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We're going to take a few minutes to look at the Mayan prophecy of December 21, 2012, as the end . . . of an age? Of the world? Of a calendar? We're going to find out.
There are two ways to approach this. One is to use the Mayan Long Count Calendar. But the other, which is very interesting, is to use the Aztec Sun Disk, which has the five ages on it. That's the one we're going to take a look at.
I took a picture of this Aztec Sun Disk (see http://youtube.com/watch?v=cH6ig9Xgq3s) at the archeological museum in Mexico City, and I have it here. The disk is of course much larger than it appears in the picture. It weighs about 25 tons and is about 12 feet in diameter, so a normal man would only come up to about half the distance of this circle; it's about 3 feet deep. We're actually going to look at this center circle, but first, I want you to notice at the top these two massive serpents coming down out of the heavens into the Earth. Symbolizing the god of fire and the god of the Sun, respectively, they come down as serpents, but their heads are now depicted as human heads. This connects with the ancient idea of the descent of the serpent from the tree of knowledge down into the Earth. Or the ancient Hindu idea that the kundalini, or the life force of humanity, descended out of energy into matter.
It is also the symbol of the descent of this power and our descent as souls, or children of God, coming out of pure spirit, of pure energy, into matter for the first time. When we look at the inner circle, we see those early ages.
Here is a closeup of the center circle. As you can see, it has a circle in the middle with the sun god's face, above it is a pyramid, and then there are four squares around the side. Each one of these squares represents one of the ancient ages. The circle in the middle is the age we are currently living in, called the Age of Movement, or Change. It actually began August 11, 3114 B.C., and it ends December 21, 2012. So the big question is, what happens after it ends? - there are only five ages shown here.
Well, actually, there are seven ages depicted, and the next two ages are very important to us. Remember the descent of the serpent energy, the kundalini life force, out of the heavens? Out of energy into matter? Out of formlessness into form? Out of spirit into flesh? This is a reverse of that process. Let's take a look at these ages.
Some people begin their interpretation of the ancient ages with the first square to the left of the pyramid, and they go around the circle counterclockwise. Others begin with the image in the square on the right of the pyramid, then go to the one on the left, and then come around. I prefer to begin with the one on the right of the pyramid and go in reverse order. You'll see that these ages fit very well with the mythology of not only the Mayans but the Egyptians and other ancient cultures.
The first square here has a stylized jaguar in it, and it's called the Jaguar Sun, or the Age of the Jaguar. It was an ancient age in which we, as souls, were quite powerful, quite sophisticated, but we were not really incarnate beings in the sense of physical form. We were more like spirits, or godlings, as the Egyptians called us. We were more like energy and spirit.
As we move down to the next square, we come into the Age of Water. The Jaguar was the Age of Earth, and now we're moving into the Age of Water - the Age of the Fish. The idea here is that, as the children of God descended from the heavens, they got lost and could not see the horizon from which they had come or to which they were headed. The Aztecs say that the great god Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent, or the winged serpent, descended and created a firmament so that the children could find their way. This is very similar to the story in the book of Genesis in the Bible.
Then we come to the next square, the Age of Fire. And in this age, there was an attempt to make a physical body that was ideal for the children of God, the sons and daughters of the Creator, to use while in the Earth world. The Mayans called this the blue maize body; maize, their term for corn. The blue maize people were perfect in every way, making it possible for the godlings to incarnate, to take on physical form. However, the children brought with them many little jealousies and weaknesses and vices that they stumbled over, and eventually, they lost their way, even then. When that age ended, the Mayans and Aztecs called it the Age of Fiery Rain, because it ended with volcanic explosions and meteors from heaven, one of which created the Carolina Bays, in the southeast of North America and the Caribbean Islands, and also created the Puerto Rican Trench. Some believe that this disturbance resulted in the destruction of Atlantis.
The beginning of the fourth age, the Age of Wind, is symbolized in the fourth square, in which we can see a stylized turkey. The story is that the great eagles of God, or the children of God, were now like little turkeys. They couldn't fly very high or very far off the Earth. They were very much possessed by this world and were caught up in the evolution of matter. Here also, interestingly, the prophecy says that they began to use Simian bodies, monkey bodies, in which to incarnate. This fits somewhat with the theory of evolution. In fact, current humans share 98 percent of their genome structure with the chimpanzee (or orangutan). That 2 percent difference is a very crucial one, of course.
That's when the children of God, the godlings, actually began to incarnate in the Earth consistently. They were, in fact, as Buddha would say, trapped in the cycle of incarnations.
In the inner circle begins the fifth age, the Age of Change---changing the situation, moving from a possessive condition to a liberating condition. This is the age we have been in since 3114 B.C. And this age ends in 2012.
The age to follow, according to the myths and the legends, is the Age of the Spirit of All Living Things. It is a time when our souls regain awareness of the essence of life rather than the form, regain a sense of energy and spirit rather than only physicality and matter. Once we gain that, we regain the real power of life, and we start to awaken to the spirit of all living things.
Next is the seventh age, the age that the Mayans called the Age of Melting Into Oneness Again. So there's a return to the great collective consciousness, the great oneness out of which all souls were created and given free will and life to go out and grow and become companions to their creator.
According to the legends, the ancient ages were very long - millions of years long. And, gradually, they got shorter and shorter. The ages that are to follow December 21, 2012, are to be even shorter. We have been in the present period, the Age of Movement, for about 5,000 years.
Nostradamus, a great prophet in his own right, wrote a letter to his son Cesar, saying that he could see to the year 3797 that life continued. So life is continuing into the next age, but it's not millions of years or tens of thousands of years. It's a shorter period of time.
The first age coming after the Age of Movement ends is the Age of the Spirit of All Living Things, an Age of Enlightenment. In the book of Revelation in the Bible, it says that for a thousand years, Satan will be bound - all evil on the Earth will go, and it will be a golden age of enlightenment. This corresponds very well with the Age of the Spirit of All Living Things.
Next follows an age, for an even shorter period of time, in which there is again full consciousness of the oneness with the life force, with the Creator, as was the condition of humankind in the first chapters of Genesis. This is a very different look at the Mayan Prophecy. It's an uplifting, hopeful, promising look versus the dark "end of the world" look or the idea that evil will conquer good, that darkness will overcome light. As most of the ancient prophecies of the ancient peoples themselves declared, Good will overcome evil, and light will overcome darkness, forever.
John Van Auken is a Director at the Association for Research and Enlightenment. He is considered an expert in spirituality, reincarnation, ancient mysteries, and rejuvenation of the body, dream work, meditation, prophecy, mysticism, and Edgar Cayce concepts.
