'End of days' fever reaches climax
2012-12-21 09:16
Mexico City - Thousands of mystics, hippies and spiritual
wanderers will descend on Mayan ruins on Friday to celebrate a new cycle in the
Mayan calendar, ignoring fears in some quarters that it might instead herald
the end of the world.
Brightly dressed indigenous Mexican dancers whooped and
invoked a serpent god near the ruins of Chichen Itza late on Thursday, while
meditating westerners hoped for the start of a "golden age" of
humanity.
"I see it as a changing of an energy, the changing of a
guard, the changing of universal consciousness," said Serg Miejylo, a
29-year-old gardener originally from Connecticut.
Wearing sandals, smoking a rolled-up cigarette and sporting
blonde dreadlocks, Miejylo is among those joining the festivities at Maya sites
in southern Mexico and parts of Central America.
Fears that the end is nigh
But while people here were celebrating, the close of the
13th bak'tun - a period of some 400 years - in the 5 125-year-old Long Calendar
of the Maya has raised fears among groups around the world that the end is
nigh.
A US scholar once said it could be seen as a kind of
"Armageddon" by the illustrious Mesoamerican culture, and over time
the idea snowballed into a belief that the Mayan calendar had predicted the
earth's destruction.
Fears of mass suicides, meteorites, huge power cuts, natural
disasters, epidemics or an asteroid hurtling toward Earth have circulated on the
internet ahead of 21 December.
Chinese police have arrested about 1 000 people this week
for spreading rumours about 21 December, and authorities in Argentina
restricted access to a mountain popular with UFO-spotters after rumours began
spreading that a mass suicide was planned there.
In Texas, video game mogul Richard Garriott de Cayeux
decided to throw his most elaborate party ever at midnight - just in case the
Earth did come to an end.
Maya experts, scientists and even US space agency Nasa
insist the Maya did not predict the world's end and that there is nothing to
worry about.
"Think of it like Y2K," said James Fitzsimmons, a
Maya expert at Middlebury College in Vermont. "It's the end of one cycle
and the beginning of another cycle."
A new dawn?
New Age optimism, stream-of-consciousness evocations of
wonder and awe, and starry-eyed dreams of extra-terrestrial contact have
descended on the ancient sites this week - leaving the modern Maya bemused.
"It's pure Hollywood," said Luis Mis Rodriguez, 45,
a Maya selling obsidian figurines and souvenirs shaped into knives like ones
the Maya once used for human sacrifice.
In Chichen Itza, below a labyrinth of gray and white Mayan
pillars, a circle of some 40 tourists sat meditating silently on Thursday.
At one point, a woman in a pink shirt said "the golden
age is truly golden" and asked the group to find a form of light to take
them to another dimension. The meditation then resumed.
Moments earlier, indigenous dancers wearing white linen,
bright feathers and beads shook maracas and the seed pod of the flame tree to
the beat of drums at the foot of the Temple of serpent god Kukulkan, a focal
point of Friday's celebrations.
"We ask all the brothers of the Earth that Kukulkan
dominates the hearts of the entire world," said one of the dancers,
raising his arms towards the sky.
The Mayan civilization reached its peak between AD 250 and
900 when it ruled over large swathes of what is now southern Mexico, Guatemala,
Belize and Honduras. The Maya developed hieroglyphic writing, an advanced
astronomical system and a sophisticated calendar.
Doomsday predictions
There is a long tradition of calling time on the world.
Basing his calculations on prophetic readings of the Bible,
the great scientist Isaac Newton once cited 2060 as a year when the planet
would be destroyed.
US preacher William Miller predicted that Jesus Christ would
descend to Earth in October 1844 to purge mankind of its sins. When it didn't
happen, his followers, known as the Millerites, refereed to the event as The
Great Disappointment.
In 1997, 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult, believing the
world was about to be "recycled", committed suicide in San Diego to
board an alien craft they said was trailing behind a comet.
More recently, American radio host Harold Camping predicted
the world would end on 21 May 2011. He later moved the date forward five months
when the apocalypse failed to materialise.
Such thoughts were far from the minds on Friday of gaudily
attired pilgrims to Chichen Itza seeking spiritual release.
"What I hope is that I let go of all the old belief
system and all the past and I just enter into a new reality that is even
better," said Flow Lesur, 48, a Frenchwoman now living in California who
teaches underwater yoga in her spare time.
Faun Rouse, a 78-year-old visitor from Colorado, was
thinking of a different kind of inner contentment when asked how she would mark
the coming of a new epoch. "With a big steak and lobster dinner, then fly
back on Saturday," she said.
