Here we glimpse what is rightly called the Perennial Philosophy, a subject we’ll explore in more detail in Chapter 8. For now, suffice it to say that symbols are the language of this Perennial Philosophy and should be correctly interpreted as being much more than signs. As Joseph Campbell said, signs denote exactly what they say: A yield sign means yield. Symbols, on the other hand, connote something beyond their surface appearance.
We seem to have hidden in Thompson a profound multidimensional (or, as he himself said, anagogical) approach to the glyphs, true to what hieroglyphic writing requires in order to do it justice. Thompson has apparently been largely misunderstood on his insistence that the glyphs be seen as anagogical metaphoragrams. Why? Simply because science and academicians don’t allow for a “higher” perspective, or indigenous writing containing “gnosis” (even when it does). Furthermore, if scientists tend to deny the transcendent on the grounds that it is subjective and therefore less real than the objective order, one wonders to what extent this conviction colors their interpretations of Maya metaphysics and spirituality. If a metaphysics of transcendence is an essential key to Maya cosmology, how can scholars who are biased against such a notion be reliable interpreters of that worldview?
Although sensitive to a larger concept, Thompson defended his notions to the detriment of progress that could only occur if the phonetic elements were acknowledged. For the glyphs, if indeed they had multiple meanings, should also contain within them a range of components, including phonetic elements, rebus-style signs, astronomy, and references to mundane events. Notwithstanding his bias against phoneticism, the more nuanced implications of Thompson’s “anagogical” approach to the glyphs have been lost and we remember only his romanticized vision of the ancient Maya as stargazing philosophers. And Thompson’s myth of the dreamy stargazer was eventually trounced, but I think way too much of the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. Thompson was apparently a closet Gnostic, even if he himself disliked the term. He believed that the glyphs were tools for directly accessing a higher perspective. In addition to being a stubborn pedagogue, he was also a secret anagogue, one who believed in the anagogical nature of Maya writing, much as a devout Christian can gaze upon the icon of suffering Jesus and be led upward into the mystical unity of eternal love. The paradox of Thompson is probably best understood in this light, for behind every pedagogue stands an anagogue telling him he is wrong.
My reading of Thompson and Maya cosmovision is much closer to statements made by modern epigraphers (those who decipher the glyphs) than one might suspect. Stephen Houston, for example, wrote about the relationship between the built environment and Maya beliefs, observing that the two define and reinforce each other like a mutually arising chicken and egg. He asked: “Is the cosmos ordered like a house or is the house ordered like the cosmos?” (This polarity can also be stated “does the microcosm reflect the macrocosm, or vice versa?” and effectively works with any pairs of opposites.) He answered: “The concept of reciprocal metaphor allows us to resolve such questions by acknowledging the indissoluble, almost playful association between semantic domains.”28 In other words, both domains are mutually arising. What Houston said here, cloaked a bit in abstract terminology, is that the Maya held to a nondual philosophy. Their worldview was informed by the mystical vision of the transcendence of opposites. This is both Gnostic and anagogical. Of course, when I say it bluntly it sounds offensive to academic ears; better to cloak it in sufficiently labyrinthine grammatical constructs so, like Thompson but unlike Le Plongeon, you won’t be accused of cavorting with Maya mystics.
Even today, discussion on the more ethereal achievements of the ancient Maya is likely to be scoffed at as a tiresome echo of Thompson’s dreamy stargazer sentiment. The tides shift over the decades in academia. 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.
There’s a problem in how scholars emphasize certain facets of an ancient culture. A tendency to make them relatable to modern minds will emphasize characteristics that are recognizable in our own culture—a reflex called re ification. This ethnocentric tendency often wafts through fields of investigation unconsciously, and the impulse to identify the aspects of ancient Maya culture that we can relate to seems natural, a given. Scholars consequently do not try to shift their consciousness in order to perceive the unique traits of an ancient culture and are instead content to interpret it through the unmoving filters of their own paradigm’s values and assumptions.
Thus, a common idea in pop consciousness has been that the ancient Maya were barbaric, bloodlusting warmongers. This can be argued with specific examples from Maya history but shouldn’t be generalized and applied to Maya civilization as a whole. It is partly true in the same way that unprovoked wars launched by the United States, motivated by self-interest, have killed millions of civilians. But that doesn’t tell the whole story, as any high civilization will engage in an entire spectrum of activities, achievements, and motivations. 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.
Thompson was willing to advance and defend the notion that the glyphs were more than just sounds, phonemes, or even signs that could be easily deciphered. He preferred the concept of metaphoragrams and believed, much like Goodman, that the hieroglyphs didn’t contain histories. The picture he painted of the ancient Maya was one of idealized stargazers philosophizing in towered observatories like the ancient Greeks. These views were eventually overturned, but at an early stage of his career he made his mark by decoding the correlation question, with the help of Goodman and Martínez. The correlation thus became known as the original GMT (Goodman, Martínez, and Thompson). By 1927 it was clear that the fabled zero date of the Long Count calendar could be located in mid-August, 3114 BC.
With this now in place and on the billboard for scholars to ponder over, we should expect that they would immediately calculate the Long Count periods using the free-floating tables Goodman published in 1897. A very significant Long Count period, documented on the Quiriguá monument Maudslay had found and Goodman commented on, is the 13-Baktun “Creation” cycle. And so we find, in Thompson’s article of 1927, a table that calculates the various Katun and Baktun endings, utilizing the unprecedented, slightly revised, Goodman correlation.29 The chart, unfortunately, ends with Katun 12.16.0.0.0, correlated to February 15, 1934 (original GMT). However, an astute reader could easily isolate the Baktun endings given on pages 19-21 of the chart and extrapolate the date of the great 13-Baktun ending:
Based on a simple visual assessment, the next date in the sequence, for 13.0.0.0.0, looks like it should fall on or about December 23, 2012 AD. And that it did, according to the original GMT correlation that Thompson was arguing for (later corrected to December 21). It’s hard to imagine that this projection was never performed, and how Thompson or other scholars might have speculated on what it might mean for the 13-Baktun cycle to end near a solstice. There are no essays or articles that I am aware of that reveal any brainstorming along these lines. The reason why, I believe, is twofold. First, the original GMT correlation still needed to be revised two days, which occurred by 1950, only then effectively bringing the end-date into exact congruence with the solstice on December 21. Without this, scholars may have calculated the 13-Baktun cycle end-date but, seeing it fell on
December 23, dismissed it as irrelevant. In addition, it wasn’t until 1930 and then 1934 that Thompson contributed more-detailed arguments to the correlation question. By then the depression was in full swing; everyone’s minds were on other things, perhaps.
The second reason is, I believe, the real culprit, and it involves a conceptual bias in how scholars tended to treat the Maya calendar. The bias would have had all the support of the conventional attitudes of Western science and the Judeo-Christian worldview. Science says that time flows from past to future, that all events are the effects of previous causes. This model of causality rejects the idea that future states might define the events that are being drawn toward that future state. This is called teleology, anathema to scientific causality. It’s more welcome in the discourses of philosophy, and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead is the best-known proponent of the idea, which was adopted by Terence McKenna.
Judeo-Christian time philosophy is linear; Creation happened a long time ago. An inherently different time concept, which is evident in Mesoamerican calendars and cosmology, has been largely overlooked by scholars: the cyclic time philosophy that sees past and future Creation events being analogically united during cycle endings. The idea that ancient Maya calendar makers were projecting into the future, to target a future event, is also supported by two observations: In Maya thought the important event, such as birth, happens at the end of a time process—in this example, the end of a 260-day interval during which embryogenesis occurs. Second, end naming is used in the Long Count such that a given period is named by its last day. For example, we are currently in the 4 Ahau Katun because its last day falls on 4 Ahau.
These considerations apparently mattered little to scholars of the 1930s and ’40s, for other challenges were demanding their attention. Ethnographic opportunities, for example, were opening up in Mexico and Central America. Anthropologists such as Oliver La Farge, J. Lincoln, and Maud Oakes were spending lots of time in remote Maya villages documenting survivals of calendar rites thought to have been long forgotten. And, of course, the decipherment of the ever-enigmatic Maya hieroglyphic script came to be of primary importance. But Thompson resisted what promised to crack the whole thing wide open.
When the brilliant independent linguist Benjamin Whorf decoded, in the early 1930s, phonetic elements in the glyphs, Thompson pounced. He craftily critiqued the weak details of the arguments yet evaded the overall importance of the new perspective. After Whorf died at the young age of forty-four, Thompson flayed Whorf’s work. It was a difficult and revealing chapter for both Thompson’s and Whorf’s legacy. In retrospect, Thompson was very right about the errors in Whorf’s work. However, Whorf’s overall hunch was correct—the glyphs did contain phonetic elements. Unfortunately for Thompson, two more pioneer figures were soon to appear, and they hailed from a country that he had a personal problem with: Russia. Like many people, Thompson adopted a hatred of Communism after World War I and harbored bad feelings toward Russians throughout his life.
Russian artist Tatiana Proskouriakoff belonged to a sector of humanity that is often overlooked but has made some of the most important breakthroughs in Maya studies. That category is: woman. When she worked on the Maya site of Piedras Negras as an artist, she naturally became intrigued with Maya writing. Copying the glyphs over and over again, she became familiar with repeating patterns. Soon she identified what she believed to be historical events and glyph names for rulers. This, from Thompson’s ahistorical viewpoint, was not acceptable. And yet, as he himself had to eventually admit, almost on his deathbed, she was right.
Yuri Knorosov, the second Russian of note, experienced the epitome of what happens when an outsider advances a new insight. The insight was shocking to the establishment because it came about not by amassing more and more data until the correct interpretation appeared; no, the data had been lying around for decades, waiting for the right person to come along and reframe the material in such a way that the right interpretation clicked into place. This was especially true for the breakthroughs in hieroglyphic decipherment advanced by Knorosov in the 1960s. There was a key, long present, that had gone unrecognized for many years. That key, as Benjamin Whorf had proposed decades earlier, was that the glyphs were both phonetic and logo-graphic (representing a spoken word). Thompson resisted Knorosov’s work as if it heralded a Communist invasion, and the avalanche of epigraphic progress really got under way only after Thompson’s death in 1975.
WHO SAID IT’S THE CYCLE ENDING?
All these players in the evolution of Maya studies contributed in their own ways to the key issue for the 2012 discussion: the correlation question. Despite Thompson’s confirmation of Goodman’s neglected work, the correlation question continued to tug at scholars. When ethnographic information was gathered in the 1930s and ’40s, it became apparent that the surviving 260-day count did not jibe with the proposed original GMT correlation. It was two days out of joint. Thompson took another look at the historical documents and realized that two leap days had been overlooked in the de Landa material. Thus, as of 1950 the modified GMT-2 became the final correction, which brought all the criteria into congruence.
In 1946, elder archaeologist Sylvanus Morley published his magnum opus, The Ancient Maya. It offered a curious table as Appendix 1, in which Katun and half-Katun endings were correlated with their Gregorian equivalents. But the table ended with 12.5.0.0.0, 8 Ahau 3 Pax, April 4, 1717 AD. As with Thompson’s chart of 1927, however, the sharp reader could track the Baktun endings given and easily extrapolate that the 13th Baktun would end just about on December 23, 2012. But the entire table was calculated with the original GMT correlation. The third edition of The Ancient Maya (1956) corrected the table two days, to the new value of the GMT-2 correlation, but the table, as in the first edition, remained incomplete. Nevertheless, the table provided a convenient resource that could have been easily extended out to the cycle ending in 2012. In fact, Maya epigrapher Barbara MacLeod told me that, as a Peace Corp worker in Belize in 1973, she did just that. It wasn’t until the fourth edition of The Ancient Maya (1983) that the tables were extended out to the end of the 13-Baktun cycle: 13.0.0.0.0, 4 Ahau 3 Kankin = December 21, 2012.
By that time, Michael Coe’s 1966 book, The Maya, had already offered what was to be the first documented mention of the 13-Baktun cycle ending. But there was a problem. Although Coe knew and followed the correct GMT correlation, the date reported (December 24, 2011) was in error. It’s not exactly clear how Coe arrived at this date, especially when the reference table in Morley’s book was so easily available. Coe’s error was corrected in a later edition, but the damage was done. By 1971 other developments in the popular appreciation of the ancient calendar were astir. Tony Shearer published his poetic treatise that year, Quetzalcoatl: Lord of Dawn, in which he suggested that 1987 would be a great cycle ending prophesied by the ancient Aztecs. Soon afterward Frank Waters came out with his book on the Maya cycle ending, Mexico Mystique, using Michael Coe’s date. A watershed moment occurs here in the transmission of obscure academic machinations out into the public arena. The first wave in a growing tsunami of popular books on 2012 was about to begin.
CHAPTER TWO
The Long Career of the Long Count
We can, therefore, with all good conscience hail our “New World Hipparchus” as a creative genius in his own right, not beholden to the ideas or ideology of any other people or region of the world…
Soconusco may well have served as a bridgehead into Mesoamerica for a variety of South American cultural traits, but there seems little doubt that it constituted the very “hearth,” or cradle, of the intellectual life of indigenous North America. The unique 260-day sacred almanac is the product of a convergence of time and space that may be directly traced to Izapa.1
—VINCENT MÄLMSTROM
Time doesn’t have an end, but it does have a middle—so say the mod ern Quiché Maya.2 And that middle, always, is located right dead center in the Now. A calendar, however, is not time,
in the same way that a map is not the territory. As philosopher Ken Wilber said, “It’s fatal to confuse the two.”3
The 13-Baktun cycle of the Long Count calendar has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Its beginning or “zero date” (August 11, 3114 BC) does not indicate when the system was invented. That date was a back calculation made thousands of years later by the creators of the Long Count. Similarly, the end date in 2012 was a forward calculation. Together, the alpha and omega of Maya time philosophy delineate a World Age lasting 5,125.36 years. That’s 1,872,000 days, to be exact.
The Maya doctrine of World Ages is found in The Popol Vuh, a document recorded in the 1550s by Quiché Maya elders. In it, we read that humanity has passed through a sequence of World Ages, and each time one of these World Age cycles comes to completion, a transformation and renewal of humanity occurs. Right away, it’s clear that the 13-Baktun cycle of the Long Count and the World Age doctrine in The Popol Vuh are linked. They are both expressions of an underlying World Age doctrine.
The 2012 Story Page 6