Jose Arguelles, 72; conceived the Harmonic Convergence

This Boston Globe obituary for Jose Arguelles is a straightforward piece of journalism reporting his death in 2011 at age seventy-two, and it is useful for exactly what an obituary is good for: verified biographical facts, birth name and date, career turn from art history to New Age teaching, his authorship of The Mayan Factor, and his role originating the 1987 Harmonic Convergence event. As a newspaper account rather than a scholarly study, it summarizes rather than analyzes his claims about Mayan calendrical prophecy, and its description of the Harmonic Convergence's significance reflects how the event was popularly understood rather than an assessment of the astronomical or Maya-calendrical accuracy of Arguelles's underlying claims, which specialists in Maya epigraphy and archaeoastronomy have separately and substantially disputed.