Yesterday's New York Times magazine had an interesting piece on the assorted crazies that have combined the ancient ur-myth of Armageddon with the slightly less ancient Maya long count calendar in order to fixate on December 21, 2012 as the likely date for the end of the world. (13.0.0.0.0 in Maya notation.)Polls apparently indicate that up to half of all Americans believe in the literal truth of the Book of Revelation, which fosters credence in the notion that a select few will survive a conflagration which will serve to usher in a flawless (i.e. not especially diverse and pluralistic) society.
Except that this Maya-inflected Armageddon is more in touch with its feminine side. More of a semi-colon than a full stop, it will signal, the New Age nutjobs tell us, a reconcilliation of infinity and finitude, time and eternity, a sudden downpour of new revelations, and a universal synchronisation with the wave harmonic of history.
Leading 2012 prophet John Major Jenkins insists that the end of the current world-age cycle is all about renewal through galactic alignment. "It's certainly nothing as simplistic [or as easy to disprove just by waiting and seeing through unsynchronised] as the end of the world," he adds.
Yet according to José Arguelles (a.k.a. Vultan Votan, Closer of the Cycle), organiser of the Harmonic Convergence event back in 1987, there will be a lot fewer of us post-2012,"with simpler lifestyles, solar technology, garden culture and lots of telepathic communication". The planet will be freed from the dissonance of Western scientific thinking. And those billions of people that don't get with the programme will be taken away in silver ships.
The connections between the thinking of the religious right and the spiritual, multi-dimensional left are obvious and fairly scary.
Perhaps the much-maligned London 2012 logo has some glyphic resonance that Lord Coe has neglected to tell us about?
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