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Do You Believe In the Mayan Apocalypse?
A tracing of an artistic representation of the Maya sun god found on the north side of the Diablo Pyramid at El Zotz, an archaeological site in Guatemala.
CREDIT: Stephen Houston
John Scillitani does not want to be seen as a fanatic. As the proprietor of 2012apocalypse.net, one of the top Google hits for searches on the Mayan apocalypse, he’d be easy to paint in that way: His site features pictures of nuclear explosions, images of meteors hitting Earth and a variety of less-pleasant predictions from the darker parts of the Bible.
But over the phone, Scillitani comes across as friendly and likable. He has a family and a job — he’s a real estate agent in California — and although he worries about the way the world is going, he says, he’s not cowering in a bunker waiting for the end of the world to come.
“I’m just reading stuff and seeing some coincidences that are kind of eerie,” Scillitani told LiveScience. He said he put together his site during “a phase” of intense reading about 2012 apocalypse predictions.”I just love the mythology of it, and you watch a couple shows … then you start doing research and going, ‘Oh my god, there’s this’ and ‘Oh my god, there’s that,’ and you start taking the numerology and trying to match stuff up,” he said. [End of the World? Top Doomsday Fears]
Scillitani is not alone in his fascination with 2012 prophecies. The crux of these prophecies is the Maya Long Count calendar. An important cycle of this calendar draws to a close on Dec. 21, 2012. But while most media have painted Mayan apocalypse believers as misguided doomsday prophets, the reality is not quite so simple.
In fact, the cult of Maya enthusiasts is much more varied — and much more adaptable — than the media have given them credit for. While it’s true that some fear the end of the world, many others look forward to Dec. 21 as a day of transformation and spiritual awakening. Predictions are as numerous as believers, and have even seeped back into modern Maya culture.
“There are all kinds of lines of thought,” said Dirk van Tuerenhout, an anthropologist and curator of “Maya 2012: Prophecy Becomes History,” an exhibit ongoing at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.
