Baktun Basics

Question: With December 21 on the way, what are your opinions on the 2012 hype? I was into it for a little when it was about a transition to a more enlightened age, but now all the apocalyptic stuff used to sell books and and movies seems like a different flavor of the Left Behind series.

Sigh. I seriously cannot wait for 2013 when we can stop hearing this question.

The 2012 hype is exactly that: hype, and nothing else. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Maya myth or ancient religion; it has nothing to do with the Maya gods or indeed anything happening in their spiritual universe. It has nothing to do with anything, because the concept of the world ending on December 21st, 2012 because that's the end of a particular example of the Long Count calendar is completely made up.

As far as anyone in the world can tell, the Maya didn't have the slightest inclination toward thinking that the world was going to end in 2012. That idea was invented by modern people who, seeing that the most famous of the Long Counts ended in 2012, were confused and theorized that this must mean that the Maya thought time itself was ending then. Of course, they didn't; like many other religious motifs in ancient Maya culture, the calendar is cyclical, meaning that when you get to the end of it, you just start over at the beginning again. Maya calendars - in fact, Mesoamerican calendars in general - are almost always round and cyclical in this way, and the idea that for some reason the end of one of the Long Counts signifies the end of the world when the ending of bazillions of other round calendars doesn't is more than a little silly.

And even if you do subscribe to the theory that the Maya believed that the Fourth World would end at the end of the calendrical cycle, that isn't now. December 21st is just the end of a baktun, a period of roughly 394 years; those theories generally refer to the end of the piktun, a period of 7,885 years, of which a baktun is only a twentieth. So if you want to worry about the Maya-forecasted end of the universe, you have plenty of time to do so before it hits in approximately the year 4772.

But I wouldn't hold my breath. The piktun is far from the largest unit of time measurement in the highly complex Mesoamerican calendar, examples of which have been known to measure time in monolithic spans of millions and millions of years; the piktun is seriously small potatoes when compared to the kinchiltun (about 3.2 million years) or the alautun (about 63.1 million years). Mesoamerican calendars have been found that are orders of magnitude further in the future than December 21st of this year, and it would be pretty silly for a culture that thought their world was going to end to bother making calendars that included dates after that time.

Okay, I think I'm done now. Sometimes the Mesoamerican ranting needs to be free. Sorry.

But back to Scion! The modern myth of December 21st, while it has no grounding in ancient Maya myth, could still be used in your games if you want to explore it. It might be a ruse designed to distract attention from something else; it might be that no prophesied event was scheduled then, but that some mischievous god or Titan with a sense of the ironic is planning to spring their Evil Plot on that day just for the dramatic potential; it might be that gods use the imminent "disaster" as an excuse to get Scions and other gods who don't know any better to do things for them; it might even be that some of the less bright gods have been confused into believing the urban legend themselves. The Maya gods probably have little to no concern over the routine end of a baktun, something they've seen many times before, but that doesn't mean that their Scions will share their nonchalance or that someone unsavory won't attempt to make the hearsay a reality.

Maya myth, like its calendars, tends to be cyclical; worlds do eventually end and restart, just as they do for the Aztecs, and while there may not be any "schedule" for this, that doesn't mean that the Maya gods are unaware of the ever-present possibility. The worry that the world might theoretically end at any moment is just as real for them as it is for other pantheons with similar ideas, like the Devas, Aztlanti or Pesedjet; depending on which scholars you prefer to believe, the only difference is that they might or might not have a generally set timebound way of knowing when that's about to happen. If you have Mesoamerican Scions in the game, exploring the repetition of cyclical myths and the possibility of a new world are always awesome places to go, and you can use the 2012 mania as a sort of gateway to get them there, whether because they have to learn what it's all about or find a way to debunk it or discover that someone is trying to make it happen after all.

So, in general, we don't have any thoughts on December 21, 2012; it's the start of a new baktun, so there will probably be a lot of partying and chanting and sacrifices to the gods, but that's probably the extent of it. Everyone will roll their calendars over to one side, food and drink will be had all around, and unless you're running a chronicle that's distinctly Maya-heavy, I don't know that anything else really needs to happen unless your plot calls for it to.

We leave you with this last tidbit for further thought: the Maya and Aztec pantheons share a few gods in common and both have similar concepts of cyclical time and successive worlds. The Maya, during their heyday, believed that they were in the Fourth World, but their empire collapsed due to mysterious causes. About three hundred years later, the Aztec empire rose to prominence with meteoric speed, and they claimed they were living in the Fifth World. Food for Mesoamerican god-political thought, indeed.