Rescheduling Doomsday

Archaeologists in Guatemala have uncovered a large Mayan mural that provides even more evidence for what they have been trying to tell people all along: The Maya never predicted the end of the world at all, much less in 2012. I discussed this in a post earlier this year (“The Mayan Prophecy”), that the doomsday prediction was based on a widespread misunderstanding of the Mayan long count calendar (in which 2012 is simply the last year before a new calendar begins, just as December marks the end of our calendar).

The recently discovered mural was created by Mayan scribes more than a thousand years ago, and it shows dates extending far beyond our current time. One of the archaeologists who helped decipher the glyphs, David Stuart, said that not only did the Maya not believe the world was going to end in December 2012, but “the Mayan calendar is going to keep going for billions, trillions, octillions of years into the future. Numbers we can’t even wrap our heads around.”

Of course, this doesn’t mean that 2012 isn’t an extraordinary year in its own right. Just last week, the world witnessed the rare transit of Venus, an event that won’t occur again until the year 2117. Perhaps you were one of many who watched footage of the June 6 transit or even witnessed it directly through a telescope, the planet a small black dot against our enormous home star.

The event provided multiple opportunities for scientific research but is also remarkable astrologically. Now that Venus is in retrograde, it’s influence is personal. Take advantage of this time for a deeper look at your relationships as well as what they reflect back about you—who you are as well as who you can be, now and into the long future ahead. After all, the end of the world isn’t around the corner, but new beginnings and reinventions are.

Now is the time. Our own transits around the sun are all too brief.

Sources: “Unprecedented Maya Mural Found”; Astrodynamics

Image credit: Venus (the black dot) in transit across the sun. Photo by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft.