nondual paradigm, the spiritual transcends the physical, meaning that it includes the physical in a larger whole. So, in this nondual sense, the spiritual domain is indeed superior to the physical. However, a common trap that reveals a misunderstanding of this principle is to make the spiritual and physical mutually exclusive, two forever-separated poles like apples and oranges that cannot mingle. This was the error of dualism in Cartesian thinking, also evident in much Christian dogma, which always results in the fundamentalist attitude that seeks to annihilate the physical, the body, the heathens—the enemy in whatever form it takes.
Calleman’s system also asserts a flat-out rejection of the December 21, 2012, cycle-ending date, frequently repeating the mantra that “the archaeologists” got it wrong. His own invented alternative of October 28, 2011, is presented as the true date of the
Calleman co-opted McKenna’s idea of fractal time acceleration but based his model on factors of 20. The Long Count is a base-20 system and expands into larger multiples by factors of 20, with the exception of the Tun level (which results from the 20-day Uinal multiplied by 18, not 20) and the 13-Baktun cycle, which is generated by multiplying the Baktun level by 13, not 20. So in his theory time unfolds in fractal multiples of the base unit 20, but each higher level in the Long Count is in fact not always generated by multiples of 20. Nevertheless, Calleman assumed that time expanded in this fractal way, and he noted that a big period generated in this way equaled 16.9 billion years, which allegedly approximates the current astrophysical estimate for the age of the universe. Never mind that the current age is now estimated to be at least 18 billion years.
The most egregious problem with Calleman’s work is that he follows in the mold of Arguelles in his attempts to evangelize a new, improved, Maya calendar. Arguelles neglected to adopt the authentic 260-day count, whereas Calleman rejects the authentic end date. With the new preordained spiritual shift-date placed on October 28, 2011, Calleman’s detailed scheme of portal days and mini-celebration shift-days then proceeds backward in intervals of Tuns (360 days). Followers of Calleman’s system heard that, for example, November 12, 2008, would be the Fifth Night of the Mayan Underworld. News flashes went out on the Internet, and Carl wrote a press release or two and did some interviews. The next big one is November 7, 2009, then November 2, 2010, and finally, voila!: October 28, 2011. And along the way there are other miniportal lieutenant and vice principal days all fitted perfectly into a system as magically rigorous as anything Arguelles devised.
Most followers hardly suspect that the scheme counts down to Calleman’s own idiosyncratic end date, and also don’t know, or don’t care, that the system as a whole has nothing to do with anything the Maya ever followed or believed. Nevertheless, writers such as Barbara Clow and Daniel Pinchbeck have jumped aboard the Calleman wagon without discerning the many difficulties that his system, and approach, present. Clow’s 2007 book
The result of the Calleman system has been to further confuse the fundamental basics of the calendar. It’s very much in the spirit of Arguelles’s confusion of the day-counts. I find this occurrence fascinating. We can scan back over the 1990s quickly and notice that the Dreamspell system arose in 1991. I quickly exposed the flaws of the system, but it wasn’t until 1996 that an acknowledgment of its flaws occurred within the Dreamspell camp—and even then it simply triggered a spin-doctoring caveat in which the Dreamspell was emphasized as the new dispensation and preferable Wizard Count. But the admission that the Dreamspell system was at odds with the True Count still followed in the highlands caused a fallout of people away from the Dreamspell camp. Then, as if on cue, Calleman’s system arose and asserted an equally flawed perspective, directing disillusioned spiritual seekers into an equally alluring alternative system that was also equally deceptive. The New Age movement was trying to find the words to express a deeper spiritual meaning in the Maya calendar, but was consistently building from flawed foundations.
The brilliant and profound wisdom of the ancient Maya was getting distorted. Professional Maya scholars didn’t bother to point out the errors in Calleman’s and Arguelles’s books. If anything, they simply cast them aside as nonscholars. But the fact is that both Calleman and Arguelles have PhDs. They technically belong in the ivory tower, so why weren’t the gatekeepers of academe taking them, their degreed colleagues, to task? Why did it fall to an outsider, who doesn’t have a PhD, to call out the errors and expose bad research and flawed models? Why was I doing the scholars’ jobs for them? Most annoyingly, I found in my dealings with scholars that they were happy to toss me into the same category as Arguelles and Calleman, unable or unwilling to make any distinction between my work and theirs.
What I actually found in my dealings with professional Mayanists is that they harbored huge assumptions and misunderstandings about the Maya calendar, almost as egregious as those found among popular writers. Few scholars I communicated with understood the correlation debate, or the site of Izapa, or how the Long Count and Calendar Round relate to each other. Likewise, the concept of the galactic alignment has been co-opted and misunderstood. As mentioned earlier, the tendency is for my galactic alignment theory to be received best only if it is delivered through the mouth of a Maya elder. It just makes for better ad copy that way. We saw this in how an interviewer in 2002 framed the collaboration between Erick Gonzalez and me. As if some new viral meme was forcefully trying to insert itself into the 2012 discussion, an identical fiasco occurred a short time later when Stephen McFadden interviewed Maya teacher Carlos Barrios.
This one has produced far-reaching ripples with disastrous effects, mainly because I decided to take the high road and ignore it. But it festered, morphed, and returned after several years to bite me on the butt. It’s both annoying and hilarious that such things happen. The interview expresses the following position regarding “anthropologists” and “other people” who write “about prophecy in the name of the Maya”:
“Anthropologists visit the temple sites,” Mr. Barrios says, “and read the steles and inscriptions and make up stories about the Maya, but they do not read the signs correctly. It’s just their imagination…. Other people write about prophecy in the name of the Maya. They say that the world will end in December 2012. The Mayan elders are angry with this. The world will not end. It will be transformed.”6
And angry they should be. I’ve been shouting since day one that 2012, like any cycle ending, is about transformation, a new beginning, not a final apocalyptic end. It says so in
He [Carlos] said Mayan Daykeepers view the Dec. 21, 2012 date as a rebirth, the start of the World of the Fifth Sun. It will be the start of a new era resulting from and
The emphasized passages are almost direct paraphrases from my books and web pages. A phrase like “the solar meridian crossing the galactic equator” provides an accurate description of what the 2012 alignment is, and I have offered this exact terminology as a clear definition. To what can we attribute this material appearing in McFadden’s interview with Barrios, apparently paraphrasing the words of Barrios himself?
One version of the interview contained some source citations. A website called “Great Dreams” was
