The 2012 Story

by John Major Jenkins

  The Great Plaza at Copán. Photo by the author, 1988

  The next day our group journeyed back to Antigua, where Jim and I gave another presentation at the Universidad Francisco Marroquin. We were hosted by Mary Lou and Jay Ridinger, an amazing couple who, in the 1970s, rediscovered the lost jade quarries of the ancient Maya. They now employ Maya artisans in the making of jade artifacts and jewelry. Mary Lou gave us an inspiring presentation on the Maya jade tradition and how Jades, S.A., revived the lost tradition. I see my friends Mary Lou and Jay as being engaged in an enterprise similar to mine—recovering and reviving a lost facet of the ancient Maya tradition. One encounters endless obstacles, but also breakthroughs. And one discovers, along the way, true friends and allies.

  Our group continued into the highlands, visiting the Quiché Maya site of Iximche, market day in Chichicastenango, beautiful Lake Atitlán, and the Maya cult deity Maximon. It was fortunate that, when we explored Izapa’s sister city, Tak’alik Ab’aj, Maya priest Rigoberto Itzep Chanchabac was burning incense and doing ritual in front of Stela 5. The ceremonial feeling of reverence and prayer, making offerings to the sky-earth and the ancestors, was moving. Our own culture rarely provides opportunities to feel deep reverence for life. We were given a brief tour by the site’s archaeologist, Christa Schieber de Lavarreda. She described for us the line of stones they had found that pointed to the center point of the bowl of the Big Dipper in the northern skies. The archaeologists, upon digging deeper, discovered another row of stones, from an earlier era, pointing to a different star in the constellation of Draco. They concluded that the people of Tak’alik Ab’aj were tracking precession and had shifted their cosmology as the skies shifted. This was clear evidence that precession was being noticed and tracked, in an area with close ties in the pre-Classic period to Izapa.

  After the tour was over and everyone said their good-byes, I stayed in Antigua because Mary Lou and I planned to strike out for Izapa to meet with local officials and give another presentation. With our friend Baldomero driving, we crossed the border into Mexico in under five hours. Little did I know, but a celebration was planned in the town of Tuxtla Chico, near the archaeological site of Izapa. We first met with Rodolfo Juan, our host, in Tapachula. Time was short, so we immediately went to Izapa, where I gave an impromptu talk at the ballcourt. This was “ground zero of the 2012 prophecy,” I said, “where the future alignment of the solstice sun and the dark rift was encoded into the mythic narrative carved into the monuments.” The next two days were a whirlwind. I was presented with the keys to the city in a formal ceremony in Tuxtla Chico and was made an honorary ambassador of Izapa to the outside world. A press conference happened that evening, and the next day we were front-page news in the Mexican national newspaper. My presentation at the Universidad Valle del Grijalva in Tapachula was well attended, and I was impressed with the students and adults who came out to learn about the astronomical knowledge of the ancient Izapans.

  Mary Lou and I were interviewed on a radio program, and I learned of Mam Indians living in the high mountains on the slopes of Tacaná volcano, near the border with Guatemala. We had wondered whether any traditional Maya day-keepers lived on the Mexican side. The answer was “a few.” A more precise answer was that a traditional Maya calendar priest wanted to visit Izapa and do ritual, but he didn’t know how to go about acquiring official permission. In Guatemala, the Maya Indians have recently been allowed into the archaeological sites, and altars have even been constructed in front of stelae at Tikal, Tak’alik Ab’aj, Iximche, and elsewhere. In Mexico, however, the old rules still apply—no Indian rituals allowed inside the national parks and archaeological sites. I wondered if Izapa could perhaps squeeze through somehow, as it exists in a marginal zone where local powers might trump federal laws. It was an intriguing possibility but would require some patience and behind-the-scenes string pulling.

  The day after my presentation at the university, we needed to return to Antigua. But we visited the site one last time and lingered while locals approached, telling us of carved stones they were finding in the fields. We went to the nearby home of a woman who had an Izapa-style potbellied boy, carved of stone with a shallow bowl in the top. I imagined this to be a stargazing device, similar to the vast rectangular pools in the architecture of Palenque, which scholars realized were filled with placid water so the Palenque stargazers could gaze downward into the underworld of the night sky. Another woman told us of some carved boulders on the slopes of Tacaná volcano north of Izapa.

  In June of 2009 I was able to visit one of these carved boulders, and I determined that it contained scenes of sacrifice and birth, which very nicely complemented the primary theme found in the Izapan ballcourt. The caiman depicted on this “birth-sacrifice” boulder was carved in the style of Izapa’s Stela 25, which is located in the museum in Tapachula. The caiman is cut in half, sacrificed, with three jagged cuts through its body. Stela 25 depicts Seven Macaw holding Hunahpu’s severed arm. Hunahpu, below Seven Macaw, is missing an arm and three cuts drip blood. The previously undocumented carved boulder in the mountains above Izapa possibly depicts a version of a Creation Text recorded at Palenque, in which a “Starry Deer Crocodile” (the Milky Way) was sacrificed and cut into three parts that became the three levels of the cosmos: underworld, earth, and sky.42 The Izapa bioregion itself is divided into three domains: ocean to the south, the narrow plateau on which Izapa sits, and high volcanoes looming in the sky to the north. This tripartite structure is also echoed in the three main monument groups at Izapa. There was clearly more to be discovered in the region of Izapa.

  Before we hit the highway for Guatemala we went to Izapa’s Group B to observe the no-shadow phenomenon of the solar zenith passage. The date happened to be August 11, one of the solar zenith passage days. We lingered until noon, and the sun was blazing. At the pillar-and-ball gnomons, we watched the shadows disappear as the sun reached the exact center of the sky overhead. On our drive back to Antigua Mary Lou, Baldomero, and I ate fresh cacao, sucking the sweet mango-like nectar off the pods.

  That trip was an incredibly demanding nonstop odyssey. Back in Antigua, I assessed the previous ten days and realized I’d given six presentations, a press conference, and a radio interview, not counting two guided tours of Izapa. And as an honored guest entered into the books for all time, I was presented with the key to Tuxtla Chico, renamed for the occasion Izapito, “little Izapa.”

  MANY SCHOLARS MOVING IT FORWARD

  I realize that I can be critical of scholars and New Agers in equal measure, but in this section I want to make it clear that I have been inspired and informed by Maya scholars past and present. Many scholars are doing incredible trail-blazing work and are driven by their own love of Maya culture. It’s rare for any specialist to become a full-time epigrapher. The new epigraphers are pursuing their interest as a sideline, attending conferences at their own expense, often finding it difficult to get their research published in official journals. It’s the digital age, so debates and think tanks unfold today in private e-mails, teleconferences, and on e-list discussion boards. Scholars whose perspectives I disagree with and critique in this book are also the same scholars who have provided insights and breakthroughs. But everything must be assessed with clarity and discernment. As far as I’m concerned, this is how it should be. Blindly following authority figures occurs in academia as much as in New Age cults and anywhere else. Often, a sense of propriety prevents authority figures from being corrected on basic errors. The entire thing is a process, and despite career ambitions professional scholars and independent researchers alike share a desire to understand more deeply what the ancient Maya civilization was about.

  Scholars currently doing important work include Susan Milbrath, Elizabeth Newsome, Prudence Rice, Karen Bassie, Julia Kappelman, Victoria Bricker, Barbara MacLeod, Barbara Tedlock, Merle Greene Robertson, Martha Macri, and Gabrielle Vail. Noteworthy pioneers of the past include Tatiana Prouskouriakaoff, Linda Schele, Maud Oakes, Maud
Makemson, Zelia Nuttall, and Doris Heyden. Notice that these are all women. A lot of them specialize in hard-core scientific disciplines—archaeology, astronomy, calendrics, and mathematics. They prove that these traditionally male domains are simply not gender-specific. Unlike other high-level disciplines (with the exception, perhaps, of women’s studies), Mesoamerican studies is overflowing with brilliant female scholars. I’m not sure why this is so, but I think it needs to be said.

  Barb MacLeod is a brilliant investigator with many interests. In addition to consistently offering breakthrough readings of tenaciously inscrutable hieroglyphic texts, she is a passionate aviation stunt flyer and instructor, a guitar-playing singer-songwriter, cave explorer, and artist (she did the Cycle 7 cartoon in Chapter 1). She first traveled from Seattle to Belize in 1970 to explore caves. In a fortuitous occurrence, she soon returned to map out caves for the archaeology department of the Peace Corps. She pursued this for five years, visiting Maya temple sites throughout Mesoamerica while studying the hieroglyphs. Around 1973, she adapted Morley’s Long Count table in The Ancient Maya, extending it out to December of 2012.

  After getting her degree at the University of Texas in Austin, she circulated a series of epigraphic observations in the late 1980s and 1990s called “North Austin Notes.” It was one of these, from 1991, called “Maya Genesis: The Glyphs,” that spelled out the decipherment of the “three-hearthstone” hieroglyph, connecting it with the three stars in Orion. This is the idea that many attribute to Linda Schele, but in fact it originated with her friend and colleague Barb MacLeod.43 The connection of this decipherment to Creation Texts at Quiriguá provided a breakthrough revealing Maya Creation Mythology as a metaphor for astronomical features and processes. Now, almost twenty years later, MacLeod has made another breakthrough, called the 3-11 Pik formula, which connects important rites of Maya kingship with temporal “stations” related to the precession of the equinoxes.

  Now for the guys. I’ve always appreciated the work of Dennis Tedlock, Anthony Aveni, Gordon Brotherston, Raphael Girard, Ian Graham (aka “Indiana Jones”), David Sedat, and Michael Coe. The research of these scholars and others that I was immersed in while I wrote Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 can be glimpsed in my online bibliography.44 When you are deeply engaged in Maya studies, you feel obliged to speak out at inconsistencies or mistakes. This is part of the process, and my critique of various aspects of Maya scholarship doesn’t diminish the respect and gratitude I feel for this unique, committed group of people. And lately there have been some newcomers, rising stars who are building upon previous scholarship and finding some truly astonishing new things. Michael Grofe is one of these; his work argues convincingly for a high level of accuracy in ancient Maya astronomy.

  David Stuart was a wonder kid who traveled to Maya sites with his parents and was swept up into the Palenque Round Table craze in the 1970s. Exposed to the hieroglyphic texts as a youngster, he quickly became adept at recognizing text elements and soon began making his own decipherments. Since the 1980s, Stuart has greatly contributed to the revolution in deciphering the Maya script. He and Stephen Houston have collaborated on many decipherments, but neither has any particular sensitivity to potential astronomical references in the texts. Yet they are there to be illuminated.

  They wrote a monograph together in the early 1990s that was about place-names—the glyphs used to name sites such as Palenque, Copán, and Quiriguá. A category of place-names referred to what they called “supernatural topography”—that is, locations involved in the Creation Mythology. They wrote, “[J]ust as the deities acceded to high office or gave birth, so too did they live in specific places, ranging from the ‘fifth sky’ to the ‘black hole’… the overlap between human and mythological geography would appear to be small.”45 It’s quite clear they are conceiving of these “mythological locations” as belonging purely to the human imagination.46 They are not part of a celestial landscape; they do not see any astronomy in the mythology.

  This assumption is unwarranted given the general connection between Maya Creation Mythology and astronomy that was being discussed, at the time, by Linda Schele, and that is now, generally speaking, undeniable. The bias belongs to a general bias, that mythology is an unreliable source of real information. Perhaps it is useful as a codification of moral guidelines, but it does not encode anything so scientific as astronomy. I suspect that when epigraphers develop a greater appreciation for the archetypal dimension of human experience and accept that the Maya culture integrated astronomy and mythology, we’ll have some progress on this front.

  In early 2008 I began a correspondence with Mark Van Stone, a callig rapher, artist, and student of Maya epigraphy. He was the artist for Michael Coe’s important epigraphic guidebook Reading the Maya Glyphs. I began by explaining the correlation question, which boils down to the old debate between two end-date choices: December 21 and December 23. The latter date was argued for and defended by Maya epigrapher Floyd Lounsbury, but his argument is flawed, as discussed in Chapter 4. A further point that I’ve emphasized frequently in online debates with scholars is that the resolution of the issue is supported by the surviving day-count in Guatemala and points right to the solstice in 2012 (December 21). This becomes, then, the vector for the likelihood of the end date being intentionally placed.

  Mark and I exchanged many e-mails in early 2008. Later that year, the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies approved and posted Mark’s lengthy, slide-show-style article called “It’s Not the End of the World: What the Ancient Maya Tell Us About 2012.”47 John Hoopes called it “The best scholarly background for discussion of 2012.”48 As I read Mark’s well-written piece I realized that he had overlooked virtually every clarification I had offered in our e-mail exchanges. I posted a response on Aztlan, providing links to a lengthy critique of Van Stone’s essay.49 The primary problem with the approach of the essay is that it neglected to examine the pre-Classic iconography that would have the most to say about the origins of the Long Count, as the Long Count first appears in the first century BC. Van Stone, on the other hand, had focused his investigation on Classic Period epigraphy and even, incredibly, post-Classic material from Central Mexico, far to the west of where the Long Count was used and centuries after it stopped being recorded.

  Mark did emphasize an approach that can produce results. We should expect to find references to 2012 in the Classic Period inscriptions, but epigraphers assume that specific texts complete with dates should be found every time, and that’s all that is admissible. This assumption will effectively eliminate information that can shed light on how 2012 was conceived by the ancient Maya. For example, I might write a page of material in which I frequently refer to “my birthday.” I never provide the actual date, but use only the secondary reference phrase. Two hundred years from now, a future literary historian could do a little additional research and find the exact date of my birth in an archive somewhere, and thus supply the missing specific date. Likewise, letters of a seventeenth-century French count might refer frequently to “the Border War” and it would take some contextual support from other sources to equate this secondary reference with a war between France and Germany that occurred in 1642 and 1643. The detailed dates could be reconstructed. In Maya history, we have some calendrical references to the era inauguration in 3114 BC. The Creation Mythology associated with this date involves three hearthstones, the zenith, and a turtle. This structural complex becomes a secondary reference phrase, and when it is found in other contexts, without a specific date reference to 3114, scholars accept that it refers to August 11, 3114 BC. The same principle can be applied to secondary references to 2012.

  Overall, I believe there is hope for Maya scholars to one day realize that 2012 was an intentional and meaningful artifact of knowledge for the ancient Maya. It’s unfortunate that many scholars are locked into responding to the superficial refrains repeated by New Agers or doomsayers—that it’s either an ascension or the end of the world. Scholars and pop write
rs form a perfectly bonded dysfunctional pair, each side unable to see the ding an sich, the thing-in-itself, as they are preoccupied and transfixed dealing with each other’s projected shadow. Scholars’ dismissive interpretations follow from this assumption, and as a result they have been blind to seeing anything of significance. At the first academic 2012 conference, the toughest critic one could imagine, Anthony Aveni, brought all these assumptions and plenty of thoughtful comments to the table. My galactic alignment theory, and the 2012 topic generally, would either be blown to smithereens or emerge unscathed. Let’s see what happened.

  THE FIRST ACADEMIC 2012 CONFERENCE

  The 2012 conference at Tulane University in New Orleans was the first of its kind. Scholars had decided it was high time to address 2012 as an overarching theme. They invited Anthony Aveni, who was working on a book on 2012, to provide the keynote address. My report on the goings-on at the conference is late-breaking stuff, as it happened in February of 2009, while I was writing this book. I’ve prepared an online resource that will share commentary and audio clips that I recorded during the conference.50

  New Orleans, for me, is a place of odd memories and experiences. I played guitar as a busker on the French Quarter at age twenty, danced down Bourbon Street with the Hari Krishnas while investigating religious cults, and spent seven days in the New Orleans Parish Prison (the infamous Tent City), and it was a bum rap, I swear. My sabbatical in jail came at the very end of my first trip to Central America. After traveling on a shoestring for more than three months, using money I’d saved working the night shift in a factory for a year, I made my way overland and crossed the border into Texas. There, I made a fateful decision to hitchhike to Florida. The details are irrelevant; suffice it to say that the arrest occurred during Mardi Gras and the charge was “obstructing a sidewalk.” The result was that my backpack disappeared with the guy who’d given me a lift. After my release in the wake of a hurricane, I was able to buy a bus ticket home to Chicago with ninety dollars I had stashed in my shoe. Arriving home with the proverbial T-shirt on my back and twelve cents in my pocket, I lamented the loss of my camera, ten rolls of pictures, my notebook, and assorted mementos. That was the beginning of my career as an independent 2012ologist, and I vowed to return to Central America as soon as possible.