Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm very Dowdy and I'm de Blaine and chocolate boarding.
Speaker 1: And I think one thing proven throughout history is that
Speaker 1: people really love a good doomsday propaty, don't they. It's
Speaker 1: so true. Just last year, we had a lot of
Speaker 1: news about the May one potential doomsday. I remember seeing
Speaker 1: billboards and news articles about it. It was kind of
Speaker 1: a kind of a story for a while. See I
Speaker 1: must have been living underground or because I remember I
Speaker 1: was in Italy at the time and the friends I
Speaker 1: was traveling with they mentioned that that was going on,
Speaker 1: and just sort of like, oh, yeah, this is going
Speaker 1: to happen maybe away. And I remember we were debating
Speaker 1: over like, well, how will we know what the time
Speaker 1: change when it's happening, because you know, when you're in
Speaker 1: a vacation, you don't even know what day. It as
Speaker 1: a lot of time. I know, I was at a
Speaker 1: friend's wedding and I remember her saying like, well, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, at least I'm throwing a big party with
Speaker 1: all my friends and family, so attitude. Yeah it is.
Speaker 1: But today we're gonna be looking both to the past
Speaker 1: and the future, and we're going to revisit an episode
Speaker 1: recorded in two thousand and eight by former podcast host
Speaker 1: Candice and Jane, and they discuss what's perhaps the most
Speaker 1: famous doomsday possibility out there at least these days, probably
Speaker 1: because it's still to come December twenty one, twelve, and
Speaker 1: that date is of course based on the so called
Speaker 1: mind calendar, really the Long Count calendar, and the fact
Speaker 1: that will be at least coming to the end of
Speaker 1: a great cycle that started back in BC. Many other
Speaker 1: doomsday prophecies have also been connected to great calendar changes
Speaker 1: like the Long Count, or otherwise around dates. Probably all
Speaker 1: but our youngest listeners remember y two k in which
Speaker 1: people feared not so much a great apocalypse but an
Speaker 1: electronic one still enough to hoard the water. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it was scary to a lot of people. But
Speaker 1: at other points in history the predictions have also been
Speaker 1: date based, but for the sake of the date symbolic
Speaker 1: significance rather than just its roundness, like the year two thousands. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, many people in England feared the year sixteen
Speaker 1: sixty six because of that inauspicious series of numbers and
Speaker 1: the world of course didn't end, but a plague did
Speaker 1: strike the year before, and of course the Great London Fire,
Speaker 1: the Great Fire of London, I should say, occurred in
Speaker 1: sixteen sixty six, something we mentioned in our Famous Fires
Speaker 1: episode and really might have served to make people feel
Speaker 1: like potentially the world was coming to an end. Cosmic
Speaker 1: events sometimes also trigger doomsday prophecies, according to National Geographic
Speaker 1: For example, the nineteen ten appearance of Hayley's comment had
Speaker 1: folks scrambling for so called comic pills and oxygen supplies,
Speaker 1: which both were supposed to protect you from the comments
Speaker 1: tales noxious gases. Yeah, and in n the appearance of
Speaker 1: the hill pop comment um drove members of Heaven's Gate
Speaker 1: to commit suicide, expecting aliens following the comment to come
Speaker 1: rescue them. So, you know, I think this gives a
Speaker 1: pretty fair representation of all of the different kinds of
Speaker 1: reasons why people expect the apocalypse. And this was just
Speaker 1: a very small number of things we could have mentioned.
Speaker 1: But even the twelve event does have of cosmic element
Speaker 1: to it, It does have a year kind of significance
Speaker 1: to it, and we're gonna look into a little bit
Speaker 1: more about that in Candis and Jane's episode, So let's
Speaker 1: take a listen. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Speaker 1: editor Candis Gibson, joined by staff sider Jane McGrath. Hey,
Speaker 1: they're Candice Jane. Did you take time the other day
Speaker 1: to watch all of the inauguration ceremonies and television footage?
Speaker 1: Know what? I was so busy eating at a chance,
Speaker 1: But I've been watching on YouTube and all like that. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you follow it up on all the stories of fashion,
Speaker 1: the speeches, the bloopers, etcetera. Of course, it was really
Speaker 1: fun in the house Stuff Works office because a couple
Speaker 1: of us dropped our work and we went into the
Speaker 1: common room and we watched the ceremony on TV, and
Speaker 1: it was it was really special, and not just because
Speaker 1: the Obama girls looked adorable and they're brightly colored clothes. Um,
Speaker 1: and because Rick Warren pronounced their names so fancifully. I
Speaker 1: have I have to quote him. Malia and Sasha. We
Speaker 1: really couldn't get enough. We've been saying around the office
Speaker 1: ever since then. But it was just really great to
Speaker 1: be in a room with intelligent people watching such a
Speaker 1: historic event. And I was thinking how utterly incredibly tragically
Speaker 1: sad that it is the last inauguration we will ever
Speaker 1: see because the world will end in Oh my goodness.
Speaker 1: I know Jane's a little bit on edge. I don't
Speaker 1: necessarily ascribe to that belief. I was trying to get
Speaker 1: everybody worked up excited for our podcast today, which is
Speaker 1: about the Mind Calendar. And if you are at all
Speaker 1: familiar with the Mayan Calendar, you may know that there's
Speaker 1: a prophecy that the world will end on December twenty one, twelve.
Speaker 1: That's true, and some people are a little on edge
Speaker 1: about this idea, although it doesn't have that much uh
Speaker 1: history in terms of the Mayan Calendar, in terms of
Speaker 1: what the mind is actually believed, which is interesting, right.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of the fuss can be attributed
Speaker 1: to doomsday speakers, and we actually got away popular. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: because they're fun to hear about and they're fun to
Speaker 1: think about. The end of the world is always the
Speaker 1: end of the world. We actually got a listener email
Speaker 1: about the Mayan Calendar, and I'm not quite sure if
Speaker 1: our friend Molina is a a doomsday believer or if
Speaker 1: she just wanted to hear more of the story behind it.
Speaker 1: But she write to us, Hi, I'd like to know
Speaker 1: what the Mayans really say about this twelve end of days.
Speaker 1: I have heard many interpretations, most of which I think
Speaker 1: you're geared at selling books Smart Girl and Doomsday Gear.
Speaker 1: I'd like to know how accurate were their prediction sends
Speaker 1: and why this calendar was so important to them. So, Molina,
Speaker 1: here's the answer, and we will start by cracking the
Speaker 1: code behind the Mind Calendar. And to understand this week,
Speaker 1: we have to get a little context about the Lion
Speaker 1: civilization in general. I guess just to let you know,
Speaker 1: the Mayans, the whole empire was incredibly sophisticated. Uh. They
Speaker 1: existed around parts of what is now Guatemala, Belize, Honduras,
Speaker 1: els Avaldoor, and parts of southern Mexico as well, and
Speaker 1: they were a very sophisticated culture. They actually started reading.
Speaker 1: They were one of the first meso Americans, the people
Speaker 1: in that Central American area to start writing at all
Speaker 1: in the pre Classic period, which went up to from
Speaker 1: between about two thousand BC and three. And you can
Speaker 1: actually divide the Mind civilization into three distinct periods. The
Speaker 1: format ever pre Classic, which Jane just mentioned, then the
Speaker 1: Classic followed in that reign from about three hundred until
Speaker 1: nine hundred and the post Classic from nine hundred to
Speaker 1: four hundred, and around that time we see the Mayan
Speaker 1: civilization sort of reaching out a bitter end when the
Speaker 1: Spanish Inquisition comes in and starts phasing the culture out.
Speaker 1: This true, and spellers are a bit baffled by what
Speaker 1: happened at the end of the Classic period is interesting.
Speaker 1: They were incredibly sophisticated, but there was a time about
Speaker 1: nine a d. Where they reached a sharp decline in
Speaker 1: their civilization. They left cities and temples abandoned. It was
Speaker 1: very odd, and scholars disagree about what caused this, whether
Speaker 1: it was exhausting the food supply or the rewards among
Speaker 1: people and do right Candice. The Spanish arrived and about
Speaker 1: the fourteen hundreds, like fourteen hundreds, and that sort of
Speaker 1: ended the period of the mind Empire in general. And
Speaker 1: we know a lot about mine history because these were
Speaker 1: people who left written records. They had a system of
Speaker 1: hieroglyphics that they used for recording myths and history and
Speaker 1: other governmental decrees things like this. They actually had sort
Speaker 1: of like a primitive type of book and paper that
Speaker 1: were bound together as well as stuli, which were large
Speaker 1: free standing stone monuments almost like an obelisk really, that
Speaker 1: they would carve things into. And in addition to hieroglyphics,
Speaker 1: they also had a logo, graphics and a phonetic syllabic
Speaker 1: sort of alphabets. They in many ways or at least
Speaker 1: three ways really of recording their history. That's right. A
Speaker 1: lot of their writings had to do with time in general.
Speaker 1: They were very focused, maybe preoccupied, with the idea of time,
Speaker 1: and that's where we get the idea um that they
Speaker 1: were how they came up with all the different calendars
Speaker 1: that they did, right, and calendars were important because they
Speaker 1: wanted to mark the passing of time, because they looked
Speaker 1: to heavenly bodies in the sky to interpret the behavior
Speaker 1: on the moods and whims of their gods, and many
Speaker 1: of their actions, whether it was you know, a ceremony
Speaker 1: for for planting, or for the economy or for accounting
Speaker 1: procedures were based on God's behavior. And almost like today
Speaker 1: how some people ascribe to astrology to determine how a
Speaker 1: person's personality may be influenced by their birth date. The
Speaker 1: Mayans use their calendar for similar purposes. That's right. In
Speaker 1: numbers them elves held a particular importance. Particular ones like
Speaker 1: the number thirteen, for instance, held sort of religious connotations
Speaker 1: with the represented levels of heaven where sacred lords ruled
Speaker 1: the your earth, and so the number thirteen is pretty important.
Speaker 1: And that applies over to the first calendar, which is
Speaker 1: called the zole Keying. I believe it's pronounced calendar, and
Speaker 1: we should mention too, there are all manner of pronunciations
Speaker 1: as far as we could tell in our research for
Speaker 1: the different increments of time and name for the Mind calendar.
Speaker 1: So um, we're assuming that there are some scholarly variations
Speaker 1: on pronunciation, but we are going to go with the
Speaker 1: most popular and to kick it off, like Jane said,
Speaker 1: the Zulking calendar also called the Sacred Round calendar. Let's
Speaker 1: let's break this down, and this is going to get
Speaker 1: a little bit painstaking, So if you're near a computer,
Speaker 1: it might actually be helpful if you could go to
Speaker 1: the House staff Works website and pull up the calendar.
Speaker 1: I'm so easy the article on how the Mind calendar works.
Speaker 1: That's right. Um, it'll be easier to visualize if you
Speaker 1: we have a nice animation on the site that will
Speaker 1: let you go through this Zolken calendar. Okay, so the basics.
Speaker 1: The Zolkan calendar is divided into two hundred sixty days,
Speaker 1: and this number is kind of significant of itself. Scholars
Speaker 1: kind of disagree. It might signify the length of pregnancy,
Speaker 1: but more than likely it probably signified the time of
Speaker 1: a corn crop exactly. So from here, two hundred sixty
Speaker 1: days are comprised of twenty different day names and thirteen
Speaker 1: different numbers. So imagine two circles, and around the outer
Speaker 1: larger circle we have the twenty day names listed and
Speaker 1: each one is represented by a glyph. Then on the
Speaker 1: inside circle it interlocked with thirteen different numbers. So is
Speaker 1: the inner circle turns a number matches up with a
Speaker 1: glyph of a day name, and if you're good at math,
Speaker 1: or you have a calculator nearby, you may figure it out.
Speaker 1: The two hundred sixty days. It's derived from the fact
Speaker 1: that twenty day names times thirteen numbers equals to sixty. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true, And so would go through the cycles of
Speaker 1: the days and the numbers together. And as you know,
Speaker 1: thirteen is less than twenty, so once it got through
Speaker 1: the thirteen numbers, it would go back to the first number,
Speaker 1: but continue on in the cycle of thet or sorry
Speaker 1: of the fourteenth day name exactly. So it just continues
Speaker 1: rotating until you reach two hundred sixty. And each combination
Speaker 1: of number and day name has a significant meaning. And
Speaker 1: the holy men and the agriculturalists of the mind civilization
Speaker 1: would use these numbers to predict auspicious times for ceremonies
Speaker 1: and crop planting. Like we said earlier, but there was
Speaker 1: a problem with the talking. I'm sorry, not the talking, well,
Speaker 1: some people stay talking. We're saying Zolking Zolking calendar, and
Speaker 1: that was that it didn't measure a full solar year
Speaker 1: like the Gregorian calendar would do. That's right. There were
Speaker 1: smart enough obviously to figure out that there were seasons
Speaker 1: and two hundred sixty days was not a solar year basically.
Speaker 1: And we should also mention that the Zolking calendar had
Speaker 1: segments of twenty days which they called wenols um u
Speaker 1: I and a L and so these segments of twenty
Speaker 1: days were particularly important, and they carried over into their
Speaker 1: other calendars as well, and this led to the hop calendar.
Speaker 1: And this is a calendar that was based on the
Speaker 1: cycle of the sun. And we know als were sort
Speaker 1: of the formative unit of the hop calendar. So as
Speaker 1: Jane said, a ween as a twenty day period, they
Speaker 1: were eighteen of these twenty day periods, which equalled three
Speaker 1: hundred sixty days. Now, as we know, again three hundred
Speaker 1: sixty days just not a full solar cycle, make so
Speaker 1: they're true, But three d and sixties a pretty even number,
Speaker 1: and I like it. Yeah, So the May Ends compensated
Speaker 1: for those five extra days by making them nameless days,
Speaker 1: and they refer to those as a way up. And
Speaker 1: that was a single month comprised of these five days,
Speaker 1: and they thought it was a very dangerous time, that's right.
Speaker 1: And the way it was kind of a compromise between
Speaker 1: the mathematicians and the astronomers, because obviously the astronomers knew
Speaker 1: like three sixty days is not a full solar year,
Speaker 1: but mathematicians loved the evenness of the number three sixty.
Speaker 1: So that's where they get the compromise of the way
Speaker 1: of And during this time, I was customary to pray
Speaker 1: vigilantly and to celebrate the gods and to beseech them
Speaker 1: for blessings on the civilization and hopes that you know, good,
Speaker 1: good tidings to be restored. Again. That's right, because during
Speaker 1: the way of they believe that gods sort of left
Speaker 1: the whole earth unprotected. So but again the samest song
Speaker 1: you'll hear this refrain a couple of times. It wasn't enough.
Speaker 1: They wanted a longer calendar. And uh, the even though
Speaker 1: the Hot calendar is closest to our Georgian calendar today, Um,
Speaker 1: they did want to record more time in a single
Speaker 1: calendar for historical reasons, to keep posterity, and so they
Speaker 1: came up with what's called the calendar Round. And this
Speaker 1: had eighteen thousand, eight hundred ninety days and encompassed fifty
Speaker 1: two years. But here comes out refrain again. It still
Speaker 1: wasn't long enough. Fifty two years was not enough, as
Speaker 1: you said it, and so they wanted to make it
Speaker 1: even longer. And this is the massive, most massive calendar
Speaker 1: I've ever heard of. Um, it's called the long Court calendar.
Speaker 1: We refer to it today, is that, and it measures
Speaker 1: time in great cycles, and a great cycle spans a
Speaker 1: little over five thousand, one hundred and twenty five years. Right,
Speaker 1: So the Long Count calendar also has its own individual
Speaker 1: units that it is comprised of. So let's go over those.
Speaker 1: We've got one day which is a keen, twenty days,
Speaker 1: the Wayne All which we've heard before, three hundred sixty days,
Speaker 1: a tune, seven thousand, two hundred days, a cartoon, one
Speaker 1: hundred forty four thousand days back tune. So we have
Speaker 1: all these different individual components going inside the Long Count calendar,
Speaker 1: and we see that it is very useful for measuring epics,
Speaker 1: really for giving historians something to um base their civilization
Speaker 1: on and predict future civilizations going on and and things
Speaker 1: like this. Yeah, it is actually a difficult test to
Speaker 1: be able to find the zero date, uh of the
Speaker 1: great cycles. For instance, that we're in a Great cycle
Speaker 1: right now, um, And in order to figure out what
Speaker 1: date today is in the Great cycle, we had to
Speaker 1: figure out what the first at the beginning of this
Speaker 1: Great cycle cycle was and that ended up being August thirteenth,
Speaker 1: three thousand one BC. And we didn't just come up
Speaker 1: with that number. Happened stance There was a British anthropologist
Speaker 1: named Sir Eric Thompson who wanted to reconcile these different
Speaker 1: calendars and in order to find out when the current
Speaker 1: great cycle began. He had to match up some different
Speaker 1: events from the Spanish Inquisition that had been recorded on
Speaker 1: the Dresden Codex, which was one of the mind governmental
Speaker 1: records that was spared from the ravages of the Spanish Inquisition,
Speaker 1: and he took that and compared it alongside the long
Speaker 1: Count calendar as well as the Gregorian calendar to come
Speaker 1: up with a definitive date. And like James said, that
Speaker 1: was Auguste h BC. So we're in the middle of
Speaker 1: a great cycle, that's right. But if you do the map,
Speaker 1: we're actually to end that great cycle, and that's where
Speaker 1: you get the date of December twenty one, which will
Speaker 1: end a cycle. But it's important to note that the
Speaker 1: Mayans believe that this is not the first cycle has
Speaker 1: ever existed. It's actually believe the fourth, and so the
Speaker 1: universe of the planet has lived through um already three cycles,
Speaker 1: the ends of three cycles. So the Mayans don't necessarily
Speaker 1: believe that the world will end at the end of
Speaker 1: this fourth one now, and they actually think that the
Speaker 1: ending of a cycle is a really wonderful time to
Speaker 1: celebrate and to appreciate the fact that the planet has
Speaker 1: made it through another great cycle. Yeah, but there is
Speaker 1: also another reason why people think that this might be
Speaker 1: the end of the world, because an interesting thing is
Speaker 1: going to happen on December, and that is that it
Speaker 1: is a winter solstice. But you know that happens every year,
Speaker 1: but it's also a particular winter solstice where the sun
Speaker 1: will along with the center of our galaxy, and that
Speaker 1: happens only every twenty six thousand years. So if you're
Speaker 1: like me and you're curious about what people say, you
Speaker 1: can do a Google search and pull up all number
Speaker 1: of different doomsday websites, and predictions for December ranged from
Speaker 1: the culmination of social strife and environmental catastrophe and in
Speaker 1: war a sort of amalgamating into a giant apocalypse. And
Speaker 1: some people say that a comet or asteroid is going
Speaker 1: to impact the Earth and we're all going to die,
Speaker 1: or that the magnetic field on the Earth is going
Speaker 1: to change and the polls will be reversed, or or hey,
Speaker 1: you could rent Mel Gibson's Apocalypto and sort of get
Speaker 1: a preview of what's going to happen. Yeah, it's interesting
Speaker 1: if you look at the idea that the minds were
Speaker 1: actually able to predict eclipses, which is pretty sophisticated for
Speaker 1: for what they knew. And so maybe you might be
Speaker 1: inclined to think, oh, well, did they know that this
Speaker 1: this crazy happened stance we can happen on that day too,
Speaker 1: But most of ronomers actually agree that they could not
Speaker 1: have known this. So hopefully, armed with that information from
Speaker 1: Candice and Jane, you be able to encourage your frightened
Speaker 1: friends that the mind calendar does not necessarily mean certain doom.
Speaker 1: And I personally like the idea of seeing the passing
Speaker 1: of such a huge amount of time as a reason
Speaker 1: to celebrate and be thankful I did too. I mean
Speaker 1: it seems like, just just as you celebrate the new year, uh,
Speaker 1: you'd celebrate this the passing of this huge chunk of time.
Speaker 1: So maybe we need to have like a long count
Speaker 1: calendar party time for that. UM. So we do have
Speaker 1: lots more to read on this, and if you want
Speaker 1: to share your own ideas about the mind calendar, UM,
Speaker 1: you can email us. We're at History Podcast at Discovery
Speaker 1: dot com. We're also on Twitter at missing history, and
Speaker 1: we're on Facebook. And if you're still uncertain, then you'd
Speaker 1: like to explore this topic a little more, we have
Speaker 1: a couple of articles regarding the Mind Calendar and the
Speaker 1: twelve issue. We have how the Mind Calendar Works and
Speaker 1: will the World Really End in twelve? And you can
Speaker 1: look those up by visiting our homepage at www dot
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com for more on this and
Speaker 1: thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com?
Speaker 1: Mmm