Doomsday Prophecy Untrue Say Mayans Ahead of 2012 Movie Release

It’s probably not the end of the world for 2012, the blockbuster disaster movie set to perpetuate the notion that – according to the Mayan Longcount Calendar – global destruction is pending in just over three years. Nobody really expects Hollywood to tell the truth, after all. But it certainly won’t do the picture’s credibility much good that members of the Maya community of South America, as well as various skeptical experts, have spoken out to make clear that they hold no such belief in doomsday’s imminent approach.

“I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff,” said Apolinario Chile Pixtun, a Mayan elder, speaking to Discovery News. He’s determined that the perceived end of the Mayan Longcount Calendar on December 21 2012 and the Armageddon it will seemingly herald is firmly a creation of western imagination, and has no rooting in Mayan beliefs.

Countless pop astronomers writing on websites and blogs propagate ideas ranging from the reversal of the planet’s magnetic field creating a solar flare equal to 100 million atomic bombs, to a giant rogue planet crashing into the earth. Other voices, from the New Age community, interpret the countdown as being one to a spiritual rebirth for mankind, and the dawn of a new era of peace and understanding, man.

Arriving with the dramatic tagline “We Were Warned,” 2012 – which is directed by Roland Emmerich, stars John Cusack, Woody Harrelson and Thandie Newton among others and is set for release on November 13 – is a big-budget move to cash-in on all the hysteria, in an orgy of CGI destruction (highlights will include a collapsing Vatican, Los Angeles being tipped into the sea and the USS John F. Kennedy smashing into the White House). It should be a fun watch, but one that falls well short of historical accuracy, according to various experts.

While a significant time period for the Mayans – who, at the peak of their civilization around 300 to 900 AD, were remarkably advanced astronomers – does end on or about December 21 2012, it’s a far from apocalyptic occurrence. On the contrary, it’s “a special anniversary of creation,” according to David Stuart, a specialist in Mayan epigraphy at the University of Texas at Austin, quoted on Discovery News. “The Maya never said the world is going to end,” he adds, “they never said anything bad would happen.”

Phil Plait, an astronomer who runs the Bad Astronomy blog, concurred. “They’re really super-duper trying to find anything astronomical they can to fit that date of 2012,” he said of the 2012 amateur hypothesisers.

Ann Martin, who runs the Curious About Astronomy? Ask an Astronomer website at Cornell University, points to examples of other doomsday prophecies that never were, such as the 1987 Harmonic Convergence, the Jupiter Effect and the turn of the millennium in 2000.

“No one who’s writing in now seems to remember that the last time we thought the world was going to end, it didn’t,” she says. “There doesn’t seem to be a lot of memory that things were fine the last time around.”

The modern Mayans, who live in the drought-stricken Yucatan peninsula, couldn't really care either way about the theory according to Jose Huchim, a Yucatan Mayan archaeologist. They’ve got much more pressing issues on their minds.

“If I went to some Mayan-speaking communities and asked people what is going to happen in 2012, they wouldn’t have any idea,” he said. “That the world is going to end? They wouldn’t believe you. We have real concerns these days, like rain.”

 

 

Here’s an extended sneak-preview of the 2012 movie, featuring some super-human limousine driving from John Cusack.

Maya Longcount Calendar picture by Glenn Harper. Some rights reserved.

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