2012 and the End of the Age

My new novel, 2012: the War for Souls, has just been bought by Warner Bros. for a movie, so I thought I?d write a little about why I wrote it and what I think about 2012. First, it?s a story about the journey of the soul, and the deep denial we are in about our souls. Most of us say we believe that we have a soul, but we live as if we don?t really believe that at all.

In my story, which takes place in a triad of 3 parallel earths, the negative side of the triad understands the soul (knowledge belongs to the dark side) and, as the approach of 2012 causes the gateways between universes to open, they swarm out into the positive side of the triad, attacking them and attempting to take their world from them. The harmonizing side of the triangle becomes involved, when a man there has to balance between dark and light in order to take the whole species to a new level.

The reality of the soul as I understand it from my own life, from the Bible and from the statements of the Master of the Key animates the novel. One of the things the book does is to illustrate how dangerous it is to be soul-blind, or in soul denial. We ignore the way that our lives affect our souls at peril.

The book also speculates that there could be a technology that affects the soul, and may once have been such in the past. I think we have lost a great deal of knowledge, and I?m very interested in the odd dichotomy between the way the past looks archaeologically and the way it looks in its own narrative.

The prime example of this, of course, is the very limited archaeological evidence for the biblical narrative. Why would that be? And the enormous difference between the archaeological record as we understand it and pre-Columbian America. I really don?t know whether findings are more important than narrative, but I do feel strongly that Eurocentric archaeology has made a mistake not only in the way it ignores narrative, but also in the way it understands what it does not ignore.

However, there is one particular area in which that has recently and quite dramatically changed, and that is the relationship between the end of the last Mayan age and the last great catastrophe to befall this planet. Whether or not that newly discovered confluence means that the next change of age, which is unfolding now, should be taken seriously as a warning is worth discussing.

In my novel, the change of age literally opens doors between worlds that coexist in the same space. It made for a terrifically exciting writing experience, and I hope that it?s as interesting to read. But there are also things in the book that echo the dark past of our own world, and possibly disclose elements of a future that is rushing straight at us right now.

In recent years, a number of geologists have recognized that something quite extraordinary befell this planet about 5,200 years ago?in other words, at the exact turn of the last Mayan age. There is evidence that there were upheavals across the entire planet, and they were fearsome.

3,100 B. C. was Year 0.0.0.0 in the Mayan Calendar. At that time, also, the rising civilization in Sumer collapsed. It was nothing like the grand culture that would follow there and in Egypt, but there was a marked decline from organized city states into a mix of loose agrarian and hunter-gatherer culture. It?s not clear that the legends of the flood date from this period, but the first recorded flood story, the Epic of Gilgamesh appears in written form about a thousand years later, and Gilgamesh himself, who is believed to have been a historical figure, lived within a few hundred years of 3,100 B. C.

A prominent researcher with the Byrd Polar Research Institute, Prof. Lonnie Thompson, has offered convincing evidence that earth?s climate was dramatically changed right around 3,100 B.C. He sees this as a worldwide event, with a very sudden onset and effects that have lasted to this day.

To summarize some of the evidence, at about this time temperate zone plants in the Peruvian highlands were frozen in a matter of minutes, and ended up at the base of glaciers that are intact to this day. The freezing process was so fast that the plants? cell walls were not destroyed, as they would have been, say, in a freeze that took an hour. The temperature plummeted in minutes. And whatever awesome thing happened, it has stayed low ever since.

In the Tyrol, the ice-man, Oetzi, was moving through an alpine meadow at about the same time when he became trapped by a snowstorm. It was not until 1991, over 5,000 years later, that the snow that fell on that day melted sufficiently to uncover his body during a glacial retreat.

Thompson has commented that something happened then that was monumental. The human world was not well organized enough to reflect it in detail, but it is worth considering that the Maya might have started their calendar then because an age did indeed end at that time, and a new one began.

There were cultural responses around the world. In England, Stonehenge and New Grange were constructed, possibly as a response to a radical climate shift from temperate to much colder. In Egypt, the Osirion was constructed over a well that had quite possibly become sacred due to the extreme drought that befell the whole of North Africa. Around the world, in fact, there was a sudden outburst of monumental construction, and, in many places, the collapse of the few more extensive civilizations that existed.

Commentary in the Mayan narrative called the Popul Vuh would suggest, as does the Epic of Gilgamesh and so many other narratives?including the Bible, with it?s archetypical flood story?that the catastrophe was remembered vividly.

So, did the Maya date their calendar from the catastrophe and just assume the cycle based on their own astronomical mythology, or did they somehow know that the catastrophe is cyclical?

The way you answer that question places you on one or the other side of a huge divide.

Conventional archaeology would say that the Maya or their predecessors could not possibly have known about such a cycle, and they simply invented it as a way of explaining the catastrophe in terms of their own primitive understanding of reality.

However, events that are unfolding now are beginning to suggest that their calendar is unexpectedly accurate. For example, not only is there substantial evidence that greenhouse gas emissions are in the process of inducing sudden climate change, completely unexpected changes in the way the sun is functioning are adding, as it were, fire to the fire.

It has been observed that the Martian polar caps have been growing smaller for the past few years. There is nothing that could cause this but an increase in solar output. In addition, scientists are predicting that the next solar max is likely to be among the most intense ever recorded, and that, after it ends, the sun will begin a cooling phase.

For the past 20 years, the number of meteors entering the atmosphere has also been on the rise, suggesting that we are entering a ?dirty? area of space. Did we pass through such an area 5,200 years ago, and did the Maya know when we would go through it again?

If so, or if they understood the sun well enough to predict its activity far in advance, or knew anything about the population cycle that would lead to global warming?well, the past is completely, radically and utterly different from what we now understand.

I would be very surprised if they had anything like such an extremely advanced science. In fact, there is little evidence of any advanced civilization in Mesoamerica as early as 3,100 B.C., let alone a culture with an extraordinarily advanced science.

I am not so sure, though, that they did not know far more about our world than we can possibly imagine. After all, somebody with incredible engineering knowledge and construction skills built the great pyramid at Giza, the enormous platform at Baalbek in Lebanon, the fortress at Sacsayhuaman in Peru, and so many other extraordinary artifacts and structures.

Not only that, the people of the deep past had very substantial geographic knowledge as well. As Jim Alison says on his website, Prehistoric Alignment of World Wonders, ?Easter Island, Nazca, Ollantaytambo, Paratoari, Tassili n’Ajjer and Giza are all aligned on a single great circle. Additional ancient sites that are located within one tenth of one degree of this great circle include Petra; Perseopolis; Khajuraho; Pyay, Sukothai and Anatom Island.

?Near Ollantaytambo, Machupicchu and Cuzco are within one quarter of a degree. The Oracle at Siwa in the western Egyptian desert is within one quarter of a degree. In the Indus Valley, Mohenjo Daro and Ganweriwala are within one quarter of a degree. The ancient Sumerian city of Ur and Angkor temples in Cambodia and Thailand are within one degree of the great circle. The Angkor temple at Preah Vihear is within one quarter of a degree.?

Because they are both undeniable and do not fit a Eurocentric and modernist worldview, the undeniable reality of these alignments are unremarked in conventional archaeological literature. And yet, the measurements are straightforward enough. Somebody, working over thousands of years, chose to place these sites in this particular way at a time when we presently believe that human beings were only rarely traveling by sea, let alone communicating across the vast distances that would be necessary to place these monuments as they have, in fact, been placed.

So, are we the confused and still-reeling remnant of a great scientific civilization, or did our ancestors, perhaps, possess some sort of exquisite instinct that has gradually been replaced by knowledge? If so, perhaps that is the real meaning of the story of the garden of Eden, which records nothing less than man?s discovery of his humanity. Prior to our eating of the tree of knowledge, did we act in some high instinct? What have we lost, then?

Whether the precise date of December 21, 2012 means anything or not I do not know. But I do know this: just as the Maya predicted, an age is indeed ending now. No matter what happens, in 50 years, this world is going to be a radically different place, and the time that this change has become undeniable is now, just a few years prior to the predicted end of the age.

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