Posts Tagged ‘Calendrics’

Legend of 2012

Tuesday, January 24, 2012 14:33 - 4 Comments

Maya Elders and Emergent-Culture.com Agree on Key Tenets of the 2012 – Mayan Calendar Mythos

So what do the present day Maya have to say about 2012? Enclosed are excerpts from an article published in 2003, but it’s being recirculated in light of December 21st, 2012′s proximity. I read it for the first time at the start of this new year. The well known Maya elder and spiritual leader Carlos Barrios is featured in the article.

The article starts out with a defensive posture. That is an understandable position given the fast and loose treatment many authors have given the Maya culture and their misunderstood and misrepresented calendrical science. The Maya’s culture has been vulgarized by those looking to capitalize on their poorly understood, yet sensationalized calendrical system. We’ve all heard the term “Mayan prophecies” yet none exist. The fallacy of the Mayan Prophecies is so pervasive that even Mr. Barrios mentions the phrase without naming a single one.

Mr. Barrios is enthnocentric in his defense by claiming that only the Maya people are capable of understanding Maya calendrics. I have argued that if the Maya did indeed discover something about our natural world then it is a scientific discovery. That would make it a universally valid body of knowledge available to anybody who wishes to investigate it and not the special province of the ethnic group who discovered it.

Mr. Barrios speaks of the many conflicting views and interpretations of the Maya calendrical system that have arisen as the result of careless scholarship. I have acknowledged that situation and I have proposed that if Maya Meso-American calendrical researchers wish to be taken seriously by the world’s intelligentsia then they must work to translate it into an intelligible and testable format. Otherwise it will remain in the realm of the superstitious or worse yet, end up as just another New Age astrological system on par with newspaper horoscope readings.

I am pleased to report that key tenets of my assessment on the 2012 – Maya Calendar (2012-MC) mythos are validated by the two Maya elders referenced in this article. Mr. Barrios mixes tangible present day world scenarios with some of his own mysticism. The excerpts I’ve included are limited to his concrete commentaries on what anybody can self-validate. The entire article may be read here.

My comments are interspersed and in italics among the excerpts. Key words-phrases used by the Maya Elders and also found in my most recent article on the nature of 2012 – MC are in bold.

What the Mayan Elders are Saying About 2012 by Carlos Barrios

Carlos Barrios is a Mayan priest, historian, anthropologist, researcher, and an expert in the Sacred Maya Calendar. Carlos was born in Guatemala. After studying with traditional elders for 25 years he became a Mayan Ajq’ij, a ceremonial priest, shaman, and spiritual guide and member of the ‘World Council of Mayan Elders.

Carlos initiated an investigation into the different Mayan calendars circulating. Carlos along with his brother Gerardo studied with many teachers and interviewed nearly 600 traditional Mayan elders to widen their scope of knowledge. Carlos found out quickly there were several conflicting interpretations of Mayan hieroglyphs, petroglyphs, Sacred Books of ‘Chilam Balam’ and various ancient text. Carlos found some strong words for those who may have contributed to the confusion:

Carlos Barrios: “Anthropologists visit the temple sites and read the inscriptions and make up stories about the Maya, but they do not read the signs correctly. It’s just their imagination. Other people write about prophecy in the name of the Maya. They say that the world will end in December 2012. The Mayan elders are angry with this. The world will not end. It will be transformed.”

The hope is that the meme of transformation spreads to as many people as possible. The world will only be transformed if enough people lend themselves to this task. Mr. Barrios seems to imply that the transformation will occur on December 21st, 2012. The transformation has been afoot for some time already, but the process of transforming imperial civilization into a sane planetary culture is a work of indeterminate length. December 21st, 2012 marks only the formal end of the Maya Long Count Cycle and it has the potential to be a mega-historic event in terms of a ritualized mass social observance with planetary scaled sociocultural implications.

“We are no longer in the World of the Fourth Sun, but we are not yet in the World of the Fifth Sun. This is the time in-between, the time of transition. As we pass through transition there is a colossal, global convergence of environmental destruction, social chaos, war, and ongoing Earth Changes.”

The Myth of the Fifth Sun is derived from an Aztec creation story that says that the world has been created and destroyed 4 times and that we are presently in the 5th Sun or world. But Mr. Barrios says we are in the 4th sun going into the 5th. The most widely accepted version of the Aztec creation myth is that we are in the 5th Sun. The Aztec creation myth is a clear reference to a cycle of some sort, but it is unclear as to how long each creation cycle is? Each creation cycle starts with one of the Tzolkin calendar’s 20 archetypal signs, but again we don’t have a reference to a specific time period(s).

Whatever the case we needn’t interpret the creation myth in literal terms. The most important cycle to the Aztecs was the 52 year cycle. And they did indeed observe each transition with rituals symbolic of destruction and subsequent regeneration. In many cases they do go so far as to destroy and rebuild significant temples. Interestingly the Aztecs were not tracking the Maya Long Count cycle that ends on December 21st, 2012. So it is very curious to see Mr. Barrios mixing uncomplementary aspects of Aztec and Maya calendrics. He acknowledges the woeful human-planetary condition as a sign that we have reached some sort of potential turning point. “Earth changes” is a popular term used among the New Age community as a reference to changes supposedly consistent with the age of transformation. Currently any cataclysmic event is considered as an “earth change” event even if such events have been present since time immemorial.

He continues: “Humanity will continue, but in a different way. Material structures will change. From this we will have the opportunity to be more human. We are living in the most important era of the Mayan calendars and prophecies. All the prophecies of the world, all the traditions are converging now. There is no time for games. The spiritual ideal of this era is action.”

Here we have his reference to “prophecies” and as always the case the authors fail to mention what they are or at least where we may find them. I pointed out in my last article that the ancient Mesoamericans were not in the practice of issuing prophecies because they didn’t need to nor can anybody know the specifics of what will happen in the future. I wrote that ‘Implicit in the closing of a cycle is the notion of transition. Transition implies the extraordinary changes that concur with such times” His mention of the “spiritual idea of the time as action” corresponds to my proposal to encourage people to realize events in honor of the zeitgiest or spirit of the times and with the specific intent to…

Carlos tells us: “The indigenous have the calendars and know how to accurately interpret it — not others. The Mayan Calendars comprehension of time, seasons, and cycles has proven itself to be vast and sophisticated. The Maya understand 17 different calendars such as the Tzolk’in or Cholq’ij, some of them charting time accurately over a span of more than ten million years.

The date specified in the calendar Winter Solstice in the year 2012 does not mark the end of the world. Many outside people writing about the Mayan calendar sensationalize this date, but they do not know. The ones who know are the indigenous elders who are entrusted with keeping the tradition.

In the preceding passage we get a whiff of Mr. Barrios’ claim to special insider privilege when it comes to understanding Maya calendrics.

“All was predicted by the mathematical cycles of the Mayan calendars. — It will change –everything will change. Mayan Day-keepers view the Dec. 21, 2012 date as a rebirth, the start of the World of the Fifth Sun. It will be the start of a new era resulting from and signified by the solar meridian crossing the galactic equator and the Earth aligning itself with the center of the galaxy.”At sunrise on December 21, 2012 for the first time in 26,000 years the Sun rises to conjunct the intersection of the Milky Way and the plane of the ecliptic. This cosmic cross is considered to be an embodiment of the Sacred Tree, The Tree of Life, a tree remembered in all the world’s spiritual traditions.

Again we have the assertion that “all was predicted yet no specifics” and that “everything will change”. My assessment concurs with the traditional Maya view that cyclical renewal is akin to metaphorical rebirth. His views about the galactic alignment are also in accord with astronomical actualities. Except for the fact that the precessional cycle is actually 25,770.1 years long and if he were holding true to Maya calendrical knowledge then would have used the Maya measure of 26,000 tun cycles or the equivalent of 25,627 years.

If the people of the Earth can get to this 2012 date in good shape without having destroyed too much of the Earth, we will rise to a new, higher level. But to get there we must transform enormously powerful forces that seek to block the way.”

He is speaking about the owner-operators of the Current World System (CWS). We can’t change the owner-operators of the CWS, but we can simultaneously and gradually dismantle and transform the CWS.

Carlos tells us: “The economy now is a fiction. The first five-year stretch of transition from August 1987 to August 1992 was the beginning of the destruction of the material world. We have progressed ten years deeper into the transition phase by now, and many of the so-called sources of financial stability are in fact hollow. The banks are weak. This is a delicate moment for them. They could crash globally, if we don’t pay attention. Now, people are paying attention.”

Mr. Barrios assessment of the perilous state economic system is on par with what most non-govcorp economists are saying, but he said it 5 years before the system began to cave in. His article was first published in 2003 and the global economic system didn’t begin to wobble until 2007-08.

The North and South Poles are both breaking up. The level of the water in the oceans is going to rise. But at the same time land in the ocean, especially near Cuba, is also going to rise. Carlos tells a story about the most recent Mayan New Year ceremonies in Guatemala. He said that one respected Mam elder, who lives all year in a solitary mountain cave, journeyed to Chichicastenango to speak with the people at the ceremony. The elder delivered a simple, direct message. He called for human beings to come together in support of life and light.

To what extent the poles will melt is uncertain. With respect to Cuba, well land does not just rise out of the ocean unless an undersea volcano is growing. There are currently no active undersea volcanoes in the area he mentions. The other elders call for large scale collective action mirrors my own calls here and here.

“Right now each person and group is going his or her own way. The elder of the mountains said there is hope if the people of the light can come together and unite in some way. We live in a world of polarity — day and night, man and woman, positive and negative. Light and darkness need each other. They are a balance.” “Just now the dark side is very strong, and very clear about what they want. They have their vision and their priorities clearly held, and also their hierarchy. They are working in many ways so that we will be unable to connect with the spiral Fifth World in 2012.”

Govcorp does indeed recognize that the CWS has reached some sort of transitional phase, but their vision of a new world order is more of the same under a new guise. Please see The World Economic and Geo-Political Game Plan Unveiled.

“On the light side everyone thinks they are the most important, that their own understandings, or their group’s understandings, are the key. There’s a diversity of cultures and opinions, so there is competition, diffusion, and no single focus.” “We need to work together for peace, and balance with the other side. We need to take care of the Earth that feeds and shelters us. We need to put our entire mind and heart into pursuing unity and unity now, to confront the other side and preserve life.”

“We are disturbed — we can’t play anymore. Our planet can be renewed or ravaged. Now is the time to awaken and take action. Everyone is needed. You are not here for no reason. Everyone who is here now has an important purpose. This is a hard but a special time. We have the opportunity for growth, but we must be ready for this moment in history.”

Carlos says: “The prophesied changes are going to happen, but our attitude and actions determine how harsh or mild they are. We need to act, to make changes, and to elect people to represent us who understand and who will take political action to respect the Earth.” Carlos reminds us this is a crucially important moment for humanity and for Earth. Each person is important. [Read more at Seri Worldwide]

We do indeed need to find the common ground because the many facets of the emergent culture will achieve relatively little in our currently fragmented state.