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- Title
Anticipating the Maya Apocalypse: What Might the Ancient Day-Keepers Have Envisioned for December 21, 2012?
- Authors
Carlson, John B.
- Abstract
Speculation about what ancient Maya have to tell us about "2012" is becoming a global phenomenon in popular culture. These ideas, largely apocalyptic, are more often based on a meager acquaintance with unreliable non-Maya Western perspectives and interpretations than on familiarity with surviving primary sources and their Mesoamerican cultural contexts. This study approaches the "2012 phenomenon" through readings of Maya texts and images considered within the contexts of precontact, historical, and contemporary Maya culture as well as more than a century of academic scholarship. As an overview in three parts of the author's long-term interest in this impending rite of passage, it (1) addresses the question of what the ancient Maya day-keepers might have anticipated for this completion of the 5,125-year 13 Bak'tun Long Count cycle based on the author's research into the name and nature of the Old Maya God L as well as his female aspect, Goddess O; (2) explores the identity of another enigmatic associated deity whose name, Bolon Yokte' K'uh, is known but about whom little else has been understood; and (3) reexamines the question of whether Dresden Codex page 74 represents a world ending deluge or the annual springtime onset of the storms that regenerate life with nourishing rains, invoked through sacrificial rites associated with a pan-Mesoamerican tradition of Venus-regulated warfare and ritual sacrifice.
- Subjects
MESOAMERICAN region; MAYA calendar; APOCALYPSE; MAYA gods; MAYA mythology
- Publication
Archaeoastronomy, 2011, Vol 24, p143
- ISSN
0190-9940
- Publication type
Article