A few words by a US scholar, a crumbling Mexican monument and the love of a good yarn were all it took to spawn the belief that the world could end this week.
December 21 marks the end of an age in a 5,125 year-old Maya calendar, an event that is variously interpreted as the end of days, the start of a new era or just a good excuse for a party.
Thousands of New Age mystics, spiritual adventurers and canny businessmen are converging on ancient ruins in southern Mexico and Guatemala to find out what will happen.
«No one knows what it will look like on the other side,» said Michael DiMartino, 46, a long-haired US citizen who is organizing one of the biggest December 21 celebrations at the Maya temple site of Chichen Itzá on the Yucatan peninsula.
It is not the world but «the way we perceive it» that will end, said DiMartino, who pledged his event at ground zero for 2012 acolytes will be a «distilling down of various perspectives into a unified intention for positive transformation, evolution and co-creation of a new way of being.»
A mash-up of academic speculation and existential angst seasoned with elements from several world religions, the 2012 phenomenon has been fuelled by Hollywood movies and computer games, and relentlessly disseminated by Internet doom-mongers.
Mass hysteria in a Russian prison, a Chinese man building survival pods for doomsday and UFO lovers seeking refuge with aliens in a French mountain village are just some of the reports that have sprung up in the final countdown to December 21.
Robert Bast, a New Zealander living in Melbourne who wrote a book called «Survive 2012» on how to cope with the possible catastrophe, believes the Maya may have sent out a warning.
«The most likely thing for me is a solar storm, but that’s not going to kill you straight away. It’s more of a long term disaster,» said Bast, 47, noting a flu pandemic could also strike the planet. «I feel the world isn’t as safe as we think it is. The last couple of generations have had it very cozy.»
When dawn breaks on Friday, according to the Maya Long Count calendar, it marks the end of the 13th bak’tun – an epoch lasting some 400 years – and the beginning of the 14th.
This fact would probably have languished in academic obscurity had not a young Maya expert named Michael Coe written in the 1960s that to the ancient Mesoamerican culture the date could herald an «Armageddon» to cleanse humanity.
Since then, the cult of 2012 has snowballed.
Among the sun-bleached pyramids, shaded mangroves and deep cenotes of the Maya heartland, there are hopes December 21 will bring a spiritual re-birth.
Nobody seems quite sure what to expect on Friday, but it has not stopped people getting their hopes up.
«This is the Arab Spring of the spiritual movement,» said Geoffrey Ocean Dreyer, a 52-year-old US musician wearing a sombrero and mardi gras beads. «We’re going to create world peace. We’re going to Jerusalem and we’re going to rebuild Solomon’s temple.»
Source: Buenos Aires Herald