TORONTO – There are only 365 days left until the end of the world – or so some would have you believe. Another doomsday scenario is making the rounds on the Internet and believers are saying that the world will end on December 21, 2012-the same date that the ancient Mayan calendar ends its 13th cycle.
The Mayans used two calendars to keep track of time, the short count calendar which ends every 52 years, and the long count calendar.
The Mayan long-count calendar is divided into 394 year cycles, or Baktun’s. The 13th cycle ends on December 21, 2012 and according to Erin Kerr, an educator at the Royal Ontario Museum, marks “a transition point.”
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It is the end of the 13th Baktun that has sparked the end of the world prophecy. While some scholars, such as Erin Kerr, believe that it simply marks the end of the current Baktun and the beginning of the 14th cycle, others argue that it marks the end of the world.
According to Kerr, the end of the 13th Baktun is a transition point. He admits that there is evidence that the ancient Mayans did prophesize about that specific date. “There is one ancient Maya piece… which indicates that next December there is going to be the appearance of a god, and gods in Mayan mythology are often associated with changes in time – or a boundary point in time,” Kerr said.
The ancient Mayans predicted the apocalypse would be market by violent earthquakes and the return of the God of War and Creation.
Kelly Lebo, an astronomer at the University of Toronto, argues that the end of the Mayan calendar does not mark any doomsday scenario and should not be interpreted as a prediction. “the Mayans didn’t even predict the end of their own civilization so how can they predict the end of ours,” Lebo said.
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