2012

Astronomy Answers

21 December 2012

1. Introduction

One of the time periods of the Long Count of the Maya is the baktun, which lasts 144,000 days. In some texts of the Maya a new period of the Long Count is said to begin after 13 baktuns (exactly 1,872,000 days). Such a new period in the Long Count of the Maya will probably begin on 21 December 2012, when the Long Count returns to 0.0.0.0.0 (see the Historical Calendar Page), and some people expect to see special things in the sky or on Earth then that would not otherwise be expected.

The interest for 21 December 2012 seems to have been spurred by publications by John Major Jenkins, who (if I understand correctly) is of the opinion that the Maya designed their Long Count in order that the coming special date 0.0.0.0.0 corresponds to a southern solstice (when the winter begins in the northern hemisphere) when the Sun stands in the Milky Way in the sky. Mr. Jenkins reached this opinion based on extensive research of Maya texts and other traces.



Over 2,000 years ago the early Maya formulated a profound galactic cosmology. They saw that the sun, on the winter solstice, was slowly moving toward the heart of the galaxy. Naturally enough, with their uncorrupted intelligence intact, they suspected that the world would go through a transformation when the solar and the galactic planes aligned. They devised their Long Count calendar to target when the cosmic alignment would maximize, and that time is AD 2012. We are lucky that the brilliant skywatchers who devised the 2012 calendar left carved monuments for us to decode, and that they have survived the decay of centuries, so that we can know exactly what they prophesied and believed about 2012.

Incredibly, at the early Maya site of Izapa in southern Mexico, the galactic cosmology and a profound spiritual teaching are preserved. Izapa speaks to us of the Galactic Alignment in 2012 as a transformative nexus in time, a still-point turnabout, inviting us to reconnect with our cosmic heart and eternal source. With the Divine Wisdom.

Persistent Misconceptions About the Maya Calendar and 2012:

1. 2012 is a New Age creation.

Wrong. I was surprised when more than one person asked me this. I believe this derives from the claims, or happily received projections, of certain New Age calendar makers, and the media attention around Harmonic Convergence in 1987. Though 2012 is an authentic Mayan artifact, the association in the public mind between it and Harmonic Convergence celebrities is hard to unravel, to the detriment of serious research.

2. The Maya tzolkin calendar is hopelessly confused and no reliable day-count can be found.

Misinformation; a bit of obfuscation projected primarily by Dreamspell followers. I’ve addressed this since 1992 in various formats, including my book Tzolkin, on Yari Jeada’s website, and most recently in a piece called Following Dreamspell. The fact remains that the surviving day-count among the Quiché and other Mayan groups is equivalent to the Classic Period day-count; it represents the unbroken survival of a day-count correlation that is at least 2,600 years old (see Edmonson’s Book of the Year, 1988).



3. The Maya disappeared (and/or re-ascended into the stars).

Not really. After being asked this question by too many interviewers, I am resigned that no amount of clarification will dispel this misunderstanding, propagated insistently in sensationalist documentaries. There are six million Maya living today in Chiapas, Yucatan, and Guatemala—possible more than lived at any given moment in the Classic Period! The question really relates to the disintegration of centralized Mayan authority in the Peten, which was caused by greed and famine.

There is an interesting, and probably more accurate, way to understand this cherished notion. The Mayan people were shamans, their culture was shamanistic, and they may have opened a clear conduit into a transcendental wisdom that certainly appears otherworldly to the mundane preoccupations of the modern consciousness. In a sense, Mayan civilization was animated by regular contact with a multidimensional vision. If the shamanistic techniques or the permission to engage in those techniques was lost, then what the Maya were really about did, in a sense, retract into the transcendent realm that resides at the heart of all manifestation. This interpretation provides a higher-dimensional metaphysical framework for understanding the more literal adumbration that persists in popular consciousness, resulting in a fragmented shadow-understanding. Modern consciousness is so program with literalness, and the need for tangible frameworks, that the more subtle yet essential root causes are submerged. For example, to think of "myths" as falsehoods, or to think of the "underworld" as being under the ocean, is poetically compelling to the modern mind, but insists that the more subtle dimensions of human experience can be mapped onto the physical domain. This results in a delusion that is equivalent to the impossibility of talking about the ineffable. The absurdity of this situation should be readily apparent, and that such frameworks of interpretation pass for conventional wisdom is a pathetic testimony to a degraded modern consciousness that is fixated upon a literalist materialism.

4. The Long Count was invented in 3114 B.C.

Wrong. Zecharia Sitchin promulgated this extremely odd conclusion in his Art Bell interview of late 2000, seriously calling into question his analytical abilities which are so lauded. The same error was stated on the book jacket of The Mayan Prophecies. It doesn’t take very much reading of the literature on 2012 to dispel this fallacy. The Long Count originated around the second or first century B.C.—the 3114 B.C. “beginning” date was a back calculation.



5. The Galactic Alignment is related to our solar system’s 280,000,000-year orbit around the Galactic Center.

Wrong! Recently, a well-known radio personality summed up my book with this perspective, and I gasped for breath. It is true that our solar system orbits the galactic hub, and this orbital period is hundreds of millions of years in length. However, the 26,000-year precessional cycle shifts the apparent position of the sun, on the December solstice, backward through the signs of the zodiac. This leads to the observation (as viewed from the earth) that the December solstice sun is moving “around” the Galactic Center, coming into alignment with it once every 26,000 years. This is the galactic alignment. Precessional shifting is not equivalent to orbital period. Related to this misconception is the description by Arguelles (in The Mayan Factor) that we will soon be passing through (or leaving, depending on where you read it) a “galactic beam” or “photon belt”, and this impending situation is related closely to a “galactic synchronization” to occur in 2012. Brian Swimme’s oh-so scientific interpretation of these concepts, as we find them in the preface to Arguelles’s book, takes the perspective of the 280,000,000-year cycle and discusses different “density waves” that astrophysicists have proposed exist in different sectors of the galaxy. Note, however, that even though the context of Swimme’s discussion is Arguelles’s terminology and concepts as found in The Mayan Factor, the precession-defined Galactic Alignment (of solstice meridan and Galactic equator) is not even mentioned! This, I believe, is the root of a great deal that is misunderstood about 2012 and discussions of the Galactic Alignment, because an accurate understanding of what the Galactic Alignment is has been submerged under completely unrelated concepts, ones that have nothing to do with the Mayan understanding of a Galactic Alignment in 2012.

6. The Gregorian calendar is 3 or 5 years in error, and this throws the Mayan end-date into error.

(My exploration and clarification of this idea is in the context of a response to an e-mail, which follows)

Now for the question of the Gregorian calendar and 2012 being a mistaken calculation that needs to be adjusted several years. Your question has come up often, and I welcome the opportunity to try and clarify how I understand the apparent dilemma. The bottom line, as I hope to convey briefly here, is that no adjustment is needed. Or, if we do make an adjustment, we are merely creating a secondary system that has its own internal consistency. We don't actually gain or lose 5 years, and so there's really no imperative need.

As you note, historical reconstructions have shown that Jesus was actually born in either 4 b.c. or 6 b.c. Thus, since the Gregorian calendar is based on starting with the year of Jesus's birth, then we need an adjustment. This could certainly be argued, and then the year formerly known as 2012 would be called either 2015 or 2017 (making a 3 or 5 year adjustment, because there's no "zero" year). But notice that no actual shifting of real time occurs; it is simply the arbitrary overlay of a new system being used. 2017 would then be equal to 2012 in the "pre-adjusted" system. A "corrected" year of 2017 would correspond to 2012 in the "old system". You would have to count five more years to get to the equivalent 2012 year. (There would be five more years that would be counted.)

It is really important to understand where the December 21, 2012 date comes from—as you note it comes from the interdisciplinary work of three scholars. They worked with dates recorded on long count monuments C-14 dated between 300 a.d. and 900 a.d. The correlation of the Mayan calendar and Gregorian calendars is based upon this range, and gives us December 21, 2012 as equivalent to 13.0.0.0.0. In other words, the data comes from a context after 4 b.c. so there is no need to correct for a 3 or 5 year gap of "uncounted" time. More to the point, if for example the Long Count date 9.16.4.4.1 was determined to be equal to May 7, 755 a.d. in the Gregorian calendar, a predictable number of days would have to elapse before 13.0.0.0.0 was reached. That number of days brings us to December 21, 2012. If we had implemented an adjusted system to correlate our own year counting with the actual birth year of Jesus, the same number of days would have to elapse but the date would be called, not December 21, 2012, but December 21, 2017. This seems to be a very roundabout and belabored way of clarifying something that is basically not really an issue. If a researcher proposes that the end-date is "really" in 2017, or some other year, and the argument is based upon an adjusted system to account for the true birth year of Jesus, then that adjusted year must be designated as the "adjusted year count" and if we looked at how it correlates with the old "pre-adjusted" Gregorian calendar, it would correlate with the year 2012. It's not that time is skipped or missing—the entire frame of counting is simply shifted 5 years.

With this clarification, I don't believe that "the Mayan chronology is entirely self-referent and the Christian dating system is also self-referent, as well as in error, so it is somewhat arbitrary when anyone tries to equate the two to one another." It's not that the Christian dating method is "in error" in the sense that it tracks the passage of time inaccurately, with mounting error as the years pass, it's only that its foundation date could feasibly be adjusted to generate a new dating framework that would run alongside the previous system with complete point-by-point consistency. The only issue is being clear on what system is used, and then the correlation of these two Gregorian systems with the Mayan calendar would be preserved with equal consistency. Case in point as to how such an adjustment is feasible while preserving an accurate correlation, is the Julian-to-Gregorian shift of 1582, in which 10 days were actually skipped! There is thus the pre-1582 Julian system and the more accurate post-1582 Gregorian calendar. We might thus say that all pre-1582 dates are "in error" but the calendric convention used has its own internal consistency, so for the purposes of chronology, it works perfectly well. It would be meaningless to back calculate the Gregorian system into pre-1582 historical contexts; although some historians might do this it can result in confusion if the system used is not stated clearly. The correlation of different calendars, such as Mayan with Gregorian, Chinese with Judaic, Islamic with Cherokee, can be a complicated endeavor, but correlative formulas do exist and do not by any means have arbitrary results.

Source: Alignment 2012