the Golden Enlightenment snake oil salesmen

Of all the theories about 2012, the one that tempts me most is the one about universal enlightenment and the coming Golden Age. Most of the authors and websites are backing this horse. And it is a very attractive entry. A peaceful change, a healthy change, a beneficial change to all of mankind as we head into a brighter, more user-friendly future.

Yes, I really like that theory. If only…

Unfortunately, I have seen this snake-oil salesman before.

Only in the 1960’s they hitched it to the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Same shtick, different date. They called for more peace, love, and understanding and all I’ve seen is more war, hate, and destruction. So far, Aquarius is not my cup of tea.

Of course, many now tell us the “actual” Age of Aquarius has not come yet, so there is still some time for the “universal enlightenment” to descend upon us. They tell us that the real Aquarian time is not due to start for a century or more. And yet some prophets have now pegged the start to December 21st, 2012. How convenient, huh?

Back in the day, there were many more people proclaiming the coming Golden Age than those predicting the end of the world. So, now, the 2012 phenomenon has given both sides a chance to renew their campaign of hope (or doom, as the case may be).

Even with all the primary writers on the 2012 phenomenon pulling for this scenario – and though John Major Jenkins, Jose Argüelles, and Carl Calleman may differ on major points, on this one they are still unified – this is to my mind the least likely of all the scenarios. Why? Well, let’s just say I have studied enough of human history to know what mankind would do with such “enlightenment”. Not being cynical, just being a realist. Without some basic understanding of what the enlightenment would mean, I do not see much impetus for people to change.

I would much prefer the Spiritual Convergence descending on us but the evidence for it is mighty slim. What evidence is offered? All the prophets for this angle merely state that the Maya were spiritual. That may be, but what exactly does that mean? What does that prove?

Unfortunately, not much.

And we are once again left where we were, like in the ’60′s with the love beads, the flower power, and nothing but a slim hope of universal enlightenment.

the Week

I have heard a lot of different theories about the week and the way it was arranged.

The Romans used a time interval longer than seven days in their earlier period but gradually adjusted it down to seven. From what I can tell, the Hebrews had seven days since their earliest writings.

But today we have seven days named Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. There are also interesting theories about how they came up with those names.

Sun-day and Moon-day are fairly obvious but the next few seem to come to us from the old Norse gods: Tewes-day, Woden’s-day, Thor’s-day, and Freya-day. The last day was named for Saturn.

Apparently some monk in the past realized the planets arranged in their distance from the Earth were Sun, Moon, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn.

The “distance-from” criteria is wrong as we now know but I can not figure out how someone thought the Sun was closer than the Moon since the latter eclipses the former, and not vice-versa.

Also, I question the rational of equating Woden, king of the gods, with Mercury. Actually, this bit of connection was done by the early Roman writers and their correlation seems to have stuck, regardless of the rationale or complete lack of it.

But Woden was Mercury? Wasn’t he the god that plucked out his eye for wisdom? And the only planet I know with a large red spot is Jupiter.

And they thought Thor was Jupiter? Yeah, I can see that the god with the bright red hair and red beard, and very warlike, should not be equated with the red planet.

Obviously, someone is not putting things together correctly to my mind. But, maybe I’m wrong.

Still, if you follow the Sun and planets in order of brightness: Sun, Moon, Venus, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Saturn. And there, amazingly, you also have the arrangement of the days of the week.

At least, to my mind, it really seems to be that simple.

Also, it is interesting that the Spanish still call Saturday, “Sabado”, the Sabbath. We celebrate the Sabbath on Sunday, even though it used to be on Saturday as well. So why did its worship on Saturday end? Well, let’s not get into that discussion at the present as it would open a whole big can of worms.

the Fire Cycle

The “Fire Cycle” is formed by the conjunction of the 260-day tzolkin and the 360-day haab every fifty-two years.

Although the existence of the repeating cycle and it’s recurrence every fifty-two years is well known, the ceremony associated with it has caused no end of confusion.

The ceremony was quite simple: everyone in the region doused all their flames, all their fires, all their lights on the appointed evening. Then everyone waited.

The priests at the local ceremonial center watched the skies to ascertain that the Earth was not going to be destroyed. Then, when they were certain the Earth was spared yet again, they lit the central fire.

People from all over the region lit torches from this new fire and carried the flame back to their villages to re-ignite the fires all over the countryside.

This scene happened at not one, but at all the Mayan ceremonial centers.

But what was this huddling in the darkness to see if the world would be destroyed?

There are plenty of theories on the subject, most of them centering on some superstitious mumbo-jumbo about a bad storm in the past – perhaps a bad hurricane or some such – and they feared it would return.

Even Velikovsky weighed in on this one, thinking it coincided with the returning of the planet Mars to come into close contact with Earth.

But still no one mentions a correlation to the most curious aspect of this scenario.

Why gather in the dark and wait until the first glow of dawn is evidenced in the east?

Sure the whole thing may be some sort of mumbo-jumbo but even superstition is based in something that makes some sense.

Yes, a hurricane does sometimes make the sky very dark. But they are not protecting themselves from wind, rain, or any of the elementary forces in that regard.

From the records I have seen, it does not appear that this ceremony goes too far distant in the past. Not anything like near the starting period of the Classic Period. In fact, it seems to become prevalent in the later Classic Period.

In other words, after the Maya had already abandoned the Long Count.

Could it be that some ceremony concerned with the Long Count was transferred to the fifty-two year correlation of the other two calendars?

And if that were the case, what could be the importance of the darkness?

If you have not seen any of my articles before this one, the answer may surprise you. (Please read further details in the other articles if you find it too highly unlikely.)

It could be that they fear the Sun will go out sooner than the end of the Long Count. For some reason they seem to have the idea that it will happen at one of the fifty-two year celebrations.

And perhaps they forgot that was what the Long Count was for: counting the days to the end of the Sun. Literally.

How could they ever forget something as major as that?

Good question. Perhaps when they lost faith in the Long Count, they lost faith in a lot of things it was supposed to stand for and that would include the coming of the New Sun, Fifth Sun.

Which was due right after Fourth Sun was extinguished.

The End of the World… Again

Harold Camping, a radio evangelist, made a bit of news recently by predicting the world was going to end… on May 21st, 2011.

As this entry is being entered after that date, we can assume it did not come to pass.

Actually, he was predicting the “rapture” would occur on that date and the world of those left behind would go through a series of tribulation until Oct. 2011 when the real final day would come.

So, May 21st was only important for those being raptured.

It was the Oct. 21st date that was going to be the Big One. So, everyone could get ready (once again) for the end of the world!!

Far be it from me to point out that this learned preacher also predicted the end of the world for September 1994. He was off by quite a bit, there.

What really is most intriguing about this new date he has set, Oct. 21, 2011, is exactly one week before the date Carl Calleman has set for the true End Date of the Mayan Calendar: Oct. 28, 2011.

So, it looked like John Major Jenkins and the remainder of the 2012 gurus were going to be upstaged by the radio evangelist and Calleman?

Well…?

I did not hold my breath for either date.

And not even for Dec. 21st, 2012.

The Mayans were never talking about the end of the world even though we seem to be obsessed with wanting it to end.

And from the rate we are progressing, I don’t see much of that “gradual enlightenment” John Major Jenkins is always talking about, either.

If we studied a little harder, we might actually begin to make some sense of this subject.

Or shall we continue wallowing in non-sense?

Apocalypto

This is about “Apocalypto”, the film by Mel Gibson.

I heard so many bad reviews from the Mayan crowd on this movie that I avoided it when it came out to the theaters.

But that did not stop me from renting it a while back and viewing it at home.

Surprise! It was actually a very enjoyable experience.

I had heard that it showed the Mayans as a blood-thirsty religious-crazed civilization on the decline.

There were enough of those elements in the film to garner that sort of reaction. But I found it to be historically accurate.

The characters all spoke Mayan throughout the film. The cinematography was magnificent, the characters agreeable in the Hollywood-stereotypical fashion.

Perhaps the one thing I knew that the others viewers did not was that the majority of the Mayan centers had been absorbed into the spreading warrior culture of the Toltecs from the west.

Most of the Mayan civilized areas had already been abandoned by the Maya themselves before this period.

So, the blood-thirsty group that rounded up the Mayan peasants and dragged them to the city for execution were not the same as the Mayan rulers of old.

It is not to say that the Maya themselves did not engage in this sort of activity at times. They most certainly did.

But nothing on the same scale as the Aztecs and the Toltecs of the period around the Spanish Conquest.

No, at that time, the majority of the Mayan were off the radar.

So, though I can understand the concern, the Maya are shown in a favorable light in the film.

But there was no mention of the calendar or their marvelous end-date. Gibson had a different sort of “ending” theme in his mind.

Back to the Calendar

It has been a while since I last wrote anything here about the Mayans or their calendar.

I have been rather busy writing other books since the calendar volume was not selling. And I had thought the book would be a rather hot topic. Seems like I was wrong.

Anyway, I have been working on the novel that lead to the research on the calendar called Cycles: a Mayan Tale and it is coming along nicely but slowly.

Working a full time job and raising a family do not lend a lot of “spare time” for other, personal, things.

But we are now only seven days away from the fated year of 2012, I thought I would get a few more articles written that I had planned… before other things interrupted.

And if there are questions from anyone on the subject, please feel free to query, or comment, or do nothing other than read and enjoy.

I seriously doubt this blog will continue beyond 2012 – not because the world is going to end!! – because the interest in the subject will have wained.

Still we can have some fun until then.

Whew! Dodging the Bullet

The end is NOT near!

At least that is what Adriana Gomez Licon assures us in her news article about the Mayan Calendar End-Date.

A German expert on Mayan glyphs, Sven Gronemeyer of La Trobe University in Australia, spoke about the stone found at Tortuguero (the original stone found as opposed to the more recently found inscribed brick – see yesterday’s blog for more on that).

He explained that the 1,300 year old inscription describes the return of mysterious Mayan god Bolon Yokte at the end of a 13th Baktun (a period of nearly 400 years) on Dec. 21, 2012. And though the Mayans considered 13 a sacred number, he says there’s nothing apocalyptic in the date.

His interpretation is that the ruler at Tortuguero, Bahlam Ajaw, apparently made a prophecy some 1,300 years ago, about the passage of the god, Bolon Yokte. They had to prepare a way for the god and the ruler was going to host the initiation of the event, when the god would come to the sanctuary in Tortuguero.

Gronemeyer said, “The date acquired a symbolic value because it is seen as a reflection of the day of creation. It is the passage of a god and not necessarily a great leap for humanity.”

Of course, one could see it as nothing remarkable if one thought the Mayans were talking about gods running around in their forests and not speaking of the gods in the heavens above, i.e. the planets. But then, that is just my take on their concepts.

And I could be wrong.

For more, see her article at:

http://news.yahoo.com/expert-mexico-glyphs-dont-predict-apocalypse-040313881.html

Expert: Mexico glyphs don’t predict apocalypse
By ADRIANA GOMEZ LICON | AP – Wed, Nov 30, 2011

All the Fuss from One Reference… and Now, a Second

Apparently, one article tells us that all the 2012 hoopla is derived from a single inscription off one stone tablet from the Tortuguero site in the Gulf coast state of Tabasco.

Wow! One inscription alone about the End-Date has created all this ruckus.

But now, they say there is a second one as well!

On the face of a brick at the nearby Comalcalco ruin is a second notice about the end date. Some scholars – like David Stuart of the University of Texas at Austin – think it is just mentioning the date of the end of any of the baktuns. He says the third glyph on the brick is to be read as the verb “huli” – and you’ll have to excuse me as my Maya is a little rusty – but this is supposed to translate as “he/she/it arrives” but without the “future tense” marker… thereby meaning it could be talking about the past, though they do not mention where a “past tense” marker was present.

Still, it is interesting that the original Tortuguero inscription mentions that the ending of the calendar involves the arrival of Bolon Yokte, a Mayan god associated with both war and creation.

War and creation… hmm, I don’t get much about a meteor hitting Earth, a black hole swallowing us up, or even a marvelous golden age arriving.

However, time and wear on the stone make the rest of the message practically unreadable, though some interpret to garbled bit as saying, “He will descend from the sky.”

Oh, I see: aliens!!
Maybe the Sitchin hypothesis was correct after all.

Of course, a meteor/comet would descend from the sky as well.

I guess we will just have to stay tuned and see what happens, huh?

As if we had a choice.

You can read more at the original article:

http://news.yahoo.com/mexico-acknowledges-2nd-mayan-reference-2012-232405916.html

Mexico acknowledges 2nd Mayan reference to 2012
By MARK STEVENSON | AP – Thu, Nov 24, 2011

Dec. 21st, 2011 – A Year to Go

Here it is!

We are now on the verge of 2012 and have only a year remaining until the Mayan Calendar comes to an end.

I’ll bet all the other groups are gathering around the banner of their causes, whether a Golden Enlightenment or the End of the World. And there are several different interpretations of both, though decidedly more variety in the latter group.

Most people who have the inclination have already begun (or finished) their preparations for riding out the massive destruction heading toward us.

That is, those of such a mind, anyway.

I imagine there will be more than one Harmonic Convergence during the coming year as the earthquakes grow ever more violent (thanks to the Mayan god of such events) and we move closer to that fatal End-Date.

At present, Venus rides high in the western sky, bright and visible just after sunset, as it prepares for its fateful ride across the space between Earth and the Sun, arriving at inferior conjunction and transit in June of 2012. It will be a visible speck moving across the face of the Sun, though I would not suggest staring at the Sun to see its crossing unless aided by some sort of special lens to view the event.

And Venus also rides high in the lore of the Maya. Often equated with the god we know as Quetzalcoatl, the chief god of the lands to the south of us, Venus shares a prominent place in the lore and – apparently – the coming announcement of the end of the calendar.

What will we see come December 21st, 2012?

Any guess is as good as any other, I suppose, but none of them are looking at what the Maya themselves saw coming. The Maya really did not care if the modern technological age would arrive at some Golden Age. But neither did they think we would be meeting our ultimate destruction.

What they expected was something they had seen before, some five thousand years ago. They spoke about it clearly enough, I thought, but we cannot understand the clarity of that vision because we use lenses of a different polarization to view through.

But that won’t change the outcome, only our anticipation of that early Christmas present as winter 2012 finally arrives.

And we can hardly wait to open that gift!

Sinkhole de Maya

Someone asked me on Wednesday about the “sinkholes de Maya”. And I thought he was talking about the sacred cenotes, sunken waterholes utilized by the Maya for ritualistic purpose as well as for the life-sustaining water it offered.

He listened politely, nodding his understanding of what I said and, when I had finished he asked, but what is all the celebration about.

Celebration? Cenotes?

Oh, I said, you mean the Cinco de Mayo celebrations?

Yes, he said, isn’t that some Mexican holiday?

Actually, it is celebrated more in America than Mexico. A lot of people think it is the Mexican Independence Day but that falls on September 16th.

Cinco de Mayo celebrates the day in 1862 when a small Mexican force defeated twice their number at the city of Puebla.

Agincourt, Waterloo, Moscow, Puebla – everyone seems to relish celebrating defeating the French.

I wonder if that means anything?

I hope everyone had a good Cinco.

(that is, if you celebrate that sort of thing)