Friday, November 7, 2008

2012 Mythology Rising

For some time the prophetic mythos of the 2012 winter solstice has been talked up by those that get excited about such things. An excellent review is available at this website and is worth a read.

http://www.adishakti.org/mayan_end_times_prophecy_12-21-2012.htm

That the Mayan tradition labels it a transition time has the earmark of a religious system of thought that designates certain dates as more important than others. This is not a simple annualized affair but wound out over the years and lifetimes of the citizen and clearly greater than themselves since they could see it all in the placement of the stars.

Stonehenge is telling us the same story or at least suggesting the same thing. This all supports a global Bronze Age religious cult that was linked to observation of the skies and in the case of the Maya, an effective numeration system that allowed then to count the years and link it to observations of the night sky.

For no other obvious good reason the solstice of 2012 is a Mayan calendar transition date. The difficulty is that this is far too good a story for the press to leave alone. So we can expect a lot of media reaction as we close in on that particular date. You can be sure that you will be hearing too much about it. So read this material in the website to get a fairly unbiased understanding of the tale before it all gets buried under a more hysterical mountain of commentary.

It has been clear to me for a long time that the two thousand year Bronze Age was an age of wealthy lordlings scattered through out the globe who had limited ability to actually project force. Their wealth was preserved in copper that required their economic clout to sustain its mining and trade.

The collapse of Atlantis at Gibraltar crippled and actually ended this economy on the Atlantic seaboard although it continued on for a while longer in Southeast Asia.

The point of all this is that echoes of this culture is embedded in our oldest works and can be recognized. What makes it all so compelling is that as we add knowledge we often find suggestive correlations that should not be there in the first place and are left with the uneasy feeling that they actually may have known things that they surely had no right to know.

There is just enough out there to warm up the conspiracy theorists and the like. It is not hard to construct a convincing line of hooey that will keep everyone awake at night.

We have no reason to think that the Mayan choice of dates had any particular significance. We do understand that their culture emerged in response to the European Bronze Age in particular and staggered on thereafter until increasing renewal of European and Asian contact let loose a series of pandemics a couple of centuries before the voyages of Columbus. At least I propose that as a viable working hypothesis that has been supported by ongoing discoveries but may never be completely provable.

It is one of those situations in which we are going to keep finding the remains until the evidence is impossible to deny. When I build these particular hypotheses about prehistory I rely on one operating principle. If they could have done it, they certainly did. I have yet to be disappointed.

As an example, during the middle ages, European fishermen could get blown out to sea and end up on the American coast or in the Caribbean. We are doing it today in row boats. This would allow disease transmission. Did the Europeans fish? Case closed.

Archeology has tried to put up roadblocks to such ideas and has been called on it over and over again. Trust the adventurous horny young men to go anywhere and get themselves killed or lost. The latest such effort came regarding the resistance to the idea that North America was peopled along the Northwest Coast. This was obvious to me twenty years ago before some brave soul suggested it. The objections are now fading as the evidence is been found and it turns out that the coastals on the Asian side used kayaks and had the best developed arms ever recorded.

The only rule that should be followed by archeology is that if it was possible why did it not happen? Who was able to stop it?

Imagine a group of European seamen cast ashore on the Guinea Coast in the fifteenth century? What evidence would we have of their existence or even their brief survival? That is the harsh rule of the ancient world, but people did survive and make it and did leave traces.

No comments: