This New Year’s Day will be your last – or so some would have you believe. As the calendar turns the page on 2011, the Internet is abuzz about a prophecy that the world will end this year on December 21, 2012-the same date 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.”
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.
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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.
On social media, the prophecy was being met with humour as people cracked jokes such as, “My calendar ran out of pages. I think the world just ended.”
Others took the December 2012 deadline as an opportunity, with many urging those in the Twitterverse to make the most of the rest of the time they have on Earth.
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