Harmonic Convergence and What Followed

The book's importance is in what it set in motion. In August 1987 it supplied the rationale for coordinated gatherings at sacred sites around the world, an event that drew large numbers and considerable press, and which is often treated as the moment the New Age became visible as a mass phenomenon rather than a publishing category. Participants were asked to be present at particular places at a particular hour, and the scheduling came from the book.

Afterwards Jose Arguelles and Lloydine Arguelles developed a calendar of their own, with a thirteen month year and a day naming scheme that runs alongside the ancient count without being it. That calendar acquired its own adherents, its own organisation and its own materials, and it is a distinct system that the atlas records separately from the Maya counts it is often confused with. The longer consequence was the 2012 phenomenon, which grew far beyond this book but took its shape from it. Scholars who have studied that phenomenon trace its central claim, that the ancient count encodes a scheduled transformation of consciousness, to this text and its immediate successors rather than to any Maya source, and note that living Maya communities were largely absent from a discussion conducted in their name.