Podcast # 7: 2012 and the Mayan Calendar
Scott: My name is Scott Paton. I am talking today with Allan Colston. He is the author of the book “The Last Days of Tolemac”. This is a book dealing with prophecy.
For those listeners who may be new to this topic, today’s podcast is the seventh in the series, and is titled “2012 and the Mayan Calendar ” Hello Allan and welcome.
Thanks Scott. It’s a pleasure chatting to you again.
Scott: Allan, as you know, many people believe that the Mayan calendar will end on December 21, 2012, and that when it does, all sorts of disasters will happen to the world. Do you believe this?
No Scott, I don’t.
Scott: Well that’s encouraging. Why not?
Several reasons. The first is that the Maya don’t believe it themselves. And the second is that those scholars who have spent years studying Maya inscriptions say that it won’t.
Scott: So what do the Maya say about this?
In 2009, the Mayan elder Apolinario Pixtun said that he was tired of being bombarded with questions about the Mayan calendar supposedly running out on Dec. 21, 2012. “After all“, he said, “it’s not the end of the world. I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with all this stuff.”
Pixtun insists that the end of the world is a Western idea based on Biblical teaching, and has nothing to do with Mayan beliefs. He also says that the idea of an apocalypse has been foisted on the Maya by Westerners who have their own agendas.
Jesus Gomez, who is head of the Guatemalan confederation of Maya priests and spiritual guides, confirms this when he says: “There is no concept of apocalypse in Mayan culture.”
And Jose Huchim, a Mayan archaeologist in the Yucatan has stated: “If I went to some Mayan-speaking communities and asked people what is going to happen at the end of 2012, they wouldn’t have any idea. That the world is going to end? They wouldn’t believe you. We have real concerns these days, like rain”.
Scott: So how did this idea get started in the first place?
Like many theories that have captured the public imagination, the idea that the end of the Mayan calendar is linked with catastrophe has a long history. Its roots can be traced back as far back as Christopher Columbus. Columbus compiled a work called “Libro de las Profecias” in the year 1502.
In it he said that he felt that his arrival on an island off the coast of Honduras was the fulfilment of prophecy, and that it foretold the coming of the apocalypse. We need to remember that end-time fears were widespread during the early years of the Spanish conquest.
In the early 1900s, a German scholar by the name of Ernst Forstemann was studying the Dresden Codex, a Mayan book believed to have been written in the 11th or 12th century. He claimed that the last page of this book made reference to the end of the world by way of a cataclysmic flood. His ideas were then repeated by an archaeologist by the name of Sylvanus Morley.
In Morley’s book titled “The Ancient Maya” he wrote: “Finally, on the last page of the manuscript, is depicted the destruction of the world. Here indeed is portrayed with a graphic touch the final all-engulfing cataclysm.”
So as you can see Scott, the idea of an apocalyptic event associated with the Mayan calendar goes back over five hundred years.
Scott: What about recently?
In 1966, an American archaeologist by the name of Michael Coe, who was a graduate of Yale University, wrote a book called “The Maya”.
In it he wrote: “There is a suggestion that Armageddon would overtake the degenerate peoples of the world and all creation on the final day of the 13th Baktun. Thus our present universe would be annihilated in December 2012 when the Great Cycle of the Long Count reaches completion. ”
Well, coming from a trained scholar who was an expert in Maya writing, this was all that non-Maya scholars needed to weigh in on the subject. Soon other Western writers were climbing on the bandwagon, all with their own ideas of what would happen when the Mayan calendar ended on December 21, 2012.
People like Jose Arguellas, Terence McKenna, Frank Waters and John Major Jenkins that we talked about in Podcast No 5. The problem with all this Scott is that the Mayan Long Count calendar was no longer being used by the Maya when the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortez arrived on the shores of Mexico in 1519.
Scott: Why did the Maya stop using it?
They stopped using it because it was no longer accurate. To understand this conundrum, it really helps if you are a serious Maya scholar. You see, the Maya had many calendars. And even trained scholars today have difficulty understanding why they had so many, and what they used them for.
Actually, I go into this in great detail on my Blog, so those listeners who would like to know more about this are welcome to read my article “2012 and the Maya Calendar“. I’ll tell you how to access it at the end of this Podcast.
But to simplify things, the Maya had a short term calendar to measure short periods of time (in fact they had several of them), and they also had a long term calendar to measure very long periods of time. It is this long term calendar, which scholars refer to as the Long Count calendar, that lies at the root of the problem.
And it is also the reason why so many people have been misled over the years. Scott, do you mind if I go back to the beginning here ? It may help to clarify matters.
Scott: No, not at all. Please carry on.
Thanks. The Mayan civilization had its origin some 2,000 years before the birth of Christ. Over the years they developed an advanced culture that spread over much of Central America, including modern countries like Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador, as well as the Yucatan peninsula and the highlands of Mexico.
Modern scholars consider that the Mayan cities reached their highest level of development during the “classic” period, from the years 250 to 900 AD. What distinguished the Maya from other pre-Columbian societies was that they had a sophisticated system of writing, as well as a unique system for measuring time.
Just like the modern calendar that we use today in the West, the Maya had a calendar to record the length of the year. But they also used another calendar to measure longer periods of time. It was this other linear system that has come to be called the “Long Count” calendar.
The Long Count calendar of the Maya was open-ended. That meant that, while they measured time by means of an ever increasing system of chronological units, there was no ”end date” to the calendar itself. So just as we can set a date for a time far in the future (say 2610 AD), so too could the Maya.
But what was significant about their Long Count calendar was that it began on a specific date.
Scott: What date was that?
The date was August 11, 3114 BC.
Scott: Why did they choose that date?
They chose that date Scott because that was the day they believed the present world age began.
Although much of Mayan writing was destroyed by the Spanish conquerors, what little remains can be found in libraries in such places as Dresden, Paris and Madrid. From these writings modern scholars have learned that the Maya had a strong tradition of “world ages”.
They were not alone in this, as similar references to successive world ages have also been found in the ancient literature of countries like India and China. According to the Popul-Vuh, a Mayan classic that included their creation myths, four “worlds” had already been created by their Gods.
These previous worlds had long since passed into history, and had been replaced by the fifth world, which is the age in which we are now living. The Long Count calendar began on the date when the fourth world ended (3114 BC). And this is where the association with the year 2012 begins.
Scott: How does this relate to 2012 ?
The Maya believed that the fourth world age lasted for exactly thirteen Baktuns. One Baktun was slightly less than 395 years, so 13 Baktuns represented a period of about 5,125 years.
Although there is nothing in the written Mayan record to support this, some Western writers (such as Graham Hancock and Michael Coe) have suggested that this fifth world will last for the same length of time as the fourth world.
This would mean that our current world age would end exactly thirteen Baktuns after it began. According to the Long Count calendar, this date would be December 21, 2012. And all of this would make perfect sense, except that it makes no sense to the Maya who are alive today.
The reason is that the present-day Maya don’t use the Long Count calendar. In fact many have never even heard of it, because it was used exclusively during the “classic” period up to the year 900 AD. Which is another reason why trained Maya scholars reject all this hoopla about December 21, 2012.
Scott: What do the Maya scholars have to say?
Mayan scholars like Susan Milbrath, curator of Latin American Art and Archeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, point out that there is no record, or knowledge, that the Maya predicted that their fifth world would come to an end in 2012.
They say that there is also no record that the Maya believed that their fifth world would end after precisely thirteen Baktuns.
The Maya of today attach no special meaning to the end of the thirteenth Baktun. They believe that the end of the thirteenth Baktun will simply be followed by the beginning of the fourteenth Baktun with no special fanfare or significance.
We know this because Mayan stelae (which are stone carvings) such as those found on the west panel at the Temple of Inscriptions in Palenque, have been found with calendar dates far beyond the end of the thirteenth Baktun.
And if there was any doubt about this, it was dispelled just a few weeks ago by the discovery in Xultan in northern Guatemala. This discovery was widely reported in the media at the time.
Scott: What did they find?
They found ancient inscriptions on the walls of a house in the Guatemalan jungle. Explorers came across these writings while they were excavating a room buried under a collapsed building that was overgrown with rainforest vegetation.
The inscriptions they found are the oldest astronomical charts ever recorded from the Mayan civilization. The hieroglyphs date to about 814 AD, making them considerably older than the Dresden codex, an 11th- or 12th-century Mayan book written on bark paper, which found its way to the Royal Library at Dresden in 1739.
One wall was covered with hundreds of small red and black symbols that tracked the phases of the moon, while others were thought to represent the Mayan ceremonial calendar, and cycles of the sun, Mars and Venus.
William Saturno, an archaeologist at Boston University who was the leader of the expedition, reported in the journal “Science”, that some calculations predicted astronomical events 7,000 years into the future. Contrary to some theories, he said, there was no sign that the Mayan calendar ended abruptly in 2012.
So Scott, here we have further evidence, if more evidence is needed, that the Maya never expected the current world age to end on December 21, 2012.
So I’d like to say to those people who are alarmed at the prospect of an imminent Apocalypse, you can rest easy. You have nothing to fear in December this year. At least nothing that can be blamed on the Maya , or their calendar.
And just a reminder for those people who would like to read my book, it can be reached here
Scott: Thanks Allan. You have been listening to Allan Colston, author of the book “The Last Days of Tolemac”. Do join us for our next Podcast, which will be another in the series titled “Signs of the Times”.
