Prophecies
The 2012 Phenomenon
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The popular belief, peaking in the years before 21 December 2012, that the Maya Long Count calendar's completion of its thirteenth baktun on that date marked the end of the world or a global spiritual transformation. The claim did not originate with the ancient Maya, who read the date as the close of one long cycle and the start of the next, much as a calendar rolls from one year to another, and left no surviving text describing it as catastrophic. The modern prophecy was built up over four decades by non-Maya writers, chiefly Jose Arguelles and John Major Jenkins, who read outside ideas, a supposed galactic alignment among them, into a date the Maya themselves treated as ordinary.
Facts
Fulfillment
Documented ResponseNothing globally catastrophic occurred on or around December 21, 2012. The actual Maya community's own documented response to the Western claim, read directly (AP wire via CBS News, October 12, 2009): Guatemalan elder Apolinario Chile Pixtun, quoted in his own words, "I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff," and the article states plainly that he said the doomsday theories spring from Western, not Mayan, ideas. The same article quotes archaeologist Jose Huchim observing that Mayan-speaking communities in the Yucatan had no awareness of any such prophecy and were occupied with more pressing concerns, drought and rainfall shortages. Restall and Solari's own scholarly study, already live on this row, frames its central question the same way in its own words: "Did the Maya really predict that the world would end in December of 2012? If not, how and why has 2012 millenarianism gained such popular appeal?" 3 Dating
Predicted DateDecember 21, 2012, the completion of the thirteenth baktun of the Maya Long Count calendar, the date this page's own primary-source, Tortuguero Monument 6, names, the only Classic Maya inscription that does. Read directly via Restall and Solari's own scholarly study, already live on this page as source 15246: the ancient Maya themselves read this as an ordinary cycle boundary, much as a calendar rolls from one year into the next, and left no surviving text describing it as catastrophic; the popular doomsday and transformation readings were built up afterward by non-Maya writers over four decades, as this page's own description already states. 1 Date AttributedSourced to the subject's own accountBuilt up chiefly from Arguelles's 1987 The Mayan Factor through the 1990s and 2000s, peaking in public attention immediately before 21 December 2012. 2 Sources
Primary SourceSourced to the subject's own accountTortuguero Monument 6 (the only Classic Maya inscription naming the date); popularised by Jose Arguelles, The Mayan Factor (1987) 2Tradition: Maya Religion Origins
Attributed Author / CompilerSourced to the subject's own accountBuilt up by non-Maya writers, chiefly Jose Arguelles (The Mayan Factor, 1987) and John Major Jenkins; not composed by the ancient Maya, who left no surviving text describing the date as catastrophic. 2 Attributions
TraditionWestern esotericism and the New Age movement, not traditional Maya religion, whose own reading of the date was ordinary rather than catastrophic. 1 Debunked
Claimed FulfillmentGlobal cataclysm or mass spiritual transformation predicted for 21 December 2012. 1 The date passed without the predicted event. Scholarship traces the prediction itself to twentieth century non-Maya writers rather than to ancient Maya sources, and the sole securely dated ancient inscription naming the date is non-apocalyptic and largely illegible. Learn More
What the Maya Actually Recorded
The Long Count measures time from a mythological creation date in 3114 BCE in units that build on one another: twenty kin make a winal, eighteen winal make a tun, twenty tun make a katun, and twenty katun make a baktun. The date written 13.0.0.0.0, corresponding to December 2012 on the most commonly used correlation with the Gregorian calendar, marks the completion of the thirteenth baktun since that creation date, a round number in the Long Count's own counting system rather than a marker the Maya are known to have singled out as an ending.
Only one securely dated Classic Maya inscription mentions this date at all: Monument 6 from the site of Tortuguero, in southern Mexico, badly damaged and difficult to read in full. What survives states that the thirteenth baktun will be completed, and associates the date with the deity Bolon Yokte K'uh in connection with what most epigraphers read as some kind of ceremonial event or investiture, not a destruction of the world. Several proposed fuller translations remain disputed, and the passage is far too fragmentary to support any confident reading as a prophecy of catastrophe. Classic and Postclassic Maya cosmology as a whole treats time as cyclical, with earlier world-ages ending and beginning again, which is the opposite of a single, final doomsday.
How the Modern Prophecy Was Built
Popular writing linking the Maya calendar to a coming world-transformation dates to the 1970s. Jose Arguelles's 1987 book The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology fused the Long Count with New Age numerology and named that August the Harmonic Convergence, a mass meditation event Arguelles presented as the opening of a twenty five year countdown ending in December 2012. John Major Jenkins, writing through the 1990s, added the claim that the 2012 date marked a rare alignment of the sun with the centre of the galaxy as seen from earth, an astronomical claim professional astronomers have not supported as either rare or precisely dated to that year.
Through the 2000s the combined idea spread rapidly through books, documentaries and internet forums, reaching a mass audience with the 2009 disaster film 2012. Scholars of Maya history and religion who examined the sourcing found almost none of it in Maya texts themselves; both Matthew Restall and Amara Solari's history of the phenomenon and Robert Sitler's study of its New Age appropriation trace the specific claims to twentieth century non-Maya writers layering their own ideas onto a date whose only secure ancient attestation says nothing apocalyptic at all. The date passed on 21 December 2012 without the predicted event.
Sources 2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya ApocalypseMatthew Restall and Amara Solari with The 2012 Phenomenon: New Age Appropriation of an Ancient Mayan CalendarRobert K. Sitler
Cross-Tradition Connections
Attributed To
Belongs to Tradition
Maya Religion, Religions The ancient Maya never made this claim and read the Long Count's thirteenth baktun completion as an ordinary cycle boundary. The modern doomsday and transformation prophecy was built up over four decades by non-Maya writers and retroactively projected onto Maya religion; associated states that relationship honestly, holds would overclaim an affirmation Maya Religion never made.
Instance Of
One of the named prophetic texts the general Doctrine entry surveys.
Related To
The completion of the thirteenth of this unit is the date the phenomenon attaches to.
Sources
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