Will the world end in 2012?
By Jaime Licauco
Inquirer.net
MANILA, Philippines—The Mayan calendar predicted the world would end Dec. 21, 2012. Is this true?
Yes, the world, as we know it, will definitely end on that date, but it will not be the end of the world.
I hesitated to write this article because I did not want to scare people. But I was told by an angelic being that I must.
This article began on my way back to Manila from Poland. In a big book and electronics store at the Amsterdam airport, two titles caught my attention: “The End of Time, the Mayan Prophecies Revisited” by Adrian Gilbert and “Building Your Mental Muscle.”
The mysterious Mayan civilization flourished in meso America then disappeared without a trace. It left fabulous temples, pyramids and other strange monuments with stranger writings.
The Mayans always fascinated me. The amazing calendar they left behind traced the precise movements of the planets and the stars without using any instruments. It described the present earth cycle from Aug. 11, 3114 BC, to Dec. 21, 2012.
Back in Manila, I got a copy of an article by novelist Benjamin Anastas about the Mayan prophecies, reprinted from the New York Times, from my neighbor Ricky Gonzales, a management consultant. I was struck by the coincidence.
Escalating phenomenon
The article tells about the growing interest in recent years about doomsday scenarios as predicted by the Mayan calendar.
“The Mayan calendar,” according to the article, “is at the center of an escalating cultural phenomenon, with New Age roots, that unites numinous (spiritual) dreams of societal transformation with the darker tropes of biblical cataclysm. To some, 2012 will bring the end of time; to others, it carries the promise of a new beginning; still to others, 2012 provides an explanation for troubling new realities—environmental change, for example, that seem beyond the control of technology and impervious to reason.”
Predictions about the end of the world is nothing new. Ancient Gnostics, for example, predicted the arrival of God’s kingdom as early as the first century. Christians in Europe attacked pagan territories in the north to prepare for the end of the world in the first millennium.
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