MAYAN CALENDAR

The Mayan calendar carries a 3,000 year old prophesy of doom. Like every religion and every ancient civilization, it predicts the end of humanity. Specifically, the calendar predicts the human race will cease to exist on the “Day of the Dead,” which we call the winter solstice (the 21st day of December), in the year 2012. This doomsday prophecy could be easily dismissed -- by “rational” people -- simply as the superstitious nonsense of jungle-dwelling savages who hadn’t even invented the wheel. Yet, the Maya possessed advanced knowledge of architecture, astronomy, and mathematics (they invented the zero, for instance) that rivals modern scientific knowledge. By analogy, the Maya were like a child who could master Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, but could not bang out “Chopsticks.”

Simplistically, a calendar is a tool designed to determine (as accurately as possible) the Earth’s annual orbit around the sun. Our modern Western ("Gregorian") calendar was introduced in Europe in 1582. It calculates the Earth’s solar orbit as 365.2500 days, which incorporates a very small error of .0003 days per year. Quite impressive for 16th-century scientists! The Maya received their calendar from their predecessors, the Olmec – a mysterious people whose origins trace back well over 4,000 years. The Olmec, entirely without precision instruments, calculated the solar year to be 365.2495 days, which incorporates an even smaller error of .0002 days per year. The 3,000-year-old Mayan calendar is actually 1/10,000 of a day MORE accurate than the calendar currently in use.

The creator of the doomsday calendar was an Olmec teacher known to the Maya as Kukulcan. He was a tall, white-haired and white-bearded Caucasian, who was also known to the Aztecs … and known to the Egyptians and Incas as well. Kukulcan left four informational “codices” when he -- as a VERY old man -- disappeared sometime after 1,100 AD. Several hundred years later (1519), Spain invaded the Yucatan Peninsula. Since Conquistador Hernando Cortez was a bearded white man, both Maya and Aztec civilizations laid down their weapons and rather peacefully allowed themselves to be conquered, thinking that their Caucasian Messiah had returned. Catholic priests took possession of the codices, and were so frightened by what they read that they burned the entire set.

The Mayan calendar’s origins are centered on the Popol Vuh, the Book of Creation. According to this “Bible of the Mesoamerican Indians,” the universe is divided into an Overworld (heaven), a Middleworld (earth) and an Underworld (hell, which they called Xibalba), accessed by the dark central snake-like rift -- the elongated band of interstellar clouds -- of the Milky Way galaxy. The Maya called this rift Xibalba Be (the Black Road), and its portal/gateway was represented in both Olmec and Mayan art as the mouth of an enormous serpent. Xibalba was ruled by the god of death, Hurakan. The English word “hurricane” is derived from that name, since the deity existed inside a maelstrom. The Aztecs had the same legend, but their name for the white teacher was Quetzalcoatl, and their underworld deity was named Tezcatilpoca.

The Mayan calendar is divided into five Great Cycles, the first of which began about 25,800 years ago, which coincides with the Popol Vuh’s date of creation. This is not an arbitrary or coincidental time period. It is the time required for Earth to complete one cycle of precession, the slow “wobble” of our planet on its axis. The first sunrise of each new Mayan year occurs on the December (winter) solstice. The prophesied date of doom is the winter solstice in the year 2012 – exactly one 25,788-year precessional cycle from the date of creation (the very first day of the Mayan calendar).

Using a sophisticated computer program that forecasts the cosmos, I calculated the night sky as it will appear in 2012. Beginning at the autumnal equinox, an extremely rare astronomical alignment will start to occur between the galactic and solar planes. The Milky Way will appear to sit (level) on the Earth’s horizon, and the sun will slowly approach alignment with the Milky Way’s center point. On the day of the winter solstice (a day considered evil by every ancient culture), for the first time in more than 25 millennia, the sun will rise directly over the Galactic Equator, at the exact center of the galaxy. Over 3,000 years ago, the Mayan calendar accurately predicted this previously-unknown celestial event.

The calendar says on that day, the Mayan Underworld of Xibalba will open …