surprisingly smart, too, even through a cannabinated drawl.
One of Charlie’s YouTube segments reveals how my galactic alignment/2012 theory has filtered into this digitalized corner of pop culture. With blinking, attention-keeping cartoon graphics, Charlie narrates a few items about 2012. “And some say an alignment of planets that happens only once every 640,000 years is going to happen.” And the planets are shown all lining up with the earth and sun and the galaxy. So, it’s there, in some twisted form, but it’s all horribly wrong. I’m reminded of when I corrected an interviewer on this point of understanding the galactic alignment and she laughed, saying, “Well, whatever! There’s an alignment of something with something.” Yes. Whatever, indeed.
An interesting contrast technique would be to cut right from Charlie Frost to a conversation with, say, David Stuart or some other Maya scholar. This would highlight the absurdity of what’s happening in the popular media. I believe the public wants to know what 2012 is all about. If they look at all to the scholars for input on their questions, they will likely receive dismissive comments or invitations to study the Maya material in more depth—an effort the public is unlikely to pursue. Professional academics have largely avoided investigating 2012 and so have very little to say about it. And we certainly shouldn’t expect Maya scholars to say anything at all about universal teachings for cycle endings, which could be approached rationally, following the lead of Joseph Campbell and other voices for the perennial wisdom.
So independent writers are left to do whatever they can do, or want to do, with the 2012 meme. The results are pretty messy, as a glance at the marketplace will reveal. It apparently all leads to Charlie Frost. Along the way, trends and tendencies in the popular press can be identified. Following the pattern set by Arguelles, we can see a tendency for popular writers to craft their own unique system or model, complete with proprietary terms and concepts. An ideological lineage can be traced from Arguelles to Calleman to Barbara Clow and, more recently, to the composite calendar system recently created by Gregg Braden. Even Terence McKenna put an innovative time philosophy on the table and connected it with 2012, but he was not influenced by Arguelles. My own work, it should be stressed, is not concerned with creating a new system or model. Instead, on two fronts I’ve tried to (1) advance a well-documented reconstruction of the original cosmology connected to 2012 and (2) elucidate the perennial wisdom teachings within the Maya Creation Myth, which is also an expression of the 2012 tradition.
The domain of “pop appeal” comprises 90 percent of the 2012 phenomenon. It’s not in service to elucidating the deeper, perennial content of Maya cosmology, philosophy, and the 2012 tradition, clearly expressing the core, essential, ideologies of 2012. This could be supported by Maya concepts of transformational renewal at cycle endings and by global parallels in other traditions. I feel it’s important to identify the shared metaphysics of spiritual awakening in all traditions, including the Maya, which are especially relevant for cycle endings. This can be done, with good results, if properly framed as an expression of the archetypal, universal level of Maya cosmology. That’s what we’ll dive into in Part II.
By the way, what is the
CHAPTER SIX
Doubting Scholars
While it may be ethnocentric to assert that the Maya were observing astronomical phenomena in the same way as their counterparts in the West, it is equally ethnocentric to insist that they were incapable of such observations, particularly when their observations and their unique system of tropical zenith astronomy appear to have led them to far more accurate calculations than those of any of their contemporaries elsewhere in the world. Perhaps it is sufficient to say that the Maya were observing precession because it was there to be observed, and because they were uniquely capable of observing it with remarkable accuracy.1
Official commentary on 2012 from academics has been long in coming. There was a small backlog of grudging comments from scholars, elicited by my persistent questions going back to 1991, but they mostly fell into predictably superficial runnels. Several published mentions of the 2012 date recorded on Tortuguero Monument 6 had appeared, going back to 1992, but they treated 2012 circumspectly without engaging the larger implications of that monument.2 We now know that, when the related inscriptions are considered, the implications of that monument are very great indeed. As we’ll see shortly, it records solar and lunar alignments with the dark rift in the Milky Way, in meaningful contexts suggesting a conceptual relationship between the birth of the cosmos and the symbolic birth, or dedication, of the building that housed the monument.
Beginning in 2006, unofficial comments on 2012 increased, resulting from questions forced upon scholars in online e-list groups such as Aztlan.3 These exchanges, which are archived and readily available, reveal several things. First, consensus trumps facts. On more than one occasion my statements were assailed at once by five or six critics, who called into question minuscule trivia that was laughable but distracting. For example, I referred to Tak’alik Ab’aj as an “astronomical observatory” (the term used by the archaeologists digging at the site), which was countered with the incorrect assertion that there was no evidence for that. Similarly, scholars have doubted the existence of evidence for astronomy in
All of this can be tracked and examined in the archival pages of these online e-lists. It got to the point where it seemed a search-bot was waiting, ready to pounce on anything I said. Once, in a spirit of humor on a thread about the amazing complexity of the Nahuatl language, which builds long compound words that rival anything produced in medieval German, I offered my favorite Nahuatl knock-knock joke: “Knock Knock. Who’s there? Amat lacuilolitquitcatlaxtlahuitl.” (After considerable practice, I can pronounce this word fast.) The joke is, of course, funny before it’s even complete because the unsuspecting victim is dumbfounded. The only response to my humorous overture was a dry linguistic correction: “The third t is a mistaken insertion; ‘…itquica…’ is a so-called preterit nominalization of ‘itqui,’ meaning ‘to carry.’”4
Scholars armed themselves with one or two critiques that effectively halted further investigation, at least in their own minds. These stopgap critiques were simplistic and were endlessly repeated, despite my pointing out their fallacious basis. For example, does the fact that the end date falls on a solstice indicate intent? Scholars such as John Hoopes and John Justeson provided an argument for coincidence that plays with statistical fudging to make coincidence seem not as unlikely as one initially supposes. Justeson, for example, explained at a recent conference that a December solstice date is meaningful, but so would be a June solstice, either one of the equinoxes, a zenith passage date, your birthday, the date of your grandpa’s hernia operation, and a myriad of other potentially noteworthy dates.5
Justeson also said that if the end date was one or even two days off one of these meaningful dates, we would still be duly impressed and allow this measure of vagueness. He ran the stats on all these considerations and found that a 16.66 percent chance existed that a randomly generated end date would be within range of any number of significant dates. That’s a 1-in-6 chance, pretty good odds. This is much less than the slim 1/365 chance one assumes upon first glance. Thus, voila!—the case for the Coincidentalists was improved.
Justeson’s argument ably applies a rationalist’s thought experiment but ignores several guiding contexts that eliminate other possible dates. To intentionally choose a December solstice date to end a large-Era cycle
