The 2012 Story

these new discoveries open up a greater understanding of how the ancient Maya thought about 2012, which in my view has lasting meaning for two reasons: (1) this is the best way to approach understanding 2012; (2) these results will survive all the trendy 2012 models and millennial madness. Here is what we found.

CHAPTER SEVEN The Galactic Alignment Theory: Update

It’s not a coincidence.

—BARB MACLEOD

The newest of the new discoveries emerged immediately in the wake of the Tulane conference. But they occurred on the fringes, in open-minded exchanges among Barbara MacLeod, Michael Grofe, and me. They were driven by a breakthrough in a documentary film on 2012 that I’d been collaborating on for almost three years with Warren Miller Films. In 2006, I was invited by screenwriter and project director Hans Rosenwinkel to present my work at the Warren Miller Films offices in Boulder. I gave presentations and for two years the script was worked and reworked, being recalibrated with my ongoing feedback. There was interest at Nova and PBS in funding the project. It seemed to be hovering in no-man’s-land when Barb MacLeod e-mailed me in January of 2008 with her findings on the 3-11 Pik formula. She alerted me to the good news by her subject line: “It’s not a coincidence!”

Barb’s findings began with data recorded at Tikal, first noted by Matthew Looper.¹ Barb’s close examination of these data revealed a consistent application of periods of time separated by 8,660 days. Usually these occurred in steps of three and were rooted in a Calendar Round position prior to the era Creation of 3114 BC. Barb next noted Nikolai Grube’s realization that identical parallel dates were generated if the base date was shifted forward 11 Baktuns.² The three date stations occurred at 8,660-day intervals, but when combined equaled precessional steps of just under 72 years, the number of years in one degree (or day) of precessional shift. (The “circle” of Maya calculation may use 365 degrees, or days, rather than the 360 used in Western geometry.) The locations of each precessional “power station” in time were significant because of their precessional resonance with the base date, the era Creation. She calls this precessional mechanism the “3-11 Pik formula” and finds evidence for it in the inscriptions of Copan and elsewhere.³

Not simply an abstract mathematical operation, this calendrical and astronomical framework was utilized in rites of Maya kingship. When a king passed through one of these temporal power stations, he gained added authority and power. Kings would often pass through two power stations during their reign, but only a few would live through three. The passage represented a cosmological relationship, via precessional resonance, with the Creation event. Furthermore, these 3-11 Pik references often appear in combination with vast distance numbers and cycles of deep time. Barb’s work suggests that precession was not only accurately calculated by the ancient Maya, but was used in a widespread paradigm that related kings to era-inauguration dates and the Creation mythos.

Her findings are well documented and are revolutionary in their implications. They provide support for my end-date alignment theory on two fronts. First, her theory utilizes the base date of the 13-Baktun cycle, in 3114 BC, as a reference point for its intervals. Second, the method requires an accurate estimate for the rate of precession (if not the full precessional cycle), which was built into the Long Count at the time of its inauguration. The apparent lack of accurate precessional calculations made by the ancient Maya was one of the critiques against my theory asserted by Aveni; now that critique is challenged by Barb’s findings. And she is not alone in finding accurate precession calculations in the ancient Maya Long Count inscriptions.

Barb introduced me to the work of Dr. Michael Grofe, a rare Mayanist who has a deep understanding of both astronomy and epigraphy. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Miami in 1993, his MA from the California Institute of Integral Studies, and his PhD in Native American Studies from the University of California at Davis in 2007. Michael had worked under Martha Macri and Matthew Looper as a graduate student, and he became interested in the calendrical bones from burial 116 in Tikal, including the 3-11 Pik calculation as discovered by Looper. In a 2003 research paper⁴ Michael had similarly proposed that the 3-11 Pik formula suggests a precessional calculation, which later prompted his correspondence with Barb in 2008 when Looper brought Barb’s paper to his attention. Barb and Michael had both reached similar conclusions independently, which says something in itself. Grofe’s work on precession is amply documented in his PhD dissertation, called The Serpent Series: Precession in the Maya Dresden Codex. His work deduces a methodology used by the ancient Maya astronomers for calculating sidereal positions of the moon, planets, and the sun, and thus precession, using eclipses and asterisms like the Pleiades. First and foremost, Michael’s pioneering work presents evidence that the Serpent Series in the Dresden Codex contains a Distance Number formula strongly suggesting that the Maya had achieved a very precise calculation of the sidereal year and the rate of precessional drift. Since then, Michael has also found epigraphic evidence in Tortuguero’s 2012 text (Monument 6) and at Palenque that identifies solar and lunar alignments with the dark rift, lending a great deal of direct epigraphic support to my controversial end-date alignment theory.⁵

I quickly realized that the film documentary needed to include these breakthroughs. The script had already gone through another revision, based on conference calls incorporating Anthony Aveni’s now obsolete critique⁶ and other scholars as voices of reason who would cast doubt on the precessional basis of the galactic alignment theory. With the new material by MacLeod and Grofe, the film script went through yet another round of changes. Forward motion was followed by hovering.

THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE DARK RIFT

After Tulane, Hans announced that a funding deal with PBS was imminent. I was called upon to be filmed, summarizing in short order the importance of my own as well as Grofe’s and MacLeod’s work. I thus needed to refresh my mind with their key ideas, and had two long phone calls with both of them. In setting up the call with Michael, I decided to share my plan to analyze the Long Count dates from Tortuguero, looking for precessional intervals and relevant astronomical alignments utilizing, for example, the dark rift in the Milky Way. I knew that only a small portion of the Tortuguero Monument 6 text had been translated, and I believed that it might be possible to identify secondary references to 2012 via the astronomical image-complex of the galactic alignment. Instead of finding specific 2012 date references, we might find secondary contextually meaningful references utilizing the “sun-in-dark-rift” statement. This would be similar to the known use of tripartite monuments to designate the solar zenith and the hearthstones in Orion—an astronomical image-complex that refers to Creation narratives connected to 3114 BC.⁷ The inscriptions might be found to consistently reference the dark rift as an alignment locus for the sun, moon, eclipses, or planets. Dates of the sun’s alignment with the dark rift during the Classic Period would be particularly compelling if they were used in meaningful ways that implicated the end date’s like-in-kind alignment (albeit utilizing the December solstice sun).

* * *

This is where the newest new discoveries come into play, ones that require further study by Maya scholars. In broad outlines, they comprise what I would call smoking-gun evidence for the hypothesis I put on the table fifteen years ago—that the ancient creators of the Long Count system intended the 13-Baktun cycle end date in 2012 to target the rare alignment of the solstice sun and the dark rift. I described in Chapter 6 how Tortuguero’s 2012 inscription was used to consecrate a building dedication. It was meaningful because a building (or a house) is a microcosm of the cosmos. That alone shows that 2012 had meaning for the Classic Period Maya. What follows are several equally important recent findings.

The Long Count dates and inscriptions from Tortuguero were described in Sven Gronemeyer’s study of the site, and Geoff Stray had made available a PDF of the study on the Tribe 2012 website.⁸ Although