The end of the world as we know it?
Well, this much seems to be clear: The Mayan Long Count Calendar does conclude a 5,125-year Great Cycle on or about the Winter Solstice in 2012. Whether that means the end is nigh is another question.
With the release of the film 2012, the doomsday chatter that has long festered on the Internet and late-night talk radio has come out into the open. While details vary, the general gist is that the ancient Maya predicted some sort of cataclysm on 12/21/12, with speculation now coalescing around the appearance of a rogue planet that could disrupt the earth's rotation, orbit and/or magnetic poles.
Scientists say that a planet approaching Earth could, indeed, wreak havoc. But if one were on its way, we'd have seen it by now.
The best comment I heard while reporting a story on the phenomenon for Friday's newspaper came from Ben Radford, managing editor of the Skeptical Inquirer: "I've got a calendar on my wall that ends on Dec. 31. I'm not particularly worried that there isn't going to be another one after it."
The comparison is apt, according to an anthropologist who studies the ancient peoples of Mesoamerica.
"In a lot of ways, it wasn't very different than our New Year's," University of New Hampshire anthropologist Eleanor Harrison-Buck told me. "It would have been seen as a very powerful time. But rather than simply the end of the world, the Maya would have viewed the end of this great cycle as a really important and powerful time of reordering and renewal."
Fascination with the end of the world has a dark side. NASA scientist David Morrison, host of the Web site Ask an Astrobiologist, told the Los Angeles Times last month that he had heard from two teenagers so concerned about 2012 that they were "thinking of ending their lives."
Comments
To compare the Mayan calendar to our Gregorian version is an insult to that culture. It also takes advantage of the lack of information available which describes how and why the Long Count calendar was developed in the first place. If you recall, the Greek poet Hesiod talks about the Golden, Silver, Bronze and Iron Ages in "The Works and Days", one of the classic books of our own culture. What he's referring to are the different world ages that cultures around the globe recognize, or did before the British Empire came along and rewrote world history. Each of these ages apparently ended with a mass extinction. This is one reason why many independent researchers have suggested that the Mayan Long Count accurately forecasts the end of the current world age.
For more information, readers should check out all the History Channel programs on this subject and visit the 2012 section at thecityedition.com, which contains a fairly comprehensive compilation of articles and websites.
Posted by: YRM | November 14, 2009 12:28 PM