Look, the damned world is not going to end today. You still have to get up and go to work. “No, no!” you say. “The Mayan calendar is ending! That means the universe will EXPLODE!” Ok. Go in the kitchen and look at that crummy calendar that your insurance agent sends you every year. See Tuesday? That’s Christmas. Merry Christmas! Now find the next Tuesday. What happens? OMG THE CALENDAR ENDS! CALENDARPOCALYPSE! The calendar WE use ends at the end of every damn December, and it doesn’t mean doomsday. It means you go to the crappy bookstore at the mall and buy a new one.
The Maya had a complex writing system and calendar, and their monuments typically contain references to various time periods. Sometimes there would be references to mythic events deep in the past. Occasionally, there would be mentions of calendrical cycles in the future. All that is happening today is that a Mayan time unit called a bak’tun–a period of about 394 years is ending. The twelfth bak’tun is ending, rolling over into bak’tun thirteen.The Mayan Apocalypse furor is basically a laughable misconception over archaeological interpretations of Mayan inscriptions, gussied up with goofball junk science and New Age claptrap. THE MAYA NEVER SAID THE WORLD WOULD END ON THIS DATE.
If you have some time, here’s a lecture by anthropology professor Tony Aveni that breaks it all down nicely. Basically, the Mayan odometer is rolling over. The universe isn’t ending. Put on your pants and take that tinfoil off of your head.
