Book Review: A Mayan Day of Doom: The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012

Abstract

A MAYAN DAY OF DOOM The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012. Anthony Aveni (University Press of Colorado, Boulder, 2009). Pp. xx + 190. $19.95 (paperback). ISBN 978-0-87081961-2.This work, Anthony Aveni states, was motivated idiosyncratically by young man's persistent and sincere inquiries regarding the prophecies and by Aveni's true calling as teacher (p. xviii). The of time also aligns with his Behind the crystal ball (New York, 1996), a book the history of magic and occult beliefs (p. 4). Aveni thus positions himself as an academic open considering non-academic material. With his agnostic take on occult behavior, he is willing suffer negative reviews in the interest of saying something about our culture that has not already been said (p. 4). For the work under review his goal is to understand what the ancient Maya really had say 2012 (p. 8).The book is sensibly divided into chapters that consider and contextualize broad selection of 20 1 2 claims. A User's guide reviewing some of the best known claims constitutes chap. 2, while chaps. 3 and 4 treat Mayan cosmology and the calendar, and chap. 5 the (modern and ancient) astronomy allegedly related Mayan creation. The two closing chapters and Epilogue juxtapose the 2010 prophecies against other ideological movements in Western cultures and then specifically in America.Chap. 2 introduces the literature on what Aveni terms Y 12. Here we confront Jose Argiielles's Harmonic Convergence predictions for the year 1987 that led him his more recent prophecies regarding the culmination of that astrological event with the end of the Mayan calendar. Here also we are introduced John Jenkins's claims that the Mayan period-end was intentionally constructed by ancient astronomers at the Preclassic (1500 B.c. - A.D. 100) city of Izapa coincide with winter solstice event aligning the Earth and Sun with the centre of the Galaxy. We also learn Daniel Pinchbeck's and Dennis McKenna's claims 2012, which were heavily informed by their own interpretations of and experiences with indigenous hallucinogenic plant rituals. Aveni also considers the work of Carl Calleman who foresees global catastrophe(s) induced by hypothesized connections between sunspot activity and/or magnetic field reversals and climate change on Earth. Although he does not treat any of these claims in depth, Aveni does provide enough description for the reader peek into what they would see were they choose enter the rabbit hole on their own.The strength of Aveni's book is chap. 5, which speaks directly the book's primary utility. Aveni's discussion of galactic astronomy, for example, is sublime. He introduces the complexity of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century maps of the Galaxy, representations that Y12ers attribute ancient Mesoamerican astronomers, and demonstrates that any such map is far from determined given Mesoamerican naked-eye observations of the night sky. Beyond questions of how Mayan astronomers might have determined the shape of the Galaxy and its exact centre, Aveni asks how such mapping would have made sense given the evidence that Mesoamerica cosmologies comprised thirteen heavens and nine levels the underworld.The alignment with the galactic centre brings up the argument for precession, since Jenkins, for instance, argues that Isapan (pre-Mayan) astronomers computed the length of precession in order set the Long Count's 'terminate' on 21 December 2012. Here we encounter one of the significant shortcomings of Aveni's book: both he and Prudence Rice (who introduces it) contradict the epigraphic consensus, since the 1980s, that Mayan calendrics incorporated cycle of 13 baktuns. …