Is the World Really Ending? – Explaining the Mayan Calendar

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

If you believe some of the rumors, the world is slated to end on December 21, 2012. This belief is based on the Mayan calendar and how it ends on December 21, 2012, when the cycle will reset to 0. In fact, the rumor was so popular; the day Dec 21 was dubbed the ‘Mayan Apocalypse’.

Mayan Calendar 12/21/12 – Source: NowTheEndBegins.com

But is that really accurate? Did the Mayan calendar really signal that, or are people just reading it wrong?

The Mayan’s actually had three calendars. They had the sacred calendar, Tzolk’in, for scheduling religious ceremonies, the Haab’, which was the secular calendar and they had the Long Count Calendar. This last calendar is responsible for all the doomsday rumors floating around out there.

The Long Count Calendar was simply a manner of counting days. The Mayans would have likely considered the day important, but they never made any end of days predictions about it. In fact the only two carvings ever found regarding 12/21 feature contemporary kings and their predictions of a long legacy.

The Long Count Calendar is based on a series of five digits separated by decimals. The first number is the baktun, and it is 13. In the Mayan counting system, 13 is the highest a baktun can go. It works a bit like an odometer, counting in blocks of twenty until the higher digit moves up. For example, the first day would have been 13.0.0.0.1. The next would have been 13.0.0.0.2, and so on. Well, on December 21, 2012, that count will read 13.0.0.0.1 again. The odometer completely rolled over. Well, in a truck that’s not so bad, but it another matter entirely with a calendar. Because of this, some people believe that rollover will equal the end of the world.

Of course the scholars that study the Mayans, also know as Mayanists, don’t believe that. There have been no depictions of doomsday and anything in their work that indicates they believed the 21 was the end of the world. While the numbers 13 and 20 were important to the Mayans, it doesn’t appear to be related to the end of the world.

Of course, end of the world rumors are pretty common. There were ones about the new millennium, ones about other specific days and pretty much any time a century or a decade turned over, there were announcements from some that the world would end. Sometimes the rumors are based in math, sometimes their based on a certain faith systems. However, every time, they are a rumor spun out of facts.

In the case of the Mayan calendar, it appears that the facts were distorted.

If the word was slated to end on the day the calendar rolled over, the Mayans would have dedicated a lot of their hieroglyphics and art to it. However, there were only a few carvings and nothing that truly indicated a doomsday prediction for December 21, 2012.

PS. – If you enjoyed reading this blog article about ‘Is the World Really Ending? – Explaining the Mayan Calendar’ then you can also have your own blog site to learn and earn writing blog articles. Click on the following banner:

To Success,
Andrew Shin

“Work Directly With Me Here”
Blog:
Facebook:
Twitter: