2012 is not the end of the world

We have to be clear about this. There is no prophecy for 2012

Says Erik Velasquez, an etchings specialist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

It’s a marketing fallacy.

This report pointed to the generation of this craze from author Jose Arguelles who called the 2012 date “the ending of time as we know it” in a 1987 book that spawned an army of Mayan theorists, whose speculations on a cataclysmic end abound online.

The National Institute of Anthropological History in Mexico also incriminates western thinking for the distortion. Said the institute:

The West’s messianic thinking has distorted the world view of ancient civilizations like the Mayans.

And the Mayans were not some doom-spouting culture as we may think of them today. The institute says that of the approximately 15,000 registered glyphic texts found in different parts of what was then the Mayan empire, only two mention 2012 in any way. For the supposed end of the world, it sure didn’t get much attention from the Mayans.

As for the Mayan calendar which supposedly predicts our destruction, it only references the end of the 13th “Baktun”, or 394-year period, in which one of their gods is supposed to show up. This only predicts a transition from one era to the next, according to the institute, and not the end of the world.

This new report aligns with what we discussed here previously; that the 2012 Apocalypse was a misrepresentation of Mayan culture that got blown out of proportion and mutated over centuries.

My Opinion

We have distorted the views of the Mayans beyond what they could have possibly ever meant. There was no 2012 “end of the world” prophecy. The innate superstition in the human being projects fears about death and doom onto anything it will fit. Once the Mayan culture’s beliefs were distorted enough to fit these superstitions, we latched onto them.

Keep in mind that the perpetuation of this belief makes millions of dollars for cranks who churn out book after book about the end of the world which never comes. It doesn’t matter to them that the evidence does not fit their beliefs; these beliefs make them money and fit an already crystallized worldview.

The Mayans did not predict the end of humanity or global warming or a massive solar storm or the poles reversing or any of that. Their mythology just was transitioning from one chapter to the next. This was merely a change in the etchings on some wall in Mexico thousands of years ago, not the universe conspiring against human kind.

Again, if the Mayans were accurate doom-predictors, they probably should have seen Cortés coming. Paraphrasing Homer Simpson: if they were so smart, how come they’re dead?

Why do people put their trust in an admittedly advanced, but by our modern standards obsolete culture instead of science? Who knows; maybe they have written a book about them.