The+Mayan+Calendar

=The Mayan Calendar=

Everyone thinks he knows something about the Mayan calendar. And we've all heard it: "The Mayan Calendar says the world is going to end in 2012!" "You know the Mayan calendar? The end of the time cycle is coming--we're all gonna die!" "Yeah, well, we don't have to worry about global warming anymore because the world is going to end in 2012 anyway!" "Awww man, I won't get any Christmas presents in 2012 because the world will end 3 or 4 days before Santa comes!"

Well, believing those kinds of apocalyptic, catastrophic, paranoid interjections about the end of the world and how the very bright, forward-thinking and "potentially-contacted-by-aliens-How-else-could-they-have-built-all-those-really-cool-temples?" Mayans somehow knew something about how our galaxy is going to swallow itself up in a supermassive black hole and how the oceans will rise and how the Statue of Liberty will crumble and how somehow the entire planet with explode in a fiery, morbid, horrific fashion is all very similar to believing in Jolly ol' St. Nick.

The Mayan calendar itself is a very intricately constructed, fascinatingly accurate system for maintaining and keeping record of steady time as they broke the year down into different "months" and used interlocking cogs to maintain steady times. This video is an exceptional tool for learning about the processes of the Mayan calendar itself.

media type="youtube" key="BeE-3BBqG58" height="390" width="480" align="left"After watching this video, I'm sure you're thinking, "Well, that's a little lack-luster and a little less climactic than I was anticipating. Where is the fire and brimstone? Where are the nuclear explosions? Where are the dying cats and flipped-over air-craft carriers and where, for goodness sakes, is the supermassive blackhole?! I mean, that's what this was all about, right? Forget the Mayan calendar--this is boring!"

Well, to you, my dear reader, I say that you do not know the whole story--yet! This is only one aspect of the mystery and intrigue surrounding the Mayan calendar. This video merely describes how the mechanism works and gives you a basic understanding of what the Mayans considered important--the accuracy of the dates, the authority of the leaders to establish the date, and their dependence on celestial bodies to tell time (Apocalypse Soon?)

The Mayans were obsessed with sophisticated time-keeping instruments much like we today are obsessed with iPhones and celebrities and Ugg boots. They kept records on painted bark books, codices, and many other things and could use their knowledge of mathematical and celestial figures to predict events like solar and lunar eclipses. Now you can buy an app for that. But the Mayans, no matter how clever they were, could not yet make apps (perhaps a sign that the aliens really didn't visit them afterall) and instead had to create an extensive and precisely measured calendar.

A few hundred years before the beginning of the classic period (AD 200 or so) the Mayans changed their calendar so that it would connect the growth and expansion of the Mayan state with their origin myths (Apocalypse Soon?). Basically, the Mayans, who were a people group that somehow immigrated to the North American continent from Asia thousands of years ago, did not have a way of time-keeping that coincided with their origin myths and were desperate to back-up their story with real, concrete evidence. Hence the Mayan Calendar.

The solution was to create the Long Count based on their base-20 counting system with one day equalling one unit of time. In coherence with their 260-day year and 365-day year, they worked out the Long Count cycle which was based not only on their calendars, but also on the movements of the celestial bodies. What makes the Mayan Calendar particularly different is that the rulers were also able to have their calendar correspond to bright spots in their reign. They formed the calendar so that heavenly phenomena seemed to correlate to their own successes as rulers, therefore using it as a mechanism of propaganda to create public trust of the government. This Long Count cycle is the equivalent of 5,125.37 years. And next year in December is when, according to the myth of Mayan origins which began in the elusive "Year Zero," we will finally reach the end of that cycle.

"OH NO!!!" you are yelling! "OH NO! So it's true, we really ARE going to die next winter!" Dear reader, please come to the lucid realization that in fact there are several reasons why you should not become disheartened with the ending of the Long Count cycle and that if you really were an ancient Mayan, you wouldn't be concerned at all! The end of the Long Count cycle had no particularly catastophic implications to the Mayans as they had no fears of the "End of the World" as we have today. The Long Count was simply a "unit" of time that was used by them to mark out the beginnings of their own creation and the ending of that first cycle. After year 5,125.37 comes year 0. And everything starts all over again. No death and destruction, no volcanic eruptions, no bubonic-swine-mad-cow flu--just the beginning of another cycle.

In fact, there are no real records that say that the Mayans ever really considered the idea that the world would end or that any disasters would come a a result of the end of the Long Count cycle, only that their unit of time would start all over again. For the Mayans, Day Zero is the day in which creation starts all over again, not as a time of catastrophe, but as a time to celebrate reciprocity with the Gods and the restoration of balance more than anything else.

So please, before you consider storing gallon jugs of water in your basement, or uying a "The End is Near" bumper sticker for your car, or joining a shady Californian cult where the kool-aid is funny, please consider the Mayans--the real Mayans--and appreciate their incredible ability to keep flawless time as well as their appreciation for wanting to understand where they came from, recreating their whole mode of time-keeping simply to gain a better sense of belonging with their traditions and in their world.

Buy hey, just incase you're interested in some Mayan Calendar apparel and want to be like one of the cool kids instead of showing off your intense knowledge of the Mayan Calendar with all of its intricacies and government intrigue, here's a fun website []