Alasdair MacIntyre and the Disquieting Suggestion

Alasdair MacIntyre, born this day (January 12) in 1929, opens his most famous work, After Virtue, with the following disturbing scenario (he titles it "A Disquieting Suggestion"):

Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe. A series of environmental disasters are blamed by the general public on scientists. Widespread riots occur, laboratories are burnt down, physicists are lynched, books and instruments are destroyed. Finally a Know-Nothing political movement takes power and successfully abolishes science teaching in schools and universities, imprisoning and executing the remaining scientists. Later still there is a reaction against this destructive movement and enlightened people seek to revive science, although they have largely forgotten what it was. But all that they possess are fragments: a knowledge of experiments detached from any knowledge of the theoretical context which gave them significance; parts of theories unrelated either to the other bits and pieces of theory which they possess or to experiment; instruments whose use has been forgotten; half-chapters from books, single pages from articles, not always fully legible because torn and charred. 1.

Professor MacIntyre raises this discomfiting hypothetical history to illustrate the way in which the language of science would be used by those trying to put it together, although the context or more accurately the overarching paradigm or structure which gave that language its meaning would be lost. He then proposes that something of the sort has actually taken place, but in the field of morality rather than of technology, saying:

The hypothesis which I wish to advance is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world which I described. What we possess, if this view is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. 2.

Without trying to analyze or even summarize the celebrated philosophical insights that Professor MacIntyre then goes on draw from his assessment of this bleak moral scenario (an area in which I am certainly not an expert), it is worth noting a few points that are at least tangentially related to the subject matter of this blog.

First, it is probably accurate to state that he sees the choices faced by those living in the aftermath of the "disorder" he describes as two: "Nietzsche or Aristotle?" I have heard this choice explained as "making oneself a work of art" in a meaningless universe (Nietzsche), or seeing meaning in the universe and seeing the universe as "a work of art" and trying to live in accordance with that very different view.

Interestingly enough, we have encountered Aristotle in this blog before, seemingly making a very important observation about what he called "our ancestors and our earliest predecessors." In his Metaphysics, he opines:

while probably each art and each science has often been developed as far as possible and has again perished, these opinions, with others, have been preserved until the present like relics of the ancient treasure.

In other words, Aristotle himself seems to be talking about a scenario not unlike that which initiates MacIntyre's signature work: a time when "each art and each science" was developed as far as possible but then "perished." However, it does not seem that Aristotle is posing this statement as a hypothetical scenario or an analogy -- he seems to really mean it. One reason to conclude this is that he then says that certain important opinions from that distant past had survived "like relics of the ancient treasure." What opinions does he mean?

The antecedent of "these opinions" (in the fuller quotation cited in the post linked above) are two different but apparently related ideas, which Aristotle describes as "a tradition, in the form of a myth, that these bodies are gods, and that the divine encloses the whole of nature."

In other words, the idea that "these bodies" (that is, the celestial bodies of the planets, including the sun and the moon) "are gods" is an idea that somehow preserves the "ancient treasure" of an ancient lost science! No wonder that this line from Aristotle is quoted in Hamlet's Mill, since they pursue the extensive evidence from around the world that the myths of the gods are exactly what Aristotle says they are -- an ancient treasure preserving a lost science.

That is startling, but no more so than the next concept that Aristotle introduces, the idea that "the divine encloses the whole of nature." In other words, it appears that the "whole of nature" being "enclosed in the divine" is related to, or at least perceived in conjunction with, the idea of the motions of the heavenly bodies (perhaps this is taking Aristotle's sentence too far, but I don't think so). This is clearly related to the hasty summary of the "Nietzsche vs. Aristotle" choice found in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre.

However, it also seems to indicate that the "disquieting suggestion" that opens his book is not just an analogy for the state of moral perception in the wake of the Enlightenment (as he says it is) but that something like that horrible scenario may have in fact taken place in the distant past long before Aristotle! Whether MacIntyre believes this or not (and I am not trying to suggest that he introduced his "disquieting" scenario as anything but a useful analogy, nor am I suggesting that he subscribes to any of the hypotheses about geology or ancient human history discussed in this blog or the Mathisen Corollary book), there appears to be evidence that such a collapse in knowledge took place. Some of the evidence even seems to come from Aristotle (although there is much evidence quite independent of that philosopher).

Professor MacIntyre suggests that it is quite plausible to believe that we are completely ignorant of the deliberate dismantling of moral context that took place in a previous century. Likewise, it appears that we can be blind to the fact that humanity also experienced a dismantling of scientific understanding in the far more distant past.

Nor is this a dry and academic debate: as we have explored in previous posts such as this one and this one, the question of how such a loss could have happened, and how some knowledge could have been (as Aristotle thinks it was) preserved and passed on like an "ancient treasure," is vitally important to everyone, if it indeed took place. However, we will never know the answers to those questions if we do not even start to see the signs that such a loss did once take place.

We wish Professor MacIntyre many happy returns on his birthday!

Leo rising into prominence in the evening sky

As the earth continues in its annual orbit around the sun, the constellations you can see at night during the early part of the evening prior to midnight continue to "advance," rising earlier each night by about four minutes (as explained in this previous post). This means that, to an observer at the same location at the same time of night, on successive nights the constellations will all be about a degree ahead of where they were at the same time the night before -- since they rise four minutes earlier, they will be four minutes higher than they were the previous night as earth progresses.

Thus, the stars of Taurus which used to dominate the east shortly after sunrise are now far advanced, and the stars of Orion (which are behind those of Taurus) which were barely peeking over the horizon in the early night hours when Taurus was getting higher are now themselves much higher in the sky in the early evening hours before midnight.

This brings up the constellation Leo the Lion, who was rising after midnight back in early November when last we mentioned him, but who now breaks above the horizon at about 8 pm and is rising majestically into the eastern sky by 10 pm, reaching his apex right about 3am.

Leo is an important constellation. Of course, Leo is part of the zodiac, the belt of constellations along the ecliptic, through which the sun and planets pass. We have seen evidence that the imagery of the lion as a guardian may stem from the time when the sun was rising in the region of the constellation of Leo when the important star Sirius made its annual return to the skies.

One of the pioneers of the academic field of the history of science and scientific thought, Willy Hartner (1905 - 1981), published an influential essay with historian of Islamic art Richard Ettinghousen (1906 - 1979) in 1964 called "The Conquering Lion, the Life-Cycle of a Symbol," which argued that the relative positions of the constellations of the Lion and the Bull give rise to the imagery of a Lion attacking (and subduing) a Bull. Their theory was that the culmination of the stars of the Lion (when they are highest in the sky, crossing the meridian) takes place when the stars of the Bull (which are ahead of the stars of the Lion) are sinking below the western horizon. Thus, the Lion can be seen as triumphant just as the Bull is seen fleeing from the scene (or descending into the netherworld, dying).

He argues that this celestial symbolism is behind the familiar ancient depiction of the lion-bull combat, which is very ancient (found at least as early as 1000 BC). Some examples are shown below:

















































Professor David Ulansey, author of the important work Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries, argues that this imagery has strong parallels to the imagery employed in the Mysteries of Mithras, and that Mithras appears to have replaced the Lion in the Mithraic imagery.

It has also been suggested that the Lion-Bull combat scene is connected to the Lion and Unicorn symbols of the United Kingdom, with the Unicorn replacing the Bull (both being horned animals).

It may even be possible to see a connection to the familiar Bull and Bear imagery of Wall Street.

There are other important connections that can be suggested surrounding the constellation Leo the Lion. Be sure to go out and look for it in the evening sky in the upcoming days and weeks.

100th anniversary of the first presentation by Alfred Wegener of his theory of Kontinentalverschiebung (continental drift)

January 6 is the anniversary of the Alfred Wegener's first presentation of his theory of continental drift, at the 1912 meeting of the German Geological Association. That makes this anniversary the 100th anniversary of this important advance in human understanding of our planet.

While there are extensive clues in the geology of our planet which suggest that the theory of plate tectonics is incorrect (many of which have been discussed on this blog, and many more of which are discussed in Dr. Walt Brown's book describing his alternative theory, which he calls the hydroplate theory), there is no denying that Wegener's theory was an improvement over the theories that reigned when he proposed it.

Wegener observed the apparent fit between the continents (he was most intrigued by the coastlines of Africa and South America on either side of the Altantic), and proposed that continental drift could explain this fit as well as solve many other vexing problems that the reigning "fixist" (no-drift) theory could not explain. [aside: An interesting note about the apparent continental fit that first spurred Wegener's interest is that Dr. Brown has demonstrated that the fit between the continents across the Atlantic is not so good, but the fit of the Atlantic-side edge of those continents with the serpentine line of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is outstanding: this suggests that the continents were blasted apart by the rupture event proposed in the hydroplate theory, during which much earth was eroded by the escaping floodwaters on either side of the rupture -- see discussion surrounding figures 51, 52 and 53 on this page of his website.]

For his efforts, Wegener was subjected to withering criticism and scorn throughout his life. This website from the UC Berkeley Museum of Paleontology cites one scornful quotation from Dr. Rollin T. Chamberlin of the University of Chicago: "Wegener's hypothesis in general is of the footloose type, in that it takes considerable liberty with our globe, and is less bound by restrictions or tied down by awkward, ugly facts than most of its rival theories."

At a special symposium on the theory of continental drift held by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in 1926, virtually every aspect of his theory was soundly rejected. This website from Emporia University in Kansas points out that: "American geology was held in high regard in the early 20th century, and such overwhelming rejection of continental drift put an end to serious scientific discussion of the idea for the next four decades."

Of course, Wegener's theory was vindicated after the Second World War, when new technologies enabled better imaging and exploration of the geology of the ocean floor around the globe, and the discovery of massive ridges and abyssal trenches showed that the fixist objection (their assumption of a solid, uniform ocean floor through which no continent could drift) might be incorrect. Unfortunately for Wegener, this was long after his death, which occurred in 1930 during a scientific expedition to Greenland to monitor arctic weather over a full 12-month period.

Wegener's perseverance in the face of criticism, the vitriol of much of that criticism, and the eventual about-face performed by the scientific community in fully accepting his theory (to the point that proposed alternatives, ironically, face similarly withering criticism from the proponents of the now-dominant tectonic paradigm) all hold important lessons about the scientific process and about the quest for the truth in complicated questions. Some previous blog posts which go to the heart of this question include "Read Dr. Daniel Botkin's article, 'Absolute Certainty is not Scientific'" and "'There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists'."

These are very appropriate lessons to ponder on this important anniversary in the history of science.

Big hat tip to Graham Hancock Message Board forum member Hans M. for pointing this anniversary out to me.

Black smokers and deep-sea hydrothermal vents

Recently, scientists who steered a remotely-operated vehicle (ROV) to explore deep-sea hydrothermal vents near Antarctica in 2010 published their remarkable findings in the journal of the Public Library of Science -- Biology (aka PLoS Biology).

This article from the Washington Post describes the findings in "popular media" terminology; here is the report of the actual team that was published in PLoS Biology.

Deep-sea hydrothermal vents are fascinating features and may hold important clues about the ancient history of the earth. They emit water from beneath the deep ocean floor that can be extraordinarily hot -- in some cases as hot as 464° C (over 867° F).

How can water even get that hot? Since we generally have the understanding that water boils at 100° C (or 212° F), we might think water cannot possibly get so hot, until we remember our high-school science class lesson about the fact that boiling temperature changes with pressure.

At lower pressures, water boils at lower temperatures (that's why you can get water to reach a boiling point more quickly when you go up to the mountains, and why you need a pressure suit if you take your body even higher in the atmosphere where the pressure is lower -- if the pressure gets low enough, your own body heat can cause your blood to boil for you).

On the other hand, as pressure increases, the boiling point gets higher. Down deep beneath the ocean where these deep-sea hydrothermal vents are found, the pressure is very high. Beneath the ocean floor, where the water is coming from, the pressure is even higher.

Walt Brown explains that the water that was trapped beneath the crust prior to the flood event (when most of it escaped violently, leading to events that would radically reshape the surface of our globe) was under enormous pressure. At enough pressure, that water reaches something called a "critical point" -- the point at which it will no longer boil. At or above that point, water is known as "supercritical water," incredibly hot and in a form that is something like a liquified gas:

At a pressure of one atmosphere—about 1.01 bar or 14.7 psi (pounds per square inch)—water boils at a temperature slightly above 212°F (100°C). As pressure increases, the boiling point rises. At a pressure of 3,200 psi (220.6 bars) the boiling temperature is 705°F (374°C). Above this pressure-temperature combination, called the critical point, water is supercritical and cannot boil. The initial pressure in the 10-mile-deep subterranean chamber was about 62,000 psi (4,270 bars)—far above the critical pressure. After about a century of tidal pumping, the subterranean water exceeded the critical temperature, 705°F.

This concept of supercritical water is important for understanding other clues on earth, such as the amounts of salt left by the flood, and the amount of limestone on the earth (supercritical water dissolves and holds much more of the chemicals that make up these substances than regular water can). It also helps us to understand the phenomenon of deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

Dr. Brown's hydroplate theory starts with the assumption of water trapped under the earth's surface, which became super-critical water (SCW) under great pressure. The violent escape of this water triggered a global flood. Before that initial breach, however, this supercritical water would have dissolved its way into the rock above and below the trapped water, creating a honeycomb of porous rock where it did so. According to Dr. Brown's theory, the vents deep beneath the ocean that are still spewing super-critical water today represent leftover water that remained in this porous rock at certain places on earth (there is some water remaining below the continents as well, but it is not as likely to spurt out, because there are continents on top of it, unlike that at the bottom of the oceans).

Dr. Brown explains this dissolving process, and how it may be related to the formation of deep-sea hydrothermal vents, as follows:

Quartz was one of the first minerals to dissolve. This opened up tiny grain-size pockets totaling 27% of the volume of granite. Other minerals undoubtedly also dissolved, so the chamber floor and ceiling must have looked like rigid sponges—each a few miles thick. [An interesting ancient writing touches on this. See the quote from The Book of the Cave of Treasures on page 451.] Trapped SCW that filled these tiny pockets remains today. In fact, in 2008, SCW was discovered two miles under the Atlantic floor. Scientists were shocked at finding the first naturally occurring SCW.⁴⁸ This vast, steady source of superhot water, thick with dissolved minerals (and sometimes hydrocarbons⁴⁹), is jetting up through the ocean floors as black smokers. [See Figure 56.]

A "black smoker" is the term often used for these vents, especially when minerals dissolved in the super-critical water precipitate out when that water vents out into the extremely cold deep ocean water, forming tall black "smokestacks."

These deep-sea vents are often the home of extremely strange and unique life forms. As the Washington Post article above explains, scientists have discovered huge six-foot worms living next to black smokers, and the image above shows a black smoker located in the Endeavor Main Thermal Area near the Juan de Fuca undersea ridge (at depths of 1200 meters to 1900 meters, or about 3900 feet to over 6200 feet) with a crowded colony of red-gilled tube worms in the foreground. The new Antarctic vents described in the articles and reports above appear to be the home of many new and previously-unknown species, including new species of kiwa crabs, barnacles, and snails (but none of the worms so common at other deep-sea vents).

The species that live near these hydrothermal vents typically eat the bacteria that feed on the chemicals that the vents spew out in the scalding-hot water -- making their food chain non-dependent on solar radiation the way ours is and the way the food chain is for all other known species on earth, according to most scientists.

The conventional explanation for these deep-sea thermal vents involves water that is somehow heated by "geothermal" heat, but although the earth's crust does contain a great amount of heat, the mechanism by which water would become heated to a super-critical temperature is not well accounted-for in the conventional explanation. This is because, in order to get to those temperatures, the water must be under tremendous pressure, and in order to get water to that tremendous pressure, the water must be in a sealed pressure chamber. Water cannot just "seep in" to an open chamber and get pressurized to the levels needed to go super-critical. Dr. Brown explains:

According to evolutionary geology, water not in a closed container seeps down against a powerful increasing pressure gradient a few miles below the ocean floor. There, magma (molten rock) heats the water to these incredible temperatures, forcing it back up through the floor. (SCW could not form by such a process, because of the two conditions highlighted in bold above. Uncontained liquid water, heated while slowly seeping downward, would expand, rise, and cool, long before it became supercritical.) Figure 55 gives a simple explanation. Besides, if the evolutionary explanation were true, the surface of the magma body would quickly cool, form a crust, and soon be unable to transfer much heat to the circulating water. (This is why people can walk over magma days after a crust has formed. The crust insulates the hot magma.) However, black smokers must have been active for many years, because large ecosystems (composed of complex life forms such as clams and giant tubeworms) have had time to become established around the base of smokers.

Thus, the bizarre world of deep-sea hydrothermal vents may be another clue that supports the hydroplate theory. It is certainly another mysterious phenomenon which the conventional theory has difficulty explaining, but which the hydroplate theory explains quite satisfactorily.

Hat tip to the "Articles Desk" section of the Graham Hancock website, where I found the link to the Washington Post article describing the new discoveries at the Antarctic deep-sea vents.

More on the Maya cycles

In the previous post which touched on the much-hyped significance of 2012, we saw a National Geographic video which -- while disappointingly sensationalized and disjointed -- actually points us towards some very worthwhile concepts.

Unfortunately, that video falls into the very formulaic style typical of many such "documentaries" -- a serious-sounding narrator who asks questions such as, "What could happen on December 21, 2012," followed by a cut to dramatized video of people being destroyed by enormous ocean waves or expanding fireballs emanating from volcanic explosions, interspersed with slow-motion footage of modern actors dressed up like ancient Maya wearing skull masks and feathered headdresses or painted from head to foot with jaguar-skin patterns.

The film also goes off on a tangent about polar-shifts and earth-crust-displacement, briefly mentioning the role of Charles Hapgood (who is mentioned in this previous post) in promoting that theory during the twentieth century. Some fairly interesting evidence is also explored from the Quelccaya Ice Cap, which is used to argue that perhaps the Maya cycle started with an abrupt climatic catastrophe over 5,000 years ago, with the implication that another such abrupt change may take place in 2012. However, we are never given any theory as to what may have caused the proposed abrupt change back then or any tie-in to the speculative upcoming one either. Was it polar wander? Does that mean polar wander is about to take place again? Those loose ends from earlier in the "documentary" are never tied up. Instead, the earnest-sounding narrator suggests that "we" may be hastening another such world-ending climate disaster (the film cuts to pictures of crowded city streets and then smokestacks pouring forth clouds): does this mean that industrial excesses caused the proposed abrupt climate event 5,200 years ago? Were the Maya building coal-fired power plants? Is the film suggesting that carbon dioxide emissions cause polar wander and earth-crust-displacement? The film's producers don't say, although they seem strangely to suggest it.

By the end of the film, the directors have managed to cast the Maya calendar cycle as a warning about "abrupt climate change" such as "we're having now" and reduce the role of 2012 to another lecture on global warming.

That's too bad, because in the middle of the video there is a segment with author John Major Jenkins, who explains that the calendar cycle end may well have an astronomical phenomenon at its core. The video spends a few minutes on this thread of analysis but never really returns to it again.

Mr. Jenkins is an independent researcher who has written at least four books about Maya cosmology and related topics. His website, which discusses the possibility that the December 21, 2012 date that ends the Maya long-count cycle (and starts a new one, he points out) may be timed to coincide with the alignment of the winter solstice sun and the center of our galaxy, can be found here.

In his latest book, The 2012 Story, Mr. Jenkins writes:

Astronomy, the calendar, and the Creation Myth were facets of the same cosmology. Beliefs about cycle endings, especially the big one in 2012, were represented in these traditions and revealed how the creators of the Long Count thought about 2012. It was not perceived as some dramatic doomsday apocalypse, as our modern media repeatedly prefers to portray it. Instead, the creators of the 2012 calendar utilized sophisticated spiritual teachings intended to facilitate a process of spiritual transformation and renewal. 3.

In a recent interview on Red Ice Radio, Mr. Jenkins laments our media's consistent desire to present a "superficial perspective on a very profound topic" (about 4:00 into the interview).

His assertions that the calendar cycle has an aspect of spiritual renewal find some support in some quotations of guests on the National Geographic video itself, although this angle is disappointingly not pursued any further. At about the 18:00 mark in the video, the Maya tradition that the gods had to destroy successive ages of mankind is discussed. At one point, the gods are said to start over with humanity because they want to create "someone that reveres us, someone that remembers our names."

This is significant. It is strongly reminiscent of a theme we have examined previously, in the blog post entitled "A brief examination of the importance of chakras and singing praises," and again in "How much time do you spend chanting praises?"

Other important themes which can be seen to be related to this larger issue is the concept of cyclical time versus linear time, or cyclical progress versus the modern belief in linear progress. We have touched on this subject in previous posts such as "The Fourth Turning and cyclical time and history" and "Reflections after a 20-year reunion."

It has been alleged in several previous posts that the modern belief in endless and inevitable progress may be blinding us to the evidence that mankind has somehow slipped from extremely advanced knowledge into darkness and barbarism in a major way at least once in its past history. Of course, even the proponents of the linear progress myth admit that there have been small and temporary setbacks, but are not willing to admit a cycle of the magnitude that we are talking about here -- from a pinnacle of knowledge that the defenders of the orthodox timeline of human history refuse to admit mankind could have possessed so many thousands of years ago. It is fairly clear that this modern myth of linear progression (which is linked to the Darwinian mentality that conquered academia about a hundred years ago) is at least partly responsible for the hostility towards all evidence of advanced ancient knowledge, and towards all discussion of such evidence.

The dawn of the year 2012 should cause us to consider some of these important subjects more carefully and urgently. Unfortunately, the media's desire to sensationalize an apocalyptic vision of 2012 has many people experiencing "doomsday fatigue" and tuning it out.

If you haven't thought about incorporating some chanting, perhaps this would be a good year to start!

David W. Mathisen is Graham Hancock's "Author of the Month" for January 2012

This first month of the much-anticipated year 2012, your humble blog host and author of the Mathisen Corollary book is serving as the "Author of the Month" on Graham Hancock's website and associated messsage-board forum.

This is really a great honor and privilege for me, as I have tremendous respect for Mr. Hancock's work in exploring the evidence for an extremely advanced ancient civilization and in engaging millions of people around the world in the conversation surrounding this issue -- people who might otherwise have never learned of the incredible evidence that supports such a possibility.

In fact, reading Mr. Hancock's many books was responsible in no small part for my own interest in these subjects (although, as I have pointed out in some previous posts such as this one, this one, and this one, these are interests that have fascinated me all my life, since the days that I was getting reprimanded by my grade-school teachers for using up all the masking tape in the classroom to make little mummies out of popsicle sticks).

Mr. Hancock is the author of numerous indispensable books on important topics relating to lost civilizations, such as Fingerprints of the Gods, Keeper of Genesis (with Robert Bauval), and Underworld (among many others). He points out that he is not at all in agreement with some of the aspects of my work and the hydroplate theory in general, saying in his opening message:

There are elements of young-earth creationism in your work. For the record I do not myself ascribe to such notions and am quite happy with the idea of the earth being four and a half billion years old or thereabouts. I also have no doubt that evolution is a fact and am convinced that it has taken several billion years for life to evolve into the forms that we see it today on planet earth.

In spite of this, he is very gracious in opening his forum to other authors such as myself, in his words "to encourage constructive open-minded discussion on a wide range of issues," and I am very grateful for the opportunity to participate in such constructive and open-minded discussion with his "web family," so to speak, and am looking forward to a very interesting and engaging conversation over the upcoming month.

I would encourage all readers of the Mathisen Corollary blog to follow that discussion as well. Additionally, it is a terrific way to ask my any questions that you may have, and to get the perspective of other participants on the Graham Hancock message-board forum on your views!

To view the Author of the Month ("AoM") article that I prepared for Graham Hancock's website, follow this link to "Connecting a Global Flood with the Mystery of Mankind's Ancient Past."

The article itself is posted to the web in nine separate webpages (each one is pretty short), and you can click on each one at the bottom of the previous page, or use this quick menu for pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9.

The AoM message board can be found here. In order to participate in the discussion, you'll have to set up a profile, if you don't have one on the Graham Hancock website already.

It has already been a very interesting first day on the discussion boards, and I'm really pleased at the level of the questions, the level of participation, and the spirit of the discussion.

It's going to be a very interesting month. Thanks to Graham Hancock and all the members of his forum for having me, and welcome to any visitors to this blog from his site who haven't been to the Mathisen Corollary before!

Happy New Year, 2012!

It's already 2012 in many parts of the globe, and soon to be 2012 in those longitudes that are still rolling towards the end of 2011.

The much-anticipated year of 2012 has gotten a lot of hype, primarily because the great cycle of the Maya "long-count" is scheduled to come to an end on December 21, 2012, and because of increasing media hype such as the sensationalistic National Geographic video shown below, entitled "2012: Countdown to Armageddon."

The Maya long-count cycle is discussed in many places on the internet, and reflects the advanced mathematical system that civilization possessed. Here is a brief description of the basics of the system from Chapter 7 of the Mathisen Corollary (pages 160-161 in the paperback version), which should help understand exactly what is supposed to come to an end on December 21 of this year:

The famous Maya long count was used for historic inscriptions and for calculating dates far into the past and the future. The system was elegant and simple, consisting of various periods of time which were indicated by their own glyphs; extremely large dates could be rendered by placing dots next to glyphs to indicate the numbers of the groupings (up to four, after which line strokes were used to indicate groups of five, with a zero symbol which could be used to indicate no units in that particular glyph-group). These groupings generally increased by factors of twenty (making the Maya long-count system a "base-twenty" system, or vigesimal system, as opposed to our "base-ten" or decimal system of numbering).

The Maya tun contained 360 days, each day known as a kin. Twenty tuns was called a katun (and totaled 7,200 days). Twenty katuns was called a baktun (which would thus have 144,000 days). The long-count cycle consisted of thirteen baktuns, an enormous length of time equal to 1,872,000 days (over 5,125 years).

As many are aware today thanks to the great interest surrounding the end of this great long-count cycle, the Maya (whose civilization is though to have started as early as 2000 BC but which reached its Classic period between AD 100 and AD 900) began their cycle with the year that we would call 3113 BC -- "believed to be the year the Maya considered as marking the creation of the present world order," according to astronomer Edwin C. Krupp (b. 1944) in his 1983 work Echoes of the Ancient Skies: the Astronomy of Lost Civilizations (185). The great cycle of thirteen baktuns that preoccupied the Maya astronomers and historians so many centuries ago will reach its conclusion near the end of our AD 2012.

It is known that the Maya believed that the world had been destroyed several times before, as the narrators and interviewees in the above National Geographic video make clear. Some sources, such as the Popol Vuh, appear to indicate that we are living in the fourth "sun" or age, while others appear to indicate that the Maya believed we are living in the fifth sun already.

There is also debate as to whether the Maya believed that the end of the current long-count cycle indicated the end of the current "sun." Assuming that they did, it is not necessarily true that this indicated that they believed there would be a literal world-ending catastrophe at the end of 2012. It is quite possible that the end of the current age refers to an a celestial event, the end of an equinoctial age due to the mechanism of precession, and that this celestial knowledge was preserved in myth using metaphorical terminology, just as we have seen with the gods of ancient Greece for example.

As an alert reader may notice, there is a prominent precessional number contained in the above calendar counting system, the number 7,200 (the number of days in a katun). The presence of precessional numbers in the long count appears to support the interpretation given above, that the end of the current "sun" is a precessional event. The number of days in the entire long-count, which is 1,872,000 days, also appears to contain some precessional aspects, in that this number is equal to the approximate length of an entire precessional cycle (26,000 years) times the fundamental precessional number 72.

For some further explanation about the celestial aspects of the "end of an age," see the explanation in some of these previous posts:

• "Capella, precession, and the end of the Golden Age"
• "The importance of Orion"
• "The constellation Auriga and his importance in ancient myth"

For some posts discussing the evidence of connections between the mythological imagery of the ancient Maya and that of other cultures, see these previous posts:

• "Possible Egyptian and Babylonian connections to the Hero Twins of the Maya Popol Vuh"
• "Hurricanes and Hamlet's Mill"
• "The Gate of Cancer"

There is much more evidence contained in what the Maya have left us which is important for our pursuit of the answers to the mysteries of mankind's ancient past. Much of it is discussed in Graham Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods. Much evidence is preserved in the spectacular Maya ruins, although much of it has been irrevocably altered by misguided modern "restoration" projects in recent centuries. In the notes he included in that book, Mr. Hancock points out the slight variations to the dates different scholars have determined for the end of the Maya long-count cycle (see page 517).

If the advent of the portentous year 2012 causes more people around the world to become interested in exploring the mystery of mankind's ancient past, and brings more minds with different backgrounds, life experiences and perspectives to bear on the study of these vitally important questions, then those ancient Maya inscriptions will have served a very important function indeed, in addition to all the other important information that they preserve and the other roles that they play.

I wish all of my readers everywhere a very Happy New Year!