The third week of December was, at least, the last week of the Mayan 13th baktun—a span of time within the Long Count that dates back to 3113 BCE, or 5,125 years. By human standards, that’s a vast reach, encompassing 1,872,000 days. A baktun is 144,000 days, though it’s not the longest measure of time that the Mayans used; there are several longer ones documented, including a piktun, though there is a controversy—we don’t know if a piktun is 13 baktuns or 20 of them. Either way, time goes on, and so too does the Mayan calendar.
Yet, if the 13th baktun was the end of the piktun, which I believe it was, then 12/21/12 was the culmination of a significant cycle, comprising one-fifth of the Mayan great cycle—the precession of the equinoxes—25,625 years. Time moves on, and we are in what you might think of as uncharted territory.
One reason I give the Mayan calendar a little extra weight is because it’s an indigenous creation of the Americas. It’s how the most advanced ancient civilization we know of here thought of time, and devised the elegantly beautiful systems of mathematics to keep track of it. Their ability to end the cycle in a year with a transit of Venus (back in June 2012) and to land on the winter solstice are truly impressive and worth taking note of. I think that these things, whether consciously or not, influenced not just the popularity of 12/21/12 but also the subtle respect that many people seemed to feel about it.
There is another model called the Mayan time pyramid that says something similar. This is arranged in layers, each layer up being more recent and 20 times shorter than the previous one. The base layer was a little over 16 billion years. The next layer up was 828 million years, the next one up was 41 million years, and so on upward in reverse exponential form. Each time pulse contained a certain amount of experience equivalent to the one that follows, but in 1/20th the span of time.
The one at the top of the pyramid began March 8, 2011, and lasted 234 days. That might explain why 2011 felt the way that it did: like everything happened all at once. I am not sure where this model comes from or how well it can be verified, but I think it’s a really interesting concept of time, and it helps explain why it does feel like we have exponentially more to do every few years. That helps explain why every new, faster model of computer is slower than the previous one, or why it seems like I have to write the monthly horoscope more often than the weekly.
And this model, too, suggests that we’re off the map; we made that particular jump in late 2011. It does not directly correspond to the Long Count that turned over on December 21, 2012, but it’s close.
As for the Long Count: The last week of 2012 was a compressed moment; an eternity lived out in a week. It was to be, by any estimation, a special week, a kind of bellwether of what was to come, and an indicator of where we were at. The conditions at the end of one cycle often point to the conditions at the beginning of the next, and vice versa. So these were seven days worth looking at carefully, and remembering for what we learned during them.
They began on December 14 with the massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. This was, said The Nation, the 16th mass shooting in the United States since the beginning of the year. We watched and grieved the burial of 20 kids, ages six and seven, as well as six of the adults whose job it was to take care of them. We got a look into the dark world of the household from where this well of death had sprung.
During that final pulse of the 13th baktun, we saw every problem our society faces flash by before our eyes, through our minds, and weigh heavily on our hearts. The Onion even parodied this: “In Wake of Tragedy, Americans Demand Reform of Everything, Anything.”
The shooting was shocking and it demanded an explanation. Bob Geldof’s line “And he can see no reasons because there are no reasons” was no longer good enough. Nothing happens for no reason. For every effect there is a cause—which I believe is the spiritual lesson that we in the United States need to learn more than any other. So, I went looking for the cause.
The “lone gunman” version of events was becoming implausible. That’s usually, or nearly always, what it is, right? A solitary nutcase who, of his own accord, with no help from anyone, ruins everything.
Therefore, I spent a good part of the following weekend researching many different conspiracy theories about that shooting. I don’t like speculative constructions of events, but I had a reason to check them out as best I could. The astrological chart for the shooting, set for 9:35 am the morning of December 14, was not the chart of a “lone gunman” at work. The planets were concentrated in the public sectors of the chart, the 10th and 11th houses, and there was a strange cluster in the house of secrets and secret enemies—the 12th.
The most outrageous of these theories linked the shooting in Aurora, Colorado, back in July to the one in Newtown, Connecticut, by way of both fathers of the shooters purportedly being “about to testify” before the US Senate about the vast, far-reaching, and underreported LIBOR scandal, said to be one of the biggest financial heists ever. This link seemed beyond any possible credulity.
However, 1) people do kill over these things and 2) the astrology. It was easy, following basic rules of reading a chart, to see a government and/or corporate connection. There were financial connections and corporate connections indicated in the astrology.
Every planet seemed to have a relationship to every other planet. There seemed to be a secret co-conspirator, which doesn’t fit with a lone gunman. The cause of death included meticulous planning and was not a spontaneous act; yet once it started, it was an uncontrolled release of energy. The chart, with a prominent Mercury (similar to the chart for September 11, 2001), described a message. That message seemed to either come from far away, or be global in nature. In short, you could read this chart in such a way that could encompass any of the darkest possibilities, including being a false-flag event: that is, something with a cause bearing no resemblance to what we were being told.
At the same time, the chart also supported the psychological health issues that were coming out in the official version of events, the sense of wounding and the isolation of the alleged gunman; there is a mother, who shows up in the chart as recently killed, but also as a collaborator. There was the involvement of drugs. A New Moon the previous day was conjunct planets that I had summed up as describing the unmitigated release of evil that shattered the family structure, a valid description of this event on the most basic level.
In other words, both versions of the scenario fit: some deep, dark, and sinister conspiracy, as well as an eminently private set of circumstances involving individuals with really serious problems. The scenario fit something happening in a deeply secretive space, which we learned was true of the perpetrator’s household. Working with a researcher, we dismantled both the official version of events and the various theories, and, at the end of this process, the official version is what withstood the scrutiny.
Obsession over conspiracy theories serves a psychological purpose: distraction from the serious issues at hand. But investigating them pushes the mind open and compels objectivity.
After a while, the official version started to make more sense; the element that pulled the whole scenario into focus for me was that the shooter’s mother was a Prepper—that is, a doomsday survivalist whose preparations for civil disorder included a small arsenal, complete with a .223 Bushmaster, the equivalent of an M4 assault rifle. This was a world of fear and pain and spiraling paranoia.
Yet I was still left with a chart that described something vast, where all the parts were interrelated. Then the larger scenario began to emerge. On the most obvious level, it included government policy that allowed these weapons in the hands of people. This in turn contributed to a state of paranoia that, if not culture-wide, is characteristic of a vast subculture, where these powerful weapons are presumed to be kept at the ready for use against the government.
The scenario included the possibility—indeed, the high likelihood—of prescription meds used by the killer, which points directly to the pharmaceutical industry. These meds can make a person extremely sick, and switching from one to another can do genuine damage to a person’s neurology.
Next, we have what typically happens to young people, especially young boys: They are exposed to a lot of violence through every possible avenue, from movies to television to news programs to video games.
Then there was the angle of a government that kills a lot of people, including children. The 22-year war against Iraq comes to mind—the one that began during Bush I, continued through Clinton, was escalated again through Bush II, and extended into the Obama administration. During the Clinton years, the US and the UK regularly bombed Iraq, including water treatment plants, the loss of which caused children to drink contaminated water.
Then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked on 60 Minutes whether the loss of 500,000 Iraqi children on her watch was worth it, and she said that it was. When the government sets an example like this, it’s not surprising that it extends into the well-armed population. Indeed, from an honest look at society, it’s amazing that these kinds of massacres don’t happen every single day of the week.
With a little perspective, the systemic level of the problem became obvious. And, remarkably, I heard that being discussed. I saw, at least among the people I know and the public that I serve, the awareness emerge that the killings must stop and that part of that involves gun control, and part involves raising awareness and addressing all the other problems that contributed to this school massacre, and to other crimes.
Said another way, what seemed to emerge during the last week of the 13th baktun was the awareness of a relationship between an effect and the cause that preceded it, as well as an awareness of the problems that we face on a systemic level.
The world did not end on December 21, 2012. There was not, that I could discern, a merger with the 5th dimension, inducing spontaneous enlightenment. But there seemed to be, on a level that to my perception was more than vague or ephemeral, a clear look at the process of karma—an understanding that the conditions of society have consequences in society, for all of us.
I don’t believe in panaceas, and I may not be spiritually advanced enough to believe that massive, deeply entrenched problems will just work themselves out spontaneously. I do believe in starting places, and if we can get there, if we can get to the point where we can see the interrelation of complex causes and understand that there is a result that manifests, that’s a really good place to enter a new era in history.
It’s all we really need to go forward in the direction of a future different from the past. If we’re going to go off-road and into uncharted territory, this is the one tool to take with us.
Click here to listen to Eric’s webcast “In This Last Week of the Mayan Cycle” on Planet Waves FM.
This article appears in January 2013.
Wow, great piece — even by Eric’s high standards.
Some observations about the indications of government and corporate agency in the Sandy Hook shooting:
1. I was immediately reminded of the fear industry, for which VP Cheney was such a powerful figurehead — a clear collusion between the far political right and the corporate media. Fox and its cohort have, almost as a raison d’être, dedicated themselves to training the American people to be afraid, and to feel beleaguered, on a permanent basis. Glenn Beck was their most bald-faced example, but even the network’s local stories feed the fear frenzy. Pretty good example of a corporate-governmental conspiracy, especially clever because it makes a profit for the conspirators.
2. The violent video game industry that trained this shooter is also training and conditioning the nation’s future military. The post-bloodbath coverage has been quite illuminating: we’ve learned that game designers work in close partnership with weapons manufacturers and the military for maximum realism — meaning that games train kids to use the actual, specific weaponry of current combat. This not only pre-trains and pre-sorts future soldiers for aptitude, it shifts the cost of that pre-training onto the students, who spend their own money for the simulators and devote huge unpaid stretches of time to developing their skills. It also trains kids to detach from any emotional reaction to killing — it becomes just a means of keeping score. Another striking example of a government-corporate conspiracy that also turns a nice profit for all the conspirators — up-front profits for the gaming industry, huge advertising benefits (every game a test-drive) for the weapons industry, and big cost savings in recruiting and training for the government.