To understand the significance of the year 2012, you need to understand the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar. To understand the Mesoamerican long count calendar, you're going to need to pay attention.Ready? Here goes.
The Long Count Calendar was used by many Mesoamerican cultures in pre-Columbian America, including the Mayans. The Long Count set its "year zero" at a point in the past marking the end of the previous world and the beginning of the current one.
Many Mayan inscriptions have the count shifting to a higher order after 13 baktuns (there's 144,000 days in a baktun, in case you didn't know). Today, the most widely accepted correlations of the end of the thirteenth baktun, or Mayan date 13.0.0.0.0, with the Western calendar are either December 21 or December 23, 2012.
Even before the dating issue was settled, the early Mayanist and astronomer Maud Worcester Makemson had written in 1957 that "the completion of a Great Period of 13 baktuns would have been of the utmost significance to the Maya".
After the correct date was determined, the anthropologist Munro S. Edmonson added that "there appears to be a strong likelihood that the eral calendar, like the year calendar, was motivated by a long-range astronomical prediction, one that made a correct solsticial forecast 2,367 years into the future in 355 B.C.".
In layman's terms, this means the Maya used a calendar that had an end date of December 21st or 23rd 2012 based on a long-range astronomical prediction that something big is going to happen when that time's up.
In 1966, Maya expert Michael D. Coe claimed that "there is a suggestion that Armageddon would overtake the degenerate peoples of the world and all creation on the final day of the thirteenth baktun when the Great Cycle of the Long Count reaches completion."Coe's apocalyptic connotations were accepted by other scholars through the early 1990s. But more recent academic scholars have specifically disputed the apocalyptic interpretation of the Long Count calendar end-date, saying instead that it would be a cause for celebration but that the cycle would continue uninterrupted by any cataclysmic event.
So depending on which camp you're in, upon completion of the thirteenth baktun, we'll either run round like headless chickens, screaming in panic as the world crumbles around us, or we'll have a jolly good knees up and party like it's 199.....er....2012.
