According to some who believe the prophetic power of the Mayans, Friday, Dec. 21, might be the end of the world. For others, it will be the dawn of a new age of enlightenment. For the 65.4 percent of voters on the RedRockNews.com poll, Friday will be just like any other day.
Dec. 21 is the winter solstice, which will occur at 4:12 a.m. The solstice marks the shortest day and longest night in the northern hemisphere and the opposite in the southern hemisphere.
The Mayan civilization existed on the Yucatán Peninsula of what is now Mexico, Belize and Guatemala from about 2000 BC, flourishing from AD 250 until the 900s when various city-states began to mysteriously collapse. In November, a group of anthropologists, archeologists, chemists and climatologists lead by Douglas Kennett from Penn State published a study in the journal Science suggesting climate change led to the Mayans’ collapse. Mayan descendants still live throughout Central America.
The Mayans used two short count calendars — the civil Haab’ and the sacred Tzolk’in.
The Haab’ solar civil calendar devised by the Mayans consisted of 18 20-day months plus five additional days at the end, roughly corresponding to one full 365-day solar year.The Haab’ did not take into account the quarter day to realign to the tropical year — the quadrennial leap day in February takes care of this adjustment on the Gregorian calendar. The Mayan sacred Tzolk’in calendar corresponds 13-day weeks over 20 cycles to create a 260-day year for determining religious ceremonies. The 260-day Tzolk’in and 365 day Haab’ aligned every 18,980 days — 52 years on the Gregorian calendar.
The Mayans also used a so-called long count calendar to measure longer dates. The long count calendar is measured in 13 b’ak’tuns, which are 144,000 days long — a little over 394 years. The 13th b’ak’tun ends Dec. 21 and resets, much in the same way Dec. 31, 1999, became Jan. 1, 2000.
Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, however, stated on NASA’s website in early December, there are no impending disasters.
For the full story, see the Friday, Dec. 21, edition of the Sedona Red Rock News.
