Mexico's ethnic Maya unmoved by 2012 "Armageddon" hysteria

IZAMAL, Mexico (Reuters) - Thousands of mystics, New Age dreamers and fans of pre-Hispanic culture have been drawn to Mexico in hopes of witnessing great things when the day in an old Maya calendar dubbed "the end of the world" dawns on Friday.

But many of today's ethnic Maya cannot understand the fuss. Mostly Christian, they have looked on in wonder at the influx of foreign tourists to ancient cities in southern Mexico and Central America whose heyday passed hundreds of years ago.

For students of ancient Mesoamerican time-keeping, December 21, 2012 marks the end of a 5,125-year cycle in the Maya Long Calendar, an event one leading U.S. scholar said in the 1960s could be interpreted as a kind of Armageddon for the Maya.

Academics and astronomers say too much weight was given to the words and have sought to allay fears the end is nigh.

But over the past few decades, fed by popular culture, Friday became seen by some western followers of alternative religions as a day on which momentous change could occur.

"It's a psychosis, a fad," said psychologist Vera Rodriguez, 29, a Mexican of Maya descent living in Izamal, Yucatan state, near the center of the 2012 festivities, the site of Chichen Itza. "I think it's bad for our society and our culture."

Behind Rodriguez, her two children played in a living room decorated with Christmas trees and Santa Claus figurines.

Mexico's government forecast around 50 million tourists from home and abroad would visit southern Mexico in 2012. Up to 200,000 are expected to descend on Chichen Itza on Friday.

"It's a date for doing business, but for me it's just like any other day," said drinks vendor Julian Nohuicab, 34, an ethnic Maya working in the ruins of the ancient city of Coba in Quintana Roo state, not far from the beach resort of Cancun.

Watching busloads of white-haired pensioners and dreadlocked backpackers pile into their heartland, Maya old and young roll their eyes at the suggestion the world will end.

"We don't believe it," said Socorro Poot, 41, a housewife and mother of three in Holca, a village about 25 miles from Chichen Itza. "Nobody knows the day and the hour. Only God knows."

FOREIGN INVADERS

Tracing its origins to the end of the 4th millennium BC, the ancient Mesoamerican civilization of the Maya reached its peak between A.D. 250 and 900 when they ruled over large swathes of southern Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and Belize.

Famed for developing hieroglyphic writing and an advanced astronomical system, the Maya then began a slow decline, but pockets of the civilization continued to flourish until they were finally subjugated by the Spanish in the 17th century.

Today, ethnic Maya are believed to number at least 7 million in Mexico, Guatemala and other parts of Central America.

The vast majority are nominally Roman Catholics, though many still uphold elements and rites of their old beliefs. According to a 2000 Mexican census, there were also a few hundred Jews and handful of Buddhists among the Maya.

Tales of human sacrifice, pioneering architectural feats and an interest in the stars burnished the Maya's supernatural reputation. So too, say experts, has the misguided notion that the Maya died out with the arrival of the conquistadors.

"That idea that they disappeared culturally back in the deep past is one of these things that feeds into this idea that they are mysterious, that they are otherworldly," said David Stuart, a Maya expert at the University of Texas.

The reality is that many Maya live in rural areas where water can be scarce, communications poor and education patchy.

Even as some shrug their shoulders at the awe and reverence December 21 has inspired, others worry it has become a free meal ticket for sharp-witted businessmen.

"There's the legend and there's the reality," said Yolanda Cornelio, 21, a tourism official in the city of Merida, whose mother speaks Maya at home. "Some people take the legend and abuse it, using it to make money. There's a lot of con artists."

With scores of old Maya ruins, temples and monuments dotting the landscape between southern Mexico and Central America, locals have plenty of opportunities to impress foreign visitors.

One of the most popular attractions lies in a leafy grove near the crumbling pyramids of Coba, where a large stone tablet records the Maya creation date of August 13, 3114 BC - quite literally the cornerstone of the 2012 phenomenon.

"This is a very powerful, sacred place," said Jonathan Ellerby, 39, a writer from Canada. "I feel something energetic, emotional, and I feel I'm in the right place. I really do."

(Additional reporting by Gabriel Stargardter; editing by Dave Graham and Todd Eastham)

Prescription: Read Often Before Ascension

“I’ll be there! Will you?”

Let’s review what we know and can expect.

The only two qualifications for Ascension on Dec. 21, 2012 (or later) are (1) that you choose it and (2) that you’ve assimilated enough light and love energy that you’ll be comfortably able to live on the Fifth Dimension or higher.

Please note: there’s no Board of Karma or Great Judging God with a White Beard approving character and stamping applications. Nothing of the sort. All your notions of Judgment Day and elites in heaven, St. Peter at the Pearly Gates and dreaded angels with lightning bolts in their hands are false and have been sold to us to keep us in fear.

If you haven’t assimilated enough light and love energy to feel comfortable on the Fifth Dimension or higher, you’d feel like you were choking without air or have other unpleasant symptoms that would force you to flee within a short time. So it isn’t a test of merit. It’s a necessary condition. As long as you choose Ascension and can withstand the more refined environment, you’re in.

And even if you’re not quite there yet, there are settings put aside, populated by our star brothers and sisters and the rest of the Company of Heaven (ascended masters, angels and archangels, etc.), which are holographic in nature (in other words, you’re not really on this Earth) that are there to help you clear whatever remains that blocks you. Think of it as the wading pool. You can join the rest of us later.

The attitude of the Company of Heaven is that everyone is welcome (even your noisy neighbor). They want as many people to ascend as possible.

You can ascend till the end of your present lifetime if you’re not quite ready to handle the more refined environment. So there’s really no cause for alarm on anyone’s part.

If you feel unclean, unworthy, ashamed, guilty, that’s fine. You can still ascend feeling unclean, unworthy, ashamed, or guilty. You may experience somewhat more vertigo and other unpleasant symptoms in the process because these attitudes really do constitute resistance to the higher vibrations, but you’ll still join the party. Feeling unclean is not required and not unacceptable.

So there’s nothing to fear and nothing to worry about. And those who are constitutionally oriented towards fear and worry no matter what, knock yourselves out. It’s quite OK to ascend from those states too.

Remember as well that you don’t have to recognize or acknowledge God, the galactics, or the archangels to ascend. You can love Jesus or not; he’s OK either way. And you can love Krishna, Buddha, Lao Tzu or Ahuramazda or not. It does not matter. The experience of duality is over and they never required you to love them anyways. Just come along and join the party.

You can be black, white, purple, or indigo. You can be tall or short, like Elvis Presley or not. You can have smoked dope or swallowed barbituates, eat pork or not eat pork. Hey, what more can I say? You get the drift.

You don’t have to know what Ascension is. You don’t have to have said “I’m ready!” or “I’m going!” to ascend. Those who know nothing about Ascension may have given their consent from their higher selves, in their dream state, etc. If they’re decent folk so that they’ll have assimilated sufficient light, chances are they’ll join us.

We live in a benevolent cosmic order, as Byron Katie stresses so much, and we’ve been persuaded otherwise. Nature is not red in tooth and claw. Actually nature is green with love and compassion.

We’re about to have a cosmic celebration and all are welcome, even your unfavoritest relative. So get your party hat on and have your noisemaker ready. (No, you don’t need a party hat and noisemaker. Just saying.)

There’s a party card with your name on it and Archangel Michael wants you. Come as you are, ready or not.

I’d like to thank all lightworkers everywhere who’ve tastefully and lovingly spread the word. Everyone who started Ascension-related blogs or did videos, transcribed, translated, or jiggled switches, thank you.

Everyone who risked ostracism and job loss and every other form of being dissed to tell people what’s coming, thank you. Everyone who did not risk anything but held the light and love, thank you.

All those who’ve been serving the world in humanitarian capacities, peacemakers, peacekeepers, healthcare professionals, spiritual leaders and every other form that lightworkers and starseeds have served in during this generation or lifetime, thank you.

All parents, all animal lovers, all earthkeepers, everyone who’s served Gaia and her children in any capacity, thank you.

What you worked for so selflessly and for so long now stands before you. Time to boogie and make merry. Even Archangels laugh and drink coffee milkshakes. (1) And they want us to celebrate.

Footnotes

(1) Archangel Michael: You deserve a holiday. Of course I’m coming along! [laughter]

Steve: Do you like coffee milkshakes?

Maya "end of days" fever reaches climax in Mexico

CHICHEN ITZA, Mexico (Reuters) - Thousands of mystics, hippies and spiritual wanderers will descend on the ruins of Maya cities on Friday to celebrate a new cycle in the Maya 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.

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 ofthe Maya has raised fears among groups around the world that the end is nigh.

A U.S. 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 Maya 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 December 21.

Chinese police have arrested about 1,000 people this week for spreading rumors about December 21, and authorities in Argentina restricted access to a mountain popular with UFO-spotters after rumors 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 U.S. 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 Maya 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 Maya civilization reached its peak between A.D. 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.

U.S. 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 May 21, 2011, later moving the date forward five months when the apocalypse failed to materialize.

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.

(Additional reporting by Karen Brooks, Jilian Mincer and Gabriel Stargardter; Editing by Dave Graham, Kieran Murray and Philip Barbara)

In Mexico, New Agers say end of Mayan calendar will herald 'cosmic dawn,' not end of world

MERIDA, Mexico - Doomsday hour is here, at least in much of the world, and so still are we.

According to legend, the ancient Mayans' long-count calendar ends at midnight Thursday, ushering in the end of the world.

Didn't happen.

"This is not the end of the world. This is the beginning of the new world," Star Johnsen-Moser, an American seer, said at a gathering of hundreds of spiritualists at a convention centre in the Yucatan city of Merida, an hour and a half from the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza.

"It is most important that we hold a positive, beautiful reality for ourselves and our planet. ... Fear is out of place."

As the appointed time came and went in several parts of the world, there was no sign of the apocalypse.

Indeed, the social network Imgur posted photos of clocks turning midnight in the Asia-Pacific region with messages such as: "The world has not ended. Sincerely, New Zealand."

In Merida, the celebration of the cosmic dawn opened inauspiciously, with a fumbling of the sacred fire meant to honour the calendar's conclusion.

Gabriel Lemus, the white-haired guardian of the flame, burned his finger on the kindling and later had to scoop up a burning log that fell from the ceremonial brazier onto the stage.

Still, Lemus was convinced that it was a good start, as he was joined by about 1,000 other shamans, seers, stargazers, crystal enthusiasts, yogis, sufis and swamis.

"It is a cosmic dawn," Lemus declared. "We will recover the ability to communicate telepathically and levitate objects ... like our ancestors did."

Celebrants later held their arms in the air in a salute to the Thursday morning sun.

"The galactic bridge has been established," intoned spiritual leader Alberto Arribalzaga. "At this moment, spirals of light are entering the centre of your head ... generating powerful vortexes that cover the planet."

Despite all the ritual and banter, few here actually believed the world would end Friday; the summit was scheduled to run through Sunday. Instead, participants said they were here to celebrate the birth of a new age.

A Mexican Indian seer who calls himself Ac Tah, and who has travelled around Mexico erecting small pyramids he calls "neurological circuits," said he holds high hopes for Friday.

"We are preparing ourselves to receive a huge magnetic field straight from the centre of the galaxy," he said.

Terry Kvasnik, 32, a stunt man from Manchester, England, said his motto for the day was "be in love, don't be in fear." As to which ceremony he would attend on Friday, he said with a smile, "I'm going to be in the happiest place I can."

At dozens of booths set up in the convention hall, visitors could have their auras photographed with "Chi" light, get a shamanic cleansing or buy sandals, herbs and whole-grain baked goods. Cleansing usually involves having copal incense waved around one's body.

Visitors could also learn the art of "healing drumming" with a Mexican Otomi Indian master, Dabadi Thaayroyadi, who said his slender hand-held drums are made with prayers embedded inside. The drums emit "an intelligent energy" that can heal emotional, physical and social ailments, he said.

During the opening ceremony, participants chanted mantras to the blazing Yucatan sun, which quickly burned the fair-skinned crowd.

Violeta Simarro, a secretary from Perpignan, France, taking shelter under an awning, noted that the new age won't necessarily be easy.

"It will be a little difficult at first, because the world will need a complete 'nettoyage' (cleansing), because there are so many bad things," she said.

Not all seers endorsed the celebration. Mexico's self-styled "brujo mayor," or chief soothsayer, Antonio Vazquez Alba, warned followers to stay away from gatherings on Friday. "We have to beware of mass psychosis" that could lead to stampedes or "mass suicides, of the kind we've seen before," he said.

"If you get 1,000 people in one spot and somebody yells 'Fire!' watch out," Vazquez Alba said. "The best thing is to stay at home, at work, in school, and at some point do a relaxation exercise."

Others saw the gathering as a model for the coming age.

Participants from Asian, North American, South American and European shamanistic traditions mingled amiably with the Mexican hosts.

"This is the beginning of a change in priorities and perceptions. We are all one," said Esther Romo, a Mexico City businesswoman who works in art promotion and galleries. "No limits, no boundaries, no nationalities, just fusion."

Gabriel Romero, a Los-Angeles based practitioner of crystal skull channeling, was so sure it wasn't the end of the world that he planned a welcome ceremony for the new age at dawn on Saturday, when he would erect a stele, a stone monument used by the Mayans to commemorate important dates or events.

The Maya, who invented an amazingly accurate calendar almost 2,000 years ago, measured time in 394-year periods known as baktuns. Some anthropologists believe the 13th baktun ends Dec. 21. Still, archaeologists have uncovered Mayan glyphs that refer to dates far, far in the future, long beyond Dec. 21.

Yucatan Gov. Rolando Zapata, whose state is home to Mexico's largest Mayan population and has benefited from a boom in tourism, said he, too, felt the good vibes.

"We believe that the beginning of a new baktun means the beginning of a new era, and we're receiving it with great optimism," Zapata said.

He said thousands of tourists and spiritualists are expected for Friday's once-in-5,125-years event. "All the flights to the city are completely full," Zapata said.

The Yucatan state government has even invited a scientist to speak about the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, to debunk the idea it could produce world-ending rogue particles, a concept popularized by author Steve Alten in his recent book "Phobos, Mayan Fear."

Alten suggests the rogue particles — "tiny black holes" — could unleash earthquakes that might cause a huge tsunami, but acknowledges that linking such events to Dec. 21 "is author's license."

"It's science fiction theory, I'm a science fiction writer," he told The Associated Press.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, however, has listed a number of odd subatomic phenomena — "magnetic monopoles," ''vacuum bubbles" and "strangelets" — that could play a role in the next apocalypse scare.

All of it amused Deyanira de Alvarez, a tourist from Mexico City, as she snapped a photo of the countdown clock mounted in the Merida international airport showing just over two days left to "the galactic alignment."

"My grandmother says that people have been talking about (the world ending) ever since she was a little girl," De Alvarez said. "And look, grandma is still here."

The DailyOM: Listening with Your Heart, December 21, 2012