendar had been no easy task. Spanish speaking priests were used for the conversion and needed to interact with the Maya who had their own language. Not only was there room for error in language differences, but the Julian calendar had gone through several trial runs over the centuries as the world coped with a one-time-fits-all calendar system. During the conversion, some countries used different calendar renditions simultaneously, and sometime in the 1500s while trying to play catch up, eleven days were lost in a single month. My overall impression: whoever had been relegated to configure dates from Julian to Gregorian to Maya had stared down an impossible undertaking. And furthermore, who was their fact checker?

RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ TUM

As the end date became a media phenomenon, I took a wider view of the “Maya prophecy” as it came to be known. Great change can span decades or even centuries, and as with all things Maya, the present is determined by the past. Everything repeats. Everything is a recurring pattern.

In 2012, Nobel laureate in literature, author Rigoberta Menchú Tum, a Quiche Maya from the Guatemala highlands who was forced to leave the country when her government disappeared thousands of indigenous Maya, said this, “There are a lot of people speaking for the Maya with little respect for the sacred Maya calendar or the culture.

“For us, the Maya, during this phase, time does not exist. Time is completely dispersed. It is ‘disordered’ time,’ when the greatest breakdown of humanity will occur, plagued by loneliness, stress and fear.

“The Maya elders say if we do not take right actions today, one-quarter of the people of the earth will perish.”

Menchú Tum’s prescient words have cast her as a Cassandra-like figure in light of the Covid pandemic. And though world-wide protests over the death of George Floyd and an impending economic crisis may not kill thousands, the stark reality of both drive away any hopes for a soon to be bright future.

2012: THE TRUE MAYAN PROPHECY FILM

In a documentary film, 2012: The True Mayan Prophecy, by Dawn Engle and Ivan Suvanjieff, founders of the non-profit PeaceJam, interviewed Maya elders along with Menchú Tum. In the 2012 interview, Menchú Tum said we’re living in a moment of chaos, and though there is global disorder, 2012 would usher in a more balanced period, if only we allow it.

“A new time is drawing near so it is important to maintain the light shining in these days, our personal and collective light,” she said. “We are passing through a period of disordered time which began in 1992 and will last forty years. There are things that happen that are not merely caused by people. It is the age, the energy, the cosmos.”

MAYA ELDERS

In the film, Menchú Tum references her spiritual advisors, Maria Faviana Chocoy Alva and Pedro Celestino Pac Noy, who state that apocalyptic predictions misrepresent the meaning of the end of the Maya Long Count cycle known as the thirteenth baktun. Their position is that this would be a time of great transition.

And who cannot agree that this is a time of transition, said Menchú Tum. “For humanity, it is the darkest of times … humanity is being called to a great responsibility, affected by our actions. We call them natural disasters but they are not natural. Much pain is already occurring.”

Again, Menchú Tum's sagacious predictions are synonymous with what we are presently living with—the human pain endured by the Covid pandemic, the earth's pain due to our disconnect from Mother Nature, and the atrocities humans have unleashed on the planet. Time, as the Maya might say, will tell.

THE OTHER SIDE OF CHICHEN ITZA—WAS IT THE FIRST CANCUN?

Is Chichen Itza one of the Maya’s most revered and renowned pyramid sites or a glorified shrine-museum concocted by slick politicians to reap tourist dollars? It’s no secret that the Mexico National Tourist Corporation (MNTC) designed Cancun with the intention of creating a luxury destination that would pull in coveted currency to fill state and government coffers—and if some spilled over into the private sector, so much the better.

BIRTH OF CANCUN

In 1967 the Mexico government’s aim was to find the best locale for an international tourist resort with the finest beaches, the most beautiful water, and the fewest hurricanes. Another requirement would be proximity to its wealthy northern neighbor, the US, so flight times would be minimal.  A strip of unpopulated sand at the northeast tip of the Yucatán Peninsula fit the bill—Cancun—a destination so easily accessible that at 9 a.m. one could be in New York and by noon, landing at Cancun International, moments away from a white sand beach and a pitcher of margaritas.

And with that very same intent, as early as the 1920s, long before Cancun was even a glimmer in MNTC’s eye, the Mexico government, along with help from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, was priming Chichen Itza to become Mexico’s first full-fledged tourist destination.

Fullbright scholar and former Assistant Professor of Anthopology at University of Washington, Quetzil Castaneda detailed this in his book, In the Museum of Maya Culture: Touring Chichen Itza. Through prolific research, Castaneda's book explains how it all came about.  

TOURIST DESTINATION

Chichen Itza, translated as mouth at the well of the Itzas, had been a tourist destination for over five hundred years when MNTC and the Carnegie Institution hatched their plan. After being twice abandoned by both the Itzas (750 AD) and the Maya (1194 AD) the site became a pilgrimage spot for religious groups in the 1500s because of its sacred cenote. A tourist Mecca for centuries, Chichen Itza was a place the Maya came to pay homage to their gods.

Early explorers Edward H. Thompson and John Lloyd Stephens, artist Frederick Catherwood, along with others fueled the flames of discovery and from their explorations the Yucatec and Hispanic elite, according to Castaneda, began to create a Maya myth or identity—distinctly different from  that of  either Spain or Mexico.  

CITY OF FABLES

In the 1920s, the Mexico government organized excavations under its agency Monumento Prehispanicos, and permitted the Carnegie Institution of Washington, headed in the Yucatán by explorer Sylvanus Morley, to conduct ‘multi-disciplinary’ research in the Yucatán and to excavate and restore what Castaneda calls ‘a city of fables.’ In his book, Castaneda insists the main goal of the Carnegie Institution's Excavations Department was to create a tourist Mecca rather than to restore the site to its original state.

Castaneda believes not only do economic interests (from local to international levels) now compete at the site but different government agencies and levels of state jurisdictions also compete for the slice of Chichen Itza’s tourist pie. Castaneda’s book maintains that the Maya civilization, although very real, has been ‘tweaked’ by competing government agencies to make the ‘reproduction’ of the archeological excavations more desirable to tourists.

In his book he calls Chichen Itza a museum exhibit which represents the Maya through the epochs. The exhibit implies the Maya came from ‘a primitive society or race’ and then rose to a high stature through the creation of the pyramids. But Castaneda argues that the Maya are examined through ‘the eyes of European civilization,’ by which all civilizations are compared and judged. In many ways, Castaneda’s views are similar to those of author Daniel Quinn in his controversial book, Ishmael, which divides the world into two camps:  the takers—modern Western civilization—and the givers— indigenous cultures.  

Quinn’s premise is that  Western man usurps indigenous cultures and these ethnic societies and their “myths” are then lost forever, so that the takers can impose their myth—science—onto the entire world. Quinn equates this with the destruction of all indigenous societies. Castaneda’s book basically concurs with this premise, and in his lament for the Maya, calls what the state and government have done at Chichen Itza a “violation” against Mayan society, and goes so far as to call it on par with rape.

EQUINOX PHENOMENON

Castaneda theorizes the height of the deception takes place every vernal and autumnal equinox (roughly March 20, September 21) since 1974—when Mexico figured out these date were significant to the Maya. According to Castaneda, specific knowledge of the phenomenon dates back to when Morley was excavating the site in 1928, but it was ignored by archeologists, local Maya, and Yucatecos until a thesis was published in Mexico City in 1974 by researcher Luis El Arochi.

 El Arochi, after years of study, noted that at 3 p.m. on these dates, sunlight bathed the main stairway of the pyramid Kukulkan (feathered serpent), creating a serpent-like shadow which crept down the pyramid’s massive stairs. El Arochi called this the “symbolic descent of Kukulkan,” and believed it related to Maya agricultural rituals. 

Once word was out about the equinox display of light and shadow, Chichen Itza’s Kukulkan pyramid became a tourist magnet. Tourist numbers jumped thirty percent that year. A star was born.

In 1921, Yucatan Governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto signed an agreement with Carnegie Institution that gave Sylvanus Morley a renewable ten year permit to conduct scientific study at the ancient Maya city. Among the site projects, studies would be conducted in geology, botany, zoology, climatology agronomy, medicine, physical anthropology, linguistics, history, archeology, ethnography and sociology.

Through these studies the Maya way of life could be dissected. Castaneda insists this allowed the structure of an evolutionary fable that created “ a museum of history” at Chichen Itza.    

"With Maya labor from nearby towns, the jungle was peeled back to reveal the ancient stones of decayed buildings. Chichen Itza was restored as a replica of itself and reconstructed into a life size model of an ancient Maya city.

Y TU, FELIPE

Castaneda even goes so far as to state that Felipe Carrillo Puerto, progressive governor of the Yucatán, permitted Morley and the Carnegie Institution to conduct research to create a class consciousness amongst the Maya and forge an ethnic group identity onto them, which was essential to complete the socialist revolution in the Yucatán for which Carrillo Puerto was striving.

In the Yucatán, however, the plan would serve another purpose as well. It would bolster a long stagnant economy based on the former reign of henequen—an all purpose fiber used for making rope and Panama hats—with something yet unseen—tourist dollars.

This contradictory view of Chichen Itza only heightens the mystery of the Maya. For a culture whose entire past was wiped out in an afternoon bonfire conducted by a fanatical priest in 1539, it makes one wonder anew—who were the Maya?