A Maya calendar has been discovered in Guatemala that proves the long-count calendar does not mark the end of the world on December 21, 2012. William Saturno found Maya murals, painted nearly 1,200 years ago that calculate astronomical happenings that will happen 7,000 years ahead.
For anyone who has been worried that the world will come to an end on the forthcoming winter solstice based on the rumor that the Mayan calendar says so, you can stop worrying.
The article by William Saturno was published by the National Geographic. Here are some highlights:
It’s rare to find ancient Maya murals, but I’ve had great luck over the years. I’d love for it to be due to some brilliance of mine, but it’s just luck. I can’t explain it. When we excavated the six-foot-wide room in this mound, we found paintings of several figures with the king. One is identified in glyphs as Younger Brother Obsidian. He’s holding a stylus. An entire wall is covered in mathematical calculations.
My hunch is that this may have been a workspace or teaching space for scribes, artists, or scholars. They were working things out for later public consumption. This room gives us a rare glimpse of Maya thought processes. When my colleagues and I studied four columns of huge numbers, we realized these were calculations based on the Maya calendar and astronomy that projected 2.5 million days—some 7,000 years—into the future.
This was done in A.D. 813 or 814, 75 years before Xultún’s final days. A lot of the Maya lowlands had already fallen silent. The collapse had begun. Trade routes and hubs of communication were all changing. At Xultún, folks were going about business as usual, but there was an undercurrent of anxiety. They wanted to tie events in their king’s life to larger cosmic cycles. They wanted to show that the king would be OK.
For those who would like to celebrate December 21, 2012 at a Mayan ceremonial site, may we invite you to look into our Cosmic Alignment Celebration with the Mayan Elders in Yucatan.
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