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How could the Mayans get it so wrong?

StewartP

Critical Thinker
StewartP
Joined
Feb 5, 2006
Messages
449
There's a lot of media activity about at the moment regarding the end of the mayan calendar in 2012. Woos are going on a bout doomsday and sensible people are talking about 2012 simply being the Mayan calendar hitting its "9999" and starting over.

On the doomsday, Mayan prophesy front I can't help wondering why the woos can't see that the Mayans got it very wrong. I mean, the Mayan civilisation is ALREADY dead and gone. My history is shaky as to whether it was soil depletion from too much maze, Hernan Cortez or syphalis, but either way the mayans seem to have mis-predicted their own apocalypse by some 300 years.
 
Since the Mayan calendar is based on astronomical observations of a repeating cycle (of around 60000 years I think) this is basically the same as the year change to 2000, and no-one predicted the end of the world for that. Oh, wait...
 
You are both wrong. The Mayan calendar isn't just going over 2000, or something like that. It is ending. There is no 2001, if you like. If it goes anywhere, it goes back to 0.

Second, Cortez destroyed the Inca, not the Maya.

As for what is going to happen in 2012, I think we had better just wait and see. The end of the calendar wasn't just supposed to be the end of Maya civilisation. It is supposed to be the rebirth of the world. The calendar is aligned to the shifting in the tilt of the Earth. It takes 60,000 years for the angle of the tilt to make one revolution. The end date is designed to co-incide with the point where the "dark rift" in the centre of the milky way lines up with the midwinter sunrise. The "dark rift" is a metaphorical birth canal, hence the universe is reborn. All of the above is encoded in Mayan mythology. Finally, the Mayans are of interest to the new-agers because they were deeply mystical, in a way that was unique amongst the native peoples of the new world.

And I do not believe that there is any more 2012 activity going on at the moment than there was three years ago. If anything, there is less.
 
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Pachyderm - I bow to your superior knowledge.

So what did get the Maya then? I'ts a shame they aren't here anymore to witness the The Big Odometer ticking over. Or stopping. Whatever.

Their deeply mystical and unique spirituality, however, will live on after them, perhaps recovering after a brief hiatus in 2013
 
StewartP said:
Pachyderm - I bow to your superior knowledge.

So what did get the Maya then? I'ts a shame they aren't here anymore to witness the The Big Odometer ticking over. Or stopping. Whatever.
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Three consecutive droughts combined with over-dependence on the local farmland. A simple case of stretching your resources too far, allowing the population to get too big and then being hit by famine, starvation and the the collapse of their civilisation.

Their deeply mystical and unique spirituality, however, will live on after them, perhaps recovering after a brief hiatus in 2013
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Indeed.
 
UndercoverElephant said:
Second, Cortez destroyed the Inca, not the Maya.
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Surely this is a typo and you meant to say Aztec, not Inca. Google it.

The Mayan civilization started to decline around 900 AD. I was at a lecture where it was suggested that the decline and the medieval warming period are correlated. The decline was exacerbated by disease with the arrival of the Spanish. However, I don't think their civilization was 'destroyed' in quite the same way as the Aztecs and Incas. Cortez basically took Montezuma in a single action. I imagine it to be like ousting Saddam Hussein (i.e. a regime ends all at once). Regardless, a few Mayan people still exist today.

As well, the cycle of the precession of the equinoxes (according to NASA) is 26,000 years, not 60.

ETA: my previous last line was rude... :(
 
StewartP said:
Their deeply mystical and unique spirituality, however, will live on after them, perhaps recovering after a brief hiatus in 2013
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Don't bet on it (Wikipedia article on Tulum):

Local Maya continued to visit the temples to burn incense and pray until the late 20th century, when tourists visiting the site became too numerous.
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In ~ 3 weeks, several JREFers are going to add to the tourist polution of this site, and detract even more from the spirituality.
 
Gr8wight said:
The idea that the Mayan calendar predicts the end of the world, or even the "rebirth" of the universe in December of 2012 is a myth based on a misunderstanding of the calendar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_calendar#End_of_the_world.3F
The end of the universe, according to the Mayan calendar, is still more than 2500 years off.
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Do you read your own links?

The end of the 13th b'ak'tun is conjectured to have been of great significance to the Maya, but does not necessarily mark the end of the world according to their beliefs, but a time of re-birth.

This is confirmed by a date from Palenque, which projects forward in time to 1.0.0.0.0.0, which will occur on October 13, 4772. The Classic Period Maya obviously did not believe that the end of this age would occur in 2012. According to the Maya, there will be a baktun ending in 2012, a significant event being the end of a 13th 400 year period, but not the end of the world.
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So a period of tumultuous upset - an overturning of the current order perhaps - but not the end of the world. They could never have meant "end of the world" revelations-style, because they believe in a cyclical cosmos instead of a linear one with creation at the beginning and the Last Battle at the end.

Given the current situation in the world, they might be right.
 
Jimbo07 said:
Surely this is a typo and you meant to say Aztec, not Inca. Google it.
:(
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Oh yes, it was Pizarro that destroyed the Inca - but the two events occured very close together in time, several hundred years after the disappearance of the Maya.
 
I read somewhere that the Mayans may not have actually disappeared. When their civilisation as it stood became untenable from drought, and possibly unrest, they became more nomadic and migrated. The Aztec and Inca empires were the result of the Mayans bringing the ideas of cities and large civilisations with them. Can't remember where I found this though, so I could be wrong.
 
UndercoverElephant said:
Oh yes, it was Pizarro that destroyed the Inca - but the two events occured very close together in time, several hundred years after the disappearance of the Maya.
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Again, not entirely accurate. In some ways, because there is a Mexica affinity in Mexico, elements of the Aztecs still exist. Moreover, actual Mayan people still exist. As well, according to this timeline, the last Maya kingdom fell after Cortez took Tenochtitlan (1697 vs. 1521)!

Discussions of the spiritual can proceed after the physical is established...

btw, the Aztec calendar is also cyclical which leads me to believe (and agree with you) that the Mayans probably did not predict a biblical-style apocalypse in 2012.
 
Around February of 2012 the asteroid Eros 433 will slam into the Earth. Coincidence? I think not.
 
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/db?name=433

I see a comparatively close pass on Feb 19, 2012, but definitely no collision. You can make it look like a collision by manipulating the 3D controls, but by manipulating those same controls it appears that the actual distance is ~1/2 that between the orbits of Earth and Venus, or ~22 million kilometers. Seems like a pretty healthy margin, to me.
 
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