A leading expert on the Mayans said so.
Is the end of the world coming on December 21? Some people are worried it will, based on an ancient Mayan calendar that comes to an end on that date. Eugen Tomiuc talked to leading Maya scholar and anthropologist Geoffrey Braswell, from the University of California in San Diego, about the Mesoamerican civilization's time-counting science.
There's a lot of fear of -- or at least, a lot of
interest in -- the end of the world coming on December 21. Those saying
the end is nigh mostly base their prophecy on the Mayan calendar, which
is about to come to an end on that date. But the Mayans are known to
have had various ways of counting the time. Could you offer us some
details?The three most important calendars -- one is
a 260-day ritual year, another is a 365-day year and together those two
repeat every 52 years in a big cycle [Eds: known as the Calendar
Round]. But they also kept track of time in 20-year units called katuns,
and 20 katuns is a baktun. So they counted the days since creation
almost as though your car counts the days or the miles of the
kilometers. And just as the old-fashioned odometers had wheels that
turned, so did the wheels in the Mayan calendar. What's happening right
now is that we're at a point where the car odometer might reset back to
all zeroes.
Are all these still being used by the present-day Maya population? Are they also preparing for Doomsday?
The 260-day ritual calendar has always been used, and
today, Maya priests still use it in highland Guatemala. The 365-day
year was also used up to the time of [European] conquest and later. The
Long Count [eds: calendar used to track longer periods of time] date --
that's the important one for 2012 issue -- the Maya themselves stopped
using that some time around 1100 or so, maybe 1000. However, there are
records they were using the other calendars that overlapped with that,
so we were able to more or less figure it out. Also, the Maya kept track
of astronomical events, particularly lunar calendars, and those often
appeared alongside the Long Count -- this is the number of days since
creation.
So the prophecy is based on a calendar -- the 5,125
year Long Count -- which the Maya stopped using a millennium ago. Could
you explain it in more detail?
[Besides the ritual 260-day calendar] the Maya
calendar had a solar year of 365 days, they did not have leap days or
leap years, like we do. The Maya dating didn't have leap years at all,
so every year they went off by approximately a quarter of a day. But
they could count time -- days -- very well, hence the Long Count, which
is the calendar of the number of days since creation in August 11, 3114
B.C.
Meaning that the 13th baktun is about to end this Long
Count on December 21 after some... 1,872,000 days. That is, indeed a very
long count. Is there any specific connection in Mayan mythology between
this date and the end of the world?
In the Mayan calendar or inscriptions themselves we
only have two mentions of the 2012 date at all, which seems to suggest
that they didn't think it was very important if they only mentioned it
twice. In one case, a monument from the site of Tortuguero [in Mexico]
mentions a defeat in battle back in the 600s or 700s of a local king and
then it counts forward to this day (December 21), and it says the Bolon
Yokte -- or the nine gods -- will descend from Heaven and will do...
something. Unfortunately, that something, that hieroglyph, is broken
off.
That beats Hollywood in terms of a good cliffhanger...
Yes, the nine gods will be sent and... aarghhh. It's
kind of like a Monty Python sketch. The second text was just found this
year and it too discusses events in the 600s, one politician visiting
another and playing a ball game, of all things, and then it counts
forward, it counts to one major ending which took place in 831 or I
should say, [Calendar Round] cycle ending, which was 100,000 in the
Mayan calendar and then it counts forward to 2012. So in that case,
again, they don't say what's going to happen.
Do the Maya say anything about the world not ending on December 21?
There is a very important text from the Mayan site of
Palenque [in Mexico] carved by King Pakal, who died in 683. Well, this
text at Palenque actually will count forward to the next major cycle
[Long Count], which is in 4772, October 11. Well, the king says that
eight days after that next cycle closes he will return and rule once
again. So, clearly he didn't believe the world was going to end. He had
big plans for 2,700 years from now. So, no, in the hieroglyphs
themselves we have no clear information that the world will end and we
even have on text that says it won't because there will be things that
happen after this date.
One of the first questions tweeted to Pope Benedict, who
launched his Twitter account this month, was something like, "is the
world going to end on December 21," and it prompted assurance from the
Vatican that a doomsday scenario "is not even worth discussing." Other
religious leaders have also given similar statements. To what extent is
this reflecting people's need for balance between scientific fact and
religious reassurance?
There is some sort of desire to make a synthesis of
both spiritual ideas and also science. And you can trace that back to
theosophy at the turn of the last century. So I think there is a
synthesis here of both science and spirituality which in our age is
something that people want. They want to somehow be able to cross that
great divide -- what [British scientist and novelist] C.P. Snow called
'the two cultures' -- and try to find meaning in both worlds.
This post appears courtesy of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.



