I was attending a meeting of the Pan American Institute former classmates when one of them, my friend Julio Perez, broached the subject of the Popol Vuh and their relationship to the world end in 2012.
With the advent of the new movie "2012 WE WERE WARNED" has become popular as discussion of the alleged prophecies of the Popol Vuh, the Mayan calendar and the end of the world as we know, with all the disasters, massacres and other calamities usually associated with biblical prophecies. Needless to say that religion has been historically based on fright, suggestion and fear. All this is very convenient for a thriller as it is currently presented in theaters.
The human being requires a certain level of adrenaline, which can be acquired in a football game, in a horror film or a roller coaster. People pay a large sum of money, take a plane with their children, traveling for almost four hours to Orlando, Florida, pay a hotel, car rental, tickets for all members of the family and goes to a park where then up to 45 minutes in a row to rise an attraction for 45 seconds where they are terrified to the core pirouetting in a mechanical device, but at the end they are all happy, commenting on how terrible was the experience.
Well, as Hollywood producers and writers of tragedy were won by the terms of the prophecies of Nostradamus, who claimed that their alleged predictions as the world ended in 1970, then in 1985, later in 1990, for then change the date to 2000, until they got to forget the matter, so they had to take a number of historical inconsistencies to assemble an Armageddon that would serve to inaugurate the new special effects.
The Popol Vuh is a book not recovered from the Mayan civilization, even the title of the book is not from the Mayas. The Popol Vuh is a supposed translation of a Mayan writings that have never been found or shown in the hieroglyphics of Tchizen Itza, Tikal, Copan or Balmopal, or any archaeological discovery.
The book is a write from a Christian priest of the seventeenth century, Fray Francisco Ximenez. According to him, it was written from an original developed by the Quiche Indians in the sixteenth century using the Roman alphabet, guarded by the Maya-speaking people, and entrusted to him in the seventeenth century. Keep in mind that the Spanish with their ignorance of biblical proportions, from the late fifteenth century, coming from a country where non-Christians were burned alive, undertook the task of systematically destroy all the writings of both Maya and all other American civilizations. The Mayan civilization, or what we know as Mayas, a generic name used by the Spanish to name those who spoke that language, had its greatest development in the 10th century A.C. This is 500 years before the Spanish arrived. Upon arrival these Europeans the population was reduced to 10% in the first 25 years of colonization. Exactly, disappeared 90% of the Maya-speaking population, a product of the killings, European diseases for which the Indians had no antibodies, but mainly because the settlers use all young men marching toward the gold mines, forced to work to extermination, while fertile women stay working the land with little chance to reproduce. Quiches are likely to have put their beliefs through oral tradition, but of course, mixed with European religion imposed by force. This is not surprising and has occurred throughout history. If not, then I refer to Santeria, a blend of Christianity with African deities all mixed to circumvent the imposition of a Christian and later joins to the rite.
So the good priest Ximénez took Quiché documents written in Latin characters and translated them into Spanish. After many tours of the priest originals they were published in 1861 by French missionary and also priest Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bour, who took them to France and published under the name developed by himself: "Popol Vuh, Le Livre Sacré et les mythes de l'Antiquité Américaine”. None of the chapters of the Popol Vuh speak of the extinction of the planet. The book contains a group of writings in which they develop his idea of the creation of the world by the gods, conflicts between the gods and the creation of human beings after several failed attempts. Admiration for the corn, that was their basic food and therefore sacred and the genesis of civilization.
So the movie makers inserted this apocryphal writing in real archaeological discoveries of the Mayan civilization, especially its religious calendar or Tzoltin, which is much more accurate than the Gregorian. Based on lunar cycles, with 4 phases of 7-day gives a total of 28 days for thirteen moons and give a year of 364 days plus a green day. Instead we use the Gregorian months of 30, 31 and even 28 days, plus one of 29 every four years. But the Maya also had the Haab, used by civilians, of 18 periods of 20 days each plus five extra at the end. And a third, the long one, counts from the start. It is a cycle of 1872 million days. As some believe it started on 13 August 3114 BC, according to his calculations this cycle ending December 23, 2112. Some will move deliberately to 21 to match the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere and others pull it to match thearrival of a comet course.
What seems contradictory, but at bottom it turns out, is that many of the most fanatical followers of this cataclysm movement are themselves earnest Christians. It turns out that some people with their dark consciences because of their many bad actions are willing to believe anything to you wash their actions or to punish themselves with fire for their sins and shameful deeds, that to embrace martyrdom for flagellates themselves but they don’t matter in passing in their minds fevered they will carry with them the rest of humanity.
Some of these devout Christians have found similarities between the Popol Vuh and the Bible. I will not contradict. It is very possible that some of the writings of Maya oral tradition has been edited by the good priest Ximenez, who must have crisscrossed the Mayan tradition with the Bible and through this soup proselytize the indigenous population that survived the great slaughter that systematically developed his countrymen, the Spanish that invaded their lands.
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