by Michael Cronin

Created on: October 08, 2010

If the Mayans could predict the future then they should have been able to see their own demise and could have prevented it. A common misinterpretation about 2012 is that it has been billed as the end of the world when it is really just the end of the Mayan calendar. This does not mean that they stopped the calendar there because there would not be any need for a calendar after that, but rather that these impeccable time keepers created a device that, much like a watch, needs to be “rewound” as no device of this nature could go on infinitely.

The time keeping device that they used was also used by other mesoamerican cultures. Only the elite in the Mayan culture understood and interpreted the calendar. They acknowledged a 260 day sacred year and a 365 day vague year. Their 365 day vague year had 18 months of 20 days each and one month of five days. They also had 20 day names that were similar in function to our week day names. When the sacred year and the vague year were combined, the result was a system called the calendar round. Every 52 years, a specific combination of these two cycles would occur.

Every generation thinks that the world is going to come to an end in their lifetime because many people cannot imagine the world moving forward without them in it. Sony pictures did a great job of scaring the hell out of people by launching a website called The Institute for Human Continuity (IHC). Now, after that horrible movie 2012 was released, the website states in the introduction section that it is tied to the 2012 film. Prior to the film’s release, they ran commercials for this fake institute during shows on the History Channel about the apocalypse with no indication that it was a sham. The website is slick and did make the whole thing look legit and was a great marketing ploy, but I digress.

Other facts about the Mayans worth noting are that they believed in a root 20 numeric system as opposed to a root 10 system like the rest of the world. This would mean that maybe the world isn’t really supposed to end until 4024 instead 2012. There are many groups that also claim to have the most accurate calendar well before modern technology made timekeeping a luxury that we now take for granted. Many historians also agree that the idea that the Mayans would have had for their calendar on what we now call Dec 21, 2012, is that it was simply just supposed to start over at the year zero. There will be a galactic alignment on that day. The center of the Milky Way will align with the ellipses of our solar system in conjunction with an eclipse in an event that is considered to be an irregular planetary crossing.

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