Does the year 2012 mean anything to you? What, it is just another year? It means an awful lot to some people out there. One thing that you can rest assured of, is that there will never be a lack of doomsday scenarios. For those of you that have no idea why I brought that year up, if you would type 2012 into Google, or Google 2012 as some are fond of saying, you would get facts on the Mayan Calendar on the first page of search results. 2012 is the year that people claim that the Mayans predicted that the world was going to end. An awful lot of people are caught up in this. I have always said that we shouldn't be too concerned with stuff like this, we should be more concerned with staying healthy, because when we die, the world has ended for us anyway. So what sense does it make for people to worry themselves into an early grave because they believe that the world will end some time in the future?

Did the Mayans actually predict the end of the world in 2012? No, not really. 2012 was when their calendar ended. To be exact it ended on December 21, 2012. This was known as their Long Count calendar. What was so significant to the Mayans about this date? For one thing, it is the winter solstice. The ancient peoples knew about such things as far back as at least 2300 years and maybe much longer. For some unknown reason the Mayans were fascinated with watching the sky. Because of this, they knew a lot of surprising facts about the heavens and time. Most experts believe that the Long Count calendar was adopted around 335 B.C. There was another system used by the Mayans called the Short Count, but that is not relative to the subject of this article. Here is where the experts have trouble, they find it very hard to reconcile the Mayan calendar with our modern one. This make me think that this date might be wrong, but even if it isn't, the significance of it might be completely different than suspected. Many people believe that this is a dead calendar, but parts of it are still being used in the high country of Guatemala. To the ancient Mayans, the heavens were also the doorway, that someone who has died, passed through. Maybe this was the reason that they studied the sky so ambitiously?

So what exactly did the Mayans believe? They seem to have thought that there are epochs and that catastrophe occurs ever 3,000 to 5,000 years. At least one author believes that somehow the Mayans figured out the magnetic cycle of the sun. He is adamant that this can be done mathematically and they, the Mayans, picked the date of December 21, 2012, because they believed that is the day that the sun will reverse its magnetic field. According to him, this happens every 1,366,040 days and the Mayan Calendar is geared to a complete cycle of time in 1,366,560 days. Could this be true, did the Mayans figure out the sun's magnetic field cycle? Wow if they did, I think that this would be a tremendous shock to the scientific community. Can you imagine a people, an ancient people, without any of the modern tools that we have today, making an astounding discovery like this? It almost boggles the mind. If they did know this, could they have known something about the sun that we don't even know today? Wouldn't that be a shock? Maybe they figured out that a huge flare is going to head toward the Earth or that the Sun's radiation is going to increase or some such thing? It just might turn out that the Mayans were a lot more clever than we thought.

There are other people that believe that the 2012 date is significant, but not that it signals the end of the world. Some people have said that the Mayan elders said that on this date the world is going to be transformed, not destroyed and all this end of world talk is upsetting them. What is the difference between these two statements? We will speak to this later. I want to mention the fact that the Mayans had at least 17 different calendars. It is claimed that there are Mayan calendars. that can chart time accurately over a period of 10,000,000 years. The reason that the calendar that ends in 2012 is the one that is always spoken about, is the fact that this particular Calendar is considered sacred since it was based on the cycle of the Pleiades. The Mayans did make some uncanny selections for important days on their Calendar They picked one day as a day that an important ancestor was going to return to Earth on butterfly wings. This day coincides with Easter Sunday. This was also the day that the Spanish landed in what is Vera Cruz, Mexico today. The sails could remind one of butterfly wings.

Back to transition. Some people feel that we are on the verge of a great society, a society that will be one with the Earth. Before that happens they feel that there will be great upheaval, suffering and war. When that passes, the Earth will be a different place. As a student of human nature, I will believe this when I see it. The idea is nice, I don't mean the war, I mean the idea that everyone will get along and they will stop harming our planet. Like all nice dreams, it is just a dream. Until all nations reach a point where they are approximately equal in resources and income, I don't believe this can ever be. I hope that I am wrong on this point. So could this be the transition that the Mayans talked about? This sort of reminds me of the prophecies of Nostradamus, where he predicts another war and then peace for at least a thousand years, or so some say. I put it this way because I don't believe that anyone can figure out those quatrains and they can be made to suit almost whatever you want them to. What you don't know what a Quatrain is? Simply put, it is a sort of poem that is four lines long. In the case of Nostradamus they were written in French with a few other languages thrown in for good measure, which I believe was just to confuse the matter even more.

Many years after the Maya, the Aztecs came along with their Calendar The most famous one dates from 1479. Even though the Aztecs came along much later, they didn't seem to learn much from the Maya. Their calendar was much more primitive and much less accurate. Even their system of numbers was not as advances as the Maya. A famous example of the Aztec calendar, that is carved in stone, rests at the Museo National de Antropologia in Mexico City, Mexico. It is a large, heavy, circular stone that is quite heavy. It was discovered buried under a square in Mexico City. The Aztecs called this stone, Cuauhxicalli Eagle Bowl, we call it the Aztec Calendar or Sun Stone. Just as the inventions and advancements made by the ancients were either lost or forgotten by the people in the dark ages, the Aztecs took a step backward. Perhaps it wasn't as far back, but it was back nevertheless.

Do I think that the Maya really believed that the world was going to end in 2012? No I do not! Do I think that there will be some sort of great transition on the Earth? Well if there is, I don't believe that the Mayans knew this ahead of time. I just think that they may not have believed that they would be around by that time, so what was the sense of continuing the Calendar? Who can figure out what the Maya knew and didn't know? We just have to apply common sense to this situation and not try and give the Maya credit for some sort of superhuman powers.