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Beyond the Long Count: Non-Mayan 2012 Prophecies

15:15 / 10.11.06

Many, many people talk about the end of the world as Winter Solstice in 6 years time, for a lot of reasons. The Mayan calendar is unfortunately often invoked as proof, which I would like to avoid in this thread as these theories often get lumped together inappropriately. People will say things like 'McKenna said the world ends in 2012! And the Mayans did too! It must be true!' without any understanding of either.

I am slightly muddle-headed due to a cold so my apologies, but my vague intent is to have a thread to discuss the idea of the end of the world divorced from the Mayan Long Count & sunstone and the book The Mayan Prophecies by Gilbert & Cotterell, and the 13moon stuff.

Here's some old threads which are a mix of stuff as examples;
Dec. 22, 2012
TOPIC: 2012 a.d.
Cosmic railway & 2012
2012 and the I Ching
Solar Storms Predicted Huge for 2008-2012
The time is now.

I personally don't believe McKenna or the Earth Changes people or the sunspot scaremongers or the Singularity or any of that stuff, I feel like the date is just the new 2000- a focus for apocalyptic fears. I'd welcome discussion on how the end of the fifth age differs from these other theories, but I'm wary of them all getting mixed together as they often do.

So how do we feel about the end of the world?

16:29 / 10.11.06

Just as an observation, neither McKenna's Timewave nor the Mayan Long Count necessarily picked 2012 as the END OF THE WORLD -- it's just when the counting system ran out and would have to start over at the beginning. In McKenna's case, he started his at the Big Bang, so it gains a certain ominous something, but still -- it's just when the pattern would restart.

16:49 / 10.11.06

True. It's the common misunderstandings that gall me, the many crazed theories that the world WILL end in six years. For example, the first post of the first link there says;

A very quick internet search brought up everything from:
Osiris is risen from the dead?
"Accomplishment of Earth Navigation of Free Will creates Self-existing Endlessness?"
A magnetic pole shift for planet Earth?
A giant comet hits the Yucatan penninsula?

that's a pretty typical sort of mis-mash of ideas that people use as justification for apocalyptic rantings.

To support my irritation allow me to slip into anecdote, a vice I usually try to avoid. I was at the Small World festival in May, a solar-powered compost-toilet folk-and-friendliness hippy event. A roving poet came into the tea tent we were in and started reciting his work (it's that sort of festival), and it was pretty good. He came onto one about the corruption of the political system, the need for unity and communal love and respect for each other, the urgency of environmental action and the evils of warmongering corporations, all of which I agreed with and was into. But then his final line was something like 'I've got one thing to say to you all which makes these problems seem small.... TWO THOUSAND AND TWELVE.' which just really, really pissed me off. The assumption that these evils we all see were signs of the End Times didn't seem like a helpful attitude to encourage people to oppose them, and smacked of a sort of smug elitism that implied most people were scurrying blindly to their doom like hamsters in a capitalist wheel. It triggered my Sheeple alarms, TBH, and I was especially affected by the way most people in the tea tent sort of nodded sagely as though it were deeply profound, as though yes, we were the enlightened ones and 2012 was like a giant killer asteroid inevitably hurtling toward the Earth. Bollocks.

It's possible I'm biased, but looking at those threads again there's a lot of nonsense. I agree there's more to most of the theories than meets the eye, but I don't often meet people who understand them (IRL or virtually) and I very often meet people (IRL and virtually) who don't.

nyarlathotep's shoe horn

17:52 / 10.11.06

Hey Quantum,

thanks for the post - in developing a version of the 13-month perpetual calendar, the mayans and winter solstice 2012 come up often, without too much in the way of substance.

in 2014, the New Moon falls on the Winter Solstice, which strikes me as more significant than 2012.

I'm using the date as the start of my calendar, only because of its popularity - not for any prophetic reasons, and the new year's day starts on the solstice.

all that aside, the remarkable thing is that if this should take off, then the weekdays (Sunday to Saturday) continue uninterrupted from the Gregorian to the Reformed Calendar.

all this is in aid of replacing the Gregorian as the international standard calendar to something less culturally biased (ie uses only numbers), that has a perpetual, elegant structure.

Personally, that's what the date holds in store. Not the end of the world (enough drivel from material-literalists already) - more like an end to an era. or aeon. or way of thinking.

theabysmal reform calendar weblog for all the convoluted details.

it's about time!

18:12 / 10.11.06

I've always understood "the end of the world" to be not so much the mass physical destruction of the planet, but at most the fall of major civilizations as we know them.

I mean we're not bracing outselves inevitably for Darth Vadar to drive by in a Death Star, are we?

I mean, is the amount of upheaval supposed to be comparable to the World Wars?

--Ember--

nyarlathotep's shoe horn

18:54 / 10.11.06

Terence & Dennis McKenna refer to the acceleration towards Dec 21 2012 as an increase in "novelty." (in the Invisible Landscape).

I haven't quite sussed out what they mean by "novelty."

but, everything's always new, isn't it?

ta

21:13 / 10.11.06

I've always understood "the end of the world" to be not so much the mass physical destruction of the planet, but at most the fall of major civilizations as we know them.

Yes, absolutely. This happens to civilisations over and over again. There is evidence to show that the ancient Egyptians were even more 'ancient' than we thought and in fact our version of ancient Egypt also had an ancient Egypt themselves.

21:31 / 10.11.06

Quantum, there's a lot of interesting information on the Mayan prophecies other than that book. I wonder why you want to separate the Mayan long count and the Mayan prophecy for 2012 out of this thread? I think that it's possible the Mayan prophecy has informed a lot of the discussion and opinion on 2012. It, for instance, might be hard to talk about sunspots without at least wondering why there was focus on that date in the first place.

Just to discard the fact that the point of singularity happens to coincide with the Mayan prophecy is a bit exclusive I think. I mean it's worth considering isn't it? Why do you feel so strongly that a scientific theory and an ancient civilisation's prophecy which share a date must be rubbish?

Wishing to discuss the concept of 2012 as the eschaton without any mention of the Mayan prophecy is a bit like wishing to talk about Christianity but with the stipulation that no-one must mention Jesus.

23:26 / 10.11.06

Why do you feel so strongly that a scientific theory and an ancient civilisation's prophecy which share a date must be rubbish?

I don't think they're rubbish. It's precisely because the Mayan calendar is genuine and there is a sunspot cycle that I want to tease the various strands of eschatology apart. Some of it is rubbish, some of it not, but it all gets lumped together which is a shame. I mean, the ascendence of the Age of Iron (Kali Yuga) is not something that I consider to be on a par with the idea that heaven will open for an hour, Dogma style.

11:17 / 11.11.06

Why do you feel so strongly that a scientific theory and an ancient civilisation's prophecy which share a date must be rubbish?

To be honest, it's a bit rich to describe McKenna's work as a "scientific theory". It's not exactly peer-reviewed, Nature-published material, is it? It's drug received revelation (from his brother, Dennis, who later disowned it) fed through a few computer graphs.

BTW I do think that side of it (McKenna's) is rubbish. Complete and utter rubbish and nothing other than that.

11:50 / 11.11.06

This is an interesting article by sometime board contributor Gyrus about his changing views on McKenna's work:

The End of the River

13:59 / 11.11.06

Pegs, I think Lula was talking about the sunspot cycles as scientific theory rather than the Timewave- is that right High Priestess of Pantmustache?

11 year solar cycle
Sunspots

14:54 / 11.11.06

Sorry. I tend to go blindw ith rage when I see the Timewave mentioned.

13:26 / 12.11.06

Yes I was. I was talking about the sunspots and singularity theory. I wasn't referring to Timewave Zero, because obviously it's not particularly scientific, but also because the Timewave Zero theory includes references to the Mayan long count.

15:38 / 20.11.06

Just got back from Belize and Guatemala, where I bounced around a bunch of Mayan sites including Caracol and Tikal.

Despite a Guatemalan guide at Tikal who blathered on about 2012, the Freemasons, the Jewish capital conspiracy, the "52 states" of the U.S., and the emergence of the sun out of the constellation of Orion, I'm even more doubtful (if that's possible) about the whole 2012 apocalypse thing.

For example, a nifty little book I picked up -- Cycles in Time: The Maya Calendar, by John Montgomery -- states that:

"That the current b'aktun cycle actually began at the creation of the world has led more than one writer to assume that the end of the cycle -- or A.D. 2012 -- corresponds to the end of the world and the end of time. As we will see, no real evidence survives for this belief, but rather the record suggests that for the Maya time had no beginning or end."

More once I've finished the book.

03:10 / 19.12.06

Ok, we're at the temple, right? Here I am allowed to say some sort of things.
I don't believe on some cosmological shift at a pre-planned day. I'm too existentialist to properly digest innerent meaning in objects. (Even if when in shamanic state everything turns profundly meaningful. Internal paradoxes.)

Then, my approach to the 2012 eschatology is "it may not happen, but we want to. then we MAKE happen". This idea usually is well received by chaoist magicians, as they believe their paradigms and faiths are hightly influent on world's shape - and they make no distinction between a "sacred ritual act" and ontological anarchy acts. Making magic when making protests, shaping the world when shaping other's minds through poetic terrorism. Most chaoists are thirsty of social upheaval and criative surges.

There's a forum at chaosmagick.com - it's called "tribe of fifth aeon" or something like that. Their 5th aeon may be not intrinsically linked with 2012, so what? Why to waste all of that hippy mythos walking around 'ere? Let's use 2012 as a tool to our intent. Chaos and disruption. Kali smiles.

15:19 / 21.07.15

I'm very much for the idea that the 2012 prophecy (alongside others) WAS true, but so many people were expecting a BANG, when instead it was the peak of a transition.
I think it's too coincidental that it points to this part of history - beginning with just before the industrial revolution, this time period is completely novel to anything that's came before (for example, the level that technology is at currently, the size of the population, mass communication etc).
When we're dealing with timescales as vast as tens or hundreds of thousands of years, the fact that it pinpointed it to within a couple of hundreds of years speaks volumes to me.

I'd be lying if I said that I hadn't hoped for aliens in 2012 though.

17:42 / 21.08.15

I've seen a few people claim that it did happen, but was imperceptible/a cultural sea change/invisible to sheeple etc. but I note that none of those people said it would happen that way *before* 2012.
I think it's easy to point to any other year and find more momentous things that happened, like 2008 for example.