How the Modern Prophecy Was Built

Popular writing linking the Maya calendar to a coming world-transformation dates to the 1970s. Jose Arguelles's 1987 book The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology fused the Long Count with New Age numerology and named that August the Harmonic Convergence, a mass meditation event Arguelles presented as the opening of a twenty five year countdown ending in December 2012. John Major Jenkins, writing through the 1990s, added the claim that the 2012 date marked a rare alignment of the sun with the centre of the galaxy as seen from earth, an astronomical claim professional astronomers have not supported as either rare or precisely dated to that year.

Through the 2000s the combined idea spread rapidly through books, documentaries and internet forums, reaching a mass audience with the 2009 disaster film 2012. Scholars of Maya history and religion who examined the sourcing found almost none of it in Maya texts themselves; both Matthew Restall and Amara Solari's history of the phenomenon and Robert Sitler's study of its New Age appropriation trace the specific claims to twentieth century non-Maya writers layering their own ideas onto a date whose only secure ancient attestation says nothing apocalyptic at all. The date passed on 21 December 2012 without the predicted event.

Sources 2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya ApocalypseMatthew Restall and Amara Solari with The 2012 Phenomenon: New Age Appropriation of an Ancient Mayan CalendarRobert K. Sitler