If readers have cashed in their life savings and spent it on self-indulgent acquisitions, have told everyone they can’t stand how they truly feel, and are searching the Internet for the best “World-End” party, then they should not read this article. Why? Unfortunately, Dec. 21 will come and go and the Mayan Calendar will simply reset itself and one might find him or herself in serious trouble.
Maybe it’s preprogramed in everyone from an early age; the belief in Armageddon or the Book of Revelations. A time when humanity must repay the cosmos for all the angst it has caused since humankind stood up right and turned stick into tool. Or maybe it is the desire to usher in a “Star Trekian” time of peace where man will boldly go where no man has gone before.
So is the Mayan calendar an antiquated system of counting linear time?
The Mayan Calendar is as simple as it is complicated. In order for the Mayans to have a beginning day, they projected a mythical creation date in the past as their starting point, or the calendar’s zero. Scholars have estimated this date to be Aug. 11, 3114 B.C.E.
The Mayan Calendar, also known as a Long Count Calendar, was created in ancient Mesoamerica, which is comprised of modern day Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize and El Salvador. There is a Short Count Mayan Calendar, too.
The Mayan Calendar shares some similarities with the Gregorian calendar — our modern calendar. Both share a base date, a way of grouping large periods of time and an astrological component, but that is where the similarities end.
“The Mayans, like other Mesoamerican peoples, had a bunch of different calendars,” said Michael Smith, Professor of Anthropology in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University.“They had five or six different calendars to keep track of months, days and years.”
The Mayan calendar from the start to the point it will reset itself is approximately 5,125 years. So if you take the Mayan’s creation date, count 5,125 years, you will come to the date that everyone is fixated on: Dec. 21, 2012.
Now things get a little tricky.
Using the base number of 5,125 years and plugging that number into the Hebrew and Gregorian creation dates, or the day the calendars zero date, those counting run into some problems. First there is a need to know when these calendars start.
The Hebrew calendar start day is marked by the creation of Adam and Eve, on the sixth day of Creation. The Gregorian calendar uses the birth of Jesus of Nazareth as its starting point either moving forward A.C., or After Christ, or backwards B.C., Before Christ — sometimes the term B.C.E., Before Common Era is used, or C.E., Common Era.
So if one is using the Mayan’s base of 5,125 years before their calendar resets, then the end of the world will be Dec. 2, according to the Mayan’s creation date; if one is using the Hebrew calendar, the event has passed; and if one is using the Christian, or Gregorian calendar, then the event will not happen for almost three thousand years. Remember, there is 5,125 years in the Mayan Long Count calendar.
The Mayan calendar works like a car’s odometer, but instead of organizing time in multiples of 10, the Mayans organized in multiples of 13 and 20.
“The Mayan calendar being discussed uses a base 20 system,” Smith said. “So when it hits 20, it goes to one in the next column — it is like an odometer in a car — and it has five columns.”
The Mayan calendar for day 1 would look like this: 0.0.0.0.0, and day 20 would read, 0.0.0.1.0 and so forth until reaching 19.19.17.19.19 (this is the date for Dec. 20, 2012), then the Mayan calendar would reset itself to zero — the third column turns over at 18, not 20, to make things even more complicated.
“The Mayans did not say the world is going to end or the world is going to change,” Smith said. “This has been made up by modern authors trying to sell books … people are making money off it.”
In fact, if you go to www.amazon.com, as of Dec.