Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization

16 Destination Galactic Center

John Major Jenkins Thinks Today’s World Has Much to Learn from the Ancient Maya

Moira Timms

Ancient Mayan trumpets erupt in a wash of primal, shamanic sound. The huge dome of the planetarium, like some fish-eye lens, glows with myriad pre-dawn stars. As the sun rises and breaks through the artificial horizon to everyone’s left, the ancient music fades, and the crack between the worlds is open once more. In his calm, focused way, the researcher and author John Major Jenkins begins his presentation and delivers the goods: According to ancient Mayan cosmology, we live today in a time of rare galactic alignment, when our solar systems with the heart of our galaxy, the galactic center. Our age is a time of transformation fixed by the Mayan calendar’s end date on December 21, 2012.

Jenkins, an internationally recognized expert on ancient astronomy and the Mayan calendar, recently spoke of his work and life. “I am devoted to reconstructing lost cosmologies,” he says, “to unraveling the knotted threads of a vast, global paradigm now forgotten.” He emphasizes that his work is both an explication and a celebration of the Primordial Tradition, or perennial philosophy—terms that refer to the universal truths at the core of the world’s major religions and philosophies that have endured down the ages.

“I believe the human race can grow spiritually by reviving the ancient Primordial Tradition that has become buried beneath the materialism of the modern world,” he says. And it is Jenkins’s discerning and painstaking retro-sleuthing into that tradition that has penetrated the rich substrata beneath the materialism of our time and discovered ancient hidden “treasure”—namely, the galactic alignment not only at the core of the Mayan calendar, but also at the center of Vedic cosmology and various Old World traditions, including Mithraism, sacred architecture, and Greek sacred geography. He lays out the details of his progressive reconstruction in two groundbreaking books: Maya Cosmogenesis 2012: The True Meaning of the Maya Calendar End Date and Galactic Alignment: The Transformation of Consciousness According to Mayan, Egyptian, and Vedic Traditions.

In the mid-1990s, while researching the 2012 end date of the Mayan calendar, Jenkins decoded what he calls the “galactic cosmology” of the Maya. He realized that the ancient Maya understood the 26,000-year cycle known as the precession of the equinoxes and the earth’s changing orientation to the galactic center. For the ancient Maya, tuning in to this stellar shifting inevitably led to the realization that at some point in the far future, the December solstice sun would with the Milky Way’s center, which can be seen as a “nuclear bulge” between the constellations of Sagittarius and Scorpio. The Maya thought of the Galactic Center as the ever-renewing womb of the Great Mother, and targeted the alignment with the end date of their calendar.

Jenkins’s approach is to skillfully cross-pollinate the discoveries of archaeoastronomy, iconography, and ethnography, blending them into a profoundly coherent synthesis. This has enabled him to revive a fragmented worldview that he calls “multidimensional.” He is interested not in inventing a new system, but in reviving the old one, one that because of its galactic focus is advanced in ways that modern science can barely appreciate. By accessing the myths, symbols, texts, and voices of the Primordial Tradition, Jenkins says that “it is clear that the Primordial Tradition is galactic in nature—the Galactic Center is its orientational locus and is the transcendental source of the wisdom it encodes, which now appears ready to make a dramatic appearance on the stage of human history . . . like a lost Atlantean dimension of the human soul.”

Because the astronomical mapping laid out in Jenkins’s recent books plugs so meaningfully into the sockets of the alignments and geodetics of so many sacred sites, the esoteric Hermetic dictum of “As above, so below” is now revealed fact. This is particularly true at Izapa in Chiapas, Mexico. “This is the site that gives us the 2012 calendar,” says Jenkins. “Here, the Mayan wisdom about what the 2012 alignment means for us is encoded into the monumental sculpture!”

Three ceremonial monument groups at Izapa contain the “legacy” to our time in terms of understanding the galactic cosmology of the ancient Maya. Jenkins decodes the ball court group at Izapa as “ground zero of this knowledge, and there is plenty there to help us understand what we, today, are fated to live through. The encoded message of the ball court is a testimony to the brilliance of the ancient Izapan skywatchers.”

A VISION QUEST

Jenkins recalls that as a child he was fascinated by gadgets and science. “I would take things apart and—sometimes—put them back together. Thomas Edison was my hero.” By high school, Jenkins says, he had exhausted science as an avenue of self-knowledge and began reading philosophy. “And that,” he says, “led to Eastern mysticism. This opened up a Gnostic path for me, a path of inner knowing, and I began to practice Yoga and meditation. I studied Tibetan mysticism, practiced celibacy, and wrote devotional poetry. I was trying to grow spiritually and free myself from the suburban nightmare of materialism that surrounded me.”

By the time Jenkins reached twenty, that which was building within him was difficult to contain. “An inner spiritual crisis was welling up inside me, and I embarked on a pilgrimage that took me around the southeast United States. My mobile hermitage was a 1969 Dodge van that I lived in for seven months. As my pilgrimage reached a crescendo, I meditated, chanted, and fasted, in locations along the Gulf Coast or in Forest Service campgrounds in the Florida panhandle.” Jenkins wrote of this period in his 1991 book, Mirror in the Sky. “This is the first time I have publicly shared this aspect of my past,” he says.

“The pilgrimage spontaneously culminated in a three-day vigil, crying for a vision, chanting, and praying. It was a crisis of connection with a higher guiding force that I yearned to serve. In the early predawn hours on the cusp of Pisces, I had a mystical vision of the boon-bestowing goddess Govinda, who I also call the Earth Guardian.” Jenkins says that the experience was attended by what is called, in Yoga, a kundalini rising. “It wasn’t ‘just’ a dream or vision, as it was attended by an actual physical process called ‘a turnabout in the deepest seat of the being’ or ‘the backward flowing method’ described in the Taoist book The Secret of the Golden Flower.”

Jenkins believes this experience with the goddess was the “boon” that bestowed upon him his mission, that led him to the Maya, a path that he now pursues in service to the Great Mother and the perennial wisdom. “It opened up a path of knowledge for me,” he says. “Less than a week after that vision, I met the person who encouraged me to travel to Mexico and visit the Maya.” Around that time Jenkins also read (the now classic) Mexico Mystique, by Frank Waters.

Today, almost twenty years later, Jenkins says that the connection with that original guiding force “continues to actively work within me, so I can continue to be a mouthpiece for the perennial philosophy. But balancing that call with the demands of making a living and paying the bills has, at times, been daunting.”

THINKING AND KNOWING

Jenkins’s mystical leanings are not that apparent in his recent books, which are academically rigorous and well documented without denying the deeper spiritual truths. In his view, “The intellect is not inconsistent with spirituality. Early on in my research, when my writings shifted from poetry and song writing to nonfiction research, I felt it would be critical to be clear and concise with my findings, mainly because spiritual materialism in New Age publishing seemed to be diluting the pristine purity of the universal truths with which it was coming into contact.

“Metaphors drawn from the profane modern culture and new terms were being coined for eternal truths . . . distortion of the ancient wisdom was happening. So I decided to place my rational intellect in service to the higher intellect, which is to say the heart. The heart is really higher than the brain.” With this approach, Jenkins’s work exemplifies the ability to go beyond the astronomy and venture more deeply into the metaphysics of spiritual transformation that awaits us on our approach to the galactic gateway.

The galactic gateway, and its meaning for our time, is the focus of Galactic Alignment. As we approach the 2012 end date of the Mayan calendar, it is clear that the knowledge expounded in many of the world’s wisdom texts regarding the end of the present world age comes together and is solidly interpreted in Jenkins’s latest book. According to his findings, the last of the four Hindu cycles of time, called Yugas, completes in synchrony with the Mayan end date, as does the Age of Pisces.

Christian millenarianism, via the year 2000, is also surprisingly close to the galactic alignment. The 2012 date itself is the astronomically defined time when the winter solstice Suns with the center of the Milky Way. Jenkins surveys the work of the galactic philosopher Oliver Reiser to offer a scientific interpretation of how our solar system and the galactic plane become aligned, and what possible effects might result for life and consciousness on Earth.

An inevitable question is, “Does our changing relationship to the greater universe mean anything?” Jenkins’s anticipation of this question is fully developed in Galactic Alignment, but the basis for a response to the question, he insists, is that “what is happening now was the centerpiece of many, many ancient systems and ancient philosophies, in virtually all of the world’s traditions. If our own civilization—including our scientific and religious leaders—fails to see any meaning in this factual event, then we stand alone, divorced from the world’s traditions that did.”

Professor Jocelyn Godwin, of Colgate University, himself an author on esoteric subjects, sees value in exploring the 26,000-year processional cycle (of which the galactic alignment is the “completion” event) in terms of what it means. He says, “John Major Jenkins is the most global and erudite voice of a swelling chorus of ‘Galactic Center’ theorists. By framing the subject in the context of the Primordial Tradition, he raises it to a new level of seriousness, and of reassurance.”

Jenkins emphasizes that his work does not promote a new “system” or “model,” but rather offers a reconstruction of lost knowledge. And he notes that, in retrospect, his pursuits seem to have been guided by the initial inspiration of his original contact with the Earth goddess of his vision. He senses that “strings have been pulled behind the scenes” to help manifest his work, which is ultimately about the rebirth of the world. He says he finds the amount of misunderstanding and misinformation that is circulating “incredibly sad” and that, most of all, he wants his work to be an inspiration, to help people understand more deeply ancient teachings about human transformation.

THE BEGINNING IS NEAR, THE BEGINNING IS NEAR!

In many of the world’s major cultures of antiquity, the center of the Milky Way galaxy was conceived of as the womb of the Great Mother goddess, the source and center of manifest worlds, and the ultimate means of our renewal at the end of a historical “chapter.” The Galactic Center region was, to the Maya, a source point, or birthplace.

Because of this, Jenkins’s early “rebirth” experience with the boon-bestowing goddess is especially meaningful, because it led him so directly into the work that has been the revelation of the whole mythic structure surrounding the 2012 astronomical time, when the Sun will be “re-birthed” in the “womb” of the Great Mother at the center of the Milky Way. Jenkins believes it is especially important to understand that 2012 indicates an alignment process and that any expectations should not focus on one precise day.

Nevertheless, 2012 has entered popular consciousness and can be considered the end of a Great Year of precession, a death of the old and the birth of the new—just as with the turning of the day or the lunar month or the solar year. Our precessional journey around the great wheel of the zodiac is humanity’s 26,000-year gestation period, and the birth time is era-2012. As in all beginnings, new life is the purpose, but there is always a possibility of mishap or disaster if all is not in harmony with the force and magnitude of the “rite of passage” known as birth. Resistance versus acceptance can lead to different results.

Questions naturally arise concerning what Jenkins sees on the horizon between now and 2012. Jenkins eases his way into his response. “It may be unpopular to say it, but it’s true,” he says. “What 2012 was intended to target is not about 2012; it is about a process-oriented shift. It’s about an open door, a once-in-a-precessional-cycle zone of opportunity to ourselves with the galactic source of life.” He points out that there are forces already set in motion “propelling us through a crucible of transformation unlike anything experienced in millennia . . . The sobering and humbling fact is that we are being called to create, nurture, and help unfold something that will not flower until long after we, as individuals, have died. The larger life wave of humanity is at stake.” And he reminds us of the Native American teaching to look ahead seven generations in order to make wise decisions, and suggests this should be our guiding maxim as well.

As to the 2012 date itself, Galactic Alignment points the compass of time not to a cause-and-effect event, but rather to a higher process of spiritual transformation (which can be intense and challenging). If the 2012 date means anything specific, it is more likely to be a rally date for the traditional Maya, whose calendrics designated the 2012 date as the end of a World Age, a truth deeply embedded in their creation mythology.

The Mesoamerican masterminds who wove together mythology, political organization, religion, and astronomy into one seamless whole must surely have wanted the modern Maya to understand and reclaim the greatness of their people’s past achievements.

In Galactic Alignment Jenkins explores how the galactic alignment is a central doctrine in global traditions. He finds it in Mithraism, Vedic astronomy, the doctrine of the Yugas, Islamic astrology, European sacred geography, Christian religious architecture of the Middle Ages, and various Hermetic traditions. “For me, this means that the galactic alignment wisdom of the Maya 2012 end date is even at the core of Western spirituality, and can unify traditions that on the surface seem so very different.”

One wonders how Jenkins sees the core of his work, and what is next for him. “The core? My ongoing relationship with Sophia, the higher wisdom. It was that vision in 1985 and my work with the Tree of Life symbology that have led me into these areas of exploration. The archetype of the Great Mother of renewal and wisdom is a recurring motif that emerges in almost all of my books—even if I wasn’t intending it at the outset. Overall, the core of the work is about healing, renewal, and opening up a little door at the end of time that leads into a new world, a new cycle in the drama of human unfolding.”