Coming Soon to a Galaxy Near You: The End of the Maya Long Count Calendar
In Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 (Bear & Company, Santa Fe, 1998), John Major
Jenkins demonstrates how the End Date of the Maya Long Count calendar on
December 21, 2012, promises not only to close a 26,000-year cycle, but
begin a new cycle of greatly accelerated human evolution.
Jenkins' work echoes the theme, if not the method, of theories
put forth by one of Magical Blend's favorite philosophers, Terence McKenna,
who received his initial epiphany during a mushroom trip in the early
seventies. Writes McKenna in the foreword to Maya
Cosmogenesis, "By 1974 I was aware of the approach of the heliacal solstice rising
of the Galactic Center and its potential as a time of renewal, yet
astonishingly this was before I was aware that the
astronomer-shamans of the Olmec/Maya had reached the same
conclusion more than two millennia ago. A different chain of
logic led me to the same moment in time, and I recognized it
as a moment of potential transformative opportunity."
McKenna continues: "The Maya believed, for reasons that are perhaps
forever lost, or perhaps soon to be revealed, that the coincidence of
the winter solstice sunrise with the part of the Milky Way
that they called the xibalba be would not be, as some have
stated, the end of the world, but its moment of true creation."
Adds John Major Jenkins, "in the clear skies of ancient
Mesoamerica, many dark, blotchy areas could be observed along the
Milky Way's length. These are "dark cloud" formations caused by
interstellar dust. The most prominent of these is called
the "dark rift" of the Great Cleft of the Milky Way. It looks
like a dark road running along the Milky Way, and it points right
at the cosmic crossing point, the center of the Maya Sacred Tree,
right where the sun will be in 2012! The Maya called this dark rift
the Black Road or the Road to the Underworld. They seem to have
imagined it as a portal to another world, and the December solstice
sun can enter it only in 2012." Jenkins thinks it no accident that
astrophysicists have recently discovered a Black Hole in that exact
position.
"The Maya believed that the 26,000-year Great Year of precession
is a spiritual gestation period for humanity, and that the 2012 alignment
will catalyze the birth of what has been growing on this planet for
26,000 years. It also signifies the insemination, or seeding, of what will
come to fruition in 26,000 years. They understood that
human civilization cycles from one extreme form of social organization
to the other. Out of this process of polarization, or spiritual mitosis,
arises a new, greater being... The opening doorway of baktun thirteen
offers us conscious relationship with each other and a creative participation
with the Earth."
END