2012 Mayan Calendar, is it Doomsday the End Times a New Beginning or Business as Usual, Paranormal or Not? Today is the last day of 2011. Now, does the countdown to 12/21/2012 begin? There are many theories out there and most are supported with credible information explained by a variety of intelligent individuals. They range from serious educators to scientists. Beliefs of doom and gloom or the rapture are also being spread by some religious groups and individuals. Only after 12/21/2012 will we know what will truly happen.
How many readers know what this calendar is other than an old calendar created by a very old culture? While the calendar has been around for such a long time and may have been known by scholars, historians, scientists and some religious individuals, the were many who were not aware of it until this past year. Last year saw many spins and hype regarding 2012. Now that it is 2012 the hype will become even louder. Watch for the movies and stories to become more common than in 2010 or 2011.
Let’s not forget about the sunbursts that are being talked about within astronomical circles. They claim to have started in 2011 and will become more intense in 2012 during a natural cycle of solar maximum bursts, according to the website All About 2012 by Alex, found on Great Dreams. This site even claims that Russia is building a large underground city to house 60,000 people because the heat from the sunbursts will be so intense. Further reading on this site includes many things from astronomy to physics and crop circles. Anyone reading this site could very well end up very worried. But wait, they can go the main Great Dreams webpage and join Earth Mountain View Community. This includes their FaceBook page and a link for donations. They talk about WWWIII, survival information, and many more conspiracy theories. More of these will pop up throughout the coming year.
Then on Wikipedia you can find explanations such as this “The Maya calendar is a system of calendars used in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, and in many modern communities in highland Guatemala and in Veracruz, Oaxaca and Chiapas, Mexico.
The essentials of the Maya calendar are based upon a system which had been in common use throughout the region, dating back to at least the 5th century BCE. It shares many aspects with calendars employed by other earlier Mesoamerican civilizations, such as the Zapotec and Olmec, and contemporary or later ones such as the Mixtec and Aztec calendars. Although the Mesoamerican calendar did not originate with the Maya, their subsequent extensions and refinements of it were the most sophisticated. Along with those of the Aztecs, the Maya calendars are the best-documented and most completely understood.
By the Maya mythological tradition, as documented in Colonial Yucatec accounts and reconstructed from Late Classic and Postclassic inscriptions, the deity Itzamna is frequently credited with bringing the knowledge of the calendar system to the ancestral Maya, along with writing in general and other foundational aspects of Maya culture. The 260 day count is commonly known to scholars as the Tzolkin, or Tzolk'in in the revised orthography of the Academia de las Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala. The Tzolk'in was combined with a 365-day vague solar year known as the Haab, or Haab year' , to form a synchronized cycle lasting for 52 Haabs, called the Calendar Round. Smaller cycles of 13 days (the trecena) and 20 days (the veintena) were important components of the Tzolk'in and Haab' cycles, respectively. The Calendar Round is still in use by many groups in the Guatemalan highlands.
A different calendar was used to track longer periods of time, and for the inscription of calendar dates (i.e., identifying when one event occurred in relation to others). This is the Long Count. It is a count of days since a mythological starting-point. According to the correlation between the Long Count and Western calendars accepted by the great majority of Maya researchers (known as the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson, or GMT, correlation), this starting-point is equivalent to August 11, 3114 BCE in the proleptic Gregorian calendar or 6 September in the Julian calendar (−3113 astronomical). The GMT correlation was chosen by John Eric Sydney Thompson in 1935 on the basis of earlier correlations by Joseph Goodman in 1905 (August 11), Juan MartÃnez Hernández in 1926 (August 12), and Thompson himself in 1927 (August 13). By its linear nature, the Long Count was capable of being extended to refer to any date far into the past or future. This calendar involved the use of a positional notation system, in which each position signified an increasing multiple of the number of days. The Maya numeral system was essentially vigesimal (i.e., base-20), and each unit of a given position represented 20 times the unit of the position which preceded it. An important exception was made for the second-order place value, which instead represented 18 × 20, or 360 days, more closely approximating the solar year than would 20 × 20 = 400 days. It should be noted however that the cycles of the Long Count are independent of the solar year.
Many Maya Long Count inscriptions contain a supplementary series, which provides information on the lunar phase, number of the current lunation in a series of six and which of the nine Lords of the Night rules.
A 584-day Venus cycle was also maintained, which tracked the heliacal risings of Venus as the morning and evening stars. Many events in this cycle were seen as being astrologically inauspicious and baleful, and occasionally warfare was astrologically timed to coincide with stages in this cycle.
Less-prevalent or poorly understood cycles, combinations and calendar progressions were also tracked. An 819-day Count is attested in a few inscriptions. Repeating sets of 9-day (see below "Nine lords of the night") and 13-day intervals associated with different groups of deities, animals, and other significant concepts are also known.”
According to an article in Discovery News by Ian O’Neill the calendar date might be wrong. Others have said the same. He wrote, “According to all the ridiculous hype surrounding Dec. 21, 2012, the Mayans "predicted" the end of the world with one of their calendars. On this date, doomsayers assert that Earth will be ravaged by a smorgasbord of cataclysmic astronomical events -- everything from a Planet X flyby to a "killer" solar flare to a geomagnetic reversal, ensuring we have a very, very bad day. As we all know by now, these theories of doom are bunkum. And now, according to a recent study by an associate professor at UC Santa Barbara, this fundamental "end date" may also be inaccurate. It could be at least 60 days out of whack.”
The main point of this article is to usher in the New Year with an open mind. Don’t fall into the beliefs of any idea or person without doing your due diligence. There are many more places to acquire information that may give a better perspective on the reality on 2012, be it paranormal or otherwise.
Where will you be 12/21/2012?
