Sorry burnt-out counterculture/conspiracy/’Mind and Spirit-section’/ McKenna wannabe – authors, the gold rush is officially OVER. Book your return flights from Guatemala, cancel your weekend retreats with gold-diggin’ 2012 consciousness gurus, and delete your last three years of patronising, and self-congratulatory blog posts, 2012 is over…it’s done. How do I know this? I read The Washington Post:
In a striking find, archaeologists in Guatemala report the discovery of a small building whose walls display not only a stunningly preserved mural of a brightly adorned Mayan king, but also calendars that destroy any notion that the Mayans predicted the end of the world in 2012.
These deep-time calendars can be used to count thousands of years into the past and future, countering pop-culture and New Age ideas that Mayan calendars ended on Dec. 21, 2012, (or Dec. 23, depending on who’s counting), thereby predicting the end of the world.
Let me just pause this delicious slice of copy, to let you know about a BLOW OUT SALE at your nearest bookshop. 99.9% off in the 2012 section, that’s 99…wait, they’re giving them away; what a deal!
…researchers have long assumed that the Mayans had worked out the cycles of the moons and planets much earlier, but no evidence of such work had ever been found.
But in 2010, an undergraduate student working with Saturno, Max Chamberlain, stumbled onto the house as the team began to excavate at a Mayan city, Xultun, which, despite being known since 1915, had never been professionally excavated. Over the decades, looters had dug deep trenches to access buildings. One day at lunch, Chamberlain announced his intention to find paintings by crawling through the trenches.
Let it be noted that the throngs of experts, channelers, and ‘academics’ (a mail-away degree ain’t worth the paper it was printed on) were disproved by a bachelors degree student. Just saying.
With the virtually unexplored city of Xultun containing hundreds of buildings stretching across at least 16 square miles of jungle, Saturno (the Boston University archaeologist who led the expedition) guesses that plenty of other surprises await excavation. “It might take another two decades,” he said.
He expects the world to still exist then and said he’d bet anyone a million dollars that it will. The Mayan calendar does start a new “long cycle,” later this year, but he equated that with the odometer on a car rolling over from 99,999 miles to zero: “You go, ‘Yay,’ but the car just doesn’t disappear.”
To quote my podcasting colleague Joseph Matheny, I’m “Laughing so hard my sides are hurting.”.
What will be interesting over the next few days, and following weeks, will be how the 2012ers react to this discovery. Will they attach it to what Michael Barkun refers to as ‘stigmatised knowledge’? Or will they somehow warp the discovery, bending it to fit their highly profitable worldview.
Only time will tell (pun intended).
(source: The Washington Post)
