The question of the Mayan calendar end date
by
Carl Johan Calleman
For some time now there has been a discussion going on as to what is the exact end date of the Mayan calendar. This debate was recently fueled by the rejection by Don Alejandro Oxlaj, head of the council of elders of the Maya, of the December 21, 2012 date promoted by archeologists. A newcomer to this field may be surprised at the aggressiveness this statement has been responded to at web pages such as the forum at Sacredroad.org or John Jenkins http://www.alignment2012.com/eldersand2 … ange.html. This aggressiveness, which by the way has been directed more against me than to Don Alejandro, who actually made the statement attests to the importance of the question and especially the understanding of the cosmic plan that lies underneath it. Hopefully Don Alejandro’s rejection (in no uncertain terms) of the December 21, 2012 end date will mean that some will dig deeper to understand the evolution of consciousness and make an attempt to understand what this end date really is based on.
Yet, the fundamental issue at hand is not so much what is the actual end date of the Mayan calendar, but how we are to understand this calendar and its relationship to the cosmic plan. This is also why the end date question requires an open mind and even a fairly deep knowledge of Mayan calendrics to address. Those that promote the December 21, 2012 date almost invariably lack a model for understanding evolution based on the Mayan calendar and are instead placing all the importance on what will happen on one particular day; December 21, 2012. What they suggest for this date is typically an event in the sky or a pole shift, a comet that will hit the earth or some other physical or astronomical singular event. In my view the most absurd of these interpretations is probably a book that sets out to prove that this is the day when the world will come to an end because of a pole shift and there is nothing we can do about it (The Orion Prophecy). For someone who does not have a scientific training and background its purported « mathematical proof » for this may even seem impressive. Those supporting the December 21, 2012 date, such as www.diagnosis2012.co.uk, prefer such depressing rubbish to an analysis of the evolution of consciousness, simply because it is consistent with the end date they propose. To them, the end date has become like a religion and if some author agrees with this anything goes. That representatives of the contemporary Maya reject this end date will then obviously not be popular among them as they do not attribute any meaning to the Mayan calendar apart from what may happen on this particular day.
At a time when we may soon expect a much expanded interest in the meaning of the Mayan calendar such interpretations of an event taking place on a special date are obviously very much welcomed by the defenders of the established order for the simple reason that they do not imply that we need to participate in a process of evolution of consciousness. Moreover, if the Mayan calendar is only about an event that happens in the sky what else would there be to do other than sit and wait with arms crossed for this event to take place? Fortunately, for the serious student of the Mayan calendar system, it has a much greater richness than this and may help people understand both the past and the future and at the same time provide a meaningful spiritual context for life.
Those defending the December 21, 2012 date however never link the Mayan calendar to a model for the evolution of consciousness and strongly oppose the very serious work that has been made to verify - literally a mountain of evidence - that it describes an ongoing evolution from the Big Bang until the present time. One of the conclusions that we may draw from this body of evidence is that in the next few years we may expect a downfall of all hierarchical structures and especially those that are based on Western dominance of the world. Another prediction is that the rule of darkness in the time period November 19, 2007 to November 13, 2008, will be a very oppressive period exerted by exactly those forces that will make their last desperate attempt to maintain their dominance of the world. If this time period is confused with a period of light many people will go along with it in the same way as happened when this very same energy ruled the world, and especially Germany, during the era 1932-1952. It then seems obvious that the ruling circles of our planet do not want this information to reach the broader public and the defenders of the December 21, 2012 date that deny that we are living in an ongoing evolution of consciousness are playing directly into their hands. When the reaction comes in November of 2007 the ruling elite, primarily based in the US, would much rather have people think that nobody should be able to question their rule and that spiritual freedom is impossible. In that time the proponents of the December 21, 2012 date will come in very handy for the rulers and all ideas that the Mayan calendar describes an evolution towards oneness and balance will be suppressed. Of course, these statements are not based on some divine revelation, but with analogies that associate this time period with corresponding destructive eras in the past. The primary reason that the end date is important is in my view that it strongly colors our perception of the present and the immediate time ahead.
Would it not be because the question of the end date is important for the present and how people will understand the upcoming energies of Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca I would see no reason to discuss it, especially not considering all the negative projections - far from a spirit of oneness - that it seems to give rise to among some. It is at the present time very important to discuss the upcoming energies of Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, but the December 21 people are trying to sweep it under the rug.
Hence, the issue of the end date is not so much a question of the particular date we favor, but what philosophy we adhere to and what vision of the world we would like to promote. Those denying the existence of a cosmic time plan leading towards a state of oneness have nothing to offer but the status quo and those seems to be the very people that are obsessed by being right about the December 21 end date. To them, the most important argument in favor of the December 21, 2012 date seems to be that there is agreement among the archeologists about it and hence no one should question it. But since modern archeologists approach the Mayan calendar as a superstition to begin with how could they possibly know when the completion date of the divine process of creation would be? The divine plan is not their field of study. Only someone who sets out to understand how the Mayan calendar describes the cosmic plan would be able to arrive at the correct end date for this.
To grasp the origin of this end date it needs first to be pointed out that there is a fundamental misunderstanding among modern people about the Mayan Long Count. This misunderstanding is that the ancient Maya devised this calendar by targeting a particular end date. Although this may seem exciting to ourselves as we are living in that time it simply is not correct. The inscriptions from the ancient Maya in fact exclusively deal with describing the beginning of the Long Count, the creation date, which was set at August 11, 3114. The Mayan royalty living some 3500 years later sought to legitimize their positions by tracing their ancestry back to the beginning of this creation and wanted to understand this creation that their power was based on. Only those that have studied Mayan calendrics in some depth will know that the inscriptions deal with the creation date and not with the end date. The exact placement of this beginning date of the Long Count falls on the date that the sun was in zenith in Izapa, where the Long Count most likely was devised. Hence we have every reason to believe that it was this solar zenith day that its ending date was based on. The end date of the Long Count will simply fall exactly 1.872.000 days after this zenith date, which places it at December 21, 2012. Hence, the end date touted by the archeologists, December 21, 2012, directly depends on the fact that the people living in Izapa at the time thought of August 11, the date the sun was in zenith in their own particular temple city, as a holy day. Because of its zenith character it had probably for a long time been regarded as a day « when time began », as indeed it meant the beginning of a yearly cycle that determined the changing seasons in that location.
From a wider perspective the problem with this beginning date is then that it lacks relevance to the world at large. Why would this zenith date, which the beginning of the Long Count is set at, matter to people living in other locations than Izapa (or on the same latitude)? Well, it obviously does not play a role for people living in other parts of the world, and is simply based on the desire of the Izapans to emphasize their own particular location and tradition. Hence, believing that the energetic beginning of the Long Count falls on the day that « time began » in Izapa is like believing that Jesus was actually born on Christmas Day. The parallel is that in both cases an older tradition, the pagan midwinter solstice in the case of the Christians, which was not related to what really was to be celebrated, was simply taken over by a new calendrical tradition. That such an ancient established highly localized tradition of the importance of the solar zenith in Izapa now seems to dominate the perception of some currently interested in the Mayan calendar and so the modern proponents of the December 21, 2012 date are stuck in the same established tradition as the ancient Izapans were. Thus, to many of them it is not permitted for a scientist to broaden his perspective or question something that the archeologists all seem to agree upon. One might wonder where science would be today if such local traditions would never have been questioned. In my view, it is the task of science to arrive at an increasingly holistic understanding of the world and being stuck in a local tradition (even if it is Mayan or proto-Mayan) prevents the emergence of an understanding of the cosmic plan that is relevant to our entire planet.
The second reason that we may understand the December 21, 2012 date to be wrong is that it falls on the tzolkin day 4 Ahau, since this is not a completion energy. It must fall on a date that is 13 Ahau, since this is the tzolkin energy towards which all the tzolkin energies are moving. This may be a more difficult argument to grasp than that the beginning of the traditional Long Count is based on a local tradition. To realize that the actual end date must fall on an energy that is a 13 Ahau date essentially requires of someone that he or she for a relatively long time have followed exclusively the true tzolkin count. Only in that way would one be able to personally experience the energy shifts, and unfortunately not so many people do that. If people mix two different counts that we may be certain that there is too much confusion for the actual energy shifts to be felt. Yet, it is important to know that Don Alejandro speaks about a prophecy of the return of 13 Ahau that seems to have survived through the ages. Carlos Cedillo also alerted me to a passage in the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel that describes the energy of 13 Ahau as follows: « Holy completion of time, truly » - a statement not found regarding any other tzolkin energy in these prophetic Mayan books written a few hundred years ago. From a knowledge of the tzolkin it simply seems logical that the true Mayan calendar should end on a day that has the energy of 13 Ahau.
The placement of the end date of this creation at the particular 13 Ahau energy of October 28, 2011 is supported by what seems to be a correction made in Palenque to the original Izapan Long Count several hundred years later. Most likely the priests of Palenque, who obviously meticulously followed the true tzolkin count then started to feel that there was something wrong with the correlation between the Izapan Long Count and the tzolkin. (Since they were living in Palenque they were not attached to or tuned in to the Izapan solstice date). The correction that they hinted at was however not implemented as a change of the Izapan Long Count because of the forbidding consequences. (Somebody who doubts that should consider how easy it would be to change the Gregorian calendar if the date of birth of Jesus was determined with absolute certainty). Such a change would not have been possible because of the enormous role that the Long Count had in legitimizing the rule of the Palenquean dynasty and providing stability to its society. Hence, its priests could only hint that the Izapan Long Count missed the mark by 420 days.
Hence, you might say that the Palenquean priests around AD 600 began to feel something that is similar to what many are beginning to feel today. This is that there is something wrong with the December 21, 2012 end date of the Long Count. This experience will only increase in the years to come at least among those that are not content with repeating what other people are saying and who actually are able themselves to experience the wave movement of divine creation towards the state of oneness. And it is to those that I am primarily addressing myself, because it is those that may craft the path that the divine plan seems to be laying out for us. I am not primarily addressing myself to those for whom it is more important to be right about a date than to facilitate the spiritual future of humanity. In this context I would also like to point out that many people have a strong intuitive sense that the year 2012 will mean something special. This intuitive sense is fully consistent with the October 28, 2011 date, since if the divine process of creation is completed on that day it will indeed be the year 2012 that will usher the great change. If instead the completion of divine creation would fall on the Izapan end date, December 21, 2012, it would be the year 2013 that would harvest the change. Intuitively, most seem to favor the 2012 date and I feel this promises that as we come closer people will increasingly be drawn to the energetically correct end date, October 28, 2011.
Carl Johan Calleman
Orsa, Sweden
4 Cib (4 Vulture)
7.6.15 of the Galactic Underworld
