By Carl Calleman
Response to the article Back to the Future by Serena Redfeather/Transitions (https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=15X_p4BCi9qNtE7rj3SIrdOAskPbbNaX…)
Serena Redfeather/Transitions (SRT) has raised a series of critical points against my work with the Mayan calendar and especially for the thirteen baktun “end date” of October 28, 2011. Most of these have been raised before and responded to by me at earlier points in time, but I feel they may now need to summarized.
She (I do not know who is using this name, but I assume it is a she) claims that almost no other researchers in the field has given the end date of October 28, 2011 to the thirteen baktun cycle. While this may be essentially true (mind you, there are also others that share my view) this may be related to the fact that I am also the only researcher in modern times that has attempted to prove that the Mayan calendar is true. (Some do not even recognize that this is a problem and that the truth of the calendar is something that needs to be verified). I may also be the only researcher in this field that has presented predictions that indisputably have come to pass and these have been based on the very end date of October 28, 2011. For instance, almost everyone on this planet experienced the frequency increase of the ninth wave whose beginning I had set to March 9, 2011. The following week the magazine Newsweek went as far as having the text “Apocalypse Now” on its cover because of the unprecedented amount of change that this wave precipitated worldwide. The end date of the Long Count as October 28, 2011 thus goes hand in hand with a reality connection to the Mayan calendar that those that claim that the end date is December 21, 2012 do not think they need to provide.
The December 21, 2012 researchers may thus sit in their ivory towers being “right” about their orthodoxy, but if this orthodoxy is not useful for establishing a reality connection what is it good for? To me the Mayan calendar is important to the extent that it aids the understanding of our current and future situation. I then also want to point out that it is simply not true when SRT says that my work is based on “revelations.” I have never used this word for my own work, since it is based on the facts of science and history. It is not “revelations” that the Thirty Years’ War started in 1618, that the telephone was invented in 1875 or that the Perm-Triassic extinction took place 252 million years ago. These are facts and to me a predictive calendar is meaningful only if it can be shown to be based on verifiable patterns of evolution. For people to accept my theories they thus do not have to believe in any revelations, since I provide facts that speak for themselves.
When it comes to the end date of the calendar I however refrained from making predictions except than to say that it will mean the collapse of dualist dominance based civilization (Which many would agree is happening). What I know from my studies of the Mayan calendar is that there is normally no reason to expect anything to happen on a specific date, and so predictions can only be based on time periods with a certain energy. In reality it sometimes takes years before an energy shift manifests in our visible reality and if indeed something would happen on a specific date it would be truly remarkable and attest to the special importance of this day. It would be a first and would not really be expected. With this in mind we might then take a look at what happened on October 28, 2011 or close to it:
•The fall of the Khaddafi Regime in Libya. A dictator and the world’s richest man was deposed.
•“Shut down the system” of the Occupy Wall street movement (October 28)
•Greek decision of referendum on aid/austerity package (October 31) Decisive shift towards the collapse of euro?
•The British monarchy scrapped male succession. (October 28)
•A super-hacker sucked out the data of 760 of the world’s largest corporations and stored it away for future use.
•The exposure of an abusive football coach was rising to the surface at the venerable Penn State University.
•The development of a practicable method of cold fusion in Italy (October 28)
•Italian physicists announced that the Faster-than-Light Neutrino experiment was to be rerun. The result of the rerun continues to challenge Einstein’s Relativity Theory. (Some of these examples are courtesy of Barbara Hand Clow)
All of these events are related to the downfall of dualist civilization and I believe quite significant indications of what is later to come. Especially in the area of science the events were huge as a new source of energy became practicable and the serious threat to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was cemented. If this is not big, what is? I think many people have been so addicted to the Hollywood version of the end date that they expected a meteor to smash into the earth or the whole world to experience some divine apparition at the end of the calendar. When this does not happen they will say that “nothing” happened. If the above list is “nothing” it makes you wonder what “something” would be.
The consequences of the shift of the ages are however much bigger than what these concrete examples would imply and are only now starting to land in people (Some were absorbed at 11-11-11 shortly after the shift). In certain ways these consequences are not at all what most people, including myself, had expected, but then again what comes with a true shift of the ages should not be predictable from the past. I am now writing a book where I am discussing what the consequences of the “end” of the Mayan calendar are and to what extent other Mayan calendars may also be affected. Of course, my use of the term “end date” to the Mayan calendar is quite questionable as SRT points out, but it has been used by all researchers in the field to refer to the end of the thirteen baktuns. The subtitle of John Jenkins Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 is “The True Meaning of the Maya calendar End Date” and José Argüelles in the Mayan Factor refers to the same date as the “end of the cycle.”
The meaning of the “end” to the Mayan calendar is in fact a very important question to ponder after this tipping point. But there are strong forces that do not want us to do this seriously and would like us to just wait for a new world age to fall down on us on December 21, 2012. There is clearly such an Elite agenda and in particular they do not want people to know about the ongoing erosion of the old world of dominance and the emerging world of unity consciousness brought by the ninth wave. Like SRT the Elite wants to hide the existence of the ninth wave that is the one bringing unity consciousness and continuing to play the most important role for transforming the world. I feel many researchers of the Mayan calendar are simply pawns in a larger game that they are not driving. It is not an accident that we have not seen any Hollywood movies about October 28, 2011.
Consequently, it was for me much more important to be able to predict when the ninth wave with its erosion of the institutions of dominance would begin (March 9, 2011) than to be “right” according to the standards of orthodoxy. The reason is that an understanding of the ninth wave may give heart to those around the world that are now fighting against oppression and dominance. If it were not for the fact that this wave continues I would not have written this article, but this is a decisive thing for the future of humanity.
Admittedly I may previously have been overly milleniaristic in my writings, but contrary to what SRT claims I have never said that contemporary Mayan elders support the October 28, 2011 end date. I think that such a support would have been next to impossible, since they lost the Long Count about a thousand years ago. Hence, if you hear some Mayan elder, or someone with connections to them such as Carlos Barrios, today giving December 21, 2012 as the end date of the Long Count then this is something they have heard from the archeologists. It does not come from their own counting.
What SRT is then actually suggesting is that we should let today’s archeologists determine our understanding of the fate of the world. After all, it is only from them that we have the December 21, 2012 end date. It surprises me how many people who regarding Egypt or Sumer are willing to completely discard the ideas of modern archeologists in the particular matter of the Mayan end date completely bow to their views. A possible reason for this is that the Mayan calendar end date is of a much greater importance to the global elite as they have invested in Hollywood movies to bolster their interests. The result has been that many in the US New Age industry have found it lucrative to go along with what most people have now been led to believe through the big media. To present intellectually complicated arguments based on complicated political relationships between the ancient city states of the Maya is beyond the horizon of many of the so called “evolutionary leaders.” Better then just to repeat what everyone else seems to be saying.
To discuss the actual end date question then it is important to realize that the reality of the Mayan calendar is a question that is anathema to archeologists. It would not be possible in today’s academic settings to address the question whether the Mayan calendar is true or not. The questions they are dealing with are what the belief systems of the ancient Maya were. From such a perspective you might say that the December 21, 2012 date is archeologically correct – as I have pointed out in my books. Yet, this date is not energetically correct and as we shall see it seems even some of the ancient Maya were aware of this. What is of interest for those that seek a reality connection to the calendar is what is energetically correct.
The answers you get from archeologists in this matter however depends very much on how the questions are asked and if you only ask them what the end date is they will mostly say December 21 (or 23), 2012. Yet, there is a consensus among them that the 1,872,000 day Long Count was anchored at its creation date (August 11, 3114) and not at its end date. It is also a relatively well-established idea that this beginning date was set at the day the sun was in zenith in Izapa, which is the location where the Long Count is believed to have been instituted. If the solar zenith theory is true we however know for certain that the December 21, 2012 is the wrong end date. Moreover, Mark van Stone, a Mayanist, who has summarized all Mayan texts regarding the end date, raises the question why the Maya did not start the Long Count on a day that was the first day of the sacred calendar. If you listen to my interview with him on YouTube he, like myself, thinks it is very strange that it starts and ends on a day that is 4 Ahau. For someone who knows what he is talking about this is an indication that there is something wrong with the consensus view.
If the beginning date and end date of the Long Count developed in Izapa is 420 days off we may wonder if there is any indication that later Maya in other city states became aware of this? Yes, there is in fact such an inscription from Palenque, which according to many developed the calendrical art of the Maya to its highest point. There, the decisive event that started the Long Count in August 11, 3114 BC was described as the First Father raising the World Tree. Interestingly, this crucial act is associated with a glyph that signifies that a king has become seven years of age, meaning seven years after his stated birth on June 16, 3122 BC. If we believe that this glyph was correctly placed (and accept for an error of one day in the projection 4000 years into the past) the creation date, the true beginning of the Long Count, would be June 17, 3115 BC. Amazingly, this is a 13 Ahau day 1,872,000 days before October 28, 2011, a date which is also 13 Ahau. If the Palenque scribes would have believed that the true end date of the Long Count instead was December 21, 2012 they would have placed the birth of First Father at August 11, 3121 BC. They however did not do so and if we do not chose to blind ourselves to the many correct predictions made in recent times based on the October 28 date the placement of the glyph makes a lot of sense. Maybe they were hoping that people some time in the future would understand what they were saying, but more likely their creation story was related to their own dynasty and not to that of Izapa so why let the solar zenith in Izapa run the show? You may then wonder: If they knew that August 11, 3114 BC was the wrong beginning date (because it had been based on the Izapa solar zenith which had no relevance to Palenque or the rest of the world) why did they not just change the Long Count? Well, the Izapan Long Count had then been in use for about a thousand years and established in the whole Mayan world for time keeping. It is not an easy thing to change such a tradition. It would be somewhat like trying to change the day we celebrate Christmas even if we know Jesus was not born then.
So what we have is really a competition between two creation stories, one from Izapa resulting in an end date of December 21, 2012 and another from Palenque giving October 28, 2011. In the ancient Mayan world Izapa, who was first out, won this. This does not mean that we who live today need to adopt it, since the one originating in Palenque is more generally valid and can be verified by predictions in modern times. This whole reasoning however assumes what professional Mayanists know, namely that the ancient Maya were no angels and that the different city states competed over power and prestige. Prudence Rice even talks about calendar wars between the different versions in different city-states, which were also subject to subtle manipulations. Mark van Stone points out that the Maya never erased errors that they cut in stone. Personally, I think that those that think things are true because they are cut in stone are much like those that say that things are true because they are written in the Bible.
Finally then, SRT refers to Bolon Yokte Kuh in the Tortuguero monument 6 as the “nine-headed god”, without giving a reference to the origin of this interpretation. I think the description given by Jenkins as the Nine-step god of period endings (sometimes Bolon Yokte Kuh has also been read as the Nine-Support god) is more accurate. Van Stone however emphasizes that this refers to a composite of nine gods. Bolon Yokte Kuh is thus a perfect metaphor for the nine waves of the cosmic pyramid as I have proposed. As is common from those criticizing my work SRT does not offer an alternative explanation of what the descent of Bolon Yokte Kuh would mean – unless of course she with her professed orthodoxy actually believes that a nine-headed god will appear on December 21, 2012. To expect this would be logical for someone who believes that everything cut in stone in ancient inscriptions is true and that the Maya – now as then – stood above all political fighting. I suggest that we instead stay grounded in reality and rely on the best understanding that is available because our future may depend on it.
Carl Johan Calleman,
Seattle, December 13, 2011, 7 Cimi
Carl Johan Calleman is the author of Solving the Greatest Mystery of Our Time: The Mayan Calendar (Garev 2001), The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness (Bear and Co, 2004) and The Purposeful Universe (Bear and Co, 2009). His web site is www.calleman.com. See alsowww.mayanninthwave.com and www.treeoflifecelebration.com.
