Scholars are attempting to explain Mayan Calendar does not predict Doomsday or Apocalypse
December 21, 2012 inches closer each day and experts on the Mayan calendar are racing to convince people that Mayans did not predict an apocalypse.
photo/Laslovarga
Archaeologists, anthropologists and other experts met Friday in the southern Mexico city of Merida to discuss the implications of the Maya Long Count calendar, which is made up of 394-year periods called baktuns.
Experts estimate the system starts counting at 3114 B.C., and will have run through 13 baktuns, or 5,125 years, around December. 21, the winter solstice. Experts say 13 was a significant number for the Maya, and the end of that cycle would be a milestone — but not an end to humanity.
“The Mayas did make prophecies, but not in a fatalistic sense, but rather about events that, in their cyclical conception of history, could be repeated in the future,” said Alfredo Barrera, of the National Institute of Anthropology and History.
“There are many ancient Maya monuments that discuss events far into the future from now,” wrote Geoffrey Braswell, an anthropologist at the University of California at San Diego. “The ancient Maya clearly believed things would happen far into the future from now.”
“The king of Palenque, K’inich Hanaab Pakal, believed he would return to the Earth a couple of thousand years from now in the future,”Braswell wrote in an email to The Associated Press. “Moreover, other monuments discuss events even before the creation in 3114 B.C.”
The Maya sites only feature a couple of references to the neither refers to an apocalypse, experts say. These apocalyptic visions in Western, Christian thinking butare not native to Maya thought.
“This is thinking that, in truth, has nothing to do with Mayan culture,” said Alexander Voss, an anthropologist at the University Of Quintana Roo. “This thing about looking for end-times is not something that comes from Mayan culture.”
Braswell compared the Maya calendar, with its system of cycles within cycles, to the series of synchronized wheels contained in old, analogue car odometers.
“The Maya long count system is like a car odometer,” Braswell wrote. “My first car (odometer) only had six wheels so it went up to 99,999.9 miles. That didn’t mean the car would explode after reaching 100,000 miles.”
[…] According to new studies surrounding the calculations of the Mayan prophecy which has foretold our doom, the end of the world may already have happened- and the worst part is that we may have missed it. (Read article here) […]