What’s up with Mayan prophecies about the world ending in 2012?

Quick answer: There are no specific Mayan prophecies about 2012!

So what's this you've heard about the Mayan calendar coming to an end? Two analogies to help you understand the situation: If you drove your car for so many miles that the counters on the odometer ran out, what would happen when the mileage went back to 000,000? Or, if it turns out that the world still exists on December 31^st, 9999, what year will it be on the next day? As you can see, the main concern is Y2K-ish, because the counting systems in the Mayan calendar might not be set up to count these kinds of numbers.

A little more background, probably with flaws, because this is what I’ve come to understand by talking to folks on this trip—each with slightly different perspectives and information.

The oldest archaeological evidence of the Mayan civilization is found at Itzapa; we saw it at the beginning of this trip. Carvings there were marked with a Mayan calendar date which corresponds to about 300 B.C. This means that 2300 years ago, the Maya already had enough knowledge from astronomical observations to know that a year was 365 days. In fact, their calendar had 18 months of 20 days, and one “unlucky” month with just 5 days.

Can you see that there's a person on the right, holding what looks like a stalk of corn on the left?

Those people at Itzapa, in fact, believed they were living around the year 4000, because for them the year 0 was when they were created, out of corn. In fact, the humans made from corn were actually the third or fourth attempt by the gods to make people. The first created beings couldn’t talk, so they became the animals. Then the gods made beings out of mud, but they washed away in the rain. Then the gods made creatures out of wood, but they couldn’t think: these are the monkeys. Finally, the gods made a dough out of corn, and from that dough they created humans, making us all, as one Mexican told us, “walking tortillas”!

And how do we know these creation stories? Again, a few things to think about. The Maya civilization had thriving city states from about 300 B.C. to 1100 A.D. These cities, many of which Nichole and I visited, were often ruled by kings. They had elaborate religious ceremonies overseen by priests, honoring a pantheon of gods linked to nature and to astronomy. They had trade networks which stretched into northern Mexico, east into the Carribean, and south to the Amazon. They had systems for collecting water and growing corn and other crops, they had tools for construction and ceremony and war, and they had artists who carved and painted records of their history.  Most of the knowledge of reading and writing and astronomy was confined to a relatively small class of the wealthy people.

The Maya city-states had all basically collapsed by the time the first Europeans came to Mexico, probably because of internal political problems as the ruling class went crazy from too many generations of in-breeding or as a drought or some other problem incited the people to revolution. In any case, the Maya people the Europeans met were living in small agricultural communities, speaking their indigenous language, and still celebrating the Mayan religion—but the vast majority of them could not read or write or explain the astronomical underpinnings of their once-flourishing society.

This sign, at Yaxchilan, is written in Spanish, English, and a local Mayan language,
here written with the alphabet that is familiar to us.

There were, however, books on bark written in Mayan glyphs, and there was a vast oral knowledge of the history and culture, which Europeans listened to and recorded in books using the Latin alphabet (this one I am typing in). The most famous of the latter is the Popol Vuh; among other stories, it contains an account of the creation of the corn people.

At some point in the Spanish conquest of Mexico, Catholic priests determined that the bark books of the Maya were evil and ordered them burned; today, only four of these books, called the Maya codices, remain. There are abundant carvings and paintings with original Mayan glyphs, but, like the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians, these have taken a lot of time and effort to “decode,” as archaeologists try to match the recorded symbols with the spoken language which was recorded in the Popol Vuh and other books. Variations of this language are still spoken by Mayan descendents today.

Weren’t we talking about the calendar? Ok, back to the calendar! For the Maya, the modern calendar started with the creation of the corn people and progressed through a series of months and years fairly similar to the one we use today. Running concurrently with this 365 day calendar, they also had a religious calendar based on 260 day cycles. If you think of these two calendars as wheels with cogs, you can imagine that while they both started out at day one, having the beginnings of each cycle occurring simultaneously would be fairly rare. It’s a least common multiple problem—and the answer turns out to be that the cycles start over together every 52 years.

This means that these calendars were sufficient for keeping track of things that happened in 52 year spans of time—probably long enough for most people that any given combination of dates happened only once in their lifetime. But clearly, if the oldest records we have are dated in the year 4000, the Maya had something more than this calendar; it is called the “long count.”

This carving, from Yaxchilan, has glyphs (lower right)
which could indicate, among other things, the date of the events described.

The 365- and 260-day calendars are cyclical; they come back to the beginning and start again, much like the cycles of human lives, or of celestial bodies. The long count calendar starts at 0 and moves forward, or at least it kept moving forward during all of the time the Maya were actually using it. Was it truly a linear calendar with the capacity to keep counting infinitely forward (by essentially moving to larger place values)?  Or, was it also conceived as cyclical, with an exceptionally long cycle?

Well, we’ll probably never know, but on Dec. 21^st, 2012, the Mayan long count will reach the end of its current formation. Perhaps it was designed to recycle, like your odometer; perhaps it was designed to move to a new place value, like New Year’s Day, 10,000.

Sense the mystery?

We’ve asked everyone about it, and the impression we get is that most people see it as hype designed to boost the tourism industry! While there are a few Mayan communities in Guatemala and the highlands of Chiapas who still use the 365- and 260-day calendars in daily life, those people have adapted our “Roman” calendar for the “long count”—so even they don’t know or care what happens to the Mayan long count.  My personal theory is that if there is a new creation at that time, it will be people made of computer chips--which won't actually be an advancement after us walking tortillas!

 

--Kris