The Long Count Calendar: Relevant Today?

In 2007 I decided to produce a documentary film that would demystify much of the speculation and hype that has slowly but steadily gathered steam in the waning years of the current “World Age” of the by-now famous Long Count calendar of the ancient Maya.

At the time I had read a number of books on the 2012 theme and I happened to know several key authors personally, not least Graham Hancock, whose book Supernatural: Meetings With the Ancient Teachers of Mankind my company had recently published. His earlier book Fingerprints of the Gods was one of the first bestselling books to reveal the many achievements of the Maya, including their myriad calendars.

In the course of pre-production on the film it became clear that although we would be able to interview many of the most popular authors in the field, they were almost exclusively non-Mayan, Caucasian males (nothing wrong with that, of course, and the description fits me too). Nonetheless, conspicuously little was being said about the approaching “end-date” by the modern Maya themselves.

I contacted the Maya Exploration Center, a non-profit organization dedicated to the study of ancient Maya civilization. Nominally based in Austin, Texas, the MEC spends a lot of time on the ground in southern Mexico and Central America. I was told that we could interview Alonso Mendez, an artist of Tzeltal Maya heritage, born in the highlands of Chiapas and raised in San Cristobal de Las Casas … if we could get ourselves to Palenque, Mexico during one of the worst periods of flooding in that part of Mexico in modern times.

Mendez has worked at the famous Palenque site as a project artist, a surveyor and an archaeologist. Despite the widespread flooding en route, Director Nimrod Erez and I eventually found Alonso in what is essentially a hippie community in the jungle surrounding the site and we definitely got the vibe that we weren’t the first gringo filmmakers to come through asking dumb questions about this 2012 thing. Fortunately, after a day or two he warmed up to us and perhaps our questions improved too. He gently but repeatedly made the point that so far as he could tell his ancestors were not focused on a galactic alignment that would take place centuries in the future:

“The Maya’s perspective probably did not incorporate a view that saw the center of the galaxy as a ‘Dark Rift in the Milky Way.’ We see much more strength in the philosophies of the Earth as the primary axis point for observations and for humanity, in general.

“It’s a mistake, I think to make a great leap like that and impose upon a people a point of view that does not correspond to the time and place of the Maya people.”

This view was echoed in our interview of the very well respected academic Tony Aveni, Professor of Anthropology and Astronomy at Colgate University and the author of numerous books about the Maya. He told us:

“Could these ancient cultures have known about the Precession of the Equinoxes? I might sound like our ex-President Clinton by saying it depends what you mean by ‘known’…is there evidence in the codices, in the alignments, even in the mythology that they were aware of or concerned about a 26,000 year period? My answer would be no.”

Mendez told us, as would others on our journey, that although the 260-day Tzolkin calendar is still in use in some parts of the highlands of Guatemala, the modern day Maya do not use, and have not used for hundreds of years, the 5,125-year Long Count calendar.

Nonetheless, during the making of the film we were repeatedly told that the Long Count calendar’s end date of December 21, 2012, had great significance. The most articulate and ardent exponent is independent scholar John Major Jenkins, author of Maya Cosmogenesis as well as the new book The 2012 Story.

I now consider John to be a friend and have met with him on several occasions since we made the film. He is very persuasive and has spent literally decades researching the calendars of the Maya, particularly the Long Count. He has visited key sites in Mesoamerica numerous times. In other words, although he is not part of the academic establishment, he’s paid his dues and put in the work.

Jenkins argues that the Maya were able to calculate an end-date that would coincide with a very rare astronomical conjunction: that of the path of the Winter Solstice Sun with the band of the Milky Way—or the Galactic Equator, to be exact. In what he calls “era-2012” (that is 1998 +/- 18, or 1980-2016), the Sun will appear at the center of the Maya’s “Sacred Tree.”

Suffice it to say that the debate continues and Jenkins finds respect hard to come by from the academic community, although he is far more popular as an author and lecturer than any of his establishment rivals. It should also be noted, of course, that not all researchers agree with the 12/21/12 end date; notably Carl Calleman believes it to be October 28, 2011.

As for me, well as you will see if you watch our film, or read the companion book by my friend Alexandra Bruce, I’m just not sure. The modern, Western scholars are convincing when they address the evidence they identify as relevant, but at the same time we’re not hearing it from the Maya themselves and as Aveni points out, there is little hard evidence that is not subject to interpretation.

It’s all too easy for skeptics to say that we’ll wake up on December 22, 2012 and nothing will have changed. That may well be true, but it doesn’t answer questions about the relevance and intent of the Long Count calendar’s start and end dates. I hope that through further research in cooperation with indigenous groups in central America and southern Mexico we may one day gain a clearer understanding of just why the running of this infamous calendar started in 3114 BC, thousands of years prior to its creation, and ends, well you know when.

Gary Baddeley is the writer and producer of the documentary film 2012: Science or Superstition, available on DVD and on iTunes. For more information visit http://2012SOS.com.