DID 2012 MAYA CALENDAR'S LONG-COUNT END DATE USHER IN AN EPOCH OF CHANGE?

 

Scribe on Maya plate

Have we entered a new epoch that began in 2012? You may recall the 2012 Maya calendar kerfuffle. First off, the media got it wrong. The Maya never predicted the world would end on the last day of their thirteenth baktun in the Maya Long Count cycle. But Maya elders did say we were in for a time of transition. Is that transition now?

As a Mayaphile and student of Maya culture, I wrote Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, to quash false information about the supposed "end date" in their Long Count calendar, one of 28 in the time-obsessed Maya system, that was being dangled like a piece of fresh meat before a pack of hungry wolves. The calendar simply rolled over into a new cycle and they started counting anew.

Maya Calendar (Historyonthenet.com)

But old habits die hard and just over a year ago a ruckus erupted over a tweet that suggested the Maya 2012 end of the world prophecy was off by a good eight years. That catapulted said end date smack dab into the cross hairs of 2020 —what a year that ended up being. 

The prediction however was not made by an eminent Maya academic or even a calendar researcher, but by plant biologist and Fulbright scholar at University of Tennessee, Paolo Tagalogquin. His Twitter account has since been deleted.

With ongoing global events, that very possibility—the world ending—may have crossed your mind.  And for the beginning of "the end" to start in 2020? Well, we've lived through two years of continuous threat from a raging pandemic still not fully in check. Let it be said some of us may have considered that to be a precursor of things to come. But it looks like we're still standing.

END OF 13TH BAKTUN

To explain biologist Tagalogquin's reasoning, apparently he did a math re-do on the Julian calendar that dates back to 8 CE and was used until the Gregorian or Christian calendar came into being in 1752. After his 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 the Gregorian calendar is 11 days. For 268 years using the Gregorian calendar (1752 - 2020) times 11 days equals 2,948 days / 365 (per year) equals eight years."

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

Dresden Codex providing clues to Maya calendars (NGS photo)

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.

CALENDAR SHUFFLE

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 some time 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 CHEN

As the end date blossomed into a full-on media phenomenon, I took a wider view of the "Maya prophecy" as it came to be known. Great change doesn't happen overnight and 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.

Rigoberta Menchú Tum, Nobel Laureate

In 2012 Nobel laureate and author Rigoberto Menchú Tum, a Ki'che' Maya from Guatemala who was forced to leave her 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.

TIME DOES NOT EXIST

"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 action today, one-quarter of the people of the earth will perish."

Tum said this in 2012. Flash forward to 2020—especially the "plagued by loneliness, stress and fear" part of her quote and we can cast her as a Cassandra-like figure in light of the Covid pandemic. And we can all agree that in the past several years numerous issues have caused hardship: floods, hurricanes, raging fires, wars, racial inequality and unwarranted deaths. The stark reality of all the above drives away any hope for a soon to be bright future.

A MOMENT OF CHAOS

Maya Renaissance film by PeaceJam

In a documentary film, 2012: The True Mayan Prophecy, Dawn Engle and Ivan Suvanjieff, film makers and founders of the non-profit PeaceJam, interviewed Maya elders along with Menchú Tum. In the 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.

DISORDERED TIME

"A new time is drawing near so it is important to maintain the light shining in these days, and 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 happened that are not merely caused by people. It is the age, the energy, the cosmos."

TRANSITION TAKES TIME

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 true 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.

Calendar cycle cogs (By DK)

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 respon-sibility, 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.

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If you enjoyed this post, check out my other works, Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya. It's available on Amazon with tales of expat life and living within 100 miles of four major pyramid sites. Also, check out my website at www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are available on Amazon where you can find my overview of the 2012 Maya calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed—Demystifying the Prophecy.