http://www.december212012.com/articles/news/the_final_days.htm
The Final Days
By BENJAMIN ANASTAS
Published: July 1, 2007
Steven from Arizona - a caller on "Coast to Coast AM" late one night
in February - had slipped into a future reality and caught a glimpse
of the devastation that was coming when the supervolcano under
Yellowstone erupted. James in Omaha, on the other hand, was worried
about the likelihood of a magnetic pole shift, while Rod from Edmonton
had recently spoken to a member of the Canadian Parliament about the
global-warming crisis and couldn't believe what he had heard.
"We're coming to an end time beyond anything that anybody has ever
imagined," Rod said with a trembling urgency. "The scientists right
now, they're not even studying the real causes. The Kyoto treaty and
CO2 have nothing to do with anything."
"Coast to Coast AM" is an overnight radio show devoted to what its
weekday host, George Noory, calls "the unusual mysteries of the world
and the universe." Broadcast out of Sherman Oaks, Calif., and carried
nationwide on more than 500 stations as well as the XM Radio satellite
network, "Coast to Coast AM" is by far the highest-rated radio program
in the country once the lights go out. The guest in the wee hours that
February morning was Lawrence E. Joseph, the author of "Apocalypse
2012" - billed as "a scientific investigation into civilization's end"
- and he came on the air to tell the story of how the ancient Maya
looked into the stars and predicted catastrophic changes to the earth,
all pegged to the end date of an historical cycle on one of their
calendars, Dec. 21, 2012.
"My motto tonight," Noory intoned at the beginning of the program, "is
be prepared, not scared." What followed was a graphic recitation of
disaster scenarios for 2012, including hurricanes, earthquakes and
volcanic eruptions caused by solar storms, cracks forming in the
earth's magnetic field and mass extinctions brought on by nuclear
winter. The only hopeful note of the night was struck when an unnamed
caller asked Joseph what he thought about recent Virgin Mary
apparitions in Bosnia.
"I love it," the author answered. "That's positive. You don't need to
be a devout Christian to admire the Virgin Mary. She's a blessing to
us all."
When I reached Noory by phone at his program's studio in California,
he told me, "I'm a staunch believer that we are in an earth cycle." As
2012 approaches, "Coast to Coast" has been devoting more and more
programming to prophecies of doom and the signs and wonders that are
thought to be harbingers of the coming end time: U.F.O. sightings,
crop-circle formations, disappearing honeybees and flocks of migratory
birds that fall from the sky. "There's no question the planet is
changing," Noory said. "And the fact that the Mayans had an end date
and their history talks of change, I find that fascinating."
But it isn't just on the lower frequencies, late at night, where
people are waiting on the Mayan apocalypse. Daniel Pinchbeck, author
of the alternative-culture best seller "2012: The Return of
Quetzalcoatl" - and a guest on "Coast to Coast AM" - has introduced a
young and savvy audience to the school of millenarian thinking that
has gathered around Mayan calendrics. To do so, he has employed viral
marketing and a tireless schedule of public appearances at bookstores,
art spaces, yoga studios and electronic-music festivals. When
Pinchbeck appeared on "The Colbert Report" last December to promote
his book, the host confronted him in front of a life-size manger
scene: "You have been called a new Timothy Leary. Why do we need
another one of those?"
Over breakfast at Cafe Gitane in Manhattan, Pinchbeck told me recently
that "there's a growing realization that materialism and the rational,
empirical worldview that comes with it has reached its expiration
date." A youthful 41, with long, drooping hair and heavy-framed
designer eyewear, Pinchbeck exudes a languid fervency that is equal
parts Jesuit and Jim Morrison. His BlackBerry sat face up on the
table, the screen dark, beside his bowl of organic fruit, yogurt and
granola. "Apocalypse literally means uncovering or revealing,"
Pinchbeck went on, "and I think the process is already under way.
We're on the verge of transitioning to a dispensation of consciousness
that's more intuitive, mystical and shamanic."
Far from its origins, divorced from its context and enlisted in a
prophetic project that it may never have been designed to fulfill, the
Mayan calendar is at the center of an escalating cultural phenomenon -
with New Age roots - that unites numinous dreams of societal
transformation with the darker tropes of biblical cataclysm. To some,
2012 will bring the end of time; to others, it carries the promise of
a new beginning; to still others, 2012 provides an explanation for
troubling new realities - environmental change, for example - that
seem beyond the control of our technology and impervious to reason.
Just in time for the final five-year countdown, the Mayan apocalypse
has come of age.
Light and darkness - heavenly forces and a corrupted earth - are the
twin engines of apocalyptic movements. For Christians awaiting rapture
or Shiites counting the days until the Twelfth Imam appears, the
trials and injustices of the known world are a prelude for the
paradise that we can imagine but can't yet achieve. Judging by the
sheer number of predicted end dates that have come and gone without
the trumpets blowing and angels rushing in, we are a people impatient
to see our world redeemed through catastrophe - and we are always
wrong. Gnostics predicted the imminent arrival of God's kingdom as
early as the first century; Christians in Europe attacked pagan
territories in the north to prepare for the end of the world at the
first millennium; the Shakers believed the world would end in 1792;
there was a "Great Disappointment" among followers of the Baptist
preacher William Miller when Jesus did not return to upstate New York
on Oct. 22, 1844. The Jehovah's Witnesses have been especially
prodigious with prophetic end dates: 1914, 1915, 1918, 1920, 1925,
1941, 1975 and 1994. Any religious movement with an end-time prophecy
is certain to attract followers, no matter how maniacal or fringy
(witness the Branch Davidians). For those who want to go online and
get the latest tally of bad news, there is a nuclear Doomsday Clock
and the Rapture Index. If you remember living through Y2K, that was
another millenarian moment - except our computer systems were redeemed
by the same code writers who corrupted them in the first place.
Who dreams of the apocalypse? Why do they dream of it? Polls indicate
that up to 50 percent of Americans believe that the Book of Revelation
is a true, prophetic document, meaning they fully expect the
predictions of "Rapture," "Tribulation" and "Armageddon" to be
fulfilled. There is a paradox built into end-time theologies in that
imminent catastrophe often brings comfort; according to Paul S. Boyer,
an authority on prophecy belief in American culture and an emeritus
professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the
apocalypse is an appealing idea because it promises salvation to a
select group - all of whom share secret knowledge - and a world
redeemed and delivered from evil. "The Utopian dream is a big part of
the Western tradition," Boyer told me, "both the religious and secular
forms. But the wicked have to be destroyed and evil has to be overcome
for the era of righteousness to dawn." This is as true in the New Age
as much as in any other one. Rumors of global crisis, the distrust of
institutional authority, the ready availability of esoteric lore, the
existence of individuals drawn to abstruse numerical schemes, the urge
to assuage anxieties with dreams of social transformation - wherever
these elements exist, apocalyptic thinking is likely to flourish.
The year 2012 first entered the public consciousness two decades ago
this August with the Harmonic Convergence organized by Jos=E9 Arguelles,
the author of a number of esoteric books about the Mayan cosmos and
his experiences with telepathically received prophecies. With a
penchant for promotion going back to the first Whole Earth Festival in
1970, which he organized, Arguelles promoted the convergence as an
earth-changing event requiring 144,000 participants - the number
echoed Mayan mathematics and the Book of Revelation - to free the
planet from the dissonant influence of Western science and synchronize
with the "wave harmonic of history" set to culminate in 2012. Mayan
civilization, to Arguelles, was not entirely Mayan: It was originally
a "terrestrial project" managed by a race of "galactic masters" from
"star bases." He saw the convergence as a stage, ordained by prophecy,
in a march to the end foreseen by the ancient calendar makers:
"Somewhere in that far and distant time, when armies clashed with
metal and chemicals released the fire of the Sun, the wonder of Maya
would burst again, releasing the mystery and showing the way that
marks return among the patterns of the stars."
Large crowds, some perhaps oblivious to the apocalyptic undertones of
the event, did end up gathering at "focus locations" around the world
- Stonehenge, Mount Shasta and Bolinas in California, even Central
Park - and extensive media coverage of the meditating and dancing
masses lent Arguelles and his project an eccentric authority. The New
Age had discovered its own eschatology - with a mysterious, mythical
people the controlling intelligence - and 2012 joined the lexicon of
"energies," transcendental meditation and crystals. By 1991 Arguelles
was popularizing his own calendric system, which he branded
Dreamspell, as a corrective to our mechanized time (dismissed, in
mathematical shorthand, as "12:60," the ratio of solar months to
minutes in an hour). Inspired by the tzolk'in, the 260-day prophetic
calendar utilized by the ancient Maya and common throughout
Mesoamerica, Dreamspell functions as a daily oracle, replacing linear
time with a "loom of resonances" that users navigate with a "galactic
signature" based on the day of their birth. More than just an
astrological sign, this signature is a tool for meditation and, as the
latest edition of Arguelles's calendar promises, "your password in
fourth-dimensional time."
Arguelles, under the aegis of his fief, the Foundation for the Law of
Time, has lobbied tirelessly for the universal adoption of his
calendar - now called the 13-Moon 28-day Calendar - by posting
communiqu=E9s on the Web and arranging audiences with Mayan elders and
members of the Vatican. Lately he has been designing large-scale
telepathic experiments in conjunction with a Russian laboratory in
Novosibirsk and other groups affiliated with his Planet Art Network.
"The post-2012 world will be a world of universal telepathy,"
Arguelles wrote me recently from New Zealand, where he has gone to
prepare for the transition. Since 1993, when he claims to have
received a new prophecy in Hawaii, he has been calling himself Valum
Votan, Closer of the Cycle. "We'll be literally living in a new time,"
Arguelles said, "by a 13-month, 28-day synchronometer that will
facilitate our telepathy by keeping us in harmony with everything all
the time. There will be a lot fewer of us, with simple lifestyles,
solar technology, garden culture and lots of telepathic
communication." As for the many who "have not evolved spiritually
enough to know that there are other dimensions of reality," Arguelles
predicts they will be taken away in "silver ships."
With Arguelles drifting into even more occult realms - his last book,
"Time and the Technosphere," spun elaborate new theories around 9/11 -
he has been supplanted in the New Age conversation by the next
generation of Mayan-calendar mystics with their own theories about the
coming transition. This new generation does not typically think that
space aliens guided the Maya and prides itself on its reverence for
Mayan culture and tradition. Carl Johan Calleman, author of "The Mayan
Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness," is a former cancer
researcher from Sweden whose calculations have led him to a
controversial end date of his own devising: Oct. 28, 2011. As
Arguelles's closest spiritual heir in the Mayan-calendar movement,
Calleman has been active in promoting a regular mass-meditation event
called the Breakthrough Celebration and other more focused projects
including the Jerusalem Hug, which gathered 5,000 people around the
walls of the Old City on May 21 to harness constructive energies and
create a "cascade of peace."
While his interest in 2012 is not exclusively focused on the Mayan
calendar, Chet Snow - a past-lives regression therapist and author
from Sedona, Ariz. - tracks the impending consciousness shift on his
Mass Dreams Newsletter, organizes annual crop-circle and sacred-site
tours and gathers the disparate camps of the 2012 movement together
for conferences devoted to ancient mysteries and the paranormal.
When I asked Snow why he thought people were turning to alternative
ideas and explanations like the ones espoused at his conferences, he
told me the answer was a simple one. "The pillars of our expectations
about the future in the West have started to crumble," he said.
"Religion, politics and economics - none of it is working any more. So
when you hear about the ancient Maya and this changeover in 2012
involving solar cycles and astronomical events, you say, 'Huh, maybe I
need to connect with that.' "
If the Mayan calendar seems like an unlikely timing device for our
salvation - whether it arrives through global catastrophe or
telepathic rainbow around the earth - its animating role in the 2012
phenomenon is entirely consistent with popular notions of the
"mysterious" Maya that have persisted for over a century. The Maya
were just one of the peoples to thrive in Mesoamerica before the
Spanish conquest of the 16th century, but the civilization's
florescence - spanning the period called the Maya Classic, between 300
and 900 A.D. - was especially bright and spectacular. After growing
into a loose confederation of rival city-states that spread across the
Yucatan peninsula and extended as far as Chiapas in the west and
Honduras in the east, the Mayan civilization fell into a rolling
decline that ended with the almost complete abandonment of their
cities. The so-called Mayan collapse is a continued source of
speculation and a major reason why the Maya have captured the
imagination of 19th-century travelers, 20th-century archaeologists and
generations of popular fantasists who have connected the Maya to
everything from intergalactic colonies to the lost island of Atlantis
to Teutonic gods from fire-breathing spaceships. The Mayan sites
attract small armies of New Age pilgrims every year, hoping to plug
into a stone socket of timeless indigenous wisdom; tens of thousands
gather for the spring equinox at Chich=E9n Itz=E1 alone to watch the
shadow of a snake slither down the steps of the Temple of Kukulcin.
In the introduction to his book "Maya Cosmogenesis 2012: The True
Meaning of the Maya Calendar End Date," John Major Jenkins describes
his first visit to Tikal, the vast ruin in the Guatemalan rain forest
that thrived as an urban center at the pinnacle of Mayan civilization.
Jenkins, perhaps the most lucid figure in the subculture of 2012
prophets, writes of the "bone-jarring 16-hour bus ride on muddy and
dangerous roads" that carried him to a "sprawling former metropolis"
of pyramids, palaces, residences, ball-courts and scores of engraved
monumental stones, or stelae, decorated with intricate, otherworldly
images and hieroglyphs.
"Sitting on the stone steps of the Central Acropolis," Jenkins
recalls, "I looked around me at the towering sentinels of stone, their
upper platforms stretching above the jungle canopy like altars to the
stars, and I listened carefully to the wind whisper messages of a far-
off time, and of another world."
Jenkins wasn't the first 22-year-old traveler with spiritual yearnings
to encounter the sublime at a Mayan archaeological site, but he is one
of the few who has found a life's vocation in the process. As
harmonically as Jenkins was struck in Guatemala by the larger
mysteries of the Maya, however, it was the calendar that really seized
him - specifically the fact that there were Maya living in the
highlands who still followed the same day count as their distant
ancestors. (A common misconception is that the Maya "disappeared" when
their cities emptied; there are six million Maya currently living in
the states of Central America, a number far larger than population
estimates of Mayan civilization during the Classic period.)
"Here was an unbroken tradition," Jenkins told me when I went to visit
him at his home in Windsor, Colo., one afternoon in late March. We sat
in a pair of lawn chairs in the backyard while a neighbor passed back
and forth on a noisy tractor. "It's a lineage going back 2,000 years,"
he said, oblivious to the racket. Jenkins, now 43, is difficult to
distract when talking about the Mayan calendar and 2012. After years
of working as a software engineer to support his research and writing
books and papers in his spare time, 2012 is now Jenkins' full-time
job. Influenced by the work of the pioneering psychedelic writer
Terence McKenna - whose Timewave Zero system, based on computer
analysis of the I Ching, also shows history to be culminating on Dec.
21, 2012 - Jenkins argues that ancient Maya "calendar priests" were
able to chart a 26,000-year astronomical cycle called "the precession
of the equinoxes" with the naked eye. He fixed the 2012 end date to
coincide with a "galactic alignment" of the winter-solstice sun and
the axis that modern astonomers draw to bisect the Milky Way, called
the galactic equator.
In the alchemical tradition, Jenkins notes, eclipses signify the
"transcending of the opposites." During the period around 2012,
Jenkins says, the galaxy will provide the opportunity for the rebirth
of creation and a reconciliation of "infinity and finitude, time and
eternity." The Maya knew it, and just like an alarm clock, they set
their calendar to coincide with the occasion.
Jenkins and his fellow travelers in the 2012 movement have chosen a
particularly arcane source of secret knowledge in Mayan calendrics.
The Maya calendar keepers are known to have charted the cycles of the
moon, the sun, Mars and Venus with an accuracy that wouldn't be
duplicated until the modern era. Like most premodern societies, the
Maya conceived of history not as the linear passage of time but as a
series of cycles - they called them "world age cycles" - that would
repeat over and over. To capture these cycles, the Maya employed what
scholars call the long-count calendar, a five-unit computational
system extending forward and backward from their mythical creation
day, which is calculated to have fallen on either Aug. 11, 3114 B.C.
or Aug. 13, 3114 B.C. All the current hoopla is due to the
mathematical fact that the current world-age cycle on the long count,
which began in Aug. 3114 B.C., is about to reach its end, 5,126 years
later, on a date given in scholarly notation as 13.0.0.0.0 - which
falls, not quite exactly, on Dec. 21, 2012. Enter the apocalypse.
I asked Jenkins how he viewed the passing of one world-age cycle into
another in December 2012, and he paused. It was a little bit like
asking a seismologist what he thinks about earthquakes. As much as
Jenkins has made a place for himself in the 2012 discussion through
his independent research on the Maya and precession, he has made an
even greater impact by applying academic rigor to the theories of his
contemporaries and exposing, in his books and on an extensive Web
site, their inconsistencies with established Mayanist scholarship.
Jenkins was the first to reveal a major flaw in the synchronization
between Arguelles's Dreamspell and the Mayan day count, and he has
been involved in an extensive, long-distance feud with Calleman since
2001 over their differing approaches to interpreting the Maya and over
Calleman's belief that the end time will be in 2011, not 2012. When I
first spoke to Jenkins on the phone, he told me, "I think of myself as
leading the charge for clarity and discernment."
"2012 is such a profound archetype," Jenkins went on. "Here we are
five and a half years before the date, and already there's so much
interest. Personally, I think it's about transformation and renewal.
It's certainly nothing as simplistic as the end of the world."
But what about the connection many people see between the approach of
2012 and environmental crisis? I asked. What about the popular link
between the Maya and end-time prophecy?
"A lot of people are talking about apocalypse right now," he said,
"but there's a deeper meditation that can and should happen around the
end date." Jenkins - bearded, in a T-shirt and jeans - is originally
from Chicago, and traces of a flat Midwestern accent remain in his
voice. He looked and sounded beleaguered by the mention of apocalypse.
"At any end-beginning nexus - at the dawn of a new religion or a
spiritual tradition - you have this amazing opening," he said.
"Revelations come down. There's a fresh awareness of what it means to
be alive in the full light of history."
To scholars monitoring the 2012 movement from their posts in academia
- and some do - this latter-day apotheosis of the Mayan calendar is a
source of frustration and an opportunity for deeper reflection. Or
sometimes, just an opportunity. Anthony Aveni, an archeoastronomer and
professor at Colgate, has a history with 2012 going back to the
Harmonic Convergence, when he was interviewed on CNN to provide some
perspective. "I got an offer from a literary agent to represent me the
same day," he told me. "So I'm grateful to Jos=E9 Arguelles for that."
Aveni is critical of Jenkins's approach and his galactic-alignment
theory. "I defy anyone to look up into the sky and see the galactic
equator," he said. "You need a radio telescope for that, and they were
not known anywhere in the world that I've heard of until the 1930s."
The real question, to him, is how an obscure, culturally circumscribed
issue like the end date of one Mayan long-count cycle could manage to
gain such traction in the wider world.
"Jenkins and Calleman and Arguelles are the Gnostics of our time,"
Aveni said. "They're seeking higher knowledge. They look for knowledge
framed in mystery. And there aren't many mysteries left, because
science has decoded most of them."
John Hoopes, an archaeologist at the University of Kansas, is more
complimentary of Jenkins's research, even if he doubts the validity of
his major conclusions, including the galactic-alignment theory. "John
Jenkins has done his homework on the ancient Maya," he told me, "and
he's thought about their culture a great deal. Arguelles and Calleman
largely disregard what we know the Maya believed." Still, like most
Mayan experts, Hoopes is not convinced that the Maya would have
considered the end of a world cycle to be an apocalyptic event; one
cycle could be subsumed into the next without a hiccup in the system,
let alone a rupture in the count of days.
In the wider discussion around 2012, Hoopes sees a parallel to the
debate going on in Kansas about teaching evolution and intelligent
design in the public schools. It is an issue he takes so seriously
that he has included the 2012 phenomenon in a course he developed
called "Archaeological Myths and Realities," which explores how
science and history are manipulated to serve a religious or political
agenda. Other examples include Nazi archaeology and the recently
heralded ancient "pyramids" in Bosnia. Referrring to occult
interpretations of the Maya, he says: "What's interesting is how this
fosters community in the New Age movement, and elsewhere, the same way
that the anti-evolutionists have coalesced around intelligent design.
I've started using the terms 'religious right' and 'spiritual left.' "
Toward the end of my visit with Jenkins in Colorado, we drove from his
home in Windsor to Denver - about 50 miles south - to meet his wife,
Ellen, for dinner and a screening of "2012: The Odyssey," a
documentary that Jenkins appears in along with Jos=E9 Arguelles and
other authorities on 2012. Jenkins had written me a long, discouraged
e-mail message that morning about an item he found on an academic
message board, linking to an article about 2012 from USA Today. The
article included a description of Jenkins's galactic-alignment theory
without citing him as the source, and to make matters worse, the
scholar who posted the link quoted a description of the galactic
alignment and asked, "Anyone want to speculate about what this
means?"
To Jenkins, it was further confirmation that his work is generally
ignored inside a scholarly community that he has looked to for
guidance and cited tirelessly in defense of the "authentic" Mayan
tradition. He told me, as we drove past new housing developments going
up where pastures had once been, that he had gone to conferences to
meet the most important Mayanists and had been sending out papers and
links to his Web site to selected scholars for years, but his attempts
at making contact were usually ignored.
"When you fund your own trip to do fieldwork by putting it on
MasterCard," he said, "and then they really don't want to engage in a
discussion with you, it's kind of like ... wrong universe, I guess."
I asked him if he thought this might have something to do with some of
his more speculative theories, like his assertion that the Maya had
practiced pranayama - yogic deep breathing - based on the posture of
Maya kings in certain paintings and carvings, which appears similar to
full lotus.
"It's the assemblage of evidence that leads to my reading," he
insisted. "It's not magically projecting something onto the images.
But ultimately there is some guesswork involved. How often can you be
100 percent sure of anything?"
By the time we drove up to the Oriental Theater in the Berkeley
Highlands section of Denver, his spirits had lifted again. The
Oriental is a handsome, Persian-themed theater from the 1920s that has
recently been refurbished after a long decline; it retains elements of
both the glamour of its distant past and the seediness left over from
its middle age as an adult theater. Now the Oriental is an arts center
with a regular schedule of film screenings and live entertainment.
"Look at that," Jenkins said with a gesture at the marquee, making
sure that I saw the big "2012" in black numerals.
While Jenkins mingled with the early arrivals inside the lobby, I sat
at a cafe table with his wife, a social worker at a hospital in
Boulder, and Gina Kissell, director of the Metaphysical Research
Society, a local group that offers workshops and programs in
comparative religion and spirituality. The society was a sponsor of
the screening that night, and Kissell, an ebullient woman in a
sequined top, was thrilled about the turnout. I asked her about 2012
and what it meant to her, and she started in without hesitating:
"To me it's all about a movement toward enlightenment. We say
compassion over competition. This whole shift in consciousness is
going to wipe away everything negative. Armageddon isn't what it used
to be, you know?" Kissell told me that she had recently tried spending
21 days without having a negative thought: "It's really hard! I tried,
but I didn't make it through the second week."
Inside the theater, it was a festive scene. The seating sections were
all full except for the balcony; a pair of waitresses roamed the
aisles taking drink and sandwich orders (the Oriental has a full bar
and panini menu); and the crowd presented a mix of the buttoned-down
and the Bohemian, trending toward the tattooed and pierced. Ellen
flashed me a proud look when Jenkins climbed onstage to give an
introduction, and he was met with a lively burst of applause. Dressed
in a well-worn jacket over a faded T-shirt, he could have been a
professor who never quite recovered from his graduate-school years.
Jenkins started by giving a primer of his theory about the galactic
alignment and how the ancient Maya had calibrated their long-count
calendar to coincide with this rare and transformative astronomical
event. He shared his belief, reflected in the mantra "As above, so
below," that our lives are influenced by larger forces in the universe
and that the Mayan sky watchers had used their sacred science to read
the stars and divine creation's deepest secrets. These same secrets
can be ours, according to Jenkins's theory, if we cup a hand to one
ear, raise it to the sky and listen.
"A lot of people ask me if the world is going to end in 2012," he
said, "and I've come up with the best way to address that. The short
answer is yes. The long answer is no."
Writing in the forward to Jenkins's "Maya Cosmogenesis 2012," Terrence
McKenna proffers that "we, by choice or design, actually live in the
end time anticipated by the ancient Maya shaman-prophets. Their bones
and their civilization have long since gone into the Gaian womb that
claims all the children of time. Indeed, their cities were ghostly
necropoleis by the time the Spanish conquerors first gazed upon them,
500 years ago. Yet it was our time that fascinated the Maya, and it
was toward our time that they cast their ecstatic gaze, though it lay
more than two millennia in the future at the time the first long-count
dates were recorded."
It is a splendid, human-size dream, that an ancient people revered for
unearthly wisdom could climb aboard a calendar ship and redeem us from
our troubled world and the confines of our vexing natures. Dec. 21,
2012, is already here - long before the date arrives - and perhaps it
has always been. End dates are not the stuff of fantasy, after all;
each and every one of us has a terminal appointment inscribed in our
calendars. And the end might just arrive sooner. Perhaps that is why
we need to imagine a supernatural force with one eye on a ticking
clock, waiting to make everything new again.
It is the Maya who bring us apocalypse this time, and when the next
one comes - well, we'll just have to wait and see if the world is
still here.
Benjamin Anastas, a novelist, previously wrote for the magazine about
Pentecostals.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com
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