Now I was back in New Orleans. My friend Jim Reed was there too, along with our friend Madison Moore. It was good to have a few allies on hand, as I planned to storm the ivory tower, much the way I had done in 1997 at the Institute of Maya Studies. I knew what Aveni’s critique entailed, and had noted that in his other public comments he harbored ideas not unlike those of the astronomers I discussed in the previous section. In periodic news items on 2012, which I too had been interviewed for, Aveni and other scholars typically dismissed the whole thing as meaningless. In a CNN interview David Stuart said: “There is no serious scholar who puts any stock in the idea that the Maya said anything meaningful about 2012.”51 By the time 2012 arrives this assertion will be proven incorrect, as the new evidence is already at hand.
I was curious if scholars really believed that the cycle ending in 2012 was meaningless for the ancient Maya, because the news media typically framed their presentations as “New Age kooks versus the scholarly voices of reason.” There was little room for the kind of work I’ve been presenting—an intentional effort to reconstruct forgotten beliefs connected to the Long Count calendar and the 2012 cycle endings. In fact, it’s fair to say that Aveni and others were content to address their comments to the silliest far end of the New Age fringe. They could simply say, “The Maya didn’t believe the world is going to end in 2012.” Of course, I’ve been offering that correction too, for many years. But Aveni was only beginning to rationally investigate the evidence for something else going on, and it was clear that he would resist the suggestion.
Barbara and Dennis Tedlock were giving a presentation, which promised to say something specific about 2012. The other speakers, including Marc Zender, Matthew Looper, Victoria Bricker, Markus Eberl, and John Justeson, only obliquely dealt with 2012, if at all. However, their presentations were fascinating, and I was greatly inspired to renew areas of research I’d been neglecting. Oddly, Robert Sitler, the first scholar to publish a peer-reviewed article dedicated to 2012, was not invited to speak. Aveni’s Friday-night key note talk would be the focus of official comments on 2012. An open panel on Sunday would provide another opportunity to ask some pointed questions.
Weeks before the conference, I had prepared an outline of what I considered to be key points that any scholarly treatment of 2012 should cover. I sent this to Aveni as a heads-up, as I was concerned that he would not sink his teeth into the real issues. The first fact that is obvious to anyone who spends a little time with the Long Count is that the end date falls on a solstice. This implies an ability to accurately calculate the tropical year more than 2,100 years ago. Despite my heads-up, as it turned out Aveni mentioned this fact but conveniently avoided addressing the implications. It took my direct question after his talk, as an audience member in a huge auditorium, to force the issue to be considered.
Items I listed as essential, which I sent to Dr. Aveni:
• The likelihood of intent suggested by the solstice placement of the 13-Baktun cycle-ending date in 2012
• The calendar correlation
• The place and time of the Long Count’s origins
• The relevance of Izapa to the Long Count’s origins
• The galactic alignment theory with respect to the significance of the archaeo-astronomical symbolism in the Izapan ballcourt
• The question of ancient knowledge of the precession of the equinoxes and its accurate calculation
Critics of 2012 spend much of their time responding to the exaggerated media hype that asserts “the Maya predicted the world will end in 2012.” We (and scholars, especially) should be addressing our questions to 2012 as an intentional artifact of the ancient calendar, and explore how this date and ideologies possibly connected with it manifested in Maya cosmology.
When I decided at the last minute that I could get away for the conference, I xeroxed 100 copies of a four-page document that I intended to hand out at the conference.52 On Friday, we attended other talks in the morning and afternoon. One noteworthy thing happened in Markus Eberl’s talk. It was a basic introductory class, the first of the weekend. In describing the Long Count, he presented the famous image from Coba, with its twenty-four place values set to 13. This image is often used to imply that the 13-Baktun cycle is meaningless because there are much greater cycles in the Long Count. This perspective avoids the fact that most Long Count dates are recorded with only five place values, meaning the Baktun level is for all practical purposes the highest. During the question session, my friend Dave Shaeffer from Antigua triggered a realization about Markus’s presentation of the Coba Creation stela. Dave pointed out that his slide cut off the bottom of the image, where the explicit date of the stela is found. It is in fact a Creation Text, so the final date, despite the huge abstract levels that precede it, ends up at 13.0.0.0.0, 4 Ahau 8 Cumku, August 11, 3114 BC. The monument is all about that date, the inauguration of the current era of 13 Baktuns. There was a subtle way that the information was selectively presented which avoided dealing with the importance of a 13-Baktun cycle in Maya Creation Mythology.
During a break in the afternoon I bumped into Aveni in the foyer. He said, “Oh, you’re here—you sent me your six points and said you weren’t coming!” This was indeed true at the time I’d sent them to him. I should mention that Aveni and I appeared in a recently released documentary together, called 2012: Science or Superstition? I’ve had serious issues with many of the documentaries I’ve been involved in, some of which micro-edited my words to make it seem as if I advocated the 2012 doomsday position (if I had a team of damage-control spin doctors, or could afford lawyers, they would have been on that right away). But the new documentary really did a nice job of accurately treating my work while providing reasonable critiques. These were provided by Aveni, and I could see that he was willing to address the question of the galactic alignment. His Tulane talk covered much of the same ground as his comments in the documentary.
Harvey Bricker gave a long introduction, with funny slides taken during vacations they had shared and satirical jabs, all in good fun. He called Aveni an interdisciplinarian who was the perfect person to address the 2012 topic. I was a bit surprised at the constant humorous references to “end of the world” ideation, as if that was all it was about. It seemed that scholars were just as imprisoned by that doomsday framework as the media and many popular writers were.
Aveni began right off with his Google results for “Maya 2012 Creation”: 281,000 hits and growing by the month. It was, indeed, “a very hot topic.”53 He said he wanted to discuss the “event” that “will occur” on “the winter solstice of 2012” from three vantage points: what latter-day prophets are saying about it, what it might have meant for the Maya, and what cycle turnings generally mean and have meant for cultures.
He mentioned Geoff Stray’s website but called it “Dire Gnosis” (the crowd tittered); Geoff’s site is actually Diagnosis2012.co.uk, and he tells me that he originally had the logo read “Dire Gnosis” as a pun. Realizing that some people were taking it literally, he explained on his website that “there is a whole complex of meanings wrapped up in the Dire Gnosis logo… The word DIRE, although it can mean calamitous; dreadful; ominous, can also have a meaning of URGENT as in ‘dire need.’ Thus, the words 2012: Dire Gnosis mean 2012: Urgent Knowledge.”54 Stray’s website has been the go-to resource for all things 2012, providing detailed critical reviews of many books, theories, and movies. More so than any other investigator, including Aveni and myself, Geoff has been tireless is providing clear, informed, careful, and accurate reviews of almost everything that has appeared on 2012.
Aveni read from the jacket blurbs of books by Lawrence Joseph and Daniel Pinchbeck. He allowed various popular writers to indict themselves with their own statements, and it’s true that the hyperbole in Pinchbeck’s writings as well as Lawrence Joseph’s book is easy to spot. For example, Joseph wrote that 2012 will be “more catastrophic, tumultuous, and revela tory than any other year in human history—it will make you t
hink twice about your retirement plans.” And he quotes Daniel Pinchbeck as writing that his metaphysical opus reveals “secret thoughts on suppressed dimensions of being embedded in Maya 2012 philosophy that can save the world from impending environmental disaster.”
We might suspect that Aveni chooses the most outrageous selection, guaranteed to entertain his audience. It’s an old modus operandi that harkens back to Eric Thompson’s treatment of Benjamin Whorf, taking the weakest points and “worrying them to death,” as Michael Coe said. But I’m not surprised that pop writers get this treatment from Aveni, because of late there’s been a tendency to do very little actual research into Maya traditions. It’s as if a subparadigm has been created that can just quote mutually supporting New Age sources. Or 2012 just gets adopted as a pop icon, removed from its roots in Maya tradition. For researchers, writers, and journalists, there’s actually a lot of fascinating Maya source material to sink their teeth into.
Aveni then came to my work, and mentioned that I was in the audience and provided him with a list of six essential points, joking that he was glad to have me on his dissertation committee. Aveni’s genuine sense of humor alternated with no-nonsense observations. “Jenkins,” he said, believes “the Maya knew the winter solstice sun was slowly moving toward the center of the galaxy and when it passes the galactic plane we too will connect with our cosmic heart.” He mentioned my emphasis on the dark rift as a birthplace and my interpretation that the Maya conceived the Galactic Center as a “womb of creation.” So far so good, but then he said that I believe “this is all recorded on Stela 25” (from Izapa). He belabored the image as my proposed key to the alignment, which it isn’t, then he correctly pointed out that I see it as encoding an oppositional relationship between the Polar Center and the Galactic Center. Stela 11 is the carving from Izapa that I’ve presented as an image of the alignment of the December solstice sun with the dark rift in the Milky Way, for reasons I explained in Chapter 4. Without really passing judgment, Aveni quickly moved on to his next subject.
Next he quoted Lawrence Joseph saying that “the world will be thrown out of kilter” on December 21, 2012. A full-course menu of catastrophic scenarios was laid out by Joseph in purple prose that would give Poe pause. In a CNN interview, Joseph claimed his book wasn’t really cataclysm oriented, that his publisher insisted on the alarmist title (Apocalypse 2012), but his own words sure give the impression that he had doomsday on the brain.55 Aveni next reported that Dr. Calleman believes “the harmonic coincidence attending the seminal moment will constitute nothing less than a spiritual awakening, an enlightenment that demonstrates the progress of evolution.” The “seminal moment” for Calleman comes not in 2012 but on October 28, 2011, according to his system.
The second area that Aveni wanted to address involves what people believe the Maya may have thought about 2012. He says these ideas can be criticized on astronomical and cultural grounds. On astronomical grounds, he claimed there was no evidence they were aware of precession. Apart from the evidence at La Venta and Tak’alik Ab’aj that I previously mentioned, there is now breakthrough information from MacLeod and Grofe, which Aveni glossed over disparagingly. He ran through some quick comments on the eclipse table in the Maya’s Dresden Codex, the use of Copán ruler 18 Rabbit’s double-serpent bar, and described Long Count numbers going into the deep past on Copán Stela B. He stated that these were “not forward-looking ideas but backward-looking ideas, connecting rulers into deep time,” making a point that the Maya did not look into the future. However, in the Tortuguero texts as well as at Piedras Negras and even in the corpus of texts from Copán he mentioned, future cycle endings are in fact frequently referenced. For example, Copán’s dated inscriptions project backward and forward, making calendrical analogies between Yax Kuk Mo’s fifth-century reign and the future close of Baktun 10 (in 830 AD).56
On cultural grounds, he said the ancient Maya weren’t forward-projecting. In fact, they did use both forward and backward projections in their Creation Texts. Many scholars, such as Matthew Looper, understand quite clearly the analogical relationship between the period ending of the previous World Age (in 3114 BC) and other period endings, great and small, throughout Maya history: “Zoomorph P and Altar P’ [at Quiriguá] were commissioned by Sky Xul as the primary commemorative monuments for his third period ending festival on 9.18.5.0.0 [September 13, 795 AD]. As a celebration of cosmic renewal, the period-ending was considered to be a replay of the events of cosmogenesis, which occurred on 4 Ajaw 8 Kumk’u [13.0.0.0.0 in 3114 BC].”57 All cycle endings would have been treated as like-in-kind events in which sacrifice and new dedications were performed.
Next, Aveni claimed that the Milky Way was never represented by the Maya as a tree, an opinion that many Maya scholars simply don’t agree with. The Lacandon Maya, to give just one example, believed that the clump of the nuclear bulge where the Milky Way crosses through Sagittarius and Scorpio was the “roots of a giant tree.”58 Aveni produced the famous image from the last page of the Maya Dresden Codex, which shows a flood pouring over the earth from the mouth of a giant sky-caiman. He compared this flood image to prognostications given in the Chilam Balam books, and Aveni believes these “prophecies” are simply free-floating “metaphorical frameworks”—sort of like moral guidelines—rather than “transcendent” messages that would apply to all humanity as some kind of universal truth. Again, one senses a resistance to accepting the archetypal dimension of the human psyche that does offer a “universal” or “transcendent” level on which these kinds of ideas have meaning. The idea of a cleansing “flood” is not only a universal occurrence geographically speaking, but more important it is a universal (in Aveni’s conceptual usage, “transcendental”) idea that has meaning for each and every human psyche—death itself will be the great flood.
Aveni stated that in the early days of Christianity, a religion he calls “Gnosticism” prevailed that believed in an essential unity of all faiths. He opined that such a view is outdated, a kind of idealistic superstition that should not be entertained today. He was, I think, trying to describe the Perennial Philosophy, which is not so much a historical phenomenon as a depth perception that acknowledges the underlying essential unity of religious teachings, at their archetypal core, while the exoteric forms and dogmas of religion always appear in changeable garb. This is an essential unity that transcends formal differences, best understood through initiation into a level of consciousness that can integrate the superficially different exoteric forms by seeing their shared root. Direct experience confers gnosis—a knowledge not limited to the statistics and data of surface reality but that embraces an integrative higher viewpoint conferred by direct inner realization, or illumination; aka, gnosis.59
I wouldn’t expect Aveni to appreciate the scholarship and insights of the Perennial Philosophers, since Publishers Weekly correctly identified him as a writer who “presupposes a readership that embraces a scientific-materialistic worldview.”60 It is surprising, however, that he misrepresents the widespread phenomenon of Gnosticism, since he wrote several books on the occult, the roots of astronomy in astrology, and magic. His approach to those subjects can be summarized as a belief that people fall prey to those subjects because of their human failings and unwillingness or inability to approach life responsibly and think rationally. This is similar to the scien tistic attitude that religion and spirituality were developed only after enough grain was stored in the tower for people to have time to ponder intangibles (i.e., to exercise their imaginations). The deck is so stacked against the in terdependency of subjective and objective domains that one wonders how anyone with this attitude can accurately represent cultures, such as the Maya, that are rooted in a nondual vision of the cosmos. Carl Calleman denies the physical realm of astronomy that can provide objective data; Aveni denies the spiritual realm that can provide direct gnosis. And never the twain shall meet.
On the precessional and sidereal-year calculations that Michael Grofe found in the Serpen
t Series of the Dresden Codex, Aveni asserted there is very little agreement that there are precessional calculations in the Dresden and he believes “such details are unnecessary in a talk about apocalypse.” This is a diplomatically cautious statement that lets him off the hook. Scientists are often in great disagreement about facts, how to interpret facts, and how many facts are needed in order to qualify as evidence. A lack of consensus among experts does not mean there is a lack of evidence. The evidence usually gets overlooked or marginalized for years, without critics ever once actually dealing directly with the evidence. This is clearly the case with Aveni’s unwillingness to assess Grofe’s work. Precession is, after all, a central issue in the 2012 alignment theory. Furthermore, the theme of the Tulane conference was 2012, not apocalypse. Aveni must see those two terms as being synonymous.
He stated that there was no evidence that the ancient Maya thought anything about the next creation (in 2012). Although this assertion was presented in no uncertain terms, it is a demonstrably false statement because of the text on Tortuguero Monument 6, which references 2012 as a Creation event and evokes the deities present at that 13-Baktun shift to consecrate a local building dedication. The building’s birth was anointed with a symbolic nod to the cosmos’s future rebirth. That is something!
The 2012 Story Page 27