Geoff Stray Shows Calleman's Calendar Wrong, His Predictions Fizzle and Fail

Editor's Note: This is Geoff Stray's follow-up to Carl Johan Calleman's response to our first "Calleman is wrong" page in the 2012 section of this site.

My email reply to Shay Addams was published with permission, however, I did not know he was going to give it the title, “Geoff Stray Proves Calleman Wrong about 2012 End Date”. This confrontational title was certain to “rattle his cage” (guaranteed to get a response from Carl Calleman) and it did.

Carl proudly speaks of the “code of honour” of academics, before launching into a series of personal remarks about myself and JMJ, accusing us of “playing games with the future of humanity”; and others, which I won’t bother listing, but I am sure that the reader will have got a certain impression of dual standards here.

This sense of double standards was also evident in an article that Carl spammed around the inter-net last year, then printed out and provided to every conference-goer at the Virginia Beach ARE conference. This is the article, The Risks of Believing.

It starts off by pretending that John Major Jenkins is a Doomsday fanatic, simply because his interviews were unfairly edited by lying film producers, who had given assurances that the interviews would not be used to promote a doomsday angle. Carl knows very well that JMJ’s stance has never been catastrophic, so what are we to make of this “code of honour”? Here is the link to Jenkins' article explaining this.

No Mayanist Supports Calleman Theory

Carl speaks of other people’s fantasies, but he cannot find one single academic Mayanist to support his ideas. This is evident in the side links here, where the Swedish Mayanist John Normark slams Carl’s calendar. In the history of Maya studies, over the last 100 years, we find that all the most significant discoveries and jumps in understanding have been made by researchers without the academic credentials. Carl constantly is making reference to his Phd in Physical Biology, and this may give his writing on evolution some clout, but when he gets away from pure biology, his Phd is as significant as a cycling proficiency test. However, it is also true that the possession of the letters after the name does seem to contribute to a feeling of elitism and superiority that gives an apparent license to patronize those who are not members.

Carl proudly speaks of his prophecy that the financial collapse would start at the start of the “Fifth Night” on 18/19 November 2007. However, he admits that this prediction is 6 weeks out, since economists agree it began at the start of January 2008. He criticizes JMJ and myself for not making predictions, but we don’t claim to be prophets, whereas Carl started calling himself “Jaguar Prophet of Our Time”. (See this link. )

More Calleman Financial Predictions Fail to Materialize

His acid-test prophecy was announced at the Virginia conference, and also in his “The Risks of Believing…” article linked above. He predicted that at the start of the “Sixth Night” on November 7th 2009, the US dollar would collapse, “triggered by a demoralizing political event”.

Well, here we are in June 2010, over 7 months into the “Sixth Night”—well over halfway through it—and Carl’s smoking gun prophecy has fizzled out. If the dollar collapses now, Carl will probably claim it as proof that he is right, but the prophecy has actually failed.

I asked Carl, during the forum, whether he would modify his theories if his prophecy failed to come true. He mumbled, no, he wouldn’t…no surprise there.

Long Count Dates on Monument 6 Contain Astronomical Correlations

Maya epigraphers Michael Grofe and Barbara Macleod have independently found evidence that the Maya were tracking precession - Grofe in the Dresden Codex, and Macleod on a carved bone from Tikal. In fact, there is an avalanche of astronomical correlations in the 13 dates of Tortuguero Monument 6, currently being decoded by Mayanists . This does not fit in with Carl's theory since he has pronounced that the Long Count has nothing to do with astronomical cycles. In his talk, he had all the cycles on display when he announced this, including the one day cycle...if that’s not an astronomical cycle, then it would be an amazing coincidence that the spiritual cycles of the entire universe (according to him) are based around exactly one Earth day.

Astronomical cycles that relate to Maya calendars:

1. All their calendars were based around a day, which is one circuit of the Earth around the Sun.
2. Three Tzolkins is exactly one Mars synodic year (3 x 260=780)
3. Eight haabs is exactly five Venus synodic years (8 x 365 = 5 x 584)
4. 46 Tzolkins = 405 lunar months
5. 59 Tzolkins = 42 tropical years
6. 135 Tzolkins = 88 Jupiter synodic years
7. 137 Tzolkins = 61 Venus synodic years
8. Twenty 819-day cycles = 21 Mars synodic years
9. Six 819-day cycles = 13 Saturn synodic years
10. Nineteen 819-day cycles = 39 Jupiter synodic years
11. 96 Tzolkins = 65 thirteen-month lunar years
12. 4 Tzolkins = 3 Eclipse years
13. One 13-tun cycle = 6 Mars synodic years = 18 Tzolkins
14. TWO 13-tun cycles = 27 Eclipse years
15. 39 Uinals = one Mars synodic year
16. Five 13-baktun cycles = one precession cycle.  

The Calleman Calendar is a mish-mash of material—the six nights and seven days of creation are from the book of Genesis, along with his Garden of Eden and Tree of Life material and there is input from other parts of the Bible, such as The book of Revelation— this is one of the reasons for the appeal, especially in the States, where large parts of the population expect Jesus to return soon, saving the harvested 144,000 elect and burning the rest like weeds. This is the part that Carl fails to address—the catastrophe that is secretly lurking in this theory is that of the billions of people who not only suffer an agonizing death, but burn in hell for all eternity, while the "144,000" Callemanites all go to Heaven.

Carl states that the advocates of a 2012 end to the 13-baktun cycle are in effect saying, "do not prepare yourself for the new world now—wait until the shift comes, December 21, 2012". Well presumably he hasn't heard that JMJ says the Galactic Alignment will not all culminate on one day—he expects the effects to be spread over years, and also recommends Vipassna meditation as a preparation, and does not imply we should wait.

have also suggested many times that I don't expect it all to culminate on 21 December 2012, but throughout that whole year and the following 2 years, and that people should start now with their self-development work, in order to address negative emotions such as fear and anger responses and other shadow material. In fact, it is in this area that I think the nine underworlds are to be understood — as nine levels of internal shadow realms containing our deep complexes and anxieties that must be addressed before our higher selves can emerge.

For more on this, click to see my essay.

Also see the Jenkins/Calleman email exchange on Mayan elders.

Geoff Stray
June 9, 2010

Editor's Note: After reading Calleman's first two books twice, my interpretation is that Calleman is an advocate of Intelligent Design whose real agenda is to use the Maya calendar to prove the existence of God.