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Mayans Say World WONT End in 2012

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educatedindian:
Finally, the message is getting out to the mainstream media.

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091011/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_mexico_apocalypse2012
2012 isn't the end of the world, Mayans insist
       
AP – In this photo taken Oct. 3, 2009, Guatemalan Mayan Indian elder Apolinario Chile Pixtun poses for a portrait …

MEXICO CITY – Apolinario Chile Pixtun is tired of being bombarded with frantic questions about the Mayan calendar supposedly "running out" on Dec. 21, 2012. After all, it's not the end of the world.

Or is it?

Definitely not, the Mayan Indian elder insists. "I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff."

It can only get worse for him. Next month Hollywood's "2012" opens in cinemas, featuring earthquakes, meteor showers and a tsunami dumping an aircraft carrier on the White House.

At Cornell University, Ann Martin, who runs the "Curious? Ask an Astronomer" Web site, says people are scared.

"It's too bad that we're getting e-mails from fourth-graders who are saying that they're too young to die," Martin said. "We had a mother of two young children who was afraid she wouldn't live to see them grow up."

Chile Pixtun, a Guatemalan, says the doomsday theories spring from Western, not Mayan ideas.

A significant time period for the Mayas does end on the date, and enthusiasts have found a series of astronomical alignments they say coincide in 2012, including one that happens roughly only once every 25,800 years.

But most archaeologists, astronomers and Maya say the only thing likely to hit Earth is a meteor shower of New Age philosophy, pop astronomy, Internet doomsday rumors and TV specials such as one on the History Channel which mixes "predictions" from Nostradamus and the Mayas and asks: "Is 2012 the year the cosmic clock finally winds down to zero days, zero hope?"

It may sound all too much like other doomsday scenarios of recent decades — the 1987 Harmonic Convergence, the Jupiter Effect or "Planet X." But this one has some grains of archaeological basis.

One of them is Monument Six.

Found at an obscure ruin in southern Mexico during highway construction in the 1960s, the stone tablet almost didn't survive; the site was largely paved over and parts of the tablet were looted.

It's unique in that the remaining parts contain the equivalent of the date 2012. The inscription describes something that is supposed to occur in 2012 involving Bolon Yokte, a mysterious Mayan god associated with both war and creation.

However — shades of Indiana Jones — erosion and a crack in the stone make the end of the passage almost illegible.

Archaeologist Guillermo Bernal of Mexico's National Autonomous University interprets the last eroded glyphs as maybe saying, "He will descend from the sky."

Spooky, perhaps, but Bernal notes there are other inscriptions at Mayan sites for dates far beyond 2012 — including one that roughly translates into the year 4772.

And anyway, Mayas in the drought-stricken Yucatan peninsula have bigger worries than 2012.

"If I went to some Mayan-speaking communities and asked people what is going to happen in 2012, they wouldn't have any idea," said Jose Huchim, a Yucatan Mayan archaeologist. "That the world is going to end? They wouldn't believe you. We have real concerns these days, like rain."

The Mayan civilization, which reached its height from 300 A.D. to 900 A.D., had a talent for astronomy

Its Long Count calendar begins in 3,114 B.C., marking time in roughly 394-year periods known as Baktuns. Thirteen was a significant, sacred number for the Mayas, and the 13th Baktun ends around Dec. 21, 2012.

"It's a special anniversary of creation," said David Stuart, a specialist in Mayan epigraphy at the University of Texas at Austin. "The Maya never said the world is going to end, they never said anything bad would happen necessarily, they're just recording this future anniversary on Monument Six."

Bernal suggests that apocalypse is "a very Western, Christian" concept projected onto the Maya, perhaps because Western myths are "exhausted."

If it were all mythology, perhaps it could be written off.

But some say the Maya knew another secret: the Earth's axis wobbles, slightly changing the alignment of the stars every year. Once every 25,800 years, the sun lines up with the center of our Milky Way galaxy on a winter solstice, the sun's lowest point in the horizon.

That will happen on Dec. 21, 2012, when the sun appears to rise in the same spot where the bright center of galaxy sets.

Another spooky coincidence?

"The question I would ask these guys is, so what?" says Phil Plait, an astronomer who runs the "Bad Astronomy" blog. He says the alignment doesn't fall precisely in 2012, and distant stars exert no force that could harm Earth.

"They're really super-duper trying to find anything astronomical they can to fit that date of 2012," Plait said.

But author John Major Jenkins says his two-decade study of Mayan ruins indicate the Maya were aware of the alignment and attached great importance to it.

"If we want to honor and respect how the Maya think about this, then we would say that the Maya viewed 2012, as all cycle endings, as a time of transformation and renewal," said Jenkins.

As the Internet gained popularity in the 1990s, so did word of the "fateful" date, and some began worrying about 2012 disasters the Mayas never dreamed of.

Author Lawrence Joseph says a peak in explosive storms on the surface of the sun could knock out North America's power grid for years, triggering food shortages, water scarcity — a collapse of civilization. Solar peaks occur about every 11 years, but Joseph says there's evidence the 2012 peak could be "a lulu."

While pressing governments to install protection for power grids, Joseph counsels readers not to "use 2012 as an excuse to not live in a healthy, responsible fashion. I mean, don't let the credit cards go up."

Another History Channel program titled "Decoding the Past: Doomsday 2012: End of Days" says a galactic alignment or magnetic disturbances could somehow trigger a "pole shift."

"The entire mantle of the earth would shift in a matter of days, perhaps hours, changing the position of the north and south poles, causing worldwide disaster," a narrator proclaims. "Earthquakes would rock every continent, massive tsunamis would inundate coastal cities. It would be the ultimate planetary catastrophe."

The idea apparently originates with a 19th century Frenchman, Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, a priest-turned-archaeologist who got it from his study of ancient Mayan and Aztec texts.

Scientists say that, at best, the poles might change location by one degree over a million years, with no sign that it would start in 2012.

While long discredited, Brasseur de Bourbourg proves one thing: Westerners have been trying for more than a century to pin doomsday scenarios on the Maya. And while fascinated by ancient lore, advocates seldom examine more recent experiences with apocalypse predictions.

"No one who's writing in now seems to remember that the last time we thought the world was going to end, it didn't," says Martin, the astronomy webmaster. "There doesn't seem to be a lot of memory that things were fine the last time around."

earthw7:
can we say Duh!
they should of asked native people to begin with ;D ;D

flyaway:
 ;D ;D ;D ;D yep!!!!!

critter - a white non-ndn person:
LOL.  I find it fun and interesting.  I'm not an expert or whatever, but I've seen some things of a prophet Sybil it is said she predicted something of 2012, and the I-Ching, also the Hopi?  Anyway, either way, regardless, I find it amusing.  I do know that any 'shift' would be magnetic, not physical.. the Earth isn't going to flip about.  I personally wouldn't mind having the magnetic flip occur.  I wouldn't mind if the world as we know it crumbled in some ways...   :)

uktena:
This idea that 12/21/12 represents some kind of "end of things" has been like static noise in the background for most of my life, but until now has been drowned out by other end-of-the-world scenarios.  There was the Jehovah's Witnesses and their 1984 prediction, which was about as accurate as the ones for 1918, 1925, and 1975.  There was the Harmonic Convergence, which I never quite figured out what was supposed to happen then, on August 17, 1987, but of course nothing did.  And who can forget that wonderful Y2K business, when all the world's computers crashed, planes fell out of the sky, banks lost all your money, and only people with concrete shelters in their back yards full of guns, bottled water, and canned food survived.......oh, wait a minute, that didn't happen either.   :D

Oh, I almost forgot that one about "In the year 1999 and seven months", blah blah, Great King of Terror, blah blah, King of the Mongols, blah blah, Mars rules happily.  I never took Nostradamus very seriously, but as far as I'm concerned, he really blew that one!

So I don't think I'm going to lose any sleep over this one, either, other than planning how I'm going to do my usual "see, I told you" number on December 22.  Other people can watch the doomsday documentaries on the History Channel ("where history happens in the future"), worry about the poles lining up with the galactic center and Planet X passing by, and buying insurance against falling asteroids, but right now, I'm just going to sit down and have my supper.   :D

All the predictions I mentioned  are just the ones that got a lot of media attention, never mind all the Chicken Littles doing freelance prophecy to anyone who will listen.  ("If it doesn’t come to pass…starting in April, then I’m nothing but a false prophet…"(Ronald Weinland, 2008 - God's Final Witness, Church of God) - well, if the shoe fits.....)

I even have a big joke about 2012: my computer has a screensaver that is designed after the Ouroboros symbol in the late-'90s TV show Millenium; its default configuration was to count down to January 1, 2000, but you can set it to any date you want to.  Guess what date it's been counting down toward for the past four years.  ;D  And just so you know, you all have 1159 days to get your house in order before the Mayan calendar ends, and time itself runs out, and we all transform into one-celled creatures crawling around in the primeval slime trying to remember how to do that evolution thing.

More to the point of this thread, I've been asking all along, why don't people just go and ask the Mayans what this whole thing means, and almost unanimously the answer has been, well, the Mayans don't exist any more (either they died out, or they just boarded their spaceships and went back home), so we have to figure it out for ourselves.  Not very different from the guy who decides that, since nobody exists who REALLY knows the Bible,  it's up to him to sit down with his KJV and a pocket calculator, and figure out that the world really ended in 2008, but mankind is just too stupid to realize it. (I know I'm trying to be funny here, but in all seriousness, I heard Newagers make this very argument both about the Harmonic Convergence and Y2K.) 

It's the usual attitude that has been brought up again and again on this board, how arrogant white people think that Indian culture is disappearing, and its up to us advanced, intelligent, spiritually refined people to recreate and reform it, and give it back to those benighted natives in a shiny, new, improved (and btw much more expensive) form, for the benefit of all mankind.

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