NY Times on 2012

Six (web) pages in a major newspaper, on 2012. Snippets:

“We’re coming to an end time beyond anything that anybody has ever imagined,” Rod said with a trembling urgency.

The guest in the wee hours that February morning was Lawrence E. Joseph, the author of “Apocalypse 2012” — billed as “a scientific investigation into civilization’s end” — and he came on the air to tell the story of how the ancient Maya looked into the stars and predicted catastrophic changes to the earth, all pegged to the end date of an historical cycle on one of their calendars, Dec. 21, 2012.

The year 2012 first entered the public consciousness two decades ago this August with the Harmonic Convergence organized by José Arguelles, the author of a number of esoteric books about the Mayan cosmos and his experiences with telepathically received prophecies.

“The post-2012 world will be a world of universal telepathy,” Arguelles wrote me recently from New Zealand, where he has gone to prepare for the transition. Since 1993, when he claims to have received a new prophecy in Hawaii, he has been calling himself Valum Votan, Closer of the Cycle.

As Arguelles’s closest spiritual heir in the Mayan-calendar movement, Calleman has been active in promoting a regular mass-meditation event called the Breakthrough Celebration and other more focused projects including the Jerusalem Hug, which gathered 5,000 people around the walls of the Old City on May 21 to harness constructive energies and create a “cascade of peace.”

Jenkins, now 43, is difficult to distract when talking about the Mayan calendar and 2012. After years of working as a software engineer to support his research and writing books and papers in his spare time, 2012 is now Jenkins’ full-time job. Influenced by the work of the pioneering psychedelic writer Terence McKenna — whose Timewave Zero system, based on computer analysis of the I Ching, also shows history to be culminating on Dec. 21, 2012 — Jenkins argues that ancient Maya “calendar priests” were able to chart a 26,000-year astronomical cycle called “the precession of the equinoxes” with the naked eye. He fixed the 2012 end date to coincide with a “galactic alignment” of the winter-solstice sun and the axis that modern astonomers draw to bisect the Milky Way, called the galactic equator.

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My opinion: 25% history of apocalyptic prophecy, 75% new-age 2012 gurus, 0% science.