LONGMONT, Colo.—Call Karen Majorowski the Calendar Girl.
Since 2006, the Longmont resident has created a yearly Mayan calendar that acts as a planner and journal, depicting each day’s deity, energy and color.
Majorowski, a former nurse who has a passion for the healing arts, said she became interested in the topic after watching a documentary about the Mayan calendars, especially that of the Long Count calendar, which points to an end date of Dec. 21, 2012.
An end to what, though, remains a mystery.
“It was just a huge revelation that captured my interest and imagination,” she said.
“2012 is about a shift in the poles. I’m not a doomsday advocate, but I’m not sure what it’s going to look like. But I do believe in the human potential to not destroy the world and to shift from a world that loves power to a world that believes in the power of love.”
John Major Jenkins, a Fort Collins-based scholar in the ancient Maya culture, was recently in Europe on a speaking tour. His work, including four books and an audio presentation, tries to unravel the mysteries of the Maya calendar, he said through an e-mail.
“The philosophy, cosmology, spirituality, astronomy and teachings connected with 2012 can be found preserved within various Maya traditions,” he said.
New Age believers anticipate an end of times, while naysayers criticize the apocalyptic meaning of this date.
Either way, Jenkins said the 2012 date is “a true artifact of the Maya calendar tradition.”
Jenkins explained that the Maya people devised many calendars, but the core was the 260-day sacred calendar that was based on the nine-month period of gestation.
The Maya believed in many different domains of nature and astronomical phenomena, and so these calendars worked in harmony, Jenkins said.
Yet these different calendar systems all culminate on Dec. 21, 2012.
“It’s quite clear that the Maya intended Dec. 21, 2012, to target a rare alignment within the cycle of the precession of the equinoxes,” Jenkins said. “The meaning of this date, properly understood, is that cycle endings promise a transformation and renewal, not a fated cataclysmic destruction of the world.”
On this date—the winter solstice—the sun aligns with the Milky Way, Jenkins said, and this alignment occurs within a star-rich region of the Milky Way that anyone can see on a late midsummer’s night between the constellations of Sagittarius and Scorpio.
He said this scientific calculation, made by the Maya more than 2,000 years ago, was encoded into their beliefs about how humanity, the cosmos and the world began and symbolizes the renewal of humanity.
“That’s the nub of what we can really say about 2012,” he said.
Unfortunately, the date has been “muddied” by misconception, he said, leading some to believe or perpetuate that the date has a more sinister significance.
“In a sense, 2012 is a cosmological Rorschach test,” he said. “You can encounter it in the most superficial and distorting way, or you can choose to dive deep into the thing in itself, the real tradition behind it.”
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