2012: new film features 'Mayan doomsday,' but Maya say Bunk

2012, a disaster movie that takes a Mayan doomsday myth and runs rampant with it, opened yesterday to mixed reviews. One person not singing its praises is Mayan elder Apolinario Chile Pixtun, who says he’s tired of the whole idea of a ‘Mayan apocalypse,’ and suggests that doomsday theories actually spring from Western rather than Mayan ideas.<

Pixtun is quoted in an sfgate article, as is archaeologist Guillermo Bernal of Mexico's National Autonomous University, who says the very idea of apocalypse is "a very Western, Christian" one that is now being projected onto the Maya, perhaps because Western myths are "exhausted."According to the article, most archaeologists, astronomers and Maya say that “the only thing likely to hit Earth is a meteor shower of New Age philosophy, pop astronomy, Internet doomsday rumors.”

But like all good rumors, the Mayan doomsday scenario has some basis in fact
Mayan culture, at its height from 250 to 900 A.D., had the first fully developed written language of the pre-Columbian Americas and was strong in the areas of art, architecture, math, and astronomy.
Mayans used a ‘Long Count’ calendar that begins in 3114 B.C. and divides time in roughly 394-year periods known as Baktuns. Thirteen was a significant, sacred number for the Mayas, and the 13th Baktun ends around Dec. 21, 2012.The primary source of the idea that the world will end on this date comes from Monument 6 of the Mayan ruin known as Tortuguero in the Mexican state of Tabasco. Monument 6 has the only known inscription depicting the end of the current 13-baktun era in 2012.

An incomplete inscription refers to “the end of the 13th b’ahktun which we will see in the year 2012,” along with the word “utom,” translated as “it will happen.” A crack in the inscription makes reading what follows difficult if not impossible, though there is a phrase translated as “he [perhaps a god] will descend.”Some see that as an indication of a cataclysmic event. But other Maya experts point out that the same verb (descend) is used as part of many Mayan dedication events and seems to not necessarily have a destructive connotation.

Many (including the writers of 2012) have taken that fragment of a sentence carved in stone and run with it, adding the supposed Maya knowledge that, according the sfgate.com story, “the Earth's axis wobbles, slightly changing the alignment of the stars every year. Once every 25,800 years, the sun lines up with the center of our Milky Way galaxy on a winter solstice, the sun's lowest point in the horizon. That will happen on Dec. 21, 2012, when the sun appears to rise in the same spot where the bright center of galaxy sets.”

Phil Plait, an astronomer who runs the "Bad Astronomy" blog, has a response to that prediction: So what? The alignment, he points out, doesn't fall precisely in 2012, and, what’s more germane, distant stars exert no force that could harm Earth.

For more on Maya and non-May predictions for the year 2012

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Photo from whowillsurvive2012.com