Some comments on Tom King's article of Decembert 10, 2007:
5 Years: 2012 and the End of the World as We Know It

John Major Jenkins
December 14, 2007
Books - CDs - DVDs
http://Alignment2012.com

Thank you, John Hoopes, for the heads up and invitation to comment. This is a nicely presented and written article. The audio clip with John Hoopes is especially useful, since transcribed talks can often be rife with mistaken meanings. My comments, as usual, grew lengthy, so I'll simply post the first two paragraphs here and link to a page on my website for the rest. The focus of King's article hones in on a somewhat contentious friendship between Hoopes and Pinchbeck, and generally the treatment is of "the 2012 movement" rather than the 2012 artifact itself. By this I mean that we hear of Hoopes's often insightful observations about the 2012 phenomenon in the culture at large. Daniel Pinchbeck's position as a visible front man for the 2012 "movement" is part of what comes under his purview. And we can sense his displeasure at Pinchbeck's success in the marketplace, probably, I suppose, because certain generalizations and inaccuracies occur in his rap and a scholar would prefer that the study and elucidation of Maya tradition be reserved for scholars.

On the far end of the spectrum, far beyond where Pinchbeck stands, are the truly ludicrous theories and ideas that dance around the 2012 meme. This is the area that journalists often feed upon. They compare these absurd fantasies with the other end of the spectrum, where calm and rational scholars assert with supreme confidence: "We [the archaeological community] have no record or knowledge that the Maya would think the world would come to an end in 2012." -Susan Milbrath. Hoopes himself emphasizes this several times. The world will not end. But I'd like to point out a discrepancy in many scholars' understanding of 2012, suggesting how academia is failing in its role of investigating 2012 rationally. For anyone who has spent anytime studying the Maya calendar and cosmology, it goes without saying that "the world will not end in 2012." The idea that it may, or will, is a complete paranoid fabrication of the media or an expression of some collective fear projection. The Maya calendar goes in cycles.

Now, when scholars make that assertion, they often leave hanging the question, "okay, well then what is 2012?" And if pressed they will respond that it is the end of a 13-Baktun cycle, a period of some 5,125 years. If we look a bit further, we find there was a tradition, or doctrine, evident in the archaeological record, where a period of 13 Baktuns is found carved on stone monuments as well as on ceramic vessels. These are not historical dates; they are "creation monuments" - ideological texts that tell us something about the Maya doctrine of time. Now, what comes next is where a deeper study of Maya tradition is helpful. The Maya Creation Myth (the Popol Vuh) contains a World Age doctrine describing four or five Ages. They are cyclic; transformation and renewal happens at the end of each. It is a simple deduction to see that the 13-Baktun periods in the Long Count calendar represent the World Ages referenced in the Creation Myth. In fact, several scholars such as Gordon Brotherston have made this suggestion. Yet Hoopes is quick to point out that there are larger periods recorded, implying that the 13-Baktun period was for the ancient Maya ambiguous, irrelevant, and just another cycle ending of many. Sometimes the fact that there is an important, documented, ubiquitous 13-Baktun period —a much better candidate than any other period for being considered the World Age interval— is left out of the discussion. This dismissive stance, unfortunately, distracts people from taking a closer look at the cycle ending date of December 21, 2012, and how the Long Count period endings and the Creation Myth are related to other Maya traditions, such as the ballgame and king making rites. In short, it halts a deeper, rational investigation of a tradition that vocational scholars have really not spent much time examining carefully.

This is just one example of how the current approach to 2012 by scholars is superficial and/or geared toward debunking the far spectrum of New Age nonsense rather than rationally investigating the thing-in-itself. That's where the independent avocational researchers step in, as they always have when Maya studies needed to advance.

After reading King's article, I suspected that references to my work, as with Geoff Stray's, had been deleted. This is unfortunate, although it is understandable considering that the Hoopes-Pinchbeck dynamic was given priority. And I should say that I appreciated the audio clip and John Hoopes's overview of the entire subject. There are indeed unfortunate human tendencies to capitalize on 2012, imitate or co-opt others - the carnival barkers will be selling snake oil and cashing in. Probably no one discussed in this article is guilty of that; in fact I think all of us will be appalled at what lays ahead on the 2012 spiritual marketplace turnpike. So, Tom King was gracious in sending me the brief paragraph in the original article that referenced my work but was excised. I include it below:

"Mayanist John Major Jenkins, whose meticulously researched investigations into the secrets of the Mayan calendar generally earn nods from academics, also factors strongly in the 2012 scene. Jenkins does his homework all right, but much of his work is usually beyond the popular intellectual grasp. There's hardly a 2012 website without several Jenkins citations, and he's often referred to as the credibility link between the 2012 movement and Mayanist academia."

This tag of intellectual inaccessibility is perplexing. My books and website contain easy intros, and my 2012 alignment theory can be summed up concisely, as Geoff Stray did beautifully in 250 words in his recent book Mayan and Other Calendars. Guess those three PhD's and two Master's degrees are coming back to haunt me. Not! Creepily, the crux of my work did appear in the posted article, but was delivered via Daniel Pinchbeck when Tom asked him, "How can people tell the 'genuine' from the sham? What is genuine about the 2012 date?" Daniel replied, "What is genuine about the 2012 date is that it … appears to be linked to a rare astronomical event: the Winter solstice sun eclipses the dark rift at the center of the Milky Way … etc, etc, etc." The entire quote is a faithful rendition of my own pioneering breakthrough work. So, I'm unsure why my intellectually ungraspable work is best delivered through someone else's mouth, without proper credit. This is the launching off point for a long rant, which I'll refrain from, except to say that I'll assume Daniel was trying to defer to my work as the most cogent and well-documented approach to 2012. A bit more clarity on sourcing, however, would be appreciated.

Popular media articles and interviews often do not, and cannot, go very deep into a subject; but they can frame and prioritize things accurately. They can serve as a gateway for those who want to investigate further, so the resource links in the sidebar are useful. Given the focus on Hoopes and Pinchbeck, and a look at the overall "2012 phenomenon", rather than the cutting-edge research into the thing-in-itself, King did a good job of addressing a difficult subject. Although Terence McKenna posted my breakthrough article of 1994 on his website long ago, the link to it in the sidebar is best switched to: http://www.alignment2012.com/why2012.html Another "well framed" article is the New York Times piece of July 1, 2007, cited in the sidebar, which has recently been revised and reprinted in the Special Edition of the U.S. News and World Report magazine.

Thank you to Robert Sitler for clarifying the existence of the Tortuguero monument. One thing in this regards persistently escapes scholarly attention, although I immediately pointed it out on the U.T. Meso discussion group when the text was deciphered last year — the presence of the Maya deity Bolon Yok-te in the text indicates a Creation event, because Bolon Tok-te is a "creation lord" and is present on many of the other period-ending Creation texts. I wrote about this last year in my article "The Mayan Lord of Creation and 2012" (where a quote of Matthew Looper's words reaffirms my position) and in more detail on my website: http://www.alignment2012.com/bolon-yokte.html. That 2012 was thought of by the ancient Maya — as all cycle endings should rightly be thought of — as a "creation" or "cosmogenesis" is a now a demonstrable fact. So, the scholars will have to revise another previously held assumption. I guess the title of that book I wrote 11 years ago (Maya Cosmogenesis 2012) was prescient after all. These "details" unfortunately are beyond what can be treated in pop venues, as recent interviews I've done reveal, including the one that appeared in your local Kansan on November 15, 2007:
http://www.kansan.com/stories/2007/nov/15/end_world_we_know_it/ and the one that appeared this week in my local Northern Colorado free paper The Chronicle, and one that appeared last month in the Boulder Nexus magazine, not to mention the rather silly coverage this summer in Portland's Willamette Weekly. At least radio shows provide direct communication — of the fifty or so radio interviews I've done since August, check out Red Ice Creations out of Sweden.

John Major Jenkins
http://Alignment2012.com