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Originally posted by whyamIhere
I have to admit...
I don't trust a preacher trying to make money.
But, as far as I can tell.
The Mayans were not trying to sell a book.
Originally posted by stereologist
reply to post by superman2012
Destroyed is destroyed. It doesn't say, "moved into a new age of enlightenment".
What does destroyed mean? Does it mean erasing a slate or a complete and utter destruction? In many of the myths the events are more of a wiping of the slate in which only some of what has been done is destroyed.
Originally posted by phishyblankwaters
reply to post by superman2012
Source? Everything is open to interpretation. Even how modern academics read the mayan calendar. This is an excerpt about the mayan calendar.
Source? the calendar itself, it's a cyclic calender, 2012 (though not actually 2012 for us, our count is way off) is the end of once cycle and the beginning of a new one.
All interpretations that say otherwise are always connected to a BOOK that is for SALE. The Mayans predicted nothing, and if you'd take 3 minutes of your life to go read what actual Mayan scholars are saying, you'd see why most of us are so over this 2012 crap it's sickening to even see threads pop up.
Originally posted by FraternitasSaturni Just so ppl get one thing straight. The mayan prophecies were never about the end of the world. It is suppose to happen something yes, a form of enlightenment, a new era or age, the discovery of something important and some even relate it to aliens or atlantis taking into account all the myths and mysteries surrounding that particular civilization... or could be something as simple as a change in cycle of the earth like today's "new year". But never, ever was about the end of the world.
A cyclical interpretation is also noted in Maya creation accounts, in which the present world and the humans in it were preceded by other worlds (one to five others, depending on the tradition) which were fashioned in various forms by the gods, but subsequently destroyed.
The date is based on the long count calendar. The calendar is set to wrap on that date. It catches people's eyes just as the odometer on a car turning many digits at once. The end of the long count can be converted to our Gregorian system by using what is known as a correlation. Dates are matched up using various techniques. The correlation is given a name, the GMT correlation. Those are the initials of 3 Mayan scholars. Not everyone agrees and so there are several of these correlations. The matter of leap years is not important since the correlation addresses the issue of the differences of the calendars.
Originally posted by FraternitasSaturni
Just so ppl get one thing straight.
The mayan prophecies were never about the end of the world. It is suppose to happen something yes, a form of enlightenment, a new era or age, the discovery of something important and some even relate it to aliens or atlantis taking into account all the myths and mysteries surrounding that particular civilization... or could be something as simple as a change in cycle of the earth like today's "new year".
But never, ever was about the end of the world.
Leap year was just one example but what you say here doesn't convince me that our 12/21/12 "correlated calculation" is accurate so I feel no need to try to convince you further.
Can you give me a source for you saying they knew nothing about "Precesion" I always thought they were #-hot when it came to astronomy (but then ' could never get my head around why "experts" with this wisdom would sacrafice humans). Something is not quite right.
Some people claim that the Maya (or their predecessors - for convenience, I refer to them all as Maya) knew about the precession of the equinoxes and tried to follow the precession using their Long Count, and that the period of the precession of the equinoxes was exactly 65 baktuns long according to the Maya. However, I have seen no indications that the Maya knew the precession, except for this rough correspondence between the period of the precession and 65 baktuns, and that correspondence could very well be a coincidence. (See at the bottom of this page for a discussion of coincidence.)
To detect precession, one needs to measure the position of the Sun between the stars in the sky very accurately and then compare those positions that were measured a century or more apart, because precession is very slow. 100 years of precession causes the phenomena of a particular star at a particular time of day to occur about one day sooner (compared to the solstices and equinoxes), or on the same day about 5 minutes earlier. However, I've not heard of any Maya texts that record measurements of the positions of one or more stars with sufficient accuracy to be able to make these kinds of comparisons.
Moreover, the period of the precession when the Long Count was invented was not equal to 65 baktuns = 25,626 Julian years, and the period of the precession is not constant anyway. In the year −500 the period of the precession was about 25,998 years and in the meantime it has declined to about 25,744 years. Only around the year 3176 will the period of the precession be equal to 65 baktuns.
Well it a LOT of cultures have vanished without a trace.