The End of The World of 2012 and The Mayan Calendar - Research Paper Example

It is a uniquely human tendency to seek patterns in randomness, or at least to seek any explanation for the phenomena that occur in our surroundings. This fascination often takes some down strange roads, trying to decipher predictions about the future from artifacts created thousands of years ago. The attempt to derive useful information from such sources is ultimately doomed to fail because it relies on the premise of mysticism, which is the mistaken belief in the spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the intellect. In the 21st century, most people believe that mysticism is fallacious or, at best, inferior to the use of empiricism and reason to arrive at knowledge. Authors and commentators who rely on mysticism to reach their conclusions have discussed the coming doomsday, as allegedly predicted by Mayan calendars, in December 2012, treating the phenomenon as a certain disaster and its source as infallible. However, the use of ancient sources to predict or interpret modern events is not entirely new, nor is the inaccuracy of such predictions and interpretations. It is incredibly disingenuous to claim that one can predict when the end of the world will happen, as well as how, when such knowledge is acquired only mystically. Although the misuse of Ancient Mayan sources is hopeless and in some cases dangerous, the proper scientific use of their artifacts serves an important role in our understandings of how humans shape their pasts and create histories. The cultural obsession with the Mayan calendar revolves around the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, which places the conclusion of the 13th b’ak’tun in December 2012. Each b’ak’tun represents approximately 394 years. The end of a b’ak’tun is not treated with any special reverence by modern Mayans and there is no evidence to support the theory that the end of the b’ak’tun will produce a significant event (Aveni 32-33). According to Mayan mythology, the gods created three cycles of 13 b’ak’tun before the current one, and currently Earth is in the fourth world, which will end in December 2012. According to one scholar, it is clear that “the Maya thought there was [a world] before this, and that implies they were comfortable with the idea of another one after this” (Rivet). The concept of a new world does not have the kind of associations in Mayan literature that it does in modern Western cultures, given the religious history and apocalyptic readings of Christianity. The New Age interpretation that the Mayan calendar predicts the end of the world originated in the 1970s with American authors writing within the tradition of millenarianism, or the belief that major social changes occur in alignment with thousand-year cycles. Although there is no basis for this interpretation within the archeology and artifacts themselves, and there is no known significant astronomical event tied to December 2012, the myth of an impending event has been promulgated throughout the world (Aveni 83). Some interpretations of this event include apocalypse, which is based on the hypothesis of esoteric author John Major Jenkins who believes the galactic alignment in December 2012 will result in a supermassive black hole at the center of Earth’s galaxy (Krupp 23). According to his theory, this will occur on the winter solstice of that year, which is consistent with the Mayan calendar. Regardless of a coincidental alignment of dates, the interpretation of this coincidence as indicative of a significant astronomical is baseless. According to Anthony Aveni of Colgate University, while the idea of great shifts in society are common throughout Mayan literature and artifacts, this New Age interpretation of 2012 is based strongly within an American spiritual context and completely unfounded in Mayan traditions. In addition, he writes that the New Age interpretation is the result of a “disconnected” society, which reflects an inability “to find spiritual answers to life’s big questions within ourselves” and, as a result, “we turn outward to imagined entities that lie far off in space or time—entities that just might be in possession of superior knowledge” (Aveni 161). The hope is that these superior entities may provide the knowledge they seek. Failed predictions of the apocalypse have littered history for the past two millennia, which means there is no reason to think that (with any degree of certainty greater than chance) an impending cataclysm is right around the corner. In 1844, when the prediction of Baptist preacher William Miller did not materialize, he changed the date from March 21 to October 22. To prepare for the apocalypse, his followers sold all of their possessions and traveled to the mountains. When it did not come later that year, his followers explained away the phenomenon as something that occurred in heaven. Likewise, in 2011, when Harold Camping’s May 21 prediction did not occur, he changed the date to October 21 (Webley 31). A curious parallelism speaks volumes of truths not only about Christian-oriented apocalyptic theories, but also about apocalyptic theories in general. With emphasis on the Mayan calendar hypothesis, there is a paucity of evidence in support of the interpretation of the 2012 date. The fact that such predictions have been occurring as far back as the construction of the Bible, illustrates a more fundamental need that human beings have for making sense of their world and seeking patterns in the noise of truly random events. This tendency is something that is desirable to test among ordinary people. For the purposes of determining whether people believed in the possibility of the 2012 doomsday, or any other for that matter, I distributed a questionnaire that tested several beliefs about the end of the world. According to the Pew Research Center, approximately 41% of Americans believe in the return of Jesus Christ before 2050, which indicates a correlated belief in the end of times within that same period (Webley 32). I decided to test this finding among college-aged individuals to see if the numbers correlate to a younger, perhaps more skeptical population within the United States. I distributed the short questionnaires, which contained questions like “Do you think the world will end before 2050?” and “Do you think that humans can predict the end of the world accurately?” The results of the questionnaire matched my hypothesis, which stated that the respondents would show a healthy skepticism of doomsday predictions as promulgated in the popular media. Approximately 5% of respondents rated the likelihood of a 2012 apocalypse “likely” while an overwhelming 87% rated its likelihood as “moderately unlikely” or “very unlikely”. Respondents also stated their skepticism about whether accurate predictions of the end of the world are possible. Approximately 76% of respondents rated accurate end-of-the-world predictions as either “nearly impossible” or “impossible”, while only 11% answered that such predictions were at lease “possible”. Within this sample, the results of the Pew Research Center were not replicated; however, this is not to say that individuals within the sample tested do not support some hypothesis about the end of the world. It seems that individuals, regardless of their beliefs about individual end-of-the-world doomsday predictions, find comfort in knowing precisely when they, along with the rest of humanity, will perish. Perhaps for this reason, a majority of respondents, almost 61%, answered “interested” or “very interested” to the question “How interested are you in end-of-the-world theories that are based on evidence?” However, the hypothesis of the 2012 doomsday based on the Mayan calendar is not based on credible “evidence” in the real, scientific use of that term. Instead, it is based on an interpretation of different facts that have been taken from a variety of Mayan artifacts. According to one scholar, this is “the next big abuse of the Classic Maya” (Webster 31). It seems that Mayan civilization has been used and abused for our own purposes for centuries (Evans 13). This is due, at least in part, because we tend to see the Mayans’ fate as somehow linked with our own. Popular film, books, and commentary on the Mayans reflect this belief that the puzzle pieces that, when put together, led to the collapse of the Mayan civilization reflect the same factors that will lead to the death and destruction of modern human civilization as a whole. As accomplished and advanced as the Ancient Mayans were in their architecture, it is a mistake to equate this technical mastery with a mystical ability to predict future events. Archaeology tends to portray their society in a romantic and exotic light that conflates accomplishment with mystical prowess and achievement with enigma (Webster 30). Despite this image, the Mayans should be the subject of scientific, empirical study, not idle speculation about the present and future relevance of their calendars. A paradigm shift toward a scientifically minded analysis of their civilization will remove the power of the mystical New Age interpretations of their Long Count calendar. According to Megan E. O’Neil, a professor of Art History at the University of Southern California, Mayan artifacts do indeed have contemporary relevance, but not for their predictions. Beyond the commercial and spectacular, the Mayans are particularly important for us in our “understandings of how humans interact with and shape their pasts and create histories” (O'Neil 317). Her project is an interdisciplinary one that integrates anthropology with art history with respect to how scholars combine cultural and historiographic traditions into world histories and history making. The Mayans are known for burying sculptures of narrations and depictions within their architecture; some of these artifacts provide an illuminating comparison of textual and pictorial history keeping. It also gives a new perspective on how subjectivity and bias played a role in how the Mayans recorded history and narratives. Accordingly, rather than attaching modern meanings and perspectives to ancient artifacts, what contemporary scholars ought to be doing is studying the Mayan artifacts with an eye to the past and an interest in expanding our knowledge of their culture. A probable consequence of doing so is a less intense focus on the Mayans as a source of information about our future and a more useful focus on the Mayans as a gateway to understanding history and art in the ancient world. One can only hope that starting after 2012, the Mayans will occupy Western imaginations for the right reasons. Although the Mayans receive a significant amount of imaginative attention in the West, this attention seems to be for the wrong reasons. Rather than focusing on their ancient civilization for seeking answers about our future, contemporary society ought to take a more scientific approach to understanding societies from the past and the histories they create. New Age interpretations of apocalypse based on the Mayan Long Count calendar are baseless, as are any other end-of-the-world predictions. Although modern, college-aged people do not accept the truth of the 2012 apocalypse hypothesis, nor accept the likelihood of similar end-of-the-world theories, there is a healthy open-mindedness about information concerning potential global calamities. Accordingly, young people should be focused on evaluating claims based on facts and evidence, rather than mysticism and interpretation of ancient sources. The need to find patterns in the random noise of the universe is uniquely human; however, it must be kept in check, lest we find ourselves completely determined by the mistaken perception of mystical order in the universe. Works Cited Aveni, Anthony. The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012. Boulder: Colorado University Press, 2009. Evans, R.T. Romancing the Maya: Mexican Antiquity in the American Imagination, 1820-1915. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. Krupp, E.C. "The Great 2012 Scare." Sky & Telescope November 2009: 22-26. O'Neil, Megan E. "The Material Evidence of Ancient Maya Sculpture." Journal of Visual Culture, 9 (2010): 316-328. Rivet, Ryan. "The Sky Is Not Falling." 25 June 2008. Tulane University. 23 May 2011 . Webley, Kayla. "Apocalypse Weekend: Harold Camping Says the World Ends Saturday. He's Said that Before." Time 20 May 2011: 30-32. Webster, David. "The Uses and Abuses of the Ancient Maya." The Emergence of the Modern World. Otzenhausen, Germany: Jared Diamond and James Robinson, 2009. 1-38. Read More