Tu Revista Latina Magazine

The world is going to end (With or Without the Mayas Predictions)

As you read on, someone, somewhere in the world is making plans for the year 2012. They’ve decided to buy a brand new luxury car and travel through Southern Asia; things that will be paid for with credit that exceeds their financial possibilities. Someone else will stop worrying about what he eats and will take the liberty to indulge in whatever he wishes. After all, the world will end on December 21, 2012 and there will be no consequences for their actions. Neither the car company nor the credit card company will ever get around to charging for the lavish purchases and the glutton will never become obese. All thanks to the Maya and their calendar which supposedly predicts that December 21st is the last day of existence of our planet. But, is this entirely true?
 
The Maya developed a time-keeping system based on the same elements many other cultures around the world were using: meteorological and astrological phenomena. Thousands of years ago humans began counting the number of times the sun rose, the times the full moon appeared, when trees lost their leaves and the number of times the cold weather came around. Once they had identified the time lapses between these events it was only a matter of classifying and putting them in order, naming the periods and establishing relations between them to formulate the calendars. For this reason, our calendar—named Gregorian after its proponent, Pope Gregory XIII—has 365 days (times the sun rises) per year (the time it takes for four seasons to occur). Calendars are arbitrary and inaccurate, and even the Gregorian calendar has to add a day to its count every four years so it can remain synchronized with the astronomical phenomena it attempts to follow.

The Mayan culture was very sophisticated and their scientific advancements baffle even modern investigators. At the peak of their civilization, the Maya used three different calendars simultaneously. One of them was the “civic” calendar, which they used for registering and organizing the daily activities of their citizens. This calendar, called the haab, was made up of 365-day cycles and it was shared by many Mesoamerican civilizations, including the Aztecs. In fact, the haab was a Mayan adaptation of the Aztec (Mexica) calendar, which, like all calendars, is a time-keeping system, not a concrete object. The archaeological piece known as “The Aztec Calendar” is actually a monolith called “La Piedra del Sol,” Spanish for “The Sun Stone.” This fascinating sculpture represents different aspects of the Mexica cosmogony, including their perception of time.
 
The second of the Mayan calendars was the sacred or tzolkin calendar, whose cycle consisted of 260 days and was associated with celebrations and rituals. Finally, the last Mayan calendar, and arguably the most complex and fascinating of the three, is sensibly called “The Long Count.” This count registers the days in a seemingly endless cycle beginning on August 11, 3114 BC, in our present day calendar. However, this long count is precisely that…a very long count that ends where the counting stops. The Mayan Long Count ends with the winter solstice of 2012, that is, December 21 of the upcoming year.
 
To assume that the world will end on the 21st of December, 2012—because that’s when the Mayan Long Count ends—is the same as assuming that time began on August 11, 3114 BC. It would be like saying that the world ends every December 31, because that’s when our calendar ends. So, if you were considering buying a new car, traveling to Asia or eating as if there were no tomorrow, we suggest you think about it a little more. In the very least, don’t base your decisions on the assumptions of the Mayan calendar.

So, could it be that the Maya miscalculated the end of times, making the debtor in our example end up in financial ruin and the overeater 170 pounds overweight? The world will end, there is no doubt about that, but you can rest assured that no one knows when. In any case, our inexistent regard for the environment makes it more likely that the world is doomed by our own carelessness, rather than come to an end based on a presumed prediction by a lost civilization.

Winter 2012