12.21

AUTHOR’S NOTE

WHEN I FIRST ENCOUNTERED PRIONS (PRONOUNCED “PREEONS”) IN medical school, I became fascinated by these tiny proteins that had baffled scientists for fifty years. They served no apparent function in the brain, violated the central dogma of molecular biology stating that reproduction could only happen through the transfer of DNA or RNA, and caused incurable diseases, including mad cow.

As I read everything I could about prions, I learned that more than 150 people had died as a result of consuming infected beef during the mad cow epidemic, and that some scientists believe many more Britons have been exposed and millions more may still get sick. In my reading, I soon came upon another disease prions caused: fatal familial insomnia (FFI). While the disease primarily affects families in Italy and Germany, several new “sporadic” cases are discovered every year in other parts of the world, including Central America.

After learning that “kuru,” the first known cluster of prion disease, was found in the South Fore people of Papua New Guinea, and was transmitted through the practice of ritual cannibalism, the idea for 12.21 took shape.

THE STORY OF HOW the date 12/21/12 became so important in the eyes of millions of people, and assumed the place it has in the cultural consciousness, is still a mystery to me. Beginning in the mid-1970s, new-age writers speculated that the end of the Maya Long Count would represent a major day for human civilization, ushering in a global shift in consciousness. Through “visionaries” like José Argüelles and Terence McKenna, 12/21/12 was linked to astrology, environmental causes, new-age mysticism, spiritual “synchronization,” and growing skepticism about the role of technology in human lives.

But this belief in the importance of the ancient calendar turn took some very strange forms as it spread. Some adherents began to associate it with doomsday theories, claiming that 12/21 would lead to astronomical alignments, collisions with other planets and stars, and reversal of the earth’s magnetic poles. In recent years, groups of believers have left their homes and built vast compounds—in the jungles of Mexico, in the mountains of the Himalayas—in which to try to survive the apocalypse they believe is coming.

Still, I have found no evidence that the ancient Maya themselves believed the turn of the thirteenth cycle was any different from their other important calendar turns, all of which they feared and revered. The Long Count is actually a base-twenty calendar, and continues on for another 2,700 years. The original mention of the importance of the end of the thirteenth cycle, which the inscription written at Tortuguero, Mexico, reinforces, comes from the Popol Vuh. There it is written that the last Long Count ended at the completion of its thirteenth cycle, and this has led some to believe that the current one will as well.

DESPITE THE WIDE SPREAD popularization of the word, even among scholars, the abandonment of water-deprived cities in the lowlands at the end of the first millennium was likely not a civilization-wide Maya “collapse.” Over a period of several centuries, at the end of the classic era, cities that had once flourished were slowly abandoned for smaller villages and more fertile ground.

Still, since the nineteenth century, when explorers rediscovered abandoned ruins buried deep in the overgrown jungles of Honduras and Guatemala, theories have circulated about what led the Maya to leave their incredible metropolises, never to return. Pollen samples from the Copán Valley and El Petén, locations of some of the largest ancient settlements, indicate that they were almost completely devoid of human life by the middle of the thirteenth century, after centuries of obsolescence.

Most Mayanists now agree that overpopulation, drought, and destructive farming practices leading to deforestation were major contributors to the dwindling population. Other possibilities are more hotly contested. Recently, scholars like Jared Diamond have argued that ongoing violence between the Maya cities was a major factor, and pointed out that fighting reached a peak in the period leading up to the end of the classic.

Evidence for cannibalism among the Maya is controversial and limited. But at the ruins of late classic Tikal, Mayanist Peter Harrison discovered a cooking pit beneath an ancient house that contained human bones with charring and tooth marks. It seems likely that if cannibalism did take place in the lowlands, it was not a signifi cant cultural practice, but rather happened only in times of desperation, when other food supplies were exhausted.

There is no evidence that the Maya suffered from a transmissible prion disease.

NEW MAYA RUINS are regularly discovered near indigenous villages: In the 1980s, the ruins of a massive city were discovered at Oxpemul, Mexico, less than fifty miles from a highly populated area. More recently, archaeologists discovered a site at Holtun, Guatemala, where more than a hundred classic Maya buildings were buried in a jungle that had been traversed for centuries.

One of the greatest concentrations of scarlet macaws in Central America migrates from eastern Guatemala to the Red Bank, in the Stann Creek district of Belize. It was along this path that I invented Chel’s village of Kiaqix, as well as Paktul’s great, lost city, Kanuataba.