The Year 2012

The Mayan concept of the shape of history has become a highly controversial topic. As the end of the current Great Cycle approaches us, speculation as to the possible meaning of that event has ranged far afield. Some writers have devised their own divisions and sub-cycles of the Great Cycle – deeply creative and perhaps valuable in their own way, though such creativity often embodies ideas and intentions quite different than those of the Classic Period Maya who invented this unique way of time-keeping.

While creative invention inspired by the Mayan Calendar may certainly have its own value, we may still wonder: What does the Mayan prophetic tradition actually tell us?

The Long Count

The Maya used the Sacred Calendar to compute large cosmic and historical cycles. These vast computations were accomplished by the use of a system of reckoning called the Long Count.

The Long Count is one of the greatest achievements of Mayan civilization. It endowed the Maya with a sense of cosmic vision that made them unique. Though all Mesoamerican civilizations made use of the Sacred Calendar, only the Classic Period Maya practiced the Long Count. Whether or not they "invented" it, they adapted it as their own and made it one of the foundation stones of their culture. In a way, it is a measure of their unique mathematical and philosophical gifts.

Based on the Sacred Calendar, the Long Count adds a new level of complexity to the concept of ritual time. Its most basic unit is the kin, which literally means "sun" and signifies a day (one day is "one sun"). Twenty days (the number of day-signs in the tzolkin) equals one uinal, and eighteen uinals is equal to one tun. The word tun literally means "stone," and is comprised of 360 days. This quantity of time, the 360-day year rather than the 365-day haab, constitutes the real starting point for computing historical cycles. A katun is comprised of twenty tuns; this “twenty-year cycle” is equivalent to 19.7 of our Western years. Twenty katuns equal one baktun or 144,000 days. While the Maya perceived these period as comprised of 400 tuns, it is more nearly equivalent to about 395 of our Gregorian years. Thirteen baktuns is equal to 5,125 years, though one would say 5,200 if counting in 360-day tuns.

20 kins	=	1 uinal	=	20 days
18 uinals	=	1 tun	=	360 days
20 tuns	=	1 katun (20 tuns)	=	7,200 days
20 katuns	=	1 baktun (400 tuns)	=	144,000 days
13 baktuns	=	1 Great Cycle (5,200 tuns)	=	1,872,000 days

This span of years comprises the highly publicized "Great Cycle" that has inspired so much New Age speculation. The Great Cycle in which we are now living began on August 11, 3114 B.C., when First Mother and First Father brought the present world into being, as the Palenque Creation Myth tells us. It will end on December 21, 2012.

The two most important subdivisions of the Great Cycle are the baktuns and the katuns. As we have noted, each baktun (400 tuns) lasts about 395 of our Western years. Each katun (20 tuns) lasts 19.7 years, and it was the katuns which the Maya used to predict the course of historical events.

The Katun Cycle

A great deal of what we know about the katun cycle is contained in the Books of Chilam Balam. These prophetic works have a somewhat complex history. The term Chilam Balam means “jaguar priest,” “jaguar prophet,” or perhaps “Spokesman of the Jaguar,” and refers either to an individual or a priestly office or title from Yucatán both before and during the Spanish Conquest. The Chilam Balam produced a series of prophecies, based on the katuns, which were used as both a model for the recording of history and a vehicle for predicting future events. Though the Maya were conquered politically by the Spanish, there were many who maintained their spiritual liberty for years afterwards, practicing the old rites and keeping the Sacred Calendar. For these traditionalists, the prophecies of the Jaguar Prophets became a kind of sacred text. Written copies were kept in various towns and villages around the Yucatán peninsula. Over the centuries, the keepers of the books inserted other material into their own copies, so that the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel is now different in many ways from the Book of Chilam Balam of Tizimin, the Book of Chilam Balam of Mani, or any other version of these books.

Each katun is an ahau, a "lord" who rules over that span of time. Each katun ends on the day Ahau in the Sacred Calendar, though always on a different number. The entire katun is given the number of the Ahau day on which it ends. Thus there was another series of cycles unfolding within the context of the larger baktun cycle. Each of these cycles was comprised of 13 katuns and lasted for 260 tuns. In the Mayan language, a cycle of 13 katuns was called a may. Mayan scholars sometimes refer to it as the “Short Count.”

The katun cycle or may of the prophetic books does not run consecutively from 1 to 13, as some recent authors appear to believe. Instead, the sequence of the katuns rusn backwards, skipping a number each time. Though there are several different sequences that were used by the Maya, it is probable that the oldest, from Tikal, began with 6 and ended with 8, thus 6, 4, 2, 13, 11, 9, 7, 5, 3, 1, 12, 10, 8. This rhythm of the katuns sets up an orderly sequence that can be applied to the entire Great Cycle and diagramed on a Calendar Board framework. It shows us the template of history as the Classic Mayan scribes understood it.

Shape of History The element of prediction or prophecy is, as noted above, based on the numbers of the katuns Each katun or twenty-year period will have a distinct character or quality that, to some degree, determines the kinds of events that will take place during that period of time. Of course there were other factors, such as the cycle of individual Year Lords or the conjunctions and stations of planets in the sky, which colored the situation. History never repeated itself exactly; rather, it could best be understood in terms of general historical themes that remained constant while being subject to modification by other concurrent cycles.

If we look at the pattern which I have entitled “The Shape of History,” it becomes clear that the final katun of the Great Cycle, our current 4 Ahau (1993-2012), is also the second cycle in the shaping of a new may, one which will continue for yet another 220 years after the end of the current Great Cycle. On December 22, 2012, we will begin a new Great Cycle, and we may think of this as a kind of macrocosmic shift. But in the smaller cycle of the may, we are transitioning into a new katun, 2 Ahau, another step up the pyramid of time. What can this mean?

The End of the Great Cycle

Independent researcher John Major Jenkins has shown that December 21, 2012, is one of those rare days, occurring only once in thousands of years, when the sun stands at the actual (as opposed to apparent) conjunction of the zodiac with the Galactic Center located in the Milky Way—the celestial equivalent of the Mayan World Tree. He draws attention to the important role occupied in Mayan myth by the so-called Great Rift in the Milky Way, which the Maya clearly regarded as the road to the Otherworld. He interprets the Hero Twins myth of the Popol Vuh as a reference to this celestial event, with the hero’s head in the tree at the crossroads of the worlds as a symbol of the sun’s transit over the Galactic Center.

Such an occurrence does indeed seem too extraordinary to be accidental. And yet all of this still leaves us with the overriding question of whether the end of the current Great Cycle really signifies "the end of history."

I am convinced that it does not. Only the monotheistic religions such as Christianity and Islam insist on a linear model of time—one with a clear beginning and an equally clear, absolute, ending. Most traditional or tribal religions postulate a whole different world view. They see human history as a series of endlessly recurring cycles. We have no reason to suspect that the Maya saw things differently.

The end of the Great Cycle simply implies the beginning of a new Great Cycle. In fact, Kan Bahlum, king of Palenque, optimistically projecting his own royal dynasty forward into eternity, recorded a Long Count date equivalent to October 23, A.D. 4772—some 2,760 years beyond the current Great Cycle's "terminal date" of A.D. 2012.

There is no doubt that a cyclic philosophy of history was part of Mayan tradition. The surviving Aztec codices speak of four previous eras, worlds or "suns" that have come and gone before the advent of our present world, the "fifth sun." The Pueblo tribes of the American Southwest, such as the Hopi, conceive of humanity as "emerging" through successive worlds—the goal is to evolve spiritually, though humankind slips backwards as often as not. The Southwestern tribes often place the drama of emergence in a purely mythic "time beyond time"—one that has only a tentative relationship to historical, chronological time.

The Mayan Popol Vuh records a similar progression of worlds. The gods make several attempts at creating human beings, but the first few attempts fail. The earliest effort results in howling, chattering creatures, which the gods transform into the animals. The next try results in a man of mud who dissolves in the rain. The third try produces men of wood who are able to function in a primitive fashion but cannot worship the gods properly—they are not yet spiritual beings. The gods destroy them in violent rains and floods, even sending the animals to attack them. Their descendants are the monkeys. Finally, on the fourth try, the gods create men.

The analogies with the Aztec cycle and the Puebloan drama of emergence are obvious, and we shall be on firm ground if we suspect that the Mayan Great Cycle corresponds in some way to one of these "worlds" or "creations."

What is important about the tale of the worlds in the Popol Vuh is that it presents us with a clear message: the early "men" are destroyed by fire, flood, and wild animals in order to facilitate an ongoing process of evolutionary development, as in the Southwestern myths. The intent of the gods is to create a human being who is fully realized. The concept of successive worlds records the progress of human spiritual evolution, and the changes in Great Cycles mark significant evolutionary leaps—moments when powerful transformations occur, when one world or level of consciousness goes through a kind of death in order that a higher level of development may take shape.

If the end of the Great Cycle means anything, it most emphatically does not mean the actual physical destruction of the planet. It heralds the death of an outmoded level of consciousness that no longer serves humanity's needs. The end of all our carefully cherished assumptions about life and the universe will surely be a painful experience, and is bound to have painful repercussions in the political or social world. However, the ancient prophecies are equally clear in promising the birth of a new, more enlightened field of consciousness.