"I was watching the Discovery Channel the other day and there was a show on about the 13 Crystal Skulls. Actually, it was really more about the Mayan Calendar, and how the world would end on December 21, 2012. The Mayans were far more intelligent than people today - their calendars are extremely accurate. It also mentioned something about how the Earth would be aligned with the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy, thus spurring many catastrophic events. Apparently, there are three ways of viewing the situation:
1) The world will be destroyed on that day.
2) There will be a drastic change in the way we are living.
3) The Mayans were all killed before they could finish the calendar, so it ends abruptly.
There is nothing in the Maya or Aztec or ancient Mesoamerican prophecy to suggest that they prophesied a sudden or major change of any sort in 2012. The notion of a "Great Cycle" coming to an end is completely a modern invention.
Maya inscriptions that predict the future consistently show that they expected life to go on pretty much the same forever. At Palenque, for instance, they predicted that people in the year 4772 AD would be celebrating the anniversary of the coronation of their great king Pakal.
Of course, astronomers expect the Sun will eventually blow up into a red giant, then collapse and eventually burn out, but not for several billion years. Although the Maya did cast some predictions into the far distant future, we have not yet discovered any that reach that far. As to whether our world will end in 2012, the answer is, well, yes and no. Americans' sense of invulnerability ended on 9-11-2001. Everything is getting darker and more desperate. Wall Street is crashing. The prospect of peace in the Middle East dims year by year. Some Russian nuclear weapons are unaccounted for. Oil consumption has outstripped our oil production capability. Don't even start with global warming or overpopulation. By any measure, the world after 2012 will certainly look much different than it does today. Statistically, some significant change for the worse is bound to happen in 2012 –or in 2011, or 2013, or 2020, or whatever year you choose.
Even if we were to find evidence of actual Maya prophecies about 2012, that doesn't make them true. Apparently all of Christendom expected Jesus to return in the year 1000, for example. And maybe the most important question to ask was voiced to me by Bill Saturno, discoverer of the San Bartolo murals. If the Maya were such skilled prophets, how could they have missed the Conquest? "Didn't see that one coming, did they?" The single most devastating disaster to befall the peoples of the Americas of all time, and not a word about it in the entire corpus of Mayan prophetic literature.
Is the Maya Calendar really more accurate than ours?
Depends how you define "accurate."
Their Solar calendar of 365 days did not count leap-years, so it was far less-synchronized with the actual tropical year of 365.2422 days than the Gregorian calendar that we use (400 Gregorian years = 146,097 days; giving an average year of 365.2425 days).
Their 260-day sacred calendar has been in use without interruption for at least 2300 years, but then, so has our weekday cycle of 7 days. "Tradition" is not the same thing as "accuracy."
Teeple (1906) found evidence that convinced him that the astronomers at Palenque recognized that the slow drift out of synchronization between the Maya 365-day calendar and the actual tropical year would take 1508 Haabs (years of 365 days) to come back into synchronization (1507 tropical years). This correction factor would come closer to 365.2422 days than the Gregorian calendar does. (This evidence consists of a distance number of slightly over 754 Haabs, almost precisely half of 1508. The "Triad Progenitor," a.k.a. "Lady Beastie," gave birth to GI, GII, and GIII 754 years and some months after the Era date 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ajaw 8 Kumk'u, for example.) So one could claim that the Maya were conscious of precisely how inaccurate their Haab cycle was with regard to the tropical year, but I don't think that amounts to saying their calendar was that accurate. We know how inaccurate the Gregorian calendar is, too, with far greater precision.
Their moon cycle alternating 29 with 30 days came close to the actual lunar month of 29.5306 days. They made it even more "accurate" by simply adjusting it by observation. That is, if the new moon appeared a day early, they simply declared the cycle to have 29 days rather than 30. Lounsbury showed they did notice a pattern in these discrepancies, however: in Copan they appear to have recognized a cycle of 149 moons = 4400 days, while the Palenque astronomers used a different cycle with 81 lunations equaling 2392 days. The later Dresden Eclipse Pages are based on the Palenque cycle multiplied by five: 405 moons = 11,960 days. All these factors come very close to the acutal value of a lunation; the latter two within a thousandth of a percent (9.3 x 10-6, or 9.3 millionths).
Ancient Maya astronomers also were apparently aware of the very long astronomical cycle we call Precession of the Equinoxes (ca. 25,800 years), and their approximation of it (26,021 years) was accurate within 1.6%. This, too, is not quite the same as possessing a superior calendar. Although it is technically incorrect to say the ancient Maya had a "more accurate calendar than we do," one must respect that the precision of their observations and their astronomical recordkeeping were astonishingly accurate. However, they were no more precise than the ancient Greeks, and considerably less accurate than our modern measurements.
Claiming that the Maya calendar was "more accurate" than the Gregorian implies, of course, that they had access to knowledge superior to our own, knowledge of a highly esoteric or even extra-terrestrial nature. This is simply not true. They simply used the tools they had at hand, and their penetrating, persistent intelligence to do the best they could. An advantage they possessed was a clearer, darker sky than we of the Industrial Age will ever see again (except the lucky few who travel in space).
