The 2012 Story

solar system around the Galactic Center, above and below the galactic plane over millions of years. This process has nothing to do with the precessional basis of the galactic alignment, as defined on Wikipedia and in my book (which came out in 2002 and was titled Galactic Alignment). For many years I’ve had a page on my website called “What is the Galactic Alignment?”²⁸ If you Google “Galactic Alignment,” the first result is this page. I discuss the distinction between the galactic alignment and Brent Miller’s scenario in my book Galactic Alignment , on my “Misconceptions” web page, and in an interview I did that is posted on YouTube.²⁹

The Horizon Project provides a list of resources used in their research, but, oddly, the book called Galactic Alignment (published in 2002, long before The Horizon Project was founded) is not listed. One would think that comprehensive research into the galactic alignment would have included a careful study of the one and only book called Galactic Alignment. In fact, none of their sources could provide clear information on the galactic alignment and only one dealt with the Maya calendar (an obsolete 1904 study by Cyrus Thomas). I’m starting to wonder if scientists were really at all involved in the supposedly science-based Horizon Project.

In the DVD, after wrongly defining and describing the galactic alignment, the narrator says: “The Mayans state that the end of each Age, which brings about worldwide devastation, is defined by the world sitting on the dark rift…. [I]t is very clear that we are talking about the same event, an event where the earth passes through the galactic equinox.”³⁰ It’s frustrating to see the defining terms of my galactic alignment reconstruction being co-opted and distorted in this way. (Not to mention that “galactic equinox” is a meaningless term, apparently meant to indicate the galactic equator.) These distorted appropriations have been the cause of hundreds of accusatory e-mails I’ve received from people who believe that I, like The Horizon Project, preach a doomsday message.

“How can we know for sure,” the narrator asks, “when you should be bracing for tomorrow?” Brent Miller sternly answers: “Computer simulations utilizing the collection of knowledge we have amassed through decades of galactic models and satellite data tell us that our solar system will definitely begin passing through the galactic plane in the very near future. The most severe effects that will cause worldwide devastation and a pole shift are most likely to occur, beginning sometime between the years 2008 and 2015.”³¹

Although the orbital oscillation above and below the galactic plane is a real process, the scientific model actually places us, right now, fifty light-years above the galactic plane and heading out, as the following Cambridge University publication reports:

The Sun is moving upwards, out of the plane of the Milky Way, at a speed of 7 kilometers per second. Currently the Sun lies 50 light-years above the mid-plane of the galaxy, and its motion is steadily carrying it further away… But the gravitational pull of the stars in the Galactic (Milky Way) plane is slowing down the Sun’s escape. The astronomer Frank Bash estimates that in 14 million years the sun will reach its maximum height above the Galactic disk. From that 250 light-year position, it will be pulled back towards the plane of the Galaxy. Passing through, it will travel to a point 250 light-years below the disk, then oscillate upwards again to reach its present position 66 million years from now.³²

The Horizon Project uses hyperbole-filled alarmist language, engages in bad science while giving the impression of being scientifically rigorous, and distorts the galactic alignment information already defined and published. While their efforts may be overlooked as the expected exploitation of fear in the marketplace, the real effects on people who trust “experts” and have little time to fact-check and dig out the truth for themselves are troubling. I’ve received dozens of e-mails from people exposed to The Horizon Project’s misinformation, including distraught mothers of young children, who were beside themselves, not knowing what to do.

Many readers and researchers have apparently been hoodwinked by the astronomical confusions and pole shift rhetoric proffered by Brent Miller, multiplied ad nauseam through the Googlesphere. In e-mail exchanges with Gregg Braden I explained how the orbital idea was taken up by various popular writers, from the murky Photon Belt concept of Marciniak in the mid- 1980s, to Jose Arguelles’s slightly less murky “galactic synchronization” as defined by him and Brian Swimme in The Mayan Factor, to more recent conflations by Michael Tsarion, Brent Miller at The Horizon Project, and others. The earlier sources, including Arguelles, were not presenting the galactic alignment concept but instead something akin to the physical orbit idea, in which our solar system orbits around the Galactic Center and passes through different energy sectors of the galaxy. The later authors often make a loose association between our solar system’s up-and-down motion above and below the galactic plane and 2012, the dark rift in the Milky Way, and other elements from my pioneering work. I find it all disappointing, for several reasons:

• According to the scientific evidence, our solar system is nowhere near the midplane right now.

• The orbital process exceeds 250 million years; the galactic midplane passages occur at approximately 60 -million-year intervals.

• The passage itself takes roughly 250,000 years.

None of this has any valid basis in Maya traditions and concepts.³³

And all of this leads ineluctably to the Survive 2012 website (no relation to Patrick Geryl’s How to Survive 2012). The director of this site says he is just providing all the angles and making survivalist gear available for those who want to be safe. Digital shopping carts and easy-to-use PayPal buttons are provided. Gas masks, water-purification pills, and survivalist food supplies are among the many things offered for sale. Again, the media loves this kind of thing, and as a savvy entrepreneur he was able to get his website linked up to the History Channel’s Armageddon broadcasts in January 2009, which included a show linking Nostradamus with 2012 (for which I was interviewed) that completely appropriated the galactic alignment as a pole shift trigger while providing little contextual information about the Maya.³⁴ I’m now convinced that cooperating with any of these mainstream venues is like handing baby chickens to a fox.

Bruce Scofield is a perceptive researcher, an astrologer who has worked to integrate the oracular insights of the Mesoamerican calendar system and the principles of Western astrology.³⁵ Aware of the work by Edmonson (The Book of the Year), he understood the correct placement of the 260-day calendar very early on, and published his book Day Signs in 1991. He reviewed my book Tzolkin and followed my work on 2012 as it developed. Suspicious of the calendar system proposed by Arguelles in The Mayan Factor, Scofield succeeded in getting Arguelles to share, in a letter of 1989, how he developed his own day-count system. Arguelles wrote that he and a Mexican artist friend working in Mexico in the 1970s developed the placement that he came to follow and would later elaborate in his Dreamspell game.

In short, the letter revealed that Arguelles was either unaware of a surviving day-count or preferred to nurture his own creative interpretation of the system. Once the placement of the day-signs was fixed in his new system, events in the world fell into place and the system appeared to be self-confirming. People thus say that “it works.” The reason for this is not rocket science—oracles will respond when you pour energy into them. It doesn’t matter that it’s fifty-plus days out of synchronization with the calendar followed by the Maya for more than 2,000 years. Said another way, if you say to someone that the number 23 is meaningful, the seed is planted for them to begin noticing it everywhere. The mind will automatically begin selecting 23s out of the environment. Scofield, rightly so, found Arguelles’s response to be proof that his system was of his own invention. Later, however, Arguelles claimed it was a direct successor to the calendar in the Chilam Balam books, even though he had noted in his 1975 book The Transformative Vision that the Chilam Balam material did not contain much helpful information.

Another thing that the Maya calendar tradition doesn’t really contain is a 13-moon calendar. This will come as a surprise to many people who follow Arguelles’s 13-moon calendar. The system, as devised by Arguelles, has 13 ? 28 = 364 days. Its New Year’s Day is always fixed to July 26 (which links it to his Dreamspell system), and you need to add one more day, July 25, to make it work. This is called “The Day Out of Time,” which I guess makes it okay. The 13-moon calendar is intended to put us back into synchronization with the rhythms of the moon, the natural cycles of life, to free us from enslavement to the 12-month/60-minute rhythm of artificial clock-time. The calendar you follow will, according to the 13-moon logic, define your consciousness. Solar calendar bad, lunar calendar good. Sounds reasonable so far. But the problem is that the 13-moon calendar does not follow any lunar or