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Historical and mainstream avatars of Ragnarok, Armageddon, and other catastrophic closures are notable for always assigning Clobbering Time to a date in the far distant future, and demanding alms paid up to date right now. Less consummate bullies pretending to the throne are infamous for setting the arcane End of All to much more proximate dates - fundamentalist Christians and their Day of Rapture. The recurrent problems with allocating next Tuesday for the funky phenomenon of defunct folk arising from their graves fully fleshed and clothed and thereafter ascending into the heavens with the living chosen, are twofold: When the bell supposedly rings, nobody apparently qualifies for the boon, you collection of sordid sinners. Or, the scam is exposed as a ridiculous artifice of insular people, otherwise mongered as a test of faith if the preacher wields a fast tongue, creative imagination, bizarrely masochistic congregation, and chutspah attendant to possessing big brass ones the size of bowling balls.
Judaism, Christianity, Islam and other direct beneficiaries of the Hairy Thunderer's words, stone-erecting drum thumpers of Stonehenge Europe or Egyptian Africa melding with nature and universal essences, Viking berserkers celebrating Valhalla and its mischievous divine denizens, Mediterranean Greece and Rome choking on a Yellow Pages of consecrated alcoholic delinquents... each and all managed to avoid naming a date for pulling the plug.
Astronomy-worshiping bloodletting maniacs of southern Mexico through Honduras were not nearly so shy. The Maya ran thorn-studded ropes through their freshly pierced tongues, lanced their foreskins, and slashed their bodies that rivers of blood would be made available for priestly obeisances to the gods. Torture and dismemberment of captured enemy, agonizingly death to the losing team at football games, gory human sacrifice of their own people including gouging beating hearts from within living chests, and other cultural peccadilloes were the sustaining rationale of their civilization. Pious perambulations aside, the Maya obsessively scrutinized the heavens and meticulously performed their esoteric mathematics. They chiseled into stone dates and times of eclipse, equinox and solstice which 500 years later are still accurate to within a half minute of actual occurrence. They also set the date for the End of All.
Classical Mayan dates are based on the Long Count, mathematically accurate within one day over a period of 374,000 years. Mayan dates are recorded in five parts, a.b.c.d.e:
a) baktuns, periods of 144,000 days
b) katuns, periods of 7,200 days
c) tuns, periods of 360 days
d) uinals, periods of 20 days
e) kins, periods of 1 day.
A Great Cycle is 13 baktuns or 1,872,000 days (5125 years plus 134.75 days Gregorian). We are perilously close to the closure of the 13th and final baktun. This portends bad trouble for our space-time continuum if you possess that genre of mindset.
Europe and west Asia weathered some tough and nasty problems with their calendars, Julian versus the currently accepted Gregorian (365.2422 days/year), which makes for interesting equivalence conversion formulas (and lunar Easter sloshing about our Gregorian calendar, slipping a half score weeks from Roman Catholic to Russian Orthodox observance). Pope Gregory got Western civilization's Daytimers on track in 1582. Britain adopted his accurate system in 1752, adding 11 days in a single spasm to synchronize their calendars with the rest of the world. The Russians stubbornly held to the Julian system until their 1917 October Revolution, which therefore occurred in September. The Maya had the reckoning of time honed to a fare-thee-well by the first century AD.
Diego de Landa, Bishop of Yucatan, took it upon himself in the 1560's to burn every scrap of Mayan literature the Church could seize, being "nothing in which there were not to be seen superstition and lies of the devil." He missed a grand total of four brief codices, all that remains of the printed Mayan legacy. However, they were also fanatic stone carvers. Scholars have logically deciphered the codices and made some sense of the surviving stone glyphs, e.g., The Ancient Maya, Sylvanus G. Morley and George W. Brainerd, Stanford University Press, 1983. Predicted celestial events accurate to within 33 seconds even today testify to the consistency and verity of translation.
Mayan chronology commences with the creation of all, 0.0.0.0.0, which corresponds to 4 Ahau 8 Cumku 3114 BC (as opposed to the Greek Orthodox 5509 BC, Bishop Ussher's 4004 BC, the Jewish 3761 BC...). I suppose modern science including archeology, geology, plus astronomical observation are jointly and severally wrong. The End of All is assigned to the Mayan calendar flipping from 12.19.19.19.17.19 to 13.0.0.0.0, completing the Great Cycle on 21 December 2012. Take Christmas early that year.
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