December 21, 2012 - Maya End of World Prophecies

My buddy Mark Van Stone has written about the many theories that have sprung up around the coming end of the Mayan calendar. Mark is a Mayanist and a professor of art history and is a fascinating fellow even when the topic isn't something as inherently interesting as ancient civilizations and end of world theories.

The Maya Cosmic Prophecy: From Sensation to Sensibility

Maya Scholars, in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador and North America, have been watching with amusement and dismay as self-styled experts proclaim that ancient Maya prophets foretold an earth-shattering happening to occur December 21, 2012. This predicted phenomenon gets described in contradictory but often cataclysmic fashion--as an ecological collapse, a sunspot storm, a rare cosmic conjunction of the earth, sun, and the galactic center, a new and awesome stage of our evolution, and even a sudden reversal of the Earth's magnetic field which will erase all our computer drives. One even predicts the earth's initiation into a Galactic Federation, whose elders have been accelerating our evolution with a "galactic beam" for the last 5000 years. In sum, the world as we know it will suddenly come to a screeching halt.

Read the rest of it here.

It does seem, though, that espousing any end of world theories (and Mark is not) is a thankless job. If such a prophet ever gets it right, it is not as though he can ever enjoy any recognition for that, after the fact. And of course if you are wrong, you have the whole world there to mock you. It sounds like the kind of job we bloggers could handle. I may just start posting the occasional end of world prediction. Stay tuned.