2012 and Mayan Calendar of the End

Several weeks ago I first saw the trailers for 2012 in movie theaters and on television. The trailer depicted a man and his family making a last second escape from apparently worldwide destruction as homes, buildings, freeways, and entire landscapes crumbled around them in a catastrophic upheaval. A small private airplane with the family on board narrowly escapes and weaves its way around falling debris.

For my tastes in storyline and special effects this was a little over the top. This film’s grandiose destruction is understandable in light of Hollywood’s preference for big blockbusters and special effects, and perhaps even more so from the involvement of co-writer and director Roland Emmerich who has penchant for large scale epics as in his previous works of Independence Day, 10,000 BC,  and The Day After Tomorrow. Beyond my personal distaste for the level of destruction, I prefer my apocalyptic tales to move in different directions such as I Am Legend or Terminator Salvation.

Yet despite my film preferences 2012 is doing well at the box office as it rides the wave of media frenzy over an alleged prophecy in an ancient Mayan calendar that purports to predict the end of the world on December 12, 2012. An article from this spring in USA Today describes this phenomenon:

Since November, at least three new books on 2012 have arrived in mainstream bookstores. A fourth is due this fall. Each arrives in the wake of the 2006 success of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, which has been selling thousands of copies a month since its release in May and counts more than 40,000 in print. The books also build on popular interest in the Maya, fueled in part by Mel Gibson’s December 2006 film about Mayan civilization, Apocalpyto.

2012 taps into the long undercurrent of millenarianism and apocalyptic thought in Western culture. This overlaps with environmental concerns, prophets and prophecy, ancient civilizations (with the Mayans being of special interest as 2012 and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull indicate), and especially the Mayan calendar. The Mayans used several calendars, and the one that has captured the imagination of many in popular culture is the Long Count calendar which was popular in Mesoamerica between 300 and 900 CE. This calendar was cyclical, providing a time frame lasting 5,000 years after which it would reset.

But does the Long Count calendar really predict the end of the world in 2012? Apparently not, again citing USA Today:

“For the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the end of a whole cycle,” says Sandra Noble, executive director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies in Crystal River, Fla. To render Dec. 21, 2012, as a doomsday or moment of cosmic shifting, she says, is “a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in.”

One particularly egregious example of wanting to cash in comes in the form of a disappointing program on the History Channel that I watched a couple of weeks ago. It is called the Nostradamus Effect, and it incorporates the statements and rationales from a number of “experts” in various prognosticators, from Nostradamus to the Book of Revelation to the Mayans, whose prophecies and warnings are strung together to reach the conclusion that allegedly various cultures and their religions have foreseen the end of the world in 2012, and they are trying to send us a message. If this is representative of the History Channel’s scholarship then caveat emptor.

Human beings produce stories and mythic narratives within which they situate their lives. These narratives have origin stories, and stories of ending as well. In 1999, and again nearing 2001, panic swept much of the globe over fears of a Y2K computer failure that would lead to an apocalypse. Our present apocalyptic fears related to 2012 haven’t yet reached the fever pitch of Y2K, but at least the public is entertained, and doomsday entrepreneurs are making the most of a misunderstanding of a Mayan calendrical cycle that has been fashioned into a contemporary myth of the end.