Though many amateurs, Maya hobbyists and New Age gurus claim to tease out 2012-related details from the many, many artifacts and records we have recovered from ancient Mayan culture—such as the impressively detailed Dresden Codex. and the famed post-colonial Chilam Balam—the powerful consensus of Maya scholars is that not a single one of these works predicts either doom and gloom or a grand new age of peace in 2012. Even the idea that the Maya calendar somehow “ends” in 2012 has been discredited by modern research. As Kansas University scholar Dr. John Hoopes, a specialist in pre-Columbian civilization, explains, “Nowhere in the databases of science does it say that the 2012 date is the end of the Maya calendar.” In fact, not only have Mayan references to dates far beyond 2012 been known for decades, a recent find in northern Guatemala in the Mayan Xultun ruins has uncovered one of the oldest Mayan calendars ever discovered which also mentions dates thousands of years into the future (“Ancient Time: Earliest Mayan Astronomical Calendar Unearthed in Guatemala Ruins,” Scientific American, May 10, 2012). Abundant evidence demonstrates that the Maya believed time would, indeed, continue as it always had, long after 2012 had come and gone.
Indeed, as Dr. Robert Sitler, author of The Living Maya—an expert who has studied the Maya for decades—has noted in correspondence, “[T]he 2012 phenomenon arises from outside the Mayan cultural context and is only now being introduced in the Mayan world.”
Sadly, even though the idea has no basis in truth whatsoever, the notion of an ancient Mesoamerican civilization somehow looking through time to our day and seeing a specific date of global change and catastrophe has been too hard for many to resist—and, consequently, the hoax and hoopla has continued to today. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given the obvious turmoil around us in our world today.