Not the New Age!

I should explain – should, perhaps, have already explained – that I am not a believer in the late Mr McKenna’s ideas, or in M Vallée’s, for that matter, and certainly not in Mr John Major Jenkins’s.

Like many other ‘New Agers’, apparently, Mr Jenkins is fascinated by the Mayans, and their Long Count Calendar in particular. This, it has been established, has a start time/date that corresponds to 0.00 GMT on the Gregorian Calendar’s Monday, 11^th August, 3114 BC (Julian Day Number 584282.5), and an end time/date that corresponds to the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere/Summer Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere of 2012 AD: to be precise, 11.11 (AM) GMT, on Friday, 21^st December, 2012 (Julian Day Number 2456282.9659722224).

According to Mr Jenkins, this end time/date corresponds to the end of the current Great, or Platonic, Year – the cycle of the precession of the equinoxes. He is simply wrong about that – it does not, in fact it isn’t due to end for another 600 years! (See: http://www.wwu.edu/depts/skywise/a101_precession.html). In fact, it is very unlikely that the Mayans knew about precession, and certainly not to the degree of precision required by Mr Jenkins’ theory (see: http://www.instituteofmayastudies.org/Milbrath2012.pdf).

He also argues that the Winter (or Summer, depending on which Hemisphere you’re in) Solstice Sun of 2012 will be passing through the exact centre of an area of the sky that corresponds to what we call the Galactic Dark Rift (or ‘Great Rift’), and that the Mayans knew that this would be the case. Susan Milbrath rightly points out that, in the absence of NASA’s high technology, that is, to say the least, highly improbable. In any event, it is not true – for the Sun was actually closer to the centre of the Dark Rift back in 1998 (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_phenomenon).

The Great Rift consists of overlapping, non-luminous clouds of dust and gas located between the Solar System and the Sagittarius Arm of the Galaxy, about 100 parsecs (326.16 light years) from Earth. They are estimated to have a total mass equal to about 1 million Suns (1.9891 × 10³⁶ kg.

The Rift starts in the constellation Cygnus, passes through Aquila (‘The Eagle’), Ophiucus (‘The Serpent Bearer’), where it widens, Sagittarius (‘The Archer’), where it obscures the Galactic Centre (officially the powerful radio source, Sagittarius A*, almost certainly a super-massive black hole), before finally ending in Centaurus. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Rift_(astronomy).

The Milky Way was, according to Milbrath, perceived by the Maya as a cosmic serpent – a feathered or plumed one (K’uk’ulkan, in Yucatec) – which the Aztecs named Queztalco’atl (Classical Nahuatl: ‘feathered serpent’). It encompassed the World Tree, the Ceiba, which linked the heavens, the realm of the gods, the Earth, and Xibalba, the Underworld. The similarity to the Norse world picture is obvious, except that in the Norse case, the cosmic serpent, Jörmungandir (Niðhŏggr), apart from not being feathered, encompasses, not the heavenly realm, which in the Norse case is Asgard, but Middle Earth, Midgard, and lies at the foot of the World Ash Tree, Yggdrasill. (See: HR Ellis Davidson, God and Myths of Northern Europe, Penguin, 1964, pp.227, 234-5, 240; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B6rmungandr).

Another important feature of the Mayan cosmic serpent is that it swallows its own tail, like the Ouroboros (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros), that classic symbol of eternity and cyclic time, as does the Midgard Serpent – another interesting similarity, which almost makes one think there might be something in Jung’s idea of the Collective Unconscious after all.

The Great Dark Rift was also seen, by some Mayans at least, as the Xibalba be’, or ‘Dark Road’, which led to Xibalba, the Underworld (literally, ‘The Place of Fear’), ruled by twelve gods or demons, know as the Lords of Xibalba, chief of whom, according to the Popol Vuh, are Hun-Came (‘One-Death’) and Vucub-Came (‘Seven-Death’). The Orion Nebula is the physical location of Xibalba, according to Darren Aronofsky, although the K’iche’ Maya of Guatemala, who identify the Xibalba be’ as the Dark Rift, also claim that the entrance to Xibalba is to be found in a cave in the vicinity of Cobán, 219 km N of Guatemala City. Cave systems in Belize have also been identified as the entrance (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xibalba), just as Avernus, near Cumae, was the supposed entrance to the underworld of Roman mythology (by Virgil, e.g., in the Aeneid, see Aen. VI, 126f., ‘Facilis descensus Averni:/Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;/Sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,/Hoc opus, hic labor est.’^[1]; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avernus).

For the Mayans, the Milky Way was not just the feathered serpent, K’uk’ulkan, but the Sac be’ or Zac be’ – The White Road. It is the White Road, not the Dark Road, that we should be focussing on, in trying to understand the Mayan cosmology and Mayan religious belief. The Xibalba be’ was the road to hell – Xibalba was a bad place, as not only the name, but the description in the Popol Vuh makes clear – the equivalent of the Greek Tartaros, the Norse Niflheim and the Christian Hell (see: Ellis Davidson, op.cit., p.235; Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, Vol.1, Penguin, 1960, pp.106, 112, 362-6; Vol.2, Penguin, 1960, pp.152-8, 409).

The anthropologist, Dr Steven Mizrach, of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Florida International University, Miami, argues in a paper entitled ‘The White Road of Yucatán. The Mayan Sacbe System Analyzed as an Information Web’, that K’uk’ulkan may have been a priest of a deity of the same name, who as the feathered serpent represents both the Earth – shedding his skin and regenerating – and Heaven – with his wings, carrying the élan vital of Heaven to Earth. Mizrach compares him to the Greek Hermes/Roman Mercury, the messenger-god and god of secret knowledge (as in ‘hermeneutics’, the science of interpreation, from Greek hermēneutikos; hermēneus, an interpreter; from Hermēs, the god; Hermetic Tradition, derived from the name, Hermēs Trismesgistos, ‘Thrice-Great Hermes’, pseudepigraphical author of the Corpus Hermeticum [prob. 2^nd/3^rd Cent. AD]) with his symbol of the caduceus, the staff bearing twin entwined snakes (which is also, incidentally, the symbol of Asklepios [Aesculapius], the Greek god of healing). See: http://www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/white-roads.html.

To return, finally, to the Mayan Long Count Calendar. The Long Count was essentially, though not strictly, vigesimal, that is to say, it operated on a base-20 system. Twenty k’ins (days) made 1 uinal, or ‘month’. Eighteen of these make 1 tun. Twenty tuns make a k’atun, and twenty k’atuns equals 1 b’ak’tun = 20 × 18 × 20 × 20 = 144,000 days. Thirteen b’ak’tuns = 1,872,000 days, which is one Long Count Cycle, not counting the hours and minutes. That’s 5,125.2566735 Julian Years (a Julian Year is 365.25 days long, to take account of leap years).

How did the Mayans come up with this number, and why 13 b’ak’tuns, as opposed to say, 14, or 15, or some other number?

Well, one of the other calendars they used, the Tzolk’in, had a ‘year’ of 260 days, consisting of 20 named days combined with a repeating cycle of 13 days, which Spanish scholars dubbed the trecena (Spanish, trece, ‘thirteen’): 20 × 13 = 260. Vincent H Malström, of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, US, in his paper, ‘Origin of the Mesoamerican 260-Day Calendar’, Science 181:939-41 (http://www.dartmouth.edu/~izapa/M-1.pdf), argues that this calendar arose among several Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican peoples (the Toltecs, Olmecs and Aztecs as well as the Mayans) from observations of the number of days between transits of the zenithal Sun in tropical latitudes, circa 15° N. It would have been easy to see on what two days the Sun did not cast a shadow from a particular stick or stone at noon, and count the number of days between them, quickly establishing that it comes to 260. The Tzolk’in Calendar was (and still is) used for religious and ceremonial purposes by the Mayans.

To convert from Tzolk’in to Long Count, it is only necessary to perform the following arithmetical calculation: 260 (= 13 × 20) × 20 × 20 × 18 = 1,872,000 days; but those are exactly the numbers that the Mayan Long Count uses, when multiplying k’ins, uinals, and so on.

It is fascinating to see how this cultural meme has arisen, but to blame the Maya for it is unfair and misleading. The Long Count end-date does not represent the Apocalypse, and those expecting to see Planet X/Nibiru slamming into the Earth that day, or the arrival/unveiling of the Antichrist, or the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius, or whatever, are likely to be disappointed. Some nutters think the Antichrist is already here – he’s Barack Obama (or Vladimir Putin, or whoever)!! With some of that, and some slightly more sensible, and non-racist, views, see: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread457040/pg1.

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^[1] ‘The road to Hell is easy:/the black gates of Dis stand open night and day;/but to retrace one’s steps, and return to the upper air,/that is toil, that is labour.’