One area of particular interest and focus, which emerged from the internet and even breached the mainstream media and Hollywood, to become a rather disappointing feature film, was 2012. There was much made about the fact that this date apparently coincided with the end of the Mayan long-count calendar which some somewhat unscrupulous writers looking to make easy money on the lively and enthusiastic apocalypse market tried to infer that the Mayans somehow knew the date of the end of the world and based their calendar around this date.
The fact that this date coincided with the winter solstice of 2012, only reinforced the sense of mystical significance. The reality was that the calendar just ticked over from one series, the 12th b’ak’tun to the 13th b’ak’tun, and in the Mayan cosmology, there were 13 b’ak’tuns in one world ‘age’. A b’ak’tun is a period of roughly 394 solar years, I say roughly because the Mayan Tun is a year of 360 days or kins, although the Maya used a practical calendar year of 365 days which had 18 uinals or ‘months’ of 20 days, because they had a base 20 system.
Now can anyone do a quick bit of maths? What is 20 times 18? It's 360. But I said the Mayans had an effective year of 365 days? So we have a problem, there’s a shortfall of five days. How do we account for that? Well, In fact the remaining five days of the year were known as ‘nameless’ days and were considered especially dangerous and any activity was kept to a strict minimum on these inauspicious days.
So although the Mayan year did indeed have 365 days like any self-respecting year should, in the ritualise reality of the Mayan world, it only had 360 REAL days. So, to get back on track, 20 Tuns made a Katun, 20 Katuns made a Baktun and so on. So, a Baktun represented a period of roughly 400 years and in 2012 it was simply the end of one of the 400 year Baktun cycles of the Mayans.
What fuelled a lot of the end-of-the-world hysteria was the very intriguing fact, perhaps totally coincidental but you never know with the Mayans and their astronomical skills, that this date coincided not only with the winter solstice but also with what was long anticipated by modern astronomers as not only the peak of the 11 year sunspot cycle, but the peak of the peak of the Grand Solar Maximum cycle.
There was a potential presage of things to come in July 2012 when the magnetic-field of a sunspot collapsed and released an X-class solar flare, the highest category of solar flares, which sent a shockwave plume of a billion tonnes of highly charged plasma out into space, of the same magnitude as the Carrington Event of 1859 which had taken place two months before the solar maximum of cycle 10 and knocked out telegraph systems in the northern hemisphere and gave telegraph operators electric shocks who found that even after disconnecting power supplies the could still send and receive messages, such was the power of the magnetic field in the solar discharge that it continued to power the system with what one of the operators called the ‘auroral current’ which was reportedly much effective than the usual power source so much so that a written conversation between telegraph operators expressed the mutual agreement to operate the telegraph system from the power of the geomagnetically induced current from the solar superstorm and they did so for two hours.
The resulting aurora from the solar flux hitting the upper atmosphere was reportedly so bright that it woke gold miners in the Rocky Mountains who thought it was morning and it was possible to read by the light of the aurora in some parts of the United States. Were the Carrington Event to take place in the modern age of advanced telecommunications and widespread electrical infrastructure the potential damages could be in excess in an astronomical sum of 2 trillion dollars. Fortunately, the solar-flare of 2012 missed the Earth by a margin of nine days.
However, the problem with the Mayan calendar is that the people who calculated the end of the 12th b’ak’tun and thus the end of the world age, actually forgot to factor in the 5 nameless days into their calculations, and this adds an extra 75 years to the calendar which means in fact, that the end of the world was not destined for December 21 2012 at all, but December 21 2087. Which suits me because I’ll be long dead by then….. Isn’t it nice that you don’t have to worry about the end of the world in your lifetime?
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