The Mayan Calender (Not offensive, just looking for info)

[teisjm]

This type of thread has been done a thousand times before and we are all growing weary of it.

...and I'm growing weary of seeing that response instead of an actual post.

Then why did you make a thread that was destined to see many responses like my own.

One cannot throw a smoke bomb into a crowd and not expect to get whopped a few times for it.

Clearly you've never seen (ok noone sees it but we know afterwards) a ninja throw a smoke bomb into a crowd before. They can not only avoid the whooping, they can also pickpocket tons of stuff and assasinate a few people before the smoke and confusion clears.

 

[Jinx_Dragon]

As someone who was interested in the Mayans I researched them for a few years, got bored and wandered off to do something else. So from my experience let me tell you something: The Mayans did NOT predict the end of the world. All the archaeologists who studied the Mayan civilisation state this very fact. The Mayans did NOT have any end of the world fables or beliefs. These are the people I choose to listen to, they are the ones who have studied the culture and even point out places where the Mayans have put 'important dates' that fall after the end of this cycle.

Now where did the end of the world stuff come from... well from people who have done NO research into the Mayan culture at all. These people are bathed in the westernised idea of the end of the world, and yes it is a western idea that is not found often outside of Biblical lore. These 'so called experts' latched their pet 'end of the world' theories, of which there are too many to sanely look at these days, onto the calendar to make themselves sound more 'official. You know, to sound as if they where not just talking our of their arse cause now some ancient prophecies are going to be fulfilled! Problem is... no such prophecies exist.

Now if you strip these non-prophecies away from the calendar you do come up with something very interesting. These 'primitives' couldn't even work metal harder then gold but they did some very, VERY, accurate calculations. Through simple observations of the world around them, and a stick in the ground, they managed to map the skies to such a degree that would be thousands of years before modern day tools allowed us to do the same.

The long calendar is much more accurate then the one we use today, which we readjust every four years and still is slowly slipping out of alignment. It pin points numerous astrological events so accurately they can be plotted over the course of tens of thousands of years to the very second. This includes what we now call a galactic alignment, something modern culture only calculated using very high precision instruments, which happens once every 26000 years.

That is why the date was chosen as the start/stop point... no end of the world, just a very intelligent mind worked out when the stars will make a complete cycle around the sky and pin pointing when that date would be in the future.

So what did the Mayans suggest we do on December 2012? CELEBRATE!

PS: For those who say to use google. I have to point out these days it is like sifting chafe for a grain of truth. Particularly when it comes to end of the world theories. There are so many out there your head will, figuratively, explode if you try and read them all. I bet he came here because we are NOT like the people who irrationally believe in the end of the world and hoped he could get some solid answers from someone who looked at the theories and laughed at them.

 

[Jinx_Dragon]

I've heard that at that time our solar system will cross the horizontal plane of the Milky Way Galaxy which is theorized to cause fluctuations in the planet's magnetic field (known to exist by the alternating magnetic alignment of strips of iron-rich sea floor rocks running parallel to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge) and is theorized as a cause for the regular cycle of mass extinction.

Though a more believable response is that the terminations of cycles of the Mayan Long Count correspond to shifting in human Ages. I believe that these would roughly mark Neolithic, Bronze, Iron, Industrial, and Space Age (the upcoming one) transitions. It seems odd that the special calender of an American people would correspond so well with tumultuous shifts in Old World civilizations but it does.

Magnetic pole switches are well documented in rock faces but I doubt it is something the Mayans could of calculated. There is no patterns which they could of observed to formulate a theory on. Nor did such a switch ever happen during the period of human existence so they wouldn't even know to look at the rocks for this information. Lastly the Mayans did not know how to work iron, it wasn't present in the area of the world they lived in, so even if they knew to look for it in the rocks they would not have seen the evidence which is present only in heavy iron baring rocks. Hence, no possible way they could of learned about magnetism let alone calculate when a shift would occur to any accurate degree.

That is if it was an accurate degree we could calculate... shifts appear to be more or less random with millions of years between shifts.

As for those ages you pointed out: Those are technological advancements that historians put in place to separate the data into nice little subsections the historians can use to catalogue artefacts found from said periods. They came into being long after the Mayan culture was scatted to the winds. They even differ depending on what part of the world your looking at, as every culture out there did not spontaneously find out how to work bronze or iron. The Mayans never found out how to work iron period, it was a resource they had no access to, and so there is no iron age within the Mayan culture.

What 'ages' ancient civilisations would talk about is the way the consolations shift across the sky. They observed the stars every night and gave names to the shapes they saw within. They then realised, through this observation, that these shapes where shifting across the sky. After noting the equinoxes would rise under another sign some hundreds of years before another sign would take it's place they discovered 'ages.' The age of Aquarius, for example, points to the 2100 odd years that the winter equinox happens in the area of the sky in which the sign we known as Aquarius lies. Every 26,000, give or take a few hundred, years we go through the whole set of zodiac signs. The Mayan calendar is made to correspond with that, I don't know if they knew the ages but they damn well calculated how long it would take for the whole sky to make one rotation around the earth.

It is this one complete cycle as to why the calendar is so damned accurate.

So what your mistaking for ages of technological advancement are in fact ages of astrological progression.

 

[Jinx_Dragon]

End of the cycle.A cycle has ended several times before.

It's all theory about it honestly, seeing as how we still don't know how they managed to plot out their all their astronomy without the aid of even a basic telescope.

Which is why I admire them. They have been proven to be accurate time and time again and all they used was the naked eye, a few lumps of rock and a couple of decades just watching the world around them. The mathematical and geological minds of the Mayans is something to be amazed at and they should be praised for it.

It is also why I dislike the end of the world theories in fact, cause the vast majority call for some divine or alien presence giving them the knowledge to calculate this. I feel such diminishes the fact these brilliant minds, whom would probably love modern physics and teach us a thing or two about it, managed to calculate so much using so very little.

Just because they where 'stone age primitives' we feel the need to belittle their discoveries by stating they couldn't possibly be this smart. It weakens not just the Mayan people but every human being, playing down just how intelligent we can excel to be if given the chance.

 

[BonsaiK]

OP - the answers to your questions are nothing, no and no, respectively.

There is no information, because it is all nonsense. The Mayans didn't know shit about the end of the world. If they were really that all-knowing and wise, their calendar would have stopped in 1697 when the Spanish handed their asses to them on a plate.

The only thing that will happen after Dec 21st 2012 is less threads like this one will get made.