by Michael Abedin

The ancient Mayans were a mysterious people, the creators of a complex civilization in the jungles of Mexico and Central America. They built huge pyramids and city-states linked by a network of ceremonial roads, and did it all without any apparent use of the wheel or domestic animals.

At the peak of their civilization, they seem to have just vanished-- disappeared virtually overnight, with no evidence of plague, warfare, or any natural disaster. Some say they were of extraterrestrial origin, others that they were travelers in time who simply decided one day to move from one dimension to the next and who will pop up again at the time and place of their choosing.

The Mayans were also mathematicians and astronomers par excellence. They not only accurately calculated the moment of the sun’s arrival at the spring solstice and autumn equinox, they constructed the great pyramid at Chichen Itza so that the sun’s shadow climbed or descended a stairway in a zig-zag serpent pattern, completing its journey at the precise moment that the seasons changed.

The Mayans also created an extraordinarily accurate calendar that operated on cycles of up to 52,000 years, cycles that extended well beyond their disappearance. As almost everyone knows, the last of these cycles ends in 2012-- December 21, 2012, is what‘s said. Speculation as to what that means has gotten more intense as the date approaches.

Some say it will be the end of the world, especially since it coincides both with other Native American predictions (like those of the Hopi), and with the evangelical Christian belief that we’re living in the biblically-predicted end times-- the Apocalypse, the Second Coming, that sort of thing. The metaphysical interpretations vary:

(a) Time will cease to exist at that time, and we’ll all become, as the Buddhist hot dog vendor said, One with Everything.

(b) An entirely new paradigm will emerge, and we’ll all see through the Matrix and board the Mother Ship (piloted by Mayans) and return to the home planet.

(c) Time, being circular, will simply start all over again.

All of these are equally credible, except for one small detail-- the date’s wrong. Not way wrong, in the scale of 52,000 year cycles, but about ninety years wrong, nonetheless. Seems there isn’t any Rosetta Stone to translate Mayan glyphs like there was for Egyptian hieroglyphics, since Catholic missionaries destroyed any translations when they converted what was left of the Mayan empire. As a result, new interpretations pop up from time to time.

Many of these come from scholars at the University of Texas, which has maintained a large staff of researchers who have braved the perils of the jungles of Maya land and downed more than one shot of pulque with tribal elders, in the interest of science. One of their first revelations, awhile back, was that the Mayans weren’t the peace-loving tribe they were once thought to be-- warfare was rampant, as was bloodletting, sacrifice, and ritual mutilation of sensitive body parts.

Intermarriage was common in the upper class, just like everywhere, and, as Eddie Izzard says, when cousins marry cousins there’s trouble. A generation or two down the line, learning disabilities started popping up-- things like dyslexia.

The Mayan calendar doesn’t end in 2012. It ends in 2102. The glyphs were reversed, and only through painstaking research (and a lot of pulque) was the truth revealed.

What does this mean? Well, for starters, if your long-term financial scenario consisted of maxxing out all your credit cards by 2012 and then jumping dimensions, you might want to give it some thought. Also, if you’d decided to keep on driving that gas-guzzler that sucks up dead dinosaurs like a sponge, super-sizing that bacon cheeseburger, or otherwise just generally carrying on like there was no tomorrow, you might want to check out that UT report.
It was just released-- on April 1.


For more information, visit www.AustinAllNatural.com/MayanCalendarError