equal, we all have dignity, we all deserve respect, we all deserve happiness; we all are useful and necessary to the growth of the country and to make a nation where we can live with respect among the different cultures.
The Prophecy says: “Those of the Center, with their mystical bird Quetzal, will unite the Eagle of the North with the Condor of the South; we will meet because we are one, like the fingers of the hand.” This prophecy means that the Indigenous People of the North and the Indigenous People of the South, through those of the Center, will come together to strengthen the recovery of the ancestral science; recovery of our identity, art, spirituality and Cosmo-vision on life and death that the different Cultures have….
According to the Maya Long Count Calendar, we are finalizing the 13 Baktun and 13 Ahau, thus approaching the YEAR ZERO. We are at the doorsteps of the ending of another period of the Sun, a period that lasts 5,200 years and ends with several hours of darkness. After this period of darkness there comes a new period of the Sun; it will be the 6th one. In each period of the Sun there is an adjustment for the planet and it brings changes in the weather conditions and in social and political life as well.
The world is transformed and we enter a period of understanding and harmonious coexistence where there is social justice and equality for all. It is a new way of life. With a new social order there comes a time of freedom where we can move like the clouds, without limitations, without borders. We will travel like the birds, without the need for passports. We will travel like the rivers, all heading towards the same point… the same objective. The Mayan prophecies are announcing a time of change. The Pop Wuj, the book of the Counsel, tells us, “It is time for dawn; let the dawn come, for the task to be finished.”21
Don Alejandro has emerged as a leading voice among the modern Maya, bridging political office and religious duties. As one can see, there are many ideas and some unfamiliar concepts presented in his narrative. In August of 2008 he was appointed Ambassador of the Native Peoples of Guatemala by President Cocom. In an irony that would have been impossible to conceive of in the 1980s, President Cocom himself had gone through the shrine initiations to become a day-keeper. It is not unheard of for “outsiders” to be initiated into the calendar tradition in this way. Barbara and Dennis Tedlock, for example, went through the process in the 1970s. And since there are five levels of day-keeper initiation, leading up to the highest “Mother-Father” position, the process continues and deepens over many years.
A curious prophecy of a Yucatec Maya man, recorded in 1930, seems to preserve a vague recollection of the timing of the end of the 13th Baktun:
I guess I’ll tell you the story of beautiful holy Lord for you to hear, because I have read the testament of beautiful holy Lord, where he says [that in] 2000 and a few more years it will end on earth. But if they have been very good Christians on earth, he will not end it….
He begins to diminish, beautiful holy Lord, His merciful grace [corn], the end of the road…. It is left, they are just looking one another in the face, no one is going to win the fight, hunger is going to win, truly.It ends, then, the fight like that. Hunger is going to finish it. Amidst that, whoever remembers there is a beautiful holy Lord, he makes a prayer in the cornfield, a harvest ceremony. Thus he makes it for beautiful holy Lord, He throws out blessings, beautiful holy Lord, there is corn in the fields.22
Jose Maria Tol Chan, a Quiche day-keeper from Chichicastenango, spoke in 2006 with Dr. Sitler about how he saw 2012:
It is an event that has already begun, there are already signs. If humans don’t correct our course in the face of these events we will be off-balance in the moment the event appears, a very strong event in comparison with what we have experienced. Humans more than ever should pay close attention to all the events that disturb balance. They are teachings that we living beings should extract from the stages through which we pass. It’s not that we are arriving at a zero hour in 2012, it’s already beginning. That is, just as in a day we begin at dawn, and as we approach noon the sun beats down harder; just as in the afternoon the forces of the sun start to calm down until experiencing night. In the passing of a day we experience degrees and effects of heat and at the same time we experience the energies that influence our lives. This date is the same way and I dare say that 12 years previous to 2012 we have been experiencing different stages of a sacred effect that can turn harmful if we lose human wisdom and there will be 12 years after in which the effects also will arrive. 2012 is just the high point of the story.23
Perhaps the best perspective is short and sweet:
As the elders said, everything is going to change. The world will be changed by that memorable date. Our children will have a different world view. The time will have passed and other beings will inhabit the universe.24
In 2007, Jim Reed and I were leading a group of twenty-two adventurers to Maya sites in Honduras and Guatemala. When we arrived at the important site of Tak’alik A’baj, a ceremony was taking place in front of Stela 5, led by a spiritual guide from Momostenengo named Rigoberto Itzep Chanchabac. Afterward we sat and talked briefly before our groups went their separate ways. He exuded the kind of humble integrity and depth of understanding that I’d seen before among the Maya day-keepers. We were told that the Maya “day-keepers” had decided that they would prefer to be called “spiritual guides.” A year after this fortuitous meeting Don Rigoberto was present, along with dozens of other Maya spiritual guides and their families, at a well-attended conference in Antigua, Guatemala, called “La Profecia 2012 Maya: El Amanacer de una Nueva Epoca.” It was organized and sponsored by my friends at the Jades, S.A., Museum and artisan factory, in coordination with the grand opening of their Museum of Maya Cosmology. Admission was free, and no moneymaking concessions were allowed. It was truly an effort to bring together many different voices in a noncommercial environment of oneness. It can be a challenge for Maya traditionalists and outsiders to come together and discuss what is fundamentally a Maya concept and tradition, the 2012 calendar, which many people from different backgrounds are writing and talking about.
The specific issues around the 2012 date are compounded by the fact that the Long Count was historically lost, although, as I’ve emphasized, cycle-ending traditions of renewal are very much alive and well. In the ideological mess that 2012 has become, opinionated assertions are mixed with spiritual truths and philosophical doctrines. Not least of the issues has been my reconstruction of the origins of the 2012 cosmology at Izapa. The modern Maya may find it unusual, strange, and even irrelevant to their concerns, even if it is true. My hope is that a space of reconciliation and unified vision can be achieved between my work and the leaders in the Maya renaissance. Beyond that small concern is the larger issue of the reconciliation of the Western and Indigenous minds. The value systems connected with these two mind-sets are in many ways diametrically opposed. I believe the pathway through to a healthy and sustainable future, for the world at large, is not for the indigenous mind to adapt itself to Western values. That results in the same problem of trying to fit the vast vision of ancient metaphysical wisdom into the small box of materialist science—it can’t work that way. The only way that unification can happen is for the Western paradigm to revive its own “indigenous” wisdom, which we could call “original mind” or even “buddhi mind.” In this regard I am inspired by the words of Don Rigoberto:
In a passage from the sacred book Pop Wuj, in one of the lines it says, “nor are they condemned by justice.” When it speaks and says this, they are making a prophecy that there was going to be a Western judgment against the Maya; this is a reality. Today the laws of the Americas are foreign to the Maya cosmovision. These laws are violating the legitimate rights of the Maya. Another interpretation enters in that the ideological power of the West in its entirety might expire forever in 2012. “As long as the sun walks, as long as there is light, our existence will never be lost.” Thus says the passage in the sacred Pop Wuj [
Don Rigoberto performed a ceremony on the final day of the conference in Antigua. We were to have an informal gathering to discuss issues pertaining to the conference. There had been an expression of some bad feeling around the Western appropriation of 2012, around big-money Hollywood movies, and around conferences excluding
