In Mexico, many spiritualists celebrate dawn of a ‘new world’

Friday, December 21, 2012

— The crystal skulls have spoken: The world is not going to end.

American seer Star Johnsen-Moser led a whooping, dancing, drum-beating ceremony Thursday in the heart of Mayan territory to consult several of the life-sized crystal skulls, which adherents claim were passed down by the ancient Maya.

The skulls weren’t the only inheritances left by the ancient civilization that have been making waves this week: The supposed end of the Mayan long-count calendar today has prompted a wave of doomsday speculation across the globe.

“This is not the end of the world, this is the beginning of the new world,” Johnsen-Moser said at a gathering of hundreds of spiritualists at a convention center in Merida. “It is most important that we hold a positive, beautiful reality for ourselves and our planet ... Fear is out of place.”

The supposed 5 a.m. doomsday hour had already arrived in several parts of the world with no sign of the apocalypse.

The social network Imgur posted photos of clocks turning midnight in the Asia-Pacific region with messages such as: “The world has not ended. Sincerely, New Zealand.”

In Merida, the celebration of the cosmic dawn began with a fumbling of the sacred fire meant to honor the calendar’s conclusion.

Gabriel Lemus, the whitehaired guardian of the flame, burned his finger on the kindling and later had to scoop up a burning log that was knocked out of the ceremonial brazier onto the wooden stage.

Still, the white-clad Lemus was convinced that it was a good start, as he was joined by about 1,000 other shamans, seers, stargazers, crystal enthusiasts, yogis, sufis and swamis at the convention center about an hour and a half from the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza.

“It is a cosmic dawn,” Lemus said. “We will recover the ability to communicate telepathically and levitate objects ... like our ancestors did.”

Celebrants later held their arms in the air in a salute to the Thursday morning sun.

Few in Merida believethe world will end today; the meeting is scheduled to run through Sunday. Instead, participants say, they are in Merida to celebrate the birth of a new age.

A Mexican Indian seer who calls himself Ac Tah, and who has traveled around Mexico erecting small pyramids he calls “neurological circuits,” said he holds high hopes for today.

“We are preparing ourselves to receive a huge magnetic field straight from the center of the galaxy,” he said.

Not all seers endorse the celebration.

Mexico’s self-styled “brujo mayor,” or chief soothsayer, Antonio Vazquez Alba, warned followers to stay away from all gatherings today, saying, “We have to beware of mass psychosis” that could lead to stampedes or “mass suicides, of the kind we’ve seen before.”

“If you get 1,000 people in one spot and somebody yells ‘Fire!’ watch out,” Vazquez Alba said. “The best thing is to stay at home, at work, in school, and at some point do a relaxation exercise.”

Others see the meeting as a model for the coming age.

Participants from Asian, North American, South American and European shamanistic traditions amiably mingled with the Mexican hosts.

Still, organizers of Yucatan’s broader Mayan Culture Festival saw the need to answer the now-debunked idea that the Maya, who invented an amazingly accurate calendar almost 2,000 years ago, had somehow predicted the end of the world. The Maya measured time in 394-year periods known as baktuns. Anthropologists believe the 13th baktun ends around today, and 13 is considered a sacred number for the Maya. But archaeologists have uncovered Mayan glyphs that refer to dates far, far in thefuture, long beyond today.

Yucatan Gov. Rolando Zapata, whose state is home to Mexico’s largest Maya population and has benefited from a boom in tourism, said he too felt the good vibes.

“We believe that the beginning of a new baktun means the beginning of a new era, and we’re receiving it with great optimism,” Zapata said.

He confirmed that thousands of tourists and spiritualists are expected for today’s once-in 5,125-year event.

“We have information that all the flights to the city are completely full,” Zapata said.

The Yucatan state government even invited a scientist to talk about the work of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, to debunk the idea it could produce worldending rogue particles, a concept popularized by author Steve Alten in his recent book Phobos, Mayan Fear.

Alten suggests the rogue particles - “tiny black holes” - could unleash earthquakes that might cause a huge tsunami, but acknowledges that linking such events to today “is author’s license.”

“It’s science-fiction theory. I’m a science-fiction writer,” he said.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, however, has listed a number of odd subatomic phenomena - “magnetic monopoles,” “Vacuum bubbles” and “strangelets” - that could play a role in the next apocalypse scare.

All of it amused Mexico City-based tourist Deyanira de Alvarez as she snapped a photo of the countdown clock mounted in the Merida international airport showing just more than two days left to “the galactic alignment.”

“My grandmother says that people have been talking about this [the world ending] ever since she was a little girl,” De Alvarez said, “and look, Grandma is still here.”

Front Section, Pages 7 on 12/21/2012