The book of this title, 2012 Science or Superstition, by Alexandra Bruce, published in 2009, provides a useful tour of the claims that have been made regarding the end of the Maya Long Count on 21 December 2012. Bruce affects a scientific demeanour, which is good, given that this topic attracts so many crazies. However, Bruce is not a scientist, and her book is chock full of errors. She expresses sympathy for woo woo ideas like global crust displacement and a binary star. But then she argues that the Maya were not aware of the Milky Way, even though it is one of the most obvious and universally seen things in the sky.

In assessing Mayan cosmology, we have to try to put ourselves in their position. All high ancient cultures revered astronomy as a guide to the calendar, and as a river of time that provides the context for human evolution. The Egyptian axiom 'as above so below' suggests that the evolution of the cosmos is matched by the evolution of the earth, because the earth is part of the cosmos. It seems probable that the Mayans shared this Egyptian axiom.

Bruce impugns the observation by John Major Jenkins that the Maya were aware that the solstice will cross the Milky Way in 2012. In fact, this is one of the simplest observations deriving from ancient observation of precession of the equinox. The Mayans watched the stars carefully for thousands of years, and like the Egyptians and Babylonians, saw the slow movement of the stars as the framework of time. This slow framework is primarily seen in precession of the equinoxes and solstices, whereby the slars slowly move against the seasons.

The last time a solstice or equinox crossed the Milky Way was in about 4300 BC, more than 6000 years ago, roughly matching to the traditional Genesis timeline of the Garden of Eden. Before the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, in the Biblical account, people were in tune with the cosmos, respecting the tree of life.

What happened then in the cosmos? The equinox shifted across the Milky Way, out of the constellation of Gemini and into the constellation of Taurus. This is why, in my opinion, Genesis speaks of two flaming cherubim guarding the road to paradise. These cherubim are the constellation of Gemini, the twins, who occupied the equinox before the fall from grace, at the tail end of the Golden Age. The Biblical idea of the four living creatures, matching to the four cardinal points and four of the brightest stars near the ecliptic, coheres with this ancient observational astronomy.

The end of the Mayan Long Count in 2012, looking to when the solstice crosses the Milky Way, is the next big shift comparable to the fall. It would have been fairly easy for the Mayan astronomers to predict, although it seems they got it slightly wrong, as the solstice already crossed the galactic equator in 1998. But 14 years is nothing against 6000, and the solstice is still actually within the band of the Milky Way.

Overall, 2012 Science or Superstition is an informative read, but you need your woo-ometer turned on. The usual crowd of crackpots - Sitchin, Von Danikin, Cruttenden - get a hearing, and the author lacks the scientific background to tell fact from fantasy, and also lacks the background in comparative mythology to assess the meaning of the cosmic message of the Long Count.

Suggestion and links

There is a strange fascination with end of the world scenarios, isn't there?

I love post-apocalyptic media, zombie movies, mad max, the road etc...

These are great venues to tell very interesting stories which apply here and now to the still-working world. People just let their "woo-woo" shields fall, turn on their spooky face, and nibble their fingers over things like the 2012 calendar without ever looking into it seriously.

Like my signature says, chicken littles of the world.

Don't be content to be terrified of a thing you know nothing about.

Thanks for the review RT.

It's entirely superstition from what I can see. That really isn't a pin point date for any of the astronomical claims that are being made, but rather well before or after any of these astronomical alignments occur. They want to claim that the age will be ending. Wrong, there's a good 140 years left until the end of the current age. They want to claim that the sun will be rising in the dark rift between Sagittarius and Scorpio (Ophiuchus), but on my Stellarium program the sun has been rising, and will continue to rise in alignment with the very top of Sagittarius's bow, not inbetween Scorpio and Sagittarius where the dark rift galactic center marker is located...

These pictures show that the solstice crossed the galactic plane in 1998, at quite some distance from the galactic center.

I prepared them using astronomy software SkyGazer 4.5

Yes, we're dealing with either the Mayan's being way off the mark or modern interpretations crediting something incorrectly to the Mayan's. Everything that I've seen claimed on these doomsday shows hinges on the sun rising up into the galactic center in what is basically the Ophiuchus region between Sagittarius and Scorpio. So much for that...

I prepared a youtube presentation of the precession of the equinox over the course of the Great Year. It also applies to the solstices, which reach the same points about six thousand years before and after the equinox. What we see here is that the galaxy does provide a plane around which the solstices oscillate. But it takes a very long time, and in fact it will take the solstice more than a thousand years to move from one side of the Milky Way band to the other. I find it plausible that the Mayans saw the long term structure of time in terms of precession, and saw the movement of the solstice across the galaxy as a key turning point.

Yeah, the basic crossing of the plane of the MW is evident. But neither crossing the plane of the MW or crossing through MW galactic center has anything to do with the winter solstice of either this year or next judging by the astronomy software.

And in the case of the MW galactic center, I don't see that any solstice or equinox ever has the sun rising against that specific region. So these doomsday programs are way, way off the mark with the claims I've been hearing lately. They want to tie the Mayan ball game to 12/21/12 and claim that the goal of getting the ball through the hoop (of sorts) represents the sun rising against the MW galactic center to the Mayans. If that's true then the Mayans were pretty far off the mark. If the modern interpretation of the Mayan ball game is false, then it would seem that the game dealt with something else entirely.

So basically 12/21/12 is but a run of the mill winter solstice. No special galactic center rising or even a basic crossing of the MW plane. Some one really needs to produce a refutation program on the History Channel and others about this astronomical fact...

Tat,

Neil deGrasse Tyson is confronted with the Mayan doomsday legend on numerous occasions, and has taken time, on multiple videos, to debunk it.

Not a whole program, like you suggest, but a good break down of the inconsistancies by somebody in the know.

Google search on Neil talking about the mayans below.

http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy-ab&h ... 22&bih=593

Thanks Johnson, but let's step back for a minute and consider what he said about them being "right" that the MW galatic center will be in perfect alignment with the sun and earth. And, that this happens "every" winter solstice.

I heard this refutation years ago and just accepted him on his word that such an alignment does happen every winter solstice. But, according to the astronomy software I've seen so far, the sun is far from being in perfect alignment with the galactic center. It's near the upper end of Sagittarius's bow, whereas the galactic center is down below in the space between the tip of Sagittarius's arrow head and the tail of Scorpio. So I'm talking about refuting the entire premise, not just going along with the claims of doomsday sites and programs about the alignment itself and then saying that it's nothing special. I'd like to start out by testing the claim of the alignment itself and then go from there and follow how the entire debate, from both sides, gets started from a false assertion from the get go.

Testing the claim of the alignment is precisely what I did in making the diagrams above showing the precise positions of the solstice in 1998 and 2011. I added the line of the Galactic Plane and the position of the Galactic Center to the diagrams to show that the line of the ecliptic - the unchanging zodiac path of the sun - passes several degrees of arc away from the precise position of the Galactic Center.

So the first claim - of an exact line up - a syzygy - between the earth, the sun and the Galactic Center never actually happens. Myth Busted.

The second claim, that the solstice point will cross the Galactic Plane close to the Galactic Center in 2012, withdraws slightly from the popular myth of the 2012 galactic core syzygy by only talking about the plane of the galaxy, not its exact center. But that event, the precession of the solstice across the galactic plane, already happened in 1998, as my two diagrams with the arrows pointing to the solstice position show. The solstice point will not cross the galactic plane in 2012. Myth Busted.

The continued popularity of these myths shows that public opinion is impervious to facts, which are rarely allowed to get in the way of a story that people want to believe. The enduring power of religious untruths (the historical Jesus comes to mind) is testament to the psychological desire for belief, and how an attractive myth can overwhelm mere evidence.

This busting of the myths illustrates that we have to go deeper than the popular fantasies if we are to find any meaning in this 2012 story. What is it about the whole idea of a galactic alignment that touches the public nerve? This is actually a point that Alexandra Bruce usefully discusses in her book under review here. She comments to the effect that the alienation of culture from nature has produced a reaction, a popular sense that our salvation depends on a restoration of a lost connection between humanity and the cosmos. This is where the 2012 meme lines up well with astrotheology, which provides an empirical and rational explanation of the historic evolution of human belief about the cosmos.

The key big theme here is precession of the equinoxes and solstices, the wobble of earth's axis as a framework to understand time, generally known as the Great Year. Ignorance about this material is profoundly widespread. And yet, precession can serve as an organizing principle for a new paradigm that restores human relation to the cosmos.

With the 2012 myth, I believe it is plausible that the Mayans saw a connection between the end of their Long Count and the precession of the solstice across the Milky Way. My reason for this view is that precession is widely used as the organizing principle for ancient religion, in a way that is now largely unseen. Christianity is based on the idea of Christ as the Avatar of the Age of Pisces. This is a simple 'as above so below' symbolism which meant that ancient Israel thought the prophecy of its coming king was written in the stars.

The Maya saw the same sky as Israel. The slow shift of the stars against the seasons due to precession is the biggest observable marker of time, what Ezekiel called 'wheels within wheels'. As close students of time, the Maya saw exactly the same events unfolding as Plato, who described the relation between the Milky Way and the zodiac as the foundation of his ontology - what he called the relation between identity and difference. Identity is eternal, so is symbolized by the Milky Way which has always looked the same. Difference is temporal, so is symbolized by the ecliptic path of the zodiac, along which the planets are always seen in changing places. Plato put the galaxy and the zodiac together in his dialogue The Timaeus as the dialectic of being and becoming, the relation of eternity and time. Plato said this natural dialectic of the cosmos was symbolized by the Chi Rho cross, which later became the central Christian symbol.

The Maya also saw the Chi Rho cross of the sky in operation. The key defining features of this cosmic cross include the movement of the equinoxes and solstices along one of its arms. The solstices and equinoxes are the four turning points of the sky and year. They are located where the ecliptic crosses the celestial equator (equinoxes) and where the ecliptic is furthest north and south from the equator (solstices). Behind this annual temporal structure, we see the eternal identity of the Milky Way, unchanging since humanity first saw it. The ecliptic and the celestial equator both cross the Milky Way, whose plane forms the biggest wheel in the sky. In this big wheel, we see the moving wheel of precession along the zodiac ecliptic, and the rapid movement of the sun and planets around this circle. These two wheels in space, the galaxy and the zodiac, intersect at the angle of the Chi Rho cross, as seen by Plato and still visible every night if you care to look up at the sky.

The Mayan Long Count is said to assert a New Age beginning on 21 December 2012, in that the counting system of time will tick over to a new start like an odometer. Why would the Mayans have identified this moment as the start of a New Age? The Milky Way solstice story is a very plausible candidate to explain the myth. Many big stories of time are calibrated against the Milky Way. The Biblical vision of the River of Life at the center of paradise speaks directly to this myth. Ancient belief in transmigration of the soul, as eventually returning to the Milky Way, also speaks to a perception of the galaxy as a symbol of eternity.

A shift of ages is measured by decades and centuries, not years. The previous shift from the pre-Christian to the Christian age was such a gradual process. After the New Age started, with the observed shift of the equinox into Pisces in 21 AD, several generations elapsed until thinkers scrambled to realize the desired messiah had not arrived, and so constructed what he would have done if he had been real, in the Gospels.

Timing and meaning of the currently occurring empirical shift of the equinox from Pisces to Aquarius is deeply problematic and controversial. Science and religion largely unite to say it is entirely meaningless. The popular interest in 2012 suggests though, that this story of human connection to the cosmos has a meaning that is not fully understood by prevailing science and religion.

If we are connected to the universe in our DNA, the apparent changes in the universe seem to have a purpose and meaning, explaining the changes on the earth. At the extremely slow level of precession, this suggested connection actually has some plausibility. After all, the same cycle has occurred with monotonous regularity for four billion years, providing the cosmic structure of the evolution of life on earth. There have been about 200,000 Great Years since our ancestral DNA first evolved on our planet.

We fully recognize the day and the year as meaningful structures of time. Words such as night and day, summer and winter, are among the most obvious and simple ideas that we have. These short time periods sit within a slower structure of time, invisible to ordinary eye, but central to observational naked eye cosmology, and to the long term cycles of life on earth.

It is just as likely that an ordered rhythm exists for the Great Year as that there is an ordered rhythm of the day and the year. It is as sure as night follows day. In fact, we see this Great Year rhythm in climate cycles of light and dark. Precession, the observation that connects the solstice to the galaxy, is the primary long term driver of the cycle of glaciation seen in ice core records. The terrestrial temperature cycle driven by precession is a stable pattern. Generally, stable patterns influence things that evolve within them. We have evolved within the stable pattern of precession. It is a legitimate scientific research program to analyze the influence of precession on life. The Mayan Long Count is a good starting point.

That's what I think someone needs to be doing on the History Channel, for instance.

The whole thing would be over that quick. The whole reason for asserting a "doomsday" is addressed to the galactic center in perfect alignment with the sun and earth. This is every bit as bad as Campings theological assertions about the flood as metaphor for this last May and October. False foundations...

I'm taken back by how Neil played right into the premise of this urban myth, as if astronomy can confirm such a thing as a perfect aligment between the earth, sun, and galactic center, and does confirm such a thing every winter solstice. That's like when scholars like Bart Erman assure people that Jesus is in fact based on an historical man, but that the historical man behind the myth isn't who we think he was, nor what has been claimed of him. They jump right past establishing the initial claim of the myth - first and foremost - as if it's already well established, when it really isn't. In both cases they feed into the basics of the myth while simply trying to downplay the extent of it's implications.

I agree with the above. The Mayan Long count more than likely has to do with trying to judge the sun crossing the galactic plane. And they were only 14 years off the mark if so. I doubt that they even recognized the dark rift below Ophiuchus as the center of the galaxy. The whole center of the galaxy, sun, and earth alignment idea seems oriented to periods where we knew that we are in the Milky Way, what it looks like from afar, and that there even is a center of the galaxy. And then fed these ideas into the Mayan cosmology where they simply understood the Galactic plane and not necessarily that it has a particular center point.

BTW Robert, welcome to the FTN moderation team. Your status has been updated...

Neil deGrasse Tyson presents a rather typical scientific condescension. As Tat notes, he speaks of a 'perfect' alignment, when in fact the alignment is never perfect with the galactic center, as my diagram above shows. But that is a minor criticism, as Neil is speaking in broad terms to indicate that there is no scientific basis for 2012 fear-mongering. Even so, he does give credence to a false myth of a perfect annual syzygy.

The bigger problem I had with this astronomical explanation was that there actually is a symbolism relating to this 2012 claim, but pointing out the factual errors about alignment, Nibiru, earthquakes and the Hollywood alien treatment in the movie 2012 basically dismisses the symbolism out of hand as not even worth discussing. If scientists think that refuting facts will make the myth go away they are not seeing the big story.

All these popular myths are down in the weeds, whereas there is a big story regarding the relation between the earth and the Milky Way in which the passage of the solstice across the galactic plane does mark a turning point in time. Whether this turning point is merely symbolic or actually has some dynamic reality is something I doubt we can say definitely. Pity it actually happened in 1998, but as John Major Jenkins points out, the solstice moves extremely slowly, just one degree per lifetime, so 2012 looks like a pretty good approximation from the primitive stone age Mayans.

Did you guys notice this book is on the current non-fiction poll?

Yes, I will vote for it. As I mention in my review above, it has a number of errors, but discussing these is a good way to explain the science.

This will be our new Camping watch for next year. How lucky are we? We get three doomsday dates to watch come and go within a less than two period. This one will be far more popular than anything Camping was up to. And we have the evidence that puts the entire thing to rest from the foundation upward right here in this thread.

A)Positive assertion: Perfect alignments > Gravitational effects of the perfect alignments causing certain destruction...





B)Reality: No perfect alignments > No gravitational effects of the perfect alignments and therefore not causing certain destruction...