The Aztec Calendar And The Eve Of Destruction
It was carved during the reign of the 6th Aztec monarch in 1479. The stone was dedicated as in many cultures to its principal god – the sun. The giant disk has mythological and astronomical significance. It weighs about 25 tons,is 12 feet across, and it is 3 feet thick.
The Mexicans, as most other Meso-Americans, believed in the periodic destruction and re-creation of the world. The “Calendar Stone” as it is known rests in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, Mexico and depicts in its central panel the date 4 Ollin, on which they anticipated that the current world as we know it would be destroyed by earthquake, and within it the dates of previous holocausts. According to the Aztecs, earth’s earliest inhabitants were devoured by jaguars. The end of the second sun brought destruction by great winds. The third era ended with a fiery rain, and the fourth sun was extinguished by massive floods.
The Aztecs used this as a religious calendar. Priests used the calendar to determine luck days for such activities as sowing crops, building houses, sacrificial ceremony, and going to war. We can only wonder whether the wise priests standing straight up looking to the sky perceived some signal from the night sky of their civilization’s imminent doom.
Did they in fact forsee that only a few years from then the mighty Aztex empire would be laid to waste? That another civilization would be set upon the rubble of their structures? Did they anticipate the conquerers coming from a distant land? Could they come to know that all evidence of the Aztec culture would be systematically erased from the record and suppressed for generations to come? Did they know more than that even?
An examination of the calendar shows that the Aztecs believed that their world was destroyed and then recreated four times. Perhaps they accepted the extinquishment of their culture as part of a natural cycle? Could they have believed that the invasion of Cortez was their sign that it was time to end another great cycle in order to start all over again? The clues might be found in the calendar itself. In the lower right corner of the outer circle of the sun god is the “Atonatium” (Sun Of Water), it means The Fourth Epoch, at the end of which everything perished because of terrific storms and torrential rains that covered the earth.
Reaching the peaks of the highest mountains the gods changed all men into fishes to save them from this universal flood. The discovery of different fossilized species of marine life on top of the mountains, created the basis for this belief. Indeed it is so that fossilized remains of shell fish and other sea creatures can be found near the tops of many mountain ranges on earth. Some scientsts believe that geological forces such as the shifting of tectonic plates caused collisions among them which led to the ocean floor in some spots to be thrusted high up above sea level creating mountain peaks and elevating the fossils.
The precession of the equinoxes, also known as the Platonic Year, is caused by the slow wobbling of the earth’s polar axis. Right now this axis roughly points to Polaris, the “Pole Star,” but this changes slowly over long periods of time. The earth’s wobble causes the position of earth’s axis to slowly precess against the background of stars. It continues to move across time. At present, The winter solstice position is in the constellation of Sagittarius. But 2000 years ago it was in Capricorn. Since then, it has precessed backward almost one full sign about every 2,000 years.
The Aztecs it seems did know their stuff because as it turns out on the winter solstice in the year 2012, the sun will be aligned with the center of the Milky Way galaxy for the first time in about 26,000 years. This means that whatever energy typically streams to Earth from the center of the Milky Way will indeed be disrupted or enhanced on On December 21, 2012 at 11:11 p.m., the date when the Calendar’s “Long Count” will mark the end of a 5,126-year era, and perhaps the end of another long cycle of birth and destruction.
POST SCRIPT
“2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl”, is a book which has been selling thousands of copies a month since its recent release and counts more than 40,000 in print so far. The popularity of the book builds on popular interest in the Aztecs, partly fueled by Mel Gibson’s 2006 film about Mayan civilization, “Apocalpyto”.