We are now a year on from what was possibly the most speculated upon, widely discussed, prophesied about, and generally hyped-up date in the modern era ( at the very least since Y2k). Otherwise known as the end of the Thirteen Baktun cycle in the Mayan long count, December 21, 2012, came and went like any other day. Or did it?
I have to declare an interest here, as the author of a ‘2012’ book ‘The Everything Guide to 2012’, I have had a long standing interest in Mayan calendrics, especially from an astronomical point of view, as well as from a cultural point of view. I have been a speaker at events worldwide on the subject for a number of years. The essential point of view I was hoping to share in my talks- and in my book- is that the Classic-era Maya had a far more sophisticated and, in many ways, accurate calendar than the one we currently use. I envisaged this leading to the possibility of modern culture coming to a critical point of self-realization as it contemplated the evidence that our technology-rich, but temporally poor, society isn’t in fact, the ultimate pinnacle of cosmic and intellectual evolution. That, in actuality, previous cultures had demonstrated greater accomplishments in understanding their place in the universe. Instead, I repeatedly declared, our headlong rush into ‘the future’ was no more than a cultural byproduct from a decidedly wonky and medieval Catholic calendar system that had blinkered us to the essentially cyclical nature of time. In coming to that realization, I fondly hoped we might suddenly see the folly of our rapaciously ecocidal culture and on the very brink of that precipice, pulls ourselves up and avoid the fate that had befallen even the great Maya themselves.
When I began my research into Mayan calendrics in the mid ’90’s, it was a fringe subject. Jose Arguelles’s ‘The Mayan Factor’ and the Harmonic Convergence had come and gone, although the Dreamspell was beginning to find a second wind in the global trance culture that was flourishing then. Terence McKenna was in full swing, but few people understood the hyperbolic intricacies of his Timewave Zero theory and John Major Jenkins ‘Maya Cosmogenesis’ was fresh of the press. 2012 was far enough away that it could be a speculative Rorschach inkblot test on the future of evolution of humanity. As Johnathan Zap has pointed out in his book ‘The Singularity Archetype’, it was just far enough away to be glamorous and intriguing, but also just far enough away that it didn’t succumb to reality testing. Those were the good old days of 2012’ology. It was esoteric, obscure, and inextricably interwoven with psychedelic culture- and we liked it that way!
Gradually, as we got closer to 2012, things changed. As if by morphogenetic resonance, the once fiendishly difficult to explain ‘otherness’ of the Mayan tzolkin calendar became more accessible to people I encountered. More people outside of Central America had heard about the end date of The Mayan Calendar and were growing curious, eager to see if this mystical date with destiny held a remedy for the vapidity of modern technological life. In the mid-noughties, 2012’ology hit what in retrospect was it’s golden peak. Daniel Pinchbeck’s synthesis of the subject in ‘The Return of Quetzalcoatl’ brought it to wider recognition in the awakening millennial culture, Geoff Stray had written and published the encyclopedic ‘Beyond 2012’, the first independent documentaries began to be made and aired, while my and Daniel’s talks at Burning Man were attended by vast throngs of eager and attentive listeners. It was as if our hour as a transformational culture was about to really hit on the world stage. It was the dawning of the age of Aquarius (all over again).
At the highpoint of the 2012’ological movement I was invited to speak to a group of Fortune 500 CEOS and business leaders at an intimate, private gathering in Amsterdam. I was whisked from the airport in an understated black Audi limo to what was obviously a very expensive, but understated Dutch hotel on the seafront. There, I gave the business leaders exactly the same presentation as the one I had made at Burning Man and countless other conferences and festivals. Afterwards we sat around a large dinner table and they earnestly asked me what they could do about 2012 and how best to prepare their corporations and employees. One of the leaders of the UN’s business leadership program asked me ‘What does it feel like to have the undivided attention of all these world business leaders?’. I pointed out that I wasn’t in the business of making predictions and that the information I presented needed to be internalized so that they could reflect for themselves about how this epic global paradigm shift would play itself out. They nodded sagely, but I got the distinct impression that they would have been much happier if I’d just told them what to do.
Then once again, ‘2012’ changed. It became a Hollywood action blockbuster and suddenly, every media outlet had to run their own article, every TV channel had to run a documentary. In the week before Roland Emmerich’s film came out, there were five different documentaries that premiered on US channels from the History channel to HBO. Each was complete with stock footage of CGI apocalypse from the ‘2012’ movie interspersed with talking heads. There’s Daniel Pinchbeck talking about a consciousness shift, followed by an aircraft carrier crashing into the White House. Here’s John Major Jenkins talking about the precession of the equinoxes, followed by a tsunami engulfing LA. Well, despite the best intentions and sincerity of the on screen pundits, guess what the take-home message was for the mass audiences? December 21 is the end of the world. All those insightful intellectual counterpoints effectively achieved was to add a veneer of pseudo-respectability to the backdrop of multi-million dollar digital mayhem.
That has always been one of the crux issues with the entangled fields that surround the subject of ‘2012’. A lot of this stuff, from Jenkins’ galactic alignment theory, to the vigesimal (base-twenty) construction of the Mayan calendar, is difficult to explain. Its complex stuff. For a while, in the mid-noughties, it felt (for a brief and Elysian moment) that we were winning. It felt like the world was listening, that change was possible and that doors were opening. After the Emmerich film appeared, that door loudly slammed and stayed shut forever like the Dark Door to the Paths of the Dead in Lord of the Rings.
My personal speculation is that the media architects of Hollywood know only too well the power of the image over the power of the word. They know, as Jung pointed out, that if the collective unconscious attaches itself to a narrative like UFO’s or 2012, that this can become an explosively disruptive force that can cause ripples in their carefully constructed matrix. When this happens, that uprising force in the human psyche must be articulated into an easy to follow plot line with clearly defined good guys and bad guys, and lots and lots of explosions. Then it doesn’t matter what is said, compared to the sensory onslaught of high definition apocalyptic mayhem. Any subtle, or nuanced, opinion about a complex subject, however profound, is going to sound like the off-screen schoolteacher in Peanuts. Just more ‘blah, blah, blah’ until we get to the next explosion. And so it went and with it, much of what 2012 ‘used to be’.
By the time we actually reached 2012, it had become very clear that the semantic battle for assigning meaning to this date had been steamrollered (at least in the western media) towards the ‘end of the world’. This was usually supplemented in the press with stock articles explaining that it wasn’t actually likely to be the end of the world after all. A real media win-win, as argument and counter-argument make for twice the copy. Not that anyone (with the exception of the Mayanist Michael Coe -back in the 60’s- and the survivalist Patrick Geryl, who provided the seed idea for the Emmerich’s ‘2012’ movie) were actually saying that it might be the end of the world. That didn’t prevent, however, the media arguing with themselves about it. It’s somewhat interesting to speculated what December 21 2012 might have been if this depressing dumbing down hadn’t occurred, but in retrospect, it has the air of inevitability to it. I only mention it because I remember a time when it was possible to believe that this date might just be a catalyst and turning point in a worldwide consciousness revolution. I know because I believed that. Yes, I can hear you sniggering, but I believe the jury is still out on what actually did happen on December 21 2012.
Although it’s fairly obvious if you are reading this, that the world didn’t end. And if we all ascended, its pretty difficult to explain the horrendous war in Syria. Assessing consciousness change is a somewhat more subtle thing. What certainly did happen is that many people and organizations who believed in this date, gathered together and tried to work together to create something positive and worthwhile that provided a counter-narrative to the widely disseminated news of the (possibly) impending apocalypse. The arc of these collaborations is worth further exposition and I’ll be writing more about this soon. Essentially these went from grandiose plans for a global Live Aid style media spectacle and alliances of NGO’s working together to promote shared messages of peace and harmony, to what became eventually a series of guerrilla media campaigns based around focusing on globally synchronized meditations on that auspicious and mysterious date.
I participated in much of this in my role as one of the founders of Peace 2012, https://www.facebook.com/
This was initially inspired by my connection to the druids of Stonehenge and the rather esoteric desire I had to make clear the connections between the indigenous British calendars and the Mayan Calendar. That interest led me on a pilgrimage that ended up in planting a seed for a unique celebration inside the circle at Stonehenge on the Winter Solstice of 2012. What became particularly useful to the bigger project of bringing together as many events and people together worldwide on December 21, especially ceremonially, was that the druids, (particularly King Arthur Pendragon and Susannah Lafond of the Loyal Arthurian Warband and Rollo Maughfling, ArchDruid of the Glastonbury Order of Druids) had been through the long and drawn out process of campaigning for open access to the Stones at equinoxes and solstices. In the process they had established precedents with English Heritage and the authorities at Stonehenge that could be applied elsewhere. (To understand how important this work was and how far they had come, you have to remember that at the beginning of this process Stonehenge was annually surrounded by thousands of riot police on the Summer Solstice in the ‘90s)
One of the outstanding challenges for a fair and equitable celebration of December 21 2012 was the fact that it is still illegal in Mexico for indigenous people to practice their traditional ceremonies at their own sacred sites. Considering the progress that has been made in Guatemala and other places on this subject, the situation in Mexico is extraordinarily unjust and backwards. One of the main focuses of Peace2012 became working with the indigenous leaders of different Mexican traditions to be able to access their sacred sites. King Arthur Pendragon usefully supported this by the writing of letters and petitions to the Mexican authorities and the UN.
This project morphed into Unify.org, when I met Adil Kassam, then of Be The Peace, at the flash mob meditation Be The Peace organized in Union Square in San Francisco for the International Day of Peace on the September Equinox of 2012. The Unify project itself is worthy of a much longer piece and the epic series of collaborations that it inspired in the run-up to and on the day of the Winter Solstice. The essential fruit of Unify was not just seeding the globally synchronized meditation around the world, but also co-ordinating the filming and live-streaming the broadcast of those events. Unify was able to join up with The Great Convergence at the Pyramids in Egypt, worked with Harmony in the Holy Land and Patrick Kronfli of MedMob/Unify to create Unify Jerusalem, live streamed Peace2012 inside of Stonehenge, worked with the Uplift event in Byron Bay, Australia and filmed at the celebrations at Teotihuacan, Palenque, Chichen Itza, Tikhal, the Zocalo in Mexico City. Groups joined in from over 500 locations worldwide. The campaign reached in total several million people and we believe many thousands of people participated in the synchronized meditations. We still have to really begin the process of turning all that raw footage filmed at these into something shareable, but it’s a remarkable archive.
The projects that eventually catalyzed collective and meaningful action on December 21, far from being big scale NGO collaborations, or a global spectacle, were well intentioned, but very modestly funded ones, especially Unify and The Shift Network and Barbara Marx Hubbard’s Birth 2012 project. To make this happen required an unprecedented amount of collaboration, gifting, and good will. Even the results of these projects alone make the idea that ‘nothing happened’ that day an absurd parody of the truth.
All around the world people gathered together to celebrate this unique moment of time, but by far and away the largest number of people to gather were in central and south America, particularly in Mexico. There has long been a tradition in Mexico of gathering to celebrate the equinoxes and solstices, so the cultural template was already laid down and, of course, much of the Maya homelands are there too. Each year more than a million people gather for the Winter Solstice at the pyramid complex of Teotihuacan, near Mexico City, and 2012 was just extra impetus to this movement. The fact is that, although Mexico is a troubled and conflicted country, it also has a massive grass roots movement dedicated to spiritual ceremony. It often takes the form of reinventing, reviving and renewing the ancient traditions in modern ‘kalpullis’, or spiritual schools. The Toltec and Aztec lineages are particularly well represented in this new syncretism with hundreds of thousands of people regularly gather to dance, sing, burn copal, dress in white and hold ceremony across Mexico. All of this is pretty much ignored by both the English-speaking media and even more strangely, by most western New Agers, who seem to prefer their own company.
On December 21, there were some truly enormous gatherings that happened at sites throughout Mexico, the biggest being at Teotihuacan, where over two million gathered; at the Zocalo, the ancient temple site at the heart of Mexico City; and at Chichen Itza in the Yucatan. This story, of a grass roots spiritual uprising in the Spanish-speaking world, has all too often this has been marginalized from, or entirely absent from the narrative about ‘2012’. When Mexican, or Mayan, voices have been included in western media, often they have been English-speaking personalities of the ‘celebrity shaman’ archetype. If two million people had gathered in white and burnt incense at the Washington Memorial, I think the reporting would have been a little different in the USA. None of this organized by any central authority, and those participating had widely varying perspectives on its significance and meaning, but nonetheless, this is what happened. It certainly wasn’t the psychedelic apocalypse, or dramatic dimensional shift that we’d been speculating about in the 90’s. Instead, on the day, it turned out to be something much more grounded, but in many ways no less meaningful. It seems that before we can anticipate a widespread outbreak of telepathy, or the manifestation of the noosphere, first we must negotiate the tricky cultural and linguistic barriers between the English and Spanish speaking worlds, at least as a starting point. Despite the speculations of some ‘2012’ authors, the evolution of human consciousness, it turns out, has rather a long way left to go.
While there was a lot of extraordinary collaborations happening in the background for these amazing events to be possible, and real progress in building bridges between differing points of view about what it all meant, there was also some real dissonance in the cultural exchange as well. Visitors to the Guatemalan temple site of Tikhal caused damage to the pyramids and at Chichen Itza, a parade of candle carrying white-robed tourists who had paid for ‘exclusive early access’ were let in to the archaeological site, while the local indigenous leaders were made to wait outside. It’s not possible to cover the scope of all of the events that happened that day, or mention very many of the people that made remarkable things happen in the scope of this short article, but hopefully this tiny snapshot of some of the things that happened can begin a dialogue about what actually did occur and once and for all dispel the notion that it was ‘nothing’.
And a year on, what are the people who helped catalyze such a remarkable event doing? Unify.org are organizing another synchronized meditation for December 21 and campaigning for the date to become ‘World Spirit Day’. They are also planning a big event for the Spring Equinox. The Shift Network are planning a ‘Planetary Birthday Party’ for December 22, the day after (‘http://planetarybirthday.
My book, The Everything Guide to 2012, is currently available for 1 cent plus postage on Amazon! ( A bargain if you want to read about plasma physics, crop circles, and any manner of things that are still relevant today). And if there’s anything less fashionable, or profitable, than being the author of a 2012 book in 2013, I’d like to hear about it. 2012 certainly was quite a ride. I have a feeling it’ll be a while before it’s possible to tell what it all meant.
www.markheley.net
