Worried about the world ending Friday? You must not be Maya. They know better.
For everyone else, consider Dec. 21 as an opportunity to learn a little about ancient civilizations and their beliefs, scholars say. Like how the whole doomsday date associated with the Mayan people isn’t even based on their culture.
The Maya didn’t believe in an apocalypse. The Aztecs, now that’s another story — and civilization — for later.
“The story of the ‘Maya Apocalypse’ is mostly one about media and marketing, not about the ancient Mayas,” said John Hoopes, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas and a Mayan history scholar.
The Mayan long count calendar begins in 3114 B.C. and supposedly stops on Dec. 21, 2012. The calendar is based on 13 time periods, each with 394 years, that were called baktuns, according to some Mayan scholars.
They theorize that the calendar ends after the 13th (a sacred number to the Maya) because the cycle starts over — like a millennium.
You remember the scary hype surrounding Y2K, right? Same concept, different culture.
Another theory as to why the calendar supposedly ends after 13 is that it was abandoned by the Maya because of a natural disaster or an outside attack. And there’s the rouge planet-headed-for-Earth theory of the ancient Sumerians that hitched itself to the Mayan 2012 prophecy.
Some scholars believe the Maya didn’t create the calendar, but it was given to them by extraterrestrials who also happened to be of Mayan descent.
Another popular modern theory is that the end of the calendar marks the dawn of a new spiritual era. The adherents to the spiritual awakening theory argue that the calendar was predicting the return of the Mayan god of creation.
All a bunch of nonsense, scholars say — especially since the Mayan long count calendar doesn’t end. Only a couple of references to the 2012 date equivalency have been found carved in stone at Mayan sites, and those don’t refer to an apocalypse, experts say.
To understand how the Mayan calendar became connected to the apocalypse, you need to understand ancient Mayan civilization, which reached its height from 300 A.D. to 900 A.D. The epicenter of Mayan territory was southern Mexico.
The ancient Maya were known to have an extreme preoccupation with the future. They also had a talent for astronomy and advanced mathematics, which allowed that astronomy talent to flourish.
Mayan royalty was obsessed with using astronomy and celestial bodies to justify their royal reigns, according to Toa Traxler, curator of the Penn Museum, which has one of the largest and oldest annual exhibits in the U.S. devoted to Mayan studies.
After all, rulers who could speak authoritatively about when Venus would reappear — because they benefited from centuries of sky observations and detailed record-keeping of celestial events — would seem pretty important, scholars say.
So where did all the world destruction talk come from? The Spanish missionaries and explorers, especially Christopher Columbus, according to scholars.
First, understand that end-of-world predictions are nearly as old as the world itself, scholars say. For more than 1,000 years, Western Christian culture has looked for the next apocalyptic benchmark. Many westerners also believe that ancient people had some special insight into the future, scholars say.
“We’re constantly looking for ancient wisdom and insights for what the future portends,” Traxler said.
Around the time Columbus set out to “discover” India (but found Central America instead), there were rumblings throughout Europe about a pending second great flood set to arrive in 1524.
Columbus, who was working on something he called the “Book of Prophecies,” believed his discovery of the New World triggered the end of time with an anticipated arrival date in the 18th century, Hoopes said.
When the Spanish explorer landed off the coast of Honduras in 1502, he first heard about the Mayan people and immediately set about trying to convert them to Christianity. As part of that conversion, he introduced the idea of “end times” into the Mayan culture, Hoopes and other scholars said.
Adding to the confusion is that history has lumped together ancient Mayan and Aztec culture and beliefs, though the two are separated by a thousand years. The Aztec culture — unlike the Maya — had myths of world destruction and creation, but they were unrelated to the Mayans or the long count calendar, scholars said.
“We have essentially mashed up a whole lot of ideas and linked it to this upcoming calendar benchmark date for us in Northern society,” Penn’s Traxler said. “It taps into our western sensitivities that come out of Judeo-Christian traditions and the idea there is a reckoning.”
So how did a cultural misunderstanding morph into a prediction of global catastrophe?
The 2012 doomsday theory is largely believed to have stemmed from a stone tablet discovered in the 1960s. The tablet describes the return of the Mayan god at the end of the 13th period.
In 1966, American anthropologist and archaeologist Michael Coe published the first correlation of a future long calendar date and associated it with Armageddon, which introduced the concept into Western academia and provided it some legitimacy, scholars said.
Seven years later, hoopla surrounding Comet Kohoutek, which was billed as the “comet of the century,” reignited popular discussions about a second coming.
The comet’s appearance — which turned out to be a non-event — also coincided with the rise of the U.S. counterculture movement, including a breakdown of trust in authority, Hoopes said. Add the popularity of psychedelic drugs, interest in so-called ancient astronauts and the birth of New Age spirituality in the 1970s, and you have a recipe for growing a modern Mayan myth, he said.
The latest version of the 2012 myth was mostly underground lore until personal computers and the World Wide Web. Today, more than 1,000 books in print focus on the 2012 phenomenon, Hoopes said.
“What were once relatively obscure New Age beliefs about the ancient Maya became accessible to a huge audience,” he said. “With all of the hullabaloo about Y2K and apocalyptic speculation for 2000, there was additional attention to the Maya calendar and supposed prophecies for 2012. When Y2K turned out to be a non-event, attention shifted to 2012.”
The mega hype prompted the nation’s leading NASA scientists to take to the Internet to dispel rumors surrounding the end of 2012.
NASA says the doomsday prediction started with claims that a planet called Nibiru, supposedly discovered by the ancient Sumerians, is hurtling toward Earth. When it didn’t hit as expected in May 2003, the doomsday date was moved to December 2012 and linked to the ancient Mayan calendar’s end, according to NASA.
As for contemporary Maya, they don’t practice the long count calendar, but they continue to track the sacred calendar as a way to plan activities and keep in touch with their culture, scholars say. That culture tells the Maya that Friday is a day of grand completion of a tremendous period of time and the beginning of the next calendar cycle.
“It’s just a period of time completion. It’s really like a millennium,” said Traxler of the Penn Museum. “You don’t have to sell your home. Everything is going to be fine.”
