The Mayan Calendar Explained

The Mayan Calendar is comprised of three concepts of time, which occur simultaneously:

• Sacred Calendar (tzolkin or bucxok, 260 days long)
• Civil Calendar (haab, 365 days) and
• The Long Count

The Mayan calendar is cyclical, repeating itself every 52 Mayan years. In the Long Count calendar, the counting of time begins on the day 0.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau, or 8 Cumku (Mayan notation), which is equivalent to 13 August 3114 a. C. in the Gregorian calendar and ends on December 21, 2012.

The high Mayan priest, called ah kin, who possessed a great deal of knowledgeable about mathematics and astronomy, would utilize his understanding of the cosmos in accordance with Maya religion to make predictions about the future and man’s destiny.

According to some scholars, the Mayan calendar had already appeared in ancient cultures that preceeded the Maya, such as the Olmec. For other, howevers, the calendar is unique to the Mayan civilizaiton. like the Olmec, for others, however, this schedule is typical of the Mayan civilization. The Mayan calendar’s similarities with the Aztec calendar provides evidence that the same calendar system was used in all of Mesoamerica.

2012 Mayan Doomsday Prophecy is not accurate…

It’s not the end of the world as we know it, says a local professor about the Mayan doomsday prophecy.

Mayan Doomsday Prophecy

The Mayan doomsday prophecy is a prediction by the ancient Mayans that the world will end in 2012.  However, Kristine Larsen, an astronomy professor at Central Connecticut State University, is debunking that theory, according to the Bristol Press.

Larsen is giving talks and writing articles about how prophecies make sense only to people wholly ignorant of science and the Mayan calendar.

Mayan Calendar

“The Mayan calendar ran in cycles. One of their cycles is “Bak-tun,” called the ‘long year’ or ‘great year,’ which is 144,000 days long,” Larsen tells the Press. “Think of it like a decade or century ending for us. It’s much bigger than the end of the year.”

According to Larsen, the current Long Year ends in 2012, but the end of one year predicts nothing more than the beginning of a new one. The equivalent, she says, to looking at our calendar ending on Dec. 31 and believing the world will end too.

Jose Arguelles & the Harmonic Convergence

The Mayan doomsday idea is all over the place and Larsen has a theory on where it began. She believes it started with a man named Jose Arguelles, a believer in the Harmonic Convergence, which was supposed to end the world in August 1987 after other planets in our solar system lined up in a certain way, the Press reports.

She also has a there an idea of the kind of reaction doomsday believers will have when they wake up on either New Year’s Day 2013 or Dec. 22, 2012, the day after the winter solstice.

“Some people will take credit for it, like they always do — ‘it was because I prayed, it was because I made a sacrifice,’ In 1910, Halley’s Comet came astronomically close to earth. People committed suicide. One man in California somehow managed to nail himself to a wooden cross — don’t ask me how — and offered himself as a sacrifice for the planet. Fortunately, someone found him in time, and took him to get medical care,” Larsen tells the Press.

“My biggest fear is someone will be hurt, either by their own hand or someone’s else’s,” Larsen said.

Guatemala’s Indigenous Mayans Celebrate the Commencement of 5126

Indigenous Mayans of Guatemala participated in religious and cultural ceremonies Monday to mark the beginning of the year 5126 according to the ancient Mayan calendar.

5126 Marks Kej, Year of the Stag or Deer

Culture Minister Emilio Ajquejay said that 5126, according to the Mayan calendar, marks Kej, or the year of the stag or deer.

The four-legged creature symbolizes four cosmic points of strength and power. Ajquejay said that this is likely to be a year in which “world powers will be strengthened.”

Director of Indigenous Affairs Maria Quezada said that the stag reflects the life’s four energies: physical, mental, spiritual and emotional, as well as mankind’s dominion over other beings on earth.

Wayeb

In the Mayan faith, the new year is ushered in after the end of Wayeb, a five-day period of reflection, meditation, planning and goal-setting. To celebrate the event, ethnic Mayan leaders held vigil services across Guatemala overnight Sunday into Monday.

Roberto Cajas, director of a confederation of indigenous groups, said the new year celebration offers Guatemalans the chance to express their “profound gratitude to Nature” for having provided humans all the essentials needed for life.

Besides holding ceremonies to offer thanks to Earth, “the new year affords each person the opportunity to asked the Mayan gods to bolster their areas of weaknesses,” Cajas said.

Guatemala, in Central America, is one of Latin America’s few majority-indigenous countries.

Understanding the Prophecy of December 21, 2012: A Mayan Age Ends – Part 2

By John Van Auken

Understanding the Prophecy of December 21, 2012: A Mayan Age Ends

By John Van Auken

At present, the year 2012 is only of interest to those of us who believe in the wisdom of ancient cultures. But soon, very soon, everyone is going to be looking for more information about this Mayan prophesied year of destiny, which many believe to be the end of the Mayan calendar and thus the end of time, as we have known it. Let’s look at this calendar and this specific date more closely.

The Long Count Calendar

Actually, it all began with a discovery that has been known for decades about the culture that invented what is known as the Long Count Calendar. On the Pacific coastal plain of Chiapas, Mexico, a few miles from the Guatemala border, the astrological observatory of the Izapa civilization was located. Some believe that the Izapa were the transitional culture between the older Olmec civilization and the emerging Maya; others believe the Izapa were the Olmecs.

For almost a thousand years the Izapa recorded the Long Count Calendar on monuments and ceramic vessels. Most of the dates refer to local, mundane events, like the crowning of a specific king. However, some of the Long Count monuments refer to mythological events that occurred at the beginning of the current “World Age” that we are living in and which is soon coming to an end. The Maya adopted the Izapa calendar, creation myths, and time cycles counting method.

Edgar Cayce’s View

When asked what the New Age means to humanity, Edgar Cayce replied: “the full consciousness of the ability to communicate with the Creative Forces and be aware of the relationships to the Creative Forces and the uses of same in material environs. This awareness during the era or age in the Age of Atlantis and Lemuria or Mu brought what? Destruction to man, and his beginning of the needs of the journey up through that of selfishness.” (1602-3)

Cayce is informing us that in a previous time cycle, humanity had a level of consciousness and relationship with the Creative Forces that allowed us to live at higher levels of material, mental, and spiritual activity in the Earth and beyond. Unfortunately, we misused this consciousness and the power that came with the close relationship to the Forces. This misuse brought on the destruction of our great cultures and a long, karmic soul journey through the pain and confusion that resulted from our selfishness and self-centered focus on our will without regard for the will of the Creator and others. Now, as the cycles come around again, we are nearing a time when the level of consciousness and relationship with the Creative Forces will allow us once again to regain these powers.

Does the Mayan Calendar predict 2012 apocalypse?

2012 is just around the corner, and with numerous people believing that the “end is near,” publishers have jumped on the apocalyptic bandwagon by printing books the explore the predictions of the Mayan Calendar, as well as survival techniques for what many anticipate to be doomsday.

Books exploring the 2012 apocalypse as predicted by the Mayan Calendar

Currently, close to 30 books exist about the 2012 apocalypse.

Each arrives in the wake of the 2006 success of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, a literary and metaphysical epic that binds together the cosmological phenomena of our time to support the contention of the Mayan calendar that the year 2012 portends an unprecedented global shift. 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl has sold thousands of copies and counts tens of thousands more in print.

The growing popularity of books about Mayan doomsday predictions is also fueld in part by Hollywood, including Roland Emmerich’s 2004 film about global warming, The Day After Tomorrow, Mel Gibson’s 2006 film about Mayan civilization, Apocalpyto, and the more recent Roland Emmerich film about a global cataclysm, 2012.

Authors disagree about what humankind should expect on Dec. 21, 2012, when the Maya’s “Long Count” calendar marks the end of a 5,126-year era.

Journalist Lawrence Joseph forecasts widespread catastrophe in Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation Into Civilization’s End. Spiritual healer Andrew Smith predicts a restoration of a “true balance between Divine Feminine and Masculine” in The Revolution of 2012: Vol. 1, The Preparation. In 2012, Daniel Pinchbeck anticipates a “change in the nature of consciousness,” assisted by indigenous insights and psychedelic drug use.

Scholars comment on 2012 predictions

Lynn Garrett, senior religion editor at Publishers Weekly, beleives that the buildup to 2012 echoes the excitement and fear expressed on the eve of the new millennium, popularly known as Y2K, though on a smaller scale. She says publishers seem to be courting readers who believe humanity is creating its own ecological disasters and desperately needs ancient indigenous wisdom.

“The convergence I see here is the apocalyptic expectations, if you will, along with the fact that the environment is in the front of many people’s minds these days,” Garrett says. “Part of the appeal of these earth religions is that notion that we need to reconnect with the Earth in order to save ourselves.”

But scholars are bristling at attempts to link the ancient Maya with trends in contemporary spirituality. Maya civilization, known for advanced writing, mathematics and astronomy, flourished for centuries in Mesoamerica, especially between A.D. 300 and 900. Its Long Count calendar, which was discontinued under Spanish colonization, tracks more than 5,000 years, then resets at year zero.

“For the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the end of a whole cycle,” says Sandra Noble, executive director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies in Crystal River, Fla. To render Dec. 21, 2012, as a doomsday or moment of cosmic shifting, she says, is “a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in.”

2012 predictions and astronomy

Part of the 2012 mystique stems from the stars. On the winter solstice in 2012, the sun will be aligned with the center of the Milky Way for the first time in about 26,000 years. This means that “whatever energy typically streams to Earth from the center of the Milky Way will indeed be disrupted on 12/21/12 at 11:11 p.m. Universal Time,” Joseph writes.

But scholars doubt the ancient Maya extrapolated great meaning from anticipating the alignment — if they were even aware of what the configuration would be.

Astronomers generally agree that “it would be impossible the Maya themselves would have known that,” says Susan Milbrath, a Maya archaeoastronomer and a curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History. What’s more, she says, “we have no record or knowledge that they would think the world would come to an end at that point.”

University of Florida anthropologist Susan Gillespie says the 2012 phenomenon comes “from media and from other people making use of the Maya past to fulfill agendas that are really their own.”