Have you any plans for December 21st, 2012? If so, you may want to hold off on making reservations - since there's a slight chance that the Universe may have ended the day before.
The Mayan civilization of Central America was, and is, the most obsessively calendrical in human history. Mayas use at least six calendars: a domestic 360-day yearly calendar (with five Very Bad Luck Days added to its end); a 260-day religious year (itself the product of unequal interlocking cycles of days); astronomical charts of lunar and planetary movements; and, over all, the Long Count: a reckoning of the exact number of days since the creation of this version of the Universe - which happened on August 11th, 3114 BC. We don't know if it was before or after lunch.
The Long Count is primarily in base 20, expressed to five places; today's date, for instance, is 12.19.16.10.12. This means that, despite the huge expanse of time it covers, the Long Count's cycle must begin again, just as the best old cars' odometers must return to zero. The current epoch ends on December 20th, 2012 - hence the general sense of anxious expectation. Even Hollywood is marking the date with a colossal disaster movie, coming out later this year. Why so early? Well, if the Universe really is coming to an end, they'll want to recover at least some of the DVD-rental income.
Humans have a fraught relationship with time, because we are intimately aware that it is both cyclical and linear. We track the recurring phenomena of tide, moon, and season - and note the similar cycles in our own bodies. It is easy to come to believe in a benevolent order to things, a "cycle of life" ensuring that the future will be as beautiful as today. At the same time, we know that life isn't a cycle, at least in local terms: animals age and die, land becomes exhausted, states rise and fall. It's not much comfort to believe that things eventually cancel out if you're the one being cancelled. The Mayas were particularly conscious of this: as one of the only complex civilizations able to survive in the poor soils of the rain forest, they had to keep track, not just of the whirling seasons, but their own progress as they slashed and burned their way through an unforgiving jungle. Years might roll around, but the Long Count drove ever forward.
Humans owe their dominion over the earth to their capacity for symbols; by letting little concepts stand for vast realities, we can anticipate and manipulate events using these paltry 10-watt, 10Hz processors we keep in our skulls. The price we pay for symbolic thought, though, is obsessive interest in the symbols themselves: what we do can soon appear to be what is. The rules become the game; we lose the ability to recognize chance - and plunge into superstition. Every crack you don't step on makes the next far more important to avoid. Thus for the Mayas, the need for close management of limited resources became a complex and frightening theological program, in which tiring deities passed on to each other the burden of time, refreshed at each hand-over by the blood of human sacrifice. The overlapping calendrical cycles prevented that dreadful moment when no god was responsible and time could be dropped forever. Western culture has had similarly tense moments at both millennia (although it's only right to point out that our own count is probably off by about three years).
And why am I telling you this? Is it because I turn 50 this week? I know that one day is not intrinsically more important than another, and that time's river flows fast or slow depending on the interest of the moment - so I trust the Universe will not be ending on Saturday.
If you enjoy these stories of inevitable human fallibility, you can find a new one every day on my sister site, Bozo Sapiens (http://bozosapiens.blogspot.com). See you there.
