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OK, folks, we've got five years left

At least we know when the end is coming

OK, folks, we've got five years left.

That's right! Five years from today--Dec. 21, 2012--the world is scheduled to come to an end.

One doomsayer's opinion?

Oh, no. This is a consensus. OK, a consensus of two, but a consensus just the same.

According to the writings of Michel de Nostredame (better known as Nostradamus), the world will end on Dec. 21, 2012 (no specific hour or minute is given).

Some think the end will be the climax of a world war that will begin in 2008. Others believe the beginning of the end occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, or the day America invaded Iraq.

But Nostradamus is not alone in his predictions. The ancient Mayan calendar, perfected long before the French physician and astrologer began writing his now famous quatrains, ends abruptly on the same date.

Scary!

OK, why Dec. 21, 2012? Why not Dec. 20 or Dec. 23?

According to astronomers, Dec. 21, 2012, is the day when our sun moves to the exact center of our galaxy, the Milky Way.

What is the significance of that scientific fact? Does the sun and Earth slingshot off into some black hole when it reaches the center of the galaxy?

Even the most brilliant of scientists have no clue, but apparently the Mayans knew. And so did Nostradamus. Unfortunately, they are all dead.

If you believe Nostradamus and the Mayans, we are hell-bent for oblivion. The end is right around the corner so get your affairs in order.

This, of course, is not the first end-of-the-world prediction. Far from it. Since the birth of Christ, there have been at least 200 sure-fire dates on which the end would occur.

We, of course, are still here.

The two most celebrated end dates came roughly 150 years apart and both originated--where else?--in America.

In the early 1840s, a religious scholar named William Miller calculated, through biblical means, that the end of time would come in 1844.

According to historians, tens of thousands of people awaited the second coming of Christ on March 21 of that year.

When the end did not occur on that date, they set their sights on Oct. 22, 1844. Many actually did sell their worldly possession in anticipation of the end of the world. It did not occur.

Most of us recall the second end-of-the-world hysteria. In the two years leading up to the beginning of the 21st century there were millions of people who were absolutely sure it would be all over when the clock struck midnight on Dec. 31, 1999.

Some hoarded food and water and waited for the end that never came. It remains unclear whether these people were relieved or disappointed.

The 1844 movement, which became known as Millerism, was sure that Jesus would return on the predicted dates. The 1999 fanatics (this was the Y2K phenomenon) were far less religious in their outlooks.

 

Call For Submissions For Cthulhu 2012

December 21, 2012 is the next planned expiration date for humanity per the Mayan calendar, though whether it heralds a new beginning or an abrupt end is open to speculation. The next Pope is prophesied to be the last before the Judgment.

The Hopi Indians predict an end to this world. The stars may soon be right: as the Sun’s sunspot cycle is to enter a period of increased activity; and, the Earth is to be in alignment with the plane of the Milky Way galaxy. The Earth’s magnetic pole is thought to be nearing a period of reversal. The Revelations of St. John is always ever present, with omens of the Beast, The Mother of Babylon, the destruction of one-third of the Earth, and the prospect of Wormwood from the skies (a near-Earth object?) blasting the planet.

Amidst this backdrop of uncertainty, chaos, destruction, and possible renewal, is an invitation to contribute to a modern day horror anthology of fiction in the tradition of H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos. Potential contributors are welcome to use the above-mentioned plot devices, or create their own, and may use the Cthulhu Mythos as sparingly or as heavily as desired. “We are more concerned about the stories being atmospheric, displaying the horror of cosmic indifference to man, and realistic writing that blends truth with pseudo-truths to create an illusion so one knows not when history becomes pseudo-history.”

Mythos Books is seeking previously unpublished fiction, maximum limit of approximately 7,500 words, payment rate of 5 cents per word for FNASR.

The planned publication will be a traditionally printed trade hardcover of 1,000 copies with full color dust jacket. There will also be a limited leatherbound edition for sale, and the authors will receive a publisher’s presentation copy of the leatherbound edition. The author will receive 2 copies of the trade edition.

Mythos Books reserves the right to reprint the anthology Cthulhu 2012 as a trade paperback and/or as a mass market paperback. Should the anthology be reprinted as either/or a trade or mass market paperback, the author’s will receive royalties based on word length as a percentage of net sales, 40% to the publisher and 60% split among the author. The author will also receive 2 copies of any paperback
editions.

Panic in the Year Zero

America has awaited one apocalypse or another with a morbid fascination for almost as long as the nation has existed. During the 19th century, hardly a decade went by without a patriarchal whack-job persuading a flock of true believers to scale an isolated mountain because, by some Old Testament calculations, he had decided the Final Days had arrived. But The End never materialized, and the now not-so-faithful came back down feeling like damned fools.

The 20th century was a little different. After two world wars with death-counts in the millions, and almost three decades of living under the nuclear doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, no verses of Ezekiel were needed to remind us of the fragility of human life. Instead, we evolved a fairly complicated system of post-nuclear mythology. (Or else non-human entities started to take notice of us.) From UFOs to cattle mutilation to Bigfoot to crop circles, we seemed determined to distract ourselves from the ever-present specter of ICBM annihilation.

Then the Cold War ended, but the mythology still grew – especially through the Bill Clinton 1990s. Black helicopters cruised the skies, the New World Order would usurp democracy, secret treaties were supposedly concluded with grey aliens at Area 51, and The X-Files helped consolidate the Fox TV Network. This cloud of dire beliefs culminated with coming of the millennium, Nostradamus’s predictions for July 1999, and the Y2K fear of a computer glitch precipitating us back into the Middle Ages.

Fortunately, instead of civilization as we knew it grinding to a halt, we passed both the Nostradamus doom and Y2K unscathed. Except, hot on the heels of this escape from Hobbesian horror, we had the fixed election of 2000, George W. Bush, Al Qaeda, 9/11, and a desperate dose of reality that seemed to put alien abduction on the national back burner, and about the only group that hung on to their imagined Armageddon were the Christian fundamentlists who prayed for The Rapture on a daily basis.

 

But seemingly, we can adapt to anything, and after more than seven years of the felonous mendacity of Bush/Cheney, the aliens are back, UFOs are buzzing Stephenville, Texas, and a whole new End of the World theory stirs, not only on outer-fringe cypto-science websites, but even on the Discovery Channel and the revamped History Channel. This apocalypse is predicted for December 21, 2112 (12.21.2112), and supposedly could come at us from multiple sources. The prime prophet is the highly complex, but also highly accurate Mayan calendar, whose “long count” comes to an abrupt end exactly on that day.

The cosmos, however, could also be the delivery system of doom. A slew of websites now make the case that 12.21.2112 – the winter solstice – will bring on an extremely rare planetary alignment of Earth, Sun, and the plane of the Milky Way that the paranoid believe could trigger a gamma ray burst, burning us all to curly fries, or cause an equally fatal flip-over of the Earth’s magnetic field. And finally we have the late, neo-psychedelic avatar Terence McKenna, whose mathematical analysis of the King Wen sequence of the I Ching created a fractal waveform known as “time wave zero”; an algorithm that hits an asymptote at exactly December 21, 2012 at which point entropy ends, and (some say) everything else ends with it.

Do I understand time wave zero? No, and McKenna, who died of brain cancer in 2000, isn’t around to elaborate. But a debate has already started as to whether its abrupt conclusion means the final elimination of everything, or a more benign, if radical, reversal of human attitudes.

Do I believe that we’ll live to see December 22, 2112? My instinct is those of us still around certainly will, but for the next four and half years the media will play 12.21.2112 harder than Y2K, and, perversely, I won’t complain. I love to see a good irrational panic.

 

Opportunity to change civilization

Four years, nine months and three weeks may be about all the time we have left on Earth. Why? Dec. 21, 2012, marks the end of a 5,000-year cycle by the Maya Long Count calendar. To some, this spells doomsday (disaster scenarios include earthquakes, volcanic eruptions caused by solar storms, cracks forming in the earth’s magnetic field and mass extinction brought on by nuclear winter). To others, it carries the promise of a new beginning. And to still others, 2012 provides explanations for unsettling developments (e.g., the disappearance of bees) that seem beyond our control.

While all this has largely been a hot topic within alternative cultures, the 2012 phenomenon is slowly trickling into the mainstream. At least four new books on 2012 have appeared in bookstores in the wake of the 2006 success of Daniel Pinchbeck’s “2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl.” This month, Sony won a bidding war for disaster-movie king Roland “Godzilla” Emmerich’s apocalyptic script “2012.” And this Saturday, 2012-ers will converge on Hollywood for a day-long conference devoted to the subject.

“There’s a real hunger for this kind of knowledge,” says 2012 Conference producer Christian John Meoli. Meoli takes a more optimistic view of the date, referring to it as “the Shift” (the conference’s slogan: “Shift Happens”). “It’s easy to manipulate people with fear,” he says. “I wanted to stay away from the gloom and doom.”

 

Among those appearing at the conference will be “Return of Quetzalcoatl” author and psychonaut Pinchbeck, who describes 2012 as “a window of opportunity to change civilization.”

Says Pinchbeck: “At the moment, global civilization is unsustainable. . . . According to many scientists, 25% of our species will be extinct within 30 years. We need to re-center our world view away from materialism. My hope is that by 2012, there’s a fundamental redirection of focus, and we start projecting the universal dream.”

Other futurists scheduled to appear at the 2012 Conference include Alberto Villoldo, a Cuban American medical anthropologist and psychologist who has studied and practiced shamanism for more than two decades, John Major Jenkins, author of “Maya Cosmogenesis 2012,” and filmmaker Sharron Rose, whose documentary “Timewave 2013? will kick off the conference.

“I’m also flying in a shaman from Peru — you should see his rider!” Meoli laughs. “Do you have any idea where I can get some yuk-yuk?”

Meoli plans to produce a total of 12 conferences in various cities around the globe.

“The grand hurrah will be on Dec. 21, 2012, at the Mayan pyramids,” he says. “This is just the beginning.”

 

 Will the world end in 2012?

The end is near. Well, more specifically, it's five years from this Friday: Dec. 21, 2012 — or so the doomsayers would have you believe.

Others believe we're five years from an unprecedented spiritual awakening. Whatever you believe, there's no denying that the 2012 movement has become a hot topic. Just take a walk through the non-fiction aisle of the nearest bookstore. Joseph Lawrence's "Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation into Civilization's End" and Daniel Pinchbeck's "2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl" are some of the more popular titles filling bookshelves these days.

Most recently, Louisville-based Sounds True, a publisher of spiritual books, audio programs and DVDs, published the book "The Mystery of 2012: Predictions, Prophesies and Possibilities," an anthology featuring many of the leading scholars on the topic, including Pinchbeck and John Major Jenkins, an independent researcher who has studied 2012 for more than 20 years and discussed the anthology at a Dec. 6 book signing at the Boulder Book Store.

The big question these books are trying to answer, of course, is what's going to happen in 2012 — in particular on the winter solstice, Dec. 21.

Here's what is known: The ancient Mayan long-count calendar — a calendar that spans more than 5,000 years — comes to an end on Dec. 21, 2012. This coincides with a galactic alignment in which the sun will align with the center of the Milky Way galaxy, an event that occurs once every 26,000 years, which could have potentially catastrophic consequences. The galactic alignment has the potential to create a shift in the Earth's poles, which would cause disastrous environmental events.

Many view this, in conjunction with the end of the Mayan calendar, as a sign of the end times. Viewers of the History Channel should be familiar with this theory, as the channel has featured the doomsday scenario in numerous programs.

But there is another theory, led by the likes of Jenkins, who makes his home in Windsor, and has spent much of the past two decades living and working with the traditional Maya in Guatemala. For him, 2012 is not the end. It's a chance for an unprecedented spiritual awakening.

"It's an opportunity for human life to understand our true natures," he says. "There will be a great awakening to the greater potential that human beings have."

The doomsday theories, though, have captured the public's imagination and have often overshadowed Jenkins' work.

"It's a little disappointing to see the carnival aspect of 2012 on the upswing," he says. "Because of the large interest that 2012 is generating ... a lot of people will be distracted by the carnival barkers selling snake oil."

There could be something positive in this, however, for at the very least the doomsayers have drawn attention to the topic, Jenkins says.

"That just means, relatively speaking, that more people will be able to navigate their way through the labyrinth to get into the heart of the information."

People are talking. A year ago, if you had asked someone their opinion about 2012, they likely would have responded that it was their favorite Rush album. Not anymore. In July, the New York Times Magazine ran a feature on 2012, and competing theories concerning the winter solstice of 2012 have gone from the fringe to the mainstream as the rival streams of perennial philosophy and apocalyptic prophecy have met at the confluence of popular culture.

"We're just seeing more titles. It seems there has constantly been one new 2012 book in circulation for the past year now," says Arsen Kashkashian, inventory manager at the Boulder Book Store, which has hosted 2012-themed readings by Pinchbeck and Jenkins in the past four months. "They used to be fringe things. They're being put out by the big publishers now."

As Dec. 21, 2007 draws near, it may be time to write up one final five-year plan. But should they be plans for the end of the world or just the end of the world as we know it? It depends on whose book you read.

Mutate or perish

It was 1986, and Tami Simon, the founder and publisher of Sounds True, which she started in 1985 with the vision to "disseminate spiritual wisdom," was volunteering at Boulder's KGNU radio station. She was working with new-age spiritual leader and author José Arguelles on a series of programs called "Earth Shift," leading up to the Arguelles-led Harmonic Convergence of 1987, a two-day gathering at various sacred sites around the world meant to usher in the final cycle of the Mayan calendar.

Arguelles gave Simon a T-shirt that read "Where Will You Be in 2012?"

"I remember, he said, 'Tami, we have 25 years. Mutate or perish,' which I thought was a very funny line," Simon says.

The 2012 issue percolated in the back of her mind for the next two decades. Twenty-one years later, she's still not entirely sure of her position on the 2012 movement.

"This is one of those topics that's very hard to pin down," Simon says. "It's like mercury under glass. It's hard to pin down exactly what I think about this."

While most people have just recently heard about the 2012 movement, Simon has had a two-decades head start. That hasn't helped.

"I was left with a lot more questions than any sense of clarity about my position on 2012," she says. "So we decided to put together an anthology ('The Mystery of 2012') about all the different viewpoints on the 2012 phenomenon."

That, she explains, is why she chose to put a large question mark on the cover of the book.

"The question mark says it all," she says. "We're not particularly taking a position, but collecting these essays that will allow the educated reader to get caught up on all the writings in this area and form their own opinion."

In addition to "The Mystery of 2012" anthology, Sounds True recently published a three-disc audio recording of John Major Jenkins called "Unlocking the Secrets of 2012: Galactic Wisdom from the Ancient Skywatchers."

Jenkins agrees with Simon that what will happen on Dec. 21, 2012 is not set in stone. The galactic alignment will occur, he says, and the Mayan calendar will reach its end, but beyond that, it's up to us.

"Ultimately, the outcome depends on free will," he says. "The Maya do not believe in predestination or predetermination."

"What we will experience on that day depends on what happens between now and then," says Arguelles, a former Boulder resident who now heads the Galactic Research Institute of the Foundation for the Law of Time in Ashland, Ore. "These five years are a spiritual test in preparation for our own conscious evolution."

Jenkins believes our culture has reached "galactic midnight," what he describes as "the point of greatest spiritual darkness."

He likens this to the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.

"It's the nadir, which is good news," Jenkins says. "We're turning the corner."

All of the recent press surrounding 2012 could have a negative and unexpected consequence, though, Simon warns, if people simply accept that what will happen — be it doomsday or a spiritual awakening — is inevitable.

"The future is in our hands," Simon says. "We can't sit and wait for a dawning of a great spiritual age in 2012 or doomsday. We need to work right now with open hearts and intelligent activism."

And while she's not entirely sure of her beliefs surrounding 2012, she's certain of her approach.

"I think my own view is to put my attention into this moment and the next moment, not on what's going to happen five years from now," she says. "What's going to happen five years from now is going to be a product of this moment and the next moment and how we act."

Apocalypse 2012

Lawrence Joseph, author of "Apocalypse 2012," released in hardcover earlier this year and slated for paperback release in January, has a different take on 2012 — and it doesn't necessarily involve attending a killer New Year's Eve party to ring in 2013.

"This is a real physical possibility that we have to deal with of 2012 being a catastrophic year," Joseph says. "If 2012 proves to be just another year, good. But we need to begin preparing."

Joseph, though, doesn't believe that the world is going to end in 2012. He believes that it is going to be a period of great change, and not necessarily for the better. He points to global warming and increased solar activity as two sources of strife.

"We cannot understand what happens on Earth without understanding what happens on the sun," Joseph says.

He says he first became aware of increased solar activity, which he has correlated with catastrophic events such as an earthquake in Ethiopia and Hurricane Katrina, while serving as the chairman of a plasma physics company in Albuquerque, N.M. His research led him, in 2005, to a solar physics conference sponsored by the University of Colorado.

It also took him to the source: Joseph went to Guatemala and spent two weeks with Mayan shamans.

"It was their work that really opened my eyes," he says, indicating that 2012 would be "a pivotal, quite possibly catastrophic, perhaps revelatory time in history."

His research among shamans and scientists resulted in "Apocalypse 2012," which is contracted for translation into 12 languages. Joseph says that unlike other doomsday books, "Apocalypse 2012" is not designed to be scary, but to serve as a warning.

"I'm emotionally incapable of believing that it's going to end on Dec. 21, 2012," he says, but adds, "We really have to take it seriously."

Arguelles agrees.

"There are a number of predictions that focus on a pole shift, a tectonic plate shift or some major perturbation to the electromagnetic field due to solar flares, or even a solar pole shift," he says. "Something like this — along with a collapse of the electronic communications grid — seems probable, and likely to peak by the time you get to the target date."

Rather than apocalypse, though, Arguelles, who along with Stephanie South is currently working on a seven-volume book series titled "Cosmic History Chronicles," sees this as the opportunity to reach a higher consciousness.

"The resonance between the focused attention of human consciousness in alignment with the galactic center will bring about a radical change of consciousness, the evolutionary shift point," he says. "It will be palpable. As our self-perceptions alter in a collective telepathic field, so will our perception of the universe. It will be the dawn of a new heaven and new earth. Expect a miracle."

The final countdown

So nobody totally agrees on what, if anything, will happen on Dec. 21, 2012. For some, it's the dawning of a golden age of spirituality. For others, it's the much-ballyhooed end of the world — though proponents of this theory seemed to be in short supply among the roughly 120 people in attendance at Jenkins' Dec. 6 reading.

Among them was Jake Wagner, 28, of Boulder, who first heard of the 2012 movement five years ago.

"It just seems like some sort of crescendo is going on," he says of the way 2012 has spread into popular culture.

Prior to the Internet, he says, a lot of this information was handed down from person to person. "Now it's to the point where it's reached the mainstream," Wagner says. "It's YouTube. You can now get easy access to these (2012) videos."

Ryan Cohen, 26, of Boulder, also believes that the zeitgeist is in effect. Information about 2012 was available a decade ago, but the public wasn't necessarily receptive to the message.

"The paradigm didn't exist for people to get it," Cohen says.

"I suppose up until then 2012 was beneath the horizon line of mainstream popular consciousness, though it was spreading massively in the alternative culture," Arguelles says. "There always comes a moment when the energy of an 'idea' pushes up through the mass mind and becomes so overwhelmingly evident in the popular culture that it can no longer be ignored. It then becomes part of the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times."

Kashkashian, of the Boulder Book Store, has another explanation for why the 2012 movement is beginning to garner so much attention in popular culture.

"People love the end of the world," he says.

He likens the proliferation of 2012 doomsday books to those preceding Y2K — and he sees their number rising in the coming five years.

"I think we'll see a whole lot more," he says, "but I don't think they'll be worth a whole lot in 2013."

The 2012 movement certainly contains the perfect storm of ingredients for a doomsday theory: the mystical (the end of the Mayan calendar), the scientific (the galactic alignment) and the ever-present societal unrest that every generation points to for proclaiming their generation as the last.

"There are many aspects of trends in current events to support this kind of thinking — everything from dire prognostications regarding climate change to the war on terror and increasing incidents of random acts of mass violence," Arguelles says. "The emphasis on violence in video games and much of mass culture creates the climate for a self-fulfilling prophecy."

For Joseph, it's also human nature.

"There's this sense of an ending that people periodically need to confront," he says. "Every culture has its own sense of how it began. ... Maybe every society needs a destruction myth, to see how it's going to end."

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