The 2012 Story

by John Major Jenkins

  Portals to the Underworld and the Cloud Center Place. Drawing by the author

  Yaxchilán provides a special example for a probable dark-rift association in its place-name, Pa’ Chan. Translated as “broken sky” or “sky cleft,” epigraphers think it represents jagged mountains along the horizon or refers to the fact that Yaxchilán is situated in a dramatic hairpin loop of the Usumacinta River. It is recognized that Yaxchilán is just about halfway between the source and mouth of the Usumacinta River, placing it in its “middle.” This great riverine highway of temple sites flows roughly north-south. In many places in Indian America and in fact around the world, rivers were seen as earthly counterparts to the celestial river, the Milky Way. The sacred Urubamba in Peru, the river flowing through Rabinal in highland Guatemala, and the great Ganges in India are just a few examples. It would be surprising if the Usumacinta did not have this meaning for the Maya. In this context, Yaxchilán’s location in a hairpin coil of the earthly Milky Way is reminiscent of the dark rift’s situation between two white branches of the Milky Way. Since the dark rift’s mythological meanings include hole, cave, cleft, portal, road, birthplace, and maw, to say it could be thought of as a “sky cleft” is not at all far-fetched. Could this be the meaning of Yaxchilán’s hieroglyphic place-name? Maybe. It sounds more reasonable, given these considerations, than its representing jagged peaks along the horizon.16

  The dark rift was a significant reference point in so many different meaningful contexts it boggles the mind. When the sun, moon, eclipses, Jupiter, or other planets aligned with it, Creation imagery occurring at cycle endings, building dedications, transcendence and transformation, death and rebirth were evoked. I suspect that other inscriptions will yield secondary references to 2012 via the astronomical image-complex of “sun in dark rift.” The epigraphic code for this will probably involve the many dark-rift glyphs combined with a “sun” infix or prefix. I argued in earlier work that the upturned frog-mouth glyph (which means “to be born”) relates to the dark rift. Significantly, it is prominent in the iconography at Izapa and is found in its later hieroglyphic forms in Classic Period inscriptions.

  We shouldn’t forget that this new evidence augments my previous work, which argues for the end-date alignment being encoded into ballgame symbolism, the Creation Myth, birthing symbology, and king-making rites. The “integrative continuity” of the entire picture virtually eliminates the possibility that all of these connections are pure chance. This work may perhaps find its best ally in good old-fashioned common sense: “Given the integrative continuity of its monuments, sculptures, calendrics, and alignments, is it possible that Izapa does not have anything to do with the precessional convergence of Milky Way and solstice sun?”17 Thankfully, Barb MacLeod herself said the obvious: “It’s not a coincidence.”

  The Black Hole Place in Maya inscriptions. Drawings by the author

  Michael, Barb, and I continue to collaborate on various investigations relating to precessional astronomy. I am learning to decipher the hieroglyphic inscriptions, which I had previously left to others. The findings of other scholars are starting to converge, adding more support to my end-date alignment theory. It doesn’t matter whether or not the alignment directly causes some kind of change or transformation. That never was central to my work, although by route of coincidence or providence the unprecedented events occurring in today’s world are undeniable. The galactic cosmology I identified at the heart of the Maya Long Count can now be shown to be more deeply interwoven into core Maya traditions, important historical rulers and astro-theological rites than I ever dreamed it would be. The dark rift, the womb of creation, the sun’s sacrifice and rebirth at the end of the cycle, has meaning in direct proportion to the depth that you meditate on it. For me, it is enough to know that such a beautiful vision once existed and has now been pulled out of the shadows.

  The entire history of the 2012 story in Part I, from the rediscovery of a lost civilization to the vicissitudes of reconstructing lost pieces of a massive cosmological and cultural puzzle, to appropriations by New Age inventors and the endless resistances of academic gatekeepers, has led us to the cusp of 2012 and we are now seeing ancient Maya cosmology for what it truly was. Its ultimate orientational nexus was the rare galactic alignment. However one wants to limit the fact of this by paring down the definition, that nuts-and-bolts fact remains. This is the bare-bones conclusion: A precession-based galactic cosmology was pioneered in ancient Mesoamerica more than 2,000 years ago.

  Now we have to attend to the Big Picture and the real interesting 2012 question: What does it mean?

  PART TWO

  2012 and The Big Picture

  Temples at Waxactun, Guatemala. Photo by the author, 2008

  PART TWO. INTRODUCTION

  Mental facts do function both singly and together, at once, and we finite minds may simultaneously be coconscious with one another in a superhuman intelligence.1

  —WILLIAM JAMES, A Pluralistic Universe

  In Part I we surveyed the 2012 story from several different angles. We addressed the Eurocentric Western world’s discovery of Maya civiliza tion, its often denigrating judgments as well as its efforts to reconstruct forgotten traditions, including the Long Count calendar. We addressed the accelerating popular appropriation of 2012 and surveyed the claims of the most prominent model makers, systems designers, doomsayers, and New Age writers. We took a concise look at my own effort to investigate 2012 and reconstruct buried ideas and a lost galactic cosmology. We summarized what some of the modern Maya themselves say about 2012, and will explore contemporary Maya views in greater detail in Chapter 11. We took a look at the media, a barometer for collective hysteria and misconceptions that also tends to feed fear-based marketing exploitation. We gave a fair hearing to scholarly critics of my theory and other ideas that have been attached to 2012, and heard a revealing account of the first academic 2012 conference, held at Tulane University in February 2009. Finally, the latest breakthroughs in understanding how the ancient Maya thought about 2012 were announced, including new information on Tortuguero, Copán, and the link between sacrifice and renewal in Maya thought.

  And where do we stand as of mid-2009? At first glance, it seems we are essentially where we were ten years ago, twenty years ago, or thirty years ago. The majority of scholars do not believe that anything relevant to ancient Maya beliefs can be found in this date. Likewise, skeptical pundits in pop culture dismiss 2012 wholesale as a “hoax” or “100 percent garbage.” My work, which has offered a rational investigation of 2012 with an eye to reconstructing original beliefs connected with it, is ignored, co-opted, distorted, or dismissed. Twenty years, however, is a short time when it comes to acknowledging new discoveries that threaten the fundamental assumptions of Western culture. In Chapter 8, and all of Part II generally, we’ll explore these fundamental assumptions and compare and contrast them to the alternative—perennial wisdom that many civilizations, including the Maya, have taken for granted.

  Acknowledging threatening ideas can take decades. Usually the pioneers who pestered the status quo die in poverty, forgotten. Many of the trouble-makers that modern science honors as trailblazers (Kepler and Galileo among many) were kicked into the gutter by the leaders of their day. After the mere formality of acknowledging unwelcome information comes accepting their merit and then integrating what they offer. In this light, 2012 is definitely not just about one day in 2012; it is about a sea change that probably won’t bear fruit for many decades. But I believe that 2012 could be seen by future historians as a temporal marker of a great renaissance that will raise a submerged continent of consciousness that has been suppressed by Western science and culture.

  With the historical survey of Part I bringing us up to the cusp of 2012, how can we quickly summarize the current state of 2012ology? Generally, popular writers are largely underinformed on the details of Maya traditions. The latest pop manifestations of the 2012 meme—in movies, novels, and cosmic models—have basically cut
themselves loose from any obligation to reference Maya tradition at all. Or if they do, they propagate stereotypes and clichés. Systems designers craft their own idiosyncratic models based on catchy marketplace ideas such as fractal time or natural time or spiritual wave-time, thereby creating cut-and-paste syncretic schools in the same way that theosophy and anthroposophy did, diluting the great teachings of the ancient Orient. On another front, the doomsday theories, as Geoff Stray pointed out in his detailed analysis of virtually every doomsday theory, are not based in facts and are internally inconsistent, irrational, and/or inaccurate. Meanwhile, scholars up until very recently have failed to address 2012 as a valid artifact of Maya tradition worthy of investigating in a rational way and instead have reactively responded to the silliest assertions in the popular marketplace. As a result, scholars and New Agers are basically locked in a staring contest, both failing to see the thing-in-itself.

  New Agers largely indulge in irrational assertions. By irrational I don’t mean to minimize feeling and intuition, but intuition guided by higher wisdom needs to be discerned from mere personal feelings and opinionated preferences. Scholars, too, indulge in irrational dismissals of evidence at hand, or refuse to engage in rational deductions that threaten their beliefs. As we saw in Chapter 4, a rational investigation leads to the evidence with which we can offer a reconstruction of the nuts and bolts of a lost Maya cosmology attached to the astronomy of 2012. But most scholars, as well as most New Agers, have seen little value in this, or distrust it without understanding it.

  A breakthrough is needed. As we explored earlier, breakthroughs require a shift in consciousness. I believe that a rational analysis of the evidence can result in a compelling and accurate reconstruction of ancient Maya cosmology. That’s what I’ve offered in my work. Beyond that reconstruction, a deeper understanding of the 2012 material is possible, but it requires a shift in consciousness to a more inclusive perspective. I earlier described three levels of approach to understanding cultural ideas and traditions, especially the complex and deep material connected to the Maya calendar: nuts-and-bolts reconstruction, investigation of underlying universal symbols, and direct experience of the universal principles thereby identified. We’ve already covered Level I, and now we are going to open it up to Level II.

  At this stage we are still within the realm of objective investigation. Beyond this rational investigation we will find in Chapter 12 not another irrational level, but a transrational level. The transrational level of consciousness includes rational processing. It can do rational processing; in fact, it has perfected the art and faculty of ratiocination and has moved beyond it to an integrative and synthesizing faculty, which is called in various philosophical traditions the intellectus, the noetic faculty, or the buddhi mind. All of these terms relate to an inner faculty that each human being has, one that allows a direct perception of the essence underlying manifest reality. This is a perspective that revives the “big picture” in order to integrate the microcosm and the macrocosm, physics and spiritual science (metaphysics).

  For now, we need to hang out with the second level for a while, the level at which we rationally investigate the universal content of Maya philosophy. This angle of approach has been neglected. We’ve been assuming that the Maya material is completely culturally relative and we should only approach it objectively. This approach is not fully satisfying. The important questions are: Does 2012 mean anything for us? Why should we expect it to? Does the 2012 material have any value for us today? We might reconstruct a galactic alignment cosmology encoded by the ancient Maya into their calendar, but so what? And what of their beliefs about cycle endings, such as the one in 2012? Can we find anything in their traditions that speaks to us directly as human beings, that provides a “prophecy” or “insight” for 2012? And if we do, why should we believe it is accurate and has meaning? These questions are really what drive New Age pop writers, but we’ve observed that instead of going deeper into the perennial wisdom, or Perennial Philosophy, that underlies Maya teachings, they invent syncretic new systems and models, or indulge in irrational self-aggrandizing fantasies. This is clearly the wrong approach. Their desire to tap into something deeper, something meaningful to all human beings, is laudable, but they’ve been going about it the wrong way.

  The first aspect of the fulfillment of the Maya prophecy is covered in Chapters 9 and 10, with surprising results: The Maya prophecy has come true! But that’s just the first part of the Maya prophecy. Our reconnection with the big picture is the second part of the fulfillment of “the Maya prophecy for cycle endings,” which will be explored in Chapter 12. Today, many self-styled prophets assert “what’s going to happen” in definite terms, saying “this will” take place and “that will” occur. I call them predictators. In my discussion of Maya prophecy we will see that prophecy isn’t intended to dictate predetermined events. The deeper symbolic content will be addressed, one that allows for and empowers free-will choice. This is how we can pierce into the heart of the inner meaning of these teachings. A deeper vision and a bigger context is necessary.

  I’ve always been interested in these deeper questions, and I believe that Maya cosmology opens a door into profound insights—insights into science and spirituality that should be meaningful to any human being, but especially so now as we approach 2012. To state it bluntly, the Maya seem to have understood the nature of cycles, integrating celestial cycles with cycles of culture and consciousness here on earth. They achieved a profound metaphysical understanding of life and understood why and how era-2012 would signal a time of great change. This is my belief, an unavoidable conclusion from having been immersed in academic research while being sensitive to the universal, or archetypal, content of the Maya material. Part II will explain what I mean by this. We’ll explore the bigger picture of 2012, the profound implications for our modern world in crisis, and why Maya wisdom teachings speak to what modern civilization is experiencing.

  Most books that covered the material I did in Part I—the approach of an objective survey—would not dare venture into this area, the domain of “soft” science, comparative mythology and philosophy, and something barely talked about in academic circles, except among a small cabal of brilliant and underappreciated philosophers. It’s rarely discussed in the universities, is outside the box of progressive West Coast experimental colleges, and has been smothered by personality-driven gimmicks in the spiritual marketplace. That is the Perennial Philosophy, also known as the Primordial Tradition. It is about time this framework of understanding is embraced, as it helps us understand so much of what 2012 means in the larger sense.

  My investigation of the larger perennial context of the Maya’s teachings for cycle ending (for 2012) has nothing to do with Atlantean New Age fantasy. Those who believe so are distracted by their own issues and projections and ignore what I’m actually saying. This work isn’t some kind of theosophical assertion hinging on faith, but an identification of the archetypal and perennial content of Maya spiritual teachings. Ironically, scholars themselves often skirt the fringes of languaging a universal level within Maya teachings, but use abstract and clinical terminology—as if speaking gingerly about it will make it less objectionable. Even so, if this area of my interest be deemed irrelevant by scholars, it shouldn’t interfere with my breakthrough work on the 2012 alignment, which received a long-awaited, late-breaking boost from, of all places, academia itself.

  The Big Picture is thus an integration of the objective and subjective approaches. This book is really a two-fer, a two-for-one offering that embraces and shows the intimate interrelationship between subjective experience and objective analysis, between science and spirituality. Why is this relevant? Because when these two domains are forcibly kept apart, the result is the crisis of the modern world. And when our consciousness allows them to integrate, the pathway through to a sustainable future opens.

  When you see a pearl on the bottom, you reach through the foam and broken sticks on the surface.
/>   When the sun comes up, you forget about locating the constellation of Scorpio.

  When you see the splendor of union, the attractions of duality seem poignant and lovely, but much less interesting.2

  — Rūmī, “Sheba’s Throne”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Sacred Science and Perennial Philosophy

  I want to speak about one of the basic laws of Mount Analog. To reach the summit, one must proceed from encampment to encampment. But before setting out for the next refuge, one must prepare those coming after to occupy the place one is leaving. Only after having prepared them can one go on up. That is why, before setting out for a new refuge, we first had to go back down in order to pass on our knowledge to other seekers.1

  —RENÉ DAUMAL, Mount Analog

  This is where we turn everything upside down, so let me start with the conclusion to this chapter: The essential spiritual teachings within the Maya Long Count calendar belong to a universal Perennial Philosophy. This conclusion will seem, especially to Maya scholars unconcerned with cultural comparisons, like an unwarranted step toward a New Age interpretation of Maya tradition. It’s not. There are plenty of statements by Maya scholars that suggest the same thing. Maya archaeo-astronomer John Carlson, for example, compared the Mesoamerican tradition of fourfold city planning oriented to celestial coordinates to similar practices in Asia.2 That’s a tangible example; in regard to ideological parallels scholars usually do not utilize appropriate terminology from the interdisciplinary field of comparative mythology that allows us to state the connections bluntly. Joseph Campbell’s archetypal mythos would be helpful here. In this regard, the Maya king’s voluntary sacrifice in bloodletting rites is symbolically parallel to a Minoan king’s willingly acquiescing to his own sacrifice at the end of his reign.