The Case for Apocalypse
The last age of man did not end well. The Popol Vuh, Quiché Maya Book of Council, describes the final days of that age, when men were ‘annihilated, destroyed, broken up and killed.’ Eyes were gouged out, heads cut off, flesh devoured, and bones and nerves broken and ground to bits. Man was attacked by the animals they had eaten and the dogs they had ignored. Even the pots and pans rose up to burn their faces, and the tenamastes, the hearth-stones that form a cosmic star map in every Mayan home, hurled themselves at the terrified inhabitants. Then came the flood. The Heart of Heaven, called Huracán, covered creation with water. A creator and destroyer, we take the name of our Atlantic cyclones from the Heart of Heaven, Huracán. In desperation, men ‘wanted to climb to the treetops, and the trees cast them away.’
Is this our vision of 2012, the end of the present age? John Major Jenkins, in Maya Cosmogenesis 2012, describes the Mayan ballgame as a metaphor for the present age, the courts themselves aligned with the galactic center. ‘The goalring,’ he writes, ‘representing the dark-rift in the Milky Way, symbolizes the place where time begins and ends. After all, when the ball goes into the goalring, the game (of time) is over.’ He writes that the ancient Maya understood that 2012 would have apocalyptic effects. ‘The door will be open, and at that time some people may be more interested in figuring out how to close it.’
On the famous Aztec sun-disc, the present age is represented by the day-sign glyph which means ‘earthquake.’ A common interpretation, notes Jenkins, is that the present world age will be destroyed by earthquakes. Author Joseph Lawrence describes himself as ‘your basic Brooklyn wise guy,’ and states he wrote his book (Apocalypse 2012) knowing that if evidence didn’t point to gloom and doom, ‘no profit-minded publisher would have taken on this book.’ His conclusion? Judging from the facts he gathered, he believes ‘there is at least an even chance of some massive tragedy and/or great awakening occurring or commencing in that year.’
Tragedy or awakening? The following came from Filomena’s blog (Filomena):
'Kasper was by last night. He overheard two people arguing about 2012, and the buzz about the end of the universe, our age of the Jaguar. One person was saying when the sun lines up perfectly between the earth and the dark place at the center of the galaxy, midnight December 21, it will let demons stream to the earth and they’ll devour the human race. The other person was saying that was a crazy idea a gringo came up with, and even if gringolandia is destroyed, the Maya will reach a new consciousness and knock the dirt of this world off their feet.
'So there it is in a nutshell, destruction or salvation, apocalypse or a new world? Some say for sure the age has to end in an earthquake and it will bury us, that sunspots and global warming and volcanoes will shake the earth until it sheds us like a shaking dog shedding fleas. Others say the shaking will be in the mind, and we’ll grow past ourselves, our individual little boxes of myspace and mytime, to see thought as its own dimension, and see the place outside of this consciousness where it’s woven together.
'So do we dread the end of the age or hope for it? In the flying saucer movie Independence Day there was a scene where people were on top of a skyscraper dancing and chanting and welcoming the new age, and in the blink of an eye the flying saucer blasts the whole building to smithereens. It’s like if the ants came out to welcome us to the forest and we stepped on them. This is what really worries us, losing our dominance, even losing it in the face of God.'
It is true that more than the end of one world age, 2012 also represents the birth of something new, a new age, and thousands of years of human death-rebirth metaphor may be reason enough for us to be concerned. Birthing is always a painful process, but just how painful might be the birthing of a new age? Joseph Lawrence quotes Gerardo Barrios, coauthor of The Maya Cholqij: “The year 2012 is a seam in time, the juncture of two different ages. Death, possibly a great deal of it, will be part of that transition.”
Gerardo Barrios has a brother, Carlos, who is both an anthropologist and Mayan priest. "Anthropologists visit the temple sites," Carlos Barrios has said, "and read the stela and inscriptions and make up stories about the Maya, but they do not read the signs correctly. It’s just their imagination...Other people write about prophecy in the name of the Maya. They say that the world will end in December 2012. The Mayan elders are angry with this. The world will not end. It will be transformed.” He goes on to state, “Humanity will continue, but in a different way. Material structures will change. From this we will have the opportunity to be more human."
Ronaldo Similox, Mayan spiritual guide from the Kaqchikel, writes, ‘to be sure there will be events that are going to affect humanity, but not in apocalyptic form or in the form of disasters. Even though, one has to realize that disasters are already starting. The world economic crisis, the shortage of basic grains to feed the world, and the use of grain to generate biofuels. In other words, there are already catastrophic events that are affecting us.'
In that previous age, described in the pages of the Popol Vuh, men were made of wood, an earlier version of humanity formed with great expectations by the creators, but found to be lacking and defective. In an even earlier age, an attempt to form men from mud was even more of a disaster. The people of the present age, version 3.0 if you will, are made of corn. We were the successful project, beings who could worship the creators and feed them with our offerings and sacrifices. Of the wooden race of men, the Popol Vuh states ‘they no longer remembered the Heart of Heaven and therefore they fell out of favor… they had no blood, no substance.’ The ‘substance’ is the itz, the ‘sacred substance’ that comes from the human body. It can be blood, but also milk or sweat or semen, and sometimes the resin of trees or nectar of flowers. The significance of itz is its usefulness in providing sustenance to gods, its use as an object of sacrifice. If the wood people had no itz, they could not fulfill a reciprocal relationship with their creator.
A reciprocal relationship with the creator is nothing new for those who follow the Judeo-Christian tradition. Genesis 1:27 tells us ‘God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him.’ It is clear that the work attributed to God was the product of a desire for companionship, and for centuries the letter of the Hebrew God’s law required blood sacrifice.
So if the defective mud and wood races were destroyed but the corn race was a success, then we’re safe, right? The Popol Vuh seems to answer that with a big ‘maybe.’ Remember the passage: ‘they no longer remembered the Heart of Heaven, and therefore fell out of favor.’ We also read, ‘they existed and multiplied; they had daughters, they had sons, these wooden figures; but… did not remember their creator.’ Did the earlier races once know their creator and, over time, forget, sealing their fate? How close are we to forgetting our creator, or forgetting the long-ago natural conditions of our creation that should bind us to our planet? Will we forget our creator and be doomed by him like the people of wood, or forget creation itself, and be doomed by one another as our planet is left a blighted property?
Apocalypse or awakening? We hope for awakening, but the time is short.