Inkanta
Group: Admins
Posts: 1453
Joined: Feb. 2000 |
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Posted: June 13 2009, 18:38 |
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The Mayan calendar will be reset--probably on December 21 after 1,871,866.725 days (365.2422 x 5125--the number of years/days it will be in 2112 since the count began). Then, another calendar will begin. There are still over 6 million Mayas around, and some of them are priests that understand Mayan calendrics. I remember reading something to that effect a couple years ago. Even though the Guatemalan government in particular tried to stamp out Mayan culture, it had no more success (thank goodness) than had the USA with its horrible policies imposed on Native people (e.g., there was a period in US history when Native kids were sent to boarding schools and beaten if they spoke their own language; under Andrew Jackson, who graces our $20 bill, small-pox infested blankets were "gifted" to people like the Blackfoot Nation. Horrible, horrible stuff, what humans do to each other--on all sides).
Anyway....I've never figured out how to read the Mayan calendar. I have one, but it's lost on me. They counted a 260-day cycle and also a 365-year (what we'd call a solar year)--and it was very accurate--365.2550 days as opposed to "modern" measurements of 365.2422 (from Anthony Aveni's Echoes of the Ancient Skies: The Astronomies of Lost Civilizations). Western Culture takes it's "long count" from the year Christ was born (or, roughly from there and with a few changes along the way). That is our "long count" - we're now 2,009 years into it, or 733,771.5798 days. The "long count" on the Mayan calendar began in 3113 BC-5122 BCE as of 2009-the year that the Mayas marked the creation of their current world-order. I don't know enough about the reasoning behind starting new counts to know for sure the significance of a new count beginning in 2012, but if I were a betting person, I would think it had to do with some aspect of astronomy and precessional shifting of the earth's axis, which causes stuff to eventually rise at a different time of the year. The cycle is 26,000 years. Helical risings (the first time you see a star, constellation, object rise in the pre-dawn sky after it has been absent for months) were very important for many societies. There are still Andeans who plant only after they see the helical rising of the Pleiades.
I know a "bit" more (though far from everything) about the Inkaic calendar, which is different than the Mayan one--they used the entire landscape and adapted the calendar to the land. For example, the geography at Cusco is much different than Machu Picchu, and yet the calendar was established at both sites. They also used lineage wakas and quipus (system of knotted strings) to track. (BTW--they sell Mayan calendars in Peru--tourists were buying them thinking they were Inkan! ) In all likelihood, the Inkas and other Andean groups knew about the precession of the earth's axis, and their world ages (pachas) focused on major precessional shifts. See William Sullivan's: The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy, and the War Against Time.
If we learn anything from the lessons of history and the struggles of people in the past, here is an opportunity. The lesson to be learned is that really bad things happen when you mix doomsday thinking with the problems at hand. For the Inkas and Mayas, it was the arrival of the Spanish when their cultures were being ripped apart by disease. The Inkas were also experiencing a civil war, and the predicament of precessional shift (maybe the Mayas were too--I haven't looked at it ethnologically) -- the Milky Way's helical rising wasn't going to align with the summer solstice any longer. How would they communicate with Wiraquocha, who traveled down the Bridge to walk amongst them at that time? A very dangerous period. Very unfortunate that Pizzaro happened along at that time. Cahokia, outside of St. Louis, once supported 30,000 people--the largest city in North America until Philadelphia surpassed it in the early 1800's. What happened to them? A combination of things--environmental change that resulted in starvation, disease, other groups attacking, and probably inner strife, as well. Their society was structured similarly to the Toltecs, another Meso-American culture, and they had a "woodhenge" --astronomy had a role in their society, as well. Did they, too, fall apart during a precessional shift? (Can look at this.) My new mission is to look at the Inka world ages against stuff going on in the other statehoods in the Americas. 
What are we facing today? Like them, global disharmony at a very dangerous time, pandemic infections, environmental change, shortage of resources. When their world was ripped apart by warfare that led to starvation and the unraveling of society, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) forged a path of dialogue and diplomacy to create one of the longest lived democracies on the planet that continues to this day. Peace is never easy. Aionwatha had to negotiate with the man responsible for the death of his entire family. You know the modern day equivalents. There are positive models to follow if we look at our planet's history in an inclusive way.
My suggestion is to focus on what is possible to do, and to not take too much stock in prophecies. There have always been doomsayers. I have lost much of my optimism for the future, but it's been replaced by realism, which maybe isn't such a bad thing.
I finally figured out what dead people I'd like to invite to dinner: Keepers of the calendar from the Mayas, Inkas, and Cahokians (not the name for themselves--that's been lost), Nostradamus, Dr. Dee, Queen Elizabeth I (cos I really like her), Carl Sagan, Sartre, and Nietzsche--and with a universal translator, of course.
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"No such thing as destiny; only choices exist." From: Moongarden's "Solaris."
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one thing is certain, long after humans have inhabited the earth and cease to exist, life will go on, evolution, adaption to climate, by other life forms,we are tenants, here temporarily, deb 
