I think it is a very good presentation actually. It needs to be publicized for the campaign for heritage site for it's own protection.

Hoopes did not say if the stone popul vuh has been known for a long time. It is news to me is all i know, and it is very cool. Hansen is inspiring, and has done great work there. His enthusiasm and passion for the area and its history i thought really came through strong. The reporter did seem a little ditzy, but not unlikable. The wikipedia article has little about this, and this seems like a lot of new work and finds on a long established site.

Lana's conclusion is pretty bizarre. It's sort of like concluding that Greek astrology was preserved intact in Linda Goodman's "Sun Signs" or that the Jewish Torah is reproduced intact in a modern Christian translation of the Bible.

El Mirador has some stucco reliefs that apparently represent the Hero Twins from the Popol Vuh. These guys may also appear in stone sculpture at the much earlier Olmec sites of La Venta and El Azuzul. Scenes from the Popol Vuh may also be present in artwork at Izapa and San Bartolo. They are also abundant in Late Classic painted vases.

However, these are scattered images of possible scenes. Going from them to the written Popol Vuh as we have it today is like going from a gallery of Greek & Roman sculpture to Bulfinch's "Mythology."

The version of the Popol Vuh that we have was written down by someone who had been taught to write by Christian missionaries, and was probably even a convert to Christianity familiar with the content and structure of the Bible. It is the product of syncretism.

Speaking of the issue of syncretism, it's ironic that many of the same people who buy deconstruction of the Christian myth in the work of Acharya S. and the film "Zeitgeist" seem loathe to apply the same kind of analysis to the new 2012 mythology.

I just wrote the following messages to some friends, but I think this crowd will find them interesting, too. The answers are in response to questions recently posed:

"1. Can we locate any direct mention of 12/21/2012 before 1985?"

Yes. It's directly mentioned in Table B.2 (p. 603) of the revised 4th edition of "The Ancient Maya" by Sylvanus Morley, which was published in 1983.

"2. Where did Arguelles get the year 2012 for The Transformative Vision? And when & how did he come across 12/21/2012 as the end of the Long Count?"

The answer to the first question is: Simple math. Coe (1966: 149) mentions the creation date of 3113 BC. All Arguelles needed was the length of the Great Cycle (which in 1975 he says is "a larger 5,125-year cycle"). 5125 - 3113 = 2012! I'd have to check to see where he got the 5125 number from, but it may have been the 1956 edition of Morley's book (Coe says it's "something less than 5,200 years," which isn't helpful.) What I do know is that Arguelles probably didn't get the year 2012 from Tony Shearer, since Shearer makes no mention of it all all in his own 1975 book.

The answer to the second question: I think Arguelles came across 12/21/2012 on p. 603 of the 4th edition of "The Ancient Maya," which was published in 1983. When that happened, he had some kind of epiphany, which was enhanced after his meeting with McKenna in 1985 and set him off on the road that led to the Harmonic Convergence, "The Mayan Factor," and all that followed. We know he read Waters' book "Maya Mystique," since he wrote a book review of it (!) for The Shamballa Review in 1976 and then cited it (much later) in "The Mayan Factor" (1987).

3. When & how did McKenna come across the date?

Sometime before 1975 is all I know. He could have gotten it the same way that Arguelles did, or it could have been (as Dennis McKenna asserts) a coincidence. Personally, I find it hard to believe that McKenna didn't read early editions of both Coe and Morley.

"4. When was the date put into the Timewave Zero software--it is undoubtedly there by 1985 at Ojai and seems to have been there for at least a little while prior (this seems potentially verifiable by talking to the mathemeticians who made the software--who as far as I know are still around and available)?"

Sometime between 1983, when the 4th edition of "The Ancient Maya" was published, and July 1985, when he met Arguelles at the Ojai Institute.

"If Burroughs is writing about this in the 50s, where did he pick up the notion from. The way he describes it in "The Mayan Caper" seems essentially the same as the general treatment in the 2012 phenomenon, just without mentioning a specific date."

(See below.)

I speculated that Arguelles got the 5,125 number from the 1956 edition of Morley (which had been revised from the 1947 edition by George W. Brainerd), but it's not there. At least not directly.

Morley/Brainerd is tricky! They never explicitly gives either the starting date nor the end date for the Long Count, but he provides enough information in various places to calculate each. For example, the 5125-year length of the Long Count can be derived by taking the number of days in a baktun (144,000), multiplying them by 13 (the final number of baktuns mentioned by Coe), dividing by 365.2425 (or even 365 1/4), and then rounding:

144,000 * 13 = 1,872,000
1,872,000/365.2425 = 5125.36191 or 1,872,000/365.25 = 5125.256673

Either of these answers rounded gives 5125

However, neither of these is *exactly* 5125 (the reason for the extra days)

The 1956 edition of Morley's book gives the following clues to get the Long Count start date (these are also present in the original 1946 first editon):

1) The date of the Leyden plate is 8.14.3.1.12 or 320 (p. 51)
2) 8.13.2.1.12 is 3,433 years after the zero date (p. 242)

3433 - 320 = 3113 BC

As I noted above: 5125 - 3113 = 2012

Morley 1956 does not mention that the total great cycle is 13 baktuns long (I still need to figure out where *that* comes from before Coe mentioned it in 1966). In fact, I can't seem to find any discussion of Maya end-times mythology at all in the 1956 edition. There is a great deal of this in the first (1946) and second (1947) editions of Morley--one of which would have been the one Burroughs was using in 1950 and the source of his "Mayan Caper" ideas--but it looks as if Brainerd may have *removed* it from the 1956 edition. (I'm now very curious about that, and will have to go and compare these different editions!)

However, theoretically, ALL of the information needed for derivation of just the *year* 2012 can be found in a combination of information in two popular, readily accessible books that were available to Arguelles: The 1946, 1947, or 1956 editions of Morley's "The Ancient Maya" and the 1966 edition of Coe's "The Maya." In theory, careful work with other data could have given either the December 23 or December 21, 2012 date, too, but there's no evidence that either Arguelles or McKenna went that far until someone else (Sharer) did it for them in 1983.

To get back to Burrough's "Mayan Caper" stuff: He clearly got his ideas about the ancient Maya directly from either the first or second editions of Morley's book. However, here's a *very* important point: In his 2006 autobiography, Michael Coe notes that Tozzer made a remark about how he was annoyed that Morley's book didn't contain adequate citations. In fact, most of Morley's discussion of Maya "end time" prophecies came directly from footnotes to Tozzer's own meticulously documented 1940 translation of Bishop Diego de Landa's "Relación de las cosas de Yucatan." Morley's uncited paraphrasing of Tozzer is so close that, to me, it borders on direct plagiarism. What Morley left out, however, is that most of the mythology he discusses comes from post-Spanish Conquest (not *ancient* or pre-Conquest) sources--including ethnohistoric ones--that represent a clear syncretism of Christian and Maya mythology.

In brief, the "end-of-the-world" disaster scenarios that Burroughs discusses are almost certainly ones that originated in the *Christian* eschatology of Franciscan missionaries, and therefore are *not* authentically Maya.

It was Morley's paraphrasing (or "plagiarism"?) of Tozzer--as well as uncritical thinking by individuals who did not go back to the original sources--that lay the foundations for the current mythology of Maya prophecies about 2012. That is, the prophecies may be "Maya," but they came from missionized, Christian Maya who had already learned about both the Great Flood and the Book of Revelation. The 2012 mythology therefore is appealing because it *seems* to confirm *Christian* mythology when it's just a repackaging of the Christian myth itself.

Anyway, just one more little bit about McKenna to tie things together: 1) Both Burroughs and Ginsberg were fascinated by the ancient Maya, with Burroughs going to Mexico to study Maya hieroglyphs while Ginsberg later hung out at Palenque, 2) Burroughs and Ginsberg later corresponded about their ayahuasca experiences in Putumayo, Colombia in "The Yagé Letters," 3) it was the McKenna brothers' reading of "The Yagé Letters" that inspired them to go to the Putumayo and La Chorrera in 1971. It seems likely to me that Terence McKenna, at least, did a lot of reading of other stuff by Burroughs, perhaps coming across reference to Maya "apocalypse" there.

For me, the whole 2012 thing was born out of uncritical, amateurish, counterculture, psychedelic musings based on readings and discussions based on various editions of popular books about the ancient Maya. If that sounds blasé, so be it.