The 2012 Story

between astronomy and Maya Creation Mythology. The key came for me when I read, in a 1993 interview with Barbara and Dennis Tedlock, that “Maya Creation happens at a celestial crossroads.”²² This echoed Schele’s work, but it made me revisit Dennis Tedlock’s translation of the Maya Creation Myth, The Popol Vuh. In his notes I found compelling identifications of astronomical features in the myth, including the crossroads formed by the Milky Way and the ecliptic, and the role of the dark rift. The part of the Milky Way that contains the dark rift is on the other side of the sky from Orion. Schele focused on one crossroads, but in fact there are two, and both yield meaningful and interesting insights.

Since the position of the December solstice sun was shifting into alignment with the center of the Crossroads in Sagittarius, and the southern terminus of the dark rift touched that crossing point, I was drawn to look more deeply at the role of these features in the Maya Creation Myth. The dark rift appears frequently as the Xibalba be, the “road to the underworld.” The Hero Twins and their father pass through it several times to do battle with the Lords of the Underworld. In one scene, the dark rift speaks to the Hero Twins; it therefore either has, or is, a mouth. The dark rift was also the crook in the calabash tree where One Hunahpu’s skull was hung. From that spot he magically conceived the Hero Twins, who later avenge his death and facilitate his resurrection. It was thus a place of death and magical rebirth, or conception.

In the underworld the Twins embarked upon the shamanic underworld journey, seeking to avenge their father’s beheading and to facilitate his triumphant resurrection. Although it’s not explicitly stated in the myth, that same portal would have to serve as the place of return, or rebirth, after the symbolic death of the underworld initiation.

In other areas of Mesoamerican symbolism and mythology, I recognized additional uses that the dark rift was put to. It was the mouth of a cosmic monster, portrayed variously as a frog, snake, or caiman. It was seen as a temple doorway or the mouth of a cave, called ch’en in the highland Tzotzil Maya language, which also means vagina. Here, again, the birthplace metaphor is encountered. The dark rift connects with a wide complex of Mesoamerican concepts that also includes ballcourts, cenotes, thrones, and the sweat bath. In the Classic Period inscriptions, it is referenced as the “impinged bone” glyph meaning “the Black Hole place,” the upturned frog-mouth glyph that designates a place of birth, and in the skeletal maw iconography. It is clearly also the reference point for “sky-cave” glyphs at Copan and elsewhere, although epigraphers neglect to look at the sky for these “supernatural” locations.²³

The alignment of planets, the moon, or the sun with the dark rift at various times throughout the Classic Period was repeatedly noted and utilized in rites of Maya kingship, including those involving births, accessions, anniversaries, and ritual decapitations. The dark rift in the Milky Way is a previously unrecognized key to my end- date alignment theory because the December solstice sun will align with it in the years around 2012. This is in fact a good definition of the galactic alignment, a simple and easy way to think about it that eliminates extraneous and misleading ideas: The galactic alignment is the alignment of the December solstice sun with the dark rift in the Milky Way.

A slight variation of this definition replaces “dark rift in the Milky Way” with the more abstract astronomical term “galactic equator.” The galactic equator is the precise midline of the Milky Way, a line that we could draw in our mind’s eye as we looked at the bright road of the Milky Way in the sky. Like the earth’s equator, which divides the earth into two lobes, the Milky Way divides the sky into two hemispheres. I prefer the first definition because it connects the galactic alignment directly into the astronomical feature (the dark rift) that would have been of interest to naked-eye sky-watchers. Early on, I realized that ancient sky-watchers needed to utilize astronomical features that were compelling to the naked eye. The Milky Way itself is compelling but quite wide. The dark rift itself is more narrow, and with its various mythological connotations it would serve well in a developing mytho- cosmic scheme.

A related issue is the generalized understanding of the galactic alignment as an alignment to the Galactic Center. Astronomers take the term “Galactic Center” to mean a precise point they can identify with absolute certainty (itself a highly problematic proposition), and thus a calculation of the solstice point’s closest approach to this abstract point has been offered.²⁴ Since the closest approach of the solstice point to the Galactic Center point occurs some two hundred years after 2012, critics believe the galactic alignment theory is invalid. The critics, however, unconscionably evade the fact that the visually perceivable nuclear bulge of the Galactic Center is quite wide. It would have served as a generalized idea for the ancient Maya rather than a precise scientific reference point for calculations. Within this nuclear bulge, you find the Crossroads formed by the Milky Way and the ecliptic as well as the southern terminus of the dark rift. These are the features that would have provided conceptual references for ancient precessional calculations. I don’t take issue with referring to the galactic alignment as an alignment to the Galactic Center. Often, in interview situations, it is necessary to get the point across in a simple way, as long as the proper definitions, the naked-eye appearance of astronomical features, and the timing issues are understood.

In any case, the galactic alignment concept is based in the facts of astronomy. However, the phenomenon is often confused with other ideas that have nothing to do with the precession of the equinoxes, including the Photon Belt, Arguelles’s galactic synchronization, and our solar system’s orbital motion above and below the galactic midplane. These misconceptions reared their heads early on in my work, and it became clear to me that I had to define the specifics of the galactic alignment and address confusing issues in the timing of it. I performed this task and published the book Galactic Alignment in 2002, but oddly that book is very often overlooked as a resource.

In 1994 very few sources had ever mentioned the galactic alignment, and even then it was poorly defined. In writing up my early research on the alignment, I used the ACS ephemeris to estimate the precise alignment of the solstice point (the precise middle point of the sun) with the galactic equator (the precise midline of the Milky Way) as occurring sometime between 1997 and 1999. That’s about the best that could be done. I felt it was important to have a good scientific calculation and definition of the alignment. That this estimate was some fourteen years away from 2012 initially might seem like a deal breaker for the theory, but it isn’t. To assume that the ancient Maya astronomers had to make an absolutely perfect forward calculation of precession, more than 2,000 years into the future, is completely unrealistic.

^{The galactic alignment of era-2012. A = position of the December solstice sun 6,000 years ago. B = position of the December solstice sun 3,000 years ago. C = position of the December solstice sun in our era.}

The assumption that the end date must target the precise day of something that will happen forms the basis of many contentious attempts to discredit the fact of the December 21, 2012, correlation. But this is putting the cart before the horse, an inversion of the facts. This misleading assumption gives rise to the following problem. Someone might have a prophetic dream that “the end” or “the shift” or “whatever” will happen on, say, May 12, 2014. Someone else might make charts on climate change that point to 2019 as the year of an irreversible Omega Point. These theorists thus claim that December 21, 2012, is not correct.

This kind of critique is called a fallacia consequentis—a fallacy having (unfortunate) consequences. If you embrace the fallacious assumption that the Maya end date is supposed to pinpoint an event that is hardwired into the structure of the universe, or in the fractal math of time, misleading conclusions are likely to follow.

In identifying the galactic alignment as the key to why the Maya placed their cycle-ending date on December 21, 2012, I am not implying that the galactic alignment is a scientifically provable causative agent of change. That is an interesting topic for further exploration, and the first conclusion is that, if that is indeed true, it can’t possibly be nailed down to a specific year, let alone a specific day. Even if we accepted a precise scientific calculation for the galactic alignment and believed that it affects life on earth, the slow nature of the process and the unknown interdynamics of the causative forces involved demands we accept a range of influence. Like the full moon, there is in fact a precise theoretical point of maximum fullness, but any alleged astrological effect falls within an “orb” of influence.

Nick Kollerstrom, an astrologer in England, published a brief note on the alignment in 1993; he said it would occur around 1999. After the publication of my article in December 1994, the writings of astrologer Raymond Mardyks came to my attention. In articles published in 1987, 1991, and 1994 he mentioned the galactic alignment and interpreted it through the filters of Western astrology. Over the years I’ve had many exchanges with Ray, who believes he is the spokesman for a secret school of galactic initiates and takes offense at my findings and the way I