Not Believing Can Be Lonely

Riots in London, Gaddafi in hiding, a hurricane in New York and flailing stock markets around the world could make even a thinking person wonder if the end of the world is nigh. Of course, there are some folks who really believe that the world is about to end, often hanging their hats on the purported Maya prophecy that December 21, 2012 represents either doomsday or the dawn of a new era in human consciousness. So which is it? Does 2012 signify destruction or transformation? Or will it just be another winter solstice caught in the clutches of the West's Christmas consumer frenzy?

Fortunately for all of us, Matthew Restall and Amara Solari offer some even-handed analysis of all things 2012 in their recently published book entitled 2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse. Although slim, the six chapters which make up this volume pack a lot of information about the Maya and their calendar, Europeans and their Christianity, and 21st century New Agers and their claims of secret wisdom about the end of the world as we know it.

Indeed, Restall and Solari have woven the topic of 2012 into three distinct, but interrelated, strands: about the Maya, about European Christianity, and about modern (mostly American) attempts at synthesizing the two. As a result, our authors have embroidered a fast-reading explanation of historical events, artistic works and contemporary psychological projections in an attempt "to explain what the 2012 fuss is all about" (5).

The first thread includes a summary of what the Maya said and the ways in which they said it. A helpful, albeit simplistic, explanation of the Maya Long Count calendar (which, in our numbering system, looks like 13.0.0.0.0 and begins on or about August 13, 3114 BC) accompanies this portion, along with a general description of Maya creation mythology. This material overlaps with a few specific locations, including ancient Maya sites at Coba in Mexico, Quirigua in Guatemala and El Tortuguero, also in Mexico.

These three Maya sites are significant for dating purposes because they each contain glyphs with dates that figure prominently in 2012ology. For example, the "oldest date recorded by the Maya" appears at Coba's Stela 1 in the form of a Long Count date consisting of twenty four places. The date is "about a billion years larger than 13.7 billion BC, which is the age that astrophysicists currently assign to the universe" (17). Although some Mayanists, such as Prudence Rice call this "computational virtuosity," Restall and Solari suggest the "Maya elite at Coba may have been demonstrating how the calendar was the formula that could be used to decode time" (17). In short, this glyph may well have been an embellishment by a light-hearted stone carver, which offers us a glimpse into the playful nature of the Late Classic Maya, or it could be pointing us to the realization that “the ancient Maya were accomplished scientists a millennium or two before the West’s scientific revolution even began” (125).

In the case of Quirigua, Guatemala this site contains Stela C, carved in 775 AD. On the east side of Stela C appears the “zero date of the Long Count, 3114 BC” or 13.0.0.0.0. What’s important about this, according to Restall and Solari, is that “the glyphs that inscribe this date exemplify the combined impact of Maya art and calendrics; the conjunction of creativity and knowledge, beauty and intellect” (20). Thus, we are not to read this stela as an ominous portent of the end of time, but as a work of art reflecting the cyclical beauty in the passage of time. Or, as Restall and Solari claim, Stela C exhibits “the end of the cycle as simultaneously the start of the next one” (33). This last idea is key to understanding the Maya and their sense of time. Unlike the linear concept of time embraced by the West, Maya time is one of cycles. Planting season comes and planting season goes, only to return again next year in an ongoing cycle that spirals back into the distant mists of the past and forward into the distant haze of the future. It is ongoing and, importantly, it does not portend an end of the world. Rather, it suggests that the Maya of the 3^rd century BC (about the time when the Long Count calendar was conceived) were imagining “that the world they lived in had been created a few thousand years earlier and dated that creation in order to give the current year a satisfying trio of zeros in a five-place Long Count date. They then structured that count around the number 13, pinning the end of the cycle a couple of thousand years in the future and placing themselves more or less in the middle” (31). This placement in the center of time is relevant, too, because The Center is a paramount concept in Maya social construction of reality. They believed they were at the center of the world. Thus, placing themselves at the center of time is completely consistent with their concepts of who they were in the world in which they lived.

The third location that’s important to the discussion of Maya calendrics is the now-destroyed site of El Tortuguero, Mexico. Indeed it was the razing of the site by the Mexican government in the 1960s which allowed for the discovery of the glyph which refers to the end of the Long Count known as 13.0.0.0.0 or December 21, 2012. El Tortuguero’s Monument 6 was likely carved in the 7^th century AD and contains a dedication for the completion of a new building. It also cites a future date to mark the end of the calendrical cycle. In short, this is the glyph that has raised all the commotion! However, according to Restall and Solari, there is “nothing in the dedicatory texts to suggest the prediction of disaster” (28). It was intended by the Maya as “dedicatory, not prophetic” and “its spirit is arguably the opposite from apocalyptic, invoking longevity and permanence rather than ephemerality and predetermined destruction” (28). So how is it that a dedication monument can fuel End of the World rhetoric as can be found so prolifically on the internet today?

For the answer to that question, we must now turn to the second strand in Restall and Solari’s book, which summarizes medieval European ideas about the Apocalypse and the ways in which those ideas traveled to the New World in the 16th century. To do so, our authors have named the chapter outlining European Judeo-Christian apocalyptic ideas as “God is Angry.” Claiming that “Western civilization is the millenarian mother lode,” Restall and Solari make the case that Judeo-Christian concepts of the end of the world were born in Mesopotamia, fostered in medieval Europe and then transported to the Americas with the help of the Franciscan friars and the Spanish Conquistadors in the 16^th century. What follows is an explanation of the interactions and the impositions between the indigenous Maya and their Aztec neighbors with the Europeans they encountered, including a few pages of detailing the impact of Diego de Landa, the priest who notoriously burned most of the Maya texts. Importantly, Restall and Solari suggest that “the Franciscans [were] keen to maintain their vision of the New World as an opportunity to create on earth a version of the ‘New Jerusalem’ described in the Book of Revelation. As a result, the history of the Conquest of Mexico was revised and reimagined, and the [indigenous] culture infused with the Franciscans’ millenarian spirit” (89). Thus the Judeo-Christian tendency to see crisis as evidence for the end of the world was transported and then imposed upon the Maya and others in the New World. What’s more, that tendency has embedded itself into the consciousness of New World society so perniciously, that “the many threads of eschatology and millenarianism run so deeply and colorfully through Western civilization that the Apocalypse acts today as a common and casual reference point” (117). In other words, millenarianism has become part of contemporary Western psyche.

This understanding, then, helps the reader pivot toward the last point Restall and Solari make which has to do with Western contemporary (and often incorrect) interpretations of Maya writings and thought, and Christian eschatalogical projections based on pseudo-Maya mathematical and scientific conceptions of the world. Accordingly, it doesn’t take a Jungian scholar to realize that the modern impulse to exoticize all things Maya is based on deeply embedded ideas in the Western tradition. According to Restall and Solari, “belief offers an explanation without need for evidence. It offers a simple solution to life’s complexities, a source of meaning and hope in a world of cruel whimsy and chaos” (115) and “not believing can be lonely” (116). Although our authors are a bit more diplomatic than this, in short they are suggesting that believing in the end of the world – whether it’s about destruction or transformation – is fantasy for the intellectually lazy and the emotionally insecure. There is no basis in Maya calendrics for believing in the end of the world. Neither is there evidence in what little bits of Maya writing escaped Landa’s flames. Rather, “the 2012 phenomenon is not ultimately about the year 2012, or about the Maya. It is about the apocalyptic impulse that lies deep within our civilization” (131).

Thus, what makes 2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse valuable is the way in which Restall and Solari explore this particular piece of popular culture. Although fast-paced, this slim volume challenges the reader to a greater understanding of the beauty of the Maya, but also to the intellectually shallow, albeit titillating, notions of the end of the world. Although not believing might be lonely, it is more intellectually honest.

Coba Stela 1 photo by Maureen Moore 9 July 2011