Predicting the Apocalypse? | The Story of God

But is it possible to predict the end? A few years back, many people thought they had. According to popular legend, the ancient Maya thought the apocalypse would arrive on a specific date: December 21st, 2012. I want to know if this is really true, so I've traveled to their ancient capital Tikal in Guatemala. I'm meeting Stanley Gunter, who's a world leading decoder of Mayan inscriptions.

This is the temple of the masks, and on the other side, the temple of the giant Jaguar. This would have been the very center of the ancient city of Tikal. What about those heads, tall duck and things? They're those what we call Stella. A Stella commemorates periods in the Maya calendar, so we see that they would have been dedicated to periods of time such as every 20 years, every 10 years, and especially about every 400 years. The ending of the great baktun cycles. The festival to mark the end of a baktun cycle would have culminated in the king sacrificing the captive.

Does that go to say that the Mayans felt that 2012 would be the end of time, the apocalypse? So we heard a few years ago about 2012 when people said the end of the 13th baktun was going to be the end of the world predicted by the Maya. And there's a monument down here; I think we should take a look at that.

This is Stella 10. You can see we've got a king—there's his head, big headdress full of feathers, his shoulders, all of his jewelry down to his feet. If you look down below, we can actually see we have a captive. We can see his head, we have his hands, and even down to his legs. He's all tied up for sacrifice.

So now, what does this have to do with the apocalypse? Well, we have to go around the other side here. Okay, we have a date that gives us a specific point in time. We have eleven years of 360 days. Then we have three cottons—that's about twenty years each—so we've got another sixty. And then here we have nine baktuns because this is a date of about 525 AD.

So if you remember, we had 13 baktuns ended in 2012. But the really interesting thing is this monument doesn't stop there; it goes on and tells us there were 19 of the higher unit, the peak tip, and even higher we have 11 of the next unit, and so on. Each one of those units is 20 times larger than the previous.

So what we see on this monument then is that 13 baktuns wasn't the end of any calendar; it was simply the end of one cycle within a whole series of nested cycles, each one larger than the other.