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Investigating the 2012 Maya Prophecy

Chris Bowerman investigates the 2012 Maya prophecy paranoia

Nothing ruins a good holiday like the end of the world. But here it is, the finale—Dec. 21, 2012—as prophesied by the Maya from pre-Columbian Central America. The ingenious astronomic projection is so airtight, it makes Nostradamus look like a Magic 8 Ball by comparison.

History Lesson

The saga begins in about 2000 BC, when Maya civilization spread out into the limestone tableland of the Yucatan Peninsula in the north, through bountiful forests, into the mountains of today’s Guatemala in the south.

As villages gave way to formidable city-states and the civilization reached its zenith—the Classic period, between 250 and 900 AD—the Maya were advancing astronomy, math and calendar-making on par with the ancient Greeks and Egyptians. All this while Europe sank into the Dark Ages.

But sustainable living proved elusive, and the conspicuous consumption of natural resources, it is believed, was the civilization’s undoing. At the close of the first millennium, the Maya passed into mythology—and their great prediction is now fodder for scads of scholars, novelists, filmmakers and let-down Y2K lemmings eager to sound the alarm about cataclysmic change.

The crux of the conundrum is the Mayas’ Long Count Calendar, a set period of cycles that includes a 5,125-year era with mystical origins on the Gregorian date of Aug. 11, 3114 BC. To the ancients, 2012 marks the end of an era—the Great Cycle—as well as a climax of solar activity.

Also encoded in Mayan ciphers is that on the winter solstice of 2012, the wrathful father Sun will eclipse the dark rift at the centre of the Galaxy.
 
Some scholars believe the calendar has a pretty good track record, linking events like Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake to predictions made centuries ago.

Galactic alignment. Dark rift. Math. I was beguiled, and let’s be honest, enticed by the tropical delights of the Yucatan and its ancient history that still lives on in its remote Mayan towns. So I improvised a trip to Cancun—a dime-store Indiana Jones fumbling for Doomsday’s on/off switch. Or at least the circuitry.

The growing 2012 hysteria can be lumped into two camps: one, that plausible solar, seismic, volcanic, electromagnetic and/or military activity will spark catastrophe; and two, it’s symbolic, ushering in a birth of global consciousness and new respect for the planet.

Empirical evidence suggests the former. But what’s the word in el Mundo Maya? No mañana?

Araceli Dominguez

Three blocks from the bus depot in downtown Cancun, I lucked into a lead—a local luminary, pundit, environmental activist, acupuncturist, shaman and 2012 theorist, all rolled into one doting grandmother.

Araceli Dominguez, president of Grupo Ecologista del Mayab, is a rescuer of coastal mangroves and contraband dolphins, a doodler of maps and a total nut for Chichen Itza, the ancient Maya centre where one day, she says, her ashes will be scattered. Her residence and family business, El Rey del Caribe (from US$55)—“The King of the Caribbean”—is a forerunner of Cancun eco-hotels.

Regarding 2012, she emphasizes “ecological order”—something the ancient Maya, or their contemporaries, took for granted, stripping forests to fuel fires, causing soil erosion, drought, famine and polluted water.

She cites Drunvalo Melchizedek, a Vietnam War vet turned spiritual leader. Melchizedek was granted the authority by the National Mayan Council of Elders of Guatemala, a nation of 440 tribes in Mexico, Belize, Honduras and Guatemala, to interpret their beliefs about 2012 for the Internet age.

He learned Mayan mojo at the ancient Yucatan sites of Uxmal, Coba, Tulum, Palenque and Chichen Itza (other Mayan sites include Ek' Balam and Muyil), and talks about the metamorphosis of humanity, a left-to-right brain switch to the “feminine hemisphere,” other dimensional worlds, angels of light and so on.

“The Maya wish to inform you that the world you know, that you live in, is not what you think it is,” begins Melchizedek’s online presentation.

“We modern people think the world is solid and real, and that nothing can change it... The Maya wish to inform you this is not true. The world is really images that can be controlled by consciousness, especially consciousness that is connected directly in the human heart.”

Dominguez implores me to visit Chichen Itza, perhaps the most important religious and scientific centre in the Classic and Post-Classic periods.

“Take your time, and just listen,” she says. “Listen to the stones.”

She tells me to follow her directions to the home of an acquaintance, Adalberto Rivera, who lives near the ancient metropolis.

The scenic drive east on Highway 180 slows to a crawl at every tumbledown Mayan village, contentedly stuck in its own time warp. Past the city of Valladolid, halfway to the peninsula’s capital of Merida—due south from the Chicxulub asteroid crash that is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs—one plodding lane turns into an expressway hemmed in by lush forest.

Rain suddenly pours, stops and forms mist. I race through, exhilarated by something kinetic on the other side.

Hotel Oka’an (from US$120)—from the Mayan word for “the initiation”—is Rivera’s new retreat on 200 hectares of forest, accessed by a craggy, rental car-eating limestone road.

I quickly realize there’s nobody else here but my friendly Mayan attendant, Israel, who confabs in Spanish to the hinterland on the other end of his walkie-talkie.

I settle into a luxury cabana. Then the generator conks out. In the inky blackness, squawks, chirps and rattles pour through the jungle canopy where wild things go skitter in the night.

I am officially creeped out, unsure about this “initiation” and the curious nonappearance of the proprietor, Rivera, whose enigma, as I doze off, becomes a hybrid of Colonel Kurtz and the Wizard of Oz.

Chichen Itza

In the morning, I hit Chichen Itza, pay the 95-peso admission (just under $8) and turn away locals offering me an “exclusive” two-hour guided tour for as much as US$60.

At the west base of one the world’s most famous Mayan landmarks, El Castillo—a Spanish misnomer for the Pyramid of Kukulcán, the Mayas’ ubiquitous, all-purpose, feathered serpent deity—I explore the 15-sq.-km. site, using the cardinal points of the archetypal step pyramid for navigation.

Communication with the rocks is participatory. A clap facing the great pyramid generates an echo ping, like a bird call, perhaps that of Kukulcán, also known as Quetzalcoatl, a name derived from the magnificently quetzal bird, and from snakes, a symbol of life, movement, infinity and change.

The walls of the Great Ball Court—166 metres long, 69 metres wide, the largest in all Meso-America—create a sounding board that amplifies whispers from opposite ends.



Such arenas hosted ritual games (think volleyball where a losing team member is sacrificed) from Nicaragua to Arizona for thousands of years. The site teems with symbolism that would make a 2012 junkie salivate—serpent statues, bas-reliefs of Jaguar god-men exploiting lesser-thans.

The platform of Tzompantli (“wall of skulls”) is a particularly bad trip, believed to be a Toltec monument to human sacrifice and a temple on which heads, decapitated by obsidian blades, were impaled on poles.

Droves of merchants drown out the wailing ghosts with rehearsed pitches like, “Cheaper than Wal-Mart—almost free!” Their wares are many and varied, from vibrant ceramic skulls to gemstone amulets and “Hard Rock Cafe: Chichen Itza” T-shirts.

Fernando, an artist who lives nearby, says his Mayan ancestors have been in the area for at least 15 generations. He says business is slow, averaging about $20 a day. Maybe the 2012 thing will help sales?

“Si,” he says in Spanglish. “The old generation say in 2012 the world broken, finished. But maybe is good for them to say because there much problems, much cancers and commercial food, not natural. But end? No.”

A trolling guide spews bunk about the 19.5˚ latitude of Chichen Itza (wrong), which correlates to the birthplace of Christ (nope) and hyper-dimensional physics (who knows). After marvelling at the most important structure to the obsessive Mayan stargazers—the spiral Observatory, also called the El Caracol (snail), used for studying the heavens from precisely placed windows, doorways and water-filled caryatids that reflected the underworld above—I want an expert opinon.

Adalberto Rivera

For 35 years, Adalberto Rivera has been a Maya gnostic and guide, an aficionado of the “esoteric” purposes of Chichen Itza’s temples, pyramids and ritualistic ball game.

As an archeo-astronomer, his claim to the discovery of the Serpent of Shadow—cast on the plaza floor at the base of Kukulcán’s pyramid during the equinox—is registered with the Secretarìa de Educación Pública.

Back at Oka’an, Israel escorts me to a gated house and rings a bell to announce our arrival. The carved cedar front doors copy a bas-relief from Chichen Itza’s North Temple—a semi-conscious initiate instructed by a superior being.

Inside, Rivera finally appears, an emaciated 65-year-old. He sits down under a self-portrait of Frida Kahlo and shows me pictures of his healthier self with Oprah. He gives me his book, The Mysteries of Chichen Itza, in which he inscribes: “I wish for you the light of universal affection.”

The book rejects Toltec influences and interprets the “Itza-Maya” as brethren of the Egyptians, Greeks and Indians, all originating in Atlantis. Rivera is philosophical about the centre’s images of grinning skulls and ritual sacrifice; to him they’re symbols of spiritual awakening and divinity.

“Chichen Itza is like kindergarten, an initiation for higher learning,” he says.

“That began with violence?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says, softly. “Yeah.”

Rivera censures the 2012 end-date outright: “The Itza were masters in astronomy. What happens on this day is the end of the astronomic observation, not the end of the Mayan calendar, which is cyclical, infinite.”

He meshes his fingers together to mimic the Calendar Round, a series of cogs—like Ezekiel’s vision of “wheels within wheels”—that perpetually turn, turn, turn.

He admits we’re in a pickle—glaciers melting, oceans rising.

“The planet is very hot. This is the one truth,” he says. “The Mayans observed some accommodation in the planet—2012 is the finish of the sun’s intensity, that’s all—and this they’ve seen for thousands and thousands of years.”

In closing, the budding hotelier says, “What happens, happens. If you’re always looking ahead, every day is panic… But the panic is very good business.”
 
And not just for local tourism. The recent release of 2012, yet another disaster-horror movie, cashes in on primal fears. Stacks of new books on the topic include Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Journey Into Civilization’s End. 

It's a convincing yarn in which author Lawrence E. Joseph posits a devastating solar flare, radiation seepage through cracks in the planet’s magnetic field and a nuclear winter caused by the eruption of Yellowstone’s super-volcano.

The gloomy overtures would make for a kind of perverted wishful thinking, if not for the author’s conclusion “to rise above the threat.”

Local Opinion

Marco, a Cancun cabbie, says his Mayan roots are about 30 generations deep. He’s psyched that I’m psyched about the subject and pulls over, mid-trip, to orate in his ancient tongue. The sibilant, glottal language sounds like English played backwards. He must know something.

“2012? Yes!” he says. “It’s fiction. Loco.”

In the city’s posh Hotel Zone on the embattled beachfront seized by higher and higher annual tides, a young waiter named Juan launches into family history.

His parents’ parents are Maya, and so on, “all the way back,” and 2012 just wasn’t a hot topic around the dinner table. He calls the prophecy “silly.”

Now and then, Juan stays up past 4 a.m. to listen to the only dedicated Maya program he can find on the radio. It’s really religious, he says, but even these dudes don’t bother speculating about our collective demise.

Much like foreign curiosity-seekers of Maya artifice and lore, the Maya descendants in their peninsula paradise view the apocalypse prophecy as a trinket from another time. But not the end of time itself.