The 2012 Story

by John Major Jenkins

  37 AD. Long Count date from El Baúl.

  41 AD. Ending of Baktun 8.

  83 AD and 103 AD. Early Long Count dates on Stela 5 from Tak’alik Ab’aj.

  197 AD. Linda Schele’s dating of the Hauberg Stela.

  292 AD. Dated monument from Tikal with full Calendar Round and Long Count information. It defined, for a previous generation of scholars, the beginning of the Classic Period (300 AD to 900 AD). Today the origins of Maya civilizations have been pushed back by new archaeological findings.

  435 AD. Ending of Baktun 9.

  620 AD-820 AD. Many Long Count dates at Classic Maya sites. Distance Numbers are used and Era beginning and end dates are found at sites such as Quiriguá, Coba, Palenque, Copán, and Tortuguero.

  612 AD. Balam Ajaw, king of Tortuguero, was born.

  652, October. 13-Baktun Creation Date (3114 BC), first mentioned at Copán.

  669, January. 13-Baktun end date (2012 AD) recorded at Tortuguero.

  711 AD, December 3. (9.14.0.0.0). Astronomically significant Long Count date found at many sites, including Piedras Negras, Calakmul, Tortuguero, Palenque, Tikal, and Copán.

  738, May 1. Copán king 18 Rabbit is ritually decapitated. It happened at the “Black Hole.”

  830 AD. Ending of Baktun 10; Classic Maya civilization begins failing.

  909 AD. Last carved Long Count monument, from Toniná: 10.4.0.0.0.

  1000 AD. The Long Count calendar tradition continues in manuscript form, with Long Count dates and distance numbers recorded in the Maya’s Dresden Codex, Madrid Codex, and Paris Codex.

  1100 AD-1500 AD. Katun counting is preserved in Yucatán. A Short Count form of the Long Count (a 13-Katun May-cycle, or Prophecy cycle) is implemented.

  1224 AD. Baktun 11 ending, probably noted in Yucatán.

  1520s-1570s. The Conquest. Maya books are burned. Bishop Diego de Landa active in Yucatán, writes his Relacion de los cosas de Yucatan.

  1520s-1700s. The Chilam Balam prophecy books are compiled by Maya leaders in Yucatán. They contain much earlier Katun prophecies and other historical information.

  1550s. The Hero Twin Myth (The Popol Vuh) recorded by Quiché elders in Guatemala.

  1618. Baktun 12 ending celebrated in Yucatán.

  1697. The Itza Maya finally acquiesce to Spanish rule in Flores, Petén.

  1700. Francisco Ximénez translates The Popol Vuh in Guatemala.

  1752. Short Count system recalibrated in Yucatán, changing the 20-year Katun cycle to a 24-year cycle. The continuity of the Katun sequencing is affected.

  1761. Maya reform leader Jacinto Canek captured, tortured, and killed by Spanish army in Mérida, along with many of his followers.

  1770s-1790s. Spanish travelers take note of ancient ruins of Palenque.

  1810s. Memory of pre-1752 placement of Short Count tradition dies with elders.

  1800-1820s. Explorers such as Count Waldeck visit Maya sites.

  1839. Catherwood and Stephens record monuments at Copán and Quiriguá containing Long Count glyphs.

  1860s. Brasseur de Bourbourg publishes The Popol Vuh and de Landa’s Relacion.

  1880s. Maudslay makes high-quality photographs of Maya monuments, including Long Count inscriptions.

  1880s. Förstemann decodes the Dresden Codex in Germany.

  1897. Goodman’s appendix to Maudslay published, containing free-floating charts for Long Count dates.

  1905. Joseph T. Goodman publishes “Maya Dates” in American Anthropologist. This is the correlation of the Maya and Gregorian calendars that would be confirmed in the 1920s.

  1926-1927. Juan Martínez Hernández and J. Eric S. Thompson confirm Goodman’s work, producing the original GMT (Goodman-Martínez-Thompson) correlation.

  1927. Thompson publishes an article with a chart that could be extrapolated to reach an estimated cycle ending of December 23, 2012, but this never appears to have been done. The cycle ending remained unstated in the literature until Coe’s 1966 book The Maya.

  1920s-1940s. Ethnographic evidence for the survival of the 260-day tzolkin calendar in the Guatemalan highlands is documented. Invites a reassessment of the correlation by Thompson.

  1946. Morley’s The Ancient Maya is published, with incomplete Long Count tables, using the original GMT correlation.

  1950. Thompson revises the original GMT by 2 days. The result brings the 13-Baktun cycle ending into alignment with December 21, 2012, although the fact has yet to be stated in the literature.

  1956. The second edition of Morley’s The Ancient Maya contains updated Long Count tables, using the revised GMT-2 correlation, but the tables are still incomplete.

  1966. Michael Coe’s The Maya is published. It is the first source to mention the 13-Baktun cycle ending of the Long Count, but the book miscalculates it as December 24, 2011 AD.

  1967. William S. Burroughs mentions 2012 in a parody magazine, according to the findings of John Hoopes.

  1975. The cycle ending is treated fully by Frank Waters in his Mexico Mystique, but he used Coe’s 2011 date. McKenna mentions 2012 in The Invisible Landscape. Argüelles mentions 2012 in The Transformative Vision.

  1975-1990. Argüelles develops his Maya calendar system and associates Tony Shearer’s 1987 Harmonic Convergence date with a “twenty-five-year countdown” to 2012. McKenna is elaborating his Time Wave Zero model, now connected to December 21, 2012. Peter Balin mentions 2012 in his 1978 book Flight of the Feathered Serpent; Peter Tompkins mentions 2011 in his 1976 book Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids. Barbara Tedlock mentions 2012 in her 1982 book Time and the Highland Maya. Argüelles’s The Mayan Factor appears in 1987.

  1988. Maya scholar Munro Edmonson writes, in his Book of the Year, that the solstice placement of the cycle ending in 2012 was unlikely to be a coincidence. For almost two decades after this other scholars asserted, when asked, that it must be a coincidence.

  1992. John Major Jenkins publishes his book Tzolkin, which offered a method by which shifting seasonal quarters were tracked in the Long Count, suggesting how December 21, 2012, might have been targeted.

  1992-1993. Linda Schele’s breakthrough work on hieroglyphic decipherments, Maya Creation Mythology, and astronomy.

  1991-1995. Popular books on the Mesoamerican calendar, such as The Mayan Prophecies and Scofield’s Day-Signs, start appearing. Argüelles’s Dreamspell system released in late 1991.

  1994. Jenkins publishes his 2012 alignment theory, connecting the era-2012 alignment of the December solstice sun and the dark rift to Maya Creation Mythology and astronomy. Research culminates in the 1998 relase of his book Maya Cosmogenesis 2012, offering a full reconstruction of the origins and intention of the Long Count/2012 cosmology.

  1998. Geoff Stray’s Internet site Diagnosis 2012 is founded and becomes an indispensable resource for reviews and insights on all things 2012.

  2000-2009. An explosion of books, films, and websites devoted to 2012 flood the marketplace. Scholars, Maya elders, popular writers, the New York Times, and documentaries cover and comment on 2012.

  2005. Geoff Stray’s book Beyond 2012 is published.

  2005. Victor Montejo’s Maya Intellectual Renaissance is published. Discussion of the indigenous “Baktunian movement.”

  2006. Robert Sitler publishes “The 2012 Phenomenon,” the first academic treatment of the topic.

  2006, April. The 2012 text from Tortuguero is translated and discussed, with varying opinions on its importance.

  2007. Michael Grofe completes his PhD dissertation, which argues convincingly for accurate knowledge of the rate of the precession of the equinoxes in the Dresden Codex.

  2008. Barb MacLeod offers her “3-11 Pik formula,” detailing a precession-based mechanism in the Classic Period inscriptions used by Maya kings.

  2009, February. The first academic 2012 conference takes place, held at Tulane University in New Orleans.

  2009, February-March. New discoveries on dark-rift astronomy and 2012 connections at Tortuguero and Copán
made by Grofe and Jenkins (see Chapter 7).

  2009, November. Sony Pictures releases mass media 2012 movie.

  The 2012 story is, of course, not yet finished. As of May 31, 2009 (a 4 Ahau day), there are exactly 5 tzolkin cycles (1,300 days) remaining to December 21, 2012. We might wish to recognize the 260-day time resonance countdown of 4 Ahau dates: May 31, 2009; February 15, 2010; November 2, 2010; July 20, 2011; April 5, 2012; December 21, 2012. Interestingly, the initiation day of contemporary day-keeper practice, 8 B’atz (8 Monkey), occurs on December 12, 2012, nine days before 13.0.0.0.0.

  December 21, 2012. The cycle-ending date of the 13-Baktun period of the Maya Long Count calendar.

  December 21, 2012 AD = 13.0.0.0.0 = 4 Ahau 3 Kankin

  NOTES

  1. Frontispiece poem: Jenkins, John Major. Shadow, Stone, and Green. Denver, CO: Four Ahau Press, 2008.

  INTRODUCTION: AN UNSTOPPABLE IDEA

  1 Tedlock, Dennis (trans.). The Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings, revised edition. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996, p. 70.

  2 McKenna, Terence. “The Light of the Third Millennium.” Talk given in Austin, Texas, 1997. http://edj.net/mc2012/TM-Light.mp3 (at 35:10).

  3 Fox news report with Dr. Michio Kaku. April 25, 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hujQg2E_fDw. Dr. Kaku himself doesn’t assert this, but the banner beneath the report does.

  CHAPTER 1. RECOVERING A LOST WORLD

  1 Covarrubias, Miguel. Mexico South. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947, p. 187.

  2 Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, March 24, 2009. www.pnas.org.

  3 Weatherford, Jack. Indian Givers. Ballantine Books, 1989.

  4 de Landa, Friar Diego. Yucatan Before and After the Conquest, trans. by William Gates. Baltimore: The Maya Society, 1937. Also at Sacred Texts online: http://sacred-texts.com/nam/maya/ybac/ybac59.htm.

  5 Goetz, Delia, and Sylvanus Morley (English trans. after the Spanish trans. of Adrián Recinos). The Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiché Maya, original trans. by Francisco Ximénez. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950, p. 6.

  6 Tedlock, Dennis (trans.). The Popol Vuh, revised edition, 1996, pp. 22-25.

  7 Perera, Victor, and Robert D. Bruce. Last Lords of Palenque. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982; Bruce, Robert D. Lacandon Dream Symbolism. 2 vols. Mexico: Ediciones Euroamericanas, 1975-1979.

  8 Graham, Ian. Alfred Maudslay and the Maya, A Biography. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002, p. 99.

  9 Fuentes, Carlos. Myself with Others: Selected Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988.

  10 Durán, Fray Diego. Book of the Gods and Rites of the Ancient Calendar, trans. by Fernando Horcasitas and Doris Heyden. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971, p. xii.

  11 Robertson, William. The History of America, 1777. Quoted in Tompkins, Peter, Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids. New York: Harper & Row, 1976, p. 40.

  12 de Pauw, Cornelius. Recherches Philosophiques sur les Américains, 1769. Quoted in Tompkins, Peter, Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids. New York: Harper & Row, 1976, p. 42.

  13 Porterfield, Kay Marie. “Ten Lies about Indigenous Science—How to Talk Back.” http://www.kporterfield.com/aicttw/articles/lies.html. See also Porterfield, Kay Marie, and Emory Dean Keoke. The Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World: 15,000 Years of Invention and Innovation, which details more than 450 examples of indigenous science and independent innovation from the abacus to zucchini.

  14 Stephens, John Lloyd. Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas & Yucatan. London: Century, 1988, p. 49.

  15 Tompkins, Peter. Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids. New York: Harper & Row, 1976, pp. 166-167.

  16 Woolley, Benjamin. The Queen’s Conjurer: The Science and Magic of Dr. John Dee.

  17 Salisbury, Jr., Stephen. The Mayas, the Sources of Their History: Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries. Worcester: Press of Charles Hamilton, 1877, p. 65.

  18 Ibid., p. 65.

  19 Coe, Michael. Breaking the Maya Code, revised edition, 1999, p. 138; Long, Richard. “Maya and Mexican Writing.” Maya Research 2 (1). New Orleans, 1935.

  20 Coe, Michael. Breaking the Maya Code, revised edition, 1999, p. 138.

  21 Graham, Ian. Alfred Maudslay and the Maya, A Biography. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002, p. 102.

  22 Goodman, Joseph T. The Archaic Maya Inscriptions. Volume 5 of Maudslay, Alfred, Biologia Centrali-Americana, 1897, pp. ii-iv.

  23 Ibid., p. iv.

  24 Ibid., p. v.

  25 Coe, Michael. Breaking the Maya Code, revised edition, 1999, p. 140.

  26 Thompson, J. Eric S. Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: An Introduction. Publication 589, Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1950, p. 295. For essays exploring anagogical themes in world literature, see Strelka, Joseph P. Anagogic Qualities of Literature. University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971.

  27 Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces, second edition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968, p. 3.

  28 Houston, Stephen. “Classic Maya Depictions of the Built Environment.” Function and Meaning in Classic Maya Architecture, ed. Stephen Houston. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1998, p. 355; and discussion, pp. 348-363.

  29 Thompson, J. Eric S. “A Correlation of the Mayan and European Calendars.” Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, Anthropological Series, 17(1):1-22, 1927, pp. 19-21. http://www.archive.org/details/correlationofmay171thom.

  CHAPTER 2. THE LONG CAREER OF THE LONG COUNT

  1 Malmström, Vincent. Cycles of the Sun, Mysteries of the Moon. Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1997, p. 258.

  2 Tedlock, Barbara. “The Road of Light: Theory and Practice of Mayan Skywatching.” The Sky in Mayan Literature, ed. by Anthony F. Aveni. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 18-42.

  3 Wilber, Ken. No Boundary. Boston and London: Shambhala Publications, 1981.

  4 Edmonson, Munro. Book of the Year: Middle American Calendrical Systems. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988.

  5 Coe, Michael. “Cycle 7 Monuments in Middle America: A Reconsideration.” American Anthropologist 59, 1957, p. 606.

  6 Guernsey, Julia. Rituals & Power in Stone. Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2006, p. 14.

  7 Schele, Linda, Peter Mathews, and Floyd Lounsbury. “Redating the Hauberg Stela.” Texas Notes, No. 1, 1990. http://www.utmesoamerica.org/texas_notes/TN-01.pdf.

  8 Rice, Prudence M. Maya Calendar Origins: Monuments, Mythistory, and the Materialization of Time. Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2007.

  9 Coe, Michael. The Maya. Great Britain: Thames & Hudson, 1966.

  10 Malmström, Vincent. “Origin of the Mesoamerican 260-Day Calendar.” Science, 181, 1973, pp. 939-941.

  11 Coe, Michael. Mexico, third edition, revised and enlarged. London: Thames & Hudson, 1988, p. 86.

  12 Schieber de Lavarreda, Christa, and Miguel Orrego Corzo. Abaj Takalik. Guatemala City: Proyecto Nacional Tak-alik Ab’aj, Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes, 2001, p. 37.

  13 Rice, Prudence M. Maya Calendar Origins: Monuments, Mythistory, and the Materialization of Time. Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2007.

  14 These day-sign translations come from Dennis Tedlock, Breath on the Mirror. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994, pp. 233-234.

  15 Freidel, David, Linda Schele, and Joy Parker. Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1993, p. 67ff.

  16 Jenkins, John Major. “The Equation of Maya Time,” in The Solstice-Galaxy Alignment in 2012. Denver, CO: Four Ahau Press, 2005.

  17 Jenkins, John Major. “Katun Beginnings Which Conjunct Seasonal Quarters.” Tzolkin. Garberville, CA: Borderland Sciences Research Foundation, 1994, pp. 300-301.

&nbs
p; 18 Schele, Linda, and David Freidel. Forest of Kings. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1990, p. 158.

  19 Michael Grofe, personal communication: e-mail to me March 2009.

  20 Milbrath, Susan. Star Gods of the Maya: Astronomy in Art, Folklore, and Calendars. Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1999, p. 293.

  21 Taube, Karl. “The Jade Hearth: Centrality, Rulership, and the Classic Maya Temple.” Function and Meaning in Classic Maya Architecture, ed. by Stephen Houston. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1998, pp. 427-478.

  22 Puleston, Dennis E. “An Epistemological Pathology and the Collapse, or Why the Maya Kept the Short Count.” Maya Archaeology and Ethnohistory, ed. by Norman Hammond and Gordon R. Willey. Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1979, pp. 63-71.

  23 Grofe, Michael John. The Serpent Series: Precession in the Maya Dresden Codex. PhD dissertation. Davis: University of California, 2007; Grofe, Michael. “Fruit from the Cacao Tree: From the Haab’ to Precession.” Miami: Institute of Maya Studies newsletter, vol. 38, issues 5 and 6 (May and June, 2009).

  24 Carlsen, Robert S. The War for the Heart and Soul of a Highland Maya Town. Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1997.

  25 Edmonson, Munro. The Ancient Future of the Itza: The Book of Chilam Balam of Tizimin. Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1982.

  26 Edmonson, Munro S. “Baktun Ceremonial of 1618.” The Fourth Palenque Round Table, 1980, vol. VI, ed. by Merle Greene Robertson and Elizabeth P. Benson. San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute, 1985.

  27 Stray, Geoff. “An Open Letter to Robert Sitler (and ensuing correspondence).” http://www.diagnosis2012.co.uk/sit.htm. 2006.

  28 The enforced English education thrust upon Hopi children by government policy is an example of this. See Frank Waters, Book of the Hopi.

  29 Wikipedia entry, “Jacinto Canek.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacinto_Canek.