2012 World End

I bet you’ve seen the posters – Aerial views of major cities crushed by a variety of natural disasters, giant waves rushing over the highest peaks of the Himalayas, and the headline “We Were Warned” above an enormous number 2012 written in a silver font that is both metallic and stone-like at the same time. It all looks pretty exciting (who doesn’t get a vicarious thrill out of having a Godzilla’s eye-view of our civilization’s demise?), but what exactly is going on here? Well, 2012 is a flashy, big-budget disaster movie due to be released on November 13, 2009; according to a wave of advance publicity materials the film’s premise focuses on a small band of humans struggling to survive in the aftermath of an enormous global apocalypse. A website designed around a fictional organization, The Institute for Human Continuity , details the efforts of a convincing-looking group of concerned scientists, businesspeople, and world leaders to inform the public about the upcoming cataclysm (”confirmed with 94% certainty”) and to “…develop plans to guarantee the survival of the human race” (both quotes from the IHC website). While films dealing with the looming threat of global apocalypse have been quite common and popular since the 1950s, the twist with 2012 is that it plays to questions surrounding a previously-obscure phenomenon that is beginning to loom large in the public imagination: What is the significance of the upcoming year that bears its namesake?

Sources of Confusion

In the much-studied (but not easily-understood) Long Count calendar from the ancient Maya culture of Central America, the Gregorian calendar date of December 21st (or possibly 23rd) in 2012 CE correlates to 4 Ahau 3 Kank’in, the ending of a 5125-year period of 13 B’ak’tuns (measuring approximately 395 years each) since the “zero date” of 4 Ajaw 8 Kumk’u, which equals the Gregorian date of August 11th (or possibly 13th), 3114 BCE. This earlier date is frequently referenced in inscriptions on Maya monuments such as the Temple of the Cross at Palenque (Rice, pp. 467-48); scholars have determined from references to earlier cycles that after 13 B’ak’tuns the “zero date” is reset, like an odometer or clock striking midnight, and the count begins again from a new “zero date” as it has in the past (Montgomery pp. 85-86; Van Stone, Appendix/Part IV). The publicity materials and websites for the film 2012 concoct a heady stew of correlations between their own fanciful ideas about this date of significance in the Maya calendar and other purported predictions of immanent apocalypse from European, African, and Asian belief systems.

While this unwieldy amalgamation of ideas is unambiguously a product of fiction writers in Hollywood, these writers have drawn inspiration from a growing school of thought that has coalesced in recent decades outside the entertainment industry; adherents to this school of thought, however, do not consider their conclusions to be restricted to the arena of fantasy. Thanks to their own tireless efforts at self-publicity and the prominence of popular media such as the film 2012, many of the highly-speculative conclusions of these theorists have begun to loom very large in the minds of the general public, and consequently the lines between fact and fiction have begun to blur. These compelling but artificial amalgamations of ideas from disparate cultures, packaged as legitimate research, have made the job of educating the public an often needlessly complicated task for anthropological+archaeological experts in the field who have spent their lives conducting peer-reviewed, careful research on ancient and modern Maya people.