Mayan Calendar & the End of the World?

From Ojibwa at DailyKos:

There has been a lot of media coverage on the misconception that the ancient Maya calendar is somehow predicting the end of the world (worse case scenario) or at least some major catastrophe in 2012. Part of the confusion stems from a misunderstanding of concepts of time which differ from those held by European cultures.

Let’s start with some background. The ancient Maya were a civilization composed of many different autonomous city states in Mesoamerica (this includes present-day Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras). Maya civilization reached its apex during a period that archaeologists call Classic Maya: a period which begins about 200 CE and lasts until 909 CE.

Classic Maya civilization is characterized by cities, pyramids, kings, and elaborate ceremonies. Above all the Maya were obsessed with sophisticated timekeeping systems. Their painted-bark books, or codices, clearly show that their astronomers had the capacity to predict celestial events, such as eclipses, accurately.

A few hundred years before the beginning of Classic Maya, Maya rulers made a fundamental revision to their calendar that would connect the rise of Maya states with their own origin myths. They invented a mountain of a time cycle—the Long Count. This was a brilliant innovation and connected the Maya and their kings all the way back to creation.

Read the rest of this excellent piece here.

Tags: Baktun, Galactic Alignment, Mayan calendar, Mayan civilization, Mayans, the Long Count, Western distortions of the Mayan calendar