(Astrology Explored) A recent TD Ameritrade commercials shows a wheels within wheels graphic representative of the Mayan calendar with the following ominious voice over:
“If you believe the Mayan calendar on December 21 polar shifts will reverse the earth’s gravitational field and will hurdle us all into space . . .”
Did the Maya really predict the world will end on December 21, 2012? There is a whole lot of people who would like to tell you so, and this astrologer personally knows of some people who seriously expect the world to end, to the point of taking an early retirement and putting their affairs in order.
While there seem to be a number of people willing to exploit the astrology of the once proud Maya civilization, there are others who calmly tell us that we have nothing to fear. One of the these people is Bruce Scofield, who recently spent an evening with the Astrological Society of Connecticut talking about the hype surrounding the various end times scenarios for this year and putting us straight.
The Mayans as we discussed before used the planetary motion to denote blocks of time. Each synodic cycle of the Moon, Mercury, Venus and all the rest of the planets by the use of mathematics were related to each other. It is a concept foreign to us Westerners with our linear view of time. While we perceive the concepts of “beginning, middle, end” the Maya had no such view of time. They saw time as repeatable and predictable blocks to time. It was a sacred and divinatory calendar and not used as a civil calendar that marked human activities. If you were to time travel and ask a Maya priest if the December 21, 2012 marked the end of the world, his response most likely would be confusion.
The Maya never predicted pole shifts would upend our gravity and throw us into space. What they did believe was that time was cyclic and these cyclicals repeated on a regular basis. The end of the 5,200 year long count calendar only meant that a new 5,200 cycle would start. Scofield says:
It is, however, only one fifth of a much larger cycle, the precession of the equinoxes, and its beginning and ending should probably be considered transition points and not originations or terminations of any kind.
Yep, multiple that long count calendar by five and you get one complete precession cycle. How about that for taking a long view? Certainly there is no need to thinking 26,000 years into the future if you thought the world was going to end.
Likewise, the idea that a pole shift, coinciding with the end of the long count calendar will throw civilization into sudden collapse is also a construct of modern times that wholly misrepresents the process of pole shifting.
Scofield tells us that while pole shifts happens about every 25,000 years and we are due for another, pole shifting takes place not abruptly but gradually, too gradually to affect us.
Maybe we just like to be frightened. Certainly the folks at the History Channel thought so when it contacted Bruce Scofield to participate in one of its shows:
A couple years ago the History Channel began running a program called “Mayan Doomsday Prophecy” and you may have seen me commenting on the topic throughout the program. The producers worked very hard to get me to make some disturbing predictions because they know the public really likes to get scared.
Those who continue to treat life on earth as some sort of roller coaster ride with a dramatic “end to life as we know it” do us no favors. We have real problems that need serious solutions. As Scofield observes, the biggest factor in our potential destruction is not supernatural and supranatural events but man’s effect on the earth itself.
TD Ameritrade at the end of their commercial asks “Now who is in control, Mayans?” The answer is course the same as as it always was, ourselves!
Image published under a Creative Commons License issue by user CarlosVanVagas on Flickr.
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