• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

2012, what happened when the cycle began?

T

tilly50

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
Joined
Oct 3, 2005
Messages
312
Sorry for the title but I'm at a bit of a loss how to phrase what I am on about here, so please bear with me.

I am posting here as I don't know where would be most appropriate.

With regard to all the doom and gloom about the forthcoming 2012 (no not the olympics!) end of it all scenario my youngest has got himself all miserable about it ,saying that ALL prophecies converge on this date, so there MUST be something in it.

Now I don't have a clue about end of world predictions and am fairly convinced that Old Mother Shipton, Nostradamus and their ilk are mostly faked (some of you will probably know much more than me here). The main cause of his worry is the Mayan prophecy about the ending of one of their astronomical cycles on 21/12/12.

Now I am a dutiful mum and don't like to see my kids worried like he is, so I am wondering if anyone here could tell me, if this is a cycle that is coming to an end, what occured when it began? If the Mayans state that something cataclasmic occurs when one of these cycles ends, then when this one started must have been the end of the previous one, so when was this and what happened? :?

His dad is a geologist and has pointed out that there have been many extinctions in geological time, some of them massive in scale. You can imagine that this proved less than reassuring :roll:

So, can any of you help me with some facts regarding this?

Thanks in advance
 
The short answer is that it's all a load of ......
There is no Mayan prophecy about the end of the world on 2012 - ONE of the calendars that the Mayan used had a cyclical pattern that went back to zero, just as our clocks do every night - like Western people, the Mayans used different calendars throughout history - we used to use the Julian Calendar, now we use the Gregorian. Since the Mayans stopped using that calendar before Columbus, no one is quite sure when it began or ended.
Probably nothing in particular happened on the day this calendar started - it happened around 3114 B.C., well before the Mayan civilization existed.
see: http://www.universetoday.com/2008/05/19 ... y-in-2012/
And the crystals skulls are nonsense too - they aren't ancient artifacts - they were probably made in the 19th and 20th Century.
tilly50 said:
If the Mayans state that something cataclasmic occurs when one of these cycles ends, then when this one started must have been the end of the previous one, so when was this and what happened? :?
So, can any of you help me with some facts regarding this?

Thanks in advance
Click to expand...
 
Yeah, it's just a more recent version of the "Nostradamus predicted the end of the world in 1999" * stuff that permeated the popular press ten to fifteen years ago. When 1999 came and went, a few commentators bravely hung on, surreptitiously revising the dates onwards a bit, but now that particular industry has gone very, very quiet.

Anyhow, once we've got New Year's Day 2013 out of the way, someone somewhere will probably volunteer the explanation that we're twelve days out because of the Julian - Gregorian calendar switch over Mark mentioned, and then around January 13th 2013 further speculations will gradually show up about it actually being sometime in the following decade, owing to some hugely contrived excuse. If the end of the world does happen about then, said speculators will spend their (presumably) short time left running about and shouting "We told you so". Hopefully it won't, though.

Bottom line - nobody really knows. The sun will cop it in 5 billion years or so, though, so Earth's prospects will take a downward turn around about then. You can tell your kids that one :).

*The point being, he didn't. In actual fact, though he wrote an awful lot, no-one's actually entirely sure what he was saying, Ever.
 
Thanks guys, great article Mark, it was reassuring and informative.

The problem is that a lot of these kids are in no way stupid but with so much "information" on offer they can find it hard to discern what is real and what is not. It is hard enough for young people today without anybody telling them that all their hard work is in vain as everything is coming to an end soon anyway!

I took a look at some of these "doomsday" sites and honestly!!! :roll: :shock: They are shamlessly using current events (global warming, fuel prices, the price of property falling, etc, etc) which are worrying in themselves, and tying them in to prophecies going back as far as the Old Testament!!! It is the usual stuff of finding the prophecy AFTER the event.

Thanks again
 
James Randi lists 44 failed end-of-the-world prophecies:

randi.org/encyclopedia/appendix3.html
Link is dead. The MIA webpage can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110310000144/http://www.randi.org/encyclopedia/appendix3.html


and there are 64 here :

http://www.religioustolerance.org/end_wrl2.htm

- and that's before 2000, when we had a whole slew of them.

What's amusing (if you've been around a but) is how people change the dates on them - Old Mother Shipton was originalyl quoted as saying that the world to and end will come in 1881....and this was later changed to 1991.

The other one is people predicting alien contact, we've had folk saying it'll be int he next year or two for at least 30 years.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Ive heard a lot of this nonsense and not from kids.

(Im afraid its in the Scholastic approved Horrible Histories series too)

I ask them what particular authority the calendar of a long defunct (and cross eyed, dont forget the cross eyes) new world race has to do with us.

As for the difference between the Gregorian and Julian calendar did you know that the island of Foula is still using the Gregorian? This means they celebrate xmas mid jan.

(some calendar fun for the kiddies)
 
Why would your kids know anything about this daft 2012 thing?

Have you been telling them?

Do you think, maybe, your kids classmates think of them as the ones from the strange family?
 
Its just pop culture, thats all.

Tilly, why dont you take him to Mother Shiptons cave? (His dad will like it too)
 
markbellis said:
And the crystals skulls are nonsense too - they aren't ancient artifacts - they were probably made in the 19th and 20th Century.
Click to expand...

Mark, I fully agree that the Skulls are modern, the work of the late 19th Century European jeweler's art.

But they are still world-class works of art, regardless of who crafted them or when, and great art is never nonsense.
 
I have a "Universal Calendar" which ends in 1975 AD. It still comes in handy for checking 19th and earlier 20th Century Fortean and Paranormal accounts and for dating radio broadcasts from the 1920s through the 1950s.

But doesn't this prove that the world ended in 1975? For God's sake, folks, THE CALENDER ITSELF RAN OUT!
 
Well, in 2012 it is forecast that the Sun's magnetic poles will reverse.
This is supposed to be an established scientific fact, but I can't remember where I read it.
This may or may not cause a pole reversal on Earth.
NASA says that this won't cause an extinction-level event to occur (but they're not always right).
If a pole reversal takes place on Earth, it will probably happen over a period of a few hundred years. However, if Earth's magnetic field shuts down suddenly, we're all in big trub - hard radiation will come in from space and sterilise the planet.
Only cave-dwellers and creatures in the sea will survive.
Once again, NASA says this won't happen...

Me, I'm going to play it safe in 2012. I'll be having my Christmas in a cave or bomb shelter. :)
 
The magnetic poles have reversed many times before and as they haven't done so recently (in geological time that is) the geological boffins are expecting that it will happen sooner rather than later. (some of them may, rather unwisely, used the word predict in their writings).

It is much the same as the idea that the Yellowstone Park caldera is overdue to erupt. Geologists cannot state to the day (or year) when an event occured (they deal with epochs, great spans of time usually) so they do not mean NOW when they say "soon".

It is something I got used to with my husbands concept of time keeping :roll: :lol:

There are so many TV programmes around which allude to this great 2012 "apocalypse" as well as press releases (not just in the tabloids either!), then there are all the sites on the net with references to it (285,000 if you type "2012 apocalypse" on Google). Now there is the new Indiana Jones movie. It is quite mainstream.

Incidently, the son in question is on his way to university, so not that young I suppose, but thankfully still talking to us about his fears.

Thanks again for all the good common sense.
 
Isnt this more fun than YK2?

(I still have the government missive reassuring us nothing would happen.)

Some of my `preparedness` friends (I mean preparedness and not quite suvivalist, though such types certainly do exist in this country) got prepared...
 
Some of my friends were quite worried about y2k - They didn't appreciate my "I told you so" phone calls at midnight, Jan 1, 2000.

:lol:
 
Whereas the Y2038 is already biting some software....
 
nyarlathotepsub2 said:
Some of my friends were quite worried about y2k - They didn't appreciate my "I told you so" phone calls at midnight, Jan 1, 2000.

:lol:
Click to expand...


I did those phone calls too - and again the next year just to rub it in.

:twisted:

Kath
 
I actually met people, intelligent people, during 1998-1999 who believed that by the time January 1, 2001, rolled around the most sophisticated form of transportation on Earth would be ox carts.

And even people who didn't panic told me that "it will be about as bad as a really nasty ice storm - three days without electricity, tops, until the engineers get things sorted out."

I was online at midnight on December 31st, 1999, and there wasn't even a flicker.

The single Y2K glitch I noticed was that a week or so afterwards one of the supermarket tabloids carried the date of 3000 AD!
 
On December 13, 2012 the date will be recomputed for December 21st and on December 22 everything will be moved ahead to the year 2021. Next it will be 2210 and we can all relax for awhile.

But that's only if we don't all die on November 11, 2011.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
I actually met people, intelligent people, during 1998-1999 who believed that by the time January 1, 2001, rolled around the most sophisticated form of transportation on Earth would be ox carts.
Click to expand...

They may eventually be right, when the oil runs out.

OldTimeRadio said:
The single Y2K glitch I noticed was that a week or so afterwards one of the supermarket tabloids carried the date of 3000 AD!
Click to expand...

I'm in the software industry, but the only glitch I experienced was with a Microwriter Agenda (a 1980s PDA/computer). I hadn't used it for years, so I decided to charge it up and see whether it would accept the date OK.
It just kept beeping loudly, so the only way I could turn it off (the battery being sealed inside) was to dunk it in a bucket of water. :)
 
Ha! it had probably evolved intelligence and was thrilled to see you after all that time.

MURDERER! :D

Kath
 
tilly50:
With regard to all the doom and gloom about the forthcoming 2012 (no not the olympics!) end of it all scenario my youngest has got himself all miserable about it ,saying that ALL prophecies converge on this date, so there MUST be something in it.
Click to expand...

Try the "End of the World" sketch, originally from "Beyond the Fringe", in 1961.

There's a clip of the version from the 1979 Secret Policeman's Ball on YouTube, starring Peter Cook and Rowan Atkinson:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hJQ18S6aag&feature=related

Quote (and spoiler!)
"It's not quite the conflagration we'd been bankin' on. Never mind, lads. Same time tomorrow. We must get a winner one day."
 
When the Tsunami happened the Jehovah's Witnesses were round at my door asking me if it had occurred to me that it was the beginning of the end of times. (no it hadn't)


There is also the prophecy about the next pope being the last pope. (Just thought i'd mention it).

I think people are just worried about different things. When people say they are worried terrorism attacks etc I feel like I have got a gene missing or something because it would never occur to me. But a bird flu pandemic? I was not even able to watch a documentary about that and had to switch it off halfway through. But I am aware that nobody shares this (not even end of times internet sites). People just have their own individual things that scare them.
 
Only last evening I watched a fascinating DVD documentary concerning precisely the subject of December 12, 2012, produced by the History Channel in 2007:

"Decoding the Past: Doomsday 2012: The End of Days."
 
Kondoru said:
And, erm, do they think its going to happen?
Click to expand...

Let's just say that the program wasn't very skeptical. Fascinating, yes. Skeptical, no.
 
From 'The Maya' Michael D. Coe (not Fortean, but a rather nice little introduction to the Maya IMO) p213-

"As has been said before, the idea of cyclical creations and destructions is a typical feature of Mesoamerican religons. The Aztecs, for instance, thought that the universe passed through four such ages, and that we were now in the fifth, to be destroyed by earthquakes. The Maya thought along the same lines, in terms of eras of great length, like the Hindu kalpas. There is a suggestion that each of these measured 13 bak'tuns (5,124.25 years, and that Armageddon would overtake the degenerate peoples of the world and all creation on the final of the thirteenth; the Great Cycle would then begin again. Thus, following the Thompson correlation, our own universe would have been created on 4 Ajaw 8 Kumk'u 13.0.0.0.0 (13 August 3114 BC), to be annihilated on 23 December AD 2012...According to our post-Conquest Maya sources, the last Creation prior to our own ended with a great flood, a belief that is also found amoung the Aztecs"

italics are mine

Basically there is a degree of uncertainty about the date - i.e. how the long count fits with our calender. If the Thompson correlation (to our calender) is wrong then we past the fifth annihilation about 255 years ago. But just to worry you, the Thompson correlation looks best given the archeology.

The flood date is interesting, given that it does appear to match up in chronilogical step (vaguely) with flood traditions of other civilisations (I'm thinking of the Sumerians here, but I do realise its a bit tenuous as the dates there are very very vague...)
 
The idea of "all prophecies converging on 2012" isn't especially new either.

It was used several times during the 20th century, most recently to show that Jesus Christ would return in 1999 (having failed to show up in 1914, 1925, 1936, 1947, 1953, 1962, 1975, 1995 and so on.)

Back during the middle 1950s there was a writer in one of Ray Palmer's occult magazines who used a half-dozen different prophetic strands to demonstrate that our terrestrial curtains would close in late 1957.

But 1958 rolled around anyway, just like....er....clockwork.
 
Mythopoeika said:
Well, in 2012 it is forecast that the Sun's magnetic poles will reverse.
This is supposed to be an established scientific fact, but I can't remember where I read it.
Click to expand...

If you check NASA's website, it flipped in 2001 too:

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast15feb_1.htm

"The Sun's magnetic north pole, which was in the northern hemisphere just a few months ago, now points south. It's a topsy-turvy situation, but not an unexpected one.

"This always happens around the time of solar maximum," says David Hathaway, a solar physicist at the Marshall Space Flight Center. "The magnetic poles exchange places at the peak of the sunspot cycle. In fact, it's a good indication that Solar Max is really here.""

Did the world end and I missed it?
 
wembley8 said:
Did the world end and I missed it?
Click to expand...

Yes, of course. We attempted to contact you hours in advance. But the only thing we heard was that you'd gone out for a walk "because the sun seems so funny."
 
tilly50 said:
It is much the same as the idea that the Yellowstone Park caldera is overdue to erupt. Geologists cannot state to the day (or year) when an event occured (they deal with epochs, great spans of time usually) so they do not mean NOW when they say "soon".

It is something I got used to with my husbands concept of time keeping :roll: :lol:
Click to expand...

This is exactly right, but people don't appreciate it. The Yellowstone Caldera will erupt imminently, geologically speaking. Which means any time between right now, and 30,000 years from now. I usually have to ask my wife whether she's speaking geologically when she talks about things happening soon...

It's interesting how dismissive people are of Y2K now, because nothing happened. People seldom remember that we spent about five years in advance fixing everything. I personally didn't think anything bad would happen, precisely because so much time and effort had gone into fixing the problem.

By the time the date rolled round, there was no Y2K bug to cause problems. So, do people just take the attitude that because nothing happened, there was no danger (rather than it was averted), or was there genuinely never a problem?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top