Apocalypse 2012 A Scientific Investigation into Civilization's End

1 WHY 2012, EXACTLY? Two hours' tromp through the tarantula/crocodile jungle where a recentSurvivorseries was set, past an ancient Mayan ball court where both losers and winners were sacrificed (that certainly would have boostedSurvivor'sratings) and then a steamy clamber up the hundred steep and crumbling steps of the 1,800yearold ruin known as the Great Pyramid, the centerpiece of Mundo Perdido (Lost World), the oldest section of the Tikal ruins, was rewarded with the following: "The problem has got to be with your server. Call tech support and tell them to reconfigure... ," explained one twentysomething to the other. Rip out their beating hearts, toss their lifeless carcasses down the stone steps, and chalk it all up as a human sacrifice to Bill Gates. Deep in the Guatemalan jungle, atop an ancient sacred temple, and these geeks still couldn't get their minds out of their computers. I had gone to Tikal, where some of the most ancient Mayan prophecies originated, to get a feel for what, up until then, was just a mass of factoidsfor example, that in the Mayan calendar the current age, known as the Fourth Age, began on August 13, 3114 BCE, which in the Mayan calendar is represented as 0.0.0.0.1 (Day One) and will end on December 21, 2012 ce, or 13.0.0.0.0 (Day Last). I could repeat that fact and many others accurately enough but, like twelfthgrade calculus (the derivative of n cubed is 3n squared, but what is a derivative, exactly?), I didn't really understand what I was saying. The problem was calendars, to me a blah staple of contemporary existence. Navigating life without them would of course be unthinkable, but that's not going to happen, so why think about it? Apparently there once was a dispute between popes about how many days February and August should have, but that's all been settled for half a millennium. And at the stroke of midnight beginning 2006, the official atomic clockkeeper somewhere added a second for the first time since 1999 because the Earth's rotation is being slowed by the moon's increasing gravitational pull, which might be an interesting development if we had enough time in our busy lives to figure out why. Fundamentalists insist that it's all in whatever their holy book might happen to be, but my visit to Mayan Guatemala was the first time I've ever been told that it's all not in their book but in their calendar, which is all I would ever need. The Maya love their calendars, see them as visual depictions of the passage of time, which is how life unfolds. They charted this unfolding with not one but twenty calendars, only fifteen of which have been released to the modern world; the remaining five are still kept secret by Mayan elders. Mayan calendars are pegged to the movements of the Sun, the Moon, and the visible planets, to harvest and insect cycles, and range in length from 260 days to 5,200 years and beyond. In the Cholqij, the 260day calendar that represents a woman's pregnancy cycle, and also the number of days that the planet Venus rises in the morning each year, each day is represented by one of 20 symbols representing spiritual guides or deities, called Ajau. The number 20 is sacred to the Mayans because a person has 20 digits10 fingers to reach to the sky and 10 toes to grasp the ground. They regard the number 10, so significant to our mathematics, as half a loaf at best. According to Gerardo Kanek Barrios and Mercedes Barrios Longfellow inThe Maya Cholqij: Gateway to Aligning with the Energies of the Earth, 2005, thirteen forces influence the 20 Ajau deities. The number 13 is derived from the fact that there are 13 major joints (1 neck, 2 shoulders, 2 elbows, 2 wrists, 2 hips,Joseph, Lawrence E. is the author of 'Apocalypse 2012 A Scientific Investigation into Civilization's End', published 2008 under ISBN 9780767924481 and ISBN 0767924487.