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Photo by Dani Voirin from Small World Stories. Dani has more than 60 new photographs in the 2008 annual edition of Planet Waves. |
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From Small World Stories
THE ASTROLOGY of 2008 puts us onto the final approach to 2012. Turn on your radar, buckle up, chuck the ginger ale and drop your landing gear: the Age of Technology is approaching the runway.
The year 2012 has been tossed around as something special since Jose Arguelles created the Harmonic Convergence in 1987. With that event, he called attention to the Mayan
Long Count, a calendar of approximately 1.87 million days used by the Maya in what is now Mexico and Guatemala. Something called the 13th baktun ends on Dec. 21, 2012, concluding a 5,125-year cycle. Notably, this cycle predates the Maya themselves, whose mathematicians dealt in very long spans of time extending before and after their own existence.
More recently, author
John Major Jenkins proposed an astronomical theory for why the Mayans chose our particular era for the cycle to end. He suggests that it involves the alignment of the position of the winter solstice Sun with the dark band that runs through the center of the Milky Way galaxy (called the
Road to Xibalba).
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Detail showing three columns of glyphs from 2nd century CE La Mojarra Stela 1. The left column gives a Long Count date of 8.5.16.9.9, or 156 CE. The two right columns are glyphs from the Epi-Olmec script. Pic: Wikipedia. |
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Due to the precession effect (that is, the very slow wobble of the Earth on its axis), the winter solstice point gets a little earlier every year (advancing a bit more than a degree per century). The same is true for the first day of all the seasons. The precession effect is usually used to measure the astrological/astronomical age. We are familiar with the concept from the Age of Aquarius theme, wherein the
Aries Point (the first degree of the Western zodiac or the first day of spring), is moving into the constellation Aquarius.
Jenkins asks a very good question. Maybe it's not the constellation that the Aries Point is in that's the true marker of our cosmic alignment, as we usually think. Maybe it's the point 90 degrees away, where Capricorn begins. Maybe that's where we need to be looking for information about an accurate calculation of the cosmic epoch. Most Planet Waves readers are familiar with the Aries Point and its astonishing connections between personal and global events.
Jenkins proposes that we have one of the cardinal points (the first degrees of the cardinal signs Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn) aligning with something tangible: the dark band running through the Galactic Core. Notably, it is the last of the four points, involving Capricorn -- the sign of corporations, government and the structure of society. All of the 2012 theories, whether friendly, cataclysmic or both (most are not so friendly, by the way), involve changes to the structure of society, whatever else they may touch upon.
This is a cool theory. It helps explain why the Aries Point (which is shorthand for all four of the cardinal points or the four directions) is so hot these days. It actually (in his theory) involves the
Capricorn Point aligning with this dark band in the center of the galaxy, which then brings in the Aries Point. When events focus on the Aries Point, we get an idea of why it's so dependably connected to events that ripple through the lives of millions, and which we tend to feel so personally (an example of an Aries Point event was Sept. 11, 2001). Jenkins' theory provides a comprehensible link between Western and Mayan astrology, something that has been lacking throughout this whole discussion. Some astrologers have looked at that 2012 chart and claimed it contains nothing special, hence, 2012 cannot be that important. (Just because someone does not understand a chart does not mean it does not have meaningful information.)
