“How can we know for sure,” the narrator asks, “when you should be bracing for tomorrow?” Brent Miller sternly answers: “Computer simulations utilizing the collection of knowledge we have amassed through decades of galactic models and satellite data tell us that our solar system will definitely begin passing through the galactic plane in the very near future. The most severe effects that will cause worldwide devastation and a pole shift are most likely to occur, beginning sometime between the years 2008 and 2015.”31
Although the orbital oscillation above and below the galactic plane is a real process, the scientific model actually places us, right now, fifty light-years above the galactic plane and heading out, as the following Cambridge University publication reports:
The Sun is moving upwards, out of the plane of the Milky Way, at a speed of 7 kilometers per second. Currently the Sun lies 50 light-years above the mid-plane of the galaxy, and its motion is steadily carrying it further away… But the gravitational pull of the stars in the Galactic (Milky Way) plane is slowing down the Sun’s escape. The astronomer Frank Bash estimates that in 14 million years the sun will reach its maximum height above the Galactic disk. From that 250 light-year position, it will be pulled back towards the plane of the Galaxy. Passing through, it will travel to a point 250 light-years below the disk, then oscillate upwards again to reach its present position 66 million years from now.32
The Horizon Project uses hyperbole-filled alarmist language, engages in bad science while giving the impression of being scientifically rigorous, and distorts the galactic alignment information already defined and published. While their efforts may be overlooked as the expected exploitation of fear in the marketplace, the real effects on people who trust “experts” and have little time to fact-check and dig out the truth for themselves are troubling. I’ve received dozens of e-mails from people exposed to The Horizon Project’s misinformation, including distraught mothers of young children, who were beside themselves, not knowing what to do.
Many readers and researchers have apparently been hoodwinked by the astronomical confusions and pole shift rhetoric proffered by Brent Miller, multiplied ad nauseam through the Googlesphere. In e-mail exchanges with Gregg Braden I explained how the orbital idea was taken up by various popular writers, from the murky Photon Belt concept of Marciniak in the mid- 1980s, to José Argüelles’s slightly less murky “galactic synchronization” as defined by him and Brian Swimme in The Mayan Factor, to more recent conflations by Michael Tsarion, Brent Miller at The Horizon Project, and others. The earlier sources, including Argüelles, were not presenting the galactic alignment concept but instead something akin to the physical orbit idea, in which our solar system orbits around the Galactic Center and passes through different energy sectors of the galaxy. The later authors often make a loose association between our solar system’s up-and-down motion above and below the galactic plane and 2012, the dark rift in the Milky Way, and other elements from my pioneering work. I find it all disappointing, for several reasons:
• According to the scientific evidence, our solar system is nowhere near the midplane right now.
• The orbital process exceeds 250 million years; the galactic midplane passages occur at approximately 60-million-year intervals.
• The passage itself takes roughly 250,000 years.
None of this has any valid basis in Maya traditions and concepts.33
And all of this leads ineluctably to the Survive 2012 website (no relation to Patrick Geryl’s How to Survive 2012). The director of this site says he is just providing all the angles and making survivalist gear available for those who want to be safe. Digital shopping carts and easy-to-use PayPal buttons are provided. Gas masks, water-purification pills, and survivalist food supplies are among the many things offered for sale. Again, the media loves this kind of thing, and as a savvy entrepreneur he was able to get his website linked up to the History Channel’s Armageddon broadcasts in January 2009, which included a show linking Nostradamus with 2012 (for which I was interviewed) that completely appropriated the galactic alignment as a pole shift trigger while providing little contextual information about the Maya.34 I’m now convinced that cooperating with any of these mainstream venues is like handing baby chickens to a fox.
Bruce Scofield is a perceptive researcher, an astrologer who has worked to integrate the oracular insights of the Mesoamerican calendar system and the principles of Western astrology.35 Aware of the work by Edmonson (The Book of the Year), he understood the correct placement of the 260-day calendar very early on, and published his book Day Signs in 1991. He reviewed my book Tzolkin and followed my work on 2012 as it developed. Suspicious of the calendar system proposed by Argüelles in The Mayan Factor, Scofield succeeded in getting Argüelles to share, in a letter of 1989, how he developed his own day-count system. Argüelles wrote that he and a Mexican artist friend working in Mexico in the 1970s developed the placement that he came to follow and would later elaborate in his Dreamspell game.
In short, the letter revealed that Argüelles was either unaware of a surviving day-count or preferred to nurture his own creative interpretation of the system. Once the placement of the day-signs was fixed in his new system, events in the world fell into place and the system appeared to be self-confirming. People thus say that “it works.” The reason for this is not rocket science—oracles will respond when you pour energy into them. It doesn’t matter that it’s fifty-plus days out of synchronization with the calendar followed by the Maya for more than 2,000 years. Said another way, if you say to someone that the number 23 is meaningful, the seed is planted for them to begin noticing it everywhere. The mind will automatically begin selecting 23s out of the environment. Scofield, rightly so, found Argüelles’s response to be proof that his system was of his own invention. Later, however, Argüelles claimed it was a direct successor to the calendar in the Chilam Balam books, even though he had noted in his 1975 book The Transformative Vision that the Chilam Balam material did not contain much helpful information.
Another thing that the Maya calendar tradition doesn’t really contain is a 13-moon calendar. This will come as a surprise to many people who follow Argüelles’s 13-moon calendar. The system, as devised by Argüelles, has 13 × 28 = 364 days. Its New Year’s Day is always fixed to July 26 (which links it to his Dreamspell system), and you need to add one more day, July 25, to make it work. This is called “The Day Out of Time,” which I guess makes it okay. The 13-moon calendar is intended to put us back into synchronization with the rhythms of the moon, the natural cycles of life, to free us from enslavement to the 12-month/60-minute rhythm of artificial clock-time. The calendar you follow will, according to the 13-moon logic, define your consciousness. Solar calendar bad, lunar calendar good. Sounds reasonable so far. But the problem is that the 13-moon calendar does not follow any lunar or “natural” rhythm. Periods of 28 days and 364 days are approximations of lunar cycles, truncating them to roughly fit into a solar year. If you really wanted to synchronize with natural lunar rhythms, you’d pay attention to the waxing and waning movements of the moon and the northward and southward oscillation of the moon’s rise positions throughout the year, eventually coming to discern the 19-year lunar extreme cycle. It’s worth paying attention to and tracking the celestial cycles and earth cycles that we live within, but you can’t get there by following a 13-moon calendar of 364 days, even if you add a Day Out of Time and skip counting February 29.36 A truly accurate lunar calendar can be created, however. Peter Meyer, the programmer for Terence McKenna’s Time Wave Zero theory, did just that; he called it the Goddess Lunar Calendar.37
In 2004, the “Road to 2012” conference was organized by Chet Snow. It was a rare venue in which José Argüelles and I would both be presenting. In my two presentations I gave an overview of the spiritual and academic aspects of the 2012 topic and provided a retrospective on the popular 2012 movement.38 I thus began with Tony Shearer and presented all of the issues with the correlation, Harmonic Convergence, and
the galactic alignment. Tony’s student, Amaurante Montez, had asked me to give José a copy of the new edition of Tony’s book Spirit Song, but the opportunity never arose because José appeared only for his presentation and then was gone. It was a bit strange; usually speakers will convene, hang out, exchange ideas, share a panel discussion and field questions from the audience, but José wasn’t around for any of that.
It was a great conference in any case, because my friend Geoff Stray from England was also speaking. I hadn’t seen him since 1999, and we caught up on all the new books, films, and 2012-related products. Geoff, beyond all other 2012ologists, has taken it upon himself to critique and assess virtually everything on 2012 that has appeared. His task has of late become quite daunting for the sheer volume of products, theories, visions, and films flooding the marketplace. His website, diagnosis2012.uk.co, has been and continues to be an indispensable resource for anyone wanting to get the lowdown on all things 2012. His fact-based reviews are refreshing, accurate, and informative. Geoff tells it like it is. For example, he reviewed The Idiot’s Guide to 2012 by Synthia and Colin Andrews. The books in this series are supposed to give you the simple, no-nonsense info, providing a nonbiased and accurate guide. This Idiot’s Guide is a travesty of disinformation, so Geoff offered a corrective guide to 2012 to the authors of The Idiot’s Guide to 2012:
The Andrews couple refer to the system as the “vestigial system”… On p. 72, Haabs (365-day cycle) are confused with Tuns (360-day cycle), where it says that the Long Count is the same as the 13-baktun cycle (not true, as there were longer cycles sometimes used), and that the 13-baktun cycle consists of 5,200 Haabs of 360 days each. This will lead to more confusion in what is already quite a complex subject. It is wrongly stated that the end-date of the 13-baktun cycle “is written the same as the beginning date: 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 8 Cumku” (pp. 74 and 114). This reveals that the authors actually know very little about the Maya calendars, and have hurriedly cobbled this book together to meet the deadline of the publisher…. The authors have invented their own version of Jenkins’s galactic alignment zone, which John Major Jenkins says is from 1980 to 2016. They have also misunderstood Carl Calleman’s theories, when they say that, along with Argüelles and Jenkins, his theory “has been inspired by the mathematics and astronomy of the Mayans” (p. 170). In reality, Calleman has declared that he thinks the Maya calendar cycles had nothing to do with astronomy.39
Geoff has an eagle eye for errors and takes the time to carefully assess what people write. It’s unfortunate that the reading public has to be subjected to these kinds of books, which pretend to be easy guides. Geoff’s summation is fair: “The book attempts to be a guide for the man in the street to the intricacies of 2012, but has been written by people who obviously knew nothing about the subject before being asked to write the book. There are one or two interesting bits, but it has been ruined by sloppy research, useless proofread ing, invented information and quotations, and general confusion.”40
When I met with Geoff in Tempe in late 2004, he was finishing up his own 2012 book called Beyond 2012: Catastrophe or Ecstasy: A Complete Guide to the End-of-Time Predictions. There are only a handful of 2012 books that I would recommend, and this is the top of the list. He asked me to write the introduction to his book in 2004, which I was glad to do. In it I expressed my gratitude for Geoff’s unparalleled contribution to clarity and discernment:
Stray has been unbiased in what he has allowed into the pavilion of purview. He is a true pioneer, the first 2012ologist who has sought to collect, survey, contextualize, and comment on the wide spectrum of manifestations related to 2012. Because of his familiarity with all things 2012, he is our best guide into the labyrinths of kaleidoscopic creation and consternation that typify the inner landscape of 2012-land…. Stray has used common sense and discerning analysis to critique the contributions, such that basic errors in theories have been identified, always involving internal inconsistencies in the theory itself, rather than by reference to a set of preconceived doctrines of what 2012 “really” means. I appreciate this quality in Stray’s book on 2012, because it allows us to categorize the wide spectrum of writings into fiction and non-fiction, trace the inter-relationships and discern, sometimes, the shared sourcings between different contributions. A bit of order has thus been given to the chaos of creativity that 2012 has spawned.40
By 2005 I had done hundreds of interviews. The great majority of them had to contend with interviewers who were approaching 2012 through a net of assumptions that were hard to unpack during the commercial interruptions of a typical radio hour. I thus welcomed the free-form late-night interview sessions offered by Mike Hagan, a smart, courageous, and progressive voice on the airwaves.41 Before signing off in June of 2008, he had interviewed many notables, including Dennis McKenna, Barbara and Dennis Tedlock, Rick Levine, Elizabeth Upton, Jay Weidner, José Argüelles, Carl Calleman, and many others.
The five interviews I recorded with Mike explore the entire spectrum of my work on 2012, and address many of the issues that have arisen in academia, among the indigenous people of the Americas, and in the popular press. It was great fun to stay with Mike for a few days in February of 2008. I did an interview with him in studio and a presentation at a nearby locale. Perhaps because I am from the Midwest myself, I appreciated the smart and down-to-earth reception of my progressive ideas. I’ve noticed two extremes in American audiences—extreme rational skepticism bordering on snobbery on the East Coast and sensation-seeking New Age gullibility on the West Coast. These are generalizations that do not speak for every person I’ve met, but the Midwest seemed closest to the no-nonsense scrutiny, focused attention, and genuine interest I’ve also experienced in European venues.
Mass media documentaries have lately gone in the direction of infotain ment and have frequently presented 2012 in the most salacious way, doing little justice to the topic. Independent films have a better chance of doing the 2012 topic justice, because the mass media outlets filter the facts through a great deal of hype and sensationalizing. Independent film producers are also concerned with turning a profit and so sometimes aspire to the same stylings of the mass media, which they believe to be proven formulas for marketplace success. Certain films that treat cutting-edge topics achieve success, such as the What the Bleep! movie. The script was framed as an adventure of discovery undertaken by the likable main character, played by Marlee Matlin. We travel with her to learn about quantum mechanics and the implication that we are cocreators of our reality. (This idea was ably introduced in Fritjof Capra’s classic 1976 book The Tao of Physics, which, unlike the Bleep! movie, noted that ancient Hindu metaphysics anticipated the discoveries of quantum physics.)
The Bleep! framework of presentation was adopted by Sacred Mysteries film producers Sharron Rose and Jay Weidner for their 2012 documentary film, released in late 2006 as 2012: The Odyssey. Rose herself was our guide, traveling the country trying to figure out what 2012 was all about. She interviewed various people and spent much time on unexpected mysteries, such as the Georgia Guide Stones and the murals at Denver International Airport. I was interviewed extensively for the film, during which I shared details of the Maya Creation Myth and the importance of Izapa for understanding the origins of the 2012 calendar. I always offer, in these types of interviews, a reading of the Maya Creation Myth in which I highlight spiritual teachings that relate to World Ages and cycle endings, such as the one in 2012. In the lingo of pop culture presentations, this would be called the “Maya prophecy” for 2012. Or, more relevantly, “spiritual teachings” that the Maya believed appropriate for cycle endings—namely, sacrifice, transformation, and renewal. I was a bit disappointed when the film came out and very little of this material was used in the film. Still, at the time it was basically the only thing available that didn’t completely hammer the doomsday angle.
Sharron did present Native American wisdom “for 2012,” but it came from a non-Maya tradition. The wisdom teachings of the Inca, courtesy o
f Alberto Villoldo’s commendable work, were presented in the film. An Inca prophecy was attached to the Maya 2012 end date and was explained by Villoldo as his Inca shaman friends sat around a fire and did a prayer ceremony. The filmmakers, Rose and Weidner, had traveled to South America to acquire this visually compelling footage of Inca shamans doing rituals in the high Andes. It was apparently strategically difficult for them to visit Maya shamans and temples. Maya cosmology is deep and at times complex, and in my experience filmmakers often limit the story I’d like to tell on the integration of Maya science, spirituality, and mythology. They may use only the portion in which I define the astronomy behind the galactic alignment. Most viewers would likely conflate the Inca with the Maya, and there may be a universal wisdom that the Inca contribute to the ideas of cycle endings and spiritual awakening, but one hopes and expects that Maya teachings would be emphasized in a film about a distinctly Maya date.
In 2007, author and Unknown Country radio host Whitley Strieber published a novel called 2012: The War of Souls. He had written an article on 2012, which appeared a short time before his book came out, that made connections between Harmonic Convergence and 2012, drawing from ideas found in the Argüelles material. When his book came out, it was exactly what it seemed to be—a horror story flavored with Maya-sounding words and names but with no accurate Maya information at all. The title, “2012,” was clearly a marketing strategy. I found it humorous that I was mentioned, along with William Henry and Graham Hancock, as thinkers whom the aliens would have to take out immediately after they appeared on that fateful future day. An alien hit contract was thus put out on my life, at least in the realm of horror fiction. The co-opting of 2012 for a fiction book is not that surprising. What is surprising is that Whitley Strieber would thereafter be called upon to keynote 2012 conferences and speak with authority on 2012 in film documentaries.
The 2012 Story Page 21