Abrupt change 2012: the prophecies

Will the coming of a tipping point in human societies coincide with the famous 2012 prophecies? Let’s first look at these prophecies, and then look at the evidence that does—or does not—support them.

The most famous of the prophecies that speak of the end of 2012 as a critical point in human life and civilization comes from the Mayans. The Mayans viewed civilization as a cyclic process, where shifts from one phase of the cycle to the next occur at specific intervals.

The cyclic concept of the world was not unique to the Mayans. Cycles exist everywhere in nature and have been recognized in almost all cultures.  Cycles occur in history as well. In traditional cultures they were seen as the advent and passing of “Great Ages.” There was the astrological Great Year which lasts just under 26 thousand years (based on the precession of the equinoxes), and the Yugas of Hindu philosophy, a cosmic epoch with a cycle of dark and golden ages. Many myths speak of celestial cycles, and many civilizations have attempted to map their principal transitions. Celestial calendars were a major reference for life in many parts of the world. One of the most famous of these calendars is the Tzolk’in calendar, a 260-day Mesoamerican system that was known to the Mayans.

The Mayan calendar itself was completed by priest-astronomers in the year 1479 and carved into the Aztec-Mayan sun stone. The Mayan calendar details long passages of time, and includes mathematical calculations so accurate that modern astronomers are at a loss to understand how a traditional people could arrive at them—for example, the calculation of the length of the Earth’s revolution within a thousandth of a decimal point.

The most famous calculation is encoded in the so-called long count. The “Age of Jaguar,” the thirteenth baktun of 144,000 days, will come to an end on the 21^st of December, 2012. That will mark the end of the Fourth Sun (also known as the Fourth World) and the end—and at the same time also the beginning—of the Mayan calendar. This transformative date is written as 13.0.0.0.0 in long count notation, which is the same as the notation for the first day in the calendar.

December 21, 2012 marks the end of the long count in the Mayan calendar (and thus also the end and re-birth of the calendar), but not the end of the world. Carlos Barrios, a Guatemalan historian and anthropologist who became a Mayan Ajq’ij, ceremonial priest and spiritual guide, is definite on the question regarding the end of the world. “Other people write about prophecy in the name of the Maya,” he declared in a series of interviews in Santa Fe. “They say that the world will end on December 2012. The Mayan elders are angry with this. The world will not end. It will be transformed.” Everything will change: December 21, 2012 will be a date of rebirth, the beginning of the World of the Fifth Sun. The nature of that world is not determined in advance, but the Mayan system suggests that it may be the beginning of a new cycle of Ages, starting with the Golden Age. It is likely to mark a fundamental shift in human culture and consciousness.

A world transformation at the end of 2012 is predicted by astrology as well. Astrologers have noted that at sunrise on December 21, 2012 the Sun will conjunct the intersection of the Milky Way and the plane of the ecliptic, creating a cosmic cross. The center of our galaxy will complete a “cosmic year”: a 25,920-year journey around the wheel of the zodiac. According to most systems of astrology a new cosmic year will then begin, lasting for another 25,920 years. (The reality of this cycle, if not its astrological—or Mayan—interpretation, rests on independent scientific evidence: it concerns the rotation of the Earth on its axis. This rotation is about 23 degrees off vertical: our planet is like a spinning top that is slightly out of balance. In this condition it takes 25,800 years for the celestial pole to describe a full circle. The conjunction noted by Mayans and astrologers will occur in a 36-year window in time between 1980 and 2016. The Mayans have chosen the winter solstice 2012 as the decisive point, even though it’s not in the middle of this window, perhaps because at that point the Earth’s axis will point exactly toward the “galactic bulge”—the thick central part of the visual image of the Milky Way galaxy as seen from Earth.)

The cosmic conjunction noted by both astrologers and the Mayans was considered a fundamental re-alignment in a number of spiritual traditions, including the Hopi time-keeping system, Vedic and Islamic astrology, Mithraism, the Jewish kabala, European sacred geography, medieval Christian architecture, and a variety of hermetic metaphysics.

Does this re-alignment, and the prophecies based on it, mean that the “abrupt” change of our world will occur at the end of 2012?

Tagged as: astrology, Hermeticism, Hopi, Islam, Kabala, Mayans, Mithraism, transformation, Vedic, Yugas