2012: Decoding the Countercultural Apocalypse

225 Pages·2014·7.92 MB·English

by  Joseph Gelfer

2012

2012
DECODING THE COUNTERCULTURAL
APOCALYPSE
Edited by
JOSEPH GELFER
Published by Equinox Publishing Ltd.
UK: Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheffield S3 8AF
USA: DBBC, 28 Main Street, Oakville, CT 06779
www.equinoxpub.com
FFiirrsstt ppuubblliisshheedd 22001112
©© JJoosseepphh GGeellffeerr aanndd ccoonnttrriibbuuttoorrss 22001112
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permis sion
in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
2012 : decoding the countercultural apocalypse / edited by Joseph
Gelfer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-84553-639-8 (hb) 1. Two
thousand twelve, A.D. 2. Twenty-first century--Forecasts. 3.
Prophecies. 4. End of the world. I. Gelfer, Joseph. II. Title: Twenty
twelve. BF1999.A13 2010
001.9--dc22
2010000021
ISBN-13 97987-81 -18 844555533-6 63399- 88 (hardback)
Typeset by ISB Typesetting Ltd, www.publisherservices.co.uk
Printed and bound in the UK by the MPG Books Group.
Contents
Contributors vi
Preface
Michael D. Coe viii
1 Introduction
Joseph Gelfer 1
2 The 2012 Phenomenon: New Uses for an Ancient Maya Calendar
Robert K. Sitler 8
3 Maya Prophecies, 2012 and the Problematic Nature of Truth
Mark Van Stone 23
4 Mayanism Comes of (New) Age
John. W. Hoopes 38
5 The 2012 Milieu? Hybridity, Diversity and Stigmatised Knowledge
Pete Lentini 60
6 Chichén Itzá and Chicken Little: How Pseudosciences Embraced
2012
Kristine Larsen 86
7 Roland Emmerich’s 2012: A Simple Truth
Andrea Austin 108
8 The 2012 Movement, Visionary Arts and Psytrance Culture
Graham St John 123
9 In a Prophetic Voice: Australasia 2012
Joseph Gelfer 144
10 Approaching 2012: Modern Misconceptions versus
Reconstructing Ancient Maya Perspectives
John Major Jenkins 163
Notes 182
Index 197
Contributors
Andrea Austin is an Associate Professor in the Department of English
and Film at Wilfrid Laurier University. She has published on science-fic-
tion literature, film, and video games, and on the early history of comput-
ing technologies and artificial intelligence. She is currently completing a
book-length project on the cyborg as biblical archetype.
Michael D. Coe is Charles J. MacCurdy Professor of Anthropology,
Emeritus, Yale University and Curator Emeritus of the Anthropology
collection in the Peabody Museum of Natural History. Coe is one of the
world’s leading Mayanists. His 1966 book The Maya captured the popular
imagination in regard to Maya studies.
Joseph Gelfer is an Adjunct Associate at the School of Political and
Social Inquiry, Monash University. He is founding and current editor of
Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality and author of Numen, Old
Men: Contemporary Masculine Spiritualities and the Problem of Patriarchy.
John W. Hoopes is Director of Global Indigenous Nations Studies and
Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kansas. His
research interests include cultural ecology, ceramic analysis, and indig-
enous cultures of Mesoamerica, the Isthmo-Colombian area, and the
Andes. He is co-editor of Gold and Power in Ancient Costa Rica, Panama, and
Colombia.
John Major Jenkins is an independent researcher who has devoted
himself to reconstructing ancient Maya cosmology and philosophy. Since
beginning his odyssey of research and discovery with the Maya, John has
authored dozens of articles and many books, including Maya Cosmogen-
esis 2012 and The 2012 Story: The Myths, Fallacies and Truth behind the Most
Intriguing Date in History.
Kristine Larsen is Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Central Con-
necticut State University. The author of Stephen Hawking: A Biography and
Cosmology 101, much of her research centres on issues of science and
Contributors vii
society, including the prevalence of pseudoscience. She has taught pseudo-
science debunking courses for the university’s Honors Program and is cur-
rently a contributor for the www.2012hoax.org website.
Pete Lentini is Director and Co-Founder of the Global Terrorism Research
Centre, Monash University. His research interests include neojihadism, coun-
ter-terrorism and radicalisation in Australia, political violence and reconcili-
ation in Chechnya, comparative extremisms and apocalyptic traditions. He is
editor of Elections and Political Order in Russia and Regional Security in the Asia
Pacific: 9/11 and After (with Marika Vicziany and David Wright-Neville). At
present he is completing a volume entitled Neojihadism: Towards a New Under-
standing of Terrorism and Extremism?
Robert K. Sitler is Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures at Stet-
son University, USA, where he also serves as Director of the Latin American
Studies Program. His most recent publications focus on the developing social
phenomenon surrounding the 2012 date in the Maya Long Count calendar.
Currently, he is translating a novel written by the Q’anjob’al Maya writer
Gaspar González that focuses on the significance of 2012.
Graham St John is a Research Associate at the University of Queensland’s
Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies. His books include the edited collec-
tions Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance and Rave Culture
and Religion. Books he authored include Technomad: Global Raving Countercul-
tures and Global Trance Culture: Religion, Technology and Psytrance. He is Execu-
tive Editor of Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture: http://
dj.dancecult.net
Mark van Stone is Professor of Art History at Southwestern College. He is
a leading Maya epigrapher and author with Michael Coe of Reading the Maya
Glyphs. He is completing a book for Thames and Hudson tentatively titled
2012: Science and Prophecy of the Ancient Maya.
Preface
Michael D. Coe
With all the hoopla and ballyhoo surrounding the supposed end of the
world in 2012, it would be somewhat pleasant for my ego if I had started
the whole uproar in a book published over four decades ago, as some
Internet sites claim. But this is not what actually happened. The book was
the first edition of The Maya, which came out in 1966 (London: Thames &
Hudson), and in it I had this to say:
The idea of cyclical creations and destructions is a typical fea-
ture of Mesoamerican religions, as it is of Oriental. The Aztec,
for instance, thought that the universe had passed through four
such ages, and that we were now in the fifth, to be destroyed by
earthquakes. The Maya thought along the same lines, in terms
of eras of great length, like the Hindu kalpas. There is a sug-
gestion that each of these measured 13 baktuns, or something
less than 5,200 years, and that Armageddon would overtake the
degenerate peoples of the world and all creation on the final day
of the thirteenth. Thus, following the Thompson correlation,
our present universe would have been created in 3113 BC, to be
annihilated on December 24, AD 2011, when the Great Cycle of
the Long Count reaches completion (p. 149).
All well and good—I probably was out to scare my readers a bit, but the date
was so far in the future that I thought that most of them would be dead
anyway by that time. But wait—the annihilation date was totally wrong!
I’d goofed in my calculations, which were by no means easy to accomplish
in those pre-laptop computer days. In the first place, the start of the cal-
endar should have been 3114 BCE; secondly, if I’d followed the correlation
then claimed to be the correct one by Eric Thompson and others, I should
have ascribed the future Armageddon to 21 December 2012.
My calculation of the “End-of-the-World” date was even more cock-
eyed in the second edition of my book, which appeared in 1980: 11 Janu-
ary 2013! In this, as in all five subsequent editions, I saw no reason to
change the wording of my destruction scenario, and will not for the
eighth, which is now in preparation.
Eventually, the scales fell from my eyes, thanks to my late colleague
in Yale’s Anthropology Department, Floyd G. Lounsbury. Floyd was a
leading American linguist, social anthropologist, and a polyglot; among
Preface ix
the many tongues he had mastered was Chorti’ Maya (now recognised as the
language of the Classic Maya inscriptions) and that of the Oneida Indians,
perhaps the world’s most difficult language. For many years, largely on his
own, he had dedicated himself to Maya epigraphy and astronomy, helped by
his strong background in mathematics. A very modest man, he was the most
brilliant person I have ever known. Every few years, Floyd taught an advanced
course at Yale in Maya hieroglyphic writing, and I always tried to sit in on it,
as did Mayanists from other universities. It was in February 1983 that he gave
several astounding—and decisive—lectures on the Maya correlation problem,
and I still have my detailed notes on them.
How do we know how to line up a day in the Maya Long Count calendar
with a day in the Christian (Common Era) one? The pioneer in this very com-
plex matter was Joseph T. Goodman, Mark Twain’s old newspaper editor, when
the author worked as a young man for the Nevada City Territorial Enterprise. In
1905, retired to California, Goodman came up with the first reasonable cor-
relation, based on the Dresden Codex, statements in Bishop Landa’s sixteenth
century account of the Yucatac Maya, and historical data from the Colonial
period. This was later amended in 1935 by Eric Thompson, who arrived at the
Correlation Constant of 584,285 days. This is the amount of days that must
be added to all the days that are recorded in a Long Count inscription to have
elapsed since the starting point of the calendar, 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ajaw 8 Cumk’u, to
reach what astronomers call the Julian Day Number (JDN). Using tables, it is
easy to figure out what day in the Gregorian (or Julian) calendar corresponds
to the JDN.
Thompson later came up with two further Correlation Constants, his third
and final being 584,283. But Lounsbury conclusively proved that Thompson
had been right with his first constant, and this is the correlation adopted by
every serious Maya epigrapher known to me, and in all editions of The Maya
from 1984 on. This means that the present cycle of the Long Count began on
13 August 3114 BCE (Gregorian), and will terminate on 23 December 2012. So
why do all the amateur doomsday prophesiers cling to the third Thompson
correlation? Because by using it, 21 December 2012 falls on a winter solstice,
whereas 23 December has no discernible astronomical meaning, either to the
ancient Maya or to us moderns!
What about Armageddon? Did the Maya believe in a total annihilation of
the universe, at the completion of 13 bak’tuns? It is certain that they did not,
since a few of their Classic Period monuments record calculations of dates
millions of years into the future. Nevertheless, I’m confident in saying that
they viewed the close of the present cycle with considerable trepidation. After
all, the ancient Maya were Mesoamericans, who shared a good part of their