There were floods and hurricanes in the Maya area and the idea of a watery ending to the world, pictured on page 74 of the Dresden Codex, last page, water gushing out of the mouth of the sky, these were real experiences. And you have it in the Enûma Eliš which is the Sumerian creation myth. It is in world mythology, because the world is destroyed. And it is recreated. And we take these marvelous stories of destruction of the world and recreation and then we bring them into a macroscopic kind of focus by imagining it’s the whole world that’s gonna end, then yes my friends it will end. There’s no question there will be an end to the world. You know, study these creation myths and you’ll see they’re there for a very good reason. I mean, people did experience the destruction of their world and they did rebuild it, and it happened before and it’ll happen again.
It’s really hard to look at any ancient mythological system without realizing that they thought in cyclical terms, not in linear terms. So literally as we would put it today, what goes around comes around. My interest was could there have been a forgotten episode in human history, and I began to find the evidence forcing me to look at a period about 12,000 years ago where it was the end of the last ice age. And much in the mythology seemed to suggest that the cataclysm that occurred then, in some way, going to come back. And so I found that my quest was not only for the beginning of human civilization, but also for the end of human civilization and that the ancients seemed to be putting down some sort of warning perhaps taking into account that human civilization would change greatly, that cultures would change, that languages would be lost looking for a universal system of communication. And it seemed to me that they looked to the heavens for that systems because the stars will always be above us and have always been above us, and that it’s possible to encode your message by using the changing patterns of the stars then you might hope that as some distant date that someone else might be able to read that message. And this is when I came across the ancient Maya.
The Maya were avid stargazers and appeared to have inherited a body of astronomical knowledge from the Olmecs before them. So it’s in the Olmec monuments that we get the first hint of a calendar system, and that calendar system is perfected into a fine tuned device by the ancient Maya. And like so much of ancient thought it is cyclical in nature that there are repeating periods of history just over 5,000 years in length. And it’s just a fact that the latest cycle of the Maya calendar begins somewhere before 3000 BCE, and culminates on the 21st of December 2012. For the Maya the idea that what was there before was lost and then returns would have made perfect sense. And it’s this sense of a cyclical cataclysm linked to a cyclical rebirth that I found most eerie really, and spooky in Mayan tradition.
The procession of the equinoxes is the astronomical process that underlies the Mayan calendar and all ancient systems of cyclical time. Perhaps I should just say a word about what the procession of the equinoxes is. Procession fundamentally is an observation of the heavens and an observation that at certain seasons of the year particular markers that the equinoxes and the solstices. If you’d look at the background of stars behind the sun you’ll find that that background is very slowly changing. And, it’s changing at the rate of 1 degree every 72 years. And the view of mainstream astronomers as to why this is happening is they hypothesize, they have not proved that there is a cyclical wobble on the axis of the Earth. Rather like the wobble of a top that has been spinning fast but the spin has begun to decay and the poles at the top begin to make a great circle, And this is what they believe is happening with the Earth. Now because Earth is the viewing platform which we observe the stars, changes in the orientation of that viewing platform will cause changes in the observed appearances and positions of the stars at that particular times of the year. And because it’s a circular wobble, the whole thing is a cycle, and in fact unfolds over a vast span of time, 25,920 years, takes you back from the starting position of the clock, back fully around the clock to the same position again. So the constellation that is rising behind the sun today in our time, and for a period of roughly 2,000 years, which we’re just entering into the Age of Aquarius, when the constellation of Aquarius has (?) it will be 26,000 years, 25,920 years before that constellation again rises behind the sun.
Our research has focused on, why are so many ancient cultures fascinated with this obtuse thing called procession of the equinox, when it takes one full lifetime just to notice that the stars have moved 1 degree. There’s 200 plus myths that talk about this movement of the stars causes some change in the history of the Earth. And it just seemed that if it is only what modern scholars say it is, just a simple wobbling of the Earth, that it shouldn’t be related to any change in history or consciousness. And so we really dug into the Vedic teachings about procession which give us a whole different meaning. We believe that the Earth, moving with the Sun the whole solar system going around another star, we believe is the cause of why we see this procession of the 12 constellations of the zodiac. We know that all orbits conform to Kepler’s laws. They move in great ellipses rather than circles. And that means the bodies speed up when the two masses get closer to each other, when the gravitation is stronger, then they slow down when they get farther away from each other. So if precession is the observable of the solar system in motion around another star, it too would have to obey Kepler’s laws and speed up and slow down. Now we have really really good scientific data for the last hundred years going back to at least the great Simon Newcomb, the number one astronomer in the U.S.-year 1900, and he kept precise records of precession and notices that it’s speeding up every year exponentially. So he actually added something called a constant to the precession equation, Newcomb’s constant we call it nowadays. And even since then the precession has sped up above the constant rate. But we’ve taken the Vedic view that it’s caused by an orbit. That orbit is 24,000 years and therefore is precession actually measures 26, we must be in the slow part of the orbit, far the other star right now. So we plotted on a curve what the precession rate should be for this last one hundred years, and we came out the the exact curve that we see historically. And from that we were able to predict that the precession rate will continue to accelerate year after year after year until we reach periapsis.
The coming solar maximum in 2012 is not the only cause for concern. Scientists have noticed a weakening of the Earth’s magnetic field and a shifting of the poles. Some even suggesting that the north and south poles could literally reverse places with each other.
The early Maya site called Izapa, the site that invented this long count calendar that gives us the 2012 end date, is really a key to understanding how the early Maya thought of 2012 and the galactic alignment. The monuments of Izapa were found in the 1950s and 60s, as they were left some 1800 years ago so they’re in situ. They’re still oriented to certain horizons and certain ways. One of the key horizon alignments at Izapa is the December solstice sunrise. So we start to see how Izapa is a site that helps us understand the galactic alignment in 2012. For example stela 11 from Izapa portrays Hun Hunahpu, the father of the hero twins, he represents the December solstice sun. And, he’s emerging from the upturned mouth of a frog. That’s the rebirth place. The mouth of the frog or the mouth of the snake, that represents the dark rift. His arms are outstretched and it’s basically a period measuring gesture. He’s basically measuring a cycle of time. So what this is saying is that at the end of a cycle, the December solstice sun is lined up with the dark rift, and this carving, tela 11, points right to the rising December solstice sun. That’s just one example of how Izapa encodes information about 2012.
It is true that when the sun is at the winter solstice it more or less lines up in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, which is close to what we would call the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which was not determined until even later. I stress this because one wants to argue about precision here. I could say in a very general way that the winter solstice sun comes through that general area of Sagittarius whether it’s perceived as the center of the galaxy or not, somewhere between the years 1900 and 2150. To dare to pinpoint it any more accurately is to suggest that the Maya did, and I’ll go back to what I always go back to, I’ve got to see the evidence. And I’ve got to see something more than just an interpretation of iconography on a stela. I’ve got to see it in the codices. I’ve got to see it in writing. I’ve got to see the numbers. If the astronomers cared about that, they would have backed it up with numbers.
