The Truth of the Mayan Calendar

Mattias Almlöf, who previously has been blogging about the Mayan calendar, has now instead attacked it claiming that it is a fraud that is part of a new world order. See Mayan Calendar- a fraud or truth on http://mayancalendar.blogspot.com/2007/09/coba-stone-fraud-or-truth.html. Not only myself, but also Gorbachev, the World Health Organization, Alex Jones, David Icke, JES Thompson, Barbara Hand Clow, Osama bin Laden, the world religions, The Mayan elders and New Age also seem in his view to be part of this conspiracy and it is not clear who, except for Mattias himself, that he does not include in it. Almlöf asserts that the Mayan calendar is a fraud, a strange word in this context, since it would imply that someone has falsified data or has a hidden agenda for personal gain. The reader who is looking for some juicy revelation in his text is however likely to be disappointed, not surprisingly since no such fraud can be found in my work. I cannot tell for certain, but it seems that what he is proposing as an alternative to the Mayan calendar is a world view where there is no divine plan or higher purpose and we are all going to fall under the spell of a new world order. To me such nqa prospect seems to be to go back to square one.

I would however like to take some responsibility for the fact that only a small portion of the evidence for the Mayan calendar has so far been published. I will try to make up for it in a forthcoming book about biological evolution, but will also address the two concrete points that Almlöf has raised to prove that the Mayan calendar is a ”fraud”, the Coba Stone and the end date of the Long Count proposed among others by JES Thompson.

The Coba Stone, which today incidentally is so badly eroded that it is hard to read, can of course be interpreted in many ways. If you were to ask the regular tour guides in Mexico

this stone is just a superstition that lacks meaning, essentially what Almlöf is saying. Almlöf says that the stone is a fraud, but what does he mean by that? Does he mean that the scribes that erected the stone some fifteen hundred years ago were fraudulent or does he mean that the stone itself is a fraud and not really having the origin that it is claimed? No academic Mayanist would however be likely to agree with him in either meaning he gives to fraud. He also claims that the stele shows a date around AD 1600, quite in contrast to scholars who look upon it as a marker of a creation date and pointing to the ancient Mayan view of several creations (see Freidel, Schele and Parker’s Maya Cosmos from 1993). No Mayanist would seriously assert like him that the number of time periods in the various Underworlds would be fourteen. Anyone who has met any Mayan elder or knows the least about their calendar system knows that thirteen was a most holy number embedded in their world view of cyclical time and in this regard the Coba Stone is no exception. The evidence that the Long Count was made up of thirteen baktuns and the short counts among the Post-Classical Maya was thirteen katuns is overwhelming and Almlöf may be alone in the world in disputing this.

When it comes to the correlation of the long count and the Gregorian calendar upon which current ”end dates” of the calendar have been computed I would like to refer to

http://members.shaw.ca/mjfinley/corr.html. Ultimately the GMT correlation that today most every Mayanist accepts in one of its forms (584 283, 584 284 or 584 285) is based on back calculations from so called ”short counts” 13- katun periods recorded in the post-colonial period and then substantiatied by many other findings such as carbon-14 datings. It seems Almlöf has not found the relevant books to read about this, but then again it also seems premature to conclude from just one book written in 1927 that he has read taht there is no evidence for the GMT correlation. Of course, every one has the right to his own opinion, but this is a question that an enormous amount of effort by scholars has gone into over at least the

past hundred years and I feel it is unfair to that collective effort to take it so lightly.

As I have pointed out in my books I agree with the GMT (584 283) archaeologically speaking, but based among other things on indications in Palenque that this start date needed to be corrected, and the necessity of ending the creation cycles on a day that is 13 Ahau, I have concluded that energetically the completion of the Underworlds take place on the date October 28, 2011, rather than on December 21, 2012. (See for instance the recent speech by Don Alejandro at the Guatemalan presidential inauguration talking about the prophecy of 13 Ahau).

The thing is that if you look upon creation as organized in Nine Underworlds,

each subdivided into thirteen Heavens, all of evolution makes sense. History as well as

biological evolution then become clear expression of time energies, whichever way you slice it. The basic criterion for the acceptance of a scientific theory is that it should explain as many facts as possible with the simplest intellectual structure and personally I find it absolutely clear that the Mayan calendar meets this criterion. It should also be able to predict previously unknown phenomena from this structure. And there is an interesting example of this: In my first book Solving the Greatest Mystery of Our Time: The Mayan Calendar (2001) I described how biological evolution takes place according to the alautun rhythm of the Mammalian Underworld (63.1 million years) something that was quite counter to the notions of Darwinist biologists. Such a (62 + 3 million years) alautun based rhythm for evolution was however verified in a study published in in 2004 Nature, the most prestigious of scientific journals
(see http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/Phys-fossil-biodiversity.html), and provides compelling evidence for the Mayan calendar and the Coba Stone in the area of biological evolution, a level of evolution that, to make the evidence even more compelling, is not impacted by human choices. The evidence is there for anyone to see and to be compared to my initial hypothesis in my first book (pages 85-108).

Does this evidence then mean that I think the Mayan calendar will be accepted anytime soon by established science? Personally, I doubt. There are enormous interests involved in denying the existence of a divine plan and the metaphysical bias of most of today’s scientists would not allow for any form of intelligent design of the universe. Quite in contrast to Newton and Einstein, who wanted to be able to read the thoughts of God, many scientists today are sworn atheists persecuting creationists and seeking to purge from science all evidence of the existence of a creator and a higher plan. Evidence for the Mayan calendar is then likely to be ignored by today’s scientific community unless for some reason it is forced to consider it seriously, in which case it will probably raise exactly the kinds of arguments against the Mayan calendar that Almlöf does. I have found that in dealings with many people truth weighs relatively light and what most people are interested in is to cement the world view they have already decided upon. What they miss out on by doing so however is the chance to be an expression of the will of God.

Carl Johan Calleman,

Seattle 10 Eb, 9. 3. 12

of the Galactic Underworld (January 29, 2008)