As the sun sets on the day of love—better known as Thursday, Oct. 29—men and women file into The Ark, a bookstore specializing in crystals, tarot cards, world music and New Age tracts.
If some cosmic accident brought Sarah Palin through its doors, she would probably burst into flames. The magazine rack alone could boil her blood; it's stocked with titles like EnlightenNext, Sedona Journal of Emergence! and UFO Magazine's "deep summer reading issue," which addresses the day's rather urgent topic: "With less than 30 months to go, is our civilization on the brink of doom?"
To be precise, there are 1,149 days until Dec. 21, 2012, when something will—nay, must—happen. It won't be the end of the world but, if it is, SFR regrets the error.
Two of The Ark's best sellers concern this purportedly fateful date. But the popularity of 2012 theories in Santa Fe is a miniscule measure of this cultural virus. More contagious than swine flu, an obscure obsession with the ancient Mayan calendar spread from amateur archaeologists to New Agers and survivalists to the peak of pop culture with last week's release of a $200 million Hollywood destruction fantasy.
So it is that on this day of love approximately 30 Santa Feans afflicted with the 2012 bug have come to hear from a speaker who claims first-hand knowledge of Mayan traditions. They sit quietly facing the guest of honor, Lina Barrios, a middle-aged woman from Guatemala who dresses in colorful Mayan garb. She stands in front of a table displaying the latest work by her brother, Carlos: The Book of Destiny. It is one of more than 500 such books; 2012 is the only year besides Y2K with its own entry in the Library of Congress' catalog. Barrios' book, endorsed by something called the "Council of Mayan Elders," contains useful info such as the Mayan sign under which Bob Dylan was born.
First, the good news: "2012 is not a date of destruction," Lina Barrios says. Rather, it will mark the start of a new astrological cycle, one that will usher in humanity's return to nature.
Barrios belongs to a camp that believes the end of the current 5,125-year Mayan calendar cycle will accompany a planet-changing wave of energy. In this subset of the Mayaphile subculture, some see the beginning of new religious movements akin to Mormonism or Scientology. For this group, 2012 is to be welcomed—much like Barack Obama's presidency, which Barrios says was foretold by the ancients.
Depending on one's preferred reality, come 2012, either the stars will choose the next president or the voters will. For the growing numbers who trust anonymous bloggers more than silver-haired CNN anchors, an election is the least important thing 2012 will bring. After all, what is a little campaign next to mass extinction? In a country where polls say 1 in 3 people believes his or her chosen scripture is the "Word of God to be taken literally, word for word," and another one-third believes the federal government participated in the 9.11 attacks, beliefs in ancient prophecy and apocalypse can't be dismissed as "fringe." A YouTube series purporting to expose NASA's cover-up of the cataclysmic arrival of "Planet X" two years from now has been viewed more than 1 million times.
However divergent these visions of the near future may seem, they share a common cause and a common outcome. All feed a cottage industry, whether in solar-flare survival kits or aura readings or popcorn entertainment. More importantly, all are rooted in overwhelming public dissatisfaction with the present.
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Like Scientology "stress tests" or rock concerts for Jesus, the 2012 craze serves as bait for deeper ideas.
At The Ark, 2012 turns out to be the hook for a lecture on politics and philosophy. Barrios proselytizes for more than an hour, in Spanish, pausing for interpretation. She tells the crowd how Evangelicals from the north have picked up where Catholic missionaries from overseas left off, how the plunder of minerals, now carried out by corporations, continues in Guatemala. She encourages support for reforestation efforts and praises the historic presidential candidacy of an indigenous Mayan woman. She decries the evils of plastic, coffee and technological over-dependence, which seems to strike a chord with the audience.
"I know people that have three cell phones, and I imagine that their world is going to end," Barrios says.
A serious woman pipes up from her seat to suggest all the doomsdayers are small-minded tech addicts, deaf to Mother Earth's cries and anxious about the fragility of their lifestyles.
"Ah, bueno," Barrios says. She pauses, and amends her earlier statement: "If your world depends on electricity," she says, "it might end."
Barrios asks each audience member where he or she hopes to be on Dec. 21, 2012. Swimming with dolphins, a woman says. Eating well, SFR replies.
"Hawaii," a scruffy, long-haired man of 53 says.
His first spiritual experience happened there around the time of "harmonic convergence" in 1987. Long story short, a volcano god spat hot lava at his feet. It was "fucking terrifying."
This is Raymond Mardyks, "galactic astrologer" and co-author of 1999's Maya Calendar: Voice of the Galaxy. He claims partial responsibility for the 2012 madness. "Someone else created the monster. I was coming out with more the real deal," Mardyks tells SFR. "One of the little Frankensteins grabbed my stuff."
Mardyks says he moved to Santa Fe a few years ago after living "out of the Matrix" in Hawaii, where he built intricate geometric mobiles based on the Mayan calendar. A confluence of factors brought him here.
"I just felt like destiny was moving me back into the world, back to the mainland, and I'm still kind of winging it," Mardyks says. There was also a nasty divorce, accompanied by domestic abuse charges from his ex-wife, the mother of his five children. Years before their breakup, they lived in Sedona, Ariz. and took dictation from extraterrestrials. In that sense, his books had many co-authors.
If a religion can be defined by metaphysical belief combined with ritual practice and arbitrary taboo, Mardyks would be the L Ron Hubbard of 2012ism. He shuns coffee but praises magic mushrooms. He believes stars and planets are like cells in the body of the universe. He holds interesting opinions about gender-specific energy and the weird eyeball pyramid on the $1 bill. Like any good priest, Mardyks has spent years researching sacred texts. He says the Mayan calendars contain his life's work.
Mardyks claims to have surpassed ancient Mayan understanding of the cosmos. But then, it's smart not to take him too literally: To Mardyks, astrology is metaphor, and the Mayan calendar, with its focus on Venus, is an advanced form of the "science of love."
He spends a lot of time online and has long corresponded with John Hoopes, a Harvard- and Yale-trained anthropologist who specializes in Central America and teaches at the University of Kansas. Hoopes, who has researched the origins of the 2012 meme, calls it a "fruitful" exchange. (They had a falling-out after Hoopes jokingly sent Mardyks an ad for Crystal Head Vodka.) "He knows a great deal more about this calendar stuff than many people out there who are presenting themselves as experts," Hoopes says. "He's not an academic. He's not a scientist. He's not an expert on the ancient Maya. He's a professional astrologer…[which] is like saying, 'this is a very qualified fortune-teller.'"
Nevertheless, Mardyks has more expertise than the typical 2012 blogger, in an area few can claim to truly understand.
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Mardyks sees his current mission as "macheteing a pathway through the jungle of stupidity" around 2012. That jungle has grown thicker than any rainforest.
For example: One nine-part YouTube film claims "The Illuminati Freemasons" have conspired over centuries to erect the new tower of Babel, aka the Freedom Tower, over the World Trade Center site in 2012. ("Anti-Semitism tends to float behind some of the conspiracy theories," Hoopes says.) The sublimely paranoid film also claims that since the 1970s, this cabal has "conveniently conditioned you to accept that global warming is all your fault," when actually "Your SUV's have little to do with it.. THEY.. conditioned you to become AFRAID of the SUN and CO2."
Another production—by a man whose résumé boasts a few years' work long ago as a CNN field producer—makes the exact opposite argument, assailing "global warming deniers" for hiding evidence of the coming catastrophe.
"In 2012, Americans will be burying their dead as their forefathers did during the Civil War—by the thousands. By the tens of thousands," the narrator says solemnly. (He goes on to pitch a "2012 Survival Guide," $34.90 plus shipping.)
This is the kind of stuff Google churns up when you search for 2012, which is exactly what Sony Pictures encouraged millions of people to do with its movie-marketing campaign. The studio also ran bogus public service announcements from the "Institute for Human Continuity," which is holding a lottery to see who gets to escape Armageddon in Noah's Ark-like floating cities.
Though he's participated in marketing junkets for the film, another 2012 author, John Major Jenkins, feels uneasy about the ad campaign.
"I think it's irresponsible they had this Institute for Human Continuity thing. That fooled a lot of people," Jenkins tells SFR. "It was almost like War of the Worlds," the 1938 radio drama about an alien invasion, disguised as a news report.
Conspiracy, prophecy, doom: Crazy as all this sounds, it's not too different from what's on the ostensibly educational History Channel. A typical 2006 show, Decoding the Past: Mayan Doomsday Prophecy, juxtaposes pseudo-academic speculation with footage of natural disasters, wars, Hitler and the 9.11 attacks—all supposedly foretold by the ancient Maya.
"In 2012, will the Earth be destroyed in a great flood? Will we bask in the dawn of a new age? Or will it be just another uneventful day?" the narrator asks, before concluding, "Time will tell."
The Texas-based production company behind this show, 1080, labels it "entertainment." For obvious reasons, it couldn't be called "history." Jenkins, who appears in the program, says his words were "microedited" to make it sound as though he endorses doomsday theories he actually rejects. Producer Don White did not return SFR's message.
While networks and film studios profit from the hysteria, the job of clearing up public confusion falls to others. David Morrison, senior scientist at the NASA Astrobiology Institute, sent SFR excerpts from worried emails people sent him in the last two weeks of October:
"I am 15, an iv been told that in 2012 there are supposed to be meteorite showers, earthquakes, tsunamis, tornados, and everything. Iv been so worried for the last year, that i have started eating half of what i used to and I dont sleep and i just worry."
And: "Yesterday I was considering killing myself, the baby in my stomach and my beloved 2 year old daughter before December 2012 for fear of having to experience the earth's destruction. Please tell me the truth. I am very scared."
And: "My only friend is my little dog, and I worry about when I should put her to sleep so she won't suffer during the 2012 catastrophe."
Sure, these people may be mentally ill. But plenty of otherwise sane people have 2012 anxieties. In his Ask an Astrobiologist column on NASA's website, Morrison patiently addresses those fears with elementary science. "The only important force that acts on the Earth is gravitation, and that is dominated by the Sun and Moon…But the con-men and snake-oil salesmen who are trying to scare you have decided to use these meaningless phrases about 'alignments' and the 'dark rift' and 'photon belt' precisely because they are not understood by the public," Morrison writes.
NASA is fighting uphill. Even basic astronomy flies over people's heads. According to a March poll commissioned by the California Academy of Sciences, only 53 percent of US adults know how long it takes for the Earth to orbit the Sun.
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To Mardyks, bogus doomsday fears distract from the rare "spiritual opportunity" 2012 will bring. He's reluctant to share his theory of exactly how the stars will align to bring about this "planetary evolution." But he says for most people—those who aren't "tuned in"—the great date will come and go without notice.
"Human participation is optional," Mardyks says.
While primarily an evangelist, Mardyks cops to another motivation: He wants recognition.
"I've had the New Age spiritual cosmic rap out there for 10 years and nobody was picking up on it," Mardyks says. "So I decided I'm just going to come in with a different approach."
His new approach is to launch vitriolic attacks against more prominent 2012 writers like "John Major Jerkchain"—that would be Mardyks' name for Jenkins, the Colorado-based author who has appeared in several documentaries and been interviewed by The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek and MTV. Mardyks believes Jenkins stole his most important ideas and, even worse, mistranslated them. Back in the '90s, Mardyks writes, Jenkins "was just another naïve kid who was way over his head in attempting to understand Maya astrology."
The heart of their dispute concerns the timing of 2012 and the so-called "galactic alignment." Mardyks says his alignment theory was published first, in an article for the August 1991 issue of Mountain Astrologer.
Jenkins calls Mardyks a "lunatic" who wants to sabotage his career.
"With Mardyks, I think there's a huge amount of envy," Jenkins says. "He has this strange notion that because he had written about the galactic alignment before I did that I derive all my work from him. This is something he pathologically asserts time and time again. All I can do is be honest."
Jenkins credits still another author with inspiring his galactic alignment theories. Mardyks counter-claims that the other author added the theory only in later editions of his book, after reading Mardyks'.
Frankly, their feud is too convoluted to be of interest to the wider world. Hoopes, the anthropologist, thinks Mardyks "feels like he's not given credit for an idea others have made a lot of money off of."
It seems the only people who haven't cashed in on 2012 are the 7 million-plus Maya in Guatemala. The US film, television and publishing industries have profited most shamelessly. Then come the small-time hucksters who hawk "bug-out bags" and "survival" kits online, and those offering answers to spiritual seekers, like the organizers of "2012 Tipping Point," a $2,245-a-head "prophets conference" in Cancun this coming January. Its sponsors include New Dawn Magazine ("questioning consensus reality since 1991"). Jenkins will lecture on the "pole shift in our collective psyche."
Jenkins tells SFR he's barely broken even on his Mayan research, even with the "pretty good deal" he got from Tarcher/Penguin for his latest book, The 2012 Story.
Hoopes provides perhaps the most objective assessment of the credibility of these various 2012ers.
"Jenkins is an independent researcher, most of whose assertions are not ones that professional archaeologists or Mayanists think have a significant foundation. That said, he's been much more diligent than others in this vein about actually reading the work of archaeologists," Hoopes says. "There are some serious deficiencies in his critical thinking. He's also been deficient in acknowledgement of previous publications…I think Ray does have a point."
Mardyks' bridge-burning style probably hasn't helped his cause. And Jenkins' writing is far more accessible. Hoopes has encouraged Jenkins to submit his work to peer-reviewed academic journals. But Jenkins feels academia is rigged against outsiders.
He's not the first passionate amateur to feel that way. In an 1895 appendix to The Archaic Maya Inscriptions, an early attempt to decode the calendar, the long-dead Mayanist JT Goodman chided the California Academy of Sciences for its indifference to his "toilsome" study.
"[N]otwithstanding the princely endowment of their institution and their alertness to the scientific necessity of building a $30,000 marble stairway and publishing a $5,000 volume composed principally of their own portraits and biographies, they could not clearly see their way to any excuse for assuming the cost of printing this little book," Goodman writes. "I retain faith in the genius of ignorance. Somewhere to-day, by an obscure fireside, sits a boy that never even saw the outside of a university or academy of sciences to whose penetrative mind these inscriptions would be as an open book."
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Around the corner from the Santa Fe Plaza, in the Museum of New Mexico library, Mardyks taps at a keyboard and vents about his online nemeses.
"They call me a troll. They call me the fringe of the fringe," he says. Wikipedia editors have banned him five times for various violations. "They all have anonymous little names. I don't know if they're from the CIA. There's no way to tell."
Why would a galactic astrologer spend so much time arguing with CIA agents or, more likely, nerds?
"Because there's a movie coming out, and you know what it says? It says, 'Google 2012," Mardyks says. "So you Google 2012; look what comes up right here." He clicks the mouse. It's Wikipedia, of course.
Mardyks asks a librarian to unlock a glass case. He removes and opens a large hardback reproduction of the Dresden Codex, one of the few Mayan documents the Spanish failed to destroy. Forget the BS online: The Dresden Codex is a real, living mystery. For the late Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, who worked on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, decoding it was a hobby.
"It's as sophisticated as super-string theory, but the math is easier," Mardyks says. He believes the ancients were galactic astrologers, just like him. He tries to explain its dots, bars and glyphs. Here is a table showing future solar eclipses. Here is a human sacrifice. ("Vietnam, wasn't that human sacrifice?" Mardyks says.) And here is the image that scares the hell out of so many end-timesers: a snake spitting water on some birds.
"This page can denote nothing but the end of the world," Ernst Förstemann wrote in his 1906 commentary on the Dresden Codex. Mardyks traces today's doomsday hype to that single sentence. "The big heads are blaming this on the New Agers," Mardyks says. "I'm like, 'Look, no—it's one of your own.'"
Most serious researchers, amateur or otherwise, agree: There is no ancient Mayan doomsday prophecy. Indeed, if the 2012 apocalypse sounds suspiciously Christian, that's because they, not the Maya, probably invented it.
Before he reached the American mainland, Christopher Columbus wrote a book "in which he saw himself as initiating the end of times" by empowering the Spanish monarchs to reconquest Jerusalem, Hoopes says. Other colonists likely shared such extreme theology. "Among the first things the Franciscan missionaries talked about with the native population were the Great Flood in the Book of Genesis and the meaning of the Book of Revelation," Hoopes says.
Even interpretations of ancient prophecy by living Maya are suspect. In The 2012 Story, Jenkins says his works inspired some of Carlos Barrios' galactic alignment theories, "framing my work in the marketplace that prefers to deliver it through the mouth of an elder."
Barrios did not return SFR's email. His sister Lina came to Santa Fe under the auspices of Saq' Be', a tiny nonprofit run by a friend of the family; its founder, Adam Rubel, met Carlos in 1997 at a talk in upstate New York.
The Barrioses may be of Spanish descent, Rubel says, but they understand Mayan traditions. "Things can get a little bit complicated and convoluted in terms of figuring out what defines authentic," Rubel says. "These communities had reached a point where they were willing to accept others that weren't of a Mayan bloodline."
Barrios recruited Rubel to spread the word to other young Yankees. Rubel says Barrios is aware of concessions that must be made for the mass market, such as the celebrity astrology in The Book of Destiny, which retails at Borders for $23.98, shelved above Oprah fave The Secret.
As Lina Barrios abhors plastic, Carlos disdains scientific thought. "Caught up in worshiping reason and ignoring abstraction, the West is adrift," he writes.
In attacking reason itself, Barrios may have misdiagnosed the world's troubles. Nevertheless, it's hard to argue that the West is on a steady course toward greater human fulfillment.
"It's dissatisfaction with existing mainstream religions that draws people to these beliefs systems," Hoopes says. With America's post-war secular religion—progress—failing to deliver, 2012ism represents a kind of backlash, a mellower, Santa Fe-style version of the anti-government "Tea Parties."
A recent Central Intelligence Agency report pegs not 2012, but 2025 as the date the world—or at least US global dominance—finally ends. Earlier this month, salon.com columnist Michael Klare noted that many of the CIA's warnings—prophecies, if you will—have already come to pass. This is shown by the dollar's uncertain future as a global medium of exchange and the International Olympic Committee's snub of Chicago, what Klare calls "a symbolic moment on a planet entering a new age."
In short, we are fixated on the end of the world as we know it because that end is now.
Maybe it's accidental that today's anxieties have found a focus in the Mayan calendar. Still, it is fitting. Some realities are too heavy to bear and, as Americans see their own empire collapsing, they may find it easier to pick over the ruins of another. Mayan hieroglyphs are easier to comprehend than Middle East politics or health care reform.
This backlash could have lasting consequences. Some scientists fear not a coming apocalypse, but a new era ruled by superstition, such as that which followed the fall of Rome.
"The Dark Ages were a terrible time to be alive. Could that happen again? Absolutely. We have forces at work right now that seem to be promoting that, though they may not realize it," Jeff Wagg, executive director of the James Randi Educational Foundation, says. The foundation seeks to debunk "paranormal and pseudoscientific claims," like those made by "Intelligent Design" advocates, the anti-vaccination movement and, of course, 2012ers.
As the moon rises on the day of destiny, better known as the day before Halloween, men and women gather in a circle around a fire pit at a condo complex in Santa Fe. Lina Barrios apologizes to everyone: She had to make some substitutions. Instead of tobacco, she has chocolate chips and candy corn.
"Culture changes through time," she says.
Authentic or not, this Mayan fire ceremony smells delicious. And, at $10 for a high-spirited three-hour prayer session culminating in hugs for everyone, it's a better deal than the 158-minute film starring John Cusack.
Most of the participants are Mayan-fire-ceremony virgins. There's a laugh when Barrios tells the group to turn to the north and everyone turns south.
Led by Barrios, the group gives thanks for pretty much everything. For water, food, children, money, sex, food, sex (the Maya have their priorities straight). For the laws that give order. For staying out of jail. For sanity. For not getting locked into a mortgage. For staying out of credit card debt.
Barrios is a missionary for cultural tolerance. "Tell everyone this is not witchcraft," she says.
OK. It's not witchcraft. But it sure ain't rocket science. SFR
