In 1995 I co-authored a book called The Mayan Prophecies. It was a great success and has since been translated into more than a dozen foreign languages. At the core of the book was a theory, first proposed by my co-author, Maurice Cotterel, that the sophisticated 'Long Count' Calendar of the Mayan Indians was based on knowledge concerning sun-spot cycles. Yet how the Maya came by this knowledge was a mystery then and is still a mystery now. Seeking for an answer to this question, I went on to examine evidence for contacts between the Old and New worlds in Classical times. I also investigated the possibility that the Maya could have inherited their knowledge from the lost civilization of Atlantis. However, although the book addressed these issues, it still raised as many, if not more, questions than it answered. In this sense it was an unfinished work.
Much has happened in the ten years since it was written, not least the launching of the SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) satellite in December 1995. This satellite, which is in a fixed orbit around the sun, constantly sends back data concerning solar activity. It has confirmed that the sun is much less predictable in its behaviour than was previously thought. It has shown that the sun is prone to huge storms that have a dramatic effect on earth’s weather. Not only that, it is now clear that the cycle of sun-spot activity is not as easy to predict as was once thought, which is important as these too affect our weather.
People have, of course, been observing sun-spots for centuries: ever since the invention of the telescope by Galileo. Whilst their cause is a matter of opinion, it has long been recognised that there is an 11.4 year cycle between successive sun-spot maxima and minima. However, we now know that this cycle is at best only part of the story. While it may be true that for most of the past four hundred years the sun was following an 11.4 year cycle of activity, today this is no longer the case. SOHO revealed that in the year 2003, when the sun should have been moving into a more dormant phase , there was instead a massive increase in sun-spot activity. Not only were there many more sun-spots than expected but they were also very active in producing solar flares. This activity reached its peak in October when an unexpectedly powerful Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) erupted from a sun-spot and some 9 hours later hit the earth's magnetosphere. This flare produced "Northern Lights" that could be seen as far south as Texas. Events like these, which seem to be becoming more common, indicate that the sun's magnetic field is going through major changes.
Any changes to the sun’s magnetic field will affect the entire solar system, not least the earth. This in itself is not too surprising. What is, though, is that the Maya, a native American people whose civilization was basically Stone-Age, seem to have known about long-period cycles of solar activity. Their calendar predicted that the present "age of the jaguar" would come to its end in 2012. We moved into the last katun of this age on 15th April 1993.[Note: a katun is a period of roughly twenty years, 20 x 360 days to be precise]. We are therefore, from the point of view of the Mayan calendar, living through the "end times".
New discoveries concerning sunspot cycles are not the only thing that has changed: Mayan studies have also come on a pace. Although as early as 1952 Yuri Knorosov, a Russian scholar of great brilliance, published an article on how Mayan hieroglyphs might be deciphered, because of academic intransigence, this work was held back for two decades or more. In 1973 the first Mesa Redondo or ‘Round Table’ conference was held at Palenque in Mexico. This brought together many of the worlds experts on the art, epigraphy and archaeology of this most exquisite of Classic Maya cities with the aim that through concerted effort, they might succeed where others had failed in decoding the many Palenque texts. Since then the world of Mayanonology has been in a ferment as more and more hieroglyphic texts—on stelas, door-lintels, stucco panels, bark books, ceramics and even jewellery have been deciphered. As a result old ideas of the ancient Maya as a pacifistic, other-worldly priesthood have been overturned. It is now known that for much, if not most of the period of Mayan civilization, the mini states that made up their world were at war with one another. In this sense they were not much different from the city states of Classical Greece, whose interminable squabbles eventually led to their conquest, one and all, by the semi-barbarian Macedonians. But like the Greeks too, the Mayans of the Classic era (c. 250-1000 AD) left behind them a legacy of majestic buildings, a written script and the enigma of how these things had been achieved.
Although the work of translating and interpreting Mayan hieroglyphic texts was well under way at the time we were writing The Mayan Prophecies, as this was still a rather esoteric field monopolised by a small number of experts, I felt it best to concentrate our attention on the more directly relevant—relevant from our point of view—numerical hieroglyphs. This did not actually seem much of a hardship at the time as our principle interest, where hieroglyphic texts were concerned, was calendric. As the system of decoding Mayan dates has been known for the best part of a century, we did not need to reference more modern research on hieroglyphs. In any case, I felt that to do so would be to complicate matters unnecessarily as our intention was to show—which we did quite convincingly—how the Mayan "Long-Count calendar" fitted with Cotterell's ideas on sun-spot cycles.
Unfortunately there were also undoubted weaknesses in our approach. The work of the Meso Redondo scholars, particularly the late Linda Schele, would have helped greatly in interpreting the true meaning of the ‘The Lid of Palenque’: the world famous covering for the sarcophagus of Pacal the Great. As it is we presented Maurice Cotterell's personal interpretation for the designs on this extraordinary work of art: interpretations that I now believe to be wrong in almost every respect. In this new work I am presenting what I think is a better interpretation for the meaning behind the designs on the Lid and one which is more in harmony with expert opinion.
That said, there was much other valuable information contained in the old book that would be hard if not impossible for readers to find elsewhere. One reason for this is that Mayanology, perhaps more than most branches of archaeology, is restrained by political considerations. Probably the worst of these is an academic taboo, which extends throughout Latin America and till recently even in the United States, against discussing the possibility that prior to the arrival of Columbus in 1492, the New World may have been colonized (or even visited) by anyone other than ‘Native Americans’ . Of course these ‘Native Americans’ (again, for reasons of political correctness we are no longer allowed to use the term American Indians) had to come from somewhere. The assumption is that they were all, diversity of tribes, languages and cultures not withstanding, descendants of a small group of Asiatic people who entered Alaska across the Bering Straits during the last ice-age. It is well known in academic circles (though not publicly admitted) that any archaeologist who publishes a paper claiming that Mexico was visited by Europeans prior to the arrival of the conquistodors is likely to have their digging licence revoked. To even discuss the possibility of ancient mariners crossing the Atlantic is deemed to be a slur on the dignity and reputation of Columbus. Worse still it implies that the ancient Central American civilization was probably not an entirely home-grown phenomenon but owed much to the importation of ideas from elsewhere. This taboo holds despite the discovery in the Americas of Roman artifacts, Scandinavian runes, Egyptian hieroglyphs and other epigraphic writings that look very much like late Carthaginian script. In actuality the ‘Alaska first’ theory—in truly scientific terms it is only a theory—is not even born out by the archaeological evidence of human settlement.
The taboo against discussing Transatlantic contacts, which represents political correctness at its most insidious, once extended to the whole of the North America continent. However in the United States and Canada, whilst there is still denial of the possibility of any Roman or Carthaginian links, there is now acceptance that Viking explorers probably did make the voyage to America—as indeed their sagas claim—maybe five hundred years before Columbus. Furthermore, very recent work at many sites in both North and South America is undermining the assumption that all native Americans prior to the arrival of Columbus are descended from Alaskan immigrants who crossed the Bering Straits. Archaeobiological evidence now indicates that South America was settled prior to North America. Recent work at Pedra Furada in Brazil has revealed human occupation there at least fifty six thousand years ago. This is the earliest known example of human occupation in the Americas and predates by tens of thousands of years the epoch in which ‘Native Americans’ are supposed to have entered Alaska from Siberia. South America's earliest settlers must have come by sea as there was no land-bridge available there even in the Ice Age. If that is so, then there is no reason to believe that North America was not, in the main, colonised in the same way: transoceanic contact between the ancient Old and New Worlds has to be a real possibility.
The subject of Transatlantic contacts is one we broached in The Mayan Prophecies. I am going into it in more detail in this new book. For regardless of any academic taboos and independently of DNA evidence, there are good reasons for believing that over the millennia the Americas have been visited repeatedly by people from not only Europe but also Africa and even China. Besides evidence such as actual artefacts (notably Roman coins and even a small, Roman bust) there is a congruency of technological ideas and religious concepts.
That scholars are in denial of Transatlantic contacts is all the stranger in that the traditions of many native tribes is that civilization was brought to them by a bearded, white man, known variously as Quetzalcoatl (Aztec), Kukulcan (Mayan) or Viracocha (South American). Another taboo subject for archaeologists and historians alike is Atlantis. Like the concept of transatlantic contact, the idea of a lost continent for some reason provokes apoplexy among the academic community. The oldest reference to this legendary island is in the Greek philosopher Plato's dialogue the Critias. He states categorically that Atlantis lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar) and was not to be confused with the ‘real’ continent that lay beyond it on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Unfortunately Plato's words have not only been ignored by academics but have been misquoted by many alternative writers too. Instead of accepting his geography: that Atlantis lay on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the lost continent has been re-located everywhere from the British Isles to the Eastern Mediterranean to Antarctica. Yet Edgar Cayce, probably the greatest psychic of the 20th century, was unequivacal the not only did Atlantis exist but it was located in the only place it could have been: in the region of the Bahamas. This again is a subject that was raised in the Mayan Prophecies but is discussed in greater depth here. I have endeavoured to show that not only did Atlantis exist—and go under the waves— but it was the root from which all the later Meso-American civilizations sprang.
Finally there is the prophecy itself. If the present age is scheduled to end in 2012 what might this mean for us? Should we be worried or will this date turn out to be of no greater significance than the millennium year of 2000? This is a subject I have addressed, I hope, in a comprehensive way. I am able to show that this is not an arbitrary date but one closely linked to observable astronomy. That being so, we have to ask ourselves just how the Maya, a primitive stone-age peoples even if possessed of some of the trappings of civilization, could have known thousands of years in advance and to the day just how the sky would be on 22nd December 2012. This is one of the world's great mysteries but I hope that here I have provided a thesis that may go some way towards answering this and other important questions.