CULTURE | NAB Communities Podcast: Dr. Robert Sitler on 2012 Discovery

Six years ago I published what was the first academic assessment of what has become known as the “2012 phenomenon,” a worldwide social movement that focuses intense speculation on the significance of the soon-approaching close of the 13th pik cycle in the Mayan Long Count calendar at the end of this year. Unfortunately, my 2006 article in the Religious Studies journal Nova Religio, “New Age Appropriation of an Ancient Mayan Calendar,” erroneously asserted that not a single Mayan hieroglyphic text made reference to the December 21, 2012 date. In fact, the now-famous Monument 6 text from the Mexican site of Tortuguero was already known to expert epigraphers at that time. Thanks to recent work by scholars such as Barbara MacLeod, Sven Gronemeyer and Mark Van Stone, we now have not only a thoughtfully crafted translation of Monument 6, but we also have a clue as to what at least some ancient Maya believed would happen in 2012. This text states explicitly that a war deity named Bolon Yokte’ will make a “display in the great return” later this year. Bolon Yokte’ is a being, or group of beings, that was present at previous major cycle changes in the Mayan calendar and who was later associated with famine and societal hardship in the colonial-period Chilam Balam books from the Yucatan.

As my follow-up article on the 2012 phenomenon went to press this past week (coming out in August in Nova Religio), a stunning announcement came from Guatemala’s Presidential Palace that a second Mayan text had been discovered with a reference to 2012. Apart from appreciating the wonderful coincidence of this text’s excavation precisely in the year 2012, I was relieved that my publisher allowed me to make a few last minute changes including this important find in my article. The newly discovered text, unearthed as part of a stairway of hieroglyphic writing in April and May, commemorates the arrival at a city now known as La Corona in Guatemala’s Petén by the famed leader of the massive urban center of Calakmul, Yuknoom Yich’aak K’ahk’. Unfortunately, the glyphs, deciphered by master epigrapher David Stuart, add little to our knowledge about how the ancient Maya viewed the 2012 date. The scribe merely makes reference to the date, placing the great Maya lord’s visit to town within a vast temporal context. Even though the La Corona hieroglyphs do not significantly expand our understanding of 2012, they do make clear that the previously discovered Monument 6 text from Tortuguero was not an isolated case and that the close of the 13th pik this coming winter solstice held the interest of the ancients across a broad area of the Mayan world. For more information on the new find, see: http://decipherment.wordpress.com/2012/06/30/notes-on-a-new-text-from-la-corona/

 Hear Dr. Robert Sitler discuss the significance of the Maya prophecies and Longcount calendar to modern Maya culture on the NABCommunities podcast: