Mesoamerican Long Count/Apocalypse?

Soon enough you could be hearing more and more about the December 12th, 2012 end of the Mayan calendar and the possible apocalyptic ramifications. This will most likely end up in the mainstream culture by way of the apocalyptic film 2012 that's due out either this winter or next.

I'm here to clear up some of the confusion over the "end-of-calendar" date and related events. I may not be a Mayan scholar, but I do some diligent research, prize the thing that most resembles the truth, and try to tell it like it is.

The name used by actual Mayan and Mesoamerican scholars for the long form of calendar system used by those societies is Mesoamerican Long Count. Sometimes it's called Mayan Long Count, but there is a debate about whether the Mayans created the construct or adapted an already widely used construct (as the evidence seems to show).

The Long Count calendar uses a breakdown of five named divisions (actually six or seven might have had names, but the sixth and seventh were probably far too large to have any practical meaning). These divisions are (with their counter parts in today's life in parenthesis): the k'in (1 day); the winal (20 days); tun (360 days); k'atun (7200 days--almost 20 years); b'ak'tun (144,000 days--394 years). The devised way scholars today denote this is with a decimal system, where things tend to cycle over in 20s (except the tun (year), which cycles over in 18s). The notation is in descending order separated by decimals, similar in setup to binary:

(b'ak'tun) . (k'atun) . (tun) . (winal) . (k'in)

This is what I mean: 1 k'in (1 day) => 0.0.0.0.1

So, 19 days looks like 0.0.0.0.19

and 20 days looks like 0.0.0.1.0

and a solar year of 365 days would look like 0.0.1.0.5

This is somewhat reminiscent of binary code. Scholars have been able to back-log the Mayan dates to discover the starting date of what the Mayans called the Third Creation, the creation of man, to be August 11, 3114 BCE in our current Gregorian calendar (using the Julian calendar it would be September 6, 3114 BCE).

What is meant when it is said that "the Mayan calendar is ending, with nothing left afterwards" is slightly misleading. On December 11th, 2012, the day before the calendar "ends", the decimal notation will be: 12.19.17.19.19

You might notice, since this is a base-twenty system (with the exception of the base-18 "year" demarcation), that's similar to your car's odomoter coming up to 99,999 or, more accurately reflected by how the Mayans saw it, like the odometer rolling up to 199,999.

On December 12th, 2012, everything rolls over like your odometer, and we'll have 13.0.0.0.0.

Nothing in the Mayan literature says anything about apocalyptical scenarios, and many experts believe that if their culture was as strong today as during pre-Columbian times, they'd probably have a wonderful party that would last for weeks, as this would begin the Fourth Creation.

But, really, the largest division here, the b'ak'tun, at almost 400 years, is also in a base-20 system. See? The Mayans probably wouldn't be too scared, since, well yeah, 12/12/2012 does represent 13.0.0.0.0, but March 26th, 2407 represents 14.0.0.0.0 and June 28, 2801 represents 15.0.0.0.0.

But, you might be asking, if it's a base-20 system, what comes next, the day after 19.19.17.19.19? Well they have the answer for that with the introduction of the piktun, that sixth named element I mentioned earlier as being too large for practical purposes...

After the fateful day 19.19.17.19.19 everything'll roll over again, roll over to 1.0.0.0.0.0.

Really, it wouldn't be inaccurate to write the date as 0.19.19.17.19.19, that makes the roll-over look more natural. But really, at the start of the second piktun, on day 1.0.0.0.0.1, we'll be calling it (or maybe not, considering) October 14th, 4772, a full three thousand years after Luis Tolosa founded SLO-town and Sam Adams and Joe Warren formed the first Committee of Correspondence (both in the latter half of 1772).

The world won't end. And if it does, it'll be a coincidence that we should have been able to foresee (asteroid, comet, nuclear proliferation gone bad) if not fully able to avert the disaster.