George Lucas Believes World Ends In 2012
George Lucas. Photo: Nicolas Genin (CC)
Having produced a feature-length documentary film and edited a book on the topic, I thought I’d interviewed or researched most of the important public figures who have something interesting or informative to say about everyone’s current favorite end-times date, December 21, 2012.
Unfortunately I didn’t know that George Lucas is one of the many people who think the end of the current 5,125-year cycle of the ancient Mayan Long Count calendar on that date will mark an apocalyptic event. The Toronto Sun is reporting that Lucas revealed his fears to Seth Rogen of all people:
Funnyman Seth Rogen was left stunned by a recent encounter with his moviemaking hero George Lucas — because the Star Wars director spent 20 minutes telling him the world would end in 2012.
Rogen was left speechless when Lucas and Steven Spielberg joined a movie meeting he was a part of – but the encounter has left…
2012: Science or Superstition
NASA has named 2012 the ‘most absurd science fiction film of all time,’ but what would you expect from the Hollywood director known as “the master of disaster”? For a ‘definitive guide to the doomsday phenomenon,’ Disinformation’s 2012: Science or Superstition, by Alexandra Bruce, presents a connection between religious, cultural and scientific research which explains the end result of how these ideas create the apocalyptic theory of 2012. An excerpt of Alexandra Bruce’s book on the correlation to Mayan myth and scientific reasoning:
The Last Apocalypse: Correlating Myth With Earth Science
“Among the Maya groups that left behind written testimonies … we find different accounts that revolve around the existence of a flood that wiped out the previous world and allowed for the creation of a new cosmological order.”
Given these Maya accounts, it is only natural to suspect that the early days of the current 13-b ’ak ’tun cycle might recall an actual, historical period of…
Robots Explore Tunnels of Teotihuacan
View of the Avenue of the Dead and the Pyramid of the Sun.
Teotihuacan, Mexico, “birthplace of the gods,” is famous for its massive pyramids and the Avenue of the Dead. Now its underground tunnels are revealing more of its secrets, thanks to robot explorers, as reported by AP:
The first robotic exploration of a pre-Hispanic ruin in Mexico has revealed that a 2,000-year-old tunnel under a temple at the famed Teotihuacan ruins has a perfectly carved arch roof and appears stable enough to enter, archaeologists announced Wednesday.
Archaeologists lowered the remote-controlled, camera-equipped vehicle into the 12-foot-wide (4-meter) corridor and sent wheeling through it to see if it was safe for researchers to enter. The one-foot (30-cm) wide robot was called “Tlaloque 1″ after the Aztec rain god.
The grainy footage shot by the robot was presented Wednesday by Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History. It shows a narrow, open space left after the…
End of the Earth Postponed
Or maybe it’s already happened. LiveScience reports:
It’s a good news/bad news situation for believers in the 2012 Mayan apocalypse. The good news is that the Mayan “Long Count” calendar may not end on Dec. 21, 2012 (and, by extension, the world may not end along with it). The bad news for prophecy believers? If the calendar doesn’t end in December 2012, no one knows when it actually will — or if it has already.
A new critique, published as a chapter in the new textbook “Calendars and Years II: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient and Medieval World” (Oxbow Books, 2010), argues that the accepted conversions of dates from Mayan to the modern calendar may be off by as much as 50 or 100 years. That would throw the supposed and overhyped 2012 apocalypse off by decades and cast into doubt the dates of historical Mayan events. (The doomsday worries are based on…
All Hell Will Break Loose – Today!
Well that’s what astrologer-cum-stockpicker Arch Crawford claims anyway, reported by Peter Brimelow at MarketWatch:
Crawford predicts “ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE”–beginning, as a matter of fact, on Monday July 26, 2010.
…the opening of Crawford’s July issue [of his newsletter, Crawford Perspectives] is definitely the sort of thing that upsets people: “NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE JULY! We mean, of course, the planetary pictures in the sky which are developing towards the tightest harmonic alignments in the most potent areas of the zodiacal circle ever recorded in Earth’s written history. These portend increasing and maximizing intensity and rapidity of ‘change’ on every level of existence: mineral, vegetable, animal, human and spirit. Will Capitalism survive? Will Democracy survive? Will our markets survive? Will governments survive? Will humanity survive? Will Earth survive?
“We don’t know, but we’ll be SHORT for it!”
Crawford–along with other astrologers, who however are merely worried about nuclear war, the end of the world…
The Mayan Calendar And The Return Of The Extraterrestrials
[disinformation ed.'s note: The following is an excerpt from the new book by Erich von Däniken, Twilight of the Gods: The Mayan Calendar and the Return of the Extraterrestrials, courtesy of New Page Books.]
“There are no absolute truths, and if there were, they would be boring.”—Theodor Fontane, 1819–1898
This sentence cannot really be applied to the exact sciences. Two plus two always makes four. And in geometry, A squared plus B squared always equals C squared. It may be boring, but “exact science” does indeed bring us many “absolute truths.” Alongside all the many errors that are constantly being corrected.
However, our power of reason is not just impressed by the results gleaned by the exact sciences; the humanities—and these include so much that requires interpretation—violate our way of thinking no less. Religions fall into this category, as do philosophy, ethnology and archaeology. Excuse me? Isn’t archaeology a combined science that cites only…
A New Mayan Apocalypse
Mayan Pyramid at El Mirador. Photo: Geoff Gallice (CC)
Why don’t humans ever learn from their mistakes of the past? Is it ‘different this time’? The New York Times reports from Guatemala on the re-deforestation of the homeland of the Maya:
EL MIRADOR, Guatemala — Great sweeps of Guatemalan rain forest, once the cradle of one of the world’s great civilizations, are being razed to clear land for cattle-ranching drug barons.
Other parts of the Maya Biosphere Reserve, Central America’s largest protected area, have been burned down by small cities of squatters.
Looters and poachers, kept at bay when guerrilla armies roamed the region during the country’s 36-year civil war, ply their trades freely.
“There’s traffickers, cattle ranchers, loggers, poachers and looters,” said Richard D. Hansen, an American archaeologist who is leading the excavation of the earliest and largest Mayan city-state, El Mirador, in the northern tip of the reserve. “All the bad guys are lined up…
Is The Movie 2012 Denigrating Mayan Science?
As the science fiction movie 2012 opens Friday, a science writer challenges the idea that it’s harmless “disaster porn”.
The film’s writers are arguing that millions of people believe the final day of the Mayan calendar — December 21, 2012 — will bring “some kind of shift in society, or a shift in spirit,” which this article calls “blithe cultural arrogance and staggering anthropological ignorance.”
And it interviews BoingBoing blogger Xeni Jardin, who knows Mayans through her work with a Guatemalan nonprofit. She calls it a parody of Mayan culture, and describes explaining to a laughing Mayan priest what the movie cost to film. (The priest’s response? “Well, that’s gringos for you…”)
The author suggests a better response — “that we step up to our social responsibilities and engage passionately with the issues of our age” — but he ends with a warning for 2012 of his own.
“Placing our faith in wet-brained ravings…
World’s Largest Pyramid Discovered, Lost Mayan City Of Mirador, Guatemala
Just in time for the 2012 craze, CNN reports on a brand new massive Mayan pyramid discovery, including an amazing stone frieze showing the Maya sacred creation story, the Popol Vuh:
2013: Or, What to Do When the Apocalypse Doesn’t Arrive
Gary Lachman is the author of several well-respected occult-themed books (including the Disinformation book Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius). He asked us to run his take on the 2012 phenomenenon (the essay was originally published in EnlightenNext Magazine):
The belief in a coming end of the world as we know it may seem understandable to people living in the first decade of the twenty-first century, but a look at history shows that it has been part of Western psychology from the beginning.
The central figure of Western religion, Jesus Christ, told his followers that the end was nigh, and most people who accepted Jesus believed that the cosmic last call would come in their lifetime. Yet Jesus worked within an age-old Jewish tradition that looked to the coming of the Messiah, a religious and political leader who would set the world…
