The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012

2: What's in Store? A user's guide to 2012 Maya Prohpecies

 Metaphysical travel—also called sacred travel—is a burgeoning branch of today’s tourist industry. Popular destinations tend to be mysterious places, especially those many of us have difficulty believing could have been constructed by an ordinary human labor force. Egypt’s pyramids, Stonehenge, and Machu Picchu all come to mind. “[W]hoever built them built them on places that were already places of power on the earth—the acupuncture points on the earth’s body that hold powerful energies,” notes the proprietor of Body and Mind Spirit Journey, a travel outfit based in Sedona, Arizona.1 People who sign up for these journeys of recreational selfdiscovery say they do it to connect with the unique spiritual energy or higher knowledge they believe they will find at these universal sacred places. For example, metaphysical travelers seek the accumulated wisdom of the advanced civilization of Atlantis, thought by some to have been secretly deposited on the site of the Great Pyramid of Khufu. W h a t ’ s i n s t o r e ? a U s e r ’ s G U i d e t o 2 0 1 2 M a y a P r o P h e c i e s 2 What’s in store? a User’s GUide to 2012 Maya ProPhecies 10 To be effective, metaphysical appointments need to be kept on time—and you must be in the right place. Historians of religion call them hierophanies, or manifestations of the sacred. They can be good, such as the Virgin Mary appearing on the wrinkles of a plate glass window or a weeping statue, or evil, such as the plume of smoke in the shape of a devil that many saw issuing from the destruction of the World Trade Center. Hierophanies can be great crowd pleasers. They inviteparticipation;theyevokeafeelingofbeingconnected.Somewitnesses feel as if their participation actually helps bring about the event. One of Mexico’s most popular destinations for acquiring a transcendent fix via hierophany is the Maya Pyramid of Kukulcan (the feathered-serpent god), also known as El Castillo, at Chichen Itza in Yucatan. Chichen Itza is fairly easy to get to—just a 2.5hour ride from Cancun on a superhighway and only 1.5 hours from Yucatan’s capital city of Merida. If you are there on the afternoon of the spring equinox, you can witness, as I have, the shadow of the “descending serpent” cast on the northern balustrade by the northwest corner of the stepped pyramid (Figure 1). A sculpted serpent head at the stairway’s base adds to the drama of the imagery. Every year on March 20 crowds numbering in the tens of thousands fill the vast plaza surrounding the pyramid to witness the spectacle, today presided over by government officials. There are dancers, musicians, groups of meditators, and hosts of sacro-tourists, many of them North Americans and Europeans. I first started following the way of the serpent of light shortly after coming across an obscure 1970 note by an obscure figure in an obscure journal printed in mimeograph that reported the phenomenon .2 At first it was the astronomy that interested me. How did the hierophany work? Was it planned? Did the Maya make it happen or is the descending serpent just the product of the overworked imagination of some contemporary traveler? Then my interest shifted to the hierophants, the people who go to Chichen Itza to witness and participate in the spectacle. I have done the hierophany—bought the t-shirt as they say— at least a half dozen times since then. Let me share my recollection What’s in store? a User’s GUide to 2012 Maya ProPhecies 11 of one such occasion. It was four o’clock on the afternoon of March 20, 2001, the first equinox of a new millennium. I stood there with 45,000 others in the plaza. We came by car, bus, train, plane, and cruise ship from all over Mexico, the Americas, Europe, and around the world—religious people, scientific photo-documenters, vacationing tourists, people in groups, families, solitary people. White people and black people come to Chichen Itza; mestizo people and people with goods to sell and ideas to trade stood alongside others looking for guidance, direction, or just a good time. 1. Sacred travel abounds as Y12 approaches. You need to be in the right place at the right time to get...