annabrewsteryx: Dissecting the Mayan Apocalypse (023543)

Did the Mayans predict the end of the world?

That belief is very much in dispute. The Mayan ?long count? calendar progresses using a cycle of approximately 394 years known as a baktun; the calendar ends after the 13th baktun, which closes on Dec. 21 of this year. A stone tablet recovered in Mexico in the 1960s made an oblique reference to a god of war descending from the sky at the end of the 13th baktun. That artifact has fed widespread theories that the world will end that day, and archaeologists last November identified an ancient brick fragment inscribed with what could be another reference to the same portentous date. But anthropologists unanimously agree that the Mayans saw time as cyclical, not linear; Dec. 21, 2012, simply represents the end of one cycle and the start of a new one. ?There is no concept of apocalypse in the Mayan culture,? said Jes?s Gomez, head of the Guatemalan confederation of Mayan priests.

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So why does the belief persist?

Conspiracy theorists keep it alive ? in many cases, for profit. Interest in the Mayan calendar dates back to the 1960s, when various New Age authors predicted that Dec. 21, 2012, would usher in a new era of cosmic peace and understanding. But other fringe historians chose to see this date as Armageddon, and soon began to publish books linking the 13th baktun with everything from Nostradamus to the lost city of Atlantis. In their book The Mayan Prophecies, published in 1996, Maurice Cotterell and Adrian Gilbert claimed to have found evidence that the Mayans had predicted that solar activity would reverse the earth?s magnetic field in December 2012, destroying civilization and wiping out the human race. This idea spawned hundreds of books, and tens of thousands of websites, all devoted to advancing the idea that the world would end in 2012. With the disaster movie 2012, even Hollywood got in on the fad. As the date itself approaches, doomsayers will renew their efforts. NASA says it is contacted by about 10 people every day asking about the end of the world, with some asking if they should kill themselves.

Read the full article at theweek.com.

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Source: http://globalparanormal.com/dissecting-the-mayan-apocalypse-023543/

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