The 2012 Story

Hancock’s work. In it, he explored the visions induced by the South American jungle vine, ayahuasca, relating observations garnered from his own experiences taking the hallucinogenic brew. This latest offering exemplifies his continuing effort to challenge establishment limits and push back the fringes of knowledge.

The Mayan Prophecies also came out in 1995. As it promised to “decode the secret of the 2012 end date,” I was faced with the possibility that the authors, Cotterell and Gilbert, had also discovered the galactic alignment as the key to 2012. Gilbert was coauthor, with Robert Bauval, of The Orion Mystery, a book hailed as a breakthrough in decoding the astronomical alignment embedded in the Great Pyramids of Egypt. I’d read that book with great interest. The alignments involved the precession of the equinoxes, as did my discoveries among the Maya, but there was no mention of the galactic alignment in the Egyptian material. It was a simple step to notice the possibility of the alignment, but it was a very new idea. At that time (1994), it was an obscure and relatively unknown fact of precession.²⁴

The Mayan Prophecies proved to be a very problematic book that was riddled with basic errors and contradictions. Obsolete sources for Maya scholarship were used, and recent breakthroughs in Maya scholarship were neglected. The thesis didn’t involve precession. Instead, it turned out that Gilbert largely served as a presenter of Cotterell’s research on sunspot cycles. Using three statistical variables in solar phenomena, Cotterell claimed to be able to accurately model long-term sunspot cycle extremes, ranging between 3,300 and 3,700 years. The book presented one extreme as having occurred in 627 AD, with another one following in 2012. Clearly, there was a fundamental problem with the theory, as the interval between those two dates was nowhere near 3,300 or 3,700 years.²⁵

The book did not attempt to show how sunspots and solar flare cycles may have been conceived by the Maya or were encoded into their books or traditions or inscriptions. The question of how the ancient Maya who created the Long Count might have discovered the sunspot cycle extremes and calculated one far off into the future also remained unposed. A fallacy of numerical coincidence permeates the book’s premise. The laws of physics dictate that astronomical cycles often exhibit harmonic relations with one another. The Maya number 260 is a kind of key number—a common denominator, if you will—that the Maya used as a framework in their astronomical almanacs for predicting planetary cycles as well as eclipses. The sun’s dark spots orbit in a twenty-six-day period. This does not mean the Maya were aware of the sun’s dark spot periodicity.

It turned out that Gilbert, for his part, had his own ideas on 2012 to present. This confusing subplot involved the cycles of Venus. Utilizing nineteenth-century ideas proposed by Ernst Forstemann that postulated the beginning of the Long Count as “the birth of Venus,” Gilbert looked at astronomy software and noted that, in 3114 BC, Venus was west of the sun, technically in the morning star position. However, in checking the facts I noticed that Venus was not in its first appearance as morning star, which would have been the critical event, nor was it even waxing to its morning star maximum. It was, in fact, in a retrograde fall toward superior conjunction, a phase of its cycle that was meaningless as a base for the Long Count.

Later in the book, Gilbert reiterated “the birth of Venus” to explain the end date, noting that “Venus sinks below the western horizon as the Pleiades rise over the eastern horizon… as the sun sets, Orion rises, perhaps signifying the start of a new precessional cycle.”²⁶ This summary was supposed to reveal the revolutionary breakthrough promised by the book, but it came across as a contrived attempt to link the end date with Orion, the subject of Bauval’s research. Oddly, the Orion connection to the Long Count was readily available in Schele’s research, which was not, however, mentioned in the book.

I interviewed Gilbert by phone in late 1995 and learned that his investigation of Maya traditions had begun about eight months prior to the writing deadline. He had embarked on a fact-finding trip to Mexico and had made some interesting contacts among the people of Mexico—notably Jose Diaz Bolio. His summary of British explorers in Mexico and Central America was interesting, if a bit ethnocentric. My observation here is not as flippant as it might sound, as Gilbert championed the old idea that Quetzalcoatl, who according to one apocryphal tale brought civilization to the heathens in Mexico long ago, was a bearded white guy from across the sea. Gilbert argued he might have been Saint Patrick, a fifth-century monk from Ireland.

During the book’s writing Cotterell had managed to pull off a promo stunt with newspaper coverage that claimed he had “decoded the Maya hieroglyphs.” This claim related not to his sunspot theory but to his fun and games with Maya art. He realized you could take drawings of pictographs from, say, Pakal’s lid at Palenque, cut them in half, edge them up to their mirror image, and generate faces and alien-looking heads. Surely, these were the faces of the secret aliens behind the Maya culture, the “supergods,” as he called them in one of his subsequent books. This is what I call a “cool stoner idea”—it appeals to a vast network of conspiracy-minded and gullible consumers. The Mayan Prophecies had all the bells and whistles in place and it sold well. Cotterell went on to produce a series of books capitalizing on his funny and entertaining art manipulations, which, however, he presented in complete seriousness.

I’ve realized through the years that some authors are adept at manipulating the showbiz side of publishing, that they maximize the appearance of having new breakthroughs while actually offering nothing new. This is a kind of magic trick, an illusion of appearances. Such authors are very often misleading and distort or ignore the facts in order to further a clever idea that serves as a compelling hook. If you shine a light on basic factual mistakes, you are either ignored or personally attacked, but rarely are your critiques rationally addressed. It’s an unfortunate state of affairs, and 2012 is an easy target for exploitation in today’s marketplace.

I was surprised that other researchers had not made the same breakthrough that I had, because the astronomy of the galactic alignment was clearly of central importance in the Maya Creation Myth and the symbolism of the ballgame. Although Linda Schele’s work was heading in the right direction, there was a strong reaction in academia to some of her ideas, effectively curtailing forward progress. For this reason it was unlikely that Schele herself, nor her coauthor David Freidel, would go to the next level and acknowledge the role of the dark rift in the rare galactic alignment of era-2012.

In 1999, I met Geoff Stray in England. Here, finally, was a welcome development in the realm of independent research and investigation of 2012. Geoff had just launched a website called Diagnosis 2012, in which he intended to review virtually everything that was published on 2012. Back in the early 1980s, Geoff had read the McKenna brothers’ The Invisible Landscape, was inspired to investigate the Novelty Theory, and became more involved in Maya calendar studies. He, too, had noticed discrepancies in the system presented by Arguelles, and he had read my book Tzolkin. His website was to become an invaluable resource for anyone wanting to learn more about the various writings on 2012. In 1999, the list was small. Today, the list is immense. Geoff’s site maintains thousands of pages of material in which he critiques and assesses new books and videos on 2012. These include not only nonfiction research but novels, prophecies, visions, dreams—virtually everything is included under the purview of Diagnosis 2012. Having immersed himself in the depths of 2012ology, he’s offered his own integrative insights on “the 2012 phenomenon” with his book Beyond 2012 (2005), illustrating how 2012 could be treated comprehensively and rationally.

As Year 2000 approached, I struggled to balance my meager-paying job with doing interviews and conference events at Esalen Institute and Naropa University, in Santa Fe, England, Copenhagen, Colorado Springs, and California. My book had been out for more than a year and, sadly, my friend Terence McKenna had just received a terminal brain cancer diagnosis. In April 1999, just weeks after I’d seen him at the Whole Life Expo in Denver, Terence had a seizure and he was flown to a hospital. He was diagnosed with a rare fast-moving form of brain cancer and was given four months to live. Terence opted for an experimental gene-replacement procedure, but he died within a year at his home in Hawaii, on April 3, 2000. The Logos Bard mused on death in a final interview, recorded by Erik Davis in November of 1999:

I always thought death would come on the freeway in a few horrifying moments, so you’d have no time to sort it out. Having months and months to look at it and think about it and talk to people and hear what they have to say, it’s a kind of blessing. It’s certainly an opportunity to grow up and get a grip and sort it all out. Just being told by an unsmiling guy in a white coat that you’re going to be dead in four months definitely turns on the lights…. It makes life rich and poignant. When it first happened, and I got these diagnoses, I could see the light of eternity, a la William Blake, shining through every leaf. I mean, a bug walking across the ground moved me to tears.²⁷