Oh, you’re going to hear a lot of it approaching 2012. And I just saw one of the most atrocious pieces of reporting on the History Channel: they ought to be ashamed of themselves.
a. Ever actually read Nostradamus? He lived during the Black Death and right next to religious upheaval, the Inquisition, and other cheerful topics, not to mention oncoming war. He didn’t compose this stuff in a paradise on earth. Small wonder he wrote what he saw—literally. AND his verses are couched in a one-size fits all disaster. Great storms. Great quakes. Wars. Plagues. Gimme break. You’ll never go broke forecasting storms, quakes, wars, and plagues. Every generation has found something to fit it.
Classic, of course, is the Delphic oracle, of whom we have a few prophecies cited from semi- historic times. One is the king in Asia Minor who sent to the oracle to know what would happen if he pursued a war of conquest against his neighbor. The Sibyl replied; “If you go to war, a mighty empire will fall.” Of course it was his. He was pretty upset. She said, “I told you so.”
In point of fact, I’ve always viewed that as a cautionary tale probably as old as Greece, because I can’t believe any head of state who really believed the oracle would be quite that stupid.
b. They cite the Roman Sibyl and her verses available today and revered by Christians… Hey, even the Romans admitted they blew it with the Sibyl and lost her original books, save one, which was incomplete without the rest of the set. And then the thing got burned, in a later disaster, so they gathered every prophecy they EVER heard of from all over their empire and put THOSE in a book for consultation. So when Vergil cited the Sibyl about the birth of the miraculous child, you have to take that with a grain of salt, particularly recalling in another section of the Aeneid he had (realworld) caused his patron Augustus’ wife to collapse in tears, referring to the ‘miracle child’ who would be born someday and yet again, namely her lost son, Marcellus. It was lucky, however, because the early Christians liked that passage and ranked him with the prophets, or we might not have Vergil today. A lot of other books weren’t passed down. Oh—and the collection of books that are currently called the Sibylline Books: written AD, the whole lot. Probably not an original Sibylline prophecy in the collection.
c. Merlin. We are told to dismiss the ‘fictional Merlin’ and are introduced to ‘the real Merlin’, about whom the TV writers seem to know an amazing lot that mediaeval researchers would love to know…I rest my case. There are some prophecies attributed to Merlin, but mostly he turns up in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Arthurian legends, and history does not know another ‘real’ Merlin.
d. The Aztec Calendar. Yep, 12/12/12…bad stuff. The world ends. Actually it’s end of cycle. Pretty long cycle, like 28,000 years, so they say, but remember, these are the people that cite Merlin and the Sibyl, so we’re not sure. In point of fact, when you have calendars based on lunar/solar observations and go on a lunar year, you get REAL long cycles, and when you play games with astronomical observations, you can get, yes, really big circles. The old Celts—I’d have to dust off my knowledge of the festivals, but 5-year cycles of 62 months, and then something involving an 84 year cycle, etc, etc. Lunar observation and eclipse data, maybe: it’s been way too long. But I’m expecting them to drag the Druids and the Babylonians (both sky-observers) into this any day now.
Go ahead and book your New Year’s Eve party for 2012. I’m pretty sure you won’t have to take a raincheck.
How about a sunspot party. That is supposed to be a peak year- and a century maximum!
You are so right about the History Channel. I’ve not had cable or satellite that carries it for about five years but I watched it a couple of weeks ago when over at my in-laws. I couldn’t believe it, going on and on about the illuminati and their secret plots with so-called experts half hidden in the shadows and creepy music galore.
Weakly based ‘historical’ entertainment wrapped up in myth and innuendo. The Misinformed Historian Channel, brought to you by the corporate hive minds and super secret conservative think tanks….Bwaa haa haa…its all a conspiracy.
🙂 But they did used to show that History channel stuff in school. I guess that’s why we still need PBS.
Okay, speaking up as the anthropology degree with the concentration in Maya Hieroglyphic Writing here!
The Maya Long Count, ending approximately December 21, 2012, has been widely misinterpreted as a doomsday thing for sensationalists ever since the first faint decipherings of the stelae and monuments were uncovered. The Maya counted in base-20 rather than base-10, thought time moved in circles, and actually had two calendars (one based on the lunar/agricultural cycle, and one for ceremonial forecasts). They needed a period of time to frame their history, hence the long count, some 5128 or so years long. This is not the first Long Count cycle. According to the mythology, there were four or five previous to this one that were various attempts by the gods to make the world and people. It is not written that at the end of each cycle the world was destroyed, merely that that seems to be the time allotted to ‘test out’ the various attempts.
Had the Maya empire survived, the end of a Long Count cycle would have been a massive party! With lots of bloodletting and head-ball playing, of course. 😀
Thank you for that breath of reason, Skitterling. 😉 Before we get to the Babylonians.
HAHAHAHAHA! Great post, CJ! Hell, I survived the first day of new millennium in the year 2000, or would it be 2001?? LOL No matter, there was no calamity on either date, as the Earth and Universe do not measure time the way humans do, I am fairly certain. People do often think strange thoughts and look for mystical meanings, as well as over-estimate their importance to the galaxy and universe. Oh, well, I gotta go feed horses and clean stalls, and the horses don’t want to hear about what’s happeneing in 2012, they just want their alfalfa. 🙂
I have to put in a word for Nostradamus because he’s just so entertaining. I recall reading him out of curiosity when I was in high school, bits that made me think: “wow, that sounds like nuclear fallout” and then Chernobyl happened. I recall somethings about an attack on the “new city” and wondering if it meant New York.
Just goes to show, he can pretty much be applied to any time period.
Yep, but ‘new city’ could be New London, or Novgorod (which means ‘new city’ and which has certainly had its ups and downs)or a hundred others in various languages. It’s that “a mighty empire will fall” thing.
Entertaining, but with the hype and misinformation already started, it’s going to have things at a fine froth by the time 2012 rolls around: I very much fear, on the grimmer side, that we’re going to have some few cults and some lives messed up: millenniums and doomsdays always bring out that sort of thing.
Given the range of calenders used by different cultures, I’ve often wondered about all the end-of-the-world-at-x-date spouted by various prophets, especially if as seems likely, some back woods sibyl on the other side of the bay/sea/pampas/ocean/whatever was probably seeing a future of great prosperity. A collision of fates…………perhaps the divergent pantheons square off in a series of divine duels over the issue, or maybe just go out to the pub?
So, 2012 isn’t going to be the Year of Years? We don’t have to worry about Hasufin stealing our souls? Whew! what a relief!
Y’know what bugs me about the whole 2012 date of doom? It’s the fact that I can’t collect consulting fees like I did for Y2k. I’ll just have to wait til 10,000 AD for the next big software data bug, I guess.
😆 Was it PT Barnum who said “You will never go broke underestimating the public?”
Don’t get me started on Y2K. DH and I had many go-arounds with normally intelligent people who were convinced that this was going to be The End Of Everything, computers were all going to disintegrate, anarchy would rule, the social contract would collapse, dogs and cats living together, etc., etc., etc. After 3 years of trying to reassure people that no, the world would not end, we had a paperbox full of documents confirming this. And guess what? We’re still here. The sheer boneheadedness of it all still makes me grit my teeth. If I had planned ahead, I could have put that box up for sale on ebay and someone could have done a doctoral thesis on all of it, people who believe weird things.
🙂
Now, I didn’t promise that, Joe. Hasufin’s still out there…getting irritable by the hour…
One of my favorite things is that the pundits are putting a lot of stock in the ‘alignment of the sun with the center of the galaxy’… Figure that one out. On the one hand, we’re always ‘aligned’ with it; but what are we and the several billion other stars in gravitational relationship with us and it supposed to do with the galactic center when we ‘align’ with it? Ha?
And another biggie is that Sagittarius is shooting an arrow into the big emptiness at the heart of it all which proves that Nostradamus (who I think had nothing to do with the paintings in question, which are not even in the style of his period) discovered black holes. Which is of course the galactic center. Well, you could be more impressed if Sagittarius didn’t come kind of unglued as a constellation if you shift position a little. Not to mention other cultures than the Greeks, Romans, and their heirs don’t see Sagittarius as an archer. Some might think of him as the Big Bunny Rabbit. Who knows?
This is such a load of it.
Heh, the Sun being aligned with the center of the galaxy… didn’t any one of those pundits go to a geometry class? Two points are always colinear! Now, if the Earth, the Sun, and the center of the galaxy made a big isosceles triangle with auspicious (or inauspicious) numbers for the interior angles and sidelengths, that might be something to ponder… 😉
Ah but Sagittarius is actually the Giant Teakettle. Look and see!:)
*grin* There’s something about fooling “…some of the people all of the time…” too.
I was cleaning my pond filter yesterday and thought of you and Jane. I’m happy that things seem to be going better for you.
Hey, as long as we are pointing fingers, what about the revered Church fathers who sat down and figured out the exact day that God created the world?
And who was the big Millenialist back around 1900? The one who got all his followers to go stand in a large field with him waiting for the Rapture?
Or taking your quarter and waiting for the big spaceship trailing Shumacher-Levy? There was a sad case.
In Lawton OK when I was a young kid we had an honest-to-gosh prophet in a long white beard and a sandwich board that proclaimed the end of the world was coming: he’d meet every bus that came into the bus station, and I rode the bus a lot (solo, in those innocent days)..and there he’d be, warning us all we were going to hell.
On the other hand, when I was a bit older, in high school, we were sitting out on the curb during a bomb scare on the eve of Yet One More Doomsday Prophecy and laying bets as to whether we should do our algebra homework or count on the end of the world. Certain idiots thought they could use it as an excuse. I, on the other hand, was never sanguine about worlds-end chances, and sat there and did my homework while the others were preparing their arguments and excuses.
Aw, you guessed the big surprise. The world didn’t end, and I earned no gratitude from my classmates, being the one with the homework on the following day.
Seen previews for the “2012” movie coming out in December? When I first saw it, I thought, They should show it on December 11th, 2012—the day before the world’s purported to end—everyone will go see it, just for kicks. If the world doesn’t end, we’ll all have a good laugh at ourselve for falling for it, and probably go to the movie again to laugh at it… and if the world does end, we’ll all congratulate ourselves for having the foresight to see the movie and prepare ourselves for the end, or we won’t be in a position to do much of anything.
In this movie, do the Aztec gods put in an appearance in New York? That’d be great special effects.
Most people don’t know this, but even the great Sir Isaac Newton, who is generally imagined today to be the very model of scientific rationality, predicted the end of the world based on Biblical considerations. (No earlier than 2060, you’ll be pleased to know.)
In fact Newton was very far from being a model scientist. He was a great believer in the most extreme kind of mystical Christianity. He spent far more time and energy on far-fetched interpretations of the Bible and on alchemy, than he did on science or mathematics.
He spent years trying to decipher hidden messages and codes in the Bible. He wrote in detail about the measurements of the Temple of Solomon and its mystical significance. He tried to discover the Philosopher’s Stone and transmute lead into gold. He wrote over a million words on alchemy, which the Royal Society condemned as “not fit to be printed”.
For an example of Newton’s writings on Biblical mysticism, see Observations Upon The Prophecies Of Daniel, and The Apocalypse Of St. John.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16878/16878-h/16878-h.htm
Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said “Let Newton be” and all was light.
Quite. This all goes to show… something or other…
😐
CJ, are you referring to the “Heaven’s Gate” cult? I believe that comet was Hale-Bopp, I don’t know what happened to comets Shumacher-Levy 1-8, but I do remember 9 hitting Jupiter.
And yes, I’m pretty sure that I’m going to have to make new lines in the house if Hasufin is still out there.
You’re right: (smiting forehead: doh!) I kept thinking of the astronomers and trying to remember their names: I should have thought of the comet instead. Hale-Bopp for sure, silly me.
Alignment with the center of the galaxy…hmmm…sort of like the fact that I am never lost because I am always directly over the center of the Earth
One was reluctant to say anything, and feels that perhaps it is better to keep one’s mouth shut (or fingers off the keyboard) at times.
Absolutely not. If you guys don’t keep me honest, who will? Thanks!
SciFi Wire did a fun summary of various Doomsday prophecies here.
Personally I always figured that Nostradamus was doing some serious drugs and probably thought that he had written some pretty cool poetry.
I’ve noticed that some of the folks who specialize in the “end of the world in 2012” stuff have started to carefully back off. In one case I know of one “writer/investigator” who has done at least one novel about 2012 is now saying that it will be an emotuional rebirth into a new world, which will look pretty much like the old one. Hmmmmm……(This is a case where, in the back of my mind I always hear that song “Doing The Sidestep” from the musical Best Little whorehouse in Texas”.)
Brad
Interesting.
I’m with you CJ — I’m seriously fed up with History channel and History International lately — all fluff, bluster and an astonishing lack of substance. Do you mutter at the TV like I do over misinformation, getting facts wrong or ignoring the latest info? Sometimes poor husband refuses to watch shows with me.
On the Nostradamus issue, he probably was a bit dotty — mercury seemed to be a prime ingredient in an awful lot of alchemical attempts, and was pretty prevelant in apothocary medicine of the day, both of which he was heavily involved with. So he probably did get close and person with fumes a lot.
With the Mayan long cycle, it’s just that! Admittedly their astronomy is amazingly accurate and sophisticated, but I really don’t think they envisioned this as the end of the world, but the end of a cycle that would be followed by another cycle.
Personally, I’d like to be hanging out at Glastonbury for that solstice, just because.