2012 - End of Days… or Just More Hype?

Due to scheduling conflicts, I have not gone to the Second Saturday Salon in a couple months. Tomorrow night's meeting should be interesting, especially for a history freak like me. I have read a great deal of the pre-conquest Maya and Aztec cultures and even did a major high school paper on the topic complete with illustrations I drew (I still have it squirreled away somewhere - I got an A+). The Salon's topic will be the Maya calendar and it's 2012 predictions - the History Channel has run several stories on the subject. Here's the introduction for the Salon topic:

Perhaps by now you’ve heard of the Mayan calendar—the exquisite time-keeping piece of an ancient civilization—a clock that reflects information about the universe we have only recently discovered ourselves. For example, the Mayans correctly described the center of our Milky Way galaxy as having a “ black rift” or “black hole” not discovered by our own scientists until September 2002.

On the basis of their calendar Mayans also calculated that on the winter solstice of December 21, 2012 our sun and earth would move into alignment with this black hole —an event that occurs only once every 25800 years. According to Mayan scholar John Major Jenkins the Mayan perspective is that “around the year 2012, a large chapter in human history will be coming to an end. All the values and assumptions of the previous World Age will expire and a new phase of human growth will commence…The Maya understood this to be a natural process”, he said “ in which new life follows a death.”If this were the cosmology of a single culture perhaps it could be dismissed more easily but in fact, there are many references to this theme and general date in a variety of world cultures and prophecies.

Join us this Saturday to discuss whether all of this is just New Age hype or something much more.

It should be an interesting session and a great social opportunity since the attendees are eclectic and vary based on people's schedules and everyone brings food and wine. It is definitely not your typical group for this area and I have enjoyed the other sessions I have attended. On June 21st, there will be a summer solstice gathering. :) I'm sure the Christianists would say were are pagans or something worse.