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| I picked this up because I'd read another of
Gilbert's books, The Orion Mystery. This one
doesn't measure up. The marketing hype for this book centers around the well-known Mayan prophecy of the "end of the world" on December 12, 2012. The jacket reads, "This revelatory and extraordinary book shows that we are standing on the threshold of a new world age. As we approach the new millennium we simply cannot afford to ignore its message." However, it doesn't really give us a "message" to ignore. There are no conclusions or recommendations. The book delves deeply into the mathematical basis for the Mayan calendar, which not only marks the passing of time, but also accurately predicts the orbits of the major planets and the rise and fall of sunspot activity. Needless to say, a large body of astronomical and mathematical knowledge must have been available to what we might otherwise call a "primitive" race. The book wanders between a number of subjects, including the author's deciphering of the Lid of Pelenque which you won't recognize by name but would recognize if you saw it. It was made famous by Erich von Däniken in his 1970's Chariots of the Gods books. It is an engraving on the lid of a sarcophagos which depicts a Mayan-looking person supposedly at the controls of a spaceship. Gilbert and Cotterell present a much more plausible decoding of the image on the lid. It is much too complex to detail here; suffice to say it includes a complete history of the Mayans and a description of the death of the king whose crypt it adorns. The authors anticipate a shift in the polarity of the Earth's magnetic field on or about the date mentioned above. The speculate that this will be accompanied by cataclysmic changes in the Earth's surface and climate. They don't go on to tell us what to do about it, which may be fortunate. The Aztecs, in order to avoid a similar fate predicted by this calendar, began a cult of human sacrifice, supposedly to release life force to the sun to encourage it to maintain its course. Hardly worth the effort, since the shift occurred anyway. Probably not worth the effort unless you're really into ancient American culture. There's a little bit of cool math and science, too. |
The Mayan Prophecies