We cannot know for certain what the significance of December 21st, 2012 was to the ancient Maya. Unfortunately, the remains of ancient Mayan civilization lie in a moist, tropical environment that damages most artifacts and records. We do know that time-tracking was critically important to their culture, since they put a great deal of time and labor into recording and measuring time. They carved glyphs into enormous slabs of rock that often recorded an extensive number of days. Furthermore, they would describe the calendar date in great detail. For instance, the Gregorian date of January 11, 699 is recorded in the Mayan Long Count Calendar as the much longer 9.11.16.8.18 9 Etz’nab 6 K’ayab. We also know that they associated gods with certain periods of time, further indicating that their culture had a deep spiritual connection with time.
December 21st, 2012 comes 1,872,000 days after the beginning of the current Mayan era. According to Mayan creation myths, this era began on 11 August 3114 B.C.E., which was known as the date 13.0.0.0.0 in the Mayan Long Count Calendar. The literal significance of December 21st, 2012 is that it is the very last day of this calendar’s cycle. This date, which is explicitly mentioned in only one known site, marks the close of the thirteenth bak’tun cycle. At 144,000 days, a bak’tun is the largest time period that the Long Count measured. There were only thirteen bak’tun cycles. Thus the calendar would restart at zero, much like a car’s odometer. December 22, 2012 would be the beginning of the next immense calendar cycle.
The major explicit written reference to December 21st, 2012 cited by Mayan scholars is Monument 6 at Tortuguero, Mexico. This block of glyphs was first translated as describing a descent of a god at the end of the thirteenth bak’tun. Recently, anthropologists have rethought this 1996 translation. The original translators Stephen Houston and David Stuart now believe that it mentions December 21st, 2012 as a prepositional phrase and the date itself is not significant in this particular narrative.
Nevertheless, In recent years, panic has set in as conspiracy theorists predicted that the Mayans thought the world would end this month. Most anthropologists, archaeologists and experts in Mayan culture say that there is no evidence to support December 21st as the Mayan’s best bet for Doomsday. Yet this panic has produced a blockbuster movie, TV specials and books. I fell victim to this hysteria myself nearly a decade ago. My geography teacher, a Cuban immigrant who occasionally fell to her knees and prayed to be spared from the horde of hyperactive seventh graders, exposed us to some politically and factually incorrect documentary about Mayan calendars and predictions.
We watched in horror as virgins’ throats were cut and the silhouettes of human bodies were thrown from the tops of temples. The announcer, after praising how accurate Mayan calendrics and astronomers were, darkly warned us that their calendar ended on 12/21/12. “For a society so obsessed with counting,” the narrator said ominously, “an end of a calendar would be the end of the world.”
In his recent article “The 2012 Phenomenon Comes of Age” (published in Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions), Stetson University professor Robert Sitler reports that the contemporary Mayan people had no symbolic significance attached to 12/21/12 until 2011. “When I first asked in 2005, nobody had ever heard of it. The last time I went down, almost all the elders have heard of it,” Sitler says. He notes that the average Mayan person has not heard of the phenomenon, likely due to limited access to television, internet and movies.
In a fascinating example of cultural exportation and re-importation, Mayan intellectuals and prayer-makers first heard about their ancestors’ Long Count predictions from foreigners or Western TV, including specials on the History Channel. The Mayan origins of the myth impressed them. While the Long Count calendar fell into disuse over a thousand years ago, the contemporary Maya continue to use two other calendars today. These calendars play an important role in predicting personality traits, performing rituals and tracking time. Their continued respect for calendars, combined with a cultural reverence for their ancient ancestors, influenced some Mayan intellectuals and elders to take the Western idea of the Mayan end-oftimes and apply it to the changes they see around them.
“The fact that their ancient ancestors made this calendar has a lot of credence for them,” says Sitler. On his last trip to Guatemala, the elders in a large Mayan town asked him to speak publicly about December 21st, 2012 in order to calm a few locals’ nerves.
Since their exposure to Western presentations of the 12/21/12 Doomsday scenario, Mayan writers, scholars and prayer-makers have taken the date as a way to express their fears about lack of balance between humanity and nature. Sitler cites traditional prayermaker Sebastián López Gómez saying that drastic changes will occur “because there is no longer respect, nor offerings, nor reflection… What I know is that we cannot lack respect nor leave behind the knowledge of our ancestors that we still have. We should make offerings and give gifts of candles.” K’iche Maya spiritual guide Rigotberto Itzep Chanchavac, who Sitler describes as a stand-up guy, remembers the following: “You will still see many warnings. You will still see and hear strange things. You will still see great ruin. There will be many changes on Earth.”
Sitler continues, “When [Itzep Chanchavac] first heard about 2012 in the Mayan Long Count from foreigners some years ago, it occurred to him that the date might be what his K’iche’ elders were referring to. He points out that the 21 December 2012 date occurs under the influence of the yearbearer Noj, a day associated with wisdom, contemplation and insight coming from the Earth itself.”
To put these interpretations in context, the Mayan people in Guatemala have witnessed massive human and environmental destruction during their lifetimes. According to the Center for Justice and Accountability, over 200,000 Guatemalans were killed or forcibly disappeared during Guatemala’s civil war. Out of the victims identified by the U.N.-back Historical Clarification Commission, 83% were indigenous Maya. In 1982- 1983, an estimated 70,000 Mayan people were killed or disappeared.
“In terms of population loss, it would be like 10 million Americans dying,” says Sitler. Additionally, soil erosion and water pollution have spoiled the land that many rural Mayan communities depend on for their livelihood. The rain forests are shrinking rapidly. According to Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Guatemala has lost nearly 25% of its forest cover in the last 20 years. These environmental changes are visible to the Maya, who see the 2012 date in the context of these trends.
“They accept themselves as a far greater process and in the context of that process it’s not a big deal. They just accept what the day offers,” says Sitler. “You won’t find a lot of whiners in this part of the world.”
