LITTLE ROCK — What if the doctor said you have five months to live? Had the doctor been a Mayan medicine man, he might have said just that. The world will end on Dec. 21, at least according to some interpretations of Mayan prophecy.
Books to read in a hurry include the Kindle edition of Francesca Marks’ The Mayan Prophecies. The Mayan calendar ends on Dec. 21, 2012, the book says. “Economists, astronomers and shamans” all agree that the Mayan calendar foretells the end of human civilization, maybe the end of the world.
Aftermath: Prepare and Survive for Apocalypse 2012
(Three Rivers Press) by Lawrence E. Joseph tells how to make the best of things under chapters and headings that include “The Mayans Were Right Before,” “Down Goes the Power Grid” and “Scorpion Plague.”
And for children: You Wouldn’t Want to Be a Mayan Soothsayer: Fortunes You’d Rather Not Tell (Franklin Watts), a picture book by Rupert Matthews and David Antham. Five months is short notice to read all there is. A search for “Mayan” turns up more than 4,000 books on Amazon.com. Even if the Mayans knew how to count the stars, they never claimed to have looked up every one of
the Internet’s blogs and websites that predict the worst.
The worst includes floods and earthquakes, famines, solar storms, strange and terrible alignments of the planets and the earth falling out of rotation. And worst of the worst — the sudden, smashing arrival of a wayward planet called Nibiru or Planet X, that will bash the Earth like nothing since the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.
In response, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration offers the rocket scientists’ answer to whether the world is especially apt to end on Dec. 21: In a word, they say, no.
NASA answers some of the particulars point by point on the agency’s website, nasa.gov. The earth is not going to change its rotation, they promise: “Impossible.” The planets are not going to align at all this year, and even if they did, the effect would be “negligible.”
The “supposed planet” Nibiru comes from an earlier prediction that the world was a goner in 2003, according to the space agency. Nothing happened. Nibiru called a do over, rescheduling for Dec. 21.
Who knows? The end of the world has been predicted over and again since the Bible’s story of Noah and the ark. But the Mayan prophecy comes with a difference — merchandising.
Mayan prophecy T-shirts (“The end is near”), jewelry, talismans, and survival guides in print and on video set up a cosmic souvenir stand of stuff to buy on the way out.
Not so in 1844, when preacher William Miller’s followers, the “Millerites,” did the opposite — gave up their homes and belongings to await the immediate end that he saw coming, that never came.
The Y2K (year 2000) “bug” threatened to shut down the world’s computers at the turn of this century. The pop-culture remnants amount to a few Y2K bean-bag and stuffed toy bugs for sale on eBay.
The Mayan prophecy comes not only with global catastrophe, but also with Mayan recipe cookbooks (try the plantains), travel cruises to see Mayan temples and ruins, Mayan fashions and Halloween get-ups.
But the Mayans themselves remain a mystery — these feathers-and-jade-wearing people who stopped their busy lives centuries ago to worry over the fate of the far future, if, in fact, they did.
“Eat ’em! Eat ’em! Crunch crunch!” — Michael Moriarty in Q (1982), about the flying lizard of ancient Central American legend, Quetzalcoatl, scooping New York City sunbathers off their rooftops.
The Mayans built cities in Central America and southern Mexico. Theirs was a complex civilization, starting around A.D. 250, lasting into the Spanish conquests of the 1500s. They observed many religious ceremonies, and their festivals and farming depended on knowing the seasons. They kept track with their understanding of hieroglyphics (writing), mathematics and calendars.
Arkansas was home to another race of mysterious early-dwellers — the Plum Bayou people, mound-builders, whose way of tracking the sun’s movements endures at Toltec Mounds Archeological State Park near Scott, east of Little Rock.
The Plum Bayou People observed their ceremonies during the time of the Mayans, around A.D. 700 to 1050. Might they, too, have had something dire to say about the future?
“We have no idea,” says the park’s resident archaeologist, Elizabeth Horton. The Mayans wrote things down, she says. The Plum Bayou people did not, leaving open to sheer speculation what they might have seen coming. But a scientist doesn’t go for guesses.
“We think they probably did have some type of yearly cycle” is far as she ventures, “a calendar cycle.”
The Mayans kept “a very complicated religious calendar,” she says. In her reading, the end of the Mayan calendar did not mean the end of the world. It meant the same as the last page of this year’s kitchen wall calendar — time for a new calendar.
She plans to Christmas shop the same as always, ignoring the chance that Planet X will destroy the Earth on Dec. 21, the big-shopping Friday before Santa flies.
Also expecting Christmas to come again, physics professor Claud Lacy is chairman of astronomy at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
The idea of a free-floating planet is possible, he says, maybe even “lots of bodies we don’t know about.”
But the chance that an unknown planet is going to play bumper-car with the Earth, swooping in from a Mayan prophecy, unforeseen by a single astronomer — and some devote themselves to just this sort of watch — is, well, “astronomically small.”
“I’m not worried,” the professor says.
“We gotta get to the Santa Monica Airport!” — John Cusack in 2012
The same as baseball season starts with the opening pitch, major-league Mayan prophecy-dreading started three years ago with a lob from Hollywood — the movie 2012. John Cusack discovers the Mayans were spot-on right, and the world goes kerblooey all around him and his family.
Jim Young, former chancellor of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, never saw the whole movie. Just the trailer upset him enough that he wrote and edited a book to counter the movie’s “playing on fear.”
Young’s book, 2013: The Beginning Is Here (O-Books, 2011), is a collection of essays including his own, “So? Live 2013 Now!” Writing in Beaver, Ark., near Eureka Springs, he takes the spiritual stand that “Only each moment of now commands our attention.” If the Mayan prophecy means anything, he expects, it means a call to “a new level of consciousness.
“They were commenting about their own lives at the time,” Young says. To imagine the Mayans had their minds on 2012 “is a bit narcissistic.” But taken as a metaphor of a new beginning, the Mayan calendar could mark a good time to stop and think — “to live life in a way that takes you to a better place.”
“Happy new year,” he says, recommending New Year’s Eve-type resolutions to be a better person in the new Mayan cycle that will start on Dec. 22.
And if it turns out that volcanoes erupt, the polar ice caps melt in a gush, the earth wobbles off its axis, and here comes Planet X like a giant, galactic bean ball? —
“Duck, is what I’d say,” Young says. “What else are you going to do?”
Style, Pages 45 on 07/22/2012