light on how 2012 was conceived by the ancient Maya. For example, I might write a page of material in which I frequently refer to “my birthday.” I never provide the actual date, but use only the secondary reference phrase. Two hundred years from now, a future literary historian could do a little additional research and find the exact date of my birth in an archive somewhere, and thus supply the missing specific date. Likewise, letters of a seventeenth-century French count might refer frequently to “the Border War” and it would take some contextual support from other sources to equate this secondary reference with a war between France and Germany that occurred in 1642 and 1643. The detailed dates could be reconstructed. In Maya history, we have some calendrical references to the era inauguration in 3114 BC. The Creation Mythology associated with this date involves three hearthstones, the zenith, and a turtle. This structural complex becomes a secondary reference phrase, and when it is found in other contexts, without a specific date reference to 3114, scholars accept that it refers to August 11, 3114 BC. The same principle can be applied to secondary references to 2012.
Overall, I believe there is hope for Maya scholars to one day realize that 2012 was an intentional and meaningful artifact of knowledge for the ancient Maya. It’s unfortunate that many scholars are locked into responding to the superficial refrains repeated by New Agers or doomsayers—that it’s either an ascension or the end of the world. Scholars and pop writers form a perfectly bonded dysfunctional pair, each side unable to see the
THE FIRST ACADEMIC 2012 CONFERENCE
The 2012 conference at Tulane University in New Orleans was the first of its kind. Scholars had decided it was high time to address 2012 as an overarching theme. They invited Anthony Aveni, who was working on a book on 2012, to provide the keynote address. My report on the goings-on at the conference is late-breaking stuff, as it happened in February of 2009, while I was writing this book. I’ve prepared an online resource that will share commentary and audio clips that I recorded during the conference.50
New Orleans, for me, is a place of odd memories and experiences. I played guitar as a busker on the French Quarter at age twenty, danced down Bourbon Street with the Hari Krishnas while investigating religious cults, and spent seven days in the New Orleans Parish Prison (the infamous Tent City), and it was a bum rap, I swear. My sabbatical in jail came at the very end of my first trip to Central America. After traveling on a shoestring for more than three months, using money I’d saved working the night shift in a factory for a year, I made my way overland and crossed the border into Texas. There, I made a fateful decision to hitchhike to Florida. The details are irrelevant; suffice it to say that the arrest occurred during Mardi Gras and the charge was “obstructing a sidewalk.” The result was that my backpack disappeared with the guy who’d given me a lift. After my release in the wake of a hurricane, I was able to buy a bus ticket home to Chicago with ninety dollars I had stashed in my shoe. Arriving home with the proverbial T-shirt on my back and twelve cents in my pocket, I lamented the loss of my camera, ten rolls of pictures, my notebook, and assorted mementos. That was the beginning of my career as an independent 2012ologist, and I vowed to return to Central America as soon as possible.
Now I was back in New Orleans. My friend Jim Reed was there too, along with our friend Madison Moore. It was good to have a few allies on hand, as I planned to storm the ivory tower, much the way I had done in 1997 at the Institute of Maya Studies. I knew what Aveni’s critique entailed, and had noted that in his other public comments he harbored ideas not unlike those of the astronomers I discussed in the previous section. In periodic news items on 2012, which I too had been interviewed for, Aveni and other scholars typically dismissed the whole thing as meaningless. In a CNN interview David Stuart said: “There is no serious scholar who puts any stock in the idea that the Maya said anything meaningful about 2012.”51 By the time 2012 arrives this assertion will be proven incorrect, as the new evidence is already at hand.
I was curious if scholars really believed that the cycle ending in 2012 was meaningless for the ancient Maya, because the news media typically framed their presentations as “New Age kooks versus the scholarly voices of reason.” There was little room for the kind of work I’ve been presenting—an intentional effort to reconstruct forgotten beliefs connected to the Long Count calendar and the 2012 cycle endings. In fact, it’s fair to say that Aveni and others were content to address their comments to the silliest far end of the New Age fringe. They could simply say, “The Maya didn’t believe the world is going to end in 2012.” Of course, I’ve been offering that correction too, for many years. But Aveni was only beginning to rationally investigate the evidence for something else going on, and it was clear that he would resist the suggestion.
Barbara and Dennis Tedlock were giving a presentation, which promised to say something specific about 2012. The other speakers, including Marc Zender, Matthew Looper, Victoria Bricker, Markus Eberl, and John Justeson, only obliquely dealt with 2012, if at all. However, their presentations were fascinating, and I was greatly inspired to renew areas of research I’d been neglecting. Oddly, Robert Sitler, the first scholar to publish a peer- reviewed article dedicated to 2012, was not invited to speak. Aveni’s Friday-night key note talk would be the focus of official comments on 2012. An open panel on Sunday would provide another opportunity to ask some pointed questions.
Weeks before the conference, I had prepared an outline of what I considered to be key points that any scholarly treatment of 2012 should cover. I sent this to Aveni as a heads-up, as I was concerned that he would not sink his teeth into the real issues. The first fact that is obvious to anyone who spends a little time with the Long Count is that the end date falls on a solstice. This implies an ability to accurately calculate the tropical year more than 2,100 years ago. Despite my heads-up, as it turned out Aveni mentioned this fact but conveniently avoided addressing the implications. It took my direct question after his talk, as an audience member in a huge auditorium, to force the issue to be considered.
Items I listed as essential, which I sent to Dr. Aveni:
• The likelihood of intent suggested by the solstice placement of the 13-Baktun cycle-ending date in 2012
• The calendar correlation
• The place and time of the Long Count’s origins
• The relevance of Izapa to the Long Count’s origins
• The galactic alignment theory with respect to the significance of the archaeo-astronomical symbolism in the Izapan ballcourt
• The question of ancient knowledge of the precession of the equinoxes and its accurate calculation
Critics of 2012 spend much of their time responding to the exaggerated media hype that asserts “the Maya predicted the world will end in 2012.” We (and scholars, especially) should be addressing our questions to 2012 as an intentional artifact of the ancient calendar, and explore how this date and ideologies possibly connected with it manifested in Maya cosmology.
When I decided at the last minute that I could get away for the conference, I xeroxed 100 copies of a four- page document that I intended to hand out at the conference.52 On Friday, we attended other talks in the morning and afternoon. One noteworthy thing happened in Markus Eberl’s talk. It was a basic introductory class, the first of the weekend. In describing the Long Count, he presented the famous image from Coba, with its twenty-four place values set to 13. This image is often used to imply that the 13-Baktun cycle is meaningless because there are much greater cycles in the Long Count. This perspective avoids the fact that most Long Count dates are recorded with only five place values, meaning the Baktun level is for all practical purposes the highest. During the question session, my friend Dave Shaeffer from Antigua triggered a realization about Markus’s presentation of the Coba Creation stela. Dave pointed out that his slide cut off the bottom of the image, where the explicit date of the stela is found. It is in fact a Creation Text, so the final date, despite the huge abstract levels that precede it, ends up at 13.0.0.0.0, 4 Ahau 8 Cumku, August 11, 3114 BC. The monument is all about that date, the inauguration of the current era of 13 Baktuns. There was a subtle way that the information was selectively presented which avoided dealing with the importance of a 13-Baktun cycle in Maya Creation Mythology.
