On December 31, 1999, most people donned glittering “2000” glasses and danced among the streets while many others waited in storm cellars with a year’s worth of canned food and water for the end of the world that never came. Hundreds of followers of Harold Camping left jobs or possessions or poured money into the multimillion-dollar advertising campaign that predicted the end of the world on May 21, 2011. Evidently, God had to reschedule.
And now, we’re closing in on the end of the 5,126-year Mayan “Long-Count” calendar. December 21, 2012: Doomsday.
Or is it?
The doomsday theory has long been attributed to the Mayans, but research shows that they didn’t necessarily believe that the end of the cycle was the end of time. In fact, this current 5,000-year cycle is the fourth in a series of cycles that will perhaps continue into a fifth cycle — a change of times, but not necessarily “the end.”
In a 2007 USA Today article, Sandra Noble, executive director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies in Crystal River, Fla. said, “For the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the end of a whole cycle.” And the Dec. 21 doomsday is “a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in.”
And many people already have. Countless books have been and continue to be written regarding our impending apocryphal fate, websites like 2012supplies.com have been selling gear such as gas masks, freeze-dried food and Hazmat suits, and just as in 1999, people are quick to believe they need these supplies, perpetuating an unnecessary market and unnecessary panic. (Perhaps the real conspiracy is the methods of the survivalist entrepreneurs.)
Some authors of doomsday books (such as Lawrence Joseph, author of “Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation Into Civilization’s End” and John Major Jenkins author of “Maya Cosmogenesis 2012: The True Meaning of the Maya Calendar End Date”) however, are adamant that it is no coincidence that Galactic Alignment will occur on December 21, 2012 at 11:11 p.m. Universal Time, when the sun, for the first time in 26,000 years will be perfectly between the Earth and the center of the Milky Way.
Yet this phenomenon is not well-confirmed, and Mayan scholars such as Susan Milbrath, a Maya archaeoastronomer who wrote an entire book about Mayan astronomy called “Star Gods of the Maya,” doubt that the Mayans could have predicted such an event.
“It would be impossible the Maya themselves would have known that,” she said in the same USA Today article. “We have no record or knowledge that they would think the world would come to an end at that point.”
Prophet William Miller predicted it in 1843, Evangelist Harold Camping in 1994 and 2011, Pastor William Branham in 1977, author Hal Lindsey in 1988 and Jehovah’s Witnesses founder Charles Taze Russell in 1914. Yet still, here we are.
It’s more probable the Mayans were working on a calendar that mapped out the fifth cycle, but were interrupted when the Spaniards came stomping all over their land spreading disease. Maybe they were a little distracted by the end of their time that they forgot to footnote the end of ours. It wouldn’t be the first time western civilization has tampered with our fate.
Then again, maybe the Mayans were on to something. Maybe they predicted that we’d be so preoccupied with trying to survive that we’d forget how to live. And there’s nothing like a doomsday prophecy to remind us of the limited time we have here, so we better make it count.
