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2012 and The Mayan Calendar
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Let's get this out of the way. If you're reading this page, you may well just want to know the answer to this one question.
And the answer is...
No.
Can we move on now. 
Okay, kidding aside, the Mayan Long Count Calendar does show the end of a Cycle, somewhere around October 28, 2011 or December 21, 2012. But there's nothing in the Mayan prophecies that predicts the total apocalypse.
In fact, inscriptions have been found referring to dates far beyond the completion of this Cycle.
Presumably, when one calendar ends, another begins, just as ours does every January 1st.
The 2012 doomsday prophecies are from other sources.
Now, if that's all you need to know about the Mayan Calendar, you may want to skip ahead to my 2012 Predictions article.
But there is one other little tidbit of interest...
The Calendar of Venus
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It is likely that it coincides with an astronomical Transit of Venus, although I haven't found corroboration of that idea so far.
The end-date of the Mayan Calendar, however, certainly coincides with a Transit of Venus. This is likely to be important, since the entire Long-Count Calendar was begun on a day that the Mayans called "The Birth of Venus."
While no one has even discovered exactly what that means, it is certain that the planet Venus was pivotal in Mayan cosmology.
It is surely not a coincidence that the number 13 was, also.
Before we get to that, let's look more closely at the Transits.
A Transit of Venus happens when the planet passes between Earth and the Sun, so that we can see the dark shape of the planet move across the face of the Sun. They are a very rare predictable phenomenon, occurring in sets that are 8 years apart, in a pattern of 243 years.
The latest transit -- the first of the current set -- happened on June 8, 2004. The second of the set happens in June, 2012.
In history, Venus Transits seem linked with major cultural events...
- 1518-1526 Transits: Cortes destroys the Aztec Empire and conquers Mexico
- 1600's Transits: One of the most destructive wars in European history, the Thirty Years War rages on, causing massive destruction, famine, plague, and bankrupting European nations.
- 1760's Transits: The American Revolution takes shape.
- 1769 Transit: Massive droughts in Bengal, leading to a famine that killed ten million people -- the worst natural disaster in human history, in terms of lives lost.
Incidentally, also the year that the Roman Catholic Church abandons their objection to lightning rods, after Brescia, Italy is devastated by a lightning fire -- 1/6 of the city destroyed and 3,000 people dead.
- 1875 Transit: Shortly after, the USA passes the Civil Rights Act, prohibiting racial discrimination.
- 1882 Transit: Nikola Tesla devises the rotating magnetic field principle and uses it to create an alternating current motor, paving the way for the Second Industrial Revolution.
The Sacred Number 13
The Mayans perceived the number 13 as a root number. It is used in the Mayan Calendar in a great many ways, including multiples and powers of 13 (like 13,000 and 26,000).
And 13 is related to Venus.
The orbit of Venus is locked into a pattern with the orbit of the Earth. For every 8 Earth years, Venus makes 13 orbits.
I'm drawn to speculate about the return of the Goddess, symbolised both by Venus and the number 13, in my 2012 predictions, but I'll resist the temptation (for now ).
If you want to understand a bit more about the Mayan Calendar, please read on...
Basics of the Mayan Calendar
The Mayan civilisation began in about 2000 BCE and reached its peak around 250 CE (Common Era). During this time, they scrutinised the skies. The stars, especially Venus (technically a planet, but they probably didn't know that), had an intense fascination for them, as did the cyclical progress of time.
In fact, the Mayans were aware of the journey of the solar system! They realised, and charted, the periodic movement of the whole solar system around the galactic core just as the planets orbit the sun.. And they found that our orbit around the galaxy was elliptical -- sometimes we are closer to the centre of the galaxy, and sometimes we are farther away.
In fact, the Mayans had such a precise understanding of the movement of the cosmos, that we are just catching up to them now!
The Mayans actually used different calendars for different purposes. The one of interest to us in regards to 2012 is their Long Count Calendar. That's what we'll be referring to in this website.
The Long-Count Calendar
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Each of the nine blocks, or Cycles, is divided into 13 equal sections -- 7 "days" and 6 "nights" -- with their own characteristic purposes.
The interesting thing is that it's not only the Mayan Calendar that used this pattern of time. The Sumerians, Mesopotamians, and ancient Vedics of India (from whose writing developed Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism, and Taoism) all used the same pattern of 9 levels divided into 13 subsections. It seems to be hinted at in the Biblical Old Testament as well, as God took 7 days (and presumably the 6 nights between them) to create the world -- referring to the 1st Cycle.
The Nine Cycles of Time / Ages According to the Mayan Calendar
- First Age
- Began: 16.4 billion years ago, with the creation of the universe in the Big Birth
- Duration of Days and Nights: Well over 1 billion years each
- Primary Mode: Action and reaction, the laws of physics
- Evolution: Creation of matter and of living cells
- Events: Light appears in the Universe; time and space are born. The birth of Consciousness. From nothingness, through "inanimate" rock and matter, consciousness evolves to the interdependency of organelles as collaborative life forms: single-celled organisms.
- Second Age
- Began: 840 million years ago
- Duration of Days and Nights: over 63 million years each
- Primary Mode: Stimulus/Response
- Evolution: Live births
- Events: Complex life evolves to the first animals, the brain develops, herds and flocks and other non-individualised groups form.
- Third Age
- Began: 41 million years ago
- Duration of Days and Nights: Over 3 million years each
- Primary Mode: Stimulus/Individual Response
- Evolution: Family and social bonds
- Events: Emergence of first primates; individuation and recognition of individuals as unique.
- Fourth Age
- Began: 2 million years ago
- Duration of Days and Nights: 180 thousand years each
- Primary Mode: Unity and Division, or Similarity/Difference, or Us and Them
- Evolution: Homo sapiens, the use of tools
- Events: Emergence of first humans; the development of the power of intellect; making choices rather than simply reacting to events
- Fifth Age
- Began: 102 thousand years ago
- Duration of Days and Nights: Almost 8 thousand years each
- Primary Mode: Reasons and explanations
- Evolution: Agriculture, religion
- Events: Development of spoken language; making rules and stories for how things are and should be; development of culture -- groups who share the same rules and stories and reasons
- Sixth Age
- Began: Over 5 thousand years ago (3100 BCE)
- Duration of Days and Nights: Almost 400 years each
- Primary Mode: Law, dominance
- Evolution: Nations, writing, civilisation
- Events: Learning to put knowledge into written form, developing legal systems for protection -- the Sumerian civilisation.
The switch to patriarchy: dominance of intellect over heart, achievement over caring, ego-aggrandisement over nurturance, humanity over nature, and man over woman and child
- Seventh Age
- Began: Over 250 years ago (1755 CE)
- Duration of Days and Nights: Almost 20 years each
- Primary Mode: Power-Over and control of others
- Evolution: Industrial manufacturing, global economy, internet
- Events: Creating and gathering power over others into the hands of a small "elite"; power overcoming law with the creation of corporations as legal entities with rights.
-- Note that even though it is selfish and destructive, this is the path through which consciousness must evolve.
Near the end of this cycle, August 1987, the 1st Harmonic Convergence ushered in the transition to the next Cycle.
- Eighth Age
- Began: Jan 4, 1999
- Duration of Days and Nights: Almost 1 year each
- Primary Mode: Personal ethics and integrity (power-within and self-command)
- Evolution: Informational age
- Events: Evolution to higher vibration, cosmic consciousness, rise of spirituality over religion. Beginning the shift away from dualistic, ego-based beliefs.
Near the end of this cycle (May 2010), the 2nd Harmonic Convergence ushered in the transition to the Ninth Cycle.
- Ninth Age
- Began: Feb 10, 2011 and ends either October 28, 2011 or December 21, 2012
- Duration of Days and Nights: 20 days each
- Primary Mode: Conscious Co-Creation: Attention, Intuition, Intention
- Evolution: Unity consciousness, reconnection with Source
- Events: End of dualism (us and them, spirit and matter, etc); peace, sharing, and cooperation; rise of spirit as motivating force; re-integration of Feminine qualities scorned for 5000 years.
The Cellular Cycle --
The Mammalian Cycle --
The Family Cycle --
The Tribal Cycle --
The Cultural Cycle --
The National Cycle --
The Planetary Cycle --
The Galactic Cycle --
The Universal Cycle --
At the end of the 9th Age of the Mayan Calendar, it is believed that the Earth will begin anew -- the Fifth World -- as has happened 4 times in the past. (See the Hopi prophecies for more.)
The Speed of Evolution
Each Cycle, or block of time, in the Mayan Calendar is 20 percent shorter than the one preceding it. Yet each Cycle consists of the same amount of evolution and development.
What that means is that each Cycle sees change happening 20 times as fast as before!
It is an ever-accelerating rate of change.
The amount of change that took a billion and a quarter years in the First Cycle is currently occurring every 20 days!
If you watch our culture with this perspective, you can actually see this evolution of consciousness in fast-forward, through TV programs and the news, books and entertainment, social movements, and so on.
There's more on the increasing Speed of Life at this link.
The next article looks at how the Mayan Calendar charts the process of shifting from one stage of human consciousness to the next.
With Bright Blessings,
Next Article on 2012 and the Mayan Calendar
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