The Maya and 2012: a dossier (part I)

This is the first of a two-part series on the Maya and 2012. Click here for Part II.

They’re everywhere. The ancient Maya, that is, and their amazingly sophisticated calendar that’s mysteriously programmed to reset December 21, 2012. The 2012 date has been seized upon by everyone from New Agers, to black helicopter types to Peak Oilers, as the focal calendar date for end times. This confluence of apocalyptic expectations reminiscent of the Y2k scare has not gone unnoticed by filmmakers and publishers. As early as 2006, when Mel Gibson released his historical epic Apocalypto, the Maya and their eschatology began turning up everywhere in pop culture– books, movies, documentaries, YouTube videos, etc. This post summarizes two key facets of the phenomenon. It focuses on the upcoming Hollywood movie and cites academics trying to tame 2012 hype with the latest findings in scholarship about the Maya. Part II of this post, later this week next week next month, will introduce the various interesting figures popularizing 2012 as a cosmic reckoning. Later this month, over at New America Media, I’m publishing a profile of José Arguelles, a Minnesota-born art historian of Mexican descent whose 1987 book The Mayan Factor is an early classic of the 2012 corpus. Meanwhile, enjoy these links.

I. 2012 Hollywood-style

In November this year, writer/director Roland Emmerich, Hollywood’s apocalypse specialist (he also directed The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day), will release his new blockbuster: 2012, with John Cusack and Woody Harrelson. 2012’s teaser trailer begins with a Tibetan lama running barefoot to a  mountaintop temple. Desperately, he rings a large bell, presumably to warn all of Tibet apocalypse is afoot. He’s too late– a huge tsunami suddenly crests over  snowy Himalayan ridges, and sweeps the temple, prayer flags and all, into a watery oblivion. Another trailer is a two minute compendium of tsunamis, meteor showers and Richter scale-busting earthquakes. Obviously, the world’s done for. Posters for the 2012 movie cry out: “The Mayans warned us, find out the truth.” The studio behind 2012 has also launched a viral Internet campaign, which includes a blog and a website for a bogus Institute for Human Continuity.

II. The academics

At the website of the authoritative Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies (FAMSI) Maya expert Mark Van Stone posts a series of papers entitled “It’s Not the End of the World: What the Ancient Maya Tell Us About 2012.”

While attempting to debunk most of the 2012 alarmism, Van Stone does acknowledge the accuracy of the Dec. 21, 2012 date itself: “… let me affirm that the year 2012 does hold particular significance in Mayan scholarship. Those of us who study the ancient and modern Maya …  have been anticipating the end of the Maya Great Cycle for some time. We write it 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ajaw 3 K’ank’in. We have known for half a century that this date probably correlates to December 21 (or December 23) in the year 2012 in the Gregorian calendar.”

However, Van Stone argues the Maya didn’t foresee major disasters as a result of this momentous date (the cycle is 144,000 years long): “Maya inscriptions that predict the future consistently show that they expected life to go on pretty much the same forever.” His FAQ on the 2012 topic is immensely informative.

Robert Sitler, a professor at Stetson University in Florida, tries to draw on indigenous sources, both ancient and modern, to give us Mayans’ own perspective on 2012. One contemporary Maya source he cites, José María Tol Chan, says: “It’s not that we are arriving at a zero hour in 2012, it’s already beginning.”

Tol Cha and other present-day Maya (millions of Mayan-speaking people live in Mexico and Central America) cited by Sitler argue their traditions don’t envision anything like a sudden spontaneous combustion of the earth or an immediate end to civilization. Some Maya do believe a series of disturbances will peak around the 2012 date. These disruptive events (political, environmental, etc.) have already begun, according to a couple of sources cited by Sitler, and will continue after 2012. The sources don’t see 2012 as a dead-end, but as a sort of test for humanity’s ability to reform itself, and in particular, fix its relationship with the planet.

A separate, but related question about the Maya, somewhat touched on in Apocalypto, is why their great classical cities in the Yucatan peninsula and elsewhere collapsed around the 9th Century A.D. In his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond argues resource-pillaging, exacerbated by competitive warfare and monument-building, doomed the classic Maya. For the many eco-moralists engaged with the 2012 phenomenon, it’s clear the ancient Maya Empire suffered a kind of deserved punishment for its imperial excesses– they were banished back to the jungle, their monumental cities in ruin, left to howler monkeys and jaguars. They believe a similar fate will befall industrial civilization on 12/21/12 or thereabouts.

This is the first of a two-part series on the Maya and 2012. Click here for Part II.