The 2012 Story_The Myths, Fallacies, and Truth Behind the Most Intriguing Date in History (John Major Jenkins)
– Highlight Loc. 108-11
It was not perceived as some dramatic doomsday apocalypse, as our modern media repeatedly prefers to portray it. Instead, the creators of the 2012 calendar utilized sophisticated spiritual teachings intended to facilitate a process of spiritual transformation and renewal. This was clearly big news, given that, in the mid-1990s when I made these discoveries, scholars had said nothing about 2012 and the doomsday interpretation was on the rise in the popular media.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 404-8
are some things that American Indians were doing all on their own: metallurgy, brain surgery, plant breeding, medicinal healing, mathematics, astronomy, massive architecture, art, music, and poetry. The gist of the prejudice is to not allow the Maya and other Native Amercian groups the same level of intellectual ability and cultural sophistication as that attributed to Western cultures. The problem has been endemic in scholarship. In the evolving understanding of the 2012 topic over the last twenty-five years, I’ve often encountered echoes of this attitude, an underinformed prejudice masquerading as coolheaded rationalism.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 509-11
Brasseur came to believe that Egypt and Central America were rooted in the same cultural origin, and at other times migrations were caused by comets, meteors, and geological disruptions having celestial origins.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 658-60
The Long Count calendar is intimately involved in these disciplines, and was used on hundreds of carved monuments and ceramic vessels for almost a thousand years (from roughly 36 BC to 909 AD). Mathematically, it is a system of counting days that uses five place values: the Kin (1 day), the Uinal (20 days), the Tun (360 days), the Katun (7,200 days), and the Baktun (144,000 days).
==========
– Highlight Loc. 769-74
Campbell wrote “myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestations.”27 Mythologies and the symbols they contain are not merely signposts for moral decrees, but embody collective and universal themes. The symbol, which is what hieroglyphic writing most closely represents (much more so than alphabetic script), is thus a doorway that leads the open mind into a higher, more integrative space. Religious art and iconography was originally intended to be anagogical in precisely this way, to lead the viewer, the initiate, upward into the mystery of the symbol’s ineffable root.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 775-
symbols are the language of this Perennial Philosophy and should be correctly interpreted as being much more than signs.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 804-6
There has been, on one hand, a tendency to see the ancient Maya as high-minded philosophers advancing human knowledge in ways comparable to those of the Greeks, Egyptians, and Hindus. Then, on the other hand, scholars dispense with such views of the ancient Maya (even if they are true) and instead focus on warfare, sacrifice, resource management, kingly power trips, and all the tangible nuts and bolts of running a civilization.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 815-18
Those who see the ancient Maya as warmongers are more likely than not engaging in a psychological shadow projection, denying their own ignorance and savagery and projecting it onto a handy “other.” The same kind of projection happens with 2012, which is turned into an apocalypse when the Maya, having a cyclic time philosophy, would never have thought about cycle endings in such a way. Many have projected the concept of the apocalypse onto 2012 when it was never there in the first place.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 984-86
Cultural changes, historical processes, and the genesis of calendrical traditions are always a lot more complicated than we would hope, and to say that Izapa gave birth to the Long Count may be overly simplistic.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1006-8
As other sites adopted the Long Count, its functions embraced more than just timekeeping. It was inextricably interwoven with kingship, astronomy, building dedications, sacrifice and renewal rites, warfare, mythology, huge distance-number calculations, and ritually timed ceremony.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1010
The three main components of the system are the 260-day tzolkin, the 365-day haab, and the 20-base Long Count system.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1011-15
The tzolkin, the haab, the Calendar Round, and the Venus Round comprise one coherently integrated system of timekeeping, astronomy, and theological beliefs and was used by both the Maya and the Central Mexican cultures, including the Aztecs. None of these calendars, however, are responsible for the famed 2012 cycle-ending date. The cycle ending in 2012 is an artifact of a uniquely Maya calendar called the Long Count. This is fact numero uno of the 2012 topic, in light of which the many designer systems that modern authors are inventing should be taken with a rather large grain of salt.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1017-19
The tzolkin consists of 13 numbers and 20 day-signs. Each day-sign has an oracular meaning, with many layers of linguistic puns and cultural references that provide a rich database for Maya calendar priests to weave their interpretations.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1022-23
The thirteen numbers provide three levels of qualities that affect the intensity of the day-sign. Numbers 1-4 are mild, 5-9 are neutral, and numbers 10-13 are intense.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1028-29
The important thing to be aware of is that the same placement of the tzolkin was followed throughout Mesoamerica prior to the Conquest.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1036-37
A Calendar Round is completed when the tzolkin and haab come back to their starting points together, which takes 18,980 days (13 days less than 52 solar years).
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1043-45
The Year Bearers symbolize the four directions, the four quarters of the year (two equinoxes and two solstices), and the four sacred mountains. Of the four Year Bearers one is chief, and in the earliest calendar system the chief Year Bearer was symbolically associated with the December solstice, because that is the most important turnabout day in the year, when the light returns and the sun is reborn.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1051-53
In effect, Venus traces a five-pointed star around the zodiac during this time, explaining the ancient Babylonian association of Venus with pentagrams. All of the cycles of sun, tzolkin, and Venus are completed in two Calendar Rounds, just under 104 years. This period is called the Venus Round.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1058-59
This is the calendar that targets 2012 as the end of a vast cycle of time, a key concept in the Maya doctrine of World Ages.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1074-78
The “zero” date is written 0.0.0.0.0 but can also be written 13.0.0.0.0 (as the completion day of the previous cycle). The “end-date” of a 13-Baktun cycle is thus written 13.0.0.0.0. The use of the term “end-date” gives rise to the mistaken notion that the Maya calendar ends in 2012. But Maya time is cyclic, and it should go without saying that time continues into the next cycle. We use similar conventions in our language when we speak of “the end of the day,” but we don’t expect the world to end at midnight.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1084-87
A primary fact that needs to be appreciated is what I call “the equation of Maya time,” which is this: 13.0.0.0.0 = December 21, 2012 = 4 Ahau.16 In addition to these systems, the Maya also tracked the 9-day cycle of the Lords of the Night, as well as an 819-day cycle that involves Jupiter.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1087-90
For the purpose of understanding 2012, one first needs to know that December 21, 2012, is the end of the 13-Baktun cycle in the Long Count calendar, and in Maya philosophy the 13-Baktun cycle equals one “World Age.” Furthermore, it is important to clarify that December 21, 2012, is not the invention of imaginative modern writers but is a true and established artifact of the Maya
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1109-11
On Copán Stela C, which contains this Long Count date, the ruler 18 Rabbit has the Venus emblem in his headgear. Also on this date, the sun was aligned with the dark rift. The popularity of this date may be rooted in this astronomical occurrence, since it evokes the alignment that falls on the cycle ending in 2012 (sun in the dark rift, on the solstice).
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1132-36
The Maya were apparently fond of generating huge numbers, which may have been attempts to find the grand number that would unify all the astronomical cycles. Greek mathematicians attempted the same thing as they grappled with the duration of the Great Year—it was supposed to be a harmonious 36,000 years, according to Plato, but the discovery of the great cycle of the precession of the equinoxes suggests a figure thousands of years less. Perhaps the Maya intended these huge numbers to represent, in a very general sense, the awesome immensity of the universe.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1140-42
Creation Mythology’s “three-stone” symbolism itself was used as a shorthand for the 3114 BC date.21 This practice has important ramifications for understanding how the Maya referenced the 2012 date in their hieroglyphic texts.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1146-47
It is this new perspective on textual evidence for 2012 being an intentional and important concept in ancient Maya cosmology that constitutes a very promising new tool for identfying 2012 references in the inscriptions.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1343-44
Terence advanced the notion that time is not a constant but has different qualities tending toward either “habit” or “novelty.” This idea counters a fundamental premise of Western science—that the quality of time is constant.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1351-54
the I Ching: Book of Changes and consult the reading. The sequence in which the 64 hexagrams are ordered, known as the King Wen sequence, appears to be random, but Terence did an analysis of the “degree of difference” between each successive hexagram and found a statistical anomaly suggesting that, for some reason, the Ken Wen sequence was an intentional construct. With the degrees of difference codified into numerical values, Terence was able to graph a wave, and this became the Novelty Time Wave.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1356-59
Terence noticed that the time wave exhibited a quality of “self-same similarity.” It unfolded like a fractal pattern in which a given small section of the wave was found to be identical in form to a larger section of the wave. Because the wave displayed the ebb and flow of novelty within time, Terence called this fractal modeling of time Temporal Resonance.5 It implied that larger intervals, occurring long ago, contained the same amount of information as shorter, more recent, intervals.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1395-96
One’s experience of time, fast or slow, is a function of the state of mind one is in. This can be noted in the reports of elderly people, for whom time seems to go very quickly.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1398-1402
There are real neurological reasons for this experience of the elderly, based in the brain’s synaptic processing of information, which slows down with age. The bandwidth, you might say, has narrowed and therefore events (time) must pass through a smaller conduit. Consciousness thus restricted experiences time moving more quickly. Visionaries experiencing ecstasy, however, undergo a heightened and intensified cerebral processing, an enlarging of the synaptic bandwidth, resulting in time slowing down. When it slows down so much that the experience of the flow of time has ceased, the door to eternity is opened. Eternity isn’t a long period of time; eternity is the cessation of time.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1404-5
Eternity is the experience of the cessation of the passage of time, time slowed down because the mind and heart have been completely opened in love.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1407
In ancient mystery religions, the experience was an initiation into the eternal Mysteries.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1455-56
Similarly, the experience of time speeding up probably has more to do with the state of our consciousness than with the boiling over of external events in history.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1585-
a free-form kind of mythmaking can be dangerous—especially if it develops into a self-referential system divorced from traditional principles (in this instance, the facts of the Maya calendar), dislocating rather than illuminating the core ideas.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1772-75
One of Hancock’s beliefs is that the Maya’s calendar wisdom must have been handed down from a previous high civilization, and this was a reiteration of his main thesis, that of an earlier source-civilization that existed before the currently accepted dawn of human civilization some 6,000 years ago in the Middle East.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1902-
The solution to problems is often not reached by rationally processing the data. German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé discovered the symmetrical ring shape of the benzene molecule in a daydream, thereby solving the baffling problem of how to account for all its molecular constituents.
==========
– Highlight Loc. 1927-38
We can discern something else about breakthroughs in understanding 2012. This “understanding” has a threefold aspect. First, there is the nuts-and-bolts reconstruction of the Long Count calendar developed by the ancient Maya, along with any associated beliefs and traditions, which is what concerns us right now. Second, there is a more universal perennial wisdom that the Maya philosophy of time is an expression of. Doctrines of sacrifice, which the Maya are known for, are found practiced all over world history, and a study of their inner meaning reveals profound parallels.4 Similarly, Amazonian shamanic rites of healing can be interpreted as psycho-spiritual methodologies analogous to the swooning initiatory rites in the mystery cult at Delphi in ancient Greece. Having identified these core archetypes of the belief system, we could then explore the implicit metaphysics of transformation with a more universal approach, drawing valid and illuminating cross-comparisons with other traditions. Third, we can understand that 2012 basically represents the shift from one World Age to the next World Age. In other words, it addresses the challenge of spiritual awakening or the transformation of consciousness (something that is a concern for many people). We can then acknowledge, and practice, a type of understanding best called “gnosis”—direct inner experience of wisdom—which is achieved by applying perennial methods such as meditation.
==========
GiCheon 