[tt] [x-risk] The believers in 2012

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from "Hughes, James J." <James.Hughes at trincoll.edu>
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From: "Hughes, James J." <James.Hughes at trincoll.edu> Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2007
16:06:12 -0400 To: For discussion of existential risks
<existential at transhumanism.org> Subject: [x-risk] The believers in 2012
Reply-To: For discussion of existential risks <existential at transhumanism.org>

The New York Times

July 1, 2007

The Final Days

By BENJAMIN ANASTAS

Steven from Arizona - a caller on "Coast to Coast AM" late one night in
February - had slipped into a future reality and caught a glimpse of the
devastation that was coming when the supervolcano under Yellowstone erupted.
James in Omaha, on the other hand, was worried about the likelihood of a
magnetic pole shift, while Rod from Edmonton had recently spoken to a member
of the Canadian Parliament about the global-warming crisis and couldn't
believe what he had heard.

"We're coming to an end time beyond anything that anybody has ever imagined,"
Rod said with a trembling urgency. "The scientists right now, they're not
even studying the real causes. The Kyoto treaty and CO2 have nothing to do
with anything."

"Coast to Coast AM" is an overnight radio show devoted to what its weekday
host, George Noory, calls "the unusual mysteries of the world and the
universe." Broadcast out of Sherman Oaks, Calif., and carried nationwide on
more than 500 stations as well as the XM Radio satellite network, "Coast to
Coast AM" is by far the highest-rated radio program in the country once the
lights go out. The guest in the wee hours that February morning was Lawrence
E. Joseph, the author of "Apocalypse 2012" - billed as "a scientific
investigation into civilization's end" - and he came on the air to tell the
story of how the ancient Maya looked into the stars and predicted
catastrophic changes to the earth, all pegged to the end date of an
historical cycle on one of their calendars, Dec. 21, 2012.

"My motto tonight," Noory intoned at the beginning of the program, "is be
prepared, not scared." What followed was a graphic recitation of disaster
scenarios for 2012, including hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions
caused by solar storms, cracks forming in the earth's magnetic field and mass
extinctions brought on by nuclear winter. The only hopeful note of the night
was struck when an unnamed caller asked Joseph what he thought about recent
Virgin Mary apparitions in Bosnia.

"I love it," the author answered. "That's positive. You don't need to be a
devout Christian to admire the Virgin Mary. She's a blessing to us all."

When I reached Noory by phone at his program's studio in California, he told
me, "I'm a staunch believer that we are in an earth cycle." As 2012
approaches, "Coast to Coast" has been devoting more and more programming to
prophecies of doom and the signs and wonders that are thought to be
harbingers of the coming end time: U.F.O. sightings, crop-circle formations,
disappearing honeybees and flocks of migratory birds that fall from the sky.
"There's no question the planet is changing," Noory said. "And the fact that
the Mayans had an end date and their history talks of change, I find that
fascinating."

But it isn't just on the lower frequencies, late at night, where people are
waiting on the Mayan apocalypse. Daniel Pinchbeck, author of the
alternative-culture best seller "2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl" - and a
guest on "Coast to Coast AM" - has introduced a young and savvy audience to
the school of millenarian thinking that has gathered around Mayan calendrics.
To do so, he has employed viral marketing and a tireless schedule of public
appearances at bookstores, art spaces, yoga studios and electronic-music
festivals. When Pinchbeck appeared on "The Colbert Report" last December to
promote his book, the host confronted him in front of a life-size manger
scene: "You have been called a new Timothy Leary. Why do we need another one
of those?"

Over breakfast at Cafe Gitane in Manhattan, Pinchbeck told me recently that
"there's a growing realization that materialism and the rational, empirical
worldview that comes with it has reached its expiration date." A youthful 41,
with long, drooping hair and heavy-framed designer eyewear, Pinchbeck exudes
a languid fervency that is equal parts Jesuit and Jim Morrison. His
BlackBerry sat face up on the table, the screen dark, beside his bowl of
organic fruit, yogurt and granola. "Apocalypse literally means uncovering or
revealing," Pinchbeck went on, "and I think the process is already under way.
We're on the verge of transitioning to a dispensation of consciousness that's
more intuitive, mystical and shamanic."

Far from its origins, divorced from its context and enlisted in a prophetic
project that it may never have been designed to fulfill, the Mayan calendar
is at the center of an escalating cultural phenomenon - with New Age roots -
that unites numinous dreams of societal transformation with the darker tropes
of biblical cataclysm. To some, 2012 will bring the end of time; to others,
it carries the promise of a new beginning; to still others, 2012 provides an
explanation for troubling new realities - environmental change, for example -
that seem beyond the control of our technology and impervious to reason. Just
in time for the final five-year countdown, the Mayan apocalypse has come of
age.

Light and darkness - heavenly forces and a corrupted earth - are the twin
engines of apocalyptic movements. For Christians awaiting rapture or Shiites
counting the days until the Twelfth Imam appears, the trials and injustices
of the known world are a prelude for the paradise that we can imagine but
can't yet achieve. Judging by the sheer number of predicted end dates that
have come and gone without the trumpets blowing and angels rushing in, we are
a people impatient to see our world redeemed through catastrophe - and we are
always wrong. Gnostics predicted the imminent arrival of God's kingdom as
early as the first century; Christians in Europe attacked pagan territories
in the north to prepare for the end of the world at the first millennium; the
Shakers believed the world would end in 1792; there was a "Great
Disappointment" among followers of the Baptist preacher William Miller when
Jesus did not return to upstate New York on Oct. 22, 1844. The Jehovah's
Witnesses have been especially prodigious with prophetic end dates: 1914,
1915, 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, 1975 and 1994. Any religious movement with an
end-time prophecy is certain to attract followers, no matter how maniacal or
fringy (witness the Branch Davidians). For those who want to go online and
get the latest tally of bad news, there is a nuclear Doomsday Clock and the
Rapture Index. If you remember living through Y2K, that was another
millenarian moment - except our computer systems were redeemed by the same
code writers who corrupted them in the first place.

Who dreams of the apocalypse? Why do they dream of it? Polls indicate that up
to 50 percent of Americans believe that the Book of Revelation is a true,
prophetic document, meaning they fully expect the predictions of "Rapture,"
"Tribulation" and "Armageddon" to be fulfilled. There is a paradox built into
end-time theologies in that imminent catastrophe often brings comfort;
according to Paul S. Boyer, an authority on prophecy belief in American
culture and an emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin
at Madison, the apocalypse is an appealing idea because it promises salvation
to a select group - all of whom share secret knowledge - and a world redeemed
and delivered from evil. "The Utopian dream is a big part of the Western
tradition," Boyer told me, "both the religious and secular forms. But the
wicked have to be destroyed and evil has to be overcome for the era of
righteousness to dawn." This is as true in the New Age as much as in any
other one. Rumors of global crisis, the distrust of institutional authority,
the ready availability of esoteric lore, the existence of individuals drawn
to abstruse numerical schemes, the urge to assuage anxieties with dreams of
social transformation - wherever these elements exist, apocalyptic thinking
is likely to flourish.

The year 2012 first entered the public consciousness two decades ago this
August with the Harmonic Convergence organized by José Arguelles, the author
of a number of esoteric books about the Mayan cosmos and his experiences with
telepathically received prophecies. With a penchant for promotion going back
to the first Whole Earth Festival in 1970, which he organized, Arguelles
promoted the convergence as an earth-changing event requiring 144,000
participants - the number echoed Mayan mathematics and the Book of Revelation
- to free the planet from the dissonant influence of Western science and
synchronize with the "wave harmonic of history" set to culminate in 2012.
Mayan civilization, to Arguelles, was not entirely Mayan: It was originally a
"terrestrial project" managed by a race of "galactic masters" from "star
bases." He saw the convergence as a stage, ordained by prophecy, in a march
to the end foreseen by the ancient calendar makers: "Somewhere in that far
and distant time, when armies clashed with metal and chemicals released the
fire of the Sun, the wonder of Maya would burst again, releasing the mystery
and showing the way that marks return among the patterns of the stars."

Large crowds, some perhaps oblivious to the apocalyptic undertones of the
event, did end up gathering at "focus locations" around the world -
Stonehenge, Mount Shasta and Bolinas in California, even Central Park - and
extensive media coverage of the meditating and dancing masses lent Arguelles
and his project an eccentric authority. The New Age had discovered its own
eschatology - with a mysterious, mythical people the controlling intelligence
- and 2012 joined the lexicon of "energies," transcendental meditation and
crystals. By 1991 Arguelles was popularizing his own calendric system, which
he branded Dreamspell, as a corrective to our mechanized time (dismissed, in
mathematical shorthand, as "12:60," the ratio of solar months to minutes in
an hour). Inspired by the tzolk'in, the 260-day prophetic calendar utilized
by the ancient Maya and common throughout Mesoamerica, Dreamspell functions
as a daily oracle, replacing linear time with a "loom of resonances" that
users navigate with a "galactic signature" based on the day of their birth.
More than just an astrological sign, this signature is a tool for meditation
and, as the latest edition of Arguelles's calendar promises, "your password
in fourth-dimensional time."

Arguelles, under the aegis of his fief, the Foundation for the Law of Time,
has lobbied tirelessly for the universal adoption of his calendar - now
called the 13-Moon 28-day Calendar - by posting communiqués on the Web and
arranging audiences with Mayan elders and members of the Vatican. Lately he
has been designing large-scale telepathic experiments in conjunction with a
Russian laboratory in Novosibirsk and other groups affiliated with his Planet
Art Network.

"The post-2012 world will be a world of universal telepathy," Arguelles wrote
me recently from New Zealand, where he has gone to prepare for the
transition. Since 1993, when he claims to have received a new prophecy in
Hawaii, he has been calling himself Valum Votan, Closer of the Cycle. "We'll
be literally living in a new time," Arguelles said, "by a 13-month, 28-day
synchronometer that will facilitate our telepathy by keeping us in harmony
with everything all the time. There will be a lot fewer of us, with simple
lifestyles, solar technology, garden culture and lots of telepathic
communication." As for the many who "have not evolved spiritually enough to
know that there are other dimensions of reality," Arguelles predicts they
will be taken away in "silver ships."

With Arguelles drifting into even more occult realms - his last book, "Time
and the Technosphere," spun elaborate new theories around 9/11 - he has been
supplanted in the New Age conversation by the next generation of
Mayan-calendar mystics with their own theories about the coming transition.
This new generation does not typically think that space aliens guided the
Maya and prides itself on its reverence for Mayan culture and tradition. Carl
Johan Calleman, author of "The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of
Consciousness," is a former cancer researcher from Sweden whose calculations
have led him to a controversial end date of his own devising: Oct. 28, 2011.
As Arguelles's closest spiritual heir in the Mayan-calendar movement,
Calleman has been active in promoting a regular mass-meditation event called
the Breakthrough Celebration and other more focused projects including the
Jerusalem Hug, which gathered 5,000 people around the walls of the Old City
on May 21 to harness constructive energies and create a "cascade of peace."

While his interest in 2012 is not exclusively focused on the Mayan calendar,
Chet Snow - a past-lives regression therapist and author from Sedona, Ariz. -
tracks the impending consciousness shift on his Mass Dreams Newsletter,
organizes annual crop-circle and sacred-site tours and gathers the disparate
camps of the 2012 movement together for conferences devoted to ancient
mysteries and the paranormal.

When I asked Snow why he thought people were turning to alternative ideas and
explanations like the ones espoused at his conferences, he told me the answer
was a simple one. "The pillars of our expectations about the future in the
West have started to crumble," he said. "Religion, politics and economics -
none of it is working any more. So when you hear about the ancient Maya and
this changeover in 2012 involving solar cycles and astronomical events, you
say, 'Huh, maybe I need to connect with that.' "

If the Mayan calendar seems like an unlikely timing device for our salvation
- whether it arrives through global catastrophe or telepathic rainbow around
the earth - its animating role in the 2012 phenomenon is entirely consistent
with popular notions of the "mysterious" Maya that have persisted for over a
century. The Maya were just one of the peoples to thrive in Mesoamerica
before the Spanish conquest of the 16th century, but the civilization's
florescence - spanning the period called the Maya Classic, between 300 and
900 A.D. - was especially bright and spectacular. After growing into a loose
confederation of rival city-states that spread across the Yucatan peninsula
and extended as far as Chiapas in the west and Honduras in the east, the
Mayan civilization fell into a rolling decline that ended with the almost
complete abandonment of their cities. The so-called Mayan collapse is a
continued source of speculation and a major reason why the Maya have captured
the imagination of 19th-century travelers, 20th-century archaeologists and
generations of popular fantasists who have connected the Maya to everything
from intergalactic colonies to the lost island of Atlantis to Teutonic gods
from fire-breathing spaceships. The Mayan sites attract small armies of New
Age pilgrims every year, hoping to plug into a stone socket of timeless
indigenous wisdom; tens of thousands gather for the spring equinox at Chichén
Itzá alone to watch the shadow of a snake slither down the steps of the
Temple of Kukulcin.

In the introduction to his book "Maya Cosmogenesis 2012: The True Meaning of
the Maya Calendar End Date," John Major Jenkins describes his first visit to
Tikal, the vast ruin in the Guatemalan rain forest that thrived as an urban
center at the pinnacle of Mayan civilization. Jenkins, perhaps the most lucid
figure in the subculture of 2012 prophets, writes of the "bone-jarring
16-hour bus ride on muddy and dangerous roads" that carried him to a
"sprawling former metropolis" of pyramids, palaces, residences, ball-courts
and scores of engraved monumental stones, or stelae, decorated with
intricate, otherworldly images and hieroglyphs.

"Sitting on the stone steps of the Central Acropolis," Jenkins recalls, "I
looked around me at the towering sentinels of stone, their upper platforms
stretching above the jungle canopy like altars to the stars, and I listened
carefully to the wind whisper messages of a far-off time, and of another
world."

Jenkins wasn't the first 22-year-old traveler with spiritual yearnings to
encounter the sublime at a Mayan archaeological site, but he is one of the
few who has found a life's vocation in the process. As harmonically as
Jenkins was struck in Guatemala by the larger mysteries of the Maya, however,
it was the calendar that really seized him - specifically the fact that there
were Maya living in the highlands who still followed the same day count as
their distant ancestors. (A common misconception is that the Maya
"disappeared" when their cities emptied; there are six million Maya currently
living in the states of Central America, a number far larger than population
estimates of Mayan civilization during the Classic period.)

"Here was an unbroken tradition," Jenkins told me when I went to visit him at
his home in Windsor, Colo., one afternoon in late March. We sat in a pair of
lawn chairs in the backyard while a neighbor passed back and forth on a noisy
tractor. "It's a lineage going back 2,000 years," he said, oblivious to the
racket. Jenkins, now 43, is difficult to distract when talking about the
Mayan calendar and 2012. After years of working as a software engineer to
support his research and writing books and papers in his spare time, 2012 is
now Jenkins' full-time job. Influenced by the work of the pioneering
psychedelic writer Terence McKenna - whose Timewave Zero system, based on
computer analysis of the I Ching, also shows history to be culminating on
Dec. 21, 2012 - Jenkins argues that ancient Maya "calendar priests" were able
to chart a 26,000-year astronomical cycle called "the precession of the
equinoxes" with the naked eye. He fixed the 2012 end date to coincide with a
"galactic alignment" of the winter-solstice sun and the axis that modern
astonomers draw to bisect the Milky Way, called the galactic equator.

In the alchemical tradition, Jenkins notes, eclipses signify the
"transcending of the opposites." During the period around 2012, Jenkins says,
the galaxy will provide the opportunity for the rebirth of creation and a
reconciliation of "infinity and finitude, time and eternity." The Maya knew
it, and just like an alarm clock, they set their calendar to coincide with
the occasion.

Jenkins and his fellow travelers in the 2012 movement have chosen a
particularly arcane source of secret knowledge in Mayan calendrics. The Maya
calendar keepers are known to have charted the cycles of the moon, the sun,
Mars and Venus with an accuracy that wouldn't be duplicated until the modern
era. Like most premodern societies, the Maya conceived of history not as the
linear passage of time but as a series of cycles - they called them "world
age cycles" - that would repeat over and over. To capture these cycles, the
Maya employed what scholars call the long-count calendar, a five-unit
computational system extending forward and backward from their mythical
creation day, which is calculated to have fallen on either Aug. 11, 3114 B.C.
or Aug. 13, 3114 B.C. All the current hoopla is due to the mathematical fact
that the current world-age cycle on the long count, which began in Aug. 3114
B.C., is about to reach its end, 5,126 years later, on a date given in
scholarly notation as 13.0.0.0.0 - which falls, not quite exactly, on Dec.
21, 2012. Enter the apocalypse.

I asked Jenkins how he viewed the passing of one world-age cycle into another
in December 2012, and he paused. It was a little bit like asking a
seismologist what he thinks about earthquakes. As much as Jenkins has made a
place for himself in the 2012 discussion through his independent research on
the Maya and precession, he has made an even greater impact by applying
academic rigor to the theories of his contemporaries and exposing, in his
books and on an extensive Web site, their inconsistencies with established
Mayanist scholarship. Jenkins was the first to reveal a major flaw in the
synchronization between Arguelles's Dreamspell and the Mayan day count, and
he has been involved in an extensive, long-distance feud with Calleman since
2001 over their differing approaches to interpreting the Maya and over
Calleman's belief that the end time will be in 2011, not 2012. When I first
spoke to Jenkins on the phone, he told me, "I think of myself as leading the
charge for clarity and discernment."

"2012 is such a profound archetype," Jenkins went on. "Here we are five and a
half years before the date, and already there's so much interest. Personally,
I think it's about transformation and renewal. It's certainly nothing as
simplistic as the end of the world."

But what about the connection many people see between the approach of 2012
and environmental crisis? I asked. What about the popular link between the
Maya and end-time prophecy?

"A lot of people are talking about apocalypse right now," he said, "but
there's a deeper meditation that can and should happen around the end date."
Jenkins - bearded, in a T-shirt and jeans - is originally from Chicago, and
traces of a flat Midwestern accent remain in his voice. He looked and sounded
beleaguered by the mention of apocalypse. "At any end-beginning nexus - at
the dawn of a new religion or a spiritual tradition - you have this amazing
opening," he said. "Revelations come down. There's a fresh awareness of what
it means to be alive in the full light of history."

To scholars monitoring the 2012 movement from their posts in academia - and
some do - this latter-day apotheosis of the Mayan calendar is a source of
frustration and an opportunity for deeper reflection. Or sometimes, just an
opportunity. Anthony Aveni, an archeoastronomer and professor at Colgate, has
a history with 2012 going back to the Harmonic Convergence, when he was
interviewed on CNN to provide some perspective. "I got an offer from a
literary agent to represent me the same day," he told me. "So I'm grateful to
José Arguelles for that."

Aveni is critical of Jenkins's approach and his galactic-alignment theory. "I
defy anyone to look up into the sky and see the galactic equator," he said.
"You need a radio telescope for that, and they were not known anywhere in the
world that I've heard of until the 1930s." The real question, to him, is how
an obscure, culturally circumscribed issue like the end date of one Mayan
long-count cycle could manage to gain such traction in the wider world.

"Jenkins and Calleman and Arguelles are the Gnostics of our time," Aveni
said. "They're seeking higher knowledge. They look for knowledge framed in
mystery. And there aren't many mysteries left, because science has decoded
most of them."

John Hoopes, an archaeologist at the University of Kansas, is more
complimentary of Jenkins's research, even if he doubts the validity of his
major conclusions, including the galactic-alignment theory. "John Jenkins has
done his homework on the ancient Maya," he told me, "and he's thought about
their culture a great deal. Arguelles and Calleman largely disregard what we
know the Maya believed." Still, like most Mayan experts, Hoopes is not
convinced that the Maya would have considered the end of a world cycle to be
an apocalyptic event; one cycle could be subsumed into the next without a
hiccup in the system, let alone a rupture in the count of days.

In the wider discussion around 2012, Hoopes sees a parallel to the debate
going on in Kansas about teaching evolution and intelligent design in the
public schools. It is an issue he takes so seriously that he has included the
2012 phenomenon in a course he developed called "Archaeological Myths and
Realities," which explores how science and history are manipulated to serve a
religious or political agenda. Other examples include Nazi archaeology and
the recently heralded ancient "pyramids" in Bosnia. Referrring to occult
interpretations of the Maya, he says: "What's interesting is how this fosters
community in the New Age movement, and elsewhere, the same way that the
anti-evolutionists have coalesced around intelligent design. I've started
using the terms 'religious right' and 'spiritual left.' "

Toward the end of my visit with Jenkins in Colorado, we drove from his home
in Windsor to Denver - about 50 miles south - to meet his wife, Ellen, for
dinner and a screening of "2012: The Odyssey," a documentary that Jenkins
appears in along with José Arguelles and other authorities on 2012. Jenkins
had written me a long, discouraged e-mail message that morning about an item
he found on an academic message board, linking to an article about 2012 from
USA Today. The article included a description of Jenkins's galactic-alignment
theory without citing him as the source, and to make matters worse, the
scholar who posted the link quoted a description of the galactic alignment
and asked, "Anyone want to speculate about what this means?"

To Jenkins, it was further confirmation that his work is generally ignored
inside a scholarly community that he has looked to for guidance and cited
tirelessly in defense of the "authentic" Mayan tradition. He told me, as we
drove past new housing developments going up where pastures had once been,
that he had gone to conferences to meet the most important Mayanists and had
been sending out papers and links to his Web site to selected scholars for
years, but his attempts at making contact were usually ignored.

"When you fund your own trip to do fieldwork by putting it on MasterCard," he
said, "and then they really don't want to engage in a discussion with you,
it's kind of like ... wrong universe, I guess."

I asked him if he thought this might have something to do with some of his
more speculative theories, like his assertion that the Maya had practiced
pranayama - yogic deep breathing - based on the posture of Maya kings in
certain paintings and carvings, which appears similar to full lotus.

"It's the assemblage of evidence that leads to my reading," he insisted.
"It's not magically projecting something onto the images. But ultimately
there is some guesswork involved. How often can you be 100 percent sure of
anything?"

By the time we drove up to the Oriental Theater in the Berkeley Highlands
section of Denver, his spirits had lifted again. The Oriental is a handsome,
Persian-themed theater from the 1920s that has recently been refurbished
after a long decline; it retains elements of both the glamour of its distant
past and the seediness left over from its middle age as an adult theater. Now
the Oriental is an arts center with a regular schedule of film screenings and
live entertainment.

"Look at that," Jenkins said with a gesture at the marquee, making sure that
I saw the big "2012" in black numerals.

While Jenkins mingled with the early arrivals inside the lobby, I sat at a
cafe table with his wife, a social worker at a hospital in Boulder, and Gina
Kissell, director of the Metaphysical Research Society, a local group that
offers workshops and programs in comparative religion and spirituality. The
society was a sponsor of the screening that night, and Kissell, an ebullient
woman in a sequined top, was thrilled about the turnout. I asked her about
2012 and what it meant to her, and she started in without hesitating:

"To me it's all about a movement toward enlightenment. We say compassion over
competition. This whole shift in consciousness is going to wipe away
everything negative. Armageddon isn't what it used to be, you know?" Kissell
told me that she had recently tried spending 21 days without having a
negative thought: "It's really hard! I tried, but I didn't make it through
the second week."

Inside the theater, it was a festive scene. The seating sections were all
full except for the balcony; a pair of waitresses roamed the aisles taking
drink and sandwich orders (the Oriental has a full bar and panini menu); and
the crowd presented a mix of the buttoned-down and the Bohemian, trending
toward the tattooed and pierced. Ellen flashed me a proud look when Jenkins
climbed onstage to give an introduction, and he was met with a lively burst
of applause. Dressed in a well-worn jacket over a faded T-shirt, he could
have been a professor who never quite recovered from his graduate-school
years. Jenkins started by giving a primer of his theory about the galactic
alignment and how the ancient Maya had calibrated their long-count calendar
to coincide with this rare and transformative astronomical event. He shared
his belief, reflected in the mantra "As above, so below," that our lives are
influenced by larger forces in the universe and that the Mayan sky watchers
had used their sacred science to read the stars and divine creation's deepest
secrets. These same secrets can be ours, according to Jenkins's theory, if we
cup a hand to one ear, raise it to the sky and listen.

"A lot of people ask me if the world is going to end in 2012," he said, "and
I've come up with the best way to address that. The short answer is yes. The
long answer is no."

Writing in the forward to Jenkins's "Maya Cosmogenesis 2012," Terrence
McKenna proffers that "we, by choice or design, actually live in the end time
anticipated by the ancient Maya shaman-prophets. Their bones and their
civilization have long since gone into the Gaian womb that claims all the
children of time. Indeed, their cities were ghostly necropoleis by the time
the Spanish conquerors first gazed upon them, 500 years ago. Yet it was our
time that fascinated the Maya, and it was toward our time that they cast
their ecstatic gaze, though it lay more than two millennia in the future at
the time the first long-count dates were recorded."

It is a splendid, human-size dream, that an ancient people revered for
unearthly wisdom could climb aboard a calendar ship and redeem us from our
troubled world and the confines of our vexing natures. Dec. 21, 2012, is
already here - long before the date arrives - and perhaps it has always been.
End dates are not the stuff of fantasy, after all; each and every one of us
has a terminal appointment inscribed in our calendars. And the end might just
arrive sooner. Perhaps that is why we need to imagine a supernatural force
with one eye on a ticking clock, waiting to make everything new again.

It is the Maya who bring us apocalypse this time, and when the next one comes
- well, we'll just have to wait and see if the world is still here.

Benjamin Anastas, a novelist, previously wrote for the magazine about
Pentecostals.

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