The Fat Lady's Aria? Humanity's Last Stand? Or Just Another Apocalypse Soon?

By Mick Farren
Source: www.lacitybeat.com

For the third time in less than 15 years, the End of the World draws near. It’s discussed in coffee shops and saloons, and texted from couches by punks of the New Age while UFO Hunters flickers unwatched on TV. Theories inundate the Internet and books are already in print. Although apocalyptic theorizing might seem a hard sell in these grim times, conferences are being staged, at least two major motion pictures are planned, and the collective consciousness wonders if the date 2012 is already copyrighted. We can be certain we are going to hear a mess of both ominous and grandly metaphysical predictions for 2012 before the crucial date arrives.

We have, of course, seen all this before. In July of 1999, after much consternation and endless documentaries on the History Channel, we survived the quatrains of Nostradamus predicting terror descending from the sky. Then, on New Year’s Day 2000, we made it unscathed through Y2K and the near-hysterical scenarios that every computer across the planet would crash due to a basic time-keeping glitch. Airplanes were supposed to fall from the sky that time, and the Midwest find itself without power in mid-winter. A third major End Time in less than a decade is hard to embrace. Too many hints of that cracker-barrel “fool me once” proverb that George Bush can never quite remember. On the other hand, stress levels are currently running high, and that is frequently when an Armageddon panic pops.

December 21, 2012, is coming in hard with multiple threats, and conflicting theories being actively debated on any and all forums that offer media time to the fringe and the fantastic. One marketplace of such ideas is George Noory’s Coast to Coast AM syndicated radio show. As the successor to the legendary Art Bell, Noory maintains the same format of paranormal and paranoid talk radio that gave Bell the highest ratings in syndicated nighttime talk. Call-in listeners warn of 12.21.2012 bringing an instant extinction of our current reality, much in the manner of the last episode of The Sopranos, but encompassing the entire universe. Alternative scenarios range from the conventional – exploding volcanoes, boiling oceans, shifting tectonic plates, and/or alien invasion, to a more metaphysical bonding that will bring humanity closer to a functioning, Jungian-style planetary mind, enabling us to clean up the mess we’ve made with our rugged individualism. (Noory added his own spike of drama to the mix when he announced he would only extend his current Coast to Coast AM contract until 2012, so he could see out the significant date on air. Later, however, pragmatism kicked in and his deal now runs to 2017.)

At the core of the flourishing furor over 2012 is the Mayan calendar. A circular replica of a Mesoamerican calendar stone has hung for years on the wall behind my desk, a flat ceramic disc the green of corroded copper. Right now a version of the same calendar stone, in the form of a spring-loaded spinning top, is currently being given away by Burger King with Kids Meals as part of a promotion for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Both are actually copies of the huge Aztec calendar stone preserved in the Museo Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City. Aztec rather than Mayan, but close enough for discomfort when it’s also used on Web pages explaining how the Mayan calendar supposedly predicts that the Fat Lady’s Terminal Aria will sound, dead on the Winter Solstice of 2012.

That the “Long Count” of the Mayan calendar mysteriously appears to come to an end in 2012 has been discussed in the counterculture since writer and supposed mystic José Arguelles promoted his concept of the Harmonic Convergence in 1987. Before Arguelles raised the hackles of skeptics by extending his idea of an earth-changing planetary alignment beyond Mayan mathematics to claims of telepathically received prophecies, the Book of Revelation, and a race of “galactic masters,” we learned that the Mayan calendar was incredibly complicated, dated back to the sixth century B.C., and functioned on mind-snapping multiples of synchronized and interlocking cycles. A 260-day sacred year is combined with a more conventional 360-day solar year, plus a lunar calendar, and the notorious Long Count that starts from the Mayans’ concept of the dawn of time – around 3114 B.C. – and runs to its calculated termination at the Winter Solstice of 2012. Just to add to the difficulties for those who aren’t Mayan scholars, the calendar also reflects the Mayans’ belief that time was not only cyclic, but its cycles involved the regular destruction and rebirth of the universe.

The quirks of the Mayan calendar, however, would hardly seem enough on which to base a whole End of the World circus, especially as the stone calendar can be open to infinite interpretation. The Mayan calendar does not come with an operating manual. All but a handful of peripheral writings about its use and function were burned as works of Satan by the zealous Catholic priests who accompanied the conquistadors when they overturned Central America in the 16th century. Fortunately for millennial circus fans, plenty more theoretic threats are aimed at 2012.

The Galactic Alignment is an astronomical event that supposedly occurs only once in 26,000 years. The ecliptic – the common geometric plane on which the planets of the solar system rotate around the sun – will coincide with the plane of the Milky Way, our sun’s parent galaxy – in which the sun and thousands of other stars rotate – exactly on Dec. 21, 2012. According to many of the more sensationally violent theories surrounding 2012, the outcome could be massive galactic stress causing anything from a rotation in the earth’s magnetic field, a sudden and cataclysmic flip of the planet’s molten core, all the way to the sun beginning a catastrophic slide to the center of the Milky Way where many astronomers suspect the as-yet-unproven existence of a vast black hole which powers the rotation of our galaxy. Perfect for a spectacular 2012 disaster movie like the one being planned by Roland Emmerich, who directed The Day After Tomorrow, but other 2012 theorists take a kinder, gentler approach.

Daniel Pinchbeck, author of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, has already emerged as one of the major players in this four-and-a-half-year countdown. Described by The New York Times as “parts Jesuit and Jim Morrison,” Pinchbeck, a tireless self-promoter who has even talked 2012 on The Colbert Report, is calmer and more philosophical when he states on the Web site Reality Sandwich, “My view is that ‘2012’ is useful as a meme if it helps us to catalyze a shift in global culture and consciousness. Rather than fretting about what may or may not happen on that date, we should concentrate on the work that needs to be done now, on an inner as well as outer level.” Pinchbeck and John Major Jenkins, author of Maya Cosmogenesis 2012: The True Meaning of the Maya Calendar End- Date are both heirs to the psychedelic school of wildly eclectic thinking pioneered first by Timothy Leary and then the late Terence McKenna, the writer, explorer, and psychedelic guru.

McKenna developed his Timewave Zero software system in the early 1970s. It fixes on 12.21.2012 as a major paradigm shift by an entirely different route, first described in the 1974 book The Invisible Landscape written with his brother Dennis. The math is complex, but, in simple terms, McKenna initially ran a computer analysis of the hexagrams of the I Ching, and claimed to have found that it was “a mathematical algorithm that wanted to be a calendar.” Then, when superimposed on a chart of world history, the wave pattern of the hexagrams totally corresponded. The I Ching dipped during hard times like (say) the Black Death and spiked in the good, like the Italian Renaissance. As the matching patterns moved into the 21st century, however, McKenna observed what he called a “surge toward the zero ? state each time a cycle enters its terminal phase” and that the terminal phase plays out (yes, you guessed it) on Dec. 21, 2012.

McKenna, who died of brain cancer in 2000, made a possible prediction for what he thought might occur in 2012 on the 1990s pop-TV UFO/paranormal show Sightings, and it was as radical as any of his other pronouncements. “One of my guesses is what we will discover in 2012 is time travel. If technologies were developed [in 2012] that were able to move through time, it would explain why the wave could no longer give a linear description of the unfolding of events because the unfolding of events would go non-linear.”

In total contrast to Pinchbeck, Jenkins, and McKenna, NASA recently brought some hard science to the 2012 party when David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center announced to the media that “on Jan. 4, 2008, a reversed-polarity sunspot appeared – and this signals the start of Solar Cycle 24.” Hathaway explained that the previous solar cycle, No. 23, had peaked in 2000-2002 with some furious solar storms. These are streams of electrons emanating from the sun, from which the Earth is protected by its magnetic field – with overspill appearing as the polar glow of the Aurora Borealis. After No. 23 had dropped away to nothing, all was quiet on the sun until the telltale sunspot indicated the start of new cycle that should peak around “2011 or 2012.”

While solar storms and more violent outpourings known as solar coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are hardly the end of the world, Hathaway warns that they can disable the satellites that we depend on for weather forecasts and GPS navigation. Radio bursts from solar flares can directly interfere with cell phone reception, while CMEs hitting earth can cause electrical power outages. “The most famous example is the Quebec outage of 1989, which left Canadians without power for up to six days.” Steve Hill of the Space Weather Prediction Center added that domestic airline flights routed over the North Pole during solar storms were among the most at risk. “They can experience radio blackouts, navigation errors and computer reboots.”

Hard science may suggest that the sun could cause problems in 2012, but, overall, conventional academics take a bleak view of the more apocalyptic predictions. Back in 2007, when USA Today broke the 2012 story in the mainstream media, Sandra Noble, executive director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies in Crystal River, Florida, was wholly dismissive. “To render Dec. 21, 2012, as a doomsday or moment of cosmic shifting is a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in.” Anthropologist Susan Gillespie is equally impatient. “The 2012 phenomenon comes from media and from other people making use of the Mayan past to fulfill agendas that are really their own.”

On the matter of the Galactic Alignment, and the works of theorists like Arguelles, Pinchbeck, and Jenkins, who attempt to link the Mayan Long Count with alignment of the Milky Way and the solar system, Anthony Aveni, an archeoastronomer and professor at Colgate, curtly told The New York Times: “I defy anyone to look up into the sky and see the galactic equator. You need a radio telescope for that.” The Curious About Astronomy Web site attached to Cornell also takes no prisoners when it comes to galactic alignment. “The sun crosses the plane of the galaxy twice every year as we orbit around it, with no ill effect on Earth.”

A year later, the academic community – especially archeologists and astronomers – don’t even want to discuss 2012, which is probably also a measure of how the phenomenon has grown since it was first featured in USA Today and The New York Times. The consensus is that it’s a crypto-scientific, four-year wonder that has more to do with tabloid sensation-seeking than any rigorous and disciplined investigation. It mixes astronomy with astrology, which is an anathema, and its ties to psychedelic drugs, UFOs, pop sci-fi, shamanism, and, at best, contemporary folklore, place it firmly within the lunatic fringe. The majority are confident it will fizzle out when the appointed day rolls around and nothing happens.

On the other hand, academics tend to dislike and distrust anything apocalyptic or unconventional. The Big Bang Theory of the creation of the universe was heavily resisted when first mooted, and conventional paleontology did everything it could to keep the asteroid-impact/dinosaur-extinction theorists at bay until they actually came up with a possible impact crater. The work of Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna has never been accepted by the mainstream. If I was looking to science to confirm or deny the possibility of something truly spectacular happening on the 2012 solstice, I would do better to look to sociology than astronomy.

In a nation where polls indicate that up to 50 percent of Americans believe that the Book of Revelation is a true, prophetic document, maybe sociology is the only way to understand the obsessive countdown to 2012. The U.S. has a long history of doomsday cults and end-of-the-world panics. Part of this has to stem from the number of religious dissenters who emigrated from Europe over the centuries, seeking religious freedom, often for extreme beliefs. Another part may be an extension of what William Burroughs used to call “the immortality racket.” In most cases, the trick any leader/prophet/patriarch has to turn is not only to convince his or her congregation that the End Times are upon them, but, for the faithful, he or she has a way out.

The awkward moment for prophets is when neither doom nor salvation materializes, which, up to now, has been the case 100 percent of the time. (Unless self-created, as in the cases of Jim Jones, David Koresh, and Marshall Applewhite and his Heaven’s Gate cultists.) The followers have been led to the top of the mountain, or the great cave in the desert, whatever’s the designated sanctuary from the apocalypse. The appointed moment comes and goes, but nothing has happened. The faithful wait. Time passes and the worst scenario downgrades itself from planetary annihilation to a chance of rain. The faithful eventually start their sheepish trudge back down the mountain.

In the last century this was the fate of the Millerites, the followers of ex-army captain turned evangelist William Miller, who, possibly suffering from traumatic stress disorder from the War of 1812, calculated that the Rapture – itself an 1829 piece of inventive biblical cross-referencing by Edward Irving, Henry Drummond and John Nelson Darby – would occur between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844. A highly visible comet, an equally spectacular meteor shower, and a grim economic recession all contributed to near-panic that garnered Miller some 50,000 followers who began disposing of their homes and worldly possessions, even leaving crops unharvested, all in anticipation of the main event. When, by March 22, 1844, the Millerites had failed to rise bodily into the sky, the disillusionment was so intense it became known as the “Great Disappointment.” Fortunately for fundamentalism, more-resilient souls continued to revise Miller’s calculations, in bouts of scriptural arithmetic that would lead to the foundation of sects like the Seventh Day Adventists and, more recently and tragically, the Branch Davidians.

Few conversations about the 2012 phenomena fail to prompt the suggestion that, with 2012, the New Age, Burning Man, post-punk mystics have engaged their own version of the Rapture, except, where the fundamentalists learned from the Great Disappointment, and now keep the Rapture’s ETA suitably vague, the 2012 theorists have nailed themselves to this highly specific date. In many respects, it’s an all-or-nothing gamble that gives the participants four years to sell a lot of books and documentary films, to accept well-paid public appearances, and generally make hay while the sun-as-we-know-it still shines. After that, we have to assume that they are totally confident that everything will be extremely different, or they will have to start seriously salvaging their careers.

Right now, though, no one seems to be thinking too hard about a possible “Great Disappointment” in the wake of 2012. Many familiar faces from the UFO/paranormal community are joining in the fun. Novelist and screenwriter Whitley Strieber, who also claims to have been abducted by aliens, has entered the fray with a sci-fi action novel, 2012: The War for Souls, in which reptilian invaders enslave humanity and feast on their souls, and the Great Pyramid is destroyed. But Strieber tends to blur the line between his facts and fiction by hinting at public appearances that 2012 may be when we really discover the true purpose of alien implants. Richard Hoagland, who previously made a name for himself with media speculation about the supposed face on Mars, and whose current book Dark Mission links NASA and the occult, has started to participate in 2012 events. Here in Los Angeles, Christian Voltaire and his partner Jay Weidner – also producer of the documentary 2012: The Odyssey – have already promoted The 2012 Conference, which drew a thousand attendees, and plan more events of the same kind both here in L.A. and in San Francisco in October and November of this year. Director Chris Carter would seem to have also sensed that the public mood is ready for his second X-Files movie – X-Files: I Want to Believe.

“Interest in the ‘unknown’ has always been cyclical,” notes Skylaire Alfvegren, founder of the League of Western Fortean Intermediatists (L.O.W.F.I.), a group that monitors southwestern mysteries and enigmas. “After 9/11, it was in poor taste to openly express interest in the unknown, or conspiracy theory – angels were okay – when such a heinous event had actually happened. Mass consciousness is now shifting once again – just look at our Democratic presidential nominee.”

The wheel spins, and the approach of 2012 – whether based in an alternative perception of reality, wishful thinking in the closing days of the George Bush nightmare, or as just the sum total of contemporary fascination with the paranormal and the nature of time – is a growth industry, and will probably remain so while fear, fascination, and even hopes are sustained that somehow Dec. 22, 2012 – the day following the crucial day – will be unlike anything we have previously seen, if indeed that day dawns at all.