Forget "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." Forget "Apocalypto." Chichen Itza is in Mexico; Machu Picchu is in Peru. Different continents, George Lucas.
A few thousand years ago, the people of Mexico didn't need the leap year. Putting that Hallmark calendar on my fridge to shame, the ancient Mayans accurately depicted the Solar Year to within minutes, star-gazing and tackling celestial mysteries through it all.
The Mayans thrived on their deep knowledge of the universe, creating a rich and prosperous empire. Then in 1519, Spanish Conquistador Hernn Corts dubbed the Mayans savages and killed them, which led to a massive burning of thousands of Mayan texts. Not many firsthand accounts of Mayan culture remain, but the Mayan Calendar-etched in stone-still stands as the most accurate and most sophisticated time-keeping system our world has ever known.
Our laminated, Gregorian time-keepers never were intended to do much more than track Grandma's birthday. The Mayan Calendar reveals not only a deeper understanding of time, seasons and cycles, but truths about our planet's recurring energy that Western culture is hesitant to fully recognize. The Mayan Calendar deserves our attention because the messages it holds not only tell us about our past, but also, may greatly affect our immediate future.
-What exactly is the Mayan Calendar?-
Well, it's not exactly a wall hanging. The mathematics and precision involved in decoding the Mayan's time-keeping system can be found at the Pyramid of Kukulkan in Chichen Itza, Mexico (http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y110/lisaviktorya/ ChichenItza.jpg).
In short, the monument honors both the Mayan god Kukulkan by keeping the most accurate record of time ever attempted (International Atomic Time comes close, but it doesn't even account for Earth's slowing rotation). Here's how.
Dr. Carl Johan Calleman (Solving the Great Mystery of our Time: The Mayan Calendar, 2000) puts it simply. The calendar combines two cycles of time: the 365-day Solar Year and a 260-day Tzolkin Year, equal to the length of human pregnancy. What a knack for bringing a human element to studying the cosmos.
Both the Solar Year and the Tzolkin Year align once every (approximately) 25,630 years to complete the overarching Long Count Calendar, which is unique in having a start- and end-date. When is this end date, you ask? About four years away.
The Long Count Calendar traces five periods of time, each lasting 5,126 years. The current period, the fifth, began on August 11, 3114 B.C. and is scheduled to end on December 21, 2012 A.D. Although no one knows for sure how the Mayan calendar was created-or how mainstream history can begin to tackle this question-these 5 time periods are perfectly aligned with the much longer galactic cycle of precession, also known as Earth's "wobbles."
Precession was not discovered by Western astronomy until the early 1900s, and "perfectly" is not a term to be used lightly.
-The galactic procession of Precession-
NASA's Web site explains precession in terms of a spinning top, conveniently enough. Each time the Earth spins, it slowly follows a cone-shaped path, a path that aligns with the center of our galaxy at the beginning and end of each cycle. This is why our North Star changes every 13,000 years or so.
Earth completes one cone-shaped path (a.k.a. precession) every 25,630 years, precisely, five of these Mayan periods. Although the Mayans didn't have our modern-day telescopes, scientific calculators or the leisure of Google, they placed highest importance on precisely depicting these unique galactic events, regardless that they wouldn't live to see them. Damn that Corts.
As for our current precessional cycle (which started way back in 23,618 B.C.), we'll be coming full circle by the time the next U.S. presidential election comes around. If it even comes around.
-Start, end, bang-
In the beginning, there was no beginning. The Mayans believed it was all relative. Rafael Cobos, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Yucatan, explains that the Mayans believed in repeating, cyclical time, unlike us, who believe that time is linear. Once the Long Count Calendar completes this fifth period, the 26,000-year precessional cycle will conclude, and time will revert back to zero. Again.
Zero, then, refers to both the end and the beginning. According to the Newton General Science Archives, this amps up Mayan credibility because they invented the concept of "zero," a notion that didn't even hit Europe until after 800 A.D. Roman numerals, anyone?
Impeccable timekeeping was at the root of Mayan culture, and they couldn't ignore the repeating nature of history and just settle for a one-dimensional timeline. An October 2006 newsletter from the Association for Research and Enlightenment explains that the Mayan Calendar designates "zero points" along and at the ends of the course of precession. In this light, time is a recurring phenomenon with a zero that repeats, not a straight shot from zero to infinity.
-Where do babies go?-
So Solar Year + Tzolkin Year = Long Count Year, the overarching timeline of galactic life. But let's look at why the Tzolkin is so human, literally.
The Tzolkin Year, equal to the 9-month human gestation period, was used as a key to understanding the many dimensions of human life and experience, kind of like a Lamaze class for critical cultural theorists.
To the Mayans, planetary and star-based events were much more than teen magazine horoscopes. Each day of the Tzolkin holds a special meaning based on the name and astronomical association with it, from which the Mayans accurately predicted eclipses, solstices, equinoxes and the precise cyclical path of planets like Venus and Mercury. Their findings led them to study how the energy of galactic events directly corresponds to the energy of both the minds and bodies of human beings on Earth. They were New Age before there was an age to become new again. And the Mayans only did what made sense to them.
For the years leading up to 2012, the Mayans predicted egoism and self-seeking enterprises to be on the rise. Modern researchers like alternative historian Michael Tsarion (Origins and Oracles, 2006) reveal these now increasing modern conditions as: excessive greed, more corruption in authority structures, greater infringement of personal privacy, and rising anxiety and depression, to name a few. Basically, MTV, the Bush administration and Zoloft.
According to Mayan text, once the cycle reaches zero, the aforementioned symptoms will have reached maximum capacity, so a new beginning-or shift-must take place. Whether this shift will be physical, spiritual or esoteric, everything has a breaking point. And regardless of where or when the ancient Mayans achieved their knowledge (that's a whole other story), they pinpoint not only the mechanisms of our entire galaxy, but also, the self-defeating nature of every great civilization in our history.
-Big bangs-
If we are to understand the past, we must be prepared to understand the future. The Mayans were experts at predicting cycles in the galaxy and within their own lives (believing Corts was Kulkalkan wasn't so mistaken after all), so the next step is to look at how the end-date of December 21, 2012 may mark a change in the world as we know it.
Almost every culture in our world has a story of "The Flood," all of which date back to approximately 5,126 years ago, the end of the last Mayan period. Do the research and have a field day. See how uncomfortable the mainstream historians get.
While many recently published books with titles like "Apocalypse 2012" and "The World Cataclysm" indicate the same doomsday result for us as we near the completion of our galaxy's 25,630-year precession, other less apocalyptically-minded sources have deeper insights. Dr. Walter Cruttenden, Executive Director of the Binary Research Institute founded in 2002, assert this extremely rare galactic alignment will portend a dramatic re-birth for humanity, without the "Apocalypto" doom and gloom. Like Dr. Cruttenden's research, many findings about ancient knowledge, energy and precession indicate repeating cycles of humanity, ala the Dark and Golden Ages.
Other researchers, like Adrian Gilbert (The End of Time, 2006), also acknowledge that the Calendar's precession end-date easily mark a long-awaited human awareness of a higher purpose. How many of us already think the world needs a wake-up call and a good massage? According to this belief, the culmination of our flaws will then result not in catastrophe, but in the beginning stages of new appreciations. It's a feel-good philosophy, with historical and scientific backing for all you left-brainers out there. And it's about time we start lending credibility to sources other than well-funded Western institutions.
In an October 2006 lecture, Dr. Claude Swanson, National Science Foundation Fellow at Princeton, gave a scientific argument about how the energies of our galaxy directly influence human consciousness, thought and capabilities. The changing energies on Earth due to our galactic alignment on December 21, 2012 are directly connected with this reality. While this article is not the place for scientific specifics, I hope to be one more voice giving credibility to a marginalized area of research. A closed mind is a wonderful thing to lose. And so is colonization.
-About that credibility thing
The ultimate lesson most people can take from the Mayan Calendar is one of appreciating our history.
As Western thinkers, we have a bias towards the newest, most conventional information. And unfortunately, anything that falls outside the framework of "college textbook" or the 6 O'clock News is instantly deemed an unreliable source. Ancient history and spirituality are only part of the gamut of human experiences that are placed on the fringe of mainstream research, and it seems like many more are waking up to the bigger picture.
In terms of what the Mayans might be telling us about the future, Giorgio de Santillana, professor at M.I.T. stated to the National Science Board in 2004 that better understanding of precession will change the way we view history, archeology, anthropology, astronomy, religion, and consciousness, to name a few. And change can be a very good thing.
We shouldn't ignore the messages hidden in the Mayan Calendar just because it's "ancient history." After all, they did manage to calculate the year much more accurately than we do and based their whole culture around the idea that "History repeats itself"-a proverb that our culture recognizes, but still fails to live by.
-In the end-
Having seen what the Mayan Calendar is and how it works, how the Mayans based their lives on repeating cycles of time and getting a taste of what modern-day research has to say about it, it's hard to argue that there is no practical relevance between Mayan culture and the things we're learning today.
Our solar system is dynamic-evolving and changing over time-and humans are subject to the same. But if we only pay attention to mainstream information, we run the risk of ignoring aspects of human experience that may have a much deeper insight into what life's really all about.
Maybe the Mayans had good reasons to be so obsessed with how the universe affected their lives, because they surely were interested in how it may affect ours.
(Note: I originally wrote/performed this text as an informative speech for the American Forensics Association and adapted it for Web publication.)