Tim Giago: What future awaits the world on December 21, 2012?

Opinion

Monday, November 15, 2010

A little more than one year ago I wrote a column about the year 2012. The emphasis I made was that the ancient Mayans did not make predictions as much as they made calculations that have withstood the test of time and have proven to be unerringly accurate.

For some odd reason I have been getting requests to republish that column from people in different parts of the United States. With that in mind I will go back to the column I wrote on September 23, 2009, and try to bring it up to date with a few revisions.

Perhaps I am being generous when I say that by now most people know about the Mayan civilization that thrived in Central America about 250 AD to 950 AD. Although many of the carefully kept records of the Mayans were destroyed by overzealous Catholic priests after their discovery thereby erasing much of the history of these remarkable people, the priests did leave some of the carvings and statues that concealed a large part of that history.

It was from these carvings that archeologists were able to re-create the Mayan calendar and its subsequent historical importance and also its predictions.

The Great Cycle of the Mayan Long Count Calendar ends on the winter solstice of 2012 AD. Following Mayan concepts of cyclic time and World Age transitions, this is as much about beginnings as endings. According to the Mayan Long Count Calendar we are almost at the end of the fifth and final 5,125 year cycle, the year when the Calendar began. How that transition will be carried out is the unanswered question.

Upheavals of epic proportions are sweeping Mother Earth. Different religions are in as much or more conflict as they were 2,000 years ago. Christians invade the lands of the Muslims and Muslim extremists use the suicide deaths of their fervent believers to bring down the twin towers of capitalism, symbols they surmise to be evidence of Western decadence. The entire world of international money grubbers nearly collapses of its own excesses in 2008 and 2009 and the world shuddered, but narrowly survives.

The new Obama Administration was caught in the whirlpool. The cries of indignant Americans rock the airwaves: “Obama is driving this Nation into bankruptcy, “I don’t need the government telling me how to spend my money, and “Obamacare will cause a huge increase in taxes,” are just a few of the expressions of anger rocking this country (I wrote the original column before the birth of the Tea Party).

In 2009 I predicted that Obama would be a one-term president. It’s beginning to look more and more as if this will happen. The inevitable hammering of the far right has begun and ironically, the presidential elections of 2012 and the year 2012 of the Mayan calendar are on a collision course. The light of change predicted by the Mayans could be darkened by the shifting winds of change.

The Mayans predicted that “Going into the 5th Dimension, it will be the start of a new era. At sunrise on December 21, 2012, the earth will be crossing the equator aligning itself with the center of the galaxy for the first time in 26,000 years. This will create a cosmic cross which the Mayan’s considered to be the “tree of life.” This will open a channel for universal energy to flow through the earth, “cleansing it and all who dwell upon it, rising all to a higher level of vibrations. This process has already begun.” Does a portion of that cleansing mean washing away a part of the earth?

For the first time in 26,000 years all of the planets will be aligned.

According to the Mayan prophecies, “The earth will not be destroyed on December 21, 2012.” The Mayan view this date as a rebirth – the start of the world of the fifth sun.

Archeologists will attest to the accuracy of the Mayan calendar. There was a tremendous power in the calculations and beliefs of not only the ancient Mayans, but in that of the Hopi Indians of the Southwest and many of the still traditional tribes of the Great Plains.

There is a powerful spiritual feeling among the wicasa wakan (holy men) of many tribal nations that something is coming, an event that will shake this civilization to its very core. Some predict that the earth will turn on its axis and where there is land there will be water and where there is water there will be land.

The next two years will creep along to December 21, 2012 with much trepidation. The wills of the believers and non-believers will be stretched to their limits. What future awaits us in “the world of the fifth sun?”

im Giago, an Oglala Lakota, is the editor and publisher of Native Sun News. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard with the Class of 1990. His weekly column won the H. L. Mencken Award in 1985. He was the first Native American ever inducted into the South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame. He can be reached at editor@nsweekly.com