at the risk of posting again in this topic — come on people, do you really need the world to end, in order to have any reason whatsoever to embrace life? go read Nietzsche, the bunch of you! — i must beg to differ. and at the same time, i hope to elucidate a couple of concepts here.
first, the maya calendar was mindblowingly accurate. for starters, they predicted the dawn of men — and the dawn of men is somewhere in the middle of the evolutionary segment between the homo faber and the homo sapiens. it sure is a huge span of time, but they point somewhere in the middle of it and hey — if they’re guessing, they’re the only civilisation to ever guess it right. science nowadays posits the exact same thing: after men discovered crafts and started fabricating tools (homo faber), a process of sexual distinction lead them to form the first hordes. something of a rudimentary notion of power emerged, and in order to acquire more power, hordes had to spread and consolidate themselves, at which point the notion of incest emerges — culminating in the institution of family, which is for many the first step into culture, or, in other words, the birth of the homo sociologicus, the first human hominid. it’s at that segment that the maya pointed the birth of men — unlike all other civilisations before the rise of our scientific western-european civilisation.
they were also jaw-droppingly accurate astronomers, predicting eclipses that would only happen hundreds of years after the end of their own civilisation, with day-precision. need more? they could predict the end of their civilisation (which disbanded into tribes and hordes and nuclear families the very year they had predicted) — historians nowadays debate the possibility that their civilisation came to an end the very year they had predicted due to a drough. and oh, at some point after the end of their civilisation, they predicted the “white gods” would arrive — and guess which band of lunatic europeans discovered the Americas that very year?
still not impressed? well, lets also say that the portion of their calendar which we call the Long Count, the portion that’s ending in 21 dec 2012, actually starts quite some time after the dawn of men, at the 32nd century BC, which is a weird century in that all over the world, civilisations started popping around. minoan Crete is born here, so is the first dynasty of ancient Egypt, following the death of king Scorpion by Narmer. but what’s really mindblowing is that the Long Count is not the only epoch that starts in the 32nd century BC: kali yuga, the “age of vice” in many hindu and buddhist calendars, starts in that very century.
what’s more: the maya tzolkin and the hindu kali yuga also come to an end at around the same time. the calculations are disputed. some say it ended in 1889. others estimate it to end at some point in the 2060s. and there’s a third calculation which marks the end of kali yuga at — you’ve guessed it — 2012. so there you have it: two calendars from two ancient civilisations way isolated in time and space, matching beginning and end of a certain era, known to one as the “human era” and to the other as the “age of vices”. say the least, that’s quite a backbreaking coincidence.
but! to neither peoples this was marked as “the” end of “the world”. it was the end of humanity (or humanity as we know it, anyway). the maya calendar had periods that stretched far beyond the long count, and they were used occasionally for even more predictions of all kinds — astronomical and socio-political. as for the hindu and buddhist calendars, they posit that with the end of kali yuga comes dvapara yuga, an age of meditation and enlightenment.
look, i find these coincidences tremendous, but that doesn’t hold me from making plans beyond december 21st 2012. i really don’t plan my life around this kind of date, and it’s not even a matter of believing or disbelieving, it’s plainly a matter of — if humanity is inexorably coming to a turnpoint at that date, it doesn’t matter whether or not i take it into account, it will change in spite of my best effort on the contrary. so why bother? but no, personally, i don’t even believe this bunch of facts is enough for me to suddenly grow a newfound trust in humanity and a hope for better days to humankind.
you can believe whatever you want to believe, but always bear in mind: it’s not the end of humanity as a whole, but rather the end of humanity as we know it. more importantly, it’s not the end of the world. and it’s processual. whatever’s going to culminate in 2012 should be building up right now — if something really is going to happen, we should be able to see it taking shape right now. setting aside the fact that we live in what’s downright the most boring epoch in the history of humankind ever since feudalism, i think i can actually see a couple of candidates for that. if i were to make a safe, conservative bet, i’d turn my eyes to the holy lands of Jerusalem and Europe, and to the respective cruzades to take over each of them. there’s a tension building up in a silent fashion in the geopolitical sphere — if it’s not released soon enough, it just might become a massive earthquake in civilisation.
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