Let's hope Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce and Jeane Dixon are wrong.These psychics predicted the world would experience a cataclysmic event -- perhaps a meteor strike or a reversal of Earth's electromagnetic poles -- in 2012. That's the year the Mayan calendar ends.
This year, the History Channel (cable Channel 58) is showing "Doomsday 2012: The End of Days," a program about predictions that link such an event to the Mayan calender. The show also points to changes in Earth's climate as possible signs of future disaster.
Hollywood plans to capitalize on doomsday predictions with the filming this year of "2012," a family action-adventure based on the Mayan calendar and directed by Tom Dey for Paramount Pictures' Nickelodeon Movies.
Mark Thompson, a Mayan culture expert and director of the El Paso Museum of Archaeology, is familiar with the History Channel series. He doesn't believe it.
"Some of the 2012 views come from the fringe element," he said.
Thompson said the Mayan calendar was so complex that the Mayas had specialized priests to interpret them.
"The Mayas had a different concept of time than we do. For them, time is a continuum, circular rather than linear. One cycle ends and another one starts."
The cycle that the Mayas thought of as the Fifth Sun will end around Dec. 23, 2012.
"The Mayas believed the end of the Fifth Sun age is a time of great risk," Thompson said.
But that doesn't mean it's the end of the world: "I believe the end of the Fifth Sun means the beginning of a new period, in this case, the Sixth Sun," a new era.
He said other scholars who also study the Mayan culture are promoting the 2012 doomsday view and attributing it to the Mayan calendar.
They include New Age guru Jose Argüelles, leader of the 1987 Harmonic Convergence world event. Anthropologist Robert K. Sitler analyzed the writings of Argüelles and others in 2006 for Nova Religion: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, in an article titled "The 2012 Phenomenon."
"I've heard about the 2012 prediction," said Tanya Coleman, a pre-law student who has a minor in astronomy. "I saw the History Channel program about it and wondered whether the Mayas based their prediction on their astronomical studies."
The Mayan calendar also projected an alignment of the Milky Way and the sun, which occurs just every 25,800 years, at the end of the Fifth Sun. That's enough for some people to deduce the worse.
The belief that there will be some kind of catastrophe in 2012 was not limited to Mayan thinking:
Saint Malachy, a Roman Catholic archbishop in Ireland in the 12th century, reportedly predicted judgment would come to the world when the "last pope" comes on the scene on or around 2012, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia of Saints.
Giant meteors, asteroids and unusual earthquakes are apocalyptical scenarios mentioned in the Book of Revelation.
These end-time predictions have contributed to popular books by Christian writers Tim Lahaye, author of the "Left Behind" series, and Hal Lindsey, author of "The Late, Great Planet Earth."
Charles Hapgood, a scholar and former Central Intelligence Agency official who died in 1982, advocated the polar shift theory, a view supported by Albert Einstein.
Hapgood published a book on the topic, "The Path of the Pole," and Einstein wrote the foreword for it. A polar shift changes the locations of the north and south poles, and creates vast changes in Earth's climate, Hapgood said. In the past, he said, a previous polar shift probably caused the Ice Age.
Not everyone is fixated on the end times, of course.
The Rev. Ed Roden-Lucero, a Roman Catholic priest and pastor of San Juan Diego Church, said the Catholic Church does not teach that the world will end with Armageddon-like destruction.
"The resurrection will be a time of joy because it means Jesus Christ will return," he said.
Jaime Padilla, a Conservative Jew, said Jews don't believe the world will end in 2012. "We believe that Messiah (the savior) will come one day, but we don't believe in an Armageddon, and we don't believe in a hell."
The publicity, Internet chatter, books and more movies inspired by the 2012 predictions of doom are reminiscent of the 2000 Y2K scare, when many people believed a computer software glitch would lead to world collapse. As it turned out, of course, nothing major happened.
Thompson said the same thing will happen again.
"The day after the 2012 winter solstice," he said," people will be back at a Starbucks cafe drinking coffee while the next big doomsday plot is hatched."
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