The Mayan Creation Event
A conjunction of a solstice or an equinox sunrise and the galactic equator will happen once every 6,442 years. The winter solstice conjunction happens only once every 25,771 years. What makes this even more significant is that it is also the end of a 5,125-year cycle of the Long Count. If you multiply the length of the Long Count by five, you get a total of 25,625 years, very close indeed to one cycle of precession.
Jenkins suggests that each of these five could correspond to one of the five worlds of creation. The Long Count would then be just one-fifth of an even bigger precessional calendar. This neatly ties up the five worlds of creation found in the Popol Vuh, with the conjunction of the place of creation and the sun on December 21, 2012. These events happening together, he suggests, perfectly mark the creation event at the ending of a whole preces-sional cycle.
The Mayan idea of creation may seem quite strange to us, but they attribute creation and birth to the end of a cycle, rather than the beginning. For example, the birth of a child follows its gestation period of approximately 260 days, or one Tzolkin. Each of the Mayan time cycles was named after its last day, not its first. In Mayan prophecy, it was the last day that determined the oracle for the time period.
Cycles that finish on an Ahau day are of particular significance. This happens in the 260-day Tzolkin, at the end of every twenty-year katun and the end of the thirteen baktuns on December 21, 2012, which is the day 4 Ahau. According to Jenkins, this is creation day, when the New Sun emerges from the cave of creation. This is a date that marks the shifting of the world ages and a cosmic re-creation. From this point of view, the thirteen baktuns of the Long Count could be seen as a planetary pregnancy leading to the birth of something entirely new.
By most estimates, precession would take about 200 years of direct observation to calculate, so the Maya may have discovered it as early as the time of the first Long Count inscriptions. Why they did not add their knowledge of the cycle to their calendar may well be explained by the fact that they encoded it into the doctrine of the five worlds of creation, although this cannot be proven.
Astrophysicists have discovered that there is a black hole at the center of our galaxy. Remarkably, the Maya had a place-name glyph associated with the entrance to the dark rift of the Milky Way that translates as “black hole.” Jenkins speculates this suggests the Maya actually knew about the black hole at the center of the galaxy.
