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 him worried his life will be over next year.

He recalls, “George Lucas sits down and seriously proceeds to talk for around 25 minutes about how he thinks the world is gonna end in the year 2012, like, for real. He thinks it.

“He’s going on about the tectonic plates and all the time Spielberg is, like, rolling his eyes, like, ’My nerdy friend won’t shut up, I’m sorry…’

“I first thought he (Lucas) was joking… and then I totally realized he was serious…

[continues at the Toronto Sun]

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 cataclysmic flooding. When the ancient Maya created the Long Count calendar, they set it up to begin on a very specific date 3,000 years in their own past, which coincided with a zenithal passage of the Sun. This astronomical event signified “New Year’s Day” to the Maya, because it was the day where one would “cast no shadows.” Thus, the 5th Maya era retroactively began on August 11, 3114 BCE or as the date was known in the Long Count, 13.0.0.0.0; 4 Ahaw 8 Kumk ’u.

In 3114 BCE, the Maya were in their “Late Archaic” stage, having long since succeeded in domesticating animals and hybridizing local grasses into maize. In the timeline below, the period around 3100 BCE appears to have been a “watershed” moment for many civilizations, according to archaeological findings all over the world.

3114 BCE    Start-date of a 13-b ’ak ’tun epoch of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar (correlated to Gregorian calendar), used by the ancient Maya civilization to record the post-Flood epoch, which ends on December 21, 2012.

3102 BCE    Beginning of the Kali Yuga era, as correlated to Gregorian calendar. Date may commemorate the “Flood of Manu” in Hindu Puranas.22

ca. 3100 BCE     The Indus Valley civilization constructs the first advanced system of drainage.

Menes unifies Upper and Lower Egypt, and a new capital is erected at Memphis

ca. 3050 BCE    The beginnings of Iberian civilizations, arrival to the peninsula, dating as far back as 4000 BCE.

a. 3000 BCE    Umm al Binni lake in the Al Amarah region of Iraq may be an impact crater, as suggested by satellite imagery, (Master 2001, 2002). Age of the crater estimated to be <  5,000 years. During that time, the region was under the Persian Gulf at a depth of approximately 10m (Larsen & Evans 1978: 237). The alleged Umm al Binni impact could be responsible for producing the energy equivalent to thousands of Hiroshima-sized bombs. The impact-induced tsunamis would have devastated coastal Sumerian cities. This may provide an alternate origin of the 2.6 m sediment layer discovered during an excavation of the Sumerian city of Ur by Leonard Wooley in 1954. Descriptive passages in the Epic of Gilgamesh may describe such an impact and tsunami, suggesting a link to the Sumerian Deluge (Matthews 2001; Britt 2001).

Neolithic period ends, Aegean Bronze Age starts, Minoan civilization starts, Troy is founded.

Stonehenge construction begins. In its first version, it consists of a circular ditch and bank, with 56 wooden posts.23

2807 BCE    A very large-scale comet or meteorite impact event in the southern Indian Ocean, caused enormous megatsunamis. It is theorized that the legends of the “Great Flood” in the Bible, the Maya Popol Vuh, the Hindu Puranic story of Manu, the Deucalion in Greek mythology and the story of Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh may be associated with this event, which created the 18-mile wide Burckle crater, under 12,500 feet of ocean.

Is it just a coincidence that there are several traditions worldwide of cataclysmic flooding during the same time period, flooding which was so destructive that a line of demarcation separates everything that occurred before this time with a word was invented specifically to describe it: “antediluvian”? Is it a coincidence that roughly a century after this time, worldwide, we see new civilizations founded and the start of new dynasties or the beginnings of “new eras” in pre-existing cultures?

For more excerpts from Alexandra Bruce’s book and the companion documentary film, visit www.2012SOS.com.

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 tunnel was intentionally closed off between A.D. 200 and 250 and filled with debris nearly to the roof.

Archaeologist Sergio Gomez says the footage showed the arched-roof tunnel was an example of sophisticated work by the ancient inhabitants of Teotihuacan, which is located just north of modern Mexico City.

“All of the passage, more than 100 meters (yards) long was excavated in the rock perfectly, and in some places you can even see the marks of the tools the people of Teotihuacan used to make it,” said Gomez.

Well-worked blocks and a smoothly-arched ceiling showed the tunnel was not natural, but rather a man-made structure that researchers believe lead to possible burial chambers…

[continues at AP]

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 the fact that the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, much as our year ends on Dec. 31.)

The Mayan calendar was converted to today’s Gregorian calendar using a calculation called the GMT constant, named for the last initials of three early Mayanist researchers. Much of the work emphasized dates recovered from colonial documents that were written in the Mayan language in the Latin alphabet, according to the chapter’s author, Gerardo Aldana, University of California, Santa Barbara professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies.

Read more here.

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 etc.–is impressed with an imminent unusual alignment that apparently involves five key planets.

He writes: “Astrologers call it the ‘Cardinal Climax.’ It is considered to be the most powerful and important planetary alignment of the modern era. Perhaps it heralds the beginning of the real ‘Aquarian Age’ or the end of the ‘Mayan Calendar.’ (After all, what’s a few months in a 25,600-year cycle?) These energies actually maximize from July 30 through August 3. There have been ’shadows’ preceding and will be echoes afterwards for quite some time.”

Crawford adds: “This huge alignment will be followed by a Full Moon on the Fall Equinox and a Lunar Eclipse on the Winter Solstice. We expect the depth and scope of dislocations during this period to exceed anything we have ever witnessed, both in otherwise civilized interaction among nations, and likely our fill in natural disasters.”

“We continue to recommend extreme caution and proper emergency measures such as extra food, water, medicines and cash over the next 24 months in particular. Do NOT wait any longer!!”…

[continues at MarketWatch:]

“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 verified findings?

Of course. But the findings still have to be interpreted. They are still the subject of interpretation. This interpretation, on other hand, relies on rationality—the zeitgeist—and, of course, on written historical evidence. Is that clear? Now here’s a short extract from Popol Vuh, the greatest writing from the legacy of the K’iche’ Maya. It was composed or written an unknown amount of time ago in the highlands of what is now Guatemala.

“Tepew Q’ukumatz

E Alom, E K’ajplom,

K’o pa ja’. Saqtetoj e k’o wi.

E muqutal pa q’ ug,

Pa raxon.…”

It might sound like Chinese to us, but to an expert it makes perfect sense. The text describes how the lord “Quetzal serpent” fathered children, descended surrounded by light covered in the feathers of the quetzal bird (hence the name). The quetzal serpent is said to have come from the blackness of the heavens, and so on. On the rear side of the folio 24 you can read how the gods first had to enter a “house of darkness” and needed torches. Consequently, they smoked cigars. (The god “Smoking Mirror” is depicted in numerous Maya temples.)

The 'Smoking Gods' in the Madrid Codex. Author's own image.

I admire the Maya specialists who can read and translate the ancient language of the K’iche’ Maya. Their skill is the result of the decades of hard work and the laborious efforts of the ethnologists who put together all the little pieces of the jigsaw. At the end of the day, though, these praiseworthy translations still remain subject to a great degree of interpretation in many respects. What do I mean? Interpretation is all down to the zeitgeist, the leading trend in “rational” thinking. And that is very flexible.

A “feathered snake” never existed. So in Guatemala, the quetzal bird seems a logical choice. It has an impressive plumage and may have even reminded the K’iche’ Maya of a flying serpent. But the quetzal bird does not engender human children. Nor does it smoke! The Maya god “Smoking Mirror” also doesn’t look anything like a quetzal bird in any shape or form.

A modern interpretation leaves room for a number of different possibilities, especially when contemporary viewpoints are brought together with other texts from other parts of the world. Impossible? Well, for the Maya specialists, just like the Egyptologists, text comparisons between Central America and Egypt are pretty much unthinkable. We’re talking about two completely different cultures, they argue. That’s right. So why is it, then, that when you start comparing the texts you keep finding all sorts of similarities? The “creation” in Popol Vuh is very similar to that in the first Book of Moses (Genesis). And there’s more: If you read the Bible, you will discover that once the whole world “was of one language” (before the building of the Tower of Babel, that is). And it’s no different in Popol Vuh. In the second book of Moses (Exodus) we find out how Moses held his staff out over the waters and divided them. The Maya tell the same story! Or in chapter 9, verse 17 of Genesis: “This is the token of the covenant, which I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth….” And in Popol Vuh? “That will help you when you call me. It is the sign of our agreement….” And so on! Who was copying from whom? The authors of Popol Vuh couldn’t have known anything about that Bible because their texts existed a long time before the Christian Spaniards arrived. So we can be pretty sure that there was no copying involved. These texts came about around the same campfire, so to speak.

Nowadays, in our times of worldwide networking and almost unlimited globalization, you would have thought that comparing texts would be the order of the day. But neither side wants to hear anything of it. The Maya archaeologist is a specialist in his own area; the Egyptologist in his. Without exception, a bunch of well-educated, well-integrated, and respectable researchers. The only problem is: they don’t work together. Each group remains bravely anchored by his own island of specialist isolation. Contemporary?

Pyramid Texts

In distant Egypt you will find the pyramid texts. What are they? They are engravings from the 5th and 6th dynasties—although it remains unclear how long the texts existed before they were chiseled into the granite. The pyramid texts are subdivided into “Utterances.” These Utterances are overflowing with gods, who descend from the heavens to Earth, and pharaohs, who were granted the honor of visiting the world of the gods. Because our confused zeitgeist doesn’t recognize any reality behind these stories, they are interpreted as being the wishful thinking of the priests or the journeys of the pharaohs after their deaths. Here are a few examples:

(Utterance 511) “Nut shouts for joy when I ascend to the sky. The sky thunders for me, the Earth quakes for me, the hail storm is burst apart and I roar as does Seth….”

(Utterance 267) “A stairway to the sky is set up for me, that I may ascend on it to the sky; and I ascend on the smoke of the great censing. I fly up as a bird and alight as a beetle on the empty throne which is in thy barque, O Re…that I may sit in your place and row over the heaven in your barque, O Re. That I may push off from the land in thy boat….”

(Utterance 302) “The sky is clear, Sothis lives…the Two Enneads have cleansed themselves for me in Ursa Major [constellation]…. My house in the sky will not perish, my throne on Earth will not be destroyed….”

(Utterance 482 C) “May I fly up to heaven like the great star in the middle of the east….”

(Utterance 434) “You have taken to yourself every god who possesses his barque that you may install them in the starry sky….”

(Utterance 472) “The sky quivers, the Earth shakes before me. For I am a magician. I have come that I may glorify Orion….”

(Utterance 480) “How lovely to behold when this god ascends into the sky, just as Atum, the father of the king, ascends to the sky….”

(Utterance 482) “You must ascend to the heaven…your son Horus will accompany you to the starry sky; heaven is yours, the Earth is yours….”

(Utterance 553 + 563): “The gates of heaven are open for you; the gates of the firmament are open for you….”

(Utterance 584) “The doors of (?), which are in the firmament, are opened for me…lie open for me….”

(Utterance 669) “The prince descends in a great storm from within the horizon….”

It goes on for pages like this. Heavenly portals are opened; gods descend in smoke and flames; pharaohs are allowed to fly with them; there are thunder and lightning all over the place; sand is thrown up into the air. Who is always behind it all? The gods. Whether it’s in old India, in Tibet, in Japan, in the Bible (Ezekiel), or the Maya. Now look here, preach the Egyptologists: These texts are not be compared with any kind of reality. They are about the ascensions of deceased pharaohs. Well, somehow I doubt that. Looking at it from a modern perspective allows some quite reasonable and totally different conclusions, and there’s nothing “anti-scientific” about them. Why don’t the universities at least teach their students about the interconnections that are actually there? They could point out that a word like heaven does not necessarily have anything to do with a place of bliss and beatitude, and just as little to do with life after death. “Heaven” is also space—especially when it’s mentioned in the same breath as attributes such as smoke, fire, quaking, noise, stars, and so on. What’s unscientific about that? As long as the texts from each individual culture continue to be treated in isolation, then new insights will continue to be impossible.

In 1975, respected philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, who taught for three decades in the University of California, Berkeley, announced his “anything goes” approach. It’s another way of saying that anything is possible. The scientific world reacted with horror because “anything goes” or “anything is allowed” was a contradiction to the long-held belief in a continual scientific process of establishing the truth. Feyerabend postulated, however, that the results of any scientific method are limited by the methods themselves. Indeed, many scientific innovations thrive not because methodological rules have been followed, but because they have been broken. Feyerabend was right, and his “anything goes” does not contradict scientific progress at all. So a comparison between the mythologies of ancient Egypt and Central America may go against the academic grain, but it does bring new answers and therefore the desired insights. Breaking the rules means eating from someone else’s bowl—but only when there’s a good reason for it. And there’s plenty of them!

Divine Intervention

Spanning the gap between Egypt and Central America makes a whole lot of sense. In both places flaming gods rise into the heavens, even though—from the point of view of the archaeologists—the two cultures existed at different times. But who can say with absolute certainty where the origins of these cultures lay and whether there really were any transatlantic connections all those thousands of years ago. In the Museum of Leyden in Holland, you can see a jade tablet known in the scientific literature as the Leyden Plate. It was found in the Maya city of Tikal (now Guatemala). Following the tricky-to-translate name of a god, it reads: “the lords of the heavenly family of Tikal descended.” Regardless of whoever these heavenly rulers may have been, it was really no different in ancient Egypt (or in China, Japan, Tibet, or India, come to mention it).

Winged sun disk, Karnak. Image courtesy of Tatjana Ingold.

Visitors to the land on the Nile will be confronted by the so-called “winged sun disk” in practically every temple. It’s a golden disk or bowl shape with colored, broadly spreading wings. Entire temple roofs (Dendera!) and countless temple entrances (Karnak!) are decorated with them. These winged sun disks are usually associated with the god Horus—the son of Osiris and Isis—whose seat was in the huge temple complex of Edfu (between Aswan and Luxor). This is where the story of the winged sun disk is immortalized on one of Edfu’s temple walls. The inscriptions describe how the god Ra and his retinue landed “in the west of this area, to the east of the Pechennu canal.” His earthly representative, the pharaoh, was clearly in some sort of trouble, as he asked the heavenly flier to help him deal with his enemies:

The holy majesty Ra-Harmachis spoke to your holy person Hor-Hut: O you sun child, you exalted one, who is created by me, strike down the enemy that is before you without delay. Then Hor-Hut flew up to the sun in a great sun disk with wings upon it…when he viewed the enemies from the high heavens…he stormed down so violently upon them that they neither saw with their eyes nor heard with their ears. Within a short time not a head of them still stood living. Hor-Hut, shining and many-colored, returned in his form as a great winged sun disk to the ship of Ra-Harmachis.

This text was translated in 1870. In other words, at a time when no Egyptologist would have known about supersonic flight. They didn’t even have aircraft back then. But the attack described here definitely came from above (“when he viewed the enemies from the high heavens”) and it must have taken place at supersonic speeds (“that they neither saw with their eyes nor heard with their ears”). The results down here on Earth were correspondingly gruesome: “Within a short time not a head of them still stood living.” The gods alone know what dreadful weapon they used against this Stone Age folk.

Whether Egypt, Central America, or anywhere else, all of these ancient texts are fed to us these days in a kind of psychological mush. This is a shame because interpretations are possible in every color of the rainbow. I find it hard just to imagine the “Saga of the winged sun disk” in an abstract way, flying blind as I am in the fog of religious/psychological dogma. After the god Ra-Harmachis had helped the pharaoh defeat his enemies, he succinctly notes: “Here it is a pleasant place to live.” Afterward the surrounding lands are given a special name and the gods of heaven and Earth are praised. I suggest, that maybe we shouldn’t spend so much time reading about how other people think things are meant and the way we should, in their exalted opinions, see things, and instead look at the uncommented original texts.

“Hor-Hut flew up towards the sun as a great winged disk. Thus he has been known since as the Lord of Heaven….” Lord of Heaven? What about something else? What about “space man”?

As the inscriptions from Edfu show, the divine assistance was the actual reason for the worship and popularization of the winged sun disk and not, as some would have us believe, the sun in some imaginary under- and overworld. The Edfu text says it clearly enough:

Harmakhis flew in a ship and he landed by the city of Horus’ throne. Thus spake Thoth: the sender of light, who is born of Ra, he has defeated the enemy. He is to be known from this day on as the sender of light, who is born of the mountain of light. Thus spake Harmakhis to Thoth: Bring this sun disk to all the cities of the gods in Lower Egypt, and all the cities of the gods in Upper Egypt and all the cities of the gods.

Here and There

The phrase sender of light, which I have used here, is not one of my own creations. It comes from the text of Professor Heinrich Brugsch, who translated the Edfu text in 1870(!). So what have the sensible and rational Egyptologists—all of them loyal and obedient to their school of thinking and the zeitgeist—made of the winged sun disk? Ceremonial oddments. The original meaning is gone. It was no fantasy or dream of the uneducated Egyptians; it was simply what we would today describe as a UFO! Incapable or recognizing the original reality, academic doctrine transforms the former truth into myth. And now the world is all right again. Really?

A friend of mine, who is an Egyptologist, once told me that he thought that some god had actually intervened in a human conflict was simply unbearable. Just as unbearable as my belief that extraterrestrials had at some time taken a hand in Earthly affairs. Human logic, however, is sometimes prepared to make quite unexpected leaps. In the Old Testament, for instance, God—descending in a swathe of smoke, fires, and cataclysmic roars—often takes a hand to assist his chosen people in their struggles. Yes, in actual fact! Here the logic is watertight. Really?

What does the winged sun disk in Egypt got to do with Central America?

So-Called 'Ode to the Sun God.' Author's own photo.

In 1860, not far from the village of Santa Lucia Cotzumalguapa in Guatemala (on the Pacific coast), a number of magnificent stelae were found during clearance work. The news reached an Austrian researcher, Dr. Habel, who traveled to Mexico in 1862 to visit the excavation site. Dr. Habel made some sketches and showed them to the director of the Royal Museum of Ethnology in Berlin, Doctor Adolf Bastian. Four years later, he himself travelled to Guatemala and bought all the old stone fragments from the owner of the finca where the stelae were found. Transporting these incredibly heavy stelae to Europe was a logistic headache. In the end, they decided to cut the stone monsters in half and transported them to the harbor of San José, 50 miles away. To make the blocks lighter, they hollowed out the rear sides. During the loading, one of the stelae broke free and sank into the harbor waters—where it still lies today. The remaining artworks from this forgotten age can be admired in the Ethnology Museum in the west of Berlin. Because archaeologists always have to label and categorize everything (otherwise they can’t exhibit the artifacts), the stelae were given a rather apt name: Ode to the Sun God. And indeed, you can clearly see a flying creature, swathed in flames, descending to the frightened folk below. You really can’t miss the sun disk!

Reprinted, with permission of the publisher, from Twilight of the Gods: The Mayan Calendar and the Return of the Extraterrestrials © 2010 Erich von Däniken. Footnotes omitted from this excerpt. Published by New Page Books a division of Career Press, Pompton Plains, NJ.  800-227-3371.  All rights reserved.

About Erich von Däniken

Born on April 14th, 1935, in Zofingen, Switzerland, Erich von Däniken was educated at the College St‐Michel in Fribourg, where already as a student he occupied his time with the study of the ancient holy writings. While managing director of a Swiss 5‐Star Hotel, he wrote his first book, Chariots of the Gods, which was an immediate bestseller in the United States, Germany, and later in 38 other countries.

In the United States, Erich von Däniken won instant fame as a result of the television special ʺIn Search of Ancient Astronauts,ʺ based upon his first book. In 1996, the American TV company ABC/Kane produced a one‐ hour special, filmed all over the world, entitled Chariots of the Gods ‐ The Mysteries Continue. In 1996/97 ABC/Kane produced another documentary with Erich von Däniken (seen on the Discovery Channel). In Germany, the biggest TV network, RTL, showed the film on November 26th, 1996. 7,7 million viewers in Germany alone watched the program. Today, Erich von Däniken continues his filming with ABC and RTL.

Erich von Dänikenʹs books have been translated into 32 languages, and have sold 63 million copies worldwide. From his books two full‐length documentary films have been produced: Chariots of the Gods and Messages of the Gods. Of the more than 3,000 lectures which Erich von Däniken has given in 25 countries, over 500 were presented at universities. Fluent in four languages, Erich von Däniken is an avid researcher and a compulsive traveler, averaging 100,000 miles each year to remote spots of the Earth. This enables him to closely examine the phenomena about which he writes.

Today, Erich von Däniken lives in the small mountain‐village of Beatenberg in Switzerland (40 miles from Berne, above the city of Interlaken). He has been married to Elisabeth Skaja since 1960, with one daughter, Cornelia (born 1963), and two grandchildren. Von Däniken is a hobby‐chef and a lover of Bordeaux wines.

Mayan Pyramid at El Mirador. Photo: Geoff Gallice (CC)

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 to destroy the reserve. You can’t imagine the devastation that is happening.”

President Álvaro Colom has grand plans to turn the region into a major eco-tourism destination, but if he hopes to bring tourists, officials say, he will have to bring the law here first.

The reserve, about the size of New Jersey, accounts for nearly two-thirds of the Petén region, a vast, jungly no man’s land that juts north into Mexico and borders Belize to the east. Spanning a fifth of Guatemala and including four national parks, the reserve houses diverse ecosystems with niches for jaguars, spider monkeys and scarlet macaws.

Pre-Colombian inhabitants mined limestone quarries here 2,600 years ago to build the earliest Mayan temples. The temples would tower above the jungle canopy before the cities were abandoned as Mayan civilization mysteriously collapsed around the ninth century A.D.

Some sites generate robust tourism. The spectacular Maya city Tikal, which draws up to 350,000 visitors a year, is a relatively well-protected oasis. Only about 3,000 visit El Mirador, which contains what may be the world’s largest ancient pyramid structure.

The threats to the reserve are many and interlocking, legal and illegal. Claudia Mariela López, the Petén director for the national parks agency, said about 37,000 acres of the reserve was deforested annually by poachers, squatters and ranchers…

[continues in the New York Times] ]]> http://www.disinfo.com/2010/07/a-new-mayan-apocalypse/feed/ 3 http://www.disinfo.com/2009/11/is-the-movie-2012-denigrating-mayan-science/ http://www.disinfo.com/2009/11/is-the-movie-2012-denigrating-mayan-science/#comments Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:49:12 +0000 moezilla http://www.disinfo.com/?p=14484 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…

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 about a ‘multidimensional realm of hyperspace triggered by mass activation of the pineal gland’ or ‘a dispensation of consciousness thats more intuitive, mystical, and shamanic’ is a luxury we can no longer afford.

“We’re out of time.”

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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 to rights and, incidentally, free the Chosen People from whomever it was who had conquered them at the time. As Jesus didn’t free the Jews from the Romans—nor seemed able to free himself from them either—the Jews who denied him seem justified in their disbelief. To them, and to the Romans, the Christians who preached a coming Day of Judgment were rather like the urban oracles who inhabit most major cities today, ranting on street corners and pestering passersby to repent.

Post-Jesus, the Jews didn’t give up their anticipation of a Messiah. They merely pushed back the date of his arrival, a tactic the Christians soon adopted as well when it became clear that Jesus’ Second Coming—after his crucifixion and resurrection—was delayed. The last major claimant to Messiahdom was the Turkish Jew Sabbatai Zevi, who, after gathering a huge following, ignominiously abandoned his call in 1666 when threatened with impalement by Sultan Mehmet IV. As did later students of eschatology (the study of the end times), the early Christian theorists were adept in cooking the books and explaining why their own final curtain hadn’t yet fallen. Nevertheless, against all the evidence, the belief in some once-and-for-all denouement remained strong. In 156 AD, for example, a Phrygian named Montanus declared that he was the incarnation of the Holy Spirit and that, in accordance with the Fourth Gospel, he would reveal “things to come,” such as the imminent arrival of Christ’s kingdom, which would physically descend from the heavens and transform Phrygia into a land of saints. Understandably, thousands of Christians flocked to Phrygia to await the Second Coming. Yet again, the expected kingdom’s failure to arrive did little to dampen the belief that it would eventually show up. After Montanus, there were several other false alarms, all of which ended in the same way.

Ironically, the Church itself soon became a strong inhibitor of apocalyptic thought. By the time it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, with the emperor Constantine in the early fourth century, the idea of a coming apocalypse was more of a threat than a promise. The Church was the second most powerful organization in the empire, and that it would lose this status because of the end of the world wasn’t appealing. Drawing on the work of the third-century theologian Origen, it shifted the emphasis from a historical apocalypse to a spiritual one and developed an eschatology of the individual soul. This idea caught on with the more educated and socially well-situated Christians, but the more spectacular theme of a “real-life” apocalypse remained part of the common people’s worldview and has been so ever since, as anyone aware of the enormous popularity of the Left Behind series of apocalyptic novels, based on a selective reading of the Book of Revelations, knows. Titles like The Rapture, Tribulation Force, and The Mark don’t show up on the New York Times bestseller list, but millions of readers with a taste for Christian fundamentalism buy and read these books—well—religiously, as page-turning guides to the coming end times. The overarching theme of Left Behind is the fate of those who are not right with the Lord and who face a gory retribution come the last days. A gateway to paradise for the faithful few, for the disbelieving many, the millennium is their worst nightmare.

As the historian Norman Cohn argues in The Pursuit of the Millennium, millenarian scenarios share some basic ideas. Salvation is collective, involving everyone, although not everyone will be saved; it is to be experienced here on Earth, not in some afterlife; it is on its way and will arrive suddenly; it will be total, effecting a complete transformation of life as we know it; and it is to be achieved through supernatural forces. As Cohn argues, by the Middle Ages, grassroots expectation of the millennium was rampant. With a corrupt Church, the common folk sought salvation through a cleansing apocalypse. This led to some remarkable developments, like the Brethren of the Free Spirit, a loose community of radical Christians circa 1200 who, because of the coming end times, believed they had become free of sin and acted accordingly. Wandering from village to village, they rejected private property—which meant they took whatever they wanted—and devoted themselves to hedonistic pleasures, including “free love” and drunkenness, rather like medieval hippies. Less driven by theology, this and other millenarian sects sought to escape the deprivations of their lives by envisioning a coming cosmic reversal that would set the righteous lowly at the head of the table, with the worldly powerful at best receiving scraps.

The motivation for many of these sects isn’t difficult to grasp. Socially and economically disenfranchised, they resented the generally fine living many monks and priests enjoyed, and understandably wanted some for themselves. If it took an apocalypse to bring this about, so be it. This aspect of millenarianism informed the secular varieties familiar to the modern period, and while the French and Russian revolutions lacked the supernatural forces common to most millenarian movements, they both shared the other criteria admirably. The storming of the Bastille inaugurated the Age of Reason, and the Bolshevik murder of the Romanovs announced the dictatorship of the proletariat. Hitler’s National Socialism was perhaps the most millenarian modern movement of them all, celebrating a Third Reich that would, it claimed, last a thousand years. (Thankfully, all it managed was twelve.) Yet just as the Church did, the leaders of these secular apocalypses soon clamped down on any who felt these events weren’t quite apocalyptic enough; and in all three cases, for many the end times only brought new oppression. Another example of secular millenarian belief was the hoopla in Europe that accompanied the outbreak of the First World War. Many believed that by the end of the nineteenth century Western civilization had become rotten, and they looked to war as a way of clearing away the old world in preparation for the new. It was not until the reality of trench warfare took hold that those expectations dimmed and the war was seen as yet another example of the very thing it was supposed to eliminate.

While I’ve been lucky enough to have missed anything like the French or Russian revolution and the First World War, my own lifetime has been peppered with quite a few millennial expectations. Growing up in the 1960s, through the media I was aware of the modern Brethren of the Free Spirit in places like Greenwich Village and Haight-Ashbury. I was also aware that something called the Age of Aquarius either was on its way or had already arrived (the jury is still out on this). Linked to this was the idea that the fabled lost continent of Atlantis-—which I read about in comic books and fantasy paperbacks—was due to surface sometime in 1969. Both were heralds of a coming golden age, when “peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars.” By the early seventies such anticipations had fizzled, but in 1974 they were briefly revived when comet Kohoutek sparked new interest in apocalyptic beliefs. A Christian group called the Children of God—who, incidentally, advocated “revolutionary lovemaking” (read: promiscuity)—distributed leaflets announcing doomsday for January of that year, which my friends and I read with interest. Predictably, Kohoutek fizzled as well. That same year, the science writers John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann published The Jupiter Effect, a bestseller predicting the devastating results (earthquakes, tidal waves, etc.) of a curious alignment of the planets on one side of the sun. When the alignment took place and nothing happened, they wrote a second book, The Jupiter Effect Reconsidered, explaining what went wrong. Not surprisingly, this sequel didn’t sell as well.

There were other millennial dates too. Remember the solar eclipse of 1999 and Y2K, the millennium bug? But the most significant millennial date so far in my lifetime surely was 1987, the year of the Harmonic Convergence—another planetary alignment—which was seen as the kickoff for the most anticipated apocalyptic event in recent years, the year 2012. For those unaware, proponents of 2012 argue that an ancient Mayan calendar—combined with permutations of the I Ching—predicts that tremendous changes will take place in that year and that, as one advocate expresses it, a “singularity,” an event of unprecedented ontological character, will take place and, as the saying goes, transform life as we know it. Recalling Norman Cohn’s criteria for millenarian belief, from everything I’ve heard about 2012, it fits the bill nicely.

I first heard of the Harmonic Convergence in 1987 when I was working at a well-known New Age bookshop in Los Angeles. Although items like crystals and other spiritual accessories were already big sellers, I was intrigued by the flood of people gathering metaphysical paraphernalia in preparation for some major event. I was informed that like Kohoutek, Atlantis, and the Aquarian Age, the Harmonic Convergence marked the end of the old world and the beginning of the new. There would be some disturbance, yes, the Harmonic Convergers I spoke with informed me; the shift into the new time would not be smooth, but I shouldn’t worry. Apparently, the bookshop was one of the safest places on the planet and I would be protected. This was, I admit, a relief, and as my apartment was just a block away from the shop, I wondered just how far the protection would reach.

The sources about the coming event were José Argüelles’s The Mayan Factor and, later, Terence McKenna’s writings on his “time wave” theory in The Archaic Revival and other books. I read Argüelles but wasn’t impressed, and when a later book, Surfers of the Zuvuya, appeared, it just seemed silly. I was also not taken with his apparent adoption of the role of avatar, an identity other proponents of 2012 seem to embrace easily. (I did, however, find an earlier book, The Transformative Vision, to be a profitable study in cultural philosophy.) I found McKenna more interesting and a better writer, but I still wasn’t sold on the idea. I heard McKenna speak, and without doubt the man had kissed the Blarney Stone, but after an entertaining ninety minutes I left the lecture no more convinced than when I arrived. The fact that he banked a great deal on a liberal indulgence in hallucinogens also made me question his seriousness. I had had my own experiences with psychedelics, and while some were interesting, for the most part they seemed more a distraction than anything else.

Much has been written about 2012, pointing out both the value and the flaws in Argüelles’s and McKenna’s interpretations. I don’t intend to repeat those here. The strangeness of the ideas did not repel me. At the time that I came across them, I was reading Rudolf Steiner, who had his own prophecies concerning the third millennium, which, to be honest, were rather vague. I had also already spent some years in the Gurdjieff “work,” so odd ideas were not a threat. What troubled me then and today is what I call the “apocalyptic gesture,” a point I raised recently on the Reality Sandwich website, much of which is dedicated to the 2012 scenario. The desire for some once-and-for-all break with the given conditions of life seems, to me at least, to be embedded in our psyche and is a form of historical or evolutionary impatience. Social, political, or cultural conditions may trigger it, but in essence it’s the same reaction as losing patience with some annoying, mundane business and, in frustration, knocking it aside with the intent to make a “clean start.” While in our personal lives this may result in nothing more than a string of false beginnings and a lack of staying power, on the broader social and political scale it can mean something far more serious.

In essays like “The Destructive Character,” “Critique of Violence,” and “Theologico-Political Fragment,” the German-Jewish cultural thinker Walter Benjamin, who combined an idiosyncratic Marxism with an equally eccentric understanding of the Kabbalah, argued for the need for apocalyptic violence in order to bring about the Messianic Age. Whether it was the class war or Jehovah’s righteous wrath, Benjamin believed in the necessity for some final conclusive event that would restore the fallen world to paradise. The violence of divine intervention and a sudden eschatological change informed Benjamin’s view of history, which he famously saw as a “single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.” This hunger for some decisive action to clear away the detritus of the postlapsarian world informed Benjamin’s personal life too, and in 1940, trying to escape from the Nazis, he committed suicide, enacting upon himself an apocalyptic violence he had long contemplated.

In mentioning Benjamin, I’m not suggesting that believers in 2012 advocate violence. I am saying that the anticipation of a singularity associated with 2012 is a manifestation of what may very well be a Jungian archetype, the archetype of the apocalypse. And while violence may not be part of the prophecy, it can easily become part of the anticlimax when the apocalypse doesn’t arrive and disappointment sets in. Recent history suggests this. The “Summer of Love” in 1967—which by many accounts wasn’t as groovy as believed—quickly became the year of “Street Fighting Man” in 1968, when the “generation gap” promised to turn into something like revolution, and dangerous slogans like “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” promoted a simplistic us-or-them scenario. Yet by 1969 the hopes of an Aquarian Age had been severely battered by the gruesome Charles Manson murders and the Rolling Stones’ disastrous concert at Altamont, when Hell’s Angels murdered one man and terrorized hundreds of others, including the Stones themselves. (I tell the story in Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius.) Exorbitantly high hopes can often lead to very deep depressions, and in a microcosmic popular sense, within a few years the peace and love unreservedly embraced by the flower generation became the “no future” of the punks. Cynicism, jadedness, and pessimism often constitute the hangover from the intoxication of excessively high expectations. No one rejects ideals more vigorously than a bruised romantic.

Again, in mentioning this I’m not saying that the many crises that lead some to look to 2012 as a solution are not real. Clearly they are. We all know them, and it would be tedious for me to roll off a list. But anticipating an apocalypse or singularity is only one response to crises. There are others. And a radical shift in the nature of things is only one possibility.

The philosopher Jean Gebser, who argued very persuasively that we are experiencing what he called a breakdown in our “structure of consciousness,” likewise saw significant changes on the historical horizon. Gebser did not, however, tie himself to a deadline and didn’t anticipate a golden age. “The world will not become much better,” Gebser wrote, “merely a little different, and perhaps somewhat more appreciative of the things that really matter.” To those expecting some unprecedented alteration in the conditions of existence, this probably seems a bit tame. To me, it is more than enough of a goal to work toward, and if only a handful of people become “more appreciative of the things that really matter,” then the Life Force, evolution, or whatever you want to call it is getting the job done.

In his Study of History, an account of the rise and fall of civilizations, the historian Arnold Toynbee argues that there are two stereotypical responses to what he calls a “time of troubles,” the crisis points that make or break a civilization. One is the “archaist,” a desire to return to some previous happy time or golden age. The other is the “futurist,” an urge to accelerate time and leap into a dazzling future. That both offerings are embraced today is, I think, clear. The belief that a saving grace may come from indigenous non-Western people untouched by modernity’s sins is part of a very popular “archaic revival.” Likewise, the trans- or posthumanism that sees salvation in some form of technological marriage between man and computer is equally fashionable. The 2012 scenario seems to partake of both camps: It proposes a return to the beliefs of an ancient civilization in order to make a leap into an unimaginable future. What both strategies share, however, is a desire to escape the present. Given our own “time of troubles,” this seems understandable enough.

Toynbee also believed in what I call the “Goldilocks theory of history,” and to me it makes a lot of sense. If a challenge facing it is too great, he argued, a civilization smashes. If it isn’t great enough, the civilization overcomes it too easily, becomes decadent, and decays. But if the challenge is “just right”—not too great and not too small—it forces the civilization to make sufficient effort to advance creatively.

Sadly, most of the civilizations Toynbee studied either cracked or went soft. The verdict has yet to come in on our own, and as everyone knows, there are no guarantees. But I’m willing to make a bet. There are still a few years left, and, of course, things can change. But I’m willing to wager that with any luck, 2013 will show that we got it just right. If nothing else, trying to meet our challenges successfully will give us all something to do when the apocalypse doesn’t arrive.