Will the world really end in 2012?

The Mayan empire produced a unique calendar that's still followed in parts of the world today. Curiously, this calendar predicts a monumental, world-wide change on December 21st, 2012. Learn more about 2012 in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Candice Gibson, joined by staff wider Jane McGrath. Hey,
they're Candice, Jane. Did you take time the other day

(00:20):
to watch all of the inauguration ceremonies and television footage?
You know what? I was so busy eating a chance,
but I've been watching on YouTube and I'll like that, Okay,
So you followed up on all all the stories of fashion,
the speeches, the bloopers, etcetera. So of course it was
really fun in the House Stuff Works office because a
couple of us dropped our work and we went into
the common room and we watched the ceremony on TV,

(00:42):
and it was it was really special, and not just
because the Obama girls looked adorable and they're brightly colored clothes. Um,
and because Ricorn pronounced their names so fancifully. I have
I have to quote him Malia and Sasha. We really
couldn't get enough. We've been saying it around the office
ever since then. But it was is really great to
be in a room with intelligent people watching such a

(01:03):
historic event. And I was thinking how utterly, incredibly, tragically
sad that it is the last inauguration we will ever
see because the world will end in oh my goodness,
a little bit on edge. I don't necessarily ascribe to
that belief. I was just trying to get everybody worked
up excited for our podcast today, which is about the

(01:26):
Mind Calendar. And if you are at all familiar with
the Mind Calendar, you may know that there's a prophecy
that the world will end on December twenty one. That's true,
and some people are a little on edge about this idea,
although it doesn't have that much uh history in terms
of the Mind Calendar, in terms of what the mind

(01:47):
is actually believed, which is interesting, right. I think a
lot of the fuss can be attributed to doomsday speakers,
and we actually got those are always popular, Yeah, well,
because they're fun to hear about and they're fun to
think about. The end of the world is always to
the world. We actually got a listener email about the
Mayan Calendar, and I'm not quite sure if our friend
Molina is a a doomsday believer or if she just

(02:08):
wanted to hear more of the story behind it, but
she write to us hi I'd like to know what
the Mayans really say about this twelve end of days.
I have heard many interpretations, most of which I think
are geared at selling books Smart Girl and Doomsday Gear.
I'd like to know how accurate were their predictions and
why this calendar was so important to them. So, Molina,

(02:28):
here's the answer, and we will start by cracking the
code behind the Mayan calendar. And to understand this week,
we have to get a little context about the Mayan
civilization in general. I guess just to let you know,
the Mayans, the whole empire was incredibly sophisticated. Uh. They
existed around parts of what is now Guatemala, Belize, Honduras,

(02:49):
El Salvador, and parts of southern Mexico as well, and
they were a very sophisticated culture. They actually started ready.
They were one of the first meso Americans, the people
in that sent role American area to start writing at all,
in the pre Classic period, which went up to from
between about two thousand BC and three D. And you
can actually divide the Mayan civilization into three distinct periods.

(03:13):
The format ever, pre Classic, which changes mentioned then the
Classic followed in that reign from about three hundred until
nine hundred and the post Classic from nine hundred to
fourteen hundred, and around that time we see the Mayan
civilization sort of reaching out a bitter end when the
Spanish Inquisition comes in and starts phasing the culture out.
This true, and scholars are a bit baffled by what

(03:36):
happened at the end of the Classic period is interesting.
They were incredibly sophisticated, but there was a time about
nine hundred a d. Where they reached a sharp decline
in their civilization. They left cities and temples abandoned. It
was very odd, and scholars disagree about what caused this,
whether it was exhausting the food supply or the rewards
among people's And you're write, Candice, the Spanish arrived and

(03:57):
about the four hundreds, like fourteen hund words, and that
sort of ended the period of the mind Empire in general.
And we know a lot about mine history because these
were people who left written records. They had a system
of hieroglyphics that they used for recording myths and history
and other governmental decrees things like this. They actually had
sort of like a primitive type of book and paper

(04:19):
that were bound together as well as style, which were
large freestanding stone monuments almost like an obelisk relay that
they would carve things into. And in addition to hieroglyphics,
they also had logo graphics and a phonetic syllabic sort
of alphabets. They in many ways, or at least three
ways really of recording their history. That's really a lot

(04:40):
of their writings had to do with time in general.
They were very focused, maybe preoccupied with the idea of time,
and that's where we get the idea um that they
were how they came up with all the different calendars
that they did right, and calendars were important because they
wanted to mark the passing of time, because they looked
to heavenly bodies in the sky to interpret the you're on,

(05:00):
the moods and whims of their gods, and many of
their actions, whether it was you know, a ceremony for
for planting, or for the economy, or for accounting procedures
were based on God's behavior and almost like today how
some people ascribe to astrology to determine how a person's
personality may be influenced by their birth date. The Mayans

(05:21):
use their calendar for similar purposes. That's right. In numbers
themselves held a particular importance. Particular ones like the number thirteen,
for instance, held sort of religious connotations with the represented
levels of heaven where sacred lords ruled the earth, and
so the number thirteen is pretty important. And that applies
over to the first calendar, which is called the zol

(05:43):
Key and I believe it's pronounced calendar, and we should
mention too there are all manner of pronunciations as far
as we could tell in our research for the different
increments of time and names of the Mayan calendar. So um,
we're susarming that there are some scholarly variations on pronunciation,
but we are going to get with the most popular
and to kick it off, like Jane said, the Zolkan

(06:03):
calendar also called the Sacred Round calendar. Let's let's break
this down. And this is going to get a little
bit painstaking, So if you're near a computer, it might
actually be helpful if you could go to the House
staff Works website and pull up the calendar. I'm so
easy of the article on how the MyD calendar works.
That's right, Um, it would be easier to visualize if
you we have a nice animation on the site that
will let you go through this Zolken calendar. Okay, so

(06:27):
the basics. The Zolkan calendar is divided into two hundred
sixty days, and this number is kind of significant of itself.
Scholars kind of disagree. It might signify the length of pregnancy,
but more than likely it probably signifies the time of
a corn crop exactly. So from here, two hundred sixty
days are comprised of twenty different day names and thirteen

(06:51):
different numbers. So imagine two circles, and around the outer
larger circle we have the twenty day names listed and
each one is represented by a glyph. Then on the
inside circle it interlocks with thirteen different numbers. So is
the inner circle turns a number matches up with a
glyph of a day name. And if you're good at math,

(07:15):
or you have a calculator nearby, you may figured out
the two sixty days is derived from the fact that
twenty day names times thirteen numbers equals to sixty. Yeah,
that's true. And so we go through the cycles of
the days and the numbers together. And as you know,
thirteen is less than twenty, so once it got through
the thirteen numbers, it would go back to the first number,
but continue on in the cycle of for thet or

(07:40):
the fourteenth day name exactly. So it just continues rotating
until you reach two dred sixty. And each combination of
number and day name has a significant meaning. And the
holy men and the agriculturalists of the mind civilization would
use these numbers to predict auspicious times for ceremonies and
crop planting. Like we said earlier, but there was a

(08:02):
problem with the talking I'm sorry now the talking, well,
some people say talking, we're saying Zolking Zolking calendar, and
that was that it didn't measure a full solar year
like the Gregorian calendar would do. That's right. They were
smart enough obviously to figure out that there were seasons
and two hundred sixty days was not a solar year basically.
And we should also mention that the Zolking calendar had

(08:23):
segments of twenty days which they called when als um
u I n A L. And so these segments of
twenty days were particularly important, and they carried over into
their other calendars as well, and this led to the
hop calendar. And this is a calendar that was based
on the cycle of the sun. And we know als
were sort of the formative unit of the hop calendar.

(08:46):
So as Jane said, a ween as a twenty day period,
there were eighteen of these twenty day periods, which equalled
three hundred sixty days. Now, as we know, again three
hundred sixty days just not a full solar cycle, make
so they were true, But three hundred and sixties a
pretty even number, and I like it. Yeah, So the
may Ends compensated for those five extra days by making

(09:08):
them nameless days, and they refer to those as a
way ab and that was a single month comprised of
these five days, and they thought it was a very
dangerous time, that's right. And the way of was kind
of a compromise between the mathematicians and the astronomers, because
obviously the astronomers knew like three sixty days is not
a full solar year, but mathematicians loved the evenness of

(09:29):
the number three sixty. So that's where they get the
compromise of the way. And during this time, I was
customary to pray vigilantly and to celebrate the gods and
to beseech them for blessings on the civilization and hopes
that you know, good, good tidings would be restored. Again.
That's right, because during the way of they believe that
God's sort of left the whole earth unprotected. So but

(09:50):
again the same old song. You'll hear this refrain a
couple of times. It wasn't enough. They wanted a longer calendar.
And uh, the even though the hob calendar is closest
to our George And calendar today, Um, they did want
to record more time in a single calendar for historical reasons,
to keep posterity. And so they came up with what's

(10:10):
called the calendar Round. And this had eighteen thousand, eight
hundred ninety days and encompassed fifty two years. But here
comes out refrain again. It still wasn't long enough. Fifty
two years was not enough, as you said, and so
they wanted to make it even longer. And this is
the massive, most massive calendar I've ever heard of. Um,

(10:31):
it's called the Long Court calendar. We refer to it
today as that, and it measures time in great cycles,
and a great cycle spans a little over five thousand,
one d and twenty five years. Right, So the Long
Count calendar also has its own individual units that it
is comprised of. So let's go over those. We've got

(10:51):
one day which is a keen, twenty days, the Wayne
All which we've heard before, three hundred sixty days, a tune,
seven thousand, two hundred days, a cartoon, one hundred forty
four thousand days back tune. So we have all these
different individual components going inside the Long Count calendar, and
we see that it is very useful for measuring epics,

(11:14):
really for giving historians something to um base their civilization
on and predict future civilizations going on and and things
like this. Yeah, it was actually a difficult test to
be able to find these zero date uh of the
great cycles. For instance, we're in a Great cycle right now, um,
and in order to figure out what date today is

(11:36):
in the Great cycle, we had to figure out what
the first at the beginning of this Great cycle was
and that ended up being August thirteenth, three thousand BC.
And we didn't just come up with that number. Happened
stance There was a British anthropologist named Sir Eric Thompson
who wanted to reconcile these different calendars and in order
to find out when the current Great cycle began he

(11:57):
had to match up some different events from the Spanish
Inquisition that had been recorded on the Dresden Codex, which
was one of the mind governmental records that was spared
from the ravages of the Spanish Inquisition, and he took
that and compared it alongside the long Count calendar as
well as the Gregorian calendar to come up with a
definitive date. And like James said, that was auguste UHC.

(12:20):
So we're in the middle of a great cycle, that's right.
But if you do the math, we're actually about to
end that great cycle, and that's where we get the
date of December twenty one, which will end a cycle.
But it's important to note that the Mayons believe that
this is not the first cycle has ever existed. It's
actually believe the fourth, and so the universe of the

(12:40):
planet has lived through um already three cycles, the ends
of three cycles. So the Miyons don't necessarily believe that
the world war end at the end of this fourth one, no,
and they actually think that the ending of a cycle
is a really wonderful time to celebrate and to appreciate
the fact that the planet has made it through another
great cycle. Yeah, but there is also another reason why

(13:02):
people think that this might be the end of the
world because an interesting thing is going to happen on
December and then is that it is a winter solstice,
but you know that happens every year, but it's also
a particular winter solstice where the sun will along with
the center of our galaxy, and that happens only every
twenty six thousand years. So if you're like me and

(13:24):
you're curious about what people say, you can do a
Google search and pull up all number of different doomsday websites,
and predictions for December ranged from the culmination of social
strife and environmental catastrophe and in war uh sort of
amalgamating into a giant apocalypse. And some people say that
a comet or asteroid is going to impact the Earth

(13:45):
and we're all going to die, or that the magnetic
field on the Earth is going to change and the
polls will be reversed, or or hey, you could rent
Mel Gibson's Apocalypto and it's going to get a preview
of what's going to happen. Yeah, it's interesting if you
look at the idea that the minds were actually able
to predict eclipses, which is pretty sophisticated for for what

(14:05):
they knew, And so maybe you might be inclined to think, oh, well,
did they know that this this crazy happened? Says what's
gonna happen on that day too? But most of strow
numbers actually agree that they could not have known this. Right,
So all all number of possibilities for December twenty one, twelve,
And we know that this is a very hard concept

(14:26):
to reconcile in your mind without seeing the visual aide,
So we would strongly encourage you to look at the
article how the Mind Calendar works and also a question
of the day that we have called will the World
really End? In twenty twelve? And if we have spooked
any of you out there, well I I blame Molina,
but for to for this of you with um and

(14:49):
satial appetites for historical knowledge. Just to be sure to
email us your questions at podcast at how staff works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff works dot com Hm, HM,