The Olmec were a clever bunch of people. They had a talent for tackling complicated subjects like astronomy, and as such they dedicated copious amounts of time to observing the cycles of nature and studying the passage of planets, stars and the Earth’s own heliacal dance. They observed how the planet wobbles around its pole and tilts a few imperceptible but crucial degrees every 21,000 years. They watched, recorded and scribed everything in stone, in uncanny detail, wrapped in a symbolic language all their own. As one would expect, this gained the Olmec a reputation for wisdom, and when you are imbued with such wisdom, people take you seriously.
Sometimes too seriously. One of the great works of the Olmec was their Long Count calendar, so much so that it was later adopted by the incoming Maya culture. This calendrical masterpiece began marking time in 3114 B.C. – ironically the same year when the Egyptians claimed the first pharaoh of a purely human bloodline ascended the throne – and continued doing so in 394-year periods known as b’ak’tuns. But on the 13th b’ak’tun, the counting stops for no apparent reason. Olmec time comes to an end on December 21, 2012, the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere.
It means that for a goodly percentage of this planet’s seven billion human inhabitants, everything ends. And that includes you.
Or does it? For someone who’s studied and dedicated a sizeable portion of his life to ancient cultures and their sacred sites, I’ve always been curious as to why the Olmec should care one way or another about marking the end of the world. For one thing, they were undoubtedly an astute culture and thus would have worked out that they would expire long before the deadline for the rest of the world; in fact, by the time of Christ, hardly a trace exists of them. It does seem odd why anyone should go to all the trouble of calculating a point in distant time they would stand little chance of experiencing for themselves.
Perhaps they were just having a laugh at how preoccupied humans are with the end of the world, as though this morbid curiosity is hard-wired into DNA. As one latterday cartoonist sees it, a Maya stone mason rolls the infamous 2012 calendar stone into his home and says to his wife, “I only had room to go up to 2012,” to which she comments, “That’ll freak people out years from now.”
Humans are a crazy bunch of people. We fixate on death and mourning even more than elephants. We even publish statistics every year on the various ways we will come to meet St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, including the odds: heart disease, 1:6; stroke, 1:28; motor vehicle accident, 1:88; poison, 1:130; diarrhea, 1:4000; contact with wasps, 1:71,623. We even subdivide statistics by low, middle and high-income countries, even by occupation!
One surprising statistic is the number of people who succumb to depression and other neuropsychiatric disorders – 1:112, a rate 600% above fatalities caused by war. For sure, one of the inevitable certainties of life is death, but I wonder, just how much depression is a direct result of a self-reinforced belief that 298 days from now we shall come to experience an unspecified end?
Apocalyptic eschatology – the study of theology and ultimate death scenarios – made its appearance in England around 1550. It generally concentrated on the four things we ought to concern ourselves with as we gaze upon our impending mortality: death, judgment, heaven and hell. Even here, only one out of four outcomes offers a glass-half-full scenario. But this was 16th century England and not a fun place to be. Puritanical beliefs were on the rise which meant intelligent women were to be burned as witches; ancient traditions of honouring the spirit of the earth were abolished, pagan monuments destroyed, and celebrations of life outlawed; furthermore, there was rapid inflation, a fall in labourer’s wages, and Catholics were burning Protestants and rebellion was upon the land. Generally speaking, joy was abolished. One sympathizes.
Depending on your religious viewpoint, the end of the world may be utopian or dystopian, and a number of organized religions have talked a considerable percentage of the population into favouring a very pessimistic outcome – fire, brimstone, comets, humans hunting each other with swords, and so on. Religions such as Bahá’í, on the other hand, favour a balanced approach: that creation has neither a beginning nor an end, that the course of human time is marked by a series of progressive revelations to help raise the level of understanding, and that failure to observe such pivotal moments leads to denial and thus exacerbates a downward spiral of suffering. Like Buddhist, Hindu or Native American eschatology, cycles are seen as symbolic regenerations in the evolution of human behaviour rather than necessarily catastrophic and geologic upheavals.
Over the course of the last two thousand years we’ve actually fared rather well with the apocalypse: between 30 and 1920 A.D. we lived through – and survived – no less than forty-six end-of-the-world predictions. A predicted Christian rapture during the 1st century failed to rapt; in 90 A.D. St. Clement I predicted the world would end at… well, any moment; bishop Hilary de Poitiers – whose name actually comes from the Latin word for cheerful – unhappily announced the end of the world in 365 A.D.. Clearly nothing happened, so one of his students moved the date to between 375 and 400 A.D.; the Christian academic Sextus Julius Africanus then rounded it off to the year 500. Such a lack of success meant other avenues were scoured for sure signs of the end of everything. In the year 988 it was the turn of the eclipse to be interpreted as the end of everything, but when that too failed to bring about a desired result, people survived an agonizing twenty four years before finally being delivered in 992 A.D. simply because Good Friday coincided with the Feast of the Annunciation, the effect of which would bring forth the Antichrist.
As the year 1000 approached, the end of the world coincided with millenarianism – the belief in a coming major transformation of society – and thus the issue of death was compounded. Many Christians came to the conclusion this was finally ‘it’, enough to validate a war against ‘pagan’ countries in Northern Europe to convert them to Christ – by force if necessary – because the Saviour would most certainly appear this year. People gave all their possessions to the Church in anticipation of the end. When the end failed to materialize, along with Jesus, the Church conveniently forgot to return their property. Criticism of the Catholic Church ensued. The Church replied by denouncing the critics as heretics and exterminated them.
Whether you choose to judge people who follow such advice as simple-minded or gullible is beside the point. Mass belief in an idea – be it negative or positive – has the potential to bind individual energies and give them forward motion, the result of which is the most dangerous of all possibilities – the self-fulfilling prophecy. And while mass belief in millennial annihilation in the year 1000 didn’t bring about the end of the world, the consequences of group behaviour nevertheless led to widespread famine and outbreaks of plague. So, in a manner of speaking, their world did come to an end.
