The Mayan Calendar is expiring because there are no more time-keepers. The next cycle of years and eons became impossible to calculate when the ancient guild of stargazers was abolished by the Spanish conquistadores. Cultural assault, not a looming apocalypse, is the reason for the loss of the Mayan system of tracking time.

The ancient Mayans celebrated the passing of the years as an evolutionary cycle of birth, ripening and fulfillment ­ at both physical and spiritual levels ­ that was coordinated with the movement of planets and the Moon. Their stargazers kept time with astounding accuracy, surpassing the inexact Gregorian calendar of Europe.

Mayan chronology was a casualty of the Holy Roman Empire’s drive to impose its authority over indigenous America. During the 170-year conquest of the Yucatan Peninsula, the Mayan time-keepers were killed, enslaved or driven into the forests, and their stone-inscribed astral records deliberately smashed by the invaders.

The destruction of Mayan astronomy and mathematics is one of the greatest cultural crimes against our world heritage ­ and sadly the so-called Mayan Doomsday only reflects and perpetrates the Western misunderstanding of a grand scientific tradition.

War Against Astronomy

“Explorers” from the Habsburg Empire pillaged the Incan and Aztec realms of their gold and silver, but their vandalism against the scientific achievements of the Mayans was immeasurably worse. During the 16th and 17th centuries, the Spaniards systematically exterminated the Mayan culture, slaughtering astronomers and defacing inscriptions across the Yucatan Peninsula.

This sustained campaign to suppress a native scientific tradition required expensive and risk-filled voyages to supply the thousands of soldiers, horses and weapons at a cost exceeding the value of any loot taken. What compelled the Europeans to banish forever the centuries of knowledge accumulated by Mayans? Simply stated, a visceral hatred of scientific truth.

In the same period that Yucatan was vanquished, the Habsburg emperors were locked in a fierce intellectual struggle against free thinkers across Europe who opposed irrational religious dogma and fought against subjugation to absolute monarchy. The Thirty Years’ War was being waged against Protestant dissenters, who considered biblical texts and not ignorant friars, as the genuine basis of theology and morality ­ and parliament, not an absolute monarchy, as the foundation of government.

A corresponding struggle for control over the human mind was directed against the heliocentric theory of Nicholas Copernicus, who suggested that the Earth is a planet revolving around the Sun. Armed with only a primitive telescope and equations, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei tracked the orbit of the planets, whose irregular movements indicated that the Earth ­ as a platform of observation ­ also circles the Sun. For the Crown even more than the Church, this solid fact was heresy.

Divine Right of Kings

As an heir of the Renaissance, Pope Urban VIII was intrigued the challenge of Galileo’s findings. Since God could act in mysterious ways, even a pontiff must adapt to the greater divine plan. The cardinals from Habsburg Spain tolerated no such deviations from doctrine and demanded the Vatican organize an inquisition against the astronomer.

For Phillip IV, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Iberia, absolutism required a terra-centric system. The Escorial Palace was the center of the world, and the imperial throne a fixed point on Earth under a system of never-changing perpetual power. .

The unthinkable possibility of adopting the heliocentric theory would mean that humanity inhabits a desolate rock circling through the icy emptiness without rules or order. At his trial in 1633, therefore, Galileo was found guilty of promoting the infernal notion that the Earth is not the center of all existence.

It is no wonder then that Spanish colonizers were deeply disturbed by the native astronomy of the New World, which  like Galileo relied on empirical observation rather than dogma.  The Mayan priesthood was a highly disciplined corps of astronomers, who spent every night atop temples, which served also as celestial observatories. Their meticulous records taken over the centuries, and likelier several millennia, were more accurate than any record in Europe until the invention of the telescope, and surpassed the ancient Babylonians.

Their patient work and empirical method meant, however, that hundreds of years of data-collecting were needed to calculate the next grand cycle of the Mayan calendar. During these recent centuries leading up to the coming winter solstice, however, have witnessed a high culture reduced to peonage and poverty under the “superior” European regime. The grand cycle of the Mayans was broken by cruelty, greed, superstition and ignorance.

Indigenous Genius

The few astral records that survived the Spanish rampage indicate the Mayans were able to calculate the orbit of Venus around the Sun ­ a mathematical triumph not easily attained due to planetary retrogression. As in the past summer’s transit of Venus across the Sun, the second planet (as seen from Earth) appears to reverse its direction, that is, go retrograde. The only way that the Mayans could have accurately estimated the Venusian orbit was to factor in the Earth itself as planet revolving around the Sun.

In Mayan hieroglyphics, land is depicted as a circle within a larger plane. Typically condescending, modern archeologists suggest that this symbol is a flat-earth map. The empirical methods of the Mayans, however, indicate otherwise, that the circle of land is a two-dimensional representation of our planet in space. From the standpoint of European theology, such a model of the Universe was intolerable.

It was easy enough for the inquisitors to demonize Mayan astronomy. The Mayans named the planet Venus after Queztlequatel, a feathered serpent and symbol of fecund renewal, much like the mythical phoenix of the Orient. The “morning star” never sat well with the Christian clergy, being identified with the pagan goddess of erotic attraction and, thus, diabolical in nature. Astronomy was the path to damnation.

Attacks Against the Scientific Spirit

The obliteration of the Mayan record by the Holy Roman Empire is a tragic loss for humankind. It also serves as a warning today against the falsehoods spun by global institutions and major corporations, which aim to bend science toward sinister purposes. Blind faith in genetic modification, an unbalanced view of climate change, a dependency on pharmaceutical drug and vaccines ­ these are just a few of the many bogus “solutions” promoted by the huckster industries.

The Fukushima disaster is the Yucatan of this decade. The nuclear industry, big government and international agencies are financing a worldwide disinformation campaign to deny the dangers of radiation to human health and the environment.

    -          Radiation levels in Japan and in North America are being deliberately undercounted by the IAEA or not counted at all.

    -          An inhumane campaign is being mounted, even by the World Health Organization,  to deny the negative effects of so-called low-dose exposure.

    -          Contamination data on food and water are being underestimated.

    -          The fallout impact on the upper atmosphere is being ignored despite the expansion of the Arctic ozone hole since March 2011 and the spate of freak tornados and derechos, which are wrongly attributed to global warming

    -          Poisoning of marine life in the Pacific is being pinned on an imaginary “red tide” in cold waters where such algae cannot survive

The blatant publication of falsehood on behalf of the nuclear industry is tantamount to a New Inquisition against fact-based science and empirical observation. The enemies of scientific honesty annihilated the Mayan civilization, and perhaps today their psychological descendants will have to destroy Japan to eliminate the evidence. No matter how much the records are rigged, they can never entirely wipe away the facts - liars be damned.

Therefore, on the coming winter solstice, it would be wrong-headed to cower in fear of time running out. We should instead offer tribute to the scientific spirit of an indigenous tradition whose astronomers gazed at the skies with awe and studiousness ­ and emulate their mathematical rigor and respect for truth.

Yoichi Shimatsu, a science writer based in Hong Kong, is director of Above & Beyond, which provides health counseling to residents of Fukushima Prefecture.

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