Phobos: Mayan Fear Read Free Page A

perception of linear time and unraveled the truth.
    Before you render a verdict, allow me to present my case.
    As previously stated, I am an archaeologist. In 1969, having earned my doctorate degree from Cambridge University, I set out on a journey of discovery, motivated more by curiosity than fear. My inspiration was the Mayan calendar, a two-thousand-year-old instrument of time and space that predicted humanity’s reign to end on December 21, 2012.
    Doomsday.
    Let us pause a quick moment and make that forkful of elephant meat more digestible. A calendar, by definition, is a device used to measure time, in this case the amount of time it takes for our planet to revolve once around the sun. Somehow a society of jungle-dwelling Indians managed to create an instrument of time and space that, despite being 1,500 years older than our modern-day Gregorian calendar, remains one ten-thousandth of a day more accurate.
    The Mayan calendar is a device composed of three cogged wheels operating in a fashion similar to the gears of a clock, plus a fourth calendar—the Long Count—which details twenty-year epochs, called katuns. Each katun is a prophecy in its own right, detailing happenings on Earth in accordance with the astrological ebb and flow of the cosmos.
    The Doomsday Event is aligned with precession. Precession is the slow wobble of our planet on its axis. It takes the Earth 25,800 years to complete one cycle of precession—the exact amount of time that defines the Mayan calendar’s five great cycles, the current and last one terminating on the day of 4 Ahau, 3 Kankin—the winter solstice of 2012.
    How were the Maya, a race of Indians who never mastered the wheel, able to create such an advanced scientific instrument that prophesied events over thousands, perhaps millions of katuns? How were they able to plot our precise position in the cosmos, comprehend concepts like dark matter, or fathom the existence of the black hole at the center of our galaxy? Most important: how were the ancient Maya able to describe events that had yet to happen?
    The simplistic answer is they couldn’t. In reality, it was their two mysterious leaders who possessed the knowledge.
    The first was the great Mayan teacher, Kukulcan, who came to the Yucatan Peninsula a thousand years ago. Described as a tall Caucasian man with silky white hair, a matching beard, and intense azure-blue eyes, this “messenger of love” who preached against the blood sacrifice remains a paradox of existence, for not only does his knowledge of science and astronomy dwarf our own, but his presence in Mesoamerica predates the arrival of the first white explorers (invaders) to the Americas by five hundred years.
    Still convinced you are reading fiction? Travel to the Yucatan and visit Chichen Itza. Harbored within this long-lost Mayan city is the Kukulcan Pyramid, a perfect ziggurat of stone, stained with the blood of ten thousand human sacrifices intended to stave off doomsday in the wake of the great teacher’s passing. Ninety-one steps adorn each of the temple’s four sides; add the summit platform and you have three hundred sixty-five, as in the days of the year. Arrive on the fall or spring equinox and you’ll witness the appearance of a serpent’s shadow on the northern balustrade, a thousand-year-old special effect constructed to warn modern man of the cataclysm to come.
    The second mysterious Mayan was Chilam Balam, the greatest prophet in Mesoamerican history. Chilam is the title bestowed upon a priest who gives prophecies, Balam translates as jaguar. The Jaguar Prophet was born in the Yucatan in the late 1400s and is known for his nine books of prophecies—one of which foretold the coming of strangers from the east who would “establish a new religion.”
    In 1519, Cortés and his invading Spanish armada arrived in the Yucatan, armed with guns, priests, and Bibles, just as Chilam Balam had prophesied.
    Though he is not credited for it, I strongly suspect