There has been a lot of media coverage on the misconception that the ancient Maya calendar is somehow predicting the end of the world (worse case scenario) or at least some major catastrophe in 2012. Part of the confusion stems from a misunderstanding of concepts of time which differ from those held by European cultures.
Let’s start with some background. The ancient Maya were a civilization composed of many different autonomous city states in Mesoamerica (this includes present-day Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras). Maya civilization reached its apex during a period that archaeologists call Classic Maya: a period which begins about 200 CE and lasts until 909 CE.
Classic Maya civilization is characterized by cities, pyramids, kings, and elaborate ceremonies. Above all the Maya were obsessed with sophisticated timekeeping systems. Their painted-bark books, or codices, clearly show that their astronomers had the capacity to predict celestial events, such as eclipses, accurately.
A few hundred years before the beginning of Classic Maya, Maya rulers made a fundamental revision to their calendar that would connect the rise of Maya states with their own origin myths. They invented a mountain of a time cycle—the Long Count. This was a brilliant innovation and connected the Maya and their kings all the way back to creation.
The time markers in the Mayan calendar were a form of religious and political propaganda. The Maya rulers used these complex time markers to link culturally important but cosmically mundane personal events—such as marriages, coronations, and military victories—with the history of their ancestor gods.
The Maya calendar is a complex system of symbols to mark periods of time. The smallest unit of this calendar is the kin or day. A period of 20 kin is a Uinal; a period of 360 days is a Tun; a period of 7200 days is a katuun; and a period of 144,000 days is a baktun. This calendar is a series of interlocking cycles.
Day Zero—the first day of the Maya calendar—occurred on August 11, 3114 BCE. Thirteen baktun later, on December 21, 2012, the cycle of the Maya calendar ends and December 22, 2012 is again Day Zero. So what does Day Zero represent?
The European concept of time sees time as linear. Thus, time has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Within this concept of time, the idea of prophesying the end of the world seems to be natural. In fact, there have been many European and American prophets who have predicted the end of time. Some modern American prophets seize upon the Mayan Day Zero as evidence of the end of the world, or perhaps the end of the world as we know it. Without any understanding of Maya culture, or the Mayan concepts of time, they are able to incorporate this date into their own apocalyptic worldview.
While it is common today to visualize the Mayan calendar as well as the other calendar systems found in Mesoamerica as a series of cogged wheels, the Maya did not see time as mechanical, relentless, or linear. Time was a series of cycles. Time was something that could be slowed down, and even stopped, through ceremony.
While Day Zero marks a creation, this is not the beginning of time since time has neither a beginning nor an end. There are many creation cycles and the coming Day Zero simply marks the beginning of a new calendar period. While the Mayan astronomers could accurately foretell many events in the heavens, there is no indication that they foresaw any cataclysm to mark the new Day Zero.