Calleman Responds to "Calleman Proved Wrong by Geoff Stray

Editor's Note: This is Carl Johan Calleman's response to our first "Calleman is wrong" article, published verbatim with his permission.

I appreciate that you notice that among the world’s Mayan calendar experts there are some that are basing themselves on hallucinogenic experiences and others that do not. What would also have been pertinent to notice is that among those that are not hallucinogen users I may be the only one, who is a professional scientist. While self-styled scholars may be both intelligent and creative they usually have never been prompted to acquire the code of honor that comes with paying their dues and subjecting themselves to a qualified mentorship, and this also provides an important background to the current discussions among proclaimed Mayan calendar experts.

On your web site you have published a number of points critical of my work including a purported proof from Geoff Stray that the October 28, 2011 completion date for the Mayan calendar is wrong. This goes back to the fact that Geoff for a long time has supported John Jenkins mechanistic understanding of the Mayan calendar, which promotes the idea that the Mayan Long Count is designed to describe a galactic alignment that ends a precessional cycle of 26000 years and has to end on a solstice day. This fantasy has been very successfully sold to people to the point that some think that there actually exists something to back it up despite the persistent denial of this by professional astronomers. What may be the most important to note however is that among the thousands of calendrical inscriptions from the Maya the 26000 year precessional cycle is not mentioned once and no Mayan text talks about a galactic alignment. As I have pointed out before the galactic alignment idea holds a great risk in that it makes human evolution dependent on some astronomical event outside of our control. The risk is that in as much as people believe in the galactic alignment fantasy, they will not be living up to their potential role as co-creators in due time. It should then not surprise us that also all the forces that want to back up the current world of hierarchies, including Hollywood, are doing their best to support the December 21, 2012 date. This date thus serves to foster a wait-and-see attitude and to divert the changes that are under way. In this, I think Stray and Jenkins are playing games with the future of humanity because they themselves are well aware of the complete absence of evidence in the Mayan sources for this galactic alignment theory. It is a fantasy generated on modern computer screens and without modern astronomical software no one would ever have come up with such a farfetched idea. Nonetheless, the idea is easy to grasp and a number of people wanting to be seen in the “2012” context has jumped on this bandwagon without rigorously examining its sources.

What we know for certain from ancient Mayan sources (the books of Chilam Balam) is instead that their prophecies were based on non-astronomical time periods such as the tun and the katun (and almost certainly the baktun and longer cycles, but these were no longer in use when these books were written). According to the ancient inscriptions in for instance Palenque these time periods and their energies (deities as the Maya would say) emanated from the World Tree (or the Heart of the Heavens as contemporary Mayans would say) and not from astronomical cycles in our local solar system. In such a perspective we may for instance understand that the katun in the Long Count with the tzolkin energy of 4 Ahau (AD 20-40) did have a special energy (we know from history that this is the energy that brought the teaching of Christ) and so there is no reason to be surprised that this tzolkin energy was celebrated as a Burner day. Without a reality background in historical processes discussions of the different celebrations of tzolkin energies are however completely meaningless and lead into a world of abstract calendar mathematics. My own work is instead based on the actual evolutionary processes of the universe and how these are related to the prophetic tradition of the Maya emphasizing the thirteen energies of baktuns, katuns and tuns etc including the seven days of creation.

This work has resulted in a series of books where the actual phenomena in the universe, biological historical or otherwise, are understood from quantum shifts emanating from the Cosmic Tree of Life. These arguments are not speculative, but supported by massive empirical evidence. Long time Mayan calendar expert, author and publisher Barbara Hand Clow has on this basis referred to my most recent book The Purposeful Universe as “possibly the most important book that has ever been written” and others have come to concur with this assessment.

Stray on the other hand, who has more or less painted himself into a corner by zealously supporting Jenkins computer based fantasy, trashes my work, for the singular reason that he thinks that its “end date” is wrong. I think he really knows better, but he has for a long time been criticizing my reality-based approach and may not find it easy to detach himself from this. He thus chooses to sacrifice all meaningful understanding of how the Mayan calendar describes the evolution of consciousness at nine levels each driven by seven pulses of light (seven gods of creation) and tries to prop up the galactic alignment idea. Since the galactic alignment fantasy cannot be verified by historical events, it is thus no wonder that Stray and Jenkins never make predictions based on the Mayan calendar. Wisely so, I must say, since if they were to base predictions on the December 21, 2012 end date these would invariably turn out to be wrong.

Also in this Jenkins and Stray deviate from the very spirit of the prophetic tradition of the ancient Maya, who used their calendar to understand coming time periods and not as abstract mathematical structures. I, on the other hand, can credit myself to some very significant predictions in my books, published years in advance, that have later turned out to be correct. Very notable is for instance, the prediction of the precise timing of when the economic downturn would begin, which was based on the October 28, 2011 date. It is important to realize that this would not have been possible if I had been relying on the Hollywood-approved end date of December 21, 2012.

This brings up the question what we are supposed to have the Mayan calendar for. Is it to understand our place in the universe and its future or is it just an abstract tool without any connection to reality as it seems to be to some? I personally think that if we are to approach the future with realism we will have to give up silly fault finding games and look primarily at the evidence for connections between the Mayan calendar and historical reality.

Over the past century there have been many suggestions as to what the end date of the Izapan Long Count may be and like Stray I would also place this at December 21, 2012 (meaning that Geoff’s argument about invalidating the dating of old inscriptions is completely erroneous and he should know this himself). The determination of the accurate “end date” can however only be based on an understanding of how the Mayan calendar system works in its totality and how it maps out the evolution of consciousness. The point to realize is then that the December 21, 2012 date is not the energetic end date when all the nine waves of evolution (the nine-step god, Bolon Yokte, symbolized by the nine-step pyramid) will be manifesting fully, which instead is October 28, 2011. While an attempt was made in Palenque almost a thousand years after the Izapan Long Count had been established, it proved impossible to correct such a strong tradition accordingly.

A valid parallel to this is that it would today be absolutely impossible to change the day we celebrate Christmas, even though we now know that Jesus was not born on December 25. Not a long time ago some orthodox and dogmatic Christians would probably have defended the idea that Jesus was born on December 25 with the same zealousness as Stray and Jenkins now defend the December 21, 2012 date simply because according to a strong tradition Christmas is celebrated on that day. But while the error in the birthday of Jesus may be of relatively little importance to us today the same cannot be said about the completion date of the Mayan calendars, which may be the most consequential question of our time. It is thus very high time that people claiming to be Maya calendar experts start discussing this in terms of the prophetic time periods, tuns, katuns, baktuns etc that the Maya were actually using. Without such a common ground there is simply no meaningful basis for discussing the end date. If the reality connection of the Mayan calendar through these time periods is thrown out all of its meaning to our current time is simply lost.

Carl Johan Calleman