Mayan End Of The World Date – Humans have been predicting their own extinction for centuries. Although the Christian apocalypse ended life on earth, other cultures such as the Maya built a fresh start at the end, creating cyclic calendars rather than linear ones. Historian Charlotte Sleigh examines why the end regularly seems near and what we can learn from past predictions.
In 2017, the respected Scripps Oceanographic Institution gave humanity a 5 percent chance of becoming extinct by the end of the century. Scripps assessed the looming fear of climate change, the reasonable but not yet quantifiable risk that we could bring about our own demise.
Mayan End Of The World Date
It wasn’t the first time people thought about her end. For many hundreds of years we have predicted the impending end of our world, whether by the whims of the gods or by our own actions.
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In this series we will look at the prophecies of the past and the science of destruction and ask what we can learn from these strange episodes. Why did the end seem near and how did people react in each of those moments? Climate change is different from these false positives, but given their story, we can get a little smarter this time.
For those of us in the West, the Christian religion is largely responsible for shaping our doomsday expectations. Christians are told to think and act with their final reckoning in mind. Saint Paul counseled the Corinthians: “Time is short. From now on…those who buy something should live as if it didn’t belong to them.
In the Christian apocalypse, Christ will return and take believers to heaven while sinners will be condemned to hell. This prophecy is recorded in the Book of Revelation, one of 66 texts compiled around AD 400. and form the complete Bible.
Bound books were an innovation at the time, and suited well to a religion uniquely based on a linear time structure, from creation to the fall, from redemption to judgment. At the end of the book of Revelation
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Speaks of the closure of all earthly things. Now the story had a final page waiting to be opened until the covers closed: The End.
“Cyclical calendars—time cycles of varying lengths that synchronized and desynchronized—were the norm in ancient and early Mesoamerica.”
But in principle it is not necessary that the apocalypse is the last page, the last event. Time is cyclical in many cultures: after the end of the world comes a new beginning.
One of the most important Mayan calendars consisted of 7,200 days. In the epic prophecy “Kucheb” (“that which turns”), Katun was a god who embodied the era. When he started limping, as scientist John Bierhorst explains, it was time to find a human replacement. This man had to be tortured or even killed to make room for the next era.
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Cyclic calendars—time cycles of varying lengths that went in and out synchronously—were the norm in ancient and early modern Mesoamerica. The Tzolkin sacred cycle of 260 days combined with the Haab solar year results in a long calendar cycle that is reset every 52 years. One round of the long calendar was not far from the life expectancy of the Maya or the Zapotec. The end of the calendar may be the end of the world for someone whose life coincided with the beginning and end, but everyone else will continue to exist.
Appropriately, the codices in which the Maya recorded their calendars were not bound like books with their linear narrative, but unfolded on huge sheets of bark paper. They burned slightly when the Europeans set fire to all but four.
Although Christians appeared to believe in the apocalypse, less than three centuries after wiping out the “primitive” Mesoamericans, European settlers developed their own mythological time system that envisioned a world without end. It was called the futures market and dated from the second half of the 19th century.
Capitalism depends on everyone who wants to imagine a future, and not just any future, but a fun, ordinary future. Promising future profits based on current debt requires it. Futures traders promised prices for goods that had not yet been produced or delivered. Saint Paul would certainly choose.
Decoding The Mayan Calendar
“Goodman began linking Mayan calendars to synchronize with modern Western calendars. What was the zero point of Mesoamerican time?
Joseph T. Goodman was caught between Christ’s inheritance and capital. A successful newspaper editor in Nevada since the 19th century, after quitting the newspaper, Goodman went to the heart of the capital, took a spot on the Pacific Stock Exchange, and became a successful trader and investor. So far, so futuristic.
But at the same time, Goodman became obsessed with the Mayan calendar. He learned that prior to the European invasion, a non-repeating ‘long count’ was used, which provided a historical dating system (used for monuments) tied to a creation event.
Goodman began trying to synchronize this calendar with the modern, Western one. What was the zero point of the Mesoamerican era?
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Eventually Goodman found the answer. Even so, the Maya were unlikely to think of the beginning of time literally as 20th-century Americans did. The Book of Western Mythology has a new cover based on American cultures calculated by science.
This first page inevitably brings with it the last page: the moment of the end. New Age theorists and conspiracy theorists feverishly awaited the end of the world. The end date of the 5126-year cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar was December 21, 2012.
Despite a specific, carefully calculated date, people could not agree on the details of how the apocalypse would happen. The explanations read like a list of sci-fi disaster movies: depending on whether you’re delving into the ancient Egyptians, the Maya, or relying on your own hallucinogenic revelations, it could have been a catastrophic shift in the Earth’s magnetic field. a planetary collision or a supermassive black hole.
The believers have missed the point. Just as Goodman never reconciled her desire to never preach “the end” with a career that has come to an end, it was perhaps less painful to divert her focus from reality and extraterrestrial conspiracy theories instead.
Apocalypse Now: Your Guide To The End Of The World
As 2012 dawned, the world was already in the midst of one of its periodic financial crises. The global banking crash of 2008 sacrificed the world’s poorest and most climate-prone “austerity programs” to restart the profit cycle. Meanwhile, the planet is getting hotter. Obviously, imagining liberation from capitalism was harder than imagining the end of the world.
Charlotte Slay is an interdisciplinary writer and practitioner in the humanities. Her latest book is Münsch (Reaction, 2020). She is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Science and Technology Research at UCL and the current President of the British Society for the History of Science.
This is where Gergo creates and animate mixed media projects, particularly in the collage and cutout style. He enjoys working with things that already have a life, from old magazines to a notebook. His longest running creative project is Ones.
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The End Of The World
Unless otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. talk about the end of the world at any time – especially this year,” says an archaeologist who helped translate the hieroglyphs of an ancient culture.
Tourists in front of the Gran Jaguar Mayan temple at the Tikal archaeological site in Guatemala where ceremonies are held to mark the end of the Mayan cycle known as Baktun 13 and the beginning of the new Mayan era on December 21. Johan Ordonez/AFP/Getty Images
Tourists in front of the Gran Jaguar Mayan temple at the Tikal archaeological site in Guatemala where ceremonies are held to mark the end of the Mayan cycle known as Baktun 13 and the beginning of the new Mayan era on December 21.
It’s December 20th, 2012 and the denizens of Earth are in a panic, preoccupied with the idea that the end of the world will come on Friday, which they believe Mayan astronomers predicted. Of course, most people don’t panic, and Mayan expert David Stewart says no one should. There’s still room on the calendar, he said.
Scientist Says Mayan Calendar Predicts End Of The World This Week
, David Green asks archaeologist Stuart, who helped translate
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