In my own process of encountering and studying all things 2012, I can’t help notice that my life has been interwoven with these authors and the 2012 meme from an early age. I have a vivid memory from 1976 of my friend Joe’s dad reading Mexico Mystique. It was described as a book about the Indians in Mexico who invented a calendar that will end in 2011. That encounter stuck with me, and I recognized Waters’s book years later when I began my studies. I spent the summer of ’76 at my uncle’s campground in Colorado, helping out and camping under the shooting stars of the Rocky Mountains. We would sometimes congregate around an old hippie storyteller’s campfire at night and listen to legends and ghost stories. One day as I was emptying garbage cans for my uncle, the old hippie called me over and gave me a copy of Shearer’s Quetzalcoatl, Lord of the Dawn. After moving to Colorado in 1985, I read The Invisible Landscape by the McKenna brothers (both of whom were born and raised in Colorado). I encountered Argüelles’s Earth Ascending book in 1986 and then the more informative and fulfilling Time and the Highland Maya by Barbara Tedlock.
All along, the books of Frank Waters were with me: Masked Gods, The Book of the Hopi, Pumpkin Seed Point, Mountain Dialogues. I loved the guy and wanted to meet him. In getaways from Boulder every summer I used to hike and camp in Bandelier National Monument, near Taos, New Mexico. The Mesa Verde cliff dwellings and Chaco Canyon were close by, and so was Frank Waters’s home in Arroyo Seco above Taos. On a whim I tried to visit Waters at his home near Taos in August 1988. I spoke with his wife, Barbara, and hung out in the courtyard for a while, but he was out of town. His Mexico Mystique book, despite the one glaring mistake that renders it obsolete, remains an important early exploration of what we now call the 2012 phenomenon.
SPIRITUAL MATERIALISM IN THE 1980S AND BEYOND
By 1980, lots of changes were happening in the cultural landscape of America. The 1960s breakthrough into liberal exploration of sex and drugs was accompanied by explorations of esoteric teachings and Oriental mysticism. The 1970s brought the shock of a gas shortage, the end of the Vietnam War, and a presidential debacle. As the ’70s closed, disco set the tone while more conservative life strategies emerged as the hippies prepared to turn into yuppies. It was the beginning of the twelve-year Reagan-Bush era, which would see an assassination attempt and a recession (in 1982) and end with the Gulf War.
The landscape of the spiritual marketplace would be changing too. Deep yet popular studies of profound ideas that were all the rage in the 1960s, such as Alan Watts’s Way of Zen, gave way to dumbed-down self-help books and trendy (and expensive) encounter groups. Good books come out in every decade, but the general trend throughout the 1980s was clear—market ancient wisdom teachings by figuring out how to make it palatable to people on the go; the intellectual equivalent of fast food at a drive-thru. One way to do this was signaled by Shirley MacLaine’s spiritual biography Out On a Limb in 1981. Spiritually themed personal-growth books could sell very well if driven by a famous and popular personality. Eventually, it was realized that the popularity could come from scandal or outrageous claims—it didn’t matter, it just had to draw attention.
The era of Argüelles coincided with this rise of New Age spiritual materialism, a trendy self-help approach to ancient perennial wisdom that appealed to the boomer generation and typified books of this genre written in the 1980s. Admittedly, Argüelles is very much a unique breed of visionary writer and his legacy combines the qualities of a Carlos Casteneda, the channeled Seth material, the mystic art of Robert Fludd, and the incomprehensibil ity of a Buckminster Fuller on LSD, with a dash of Merlin playing the pipes of Pan for good effect.10 José Argüelles, one-half of a dyad with his twin brother Ivan (a poet), started his career with a fascinating PhD thesis from the University of Chicago, which became the book Charles Henry and the Formation of a Psychospiritual Aesthetic. That was followed by an artistic compilation called Mandala, which did so well he was able to buy a house in Oakland with the royalties.11 The evolution of this artist-mythmaker can be traced in his books, and his recent autobiography provides many more details. His ideation changed rapidly after 1979, when “he was at the peak of his alcoholism, and his marriage of 13 years was about to collapse, along with his entire life as he knew it.”12 His well-documented and intriguing book The Transformative Vision (1975), which he considered his seminal text, was a far cry from the cosmic diagrams and inventive speculations of Earth Ascending (1984).
Along the lines of Buckminster Fuller’s integrative vision, Earth Ascending wove connections between DNA, the I Ching, and the Maya sacred calendar. While Argüelles was teaching at the University of Colorado in Boulder in 1985, he invited a Maya day-keeper from Mexico named Hunbatz Men to come and speak. That friendship set the stage for later developments, including the spread of Argüelles’s ideas to Mexico. Something opened up in the mid-1980s as Shearer’s old Harmonic Convergence date approached. The stage was prepared, the curtain rose, and Argüelles walked on. Shearer himself did his own thing with the Harmonic Convergence date, involving a presentation he gave near Denver.13
The up-and-coming New Age publisher Bear & Company got strategic with the Maya material and collaborated with Argüelles for his 1987 book The Mayan Factor. Bear & Company was cofounded by radical Christian theologian Matthew Fox. When Barbara Hand Clow stepped up to run Bear in the mid-1980s, it became a conduit for popular Native American teachings as well as books on Pleiadian channeling—Clow’s own métier, as we can see in her various books, an exception being her less overtly channeled Pleiadian Agenda (1995), which presented a smorgasbord of 2012 ideas. The Native American Medicine Cards oracle was a huge hit for Bear & Company, as was Barbara Marciniak’s Bringers of the Dawn.
An idea called the Photon Belt appeared in Marciniak’s book, which was a vaguely defined mystical concept that visualized the earth passing through a photon beam, or belt of energy, that supposedly emanates from the Galactic Center. As earth travels through space it would enter this zone of increased energy, connecting us to the Pleiadian interdimensional superhighway, and all kinds of speculations were offered as to what it would mean. (The beam was also sometimes described as sweeping through space.) The topic merged nicely with UFOs and crop circles. Communications or visits with extraterrestrials, enlightenment of the race, lizard alien takeovers—the Photon Belt’s extended family of scenarios was large and creative.
A variation of this Photon Belt idea became a major component in Argüelles’s The Mayan Factor book, which he connected with 2012 and called “galactic synchronization.” In Brian Swimme’s introduction to The Mayan Factor, we find an explanation of what the galactic beams are, astronomically speaking:
Current astrophysics describes these beams as density waves that sweep through the galaxy and that influence galactic evolution. For instance, our Sun’s birth was a result of this wave… the density wave passed through and ignited a giant star, which exploded and evoked our own Sun’s existence.14
Galactic synchronization, “synchronization with the beyond,” is, according to Argüelles, “to surpass all fantasy and all of our wildest dreams.”15
This idea eventually morphed into a concept involving the orbit of our solar system around the Galactic Center, in an up-and-down motion above and below the galactic plane over some 240 million years. Our solar system is in this way thought to enter different “density sectors” in its passage through space (see the figure on page 234). Argüelles believed that our passage through the “synchronization beam” was linked to the 5,125-year Great Cycle of 13 Baktuns. It was an evolutionary beam, which he philosophized with artistic finesse in his book, and 2012 represented the critical emergence point, our last chance for “getting on the beam” before we left its transformative presence.
The only thing I need to emphasize here, which I’ll clarify later, is that these concepts have nothing to do with the “galactic alignment” astronomy that is demonstrably embedded in the Maya Creation Mythology and other traditions. The galactic alignment
and galactic synchronization are not at all the same thing. I was adamant about the distinction from the get-go, and for more than a decade have clarified the issue in my books, on my website, and in interviews.16 Unfortunately, today the concepts are still frequently confused, to the detriment of understanding a key concept of ancient Maya cosmology that demonstrably relates to 2012. In addition, the galactic alignment concept as I have defined it has been retroactively adopted by or applied to Argüelles and others, even though there is no mention of it in their previous books.17
In a 1991 article I wrote (reprinted in my 1992 book Tzolkin: Visionary Perspectives and Calendar Studies), I took an open-minded position on the larger visionary work that Argüelles was doing and defended the role of the mythmaker in our society, especially at critical ideological junctures like the one we find ourselves in:
The role of the myth-makers is hard to understand. They seem to break with tradition and flaunt a speculative certainty; they seem just one step up from a raving maniac or doomsayer… The myth-maker recognizes the end as a new beginning and starts to formulate the new values and myths to serve the changing needs of humanity. A myth maker is a living oracle for the vaguely sensed needs of a people undergoing transformation. It is a time to create the future, not arbitrarily or according to one person’s agenda, but based on collective need; the “new world order” in a sense “congeals” or crystallizes from the field of human unfolding. A myth-maker facilitates this birth by naming what’s happening.18
And Argüelles is without doubt a mythmaker. But I also knew that 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. It then makes a gamble for being a “new dispensation” or falls off as an irrelevant sideshow. It can grow as a new dispensation only if it has a clear channel into universal wisdom, or Truth (with a capital T in the theological sense of that which is rooted in the higher spiritual wisdom).
By 1991 Argüelles’s nascent Dreamspell group promoted July 26, 1992, as the next Harmonic Convergence, a date that would supposedly signal the beginning of the final Katun (20-year period) of the Great Cycle of 13 Baktuns. July 26 was presented as New Year’s Day, to be celebrated right after the “day out of time,” July 25, which was a necessary fudge factor in order to incorporate the 364-day 13-moon calendar (another component of the Dreamspell system). If this all sounds complicated and contrived, as well as not recognizable as having much to do with the real Maya calendar, it is and it doesn’t. And it’s just the tip of a very messy iceberg.
My book Tzolkin primarily offered a reconstruction of the Venus calendar in the Dresden Codex, but also exposed the factual errors in the calendar system Argüelles had just presented in his new Dreamspell game/oracle. The seeds of that system had been planted, and were evident, in The Mayan Factor . The following offers a quick rundown on the factual problems.
The correlation used in the Dreamspell system is not aligned with the traditional, surviving day-count in the highlands of Guatemala, which has a direct unbroken lineage going back to the Classic Period Maya and beyond—to the very dawn of the 260-day calendar at least 2,500 years ago. On page 211 of The Mayan Factor, we find a list of tzolkin dates that tells us that, according to Argüelles, July 26, 1992, corresponds to 12 Ix. The count promoted by Argüelles was thus, at that time, 53 days out of synchronization with the day-count actually used today by the Maya. The discrepancy was repeated in the birthday calculator included in the Dreamspell game released in late 1991. In my early writings I referred to the surviving traditional day-count as “the True Count,” and I proposed that, in order to be clear, Argüelles’s day-count could charitably be referred to as a “Newly Created Count.”19
The Dreamspell system skips counting leap day, February 29, which comes around every four years. This is the biggest no-no one could imagine, as it throws out of whack the internal consistency of the sacred 260-day rhythm. Every 260 days the same day-sign and number combination should come around and synchronize. By skipping a day, the “time resonance” factor of 260 days is compromised. For example, if you were born on June 15, 1966, your birthday according to the traditional tzolkin is 4 Muluc. Every 20 days Muluc recurs and every 260 days, 4 Muluc recurs, defining resonances with others whose birthdays fall on Muluc or another day-sign that has a resonant relationship with Muluc—for example, Cauac (opposite Muluc on the 20-day wheel of the day-signs). You might find that your grandfather was born on April 7, 1903, which was a 12 Muluc day. You would, according to the oracular use of the 260-day tzolkin calendar, have a special resonance with your grandfather. The traditional, surviving calendar utilizes these kinds of concepts and operations. Not so for Dreamspell. Because it skips counting February 29, there will be an accumulated error of 16 uncounted days between your grandfather’s birthday and your own. Looking up your birthdays in the Dreamspell calculator will not accurately reflect the real passage of days. It’s obvious that there is a problem here.
The reason why this feature was implemented in the Dreamspell system involves the fixing of the New Year’s Day to July 26. This date was indeed used by the Yucatec Maya as New Year’s Day. They did so because at the latitude of northern Yucatán the sun passes through the zenith at high noon on that day (as well as May 23). However, Argüelles states that July 26 was chosen in his system because it correlates with the ancient Egyptian heliacal rise of Sirius.
Nevertheless, the New Year’s Day wasn’t fixed for the Maya; it was intended to fall back one day every four years, probably in order to track a larger cycle known as the “year drift formula” (in which 1,507 tropical years = 1,508 haab of 365 days each). The modern Quiché Maya, for example, allow their New Year’s Day to cycle backward through the months of the year. Though somewhat counterintuitive to the modern mind, the ancient Maya didn’t need their mundane solar calendar to stay fixed to one New Year’s Day; instead, the sacred rhythm of 260 days had precedence.
It’s very possible that the Yucatec Maya intentionally tracked their New Year’s Day falling backward from July 26 to May 23, from one zenith passage to another, which took 256 years. This period corresponds to the all-important 13-Katun prophecy cycle, or May cycle, which scholar Prudence Rice has recently argued was an important key to Yucatec Maya cosmology and politics.
The point is that Argüelles’s policy of fixing New Year’s Day doesn’t reflect how the ancient Maya themselves actually used their calendars. The a priori assumption that this must be done led Argüelles to implement the highly dubious February 29 day skipping. But, again, no day-keeper would ever consider not counting a day. As a result, the day-count discrepancy of Dreamspell changes by one day every four years. While it was 53 days out of accord with the True Count between 1988 and 1993, it became 52 days out of whack between 1992 and 1996. And so on.
The so-called “day out of time,” July 25, is something entirely different. It was intended by Argüelles to keep the 364-day 13-moon calendar in sync with the New Year’s Day, July 26. The 13-moon calendar is, according to the Dreamspell view, supposed to be the “natural rhythm” that we should follow in order to synchronize ourselves with the natural earth-moon rhythm of life, reflected in women’s fertility cycles. A 28-day lunar cycle, however, is only an abstract average, useful only for an approximate reckoning of a numerologi cally handy 13 × 28 = 364 days. It quickly will shift out of step with real lunar cycles and thus doesn’t accurately track lunar rhythms. It can’t really do what its designer says it is supposed to do.20
Another issue of dislocation, or misrepresentation, in Argüelles’s thought occurred in regard to the commencement of the last Katun of the Long Count. A Katun contains 7,200 days. The end date is December 21, 2012. Thus, the final Katun commences on April 5, 1993. In the early 1990s I circulated an article I wrote called “The Importance of April 5, 1993” and published it in my book Tzolkin. I noted the s
trange synchronicity that the final Katun commenced on a day on which Venus rose as morning star, and it was a full moon. This suggested a patterning between Venus and Katun cycles, which I plotted out, discovering that 3 Katuns equal 37 Venus cycles. In a 1991 interview with Antero Alli in the magazine Welcome to Planet Earth, Argüelles stated that the final Katun begins on July 26, 1992—the date then being promoted as the next Harmonic Convergence. Clearly, this was a very generalized mathematical operation, and it detracted from the very striking fact that the correct beginning date of the last Katun coordinated with a first appearance of Venus as morning star. Consequently, the morning star Venus rise that fell on the commencement of the final Katun of the 13-Baktun cycle was lost upon Dreamspell followers. However, an original thinker named Marko Bartholomew, who had acquired the original self-published version of my book Tzolkin in 1992, led a group of seekers up a volcano in Hawaii to observe Venus, Quetzalcoatl reborn, and the dawn of the final Katun.
I’m not meaning to be difficult, but all of these errors are of a fundamental nature and to any discerning mind would render the Dreamspell system problematic, at best. It’s not a matter of debatable opinions; my critique is addressed to the level of stated facts and functional operation. After I published my critique of Dreamspell-think in my book Tzolkin, I immediately came under fire by members of the Dreamspell group, who frequently accused me of impugning the wisdom of their teacher. For example, Steven Starsparks sent me a postcard filled with four-letter words after reading my book, aghast at my audacious questioning of the wisdom of the Dreamspell revelation. For four years I exchanged more than three hundred letters with various disillusioned Dreamspellers (this was before e-mail) in which I patiently tried to educate them about the existence of an authentic surviving day-count—and that the Argüellian system simply was not it. “Disillusioned” is an apt word for what they were going through. I hoped that Argüelles himself might offer some clarification, which was not forthcoming for many years. My 1993 book 7 Wind: A Quiché Calendar for 1993 was intended as a simple introductory guidebook to how the Maya day-keepers use their tzolkin calendar.
The 2012 Story Page 11