Learn about the debate straight from Lucius and Anna

May 21, 2008, Art History Building

“That’s so incredibly wrong, it’s not even funny.” Lucius scowled and hunched further over his office desk, as though getting his face closer to his laptop monitor would add force to the words he typed now, banging the computer keys with growing irritation.

“No, you moron,” he said to the idiot on the message board, “it’s not October 11, 2011, that was an erroneous calculation that was incontrovertibly corrected like two decades ago. The end-date of the Long Count Calendar is December 21, 2012, and the Maya absolutely believed that this date signaled the end of the time cycle. Period, end of discussion.”

“There shouldn’t even be a discussion,” a voice said from the doorway. “It’s like trying to figure out how many angels fit on a paperclip.”

Lucius looked up at his boss, senior epigrapher and guru of all things ancient Maya, Anna Catori. He tried not to let it show that his heart kicked a little at the sight of her, long and lean and chestnut-haired, with clear cobalt eyes that made him wish he were a poet as he corrected, “I’m pretty sure it’s how many angels can dance on a pinhead.”

“Paperclip, pinhead, whatever.” She waved him off. “It’s dumb.”

If he’d gotten that from anyone else, he would’ve either launched into the argument- like he was currently doing with some moron on one of the 2012 message boards- or ignored the dig, knowing there was no way he could change a mind that was dead set against believing that the Maya had predicted the end of the world.

Since the dig had come from Anna, though, he grinned. “Come on, boss. Aren’t you always on us to explore the possible interpretations of the ancient texts?”

“That would be text, singular. Only one damn stelae out of thousands even has a reference to the 2012 end-date. That doesn’t exactly suggest it was a focus of the empire.”

The stone pillar at the Maya site of Tortuguero, unimaginatively called Monument 6, talked about an event that would occur on 4 Ahaw of the thirteenth pik, which corresponded unequivocally to December 21, 2012. Unfortunately, the nature of that event wasn’t clear, aside from it being associated some how with the earthly descent of Bolon Yokte K’u, aka the Nine Foot Tree God.

Yeah, that was helpful.

The inscription- or rather the lack of other such inscriptions- was a central argument of the Mayanists who believed the end of the Long Count Calendar was nothing more than a Y2K moment- lots of hype and not a ton of outcome.

“The lack of something now doesn’t mean it never existed,” Lucius pointed out in what he was pretty sure was a reasonable tone. “It could’ve been so incontrovertibly woven into the fabric of Mayan life that the Daykeepers didn’t see any need to chisel it in stone. It might’ve been dealt with in one of the thousands of bark-bound folios the Conquistadors burned. Or,” he grinned, knowing this one would really chap her butt, “there’s always the theory that they thought it was bad luck to write down anything about the zero date, that putting talk of the end-time into hieroglyphs would attract the attention of the lords of Xibalba.”

Xibalba, the nine-level underworld of Mayan mythology, wasn’t the fiery hell of many other belief systems; it was more a place of trial and journey, a battle the dead had to win in order to be released to the sky, where they could take their place among their ancestors and gods.

The Maya had believed that the entrance to Xibalba existed in many forms, all of which were consistent in having a mouth of some sort, leading to a tunnel. The earthly incarnations often also involved water, as well as a journey upwards. These might be river caves or cenotes- sinkholes where the subterranean waterways of the Yucatan had broken through to the surface. Or they might be the pyramids that the Maya built to create mountains of their own, leading up to a carved cave mouth and a tunnel descending into the pyramid itself, forming tombs and ceremonial chambers.

The unearthly Xibalba, by contrast, was another sort of tunnel itself: the dark center of the Milky Way, which was barely visible to the naked eye. That dark maw, which the earth would pass through on the end-date, was the true entrance to Xibalba.

Or so the stories went.

The concept of perdition and punishment wasn’t as clear in the ancient Mayan system as it might be in some others: evildoers were banished to Xibalba, it was true, but they weren’t punished per se. It was more that they were put in limbo, waiting for the clock to run out.

When it did, on December 21, 2012, the barrier separating the earth and underworld would fall, and the dead who hadn’t reached atonement would be freed to return to earth, along with a slew of underworld nasties with one goal in mind: world domination and the eradication or enslavement of humankind. Anna rolled her eyes. “Why do you keep insisting this crap is true? Because Fox Mulder says so?”

Lucius let the X-Files insult roll off, because it wasn’t like the writers had picked 2012 randomly for the final alien invasion of the earth; they’d been working off the Maya calendar when they crafted their mythology. Instead, he said, “Why do you keep insisting that nothing’s going to happen on the end date? There’s plenty of science that says you’re wrong.”

“Science and pseudoscience aren’t the same thing,” she countered tartly. “Just because a handful of authors have managed to twist the geological record to make it sound plausible that Atlantis really existed, and that it was destroyed by magnetic reversals and pole shifts in 24,000 B.C., doesn’t mean the same thing is going to happen in 2012.”

Lucius shook his head. “I wasn’t talking about Atlantis. But since you brought it up, you can’t argue that 24,000 B.C. was the last time the earth, sun and moon aligned at the center of the Milky Way, right in the middle of the dark spot the Maya believed was the mouth of Xibalba.” He paused. “And oh, by the way, the next time that happens will be on December 21, 2012, and a whole boatload of astrophysicists are predicting the conjunction is going to bring some serious cosmic crapola our way: solar flares, magnetic fluxes, maybe even another reversal. Hell, the earth’s magnetism has been decreasing exponentially for a couple of decades already, suggesting it’s getting ready to flip. You think that’s a coincidence?”

“I think it’s pseudoscience.” Anna wrinkled her nose. “I think you and your tinfoil hat-wearing buddies are starting with the 2012 calendric end date and working backwards, looking for evidence that supports your theories and chucking out the stuff that doesn’t. Not exactly the sort of rigorous method I’ve been trying to teach you.”

She gave him a long, drawn-out sigh and tugged at the cuff of her long-sleeved shirt, pulling it down over two tattoos of ancient Mayan glyphs. One was the jaguar, balaam, the other the symbol of royalty, ju; both were located on her inner right forearm, where many doomsday 2012 believers wore the geometric hunab ku glyph, which had no real meaning in the ancient Mayan texts, but had come to be associated with the end date.

Lucius had long suspected the glyphs Anna wore had a story to go with them, one that predated her tenure at the university, or even her marriage to analytical, philandering Dick Catori in the economics department. Since she wouldn’t talk about the tattoos, he’d been forced to guess. Adding them to her refusal to budge on the significance of the end-date had made him suspect she’d maybe been involved with a doomsday 2012 supporter, had maybe been one herself.

Which pretty much meant he was screwed in terms of talking her over to his way of thinking. . . but he wasn’t even sure he really wanted to convince her anymore. He just plain liked talking with her, arguing with her, going back and forth with her over the smallest things.

Okay, he just plain liked her. Not that it was going to get him anywhere- she’d made it clear time and again that she and Lucius were friends, nothing more. That didn’t stop him from checking back every now and then, though, just in case things had changed. Not that he expected them to, but he was an optimistic sort.

Which was why he persisted, “So it’s not going to change your mind if I point out that patterns buried in the I-Ching, the speed of invention worldwide, and even the freaking internet are all oscillating at different rates, decaying to a finite zero point. . . and all of those zeroes converge on the 2012 end date?”

She shook her head. “Not so much. Sorry. Patterns are all well and good, but until you show me an actual text that says ‘time ends here’ with a big old arrow, I’m not going to believe the Maya intended to predict the Trump and Shout, or any pantheistic version thereof. They believed time was cyclical. The only thing that’s going to happen four days pre-Christmas in 2012 is some last-minute shopping and bad eggnog.”

“No solar flares shooting through our depleted ozone layer?” Lucius asked. “No descendants of the ancient Atlanteans coming to our rescue and driving the demons back to Xibalba?”

Anna sent him a sharp look at that, but said, “Don’t sound so disappointed.” She gave him a ‘just buddies’ punch on the shoulder. “Look at it this way: by then there’s a good chance you will have finished your thesis. Maybe.”

“Ha, ha. Very funny.” Lucius smothered a wince at the reminder of the thesis project that would loom large over the next few months. He had most of the notes and stuff in order. It was the whole writing thing he wasn’t looking forward to. “And I’m not disappointed at the thought the world isn’t going to end. It’s just. . .” He trailed off, not sure how to put it into words without sounding like an ass. “I guess I just keep thinking there has to be more out there, you know? It just doesn’t make sense that the predictions of the two shorter calendars are so damned accurate, but the Long Count isn’t.”

In addition to the Long Count that the Maya used to measure the five cycles of time, in increments of five-thousand years each, there were two other calendars, the tzolkin and the haab, each of which were associated with shorter-range predictions that repeated on regular cycles, like the repeating 20-year katun cycle. The thing was, they’d proven uncannily accurate.

For example, katun 13 was said to be associated with ‘total collapse, the judgment of the gods, terrible epidemics and governments lost.’ The last two occurrences of katun 13 included the years 1519, i.e. Cortez’s arrival in the New World, which spelled the end of Pre-Columbian civilization, and 1776, i.e. the American Revolution.

katun 8, which was said to bring ‘cultural breakdown and social problems, demolition and destruction of governments’ corresponded to the fall of the last Maya kingdom in the 1690s, as well as the years of the Vietnam War and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and JFK.

Then, within each katun there were more specific prophecies that had also held true with disturbing regularity. The day 6 imox, corresponding with September 11, 2001, was called a ‘day of large events and great change’, while 6 kiej, the day the US declared war on Afghanistan, was a ‘day to settle the balance.’

It was more than a little tough to ascribe all that to coincidence.

“Life is what it is,” Anna said finally, and there were shadows in her eyes. “There’s no such thing as magic, no such thing as cosmic battles between good and evil. If that’s what you need, then it’s time to send your resume to Marvel Comics or Dreamworks or something. Otherwise,” she said with a telling look at his laptop, “I’d suggest you get off the message boards and back onto those translations.”

Lucius saluted her. “Aye aye, captain.”

She rolled her eyes. “Wise ass.”

“Always.”

They shared a grin that wasn’t nearly as light as it should’ve been, and she left his office, her purposeful strides clicking away into the distance of the echoing hallway.

Sighing, Lucius leaned back in his chair and stacked his hands behind his head as he stared at the overstuffed bookshelves in his office. A figurine caught his eye, sleek and sinuous.

Carved of jade, the jaguar statuette wasn’t particularly old, but it held a special place of honor. He’d bought it during his first field assignment, haggling mercilessly with the old, bearded merchant because it would’ve been rude not to bargain. The jaguar reminded him of that first field trip. . . and of Anna.

As he stared at it now, it was hard not to draw the parallel between the statuette and the balaam glyph on her arm, between the sleek lines of the feline predator and those of the woman. And it was difficult not to think she was hiding something, that there was more to her denial of the 2012 doomsday than simple academics.

He had a feeling if he put her on a polygraph, it’d tell a hell of a story, one that coincided with what he believed in, too, that something really big, and really bad was going to happen on December 21, 2012.

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- To see a summary of the modern and historical sources pointing to the possibility of global upheaval on 12/21/2012, click here.