Until just recently, not many people put a lot into the calendar. To most of us a calendar is blocks of time by which we arrange our busy lives. We are in tune with dayplanners; books with lines for every hour of every day, week in and week out. Suddenly the world is agog over a calendar chisled in stone. It cannot be erased or changed to suit the whims of modern life. At best, the Mayan 2012 calendar is mysterious and other worldly.
Nor is this piece of archaeolgical time keeping brightly colored. In fact, the Mayan Long Count is a series of calendars known as ‘stella’. They are actually very tall squared columns of rock that occupy a special place in each ancient Maya community. All four sides of these stella have series of glyphs and figures carved on them. Once up on a time there were many books that held the key to the Long Count calendars. All but one of the books, or codexes as they are referred to, were destroyed by the papacy in the 1500’s when the Spanish arrived to change the Maya world forever.
Many years of study has gone into deciphering the glyphs by numerous archaeoligists and historians. Originally, there were several different conclusions, with four different translations arriving at end dates within a several day range. Eventually, it was decided that one of them was correct. Then decades later this particular scholar changed his mind after further study. He proclaimed the real end date of the Mayan calendar was not December 21, 2012 but December 23, 2012.
Numerically, this is a curious date that looks the same coming and going, with a center that is a mirror of both ends. More mysterious than the baktuns and glyphs is the fact that every program on your television, webpage or print publication about the 2012 calendar of the Mayas shows the wrong artifact. Every single one of them presents you with the Aztec Sun Stone as the image of the Maya Long Count calendar.
The Aztec Sun Stone mimics the time keeping system known as the Maya Tzolkin. But the Tzolkin measures a moon cycle and just keeps rotating through the days. The Haab is very simple, while the sun stone is complex in carvings. Additionally, the Aztecs were not meticulous time keepers; in fact the dates could be off by years from one community to another. Whether it is because the sun stone is brilliantly colored or the reasoning lies elsewhere is at present unknown. Still, what most people think is the Mayan Long Count calendar is absolutely wrong. After all, the Aztecs and the Mayas are two seperate cultures.
Some people believe that the Mayan people were the first to use decimals. They learned mathmatics and calendar keeping from the Olmecs. The Olmecs were the first native inhabitants of South America in the current age of man. It is said that the Olmecs were the people saved from the land of Lemuria at the time that Atlantis and Lemuria were destroyed. So this incredible mathematical system appears to actually carry over from the third world of man. Be that as it may, the end date remains firm for the 2012 calendar on December 21st.