It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel pretty darn fine

Today on the History Channel there was a show about the impending doom that is supposedly happening on December 21, 2012. I did a little research on it a few days ago after my mom mentioned it but didn't get very far past this one author that wrote a series of books on it and dominates Google searches. So I was happy when everything I wanted to know was researched by other people and summed up in an hour long show complete with reenactments of oracles going crazy off of natural gas in their underground lairs.

The basis for a lot of people believing that 12-21-2012 is the end of the world is the Mayan calendar. The Mayans were amazing at calendar figuring and were able to create a calendar that is so accurate is predicts eclipses hundreds of years into the future and is even more accurate than the Gregorian calendar that we use. The Mayan calendar mysteriously stops at 12-21-2012. I guess it didn't occur to anybody that maybe they just never got around to making the calendar go any further. I mean seriously, the civilization collapsed in the 9th century due to unknown reasons. Maybe the calendar makers didn't get to go any further than the winter solstice over a thousand years in advance before the drought, or revolt, or epidemic, or whatever killed them. But that aside, there's a bunch more evidence pointing to 12-21-2012 as doomsday. First, I-Ching, those little Chinese coins that I used to use in 7th grade to tell fortunes. It consists of three coins. You flip them and write either a solid line or a broken line depending on whether you get mostly heads or mostly tails, then repeat for a total of six times. The combination of lines can be looked up in a book to produce surprisingly accurate answers to whatever question was asked. One day a scientist randomly decided one day to graph the change of the I-Ching lines, repeat it 64 times, the number of line combinations, and place it on a time line starting at I-Ching's conception. (Don't ask me why. He must've been crazy bored.) He found that peaks and valleys in the graph corresponded to major events in history like both World Wars. He also found that the graph ended exactly on December 21, 2012.

Those are the two things specifically pointing to 12-21-2012 as the end of the world. Besides those, however, there's a collection of prophecies from assorted oracles including Merlyn (not the lovable old wizard, the Celtic Myrddin who was half human, half demon and lived in the forest), the Sybil, the oracles at Delphi, a Native American shaman, and John, the author of the Book of Revelations. I can't say much about most of the oracles except that it is speculated that the Sybil and the Delphi ladies were put into their famous trances by natural gases since they did their prophesizing underground. All of the listed people, with the exception of John, kept their prophesies for the most part vague, which would allow for multiple interpretations, but have a good record of miraculous predictions. John's own frightening account of the Apocalypse, which many people say will be happening sometime within this century, can be interpreted as a warning for his own time period instead of a sight into the future. His predicts the Antichrist and uses the number 666 as the Number of the Beast. The Roman emperor Nero's name, when written in Greek and converted by numerology, equals exactly 666 and he is known for his persecution of Christians and is considered the Antichrist by some people.

Whatever time period the Book of Revelations refers to, there are still overwhelming predictions foretelling society's down fall sometime soon. What is going to happen, then? On 12-21-2012 the sun and the Earth and the center of the universe will reportedly all be in alignment for the first time in thousands of years. Nobody knows what that will cause. There is speculation that a pole shift will occur then, meaning the North and South poles will shift an unknown amount out of the regular alignment and the mantel of the Earth will shift. The poles shift a tiny amount regularly based on season, but this shift will be, if I might say, apocalyptic. This will cause our electronics to malfunction, serious earthquakes, tsunamies, storms, volcanic eruptions and a whole ton of awfulness. The magnetic field protects Earth from the sun's radiation and when that is disturbed the Earth will be pelted with horrible radiation and might burn up a bit. How fun. Keep in mind this is only a theory. A scary theory, but a theory nonetheless. Just thought you all'd like to know.

♥ j.j.