The 2012 Story

themes of sacrifice, transformation, and renewal central to ancient spiritual teachings for cycle endings.

I felt I should collaborate with Maya teachers who were creating ceremonial spaces of renewal. I remembered conversations I had had with Erick Gonzalez back in 1996. Ironically, he had introduced Ian Lungold to my book Tzolkin, which led Ian to adopting the True Count and deriving the day-sign conversion tables he used in his place mats (which were a simplified method based on the charts in my book). And through a mutual friend I learned that Erick was actively traveling the country facilitating renewal rites with Maya fire ceremonies. Reconnecting with Erick, we discussed the importance of having a collaboration between the intellectual and spiritual approaches to 2012. My reconstruction could proceed as an academic presentation. Although I also enjoyed speaking about the spiritual teachings in the Maya Creation Myth, I was glad to have Erick give participatory fire ceremonies so that people could experience transformation and renewal directly. Most people considered this the more important part of the weekend gathering. Fire is, indeed, the great transformer, and I could frame that ceremony as the logical expression of what the 2012 alignment to the Galactic Center was inviting—humanity reconnecting with the renewing fire of the central heart and source. We gave two well-attended events in Boulder, one in October of 2000 and another in April of 2001. It was good. After April I was deeply involved in writing my book Galactic Alignment; Erick and I were content to move on and did not set up any more events.

Naropa University is located in Boulder, Colorado. I had taught a series of classes there in late 1999. In early 2002 I came across a write-up on Erick’s work in a journal published by Naropa. I was surprised to read of the “Maya prophecy” of the galactic alignment and Erick’s fire ceremonies, but no mention of my work. These kinds of things happen. Remembering the Don Alejandro incident and considering my prior relationship with Naropa, I though it prudent to inform the editor of my work and seek a correction; perhaps I could write a piece for their journal to explain the galactic alignment theory. I received a rather surprised apology but no invitation to submit something new.

Years later I found out from Erick that he had never intended to portray the galactic alignment as a direct lineage teaching, and as a result of my complaint a potential collaboration with Naropa had collapsed. It seemed an interviewer had framed the information incorrectly, causing an unfortunate debacle. Meanwhile, 2001, the sci-fi year of Kubrick’s Space Odyssey, was getting under way. I had been trying to finance a documentary on 2012 with the site of Izapa as the focal point. It was transparently obvious to me that Izapa, as the origin place of the 2012 calendar, should be the centerpiece of any documentary on 2012. Two potential funding sources fell through, so I and my indefatigable friend Jim Reed decided to do it ourselves. With the financial assistance of Visa and MasterCard, we flew to Guatemala and then took a shuttle across the border into Mexico. Jim brought his mini-DV camera and I was armed with maps and diagrams.

It was gloriously hot in the tropical lowlands in early March. We visited the three main groups. I pointed out the orientation of the Group A monuments to the polar Big Dipper, the Group B pillar-and-ball gnomons symbolizing the zenith and the hearth stars of Orion, and the Group F ballcourt’s orientation to the dawning December solstice sun. When all was said and done, we had taken some good footage, but as digital technology had quickly evolved the format we had recorded in was deemed not usable for a professional presentation. As of this writing, in early 2009, there has yet to be a documentary production devoted to the importance of Izapa for the 2012 discussion, although I have persistently tried to facilitate one.

When I’ve done interviews for documentaries, I’ve gotten verbal agreements that Izapa will be the focal point, but that never ends up being the case. Incredibly, through dozens of 2012 documentary appearances, making direct appeals for inclusion of this material, Izapa has barely been mentioned. I’m used largely as a talking head in someone else’s perception of what is central to the 2012 discussion. The origin place of the 2012 calendar has been relegated to the cutting-room floor, while Nostradamus, alchemy, Incas, pole flips, and jet-setting trippers are abundantly portrayed. The one exception, in which my discussion of Izapa was included, was the well-conceived documentary of early 2009 called 2012: Science or Superstition?

In 1999, I had a falling-out with Lungold when I learned that he had big dollar signs in mind with his tzolkin-themed place mats and was planning to work with a publisher in Mexico that could produce them by the millions. This commodification of the Maya calendar wasn’t something I really wanted to be involved in. By the summer of 2000, Lungold had hooked up with a Swedish researcher of the Maya calendar, Carl Johan Calleman. They were traveling through Mexico, setting up the publication of the place mats, visiting the temple sites, and seeking promotional opportunities. I can remember receiving a long-distance call from Ian at the time, afire with an impending deal and how he and Carl were taking Mexico by storm. Their ambitions began to unravel as the summer wore on, until a disappointment with their Mexican agent led to the collapsing of their plans.

Meanwhile, Carl was awaiting my comments on his book The Mayan Calendar: Solving the Greatest Mystery of Our Time. I’d read the book, and it basically took on the audacious and impossible task of proving God. My friend Nicholas Kirsten Honshin, an artist, poet, and mystical philosopher, had pointed out to me with a smile that mysteries could never, by definition, be “solved”—but they could be experienced. This was an apt indication of what emerged as a consistent flaw in Calleman’s approach to the Maya calendar and his proposed theology of spiritual transformation. To force-fit spirituality into scientific boxes results in a truncated travesty. The approach should be, rather, to enlarge the conceptual framework of science—of our currently limited mental framework—so that it could directly perceive and embrace the higher metaphysical principles of spiritual teachings.

It’s important to share a bit of background so that Calleman’s ideas can be understood in proper context. Calleman fell in with the Dreamspell group in the early 1990s while attending the University of Washington in Seattle. My own critique of the Arguelles day-count was available in my 1992 book Tzolkin, reprinted in 1994, which Calleman acquired. He could see the value of switching to the True Count and being on track with the traditional Maya system. By 1998 he was writing a book on the subject of the “True Cross” and Maya cosmology. It proposed a notion that the Maya sacred tree, or cross, should be understood as the cross formed by the Milky Way and the perpendicular line that runs through the central axis of the spinning Milky Way. Every spinning body spins upon an axis, and for Carl this was the preferable axis.

His notion contradicted the definition of the Sacred Tree accepted by Schele and other scholars, which was relevant in terms of what naked-eye sky-watchers could actually be viewing—the cross was formed by the bright band of the Milky Way and the ecliptic (the path of the sun, moon, and planets). Carl was utilizing a scientifically valid concept, but it was not in fact a concept utilized in Maya cosmology. The idea of living close to the tree’s spinning “axis” had meaning for Carl, and by way of an analogy with the spinning earth and its axis, Carl seemed to believe that people living closer to the earth’s poles were somehow more in touch with God or the Creation. During one e-mail exchange, Carl implied that he had the scoop on the divine wisdom because he lived in Sweden, closer to the north pole. This is an old notion found in theosophy and other occult teachings. The implication, of course, is that equatorial cultures—the Maya, for example—are less privy to the axial wisdom. But the Maya were supposedly the source of Carl’s True Cross idea, so if one actually thought through the ideas proposed by Calleman, gulfs of self-contradiction emerged.

I had a problem with these and other assertions evident in his book, and I explained them to Carl in clear factual terms. This caused a backlash, and our ensuing exchanges through the years have always begun with Carl trying in various ways to discredit “my” end date (which is actually not mine in the sense of its being of my own invention; December 21, 2012, is simply derived from the established correlation).⁵ As a reaction to our e-mail exchanges, he began to assert a distinction between my approach to 2012, which he claimed was astronomical and therefore “physical,” and his own approach, which was “spiritual.” I responded that my books were always concerned with reconstructing the scientific (astronomical) as well as spiritual concepts associated with 2012, and that to make artificial distinctions between physical and spiritual was not consistent with an integrated worldview—a nondual philosophy that was a hallmark of both Maya cosmology and the profound insights of Vedanta. The philosophical and conceptual problems that arise when one is stuck in a dualist framework have typified Calleman’s approach.

In late 2001 Carl invited me to a debate and we decided to do three written exchanges, to be posted on Geoff Stray’s Diagnosis 2012 website. The exchanges were lengthy and revealing. In a nutshell, Carl rejects the December 21, 2012, end date and my end-date alignment theory because it is based in astronomy. He asserted that the Maya calendar has nothing to do with astronomy, and instead it’s all about timing a spiritual wave of unfolding. Carl never accepted my clarifications and has persistently asserted the superiority of his exclusively “spiritual” interpretation of the Maya calendar, and thus the priority of his own invented end date, October 28, 2011. In a