Notice the first actual opinion given is that of someone who says "it's all bunk":
Scholars rarely love popularizers, and nowhere is this enmity more evident than in the battle over 2012—a date which, depending on your view, will coincide with the end of the world, the transformation of global consciousness, the end of the Mayan calendar, the beginning of another cycle of the Mayan calendar … or nothing at all. "I don't pay any attention to this stuff because it's bunk," says Anne Pyburn, an anthropologist at Indiana University who studies the Maya. Among followers of New Age religions, though, and particularly among those who like to celebrate the equinox at the Mayan ruin Chichen-Itza on Mexico's Yucatán peninsula, the belief that the year 2012 will mark a global transformation is widespread. In bookstores, on shelves marked "magic" or "divination," numerous volumes promote this view—and many more are on their way, from publishers as big as HarperOne and as small as Bear & Company, a New Age publisher in Rochester, Vt. Around Thanksgiving, Sony Pictures plans to release "2012." The trailer for the movie shows the oceans washing over mountains that look like the Himalayas while the face of a monk registers terror. One of the most popular authors in the 2012 category is John Major Jenkins, a self-described "independent researcher" whose 1998 book "Maya Cosmogenesis 2012" helped usher in this craze. "Around the year we call 2012," he writes, "a large chapter in human history will be coming to an end. All the values and assumptions of the previous World Age will expire, and a new phase of human growth will commence."
Look at this next asshole:
David Freidel is an archeologist at Washington University in St. Louis. He recently agreed to speak at a New Age conference on 2012, he says, mainly because he wanted to deprive Jenkins of the opportunity. "I immediately said yes so I could get to the podium before the charlatans do," says Freidel.
What a prick.
He has studied the Mayan calendar (actually, calendars), and while he agrees that what's called the "long count" calendar does end in 2012, he believes that the Maya—were they still living by their ancient system of dates—would not have seen it as any kind of cataclysm. The year 2012 is nothing more than the resetting of a clock, an odometer reaching zero before it starts again, he says. Freidel accuses Jenkins and other popularizers of inventing a theology to support their view that the world is in decline—and that an external force will soon intervene to set things right. "There is a tendency," he says, "to be wholly naive on the part of individuals who want to see consciousness raised on a global scale." Jenkins defends himself against accusations that he's a fraud, saying, "Read my book, look at the bibliography."
Pyburn complains that the 2012 phenomenon makes exotics out of the Maya. "When people who have been colonized and oppressed decide they want to use their heritage to promote themselves, that's their choice. When it's being done by wealthy First-World nations, I think that's exploitative and I have a problem with it." Her Indiana University colleague Quetzil Castañeda makes a similar argument a different way. "The Maya," he says, is a Western tag for a diverse group of people who lived—and indeed still live—without any unifying language or culture. To speak of any belief as "Mayan" is like saying "all brown people are the same. We obliterate the fact that they speak 28 different languages, there are 8 million of them—today. If they're all called Maya, they must be identical." In Mexico, he adds, the real Maya think of 2012 as "a gringo invention." In America, we have always been uniquely receptive to end-times prophesy—Y2K is the most recent example. What's unique about 2012 is that it appeals not to fundamentalist Christians but to the New Age set.
I have a whole book on 2012 which basically links all religions and mystic traditions (even McKenna's Timewave Zero) to this date of 2012 as being significant. There is so much more to it than this author would have us believe.
Now, I have my feelings that 2012 is pretty much setting a "countdown timer" for us to hope and hope for something yet be let down in the end (or even worse, have the NWO come crashing down on our heads, due to all the Numerology and everything Freemasonry uses it could just be their "set date" to begin their "apocalypse") or spend all this time worrying about whether we are spiritually enlightened enough or not to make it through (if you want to consider it "The Rapture", a pretty horrible concept), but there is also something very special about the date which has been stuck in my mind since I first began looking into it. It could be the biggest hoax of all time, with all the different religions of the world playing into the scheme, or it could be a case of true synchronicity, where they all predicted the same date even though they were entirely separate (same as them having mostly the same gods, but Zeitgeist would have us believe that is all formulated by Freemasons or something, I don't like to give them that much credit). Then there's the astrology, the alignments, all of that... I'm sure there are people betting everything they've got on this one date, but I'm not sure that's the point of it. The only reason newsweek picked this up is because of the fake "cataclysm" terminology which has been applied to it by fearmongers, because fear is what they run on and if there's no actual fear or danger involved, it must be false. Everything wants to kill you. Why aren't you dead yet?
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