2012: What Does it Mean?
John
Major Jenkins in conversation with Doghead Cola
in mid-1999
Published in The Deadly
Type magazine
http://www.deadlysystems.com/zine/
“In Maya Cosmogenesis 2012, Jenkins has shown that this
precessional alignment of the winter solstice sun with the galaxy is the
phenomenon in nature to which the ancient Olmec/Maya anchored their great
calendar. Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 sets the stage for us to ask the deeper
question: ‘Why?’ This would be an interesting question under any circumstances;
for us in these times it is doubly interesting, for we, by chance or design,
actually live in the end time anticipated by the ancient Maya shaman-prophets.
Their bones and their civilization have long since gone into the Gaian womb
that claims all the children of time. Indeed, their cities were ghostly
necropoleis by the time the Spanish conquerors first gazed upon them, five
hundred years ago. Yet it was our time that fascinated the Maya, and it was
toward our time that they cast their ecstatic gaze, though it lay more than two
millennia in the future at the time the first Long Count dates were recorded.”
—Terence McKenna, from his
introduction to Maya Cosmogenesis 2012
In
recent years, John Major Jenkins has come to be renowned as one of the leading
independent researchers investigating ancient Mesoamerican cosmology. His
latest effort in that study, Maya Cosmogenesis 2012: The True Meaning of the
Maya Calendar End-Date, from Bear & Company Publishing (1998),
specifically explores the Mayan end-date which has emerged as a point of
Apocalypse for some New Age doomsayers, and remains a fascinating enigma to
serious researchers. Jenkins isn’t new to the subject of Mayan calendrics and
culture, having authored four other books on the subject previous to his most
recent outing, including Journey to the Mayan Underworld, Mirror in
the Sky, Tzolkin: Visionary Perspectives and Calendar Studies, and The
Center of Mayan Time. I caught up with John in the RadioValve studios for a
lengthy wine-laden, tobacco-hazed conversation about Mayan cosmology, the
academic and underground tour circuits, his
books
and adventures in Mexico, and other bits of verbal bandying about. This
interview represents the first in a two-part series which will conclude in the
next issue of The Deadly Type...
Doghead Cola:
So
let’s just sort of talk about the orientation of where this book has come
from. I know you’ve written several other books previously, and uh, I remember
that the first night
John
Major Jenkins:
Mm-hmmm.
Yeah, I remember that; that was back in 1996, actually the first time I met
I
didn’t want to sort of rest with that as a statement…. I wanted to go deeply
into the information of the Maya, mostly drawing from academic studies, to
demonstrate how the Maya incorporated this concept into their basic
institutions, such as the Ball Game, king accession rites, and so on.… Um, but
yeah, a lot of my interest into the Maya developed from trips that I took to
Mexico and Guatemala, stretching over 5 or 6 years. I basically returned almost
every winter and lived and worked among the Maya in the highlands of Guatemala.
Very traditional groups of Maya people, different groups of the Maya, including
the Cakchiquel, Ixil, and Quiché Maya. Basically there’s six groups of
pure-blood Maya living in the highlands of Guatemala, and many, many of the
ancient traditions still survive. I felt that the Maya of today are heir to a
very profound understanding of the cosmos; a very profound understanding of the
cosmological forces that contribute to and stimulate the evolution of
consciousness on this planet.
This
idea of the solstice sun lining up with the galactic center—the center of
the Milky Way Galaxy—seemed to be a very profound thing that should be looked
at more closely.
garage—actually
by that time I was living in Louisville, six miles east of Boulder—and, um, I
set up my life so that I would have a lot of free time to do this research. It
was really an amazing time of discovery for me. My work with the Maya and the
Maya cosmology has sort of been my own gnostic path to understanding some deep
principles that have to do with the situation that we are in today as a
civilization... Oh, let’s see, what can we sort of... There’s a lot to talk
about here, really, yeah...
DC:
Right,
because clearly within all of civilization right now we’re at a head with
a lot of systems which have been proven to be archaic in many ways. Um, war-driven,
economically-driven, that have very little to do with the substance of who
we are, and how, and why we’re here, and what it means to be alive. I mean,
obviously, like, being
JMJ:
Hmmm.
DC:
…and
be, uh, generating energies, y’know, towards that... It seems like, in a sense,
the calendrical studies that you’ve become involved in seems relevant ...Why did the Maya pick
2012 to end this vast cycle of time? And why did they believe the years around
2012 would be a time of great change and great transformation unprecedented in
human history? …these ideas reflect the idea that we’re moving towards a death and a rebirth of this
state of civilization.
JMJ:
Mm-hmm.
Right. A lot of times in the presentation that I give, the question comes
up, ‘Is this the end of the world?’ And, uh, there’s really no definite answer
to that. I’d like to emphasize that indigenous time is cyclic, and, um, espouses
a doctrine of renewal. But of course that is based upon the idea that something
will be coming to an end. So it’s kind of unavoidable to confront the spiritual
transformation that comes from confronting our imminent death. Instead of
shying away from that, and trying to sort of evade the issue that maybe the
world is going to end. I dunno—I mean,
we live in a really crazy time. I mean, look at what’s going on right now
with Kosovo. The nuclear threat certainly is not a done deal. It’s not over
with. Also, we’re approaching the
Millennium—the millennial turning of our own Judeo-Christian calendar, which,
y’know, is a social-historical phenomenon... Always at the end of a decade,
the end of a century—and now we’re approaching the end of a millennium—human
beings react in very, very strange ways. [some laughter] And there is this
feeling that something very big is coming to an end.
DC:
Mmmm...
The Alignment of AD 2012
JMJ:
—for
working together and getting real with each other, and building what the world
is going to look like in the next phase, or the next chapter of human unfolding
on this planet. But really, what’s
fascinating for me is that, it’s only the Maya material that identifies the
underlying empirical reason why we’re in a time of such great, transformative
change. And it seems to be about this astronomical alignment with the galactic
center.
DC:
Well,
along that line, I’m curious, because based upon some other reading that I’ve
done, um, there’s the concept of 2012 being Year Zero…
JMJ:
Mm-hmm.
DC:
…and
that’s both kind of promising and kind of, y’know, horrifying in a sense.
Y’know, obviously the Cambodians called 1973 Year Zero for themselves because
their civilization was completely destroyed…
JMJ:
Right.
DC:
…by
the Nixon campaign to discover the “secret” Viet-Cong encampments within
Cambodia. And so that’s kind of a model that we can work with in terms of total
devastation of a society. So I’m curious, in terms of this Year Zero
potentially being a new beginning, is there anything in the calendrical system
that kind of foretells of things that may come beyond that. Y’know, is there a
set-up for calendrical ideas that also deal with community that transcends the
2012 date?
JMJ:
Yeah,
but I can’t be really specific about predictions. I think we need to understand
this from the point of view of systems-dynamics. What we’re approaching is Year Zero. But Year Zero in what? Um, a
little background on this concept, um...The 13 Baktun period of the Maya is this period of 5,200 years,
and in the Maya doctrine of World Ages, there’s five World Ages—there’s five
periods of 5,200 years. So 5,200 years times five is 26,000. 26,000 years is
the cycle of precession; it’s the cycle of the earth’s wobble. This is a very,
very important concept. It’s been neglected in scientific discourse. In many,
many ancient traditions—including Egyptian cosmology and Vedic doctrine of the
Yugas—this 26,000-year cycle is recognized as a vast period of human spiritual
gestation on this planet. So even in the Western astrological tradition, you
have the twelve Zodiacal Ages, and, y’know, we’re supposedly entering the Age
of Aquarius, and all that, and um... The Maya divided up this 26,000-year cycle
into five periods whereas the Western astrological tradition divides it into
twelve. Also, the Western astrological tradition is not very clear on where the
beginning point of this gestational cycle should be. I mean, if it is a
gestation, there must be a birth moment somewhere. Well, the Maya information
provides that, and the birth moment, our collective birth moment, into the next
phase of our collective unfolding as a species is the moment, or the era, in
which the December solstice sun is lining up with the galactic center. It kinda
makes sense too, just from the point of, y’know, understanding that the
galactic center is that point in the sky that is very, very energetic…. I mean,
it’s a place that is dense with radiowaves, it’s a place where quasars are
found. In fact, astrophysicists believe that there’s a Black Hole residing in the
center of our galaxy. This is, uh, a trans-dimensional portal that can move us
into other dimensions.
So
in the Maya material, they provide us with an answer to the question of when
the 26,000-year cycle of human spiritual gestation ends and begins anew... So it’s really hard to be more specific about
that in terms of predictions. It’s sorta funny because it’s sort
the
yearly cycle. Y’know, their time-concept was limited to the task at hand.
And probably some intrepid shaman came along and said, ‘Hey, if we put these
seeds in the ground now, they’re going to sprout in six moons, or eight moons,’
or something. Basically, it was an enhancement of the time-concept of human
beings to the level of the year so that we could anticipate. And then they
could say that, y’know, let’s say that today it’s like spring-time, right?
Well, human time-concept became enhanced to the point that they could project
forward and say that ‘in six months, it’s going to be cold.’ They could anticipate
and plan for events that would be taking place in the future. Well, that’s just a very short yearly cycle. Now we’re dealing with
this vast Great Year cycle of 26,000 years. And we have to start seeing ourselves
as beings that are participating in a
DC:
And
certainly some of the things that we’re discussing here plug in with Terence
McKenna’s concept of Timewave Zero, and previous to this interview you and I
have talked about that to a degree. Um...
JMJ:
Anywhere
you wanna go.
DC:
Yeah.
[laughter] Um...
JMJ:
I’m
not even sure it’s a question of what we can do or what we can expect. I think
getting back to the idea that we’re approaching this birth-death nexus...
I’m mean, the imagery of the sky, this area of the sky that contains the galactic
center, there are features along the Milky Way... For example, there’s the
Dark Rift caused by inter-galactic dust clouds that run along the Milky Way.
You can see it if you’re out there on a dark mid-summer’s night. That area
of the Milky Way that contains the galactic center is very bright and very
wide. And that is how the Maya were able to recognize and understand that
part of the Milky Way as what they call the Cosmic Womb. They conceived of
the Milky Way as
DC:
Sure.
JMJ:
He
pointed his telescope to Jupiter and saw moons revolving around Jupiter, and
said ‘Hey, look— proof that there are things out there that are not revolving
around the earth!’
Izapa Stela 11
DC:
In
fact, one of the most humorous facts about that story is that, uh, he spent
pretty much the remainder of his life from that point on in imprisonment because
of his ideas. And on his death bed was given his last rites, and was offered
a chance to confess. And just
Which
is a funny story, y’know, it’s a great way to approach your last rites—you’re
no longer excommunicated, you now go into the Heaven of doctrinal Christianity,
and then at the last moment you reclaim the truth… —to be continued—
An
Open Letter to Astronomers
By
John Major Jenkins / June 30, 1999
Printed
in The Deadly Type; for revised version see website: http://www.alignment2012.com/openletter.htm