Will the world end on December 21, 2012?

Are we living in the end times? For years, the fast approaching end of the Mayan calendar, calculated to end Friday, December 21, 2012 during the winter solstice has been hyped as an apocalyptic conclusion to life as we know it.

After all, the wildness of the current political scene, the unfolding world government, the pace of fantastic technology surveilling and tracking our lives and much more seemingly coincide with many ancient predictions for the final days.

There is clearly something about the combination of pyramids and ancient calendars which appeals to our inner kookiness. In the 19th century, even a scientist as brilliant as Piazzi Smyth, the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, was convinced that the future of the human race had been encrypted within the Great Pyramid of Giza. Nowadays, enthusiasts for predictive code-matrices look not to ancient Egypt but to the Yucatan. There, back in the first Christian millennium, calculations are widely believed to have been made that foretell the end of the world. The date? A mere six days’ time: 21 December.

In reality, the Mayan culture had a great deal of astonishing knowledge but its cyclical calendar never predicted a doomsday end for the planet. No scholarly researchers, Mayanists, archaeologists or anthropologists have claimed the calendar signals an end; to the contrary, these academics and those still tied to the Mayan people have found an accurate marking of the start of a new cycle according to planetary movements, a new age where their long count date simply starts again.

Why, then, the current hysteria? In part it springs from the undoubted fact that December 2012 was significant in the Mayan calendar as the turning point of a bak’tun, a 400-year cycle. One of only two known direct allusions to the date was discovered just this summer, and makes clear that those recording it were as concerned with contemporary politics as with any grand chronological sweep.

In AD 695, the two superpowers of the Mayan world, the rival cities of Calakmul and Tikal, had met in battle. Calakmul, under the command of its ruler, Jaguar Paw, had suffered a resounding defeat. Early the following year, Jaguar Paw went on a morale-boosting tour of his wavering allies. The association of his own reign with the distant date of 2012 was designed to place his defeat in a reassuringly cosmological context. Bad news was being veiled behind a recitation of numerals. George Osborne would surely have approved.

“Who will be the prophet?”, asked a Maya author in the colonial period, when Calakmul, Tikal and all the other great cities of his people’s golden age had long since been lost to the jungle. “Who will be the priest who can accurately interpret the word of the book?” The attempt to make sense of the vanished civilisation of the Maya, and to give back to it its silenced voice, has been one of the great projects of Mesoamerican scholarship, and offers, perhaps, one further clue to the roots of the 2012 panic. Back in the early 19th century, when European archaeologists were first venturing into the Yucatan, many of them found it impossible to accept that the monumental architecture they were finding buried beneath creepers could possibly have been built by indigenous people. The existence of pyramids and hieroglyphs seemed to suggest settlers from Egypt – or perhaps from Atlantis. Erich von Däniken updated this presumption by arguing that the influence had been extraterrestrial. Indiana Jones then set the seal on this by finding a spaceship in a pyramid.

The apocalyptic interpretation of 2012 was largely manufactured by a number of prominent New Age occultists, as well as numerous Hollywood fiction peddlers, who have distorted the calendrical prediction into an image that renders the individual helpless, and largely empowers the State to tackle some grand, emergency crisis. Consider films like “Armageddon” or “Deep Impact” where the government must deploy teams to destroy an asteroid headed for earth or the eponymous “2012″ in which most of the people of the world are consumed by a series of earthquakes, tidal waves and other mass scale destructive events, while a small elite contingent flock to a continuity of civilization “ark” controlled by governmental insiders.

When the world doesn’t end this time, let’s learn a lesson to engage in real problems we could collectively really do something about, that we have a duty to address, rather than waiting for the next obscure predictions for cataclysmic doom — like the planet Niburu or an extraterrestrial invasion– that will, for a time, captivate the imagination and induce a learned helplessness and acceptance of systematic evil that would normally be refused by the populace.

Read more:

http://www.infowars.com/is-the-end-of-the-world-coming-this-friday/

2012-12-17 20:21:18

Source: http://gibiru.com/index.php/uncensored-news/78-news/26821-will-the-world-end-on-december-21-2012