Back to the future
Source: www.thetimes.co.za

You can put your money on the Olympics happening in London, but not much else.

While South Africans are fixating on the 2010 World Cup, which could be the supreme test of the viability of our nation, there are other people staring at a different date: 2012. They are proclaiming the disconcerting news that the world is going to end — again.

I have spent a couple of midnights sipping chilled champagne and waiting through the night for various Armageddon-styled events, from Y2K (remember that one?) to the reversal of the magnetic poles of the Earth. All I ever got was a dry mouth and a headache.

But apparently, this new one is a sure bet. The Mayan civilisation was a vastly skilled and “advanced” culture. A major feature of the Mayans’ insight and power is an intricate calendar that is — says one breathless Internet scribe — “…actually more accurate than the one used at this moment throughout our present world. An additional example of their accomplishments was the calculation of the time involved in a lunar cycle all the way out to the fifth decimal.”

I’m not quite sure what that means. I’ve never really needed to get much further than the second decimal, but I will take their word for it. It took me a few hours to gain some perspective on the mystery of it all, but it seems to revolve around the fact that the last Mayan calendar, carved in stone, ends on the date December 21 2012. It is assumed that this implies the end of the world.

Of course, the Mayans did not know what December was, nor did they know it would be in 2012. Our calendar months and our system of BC and AD chronology only came into being several centuries after the Mayan society had vanished, but we must trust our scientists to have made the proper conversions as they specified that date.

We must also take, on trust, the assumption that the Mayans stopped the calendar at that specific date because they believed that it would be the pivotal, final point of crisis and change.

What if the stonecutters simply downed tools and said: “Bloody hell! We’re more than a thousand years ahead on this production line. Let’s go and carve some restaurant lintels and have some fun.”

It’s also possible that they ran out of good stone tablets and had to wait for so long for the slabs of rock to be hauled through the jungle that their culture slid into decadence, then into obsolescence.

Or maybe they did have a deep mystical precognition and really did foresee the “End of Days” occurring on December 21 2012, and left us this carved calendar so that we could make our spiritual preparations for our extinction.

Still, I can’t help asking: why, if these Mayans were so damn clever, are they so damn extinct? Of what use is it to foresee the end of the world when you can’t even see the imminent collapse of your own culture, which was much closer at hand?

And why didn’t the subsequent cultures — Aztec, Inca, Olmec, Toltec, Zapotec and Nazca — make any mention of this prophecy?

But here we are in 2009, with at least six published books and 10 times that many websites solemnly affirming a prophecy made by a culture that hardly ever left its home territory and certainly never left its continent.

For the Mayans, human sacrifice was a regular social custom, and when a powerful man died, all his servants and some of his minor relatives were slaughtered so that they could continue working for him in their next life. Do I really want to buy my Armageddon from these guys?

All things considered, though, 2012 is going to be a busy little year. You may recall Michael Drosnin, who created a stir in 1997 with his book The Bible Code, alleging that aliens wrote the Bible and embedded secret codes in the Hebrew text that could only be detected by modern computers. Drosnin claimed that the algorithms of the Bible code indicated that an asteroid or comet will collide with the earth in 2012.

In The Return of Quetzalcoatl by Daniel Pinchbeck, we are promised that in 2012, a global awakening to psychic consciousness will create the ultimate “noosphere”. If you don’t know what that is, go look it up for yourself. Do I have to do everything?

Then there’s a guy, Riley Martin, who claims that Bi-Aviian aliens will invite selected humans aboard their “Great Mother Ship” when the earth is “transformed” in 2012.

There will also be the 2012 Summer Olympics in London during which Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee will be celebrated, and I will put money on the table, betting that of all those possibilities, only the Olympics and the Jubilee will actually happen.