New York Times July 1, 2007
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prophetic project that it may never have been designed
to fulfill, the
Mayan calendar is at the center of an escalating cultural
phenomenon —
with New Age roots — that unites numinous dreams of societal
transformation with the darker tropes of biblical cataclysm.
To some,
2012 will bring the end of time; to others, it carries
the promise of a
new beginning; to still others, 2012 provides an explanation
for
troubling new realities — environmental change, for example
— that seem
beyond the control of our technology and impervious to
reason. Just in
time for the final five-year countdown, the Mayan apocalypse
has come of
age.
Light and darkness — heavenly forces and a corrupted earth
— are the
twin engines of apocalyptic movements. For Christians
awaiting rapture
or Shiites counting the days until the Twelfth Imam appears,
the trials
and injustices of the known world are a prelude for the
paradise that we
can imagine but can’t yet achieve. Judging by the sheer
number of
predicted end dates that have come and gone without the
trumpets blowing
and angels rushing in, we are a people impatient to see
our world
redeemed through catastrophe — and we are always wrong.
Gnostics
predicted the imminent arrival of God’s kingdom as early
as the first
century; Christians in
prepare for the end of the world at the first millennium;
the Shakers
believed the world would end in 1792; there was a “Great
Disappointment”
among followers of the Baptist preacher William Miller
when Jesus did
not return to upstate
have been especially prodigious with prophetic end dates:
1914, 1915,
1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, 1975 and 1994. Any religious movement
with an
end-time prophecy is certain to attract followers, no
matter how
maniacal or fringy (witness the Branch Davidians). For
those who want to
go online and get the latest tally of bad news, there
is a nuclear
Doomsday Clock and the Rapture Index. If you remember
living through
Y2K, that was another millenarian moment — except our
computer systems
were redeemed by the same code writers who corrupted them
in the first
place.
Who dreams of the apocalypse? Why do they dream of it?
Polls indicate
that up to 50 percent of Americans believe that the Book
of Revelation
is a true, prophetic document, meaning they fully expect
the predictions
of “Rapture,” “Tribulation” and “Armageddon” to be fulfilled.
There is a
paradox built into end-time theologies in that imminent
catastrophe
often brings comfort; according to Paul S. Boyer, an authority
on
prophecy belief in American culture and an emeritus professor
of history
at the
appealing idea because it promises salvation to a select
group — all of
whom share secret knowledge — and a world redeemed and
delivered from
evil. “The Utopian dream is a big part of the Western
tradition,” Boyer
told me, “both the religious and secular forms. But the
wicked have to
be destroyed and evil has to be overcome for the era of
righteousness to
dawn.” This is as true in the New Age as much as in any
other one.
Rumors of global crisis, the distrust of institutional
authority, the
ready availability of esoteric lore, the existence of
individuals drawn
to abstruse numerical schemes, the urge to assuage anxieties
with dreams
of social transformation — wherever these elements exist,
apocalyptic
thinking is likely to flourish.
The year 2012 first entered the public consciousness two
decades ago
this August with the Harmonic Convergence organized by
José Arguelles,
the author of a number of esoteric books about the Mayan
cosmos and his
experiences with telepathically received prophecies. With
a penchant for
promotion going back to the first Whole Earth Festival
in 1970, which he
organized, Arguelles promoted the convergence as an earth-changing
event
requiring 144,000 participants — the number echoed Mayan
mathematics and
the Book of Revelation — to free the planet from the dissonant
influence
of Western science and synchronize with the “wave harmonic
of history”
set to culminate in 2012. Mayan civilization, to Arguelles,
was not
entirely Mayan: It was originally a “terrestrial project”
managed by a
race of “galactic masters” from “star bases.” He saw the
convergence as
a stage, ordained by prophecy, in a march to the end foreseen
by the
ancient calendar makers: “Somewhere in that far and distant
time, when
armies clashed with metal and chemicals released the fire
of the Sun,
the wonder of Maya would burst again, releasing the mystery
and showing
the way that marks return among the patterns of the stars.”
Large crowds, some perhaps oblivious to the apocalyptic
undertones of
the event, did end up gathering at “focus locations” around
the world —
Stonehenge, Mount Shasta and Bolinas in
and extensive media coverage of the meditating and dancing
masses lent
Arguelles and his project an eccentric authority. The
New Age had
discovered its own eschatology — with a mysterious, mythical
people the
controlling intelligence — and 2012 joined the lexicon
of “energies,”
transcendental meditation and crystals. By 1991 Arguelles
was
popularizing his own calendric system, which he branded
Dreamspell, as a
corrective to our mechanized time (dismissed, in mathematical
shorthand,
as “12:60,” the ratio of solar months to minutes in an
hour). Inspired
by the tzolk’in, the 260-day prophetic calendar utilized
by the ancient
Maya and common throughout
oracle, replacing linear time with a “loom of resonances”
that users
navigate with a “galactic signature” based on the day
of their birth.
More than just an astrological sign, this signature is
a tool for
meditation and, as the latest edition of Arguelles’s calendar
promises,
“your password in fourth-dimensional time.”
Arguelles, under the aegis of his fief, the Foundation
for the Law of
Time, has lobbied tirelessly for the universal adoption
of his calendar
— now called the 13-Moon 28-day Calendar — by posting
communiqués on the
Web and arranging audiences with Mayan elders and members
of the
in conjunction with a Russian laboratory in
affiliated with his Planet Art Network.
“The post-2012 world will be a world of universal telepathy,”
Arguelles
wrote me recently from
transition. Since 1993, when he claims to have received
a new prophecy
in
“We’ll be literally living in a new time,” Arguelles said,
“by a
13-month, 28-day synchronometer that will facilitate our
telepathy by
keeping us in harmony with everything all the time. There
will be a lot
fewer of us, with simple lifestyles, solar technology,
garden culture
and lots of telepathic communication.” As for the many
who “have not
evolved spiritually enough to know that there are other
dimensions of
reality,” Arguelles predicts they will be taken away in
“silver ships.”
With Arguelles drifting into even more occult realms —
his last book,
“Time and the Technosphere,” spun elaborate new theories
around 9/11 —
he has been supplanted in the New Age conversation by
the next
generation of Mayan-calendar mystics with their own theories
about the
coming transition. This new generation does not typically
think that
space aliens guided the Maya and prides itself on its
reverence for
Mayan culture and tradition. Carl Johan Calleman, author
of “The Mayan
Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness,” is
a former cancer
researcher from
controversial end date of his own devising: Oct. 28, 2011.
As
Arguelles’s closest spiritual heir in the Mayan-calendar
movement,
Calleman has been active in promoting a regular mass-meditation
event
called the Breakthrough Celebration and other more focused
projects
including the Jerusalem Hug, which gathered 5,000 people
around the
walls of the
create a “cascade of peace.”
While his interest in 2012 is not exclusively focused
on the Mayan
calendar, Chet Snow — a past-lives regression therapist
and author from
Dreams Newsletter, organizes annual crop-circle and sacred-site
tours
and gathers the disparate camps of the 2012 movement together
for
conferences devoted to ancient mysteries and the paranormal.
When I asked Snow why he thought people were turning to
alternative
ideas and explanations like the ones espoused at his conferences,
he
told me the answer was a simple one. “The pillars of our
expectations
about the future in the West have started to crumble,”
he said.
“Religion, politics and economics — none of it is working
any more. So
when you hear about the ancient Maya and this changeover
in 2012
involving solar cycles and astronomical events, you say,
‘Huh, maybe I
need to connect with that.’ ”
If the Mayan calendar seems like an unlikely timing device
for our
salvation — whether it arrives through global catastrophe
or telepathic
rainbow around the earth — its animating role in the 2012
phenomenon is
entirely consistent with popular notions of the “mysterious”
Maya that
have persisted for over a century. The Maya were just
one of the peoples
to thrive in
century, but the civilization’s florescence — spanning
the period called
the Maya Classic, between 300 and 900 A.D. — was especially
bright and
spectacular. After growing into a loose confederation
of rival
city-states that spread across the
as
fell into a rolling decline that ended with the almost
complete
abandonment of their cities. The so-called Mayan collapse
is a continued
source of speculation and a major reason why the Maya
have captured the
imagination of 19th-century travelers, 20th-century archaeologists
and
generations of popular fantasists who have connected the
Maya to
everything from intergalactic colonies to the lost
Teutonic gods from fire-breathing spaceships. The Mayan
sites attract
small armies of New Age pilgrims every year, hoping to
plug into a stone
socket of timeless indigenous wisdom; tens of thousands
gather for the
spring equinox at Chichén Itzá alone to watch the shadow
of a snake
slither down the steps of the
In the introduction to his book “Maya Cosmogenesis 2012:
The True
Meaning of the Maya Calendar End Date,” John Major Jenkins
describes his
first visit to
thrived as an urban center at the pinnacle of Mayan civilization.
Jenkins, perhaps the most lucid figure in the subculture
of 2012
prophets, writes of the “bone-jarring 16-hour bus ride
on muddy and
dangerous roads” that carried him to a “sprawling former
metropolis” of
pyramids, palaces, residences, ball-courts and scores
of engraved
monumental stones, or stelae, decorated with intricate,
otherworldly
images and hieroglyphs.
“Sitting on the stone steps of the Central Acropolis,”
Jenkins recalls,
“I looked around me at the towering sentinels of stone,
their upper
platforms stretching above the jungle canopy like altars
to the stars,
and I listened carefully to the wind whisper messages
of a far-off time,
and of another world.”
Jenkins wasn’t the first 22-year-old traveler with spiritual
yearnings
to encounter the sublime at a Mayan archaeological site,
but he is one
of the few who has found a life’s vocation in the process.
As
harmonically as Jenkins was struck in
of the Maya, however, it was the calendar that really
seized him —
specifically the fact that there were Maya living in the
highlands who
still followed the same day count as their distant ancestors.
(A common
misconception is that the Maya “disappeared” when their
cities emptied;
there are six million Maya currently living in the states
of Central
civilization during the Classic period.)
“Here was an unbroken tradition,” Jenkins told me when
I went to visit
him at his home in
in a pair of lawn chairs in the backyard while a neighbor
passed back
and forth on a noisy tractor. “It’s a lineage going back
2,000 years,”
he said, oblivious to the racket. Jenkins, now 43, is
difficult to
distract when talking about the Mayan calendar and 2012.
After years of
working as a software engineer to support his research
and writing books
and papers in his spare time, 2012 is now Jenkins’ full-time
job.
Influenced by the work of the pioneering psychedelic writer
Terence
McKenna — whose Timewave Zero system, based on computer
analysis of the
I Ching, also shows history to be culminating on Dec.
21, 2012 — Jenkins
argues that ancient Maya “calendar priests” were able
to chart a
26,000-year astronomical cycle called “the precession
of the equinoxes”
with the naked eye. He fixed the 2012 end date to coincide
with a
“galactic alignment” of the winter-solstice sun and the
axis that modern
astonomers draw to bisect the Milky Way, called the galactic
equator.
In the alchemical tradition, Jenkins notes, eclipses signify
the
“transcending of the opposites.” During the period around
2012, Jenkins
says, the galaxy will provide the opportunity for the
rebirth of
creation and a reconciliation of “infinity and finitude,
time and
eternity.” The Maya knew it, and just like an alarm clock,
they set
their calendar to coincide with the occasion.
Jenkins and his fellow travelers in the 2012 movement
have chosen a
particularly arcane source of secret knowledge in Mayan
calendrics. The
Maya calendar keepers are known to have charted the cycles
of the moon,
the sun, Mars and Venus with an accuracy that wouldn’t
be duplicated
until the modern era. Like most premodern 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.
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, which is
calculated to
have fallen on either Aug. 11, 3114 B.C. or Aug. 13, 3114
B.C. All the
current hoopla is due to the mathematical fact that the
current
world-age cycle on the long count, which began in Aug.
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. Enter the apocalypse.
I asked Jenkins how he viewed the passing of one world-age
cycle into
another in December 2012, and he paused. It was a little
bit like asking
a seismologist what he thinks about earthquakes. As much
as Jenkins has
made a place for himself in the 2012 discussion through
his independent
research on the Maya and precession, he has made an even
greater impact
by applying academic rigor to the theories of his contemporaries
and
exposing, in his books and on an extensive Web site, their
inconsistencies with established Mayanist scholarship.
Jenkins was the
first to reveal a major flaw in the synchronization between
Arguelles’s
Dreamspell and the Mayan day count, and he has been involved
in an
extensive, long-distance feud with Calleman since 2001
over their
differing approaches to interpreting the Maya and over
Calleman’s belief
that the end time will be in 2011, not 2012. When I first
spoke to
Jenkins on the phone, he told me, “I think of myself as
leading the
charge for clarity and discernment.”
“2012 is such a profound archetype,” Jenkins went on.
“Here we are five
and a half years before the date, and already there’s
so much interest.
Personally, I think it’s about transformation and renewal.
It’s
certainly nothing as simplistic as the end of the world.”
But what about the connection many people see between
the approach of
2012 and environmental crisis? I asked. What about the
popular link
between the Maya and end-time prophecy?
“A lot of people are talking about apocalypse right now,”
he said, “but
there’s a deeper meditation that can and should happen
around the end
date.” Jenkins — bearded, in a T-shirt and jeans — is
originally from
looked and sounded beleaguered by the mention of apocalypse.
“At any
end-beginning nexus — at the dawn of a new religion or
a spiritual
tradition — you have this amazing opening,” he said. “Revelations
come
down. There’s a fresh awareness of what it means to be
alive in the full
light of history.”
To scholars monitoring the 2012 movement from their posts
in academia —
and some do — this latter-day apotheosis of the Mayan
calendar is a
source of frustration and an opportunity for deeper reflection.
Or
sometimes, just an opportunity. Anthony Aveni, an archeoastronomer
and
professor at Colgate, has a history with 2012 going back
to the Harmonic
Convergence, when he was interviewed on CNN to provide
some perspective.
“I got an offer from a literary agent to represent me
the same day,” he
told me. “So I’m grateful to José Arguelles for that.”
Aveni is critical of Jenkins’s approach and his galactic-alignment
theory. “I defy anyone to look up into the sky and see
the galactic
equator,” he said. “You need a radio telescope for that,
and they were
not known anywhere in the world that I’ve heard of until
the 1930s.” The
real question, to him, is how an obscure, culturally circumscribed
issue
like the end date of one Mayan long-count cycle could
manage to gain
such traction in the wider world.
“Jenkins and Calleman and Arguelles are the Gnostics of
our time,” Aveni
said. “They’re seeking higher knowledge. They look for
knowledge framed
in mystery. And there aren’t many mysteries left, because
science has
decoded most of them.”
John Hoopes, an archaeologist at the
complimentary of Jenkins’s research, even if he doubts
the validity of
his major conclusions, including the galactic-alignment
theory. “John
Jenkins has done his homework on the ancient Maya,” he
told me, “and
he’s thought about their culture a great deal. Arguelles
and Calleman
largely disregard what we know the Maya believed.” Still,
like most
Mayan experts, Hoopes is not convinced that the Maya would
have
considered the end of a world cycle to be an apocalyptic
event; one
cycle could be subsumed into the next without a hiccup
in the system,
let alone a rupture in the count of days.
In the wider discussion around 2012, Hoopes sees a parallel
to the
debate going on in
design in the public schools. It is an issue he takes
so seriously that
he has included the 2012 phenomenon in a course he developed
called
“Archaeological Myths and Realities,” which explores how
science and
history are manipulated to serve a religious or political
agenda. Other
examples include Nazi archaeology and the recently heralded
ancient
“pyramids” in
he says: “What’s interesting is how this fosters community
in the New
Age movement, and elsewhere, the same way that the anti-evolutionists
have coalesced around intelligent design. I’ve started
using the terms
‘religious right’ and ‘spiritual left.’ ”
Toward the end of my visit with Jenkins in
home in
Ellen, for dinner and a screening of “2012: The Odyssey,”
a documentary
that Jenkins appears in along with José Arguelles and
other authorities
on 2012. Jenkins had written me a long, discouraged e-mail
message that
morning about an item he found on an academic message
board, linking to
an article about 2012 from USA Today. The article included
a description
of Jenkins’s galactic-alignment theory without citing
him as the source,
and to make matters worse, the scholar who posted the
link quoted a
description of the galactic alignment and asked, “Anyone
want to
speculate about what this means?”
To Jenkins, it was further confirmation that his work
is generally
ignored inside a scholarly community that he has looked
to for guidance
and cited tirelessly in defense of the “authentic” Mayan
tradition. He
told me, as we drove past new housing developments going
up where
pastures had once been, that he had gone to conferences
to meet the most
important Mayanists and had been sending out papers and
links to his Web
site to selected scholars for years, but his attempts
at making contact
were usually ignored.
“When you fund your own trip to do fieldwork by putting
it on
MasterCard,” he said, “and then they really don’t want
to engage in a
discussion with you, it’s kind of like ... wrong universe,
I guess.”
I asked him if he thought this might have something to
do with some of
his more speculative theories, like his assertion that
the Maya had
practiced pranayama — yogic deep breathing — based on
the posture of
Maya kings in certain paintings and carvings, which appears
similar to
full lotus.
“It’s the assemblage of evidence that leads to my reading,”
he insisted.
“It’s not magically projecting something onto the images.
But ultimately
there is some guesswork involved. How often can you be
100 percent sure
of anything?”
By the time we drove up to the Oriental Theater in the
Highlands section of
is a handsome, Persian-themed theater from the 1920s that
has recently
been refurbished after a long decline; it retains elements
of both the
glamour of its distant past and the seediness left over
from its middle
age as an adult theater. Now the Oriental is an arts center
with a
regular schedule of film screenings and live entertainment.
“Look at that,” Jenkins said with a gesture at the marquee,
making sure
that I saw the big “2012” in black numerals.
While Jenkins mingled with the early arrivals inside the
lobby, I sat at
a cafe table with his wife, a social worker at a hospital
in
and Gina Kissell, director of the Metaphysical Research
Society, a local
group that offers workshops and programs in comparative
religion and
spirituality. The society was a sponsor of the screening
that night, and
Kissell, an ebullient woman in a sequined top, was thrilled
about the
turnout. I asked her about 2012 and what it meant to her,
and she
started in without hesitating:
“To me it’s all about a movement toward enlightenment.
We say compassion
over competition. This whole shift in consciousness is
going to wipe
away everything negative. Armageddon isn’t what it used
to be, you
know?” Kissell told me that she had recently tried spending
21 days
without having a negative thought: “It’s really hard!
I tried, but I
didn’t make it through the second week.”
Inside the theater, it was a festive scene. The seating
sections were
all full except for the balcony; a pair of waitresses
roamed the aisles
taking drink and sandwich orders (the Oriental has a full
bar and panini
menu); and the crowd presented a mix of the buttoned-down
and the
Bohemian, trending toward the tattooed and pierced. Ellen
flashed me a
proud look when Jenkins climbed onstage to give an introduction,
and he
was met with a lively burst of applause. Dressed in a
well-worn jacket
over a faded T-shirt, he could have been a professor who
never quite
recovered from his graduate-school years. Jenkins started
by giving a
primer of his theory about the galactic alignment and
how the ancient
Maya had calibrated their long-count calendar to coincide
with this rare
and transformative astronomical event. He shared his belief,
reflected
in the mantra “As above, so below,” that our lives are
influenced by
larger forces in the universe and that the Mayan sky watchers
had used
their sacred science to read the stars and divine creation’s
deepest
secrets. These same secrets can be ours, according to
Jenkins’s theory,
if we cup a hand to one ear, raise it to the sky and listen.
“A lot of people ask me if the world is going to end in
2012,” he said,
“and I’ve come up with the best way to address that. The
short answer is
yes. The long answer is no.”
Writing in the forward to Jenkins’s “Maya Cosmogenesis
2012,” Terrence
McKenna proffers that “we, by choice or design, actually
live in the end
time anticipated by the ancient Maya shaman-prophets.
Their bones and
their civilization have long since gone into the Gaian
womb that claims
all the children of time. Indeed, their cities were ghostly
necropoleis
by the time the Spanish conquerors first gazed upon them,
500 years ago.
Yet it was our time that fascinated the Maya, and it was
toward our time
that they cast their ecstatic gaze, though it lay more
than two
millennia in the future at the time the first long-count
dates were
recorded.”
It is a splendid, human-size dream, that an ancient people
revered for
unearthly wisdom could climb aboard a calendar ship and
redeem us from
our troubled world and the confines of our vexing natures.
Dec. 21,
2012, is already here — long before the date arrives —
and perhaps it
has always been. End dates are not the stuff of fantasy,
after all; each
and every one of us has a terminal appointment inscribed
in our
calendars. And the end might just arrive sooner. Perhaps
that is why we
need to imagine a supernatural force with one eye on a
ticking clock,
waiting to make everything new again.
It is the Maya who bring us apocalypse this time, and
when the next one
comes — well, we’ll just have to wait and see if the world
is still here.
Benjamin Anastas, a novelist, previously wrote for the magazine aboutPentecostals.