Many of you will be aware of the looming end date of the Mayan Long Count Calendar which is due to take place on 21 December 2012. There is considerable interest in this event which is obvious if you simply type the words “Mayan Calendar” into Google. The recent release of the movie 2012 starring John Cusack is based on the cataclysm which some predict will take place when the Mayan Long Count Calendar comes to an end and this has been an important contributor to increasing interest in the event.
There is a diverse range of suggestions as to what might happen. These include physical events such as earthquakes, floods, famines and other natural disasters. Other predictions are based around economic and political catastrophes. An increasingly larger number of predictions suggest that the end of the Mayan Calendar will usher in a new spiritual age rather than a physical one and a number of these suggestions claim that this will be a positive event rather than a negative one.
If you want a summary of some of the ideas out there have a look at the articles at Helium. There are, of course, many sceptics who present fairly convincing arguments that much of the hype surrounding the end of the Mayan calendar is just that and more directed at financial gain than anything else.
Who were the Maya?
Very briefly, the Maya were a people who dominated southern Mexico and parts of Central America from ca. 250-900 AD and were also important in this region centuries before and after. The Mayan calendar is actually a system of calendars which is thought to have its origins as early as the sixth century BC. In all, there were three main Mayan calendars, one being the Tzolkin calendar of 260 days which was possibly based on the pregnancy cycle and revolved around religious events and festivals. The second was the Haab which had 365 days like our Julian calendar and focussed on civil events.
Both of these calendars operated on an annual basis like our calendar but unlike our calendar did not include consecutive years as part of its formula. It was the third calendrical system, the Long Count calendar, which did this and it is this calendar which will revert to 0 in the last days of 2012. The Long Count calendar counted the days from the mythical origins of time but the system used to do this had an upper limit meaning that there would be a date in the future when the calendar would revert back to 0. This date is the Julian equivalent of 21 December 2012 which is the basis for all of the present interest in what might happen when the Mayan calendar reverts to 0, or as some might interpret it, when the Mayan concept of time comes to an end and the world with it.
We do not have enough evidence from Mayan civilisation to determine whether the Long Count calendar was designed to point to the end of the world or not. We have significance evidence, however, from the Mediterranean world to suggest that many people living in the Roman Empire were looking to the end of the world as we know it and using certain dating systems to predict it. The two groups who were especially interested in when the end of the world would come were Jews and Christians.
From quite early in their history, the Jews had been looking for the arrival of the Messiah who would essentially save them from dominant imperial powers such as the Babylonians, Greeks and Romans. For some Jews the Messiah would do more of a spiritual nature and for some this was Jesus Christ. These Jews, of course, became Christians. The Christians looked for signs of the second coming of Jesus Christ as a way of predicting the end days of this world and the eventual beginning of a new Heaven and a new Earth. Initially, for most Jews and Christians much of the motivation for establishing when the end of the world was coming was related to persecution by empires of various persuasions. The Jews had suffered under Egyptian, Babylonian and Greek rulers and they continued to suffer persecution at times throughout the whole of the Roman period. The Christians suffered sporadic persecution by Roman emperors from as early as the reign of Nero (AD 54-68) and periods of persecution sparked great interest in when Jesus would return and the end of this dangerous world might come.
The main focus on establishing when Jesus would come a second time and bring an end to this world comes from the New Testament book of Revelation. Revelation was written at the end of the First Century AD and it provided Christians with a detailed vision of what the end times would like. An important part of this vision was to give coded details of a series of events which would take place before the second-coming of Christ.
In the following centuries and right up to today, a lot of ink has been spilled on trying to establish what these events might represent in reality and whether they have happened yet or not. More specifically, Revelation 20 predicted that Jesus would come again and rule for 1,000 years before God would bring the whole of creation to an end and establish a new Heaven and a new Earth. The thousand year reign would come after the reign of the anti-Christ referred to in Revelation 13 who Christians variously identified with a number of Roman emperors, especially Nero. Following Nero’s reign, however, the thousand year reign of Christ was increasingly delayed and this led to numerous attempts at identifying other indicators of the end times and deliverance for persecuted Christians.
By the end of the third century Christians had begun to establish a chronology of historical events since Creation which showed the historical centrality of Jesus as Messiah and the emergence of the church following his ascent to Heaven. Eusebius of Caesarea (ca. 260-340) was one of the key figures in developing this style of recording history which is called Chronicle. Eusebius collated available lists of events which took place in the various kingdoms since Creation. These lists included king lists written down centuries earlier by the Babylonians and also the Egyptians.
The tradition of Christian World Chronicles became very popular and there were many Christian writers in later centuries who followed the tradition of writing Chronicles continuing on from Eusebius. Christian World Chronicles were initially designed more to demonstrate that Christianity was a religion which could be traced back to the earliest days and that it wasn’t a new religion with no respectable antiquity as many of its critics claimed. As the delay in Jesus’ return to Earth grew longer, however, Christian World Chronicles also began to be used as a means of identifying the end times prophesied in Revelation. The collation of the lists of historical events in Christian World Chronicles was compared with the various visions and predictions of historical events before the second coming in Revelation in an effort to break the code in Revelation and indicate the exact time when Jesus would return and the thousand year reign of peace commence.
It appears that the end of the Long Count Mayan Calendar is used by some today in the way that Christian World Chronicles were used in the Late Roman and Byzantine periods. The purpose of the Mayan Long Count Calendar was similar in some ways to the original aim of the Christian World Chronicle, which was to provide a means of recording historical events since the beginning of time. The resetting of the Mayan Long Count Calendar to 0 does not necessarily mean the end of time itself and there are many who acknowledge this.
For Christians who were being persecuted, the end days predicted in Revelation could not come fast enough. Once the Roman world had become heavily Christianised from the Fourth Century AD onward, persecution of certain Christians stopped but this coincided with a period in which the Roman Empire itself came under significant threat from outside forces, especially in the West. The end of days came to be represented by the possible end of the Roman Empire itself and Christian World Chronicles played an important role in indicating just how bad the times had become for the Roman Empire.
Given all of the perceived threats we feel today and serious concerns over the viability of Earth as we know it due to issues such as Global Warming, it is little wonder that such interest has been sparked in an ancient and mystical calendrical tradition which could be interpreted as indicating dramatic and permanent change.