The 2012 Story

much like the Nostradamus prophecies that Westerners know so well.

Only the barest fragments of the Long Count can be found today. Michael Coe wrote that the Yucatec Maya believe the current World Age is to end in the year “2000 plus a little,”³⁰ but it’s unclear whether this information comes from modern sources or ancestral lore. In highland Guatemala, a Jacaltek Maya legend called “Man of Lightning” mentions the dire events of the Oxlan ben (Oxlan = 13; be = road), which Victor Montejo believes might be a reference to the end of 13 Baktuns in 2012.³¹ But exactly when the 13th Baktun is to conclude was not preserved; the Long Count had slipped away.

The complete loss of the Long Count following its latter-day echoes in Yucatan brings us to the cusp of the rediscovery of the ancient Maya civilization. By 1800, just when the final glimmer of the accurately timed Long Count-Short Count faded out, an interest in the Maya grew among Europeans and Americans fueled by rumors that the jungles of Mexico hid a lost civilization. In 1839, Catherwood and Stephens mounted their expedition. Perhaps there was still time for the Long Count to be pulled back from the brink of oblivion and brought back to life. As it turned out, that’s exactly what happened.

CHAPTER THREE Seductive Spells

O son, no one can ascertain how this mysterious illusion came into being. As to why it arose it is because of the person’s lack of discerning inquiry.¹

—THE KAIVALYA NAVANITAM

I’ve always been interested in how the 2012 meme first entered public awareness. We saw in Chapter 1 how it was floating around as something that could have been extrapolated from Goodman’s charts as early as 1905, when his correlation was published. It could have been easily extrapolated with Thompson’s incomplete table of 1927, and again with Morley’s 1946 appendix (in his book The Ancient Maya), but it wasn’t until Coe’s book The Maya, in 1966, that the end-date of the 13-Baktun cycle was actually computed and discussed, albeit briefly. Unfortunately, although Coe subscribed to the correct correlation, the date he reported was off by one year and three days. December 24, 2011, became the date adopted by other authors. The sad fact of the situation is that the popular treatment of the Maya’s 2012 calendar, misinformed at the very get-go, has been confused ever since.

In 1967 Tony Shearer, the great-granddaddy of the Mesoamerican calendar movement, self-published a pamphlet called The Sacred Calendar. Part Native American, Shearer abandoned a lucrative career in Denver’s news media and nurtured his deepening relationship with Mexico and its mysteries. In 1971, Sun Books published his Lord of the Dawn, Quetzalcoatl: The Plumed Serpent of Mexico. It explored the spiritual content, as he saw it, of the Aztec and Toltec Sacred Calendar of 260 days, the tonalpohualli. Shearer’s travels in the 1960s led him from Denver to Central Mexico and the state of Oaxaca, where he wandered the ancient Zapotec capital of Monte Alban and visited contemporary Mazatec Indians living in remote villages. He fell in love with a new life and nurtured an inspired poetic vision of the ancient calendar’s power to spiritually awaken and transform those who learned to follow it.

In his introduction to Shearer’s book, author Vinson Brown wrote:

This is an adventure that you can follow too and find the meanings behind the rainbow and the morning star, and follow the ghost path of the Milky Way, and the carvings of an ancient and vanished civilization whose prophetic dreams and warnings may come to us just in time to save our world from a destruction and degradation too horrible to imagine.²

By the early 1970s the consciousness-raising cultural and human rights events of the 1960s had morphed into other concerns. The youth culture was speaking out against the dangers of industrial pollution. Brown’s words express a sentiment for the growing concern over gas shortages and impending environmental catastrophe, something that Shearer illustrated in his book with dramatic effect. We also catch a clue about “prophetic dreams” that may come “just in time.” The book was an inspired poetic treatise, and on page 184 we read that, according to Shearer’s reconstruction of the ancient calendar prophecy, the modern nightmare of hellish materialism will end on August 16, 1987. No other details are presented in the book on how this date was derived.

The modern world’s insane materialism has been a recurring theme in the 2012 discussion. It is perhaps the one common thread woven through the works of many authors who otherwise hold wildly different views. A useful framework for understanding this particular thread is the Perennial Philosophy, which subscribes to the idea that all cycles in nature go through periods of increase and decrease. Thus, the materialism and corruption that maximize at the end of a historical cycle are to be expected, and signal an impending shift or turnabout in which the neglected opposite half of human nature, spirituality and integrity, becomes increasingly emphasized.

In 1975 Shearer published Beneath the Moon and Under the Sun, which contained both poetic elements and explanations of his research. On his acknowledgments page, dated September 13, 1974, he graciously thanked many people, including “Jose and Miriam Arguelles for their interest in my thesis of 13 Heavens and 9 Hells.” This is a clear indication of how Jose Arguelles, an art teacher, author, and visionary, later became the leader of the Harmonic Convergence of August 16-17, 1987.

The “thesis” that Shearer refers to is a reconstruction he advanced as to how the Aztec World Ages are timed. He noted that the Aztec worldview was divided into 13 Heaven realms above and 9 Hell realms below, making 22 distinct levels of the cosmos. Shearer believed the model worked for time as well as space, a valid insight considering the interwoven nature of time and space in Aztec cosmovision. So he connected the 22 realms with levels of time, each one representing a 52-year Calendar Round period, making a total Great Age of 22 ? 52 = 1,144 years.

He proposed that the 9 Hell periods commenced when Cortes landed on the Gulf Coast at Veracruz on April 21, 1519. Thus, it would take 9 ? 52 = 468 years for the Hells to play themselves out. Similar to the Hindu concept of the Yugas, Shearer saw each Hell as being worse than the last, a deepening darkness of spiritual bankruptcy. In this way he arrived at the year 1987 as the end of the process, when the calendar’s cycles all came together and humanity could experience a return to the Heaven periods. This is, in a nutshell, the idea adopted later by Arguelles, which he applied to the Baktun periods of the Maya Long Count.

Shearer’s first book focused exclusively on the Central Mexican Calendar Round tradition, far outside the Maya realm, but in his 1975 sequel he mentions Palenque, The Popol Vuh, and other uniquely Maya material, revealing how the Aztec and Maya traditions started to be blended together. We still have this problem in the popular press today, where the famous Aztec Sunstone is used as a Maya calendar symbol. But Shearer did not, at this stage, specifically discuss the Long Count or 2012—that was taken up later by Arguelles.

Shearer must be recognized for three things: (1) the origin of the Harmonic Convergence date (August 16- 17, 1987); (2) advocating that modern seekers could follow the 260-day sacred calendar as a spiritual system; (3) furthering the idea of a dire turning point looming in the near future, based on mysterious calendar systems perfected long ago in Mexico. But it’s important to realize that Shearer worked solely with ideas connected to the 52-year Calendar Round, and his 1987 cycle-ending date is not based on the Long Count.

As we will see, his friend Jose Arguelles took the baton from Shearer and morphed the entire movement in several ways. He blended the Harmonic Convergence with the Maya 2012 date, suggesting a 25- or 26-year countdown from 1987 to 2012 or 2013 (the exact idea is unclear in his various interviews and writings). He also sparked grassroots gatherings at sacred sites with his Planet Art Network and tied his call for these events to the Harmonic Convergence date. The “be-in” concept, wherein people up for anything gather together to celebrate their