Jose Arguelles, born Joseph Anthony Arguelles on 24 January 1939 in Rochester, Minnesota, to a Mexican and American family, earned a doctorate in art history and aesthetics from the University of Chicago and spent years teaching at colleges including Princeton University, the University of California, Davis, the San Francisco Art Institute and Evergreen State College. His academic training in art history sat alongside a growing interest in the Maya calendar and in what he read as its implications for human consciousness.
That interest produced his best known book, The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology, published in 1987 in conjunction with the event he organized that August, the Harmonic Convergence, a globally coordinated set of gatherings he presented as marking a pivotal shift in planetary consciousness tied to the Maya calendar. It was among the first events of its kind to draw wide public and media attention to New Age calendar prophecy, and it set the template that later fed into the 2012 phenomenon. Before his calendar work, Arguelles had already published serious academic and popular writing on art history, including studies of Charles Henry's scientific aesthetics and of the psychedelic and consciousness movements of the 1960s, so the turn toward Maya calendar prophecy built on an existing career rather than beginning it from nothing.