The 2012 Story

1719. Quickly condensed and translated into other languages, it contained the first and best description of Mexico to reach the outside world. His book was a huge success, and his itinerant method of taking public transportation inspired Jules Verne to write Around the World in Eighty Days. However, many could not believe Careri’s observations of the pre-Conquest cultures of the New World, and he was roundly criticized as a fraud. The eighteenth-century Scottish historian William Robertson refused to include Careri’s findings in his highly inaccurate History of America (1777). Instead, he asserted that “America was not peopled by any nation of the ancient continent, which had made considerable progress in civilization.” The Mexicans and the Peruvians were not “entitled to rank with those nations which merit the name civilized.”¹¹

Another well-known historian of the mid-1700s, Cornelius de Pauw, wrote in his book Recherches Philosophiques sur les Americains (1769) that the so-called palace of the Mexican kings was no more than a hut. He criticized both Careri and Siguenza, calling into question their reports of a sophisticated calendar with intricate wheels that calculated astronomical cycles over many centuries. Such a scenario was completely unbelievable to him, and without further examination he asserted that astronomical observations of this sort were “incompatible with the prodigious ignorance of those people” who “did not have words enough to count to ten.”¹² This kind of prejudice has become woven into popular views of the native peoples of Mesoamerica such that even today we see rather loud echoes of it in movies like Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. The History Channel’s “2012: Decoding the Past, Mayan Doomsday Prophecy” of 2006 also insisted on emphasizing salacious scenarios of sacrifice and violence, and committed a completely false assertion that the ancient Maya predicted doomsday in 2012.

These attitudes are thought to be the expressions of common sense, raw honesty, or healthy skepticism. The sentiments of de Pauw are found repeated in various guises down through the centuries, putting the brakes on how deeply we might dare understand the genius of Native Americans. And the ingrained problem can be difficult to detect, because “it often omits critical facts about both American Indian and European history. The fact that it is frequently written by well-respected scholars and authorities makes it even more difficult to detect. Like a low- grade infection, it works below the level of awareness, affecting students from elementary school to graduate school.”¹³ Here are some things that American Indians were doing all on their own: metallurgy, brain surgery, plant breeding, medicinal healing, mathematics, astronomy, massive architecture, art, music, and poetry. The gist of the prejudice is to not allow the Maya and other Native Amercian groups the same level of intellectual ability and cultural sophistication as that attributed to Western cultures. The problem has been endemic in scholarship. In the evolving understanding of the 2012 topic over the last twenty-five years, I’ve often encountered echoes of this attitude, an underinformed prejudice masquerading as coolheaded rationalism.

Throughout the 1700s few explorers and writers commented on the wealth of culture buried under the political tumult that was Mexico. But then, in 1790, a potential breakthrough came, one that by its sheer size and magnificence just might make a difference. The Aztec Calendar Stone, also known as the Sunstone or Eagle Bowl, was found under Mexico City and hauled up into the light. Because of its immense size and central location, it was probably a primary icon in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan that was destroyed by Cortes two and a half centuries earlier. Mexico in the 1790s was still a colony of Spain, its independence not to be won until 1821. Mexican writer Antonio de Leon y Gama analyzed the symbolism of the Sunstone and with an impressive amount of careful research combined with insight he revealed it to be a depiction of the ancient Mexican calendar system. But more than that, it was the slam dunk that proved a level of genius previously considered ridiculous. The ancients clearly observed the cycles of the sun, moon, and planets, and had devised a sophisticated calendar system to track those movements.

Up through the revolution for independence that culminated in 1821, traveling to New Spain was quite rightly viewed as a dangerous undertaking. Revolutionary violence was everywhere in a chaotic environment of unrest, and foreigners were suspect. In 1822, just after the Mexican Independence, an Englishman named William Bullock traveled to Mexico, entering by the Gulf Coast port of Veracruz. It was a quick but effective trip. Returning to London, he published a popular book, Six Months’ Residence and Travels in Mexico, in 1825. Bullock was part of a new phase of interest in Mexico. Romantic poets such as Shelley and Keats were capturing the imaginations of Europeans in the 1810s and 1820s, and the romance of Mexican ruins was irresistible. The Mexican Independence promised a new era of stability for the region, which was appealing to foreign visitors, and to outsiders Mexico was starting to look more like a land of opportunity.

Interest in the mysteries of Mexico was building. William Prescott’s monumental History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) was a watershed work that made clear the scale of destruction exacted on the Aztec civilization by Cortes. A call to collect all the native documents of Mexico together in one place was expressed by von Humbolt, and a young Englishman named Edward King took up the challenge. Later known as Lord Kingsborough, he spent a fortune between 1831 and 1848 hiring lithographers and artists to copy and hand-color the original pictographic documents. When it was done, the massive nine-volume work was offered for a price equivalent to $3,500.

It was filled with commentaries in Latin, Hebrew, Greek, and Sanskrit supporting the idea, which Kingsborough had lifted from las Casas, that the Maya descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel. This idea became a point of theological doctrine for the Mormons, whose archaeologists have done impressive scientific work at early Maya sites in southern Mexico. Kingsborough’s obsession got him into trouble, as his lavishly produced volumes put him in debt. The handmade paper he had chosen for his opus were more than he could afford. Sadly, he died of typhus in a debtors’ prison in Ireland, a circumstance that caused the British Museum to purge his name from its catalog, listing Kingsborough’s work instead under the name of Aglio, his hired artist.

EXPLORERS AND LOST CITIES

Mexico was often accessed by travelers landing in Veracruz or Acapulco. But the Maya heartland lay far to the east, and the remnants of the ancient civilization of the Maya, more distantly remote in time than the Aztecs, were off the beaten path and had largely escaped the attention of travelers. Nevertheless, rumors of what lay hidden in the thick jungles of the east began reaching the ears of adventurers, including a colorful character named Count Waldeck.

Antonio Del Rio visited Palenque when it was very difficult to reach. He managed to publish his account in 1822, and to illustrate his book his London publisher hired a man named Jean-Frederic Maximilien de Waldeck. An artist, traveler, and womanizer, Waldeck was so intrigued with Del Rio’s story of a lost city in the jungles of Mexico that, at age fixty-six, he crossed the ocean to see it for himself. While insinuating himself into society circles in Mexico City, doing portraits while seeking funds for his expedition to Palenque, Waldeck claimed to have been close friends with Lord Byron and Marie Antoinette. Eventually, the self-described count spent an entire year in the village of Santo Domingo near Palenque, plus four months in a hut he built in the shadows of Palenque’s crumbling tower. Joining him during his tenure studying the ruins was a young mestizo woman who probably provided some incentive for staying in that sweltering, bug-infested place. In these inhospitable circumstances he produced some ninety drawings, striking in their artful execution but deceiving in their embellished details.

After Palenque he went to the sites of Yucatan and made more drawings, escaping to London when he found out that the local authorities thought he was a spy. His drawings narrowly avoided being seized. Discovering that government officials were suspicious of his activities, he quickly copied the entire lot of drawings and let them seize the copies, while the originals were safely hidden away. His ruse made further searches of his belongings unnecessary. With his pictographic booty in hand, he published a selection of twenty-one plates with a hundred pages of text, in which he elaborated his theory that Palenque was built by Chaldeans and Hindus. Considering that no one had any clue as to when the Maya cities were built and lived in, Waldeck’s estimate for Palenque’s demise (600 AD) was surprisingly accurate. His book was immensely pricey, some $1,500 apiece in today’s dollars, apparently intended for nobles and counts like himself. Waldeck had accomplished what he set out to do, and he did it in his characteristic roguish style. For all we know, descendants of Waldeck are living in Palenque’s environs today.

By the late 1830s, many explorers had crisscrossed Anahuac (Mexico), looking for and finding evidence of many layers of ancient civilizations and fragments of a lost calendar. But for most outsiders—Europeans as well as