What You Need to Know About the Maya Calendar and the End of Time in 2012

The Maya civilization that lived in Central America 2500 years ago knew quite a bit about how to organize time. But they were not alone. The calendar they created drew quite a bit from other tribes of people around them, during that era, including the Olmec, Aztec, Mixtec (which truly sounds like a brand a concrete) and Zapotec civilizations. It certainly would have been interesting to meet someone from a nation that goes by the name of Zapotec. Perhaps they were the pre-cursors of Google. But all these civilizations were similarly advanced in their organization of culture and time. Therefore they creep us out today because we think they knew something we don't.

These days we have to look beyond our own concepts of time in order to appreciate the elegance of the Maya calendar that evolved 2000 years ago. The only thing inelegant about the Maya calendar is that it is about to "run out" in our calendar year 2012. Given that Central American nations from two millennia ago believed that time had already come to an end several times before (way back to 5000 years or so BCE) there really should be nothing to worry about with the ending of the Maya calendar December 21, 2012. It's just cosmic deja vu.

But people in the modern age love to give themselves the willies by messing around with ancient prophecies. That crusty old dude Nostradamus (1503-1566) made a whole bunch of predictions, some of which are claimed to have come true. But are you going to sell your Apple stock and buy Microsoft next year? One would think not considering it was Apple that sailed through the Y2K scare without missing a beat. Now Apple has effectively become a major religion. Everyone highly anticipates their release of a new device called iGod. Imagine the apps!

Many Christians (some estimates reach 50%) happen to believe the Bible predicts the End Times, and that they are coming soon. Those who read the Bible as if it were a book of cryptic Tarot cards like to use the Book of Revelation and other biblical texts to concoct scary stories about when the "rapture" will arrive and how many true believers will be swept up to heaven in the blink of an eye. Never mind that this version of Christian is best told around a campfire with a flashlight under your nose. People like to believe scary stuff because it makes them think of God as one of those mean old bastards that chase kids out of their yards. In other words, someone we can all relate to.

Christians predicting the End Times now have a soul mate in the Maya calendar which, as we've stated earlier, comes to an end in 2012. How convenient is that? Seems to confirm all the Left Behind crap about airplanes crashing to earth because Christian pilots will get whisked away to heaven. And since Christianity pretty much stole its annual calendar of high holy days from other so-called pagan religions so that Christian leaders could recruit more members to the faith, there is nothing new about finding significance in the apocalyptic assumptions of a completely unrelated civilization. As it turns out, the height of Mayan rule in Central America was roughly contemporary in time to the beginnings of Judaism, the Muslim faith and Christianity. In fact if you back up a few feet and squint, you can see that just about every faith worth talking about started about 2000 years ago. So the plain truth is that we're all about to get creeped out together or it will turn out that the notion of the End Times is a bunch of bunk.

History and the many false alarms fomented by creepy prophets (some recent, some ancient) point to the verity of the latter. Many nutballs have predicted the end of the world and all have been wrong. Are the Maya any different?

Perhaps we can assume there was something in the water all around the world 2000 years ago that got the whole time continuum thing in relation to God started. Or maybe the worldwide flood described in biblical Genesis carried a virus causing the world's civilizations to hallucinate God (and time) into being at once. The only people who seem to have kept their heads in all this are Australian aborigines, who claim reality is all a dream and that time is a big circle. Now that's some theological problem-solving! Make time a circle and it never ends. How nifty. Maybe we should listen to the aborigines rather than the Maya.

Whatever the case may be, God still seems to like to pull stunts like parting the oceans for the fun of it, lighting up the burning bush and cracking the heavens in two to get our attention. The only problem with the global flood theory is that there is no concrete geological evidence that a worldwide 40 day/40 night flood ever occurred. No, the Grand Canyon is not evidence for the Genesis flood. Neither is New Jersey, despite its high water table.

That is not to say that oceans did not once cover significant portions of our current day continents. But that was millions of years ago, not just a few millennia. And given that human beings as a species have been around the earth for a mere 350,000 years or so, minus a few hunched postures and prominent eyebrows along the way, we humans really have no business predicting when the end of the world will come. Compared to the real age of the earth and the universe, which is billions of years old, humans are a drop of spit on the hind end of a constellation.

But let's take a look at the Maya calendar for the fun of it, and see what it really tells us. Because if we're going to creep ourselves out worrying about the end of time until December 21, 2012 rolls around, we might as well get a basic grasp of what we're facing.

First, it is important to understand the fact that most of us are generally too lazy to comprehend how the Maya calendar works. It revolves around a year constituted of 260 days, and that's confusing already. What most people will understand is that the Maya calendar viewed some days as more significant than others. That means they had their own versions of Easter, Christmas, Hanukkah, Eid Al-Fitr, Eid Al-Adha (Muslim holidays, in case you didn't know) and what have you. In other words, these people were just like us because they like to use religious holidays to get out of work.

The Maya used a very interesting system of glyphs, or pictograms, to represent these important days. Maya glyphs look a lot like characters from the children's card game Pokemon, which really did almost bring an end to the world for some parents who could not afford to buy another pack of those dumb little cards in hopes of landing a Bulbasaur or Charmander card. You get the picture. Pokemon was a made-up bunch of crap foisted on the world by some Japanese who got sick of collecting real insects and invented a fantasy world of Pocket Monsters to entertain children. Now that really is creepy.

So the Maya put all their Pokemon characters in place during the calendar year and that gave everyone something to look forward to, especially because before glyph worship, the Maya probably had to work 7 days a week.

And this system when on and on into infinity, or at least until the modern day calendar year 2012. The Maya apparently did not care to think about a world that went on much longer than this, figuring they would not be around to see what happened anyway. And they are largely correct. Their bloodlines still exist and people in Guatemala and other places still use forms of the Maya calendar, but all told we are safe to say that the Maya people simply spread out into history or are playing Winter League baseball in hopes of making the United States major leagues like so manyCentral American and Caribbean hopefuls.

So let's be honest, when it comes to the Maya calendar, those people 2000 years ago simply got bored and gave up trying to measure the future. Probably some pre-history Jimmy Buffet type drifted into town about the time the Maya were wrapping up their big calendar convention. Everyone got drunk and stoned and distracted and quit doing the whole calendar thing together. "Let's chill on the beach and smoke some more of that green stuff you brought with you," the King of the Maya said then. "Let those dopes 2000 years from now figure out the rest."

By then it was too late. When the Maya finally all sobered up the Spanish had arrived and the calendar could never be updated. Too bad they never got to talk to the aborigines. I hear they have some pretty cool glyphs too.