2012: The Beginning: Documentary on the Sacred Maya Texts

December 21st of 2012 is the end of 13 Bak'tuns in the Maya long count calendar. There are these doomsday theories that the poles are going to flip or solar flares are going to happen. We have the Hopi prophecy of an emergence from one world to another world and the Pachacuti prophecy of a golden age where the three realms converge and the Maori prophecy of the veil will dissolve between this world and the next. All over the world it did seem to actually confirm that there is something going on here about the year 2012. December 21st, 2012. This date, identified by the Maya nearly 1400 years ago, has in recent years become the source of great curiosity and debate. Some believe it will bring catastrophe, others enlightenment. But what did the ancient Maya themselves believe? In 2012, the beginning, our investigation takes us around the world to uncover what the sacred Maya texts really say. At the ruins of Copán, Honduras, we go where few individuals and even fewer cameras have gone, 20 meters underground to the 1600-year-old Margarita Temple. But where did the doomsday theory begin? An important clue is found in a most unlikely place, a dimly lit room in Dresden, Germany. Across the globe in Guatemala, the veil is lifted from the mysterious world of Maya shamanism. And in Mexico, we examine the rarely seen Tortuguero Monument 6, which bears the only known inscription of this much-storied date. As the fateful date draws closer, we turn to noted archaeologists, scholars and the living Maya. They take us into the field, to the very origins of the Maya long-count calendar, and into their lives and sacred ceremonies. Together, these people from very different worlds shed light on a date that has long been shrouded in mystery and intrigue. If I were in the 15th century, if I were dressed as I am now, with my sacred ornament, they would have taken me to the bonfire, they would have burned me, they would have mistreated me. Today, the world's reaction is incredible, that now the Maya, because they really saw that we are the fundamental foundation of society. The city-state of Palenque flourished in the 7th century. Its monuments contain hieroglyphic inscriptions detailing events that occurred prior to the beginning of the long-count calendar. They provide insight into how the Maya counted long cycles of time, and serve as some of the best evidence we have that the Maya were great astronomers. John Major Jenkins has been studying Maya culture and writing about 2012 for more than 25 years. As an independent scholar, he is the author of over a dozen books on Maya cosmology and calendrics. His galactic alignment theory is one of the field's most controversial subjects. I first got interested in the Maya back in the mid-1980s, and as I got more into researching the Maya calendar and everything related to that, I realized that there was a great unanswered question. This 2012 date, I'd read that it fell on December 21st of 2012, well that's a winter solstice. So right away I thought, well, that's a pretty good indication that there's some kind of intention going on in this date, but I couldn't find any information really about it. So I started looking at the various traditions, and by the early 1990s, I was doing my own independent research into these questions. It's always been driven by getting to the heart of the mystery. That's really been the question for me. Palenque is this amazing 7th, 8th century site, and we're here in the triad groove, which is really the ceremonial core where the inscriptions that relate to the creation mythology are found. You have the temple of the cross, the temple of the sun, and the temple of the foliated cross. Now the temple of the cross, for example, faces a south-southwest horizon, and on the date of the rituals that are recorded on the inscriptions inside of that temple, you find that the Milky Way was moving into its upright position. And this image of the Milky Way is reflected on the tablet inside of the temple in the form of the cross image. The entire complex of narratives relates the birth of the triad deities and the role of the great mother deity to the era beginning in 3114 BC. However, much of the astronomy of these triad deities is also pointing to the astronomy that culminates on the cycle end date in 2012. These are the narratives of the Maya creation mythology, and we find a consistent reference to things like the winter solstice position, the position of the sun on the Milky Way. This is basically the position of the sun in 2012. So we have these indirect references going on in the astronomy, in the mathematics of the calendar, and in the archeoastronomical orientations of the temple buildings. My work's never been about doomsday, in fact, the opposite, because what I find in the Maya creation mythology is a spiritual teaching that is about transformation and renewal. I think that accurately reflects what the ancient Maya actually believed about period endings in their calendar. The Mayas, since 5,000 years ago, have managed 20 calendars, and each one has a special function. The calendar, the long account, has a duration of 5,200 years. On December 21, 2012, a bactum is closed and another bactum is started. To the Maya, their calendars and their spirituality are inseparable. The sacred fire ceremony is a way of honoring both. When we talk about the Maya calendar, it's very important to realize there isn't just one calendar. There are several Mayan calendars. One consists of 13 numbered days and 20 day names. So you have this ritual calendar of 260 possibilities that keeps cycling throughout the year, irrespective of the day on our calendar. And you'll notice that 260 days parallels the length a typical human baby is in the womb. And this is not a coincidence for the Maya. They love these connections between their calendars and the natural world. Then there is a solar calendar. Nowadays we call that the HAB. That calendar continued for the Maya without taking into account the leap day that we have included in our later Julian and Gregorian calendars. And finally, there's the most important calendar for 2012, and that's the long count. And in the long count calendar on the winter solstice on December 21st of 2012, a large cycle of approximately 5,125 years will be coming to fruition. In the long count, 360 days make a tune. Then you have a khak tune, which is a 20-year period. Then finally you have the bak tune, which is a 400-tune or year period. This is the only Maya calendar that has anything to do with the date 2012. Now that's an odd calendar. Why did they make this? They had all these other calendars. What purpose could it serve to them that the other ones didn't already give? For one, it was a linear calendar. It was something that they could project far into the future or far into the past using that and talk about a unique day. But why was that important to them? Looking at the Maya as mathematicians, one of the favorite games the Maya would constantly play were the concepts of lowest common multiples or highest common divisors. They're very interested in saying, what's the lowest common multiple between the cycle of Venus and the cycle of the Sun? When we look at all those different cycles, the long count seems to incorporate all of them. The Maya are using the long count and particularly the bak tune cycle to know when it's time to change the way they're doing things versus when it's time to follow the status quo. We see major changes in their politics, in where they live and how they live right at the change of each one of these bak tunes leading up to this next one, the 13th bak tune. Starting in 2012, we're going to have a lot of problems with floods and earthquakes. According to the Maya calendar, we're going to have to go through this because it's something that hasn't happened before. Supposedly, by 2012, the world is going to end. By 2012, nothing is going to exist anymore. Everything is going to be destroyed. The Maya that were before, that was explained very well. But at that time, we didn't remember about the Maya. Everything was lost. Currently, in the field of Maya studies, there is a bit of a divide between those who entertain the possibility that the Maya were interested in 2012 and that there may be an astronomical component to 2012 and those who basically dismiss the entire thing. And I think that divide really stems from the association between 2012 and apocalyptic ideas of the end of the world or even New Age ideas of a rebirth of consciousness. I fall somewhere in the middle in that I study my archaeoastronomy and so I'm basically looking at the evidence and whatever the evidence says. And so I think it's really important for us to separate out the ideas that the Maya were capable of astronomical measurements and also how they thought about those mythologically. The fact that the Maya were intensely great astronomers is exhibited at Palenque. And people use that evidence that the Maya at Palenque were great astronomers to infer that then they would have been able to create an end date of the calendar in 2012. There's where, in my opinion, you've taken the argument too far. The conclusion that 2012 is a result of their astronomical prowess is the place in which we depart any reasonable scientific argument. There are so many dimensions to the confusion regarding 2012. One of the big ones, though, is this issue of the galactic alignment. The way John Jenkins describes it is very accurate and very valid because he always refers to it very clearly as an alignment that takes place on the solstice. Well, that's a very interesting alignment. And it's one, this is something that most people really don't get, it's one that happens every single year and has since the dawn of our solar system. This is not something that can affect us in any way. If it were going to affect us, it does affect us every single year. There is definitely a schism between New Agers and scholars. The rocks are being thrown on both sides, there's no question. I'd like to see that schism healed. Barbara McLeod is a pilot, anthropologist and epigrapher specializing in Maya languages. Together with archaeologist Sven Gronnayer she made the most comprehensive decipherment of Tortuguero Monument 6. This monument contains the only known inscription citing the December 21st, 2012 date. This is my contribution. I know what the ancient Maya said. My first recollection of Tortuguero Monument 6 was sometime in the 70s, late 70s or early 80s when I first saw a drawing of it. And my thought was, wow, you know, whoever can read that, more power to them. And so I kind of forgot about Tortuguero Monument 6 until the fall of 2009 when Sven Gronnayer and I decided, well, let's talk about this monument. Let's talk about the right panel because he had drawn it and let's see if we can figure out what it really says. And I would crack every single hard nut on this text. And there are some. Everybody wants to know what Tortuguero Monument 6 says about 2012. And we knew. We're actually approaching the museum that has the Tortuguero Monument 6. And of course, Monument 6 is the only known inscription that has the 2012 date on it. Monument 6 is the biographical testimonial of the 7th century Maya king named Balam Ahau or Lord Jaguar. Lord Jaguar basically was using 2012 in a certain way and it involves the relationship between his birthday and the 2012 date. By some miracle, we were able to pull off getting permission to view and examine the monument. It's really an amazing opportunity and honor to be able to do this because there was a flood several years ago and the museum has been rebuilding and Monument 6 has actually been in storage. We've gotten special permission to get in so it's really exciting because not very many people get to view the monument here. Oh, wow! It's really incredible to be here to be looking at this amazing monument. It's amazing that it survived. So many monuments get destroyed and this is the key to understanding what the ancient Maya were thinking about and why they thought 2012 was such an important date. It's amazing. Over here, you have the building dedication. This corresponds to January 10th of 669 A.D. You also have deep-time mythological dates that are calculated with distance numbers. Distance numbers are generating each successive date. You have dates that are in the historical time frame of when Lord Jaguar lived between 612 A.D. and 679 A.D. but you also have references to deep-time rituals that were going on a century before Lord Jaguar was born. You also have him referencing the 2012 date on the right flange, which is over here. You can even see, we have here the 13th Bak'tun completion with the two bars and the three dots. Here's the Bak'tun glyphs. Here you have the Ahau glyph and the three kankin. So four Ahau, three kankin. That is the date of December 21st, 2012, the end of 13th Bak'tuns. What's going on in the sky on that date is that the bright band of the Milky Way crosses over the ecliptic, which is the path that the sun, moon, and the planets follow. So there's a cross in the sky and on December 21st of 2012 the sun will be right in the middle of that cross. That is a rare astronomical alignment, so it's something that only happens in the era of 2012. It is a great period ending in the Maya long-count calendar. They really do believe that period endings are about transformation and renewal, but it requires a sacrifice of the illusions that keep us imprisoned by the values and beliefs of the previous cycle that have expired. The Tortuguera Monument is very critical for understanding how the ancient Maya thought about 2012. The astronomy of these two dates which bracket the entire monument is the same. They're both dates when the sun is lined up with the crossroads of the Milky Way and the ecliptic. And for this reason we can understand that Lord Jaguar was referencing the 2012 date because it reflected his birthday astronomy. Coming to see Tortuguera Monument 6 has emerged as the culmination of a 25-year quest to really understand what the ancient Maya thought about 2012. I think it's important to point out that you can't just look at the right panel of this monument in isolation. That's the part that mentions the 2012 date. It was a T-shaped monument, but the left panel has never been seen. But it must have recorded the king's birthday because the main text opens up with a distance number that counts from the king's birthday to his accession as king. And from that date other distance numbers count to various other events, mostly war events. The reason that 2012 is mentioned on this text is because one of the gods who was present at the creation is the very same god who's mentioned on the right panel of Tortuguera Monument 6 in connection with the 2012 date. That's not an accident. This is really what the text is about. This guy is coming back again, and he is a god of war. He doesn't take sides. John Major Jenkins has proposed that the Maya intentionally placed the end of the long count on December 21, 2012 because of this alignment with the galaxy. I don't think we have enough evidence to suggest that the creators of the long count actually intended that. We know that the Maya probably had multiple interpretations of the importance of various dates and various kings connected themselves to these past and future time periods for their own reasons. I think John Major Jenkins is a very smart man. He is very well read, better than most of my colleagues. A lot of the things that he uses to build his argument are absolutely correct. I think along his path he's actually come up with some important discoveries. One of the fundamental problems I have with the Jenkins hypothesis is that the architects of the Maya calendar some 1,500 years ago were doing it intertwined in their religion. Whatever the reasons for the calendar, it had to have a more contemporary meaning. A lot of times people try to separate spirituality from the physical world. This is the dualist approach and it's led to many problems throughout human history. The Maya worldview integrates all the different domains of human experience including the physical and the spiritual. So it's no surprise that we can look at the traditions that revolve around the 2012 date and find that yes, there is this empirical physical world component that involves astronomy, but there are also spiritual teachings that the Maya had intended to be involved in that alignment. The relation between the Mayan calendar and spirituality is very deep and very profound because it is not a spirituality that we learn from books. It is a spirituality that is active, that is presence, that is alive. And when we follow the Mayan calendar we start giving this special respect to each one. We have to believe that most of their monuments and most of their buildings were made for a spiritual reason. Recent discoveries have shed light on just how much the Maya knew about astronomy. This new evidence is being used to support the theories of all sides of the 2012 debate. The Maya were naked eye astronomers which basically means they weren't using telescopes so far as we know to observe the stars. But what they were doing is recording their observations over often many hundreds of years. One of the things that I've been interested in is trying to determine whether the Maya understood precession. What precession is, it's a phenomenon caused by the axis of the earth wobbling like a top. The axis of the earth right now, the North Pole is pointing towards Polaris, the North Star. But it was not doing that about 13,000 years ago. And so it wobbles and that changes the seasonal position of the sun. From the very beginning of hieroglyphic translations we've recognized that the Maya have this love of recording very long periods of time. Early on they were called esoteric time worshippers. But the work of Michael Grove has looked at these long periods and recognized that they are calculating precession. Since Michael Grove has just in the last few years truly proved that the Maya have the ability to calculate precession, now that idea that they would have purposely designed the calendar to work with precession has more validity. There are many who say that there will be the end of the world. That's what people say, but I don't know if it's true. If you know, in relation to the year 2000, there was talk of the 10K12. It was hoped that the technological system would collapse, but nothing happened. I think the same will happen in 2012. Nobody knows if it will happen or not. There are many who say that the world will end and that it will end in 2012, but who knows? The Maya had the vision that the cycles of time marched on and on and on. The question is, do people always accompany the drumbeat of time? Archaeologist David W. Sedat is a University of Pennsylvania Museum consulting scholar. He led the team that discovered two of the richest tombs ever found in the Americas, the resting places of Copan's dynastic founder and his queen. Of all the major centers, Copan is really like the Athens of ancient Greece. It has extraordinary sculptures and lengthy and complicated texts in Maya writing that explain many details of their history and their belief system. The significance of Copan with regard to the question of 2012 resides in our understanding the art of statescraft that the Copan dynastic founder Yashcuk Mo practiced when he performed the great ceremonies for the initiation of Bak'tun 9 in 435 A.D. People were reminded that for the great eras to continue they must be followers of the spiritual way that was part of their life. Born and raised in Guatemala, he returned to the Maya lands to serve as field director of University of Pennsylvania Museum's Early Copan Archaeological Project. The first real major Maya site that I ever visited when I was 8 years old was Quirigua. And I remember so clearly looking at these awesome stelae that the Maya ever erected there at Quirigua and then this elderly gentleman said across those mountains over there and he pointed towards Copan There was an even bigger city with many more of these stone idols he called them. I always felt that in some way on some level I was meant to come here. We have preserved underneath Temple 16, Margarita Temple. This is the temple that was discovered by our university back in 1993. This temple is rarely visited and filmed because of its difficulty in access. We are very, very privileged to have been granted authorization to come in here today. So we're going down to a level which corresponds to 435 A.D. Wow, this is as impressive as ever! Here we have this very pervasive myth on the origin of time and the preceding events that led to the destruction of the previous age and the creation of the new period that we are so close upon to completing. This is the name of the Copan dynastic founder He is giving a very explicit lesson to those that saw this that mankind, through the agency of the founder Yashcukmo, emerges from the darkness of the underworld and starts the new time, a new dawning, a new great age. The very first reference to a cycle of 13 baktuns actually doesn't show up until about 600 A.D. in the site of Copan. And what I've suggested in one of my papers is that this idea of a cycle of 13 baktuns may have begun in Copan because we don't see any earlier evidence for it. And that idea then diffused elsewhere into Palenque, Quirigua and as well as to Tortuguero and up in Coba also where we have this giant, giant number showing the cycle of 3114 B.C. within larger and larger cycles of 13, 13, 13, 13, 13. And I think it adds up to about 29 octillion years or something like that. The love the ancient Maya had for calculating deep time dates can be observed in their concept of baktun change or the change from one 144,000 day cycle into the next. If you look at the actions of the Maya people you can see them majorly changing their society each one of these baktuns. All around the 9th baktun the Age of Kings starts. You go to the 10th baktun the Age of Kings ends. All of those cities that had kings 16, 20 kings in a row they abandoned them. Go to the 11th baktun and that is the abandonment of Chichen Itza, a major capital of the Yucatan. 40,000 people walk away from a city and a new capital, Mayapón, begins. Go to the 12th baktun and you've got 1618 as the date. The Itza, who have been resisting the Spanish for 100 years, send an emissary to Merida and they say the great cycles come to an end and we're prepared for our change. And this heralds in a few decades of fighting and misunderstanding that ends the Itza. But they volunteered that information on the very same year of the 12th baktun. The 13th baktun, I think, at least to classic Maya people, would have been something particularly important. It would have been recognized as the anniversary of the beginning of this creation, the 4th creation. We're people of the 4th creation and texts are very clear that right where the 3rd creation ends and the 4th creation begins, the calendar resets, like the odometer on your car. Leading it from that first day, August 13th, 3114 B.C., and running 13 baktuns up, we get to 2012, December 21st. They say the end comes in 2012, that we're all going to die. But I don't believe that. According to the Mayans, what happened was that a hecatomb was going to happen for nature to be reborn. That's what it is. They say the world may be lost, but it's not. We don't believe that we'll get to 2012. Dresden, Germany, is home to the Dresden Codex. It is from this manuscript that the doomsday theory was born. The Dresden Codex is one of the three or four surviving Maya books, most of which were burned by the Spanish Inquisition. It seems to be a manual with mostly astronomical and calendrical information. We know obviously that the Maya were interested in astronomy, but here in the Dresden Codex we have some of the most beautiful and refined examples of their astronomical and calendrical measurements. They had thousands of these, and it's all gone. It's just a pity, but it is. The Dresden Codex is a very important book of the Mayans. There is a reason why it survived. There are stories of the Mayan people that jumped inside a fire while the books were burning. I always felt a very deep connection with that book. The Maya calendar guides Aumrak's life and work as a medicine woman and ceremonialist. She has traveled here to fulfill her lifelong dream of seeing the Dresden Codex. This Codex, the moment I saw it, I had a very intense response, very emotional, because I started crying. This sacred book is very far away from its original people, and I believe all of the ancient knowledge of the Mayans is also very far away from my people. For many years the Mayan people have hidden in caves to do ceremony. They were persecuted. From the time the conquerors came to our countries, they saw the snakes depicted, and the snakes meant the devil for the conquerors. So they started burning their books, killing the wise men, the wise women, destroying the sacred places and the pyramids, and trying to convince people that the church was the real path, and that is why many of our cultures have been destroyed. Page 74 of the Dresden Codex contains a very famous image of what's called the flood scene, and it shows a giant caiman up in the sky with a sky band on his body, and his head is inverted and out of his mouth is pouring a lot of water, and there's kind of dark coloring in the background showing us that this is some kind of cataclysmic event. A lot of people have interpreted this as what's going to happen in 2012, but actually there is no mention whatsoever of 2012 in any part of the Dresden Codex. One of the first interpreters of the Dresden Codex, a librarian in Dresden named Ernst Furstmann, was one of the first to identify that scene as the end of the world, and that was later picked up by other scholars who have referenced it in that way, but really I think it's not necessarily a future prediction, it's more of a description of something that happened in the past mythologically. There's a rather large movement of a lot of people thinking about something going to happen in 2012, and I am a believer in manifesting our destiny. I think that if enough people think something, that that in and of itself sometimes makes things happen. As Maya archaeologist, I talk about what we see from ancient and contemporary Maya wisdom. What are they saying about this? And from the Maya perspective, I think they see these turns of baktuns, which is coming here in 2012, as an opportunity to change, as a correct time in our lives where we've got to put away things that have gone stale and have the bravery and the agency to change. I think there's a paradigm shift going on, on the level of people all over the planet coming together and putting on the table an agenda for humanity. There's no question that that's something real. They're concerned with issues that everyone's concerned with, or everyone should be concerned with. The exhaustion of our resources, the overcrowding on the planet, the mismanagement of the resources we have, the constant conflicts and wars and competitions. These are all problems that I think are really coming to a head, and I think that the 2012 movement, or whatever you want to call it, is bringing that into focus. We as human beings, in this passage in the Popopu, have had a haze cast over our eyes. When the original inhabitants on the planet were created, the gods deliberately clouded their eyes so they could not see clearly. That is our current situation. We do not see the damage. The end of the world is one that is going to take place by little scratches and cuts. It's not going to be a big explosion. It's happening now, and we're partying and running around as if everything's fine. In 2012, the only thing we have to do is enter into a state of consciousness of not damaging Mother Earth, to stop using so much plastic packaging, to stop using an instantaneous and disposable life that is ruining Mother Earth. In any situation, everyone has double, triple packaging, and we are damaging Mother Earth. The Maya world is really about understanding one's deep relationship to the world, how we are indispensable participants in the world that we live in. We are not outside of the universe. We participate in and belong to the universe. We are part and parcel of everything that goes on around us, and we probably need to think about behaving in such a way that honors this interdependence. I think the great intellectual energy that the Maya started can really benefit us and focus us on what we would hope would be the best solution, a new beginning, the beginning of a new great era, and be the ones to be the agent of that change. So I think if we have a Maya message at all here, it's not that an apocalypse is coming, it's not that we're going to stand around passively and receive gifts we didn't work towards, but that this is the right time to put away old things that aren't working and start new things that'll work again. I'm afraid, I'm afraid I know who I am. Many talk about preparation through meditation. Others talk about prayer. Others talk about different ways to wait for 2012. But the most important thing right now is to achieve the unity of consciousness. It doesn't matter what religion you are, what philosophy you have, it doesn't matter how you think, but the intention you have to achieve a more harmonious world. When we start to get together and start to live together spiritually and energetically, we can transform this world. My hope is that as we approach 2012, that we may actually be able to reflect on who the Maya were, what they were about, and why these kinds of cycles of time were interesting to them. But also reflecting on us as humanity and what is our connection to these large cycles of time, what does it mean to look up in the sky and observe the positions of the planets and the moon and the stars. As an astronomer, my hope is really to redirect people to become naked-eye astronomers again, to look at what the Maya saw and look at what cultures all over the world have been looking at, and to turn our lights off and really go outside and look up and to wonder about our place in the universe. This is a message of peace for the new generation to come. So there is no doubt, everyone with conviction, everyone with a lot of will, and everyone with a lot of faith in ourselves, we are close to starting the cycle of peace, the cycle of love, the cycle of understanding, the cycle of forgiveness. I have invoked the 260 energies, the 13 cosmic energies, pillars of the Maya life. Thank you, Nahual, thank you, Ajao, creator and forerunner, father and forerunner, mother and forerunner. With us, the Mayans in the Maya way of thinking, there is no absolute end. There is a rebirth, a transformation, and this is shown to us by the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the K'ich'es. When they were murdered, the mother, the Doncella Ish'kik, from her long whip, grabbed the ashes of her children and with her tears, because she cried, those ashes went to the river. Therefore, they revived, they incarnated in the water, two very wonderful twins. Therefore, with us, the renewal does exist. We reincarnate and we never die.