The Mesoamerican calendar that counts elapsed days from a fixed base date in a modified base-twenty positional notation, used across the Maya lowlands from the first century BCE and the reason Maya monuments can be dated to the day.
The 2012 date
Thirteen baktuns from the base date falls on 21 December 2012 under the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson correlation constant 584283, which scholarship settled on. Fingerprints of the Gods gives 23 December, which follows the 584285 constant used by Michael Coe, whom Graham Hancock cites; the two-day difference is a live scholarly choice of its time and not a slip. What failed is the prediction attached to it. Nothing happened, and the ancient texts do not in fact describe the completion of the cycle as an end of the world; the one monument that mentions the date, Tortuguero Monument 6, describes a god’s descent and is damaged.
Why the node is here
Because the 2012 date is the clearest dated prediction the alternative literature has ever made, and because it is a good demonstration of the difference between a calendar, which is understood, and a prophecy, which was attached to it later. Terence McKenna’s timewave zero attached itself to the same date by a different route and failed with it.
Connections
Fingerprints of the Gods · Graham Hancock · Terence McKenna · Teotihuacan · Quetzalcoatl · Precession of the Equinoxes · Hamlet’s Mill · Lost Civilization Hypothesis