Alternative Right: One of the legacies of the world
financial crisis is that it showed how absolutely clueless pundits,
politicians, and financial planners can be about the direction we are
heading in. This also explains our growing fascination with the
mysterious Maya and their reputation for fathoming the distant future by
reading the stars and the courses of the planets.
With the great vacuum of ignorance that
enshrouds the future, it is not surprising that this long dead
civilization with an astronomical bent has been sucked into the role of
providing gnostic hints of what is to come. It was either that or Madame
Zaza’s tea leaves.
According to a lot of breathless twats
on the Discovery Channel, the Mayans saw something very important lined
up for 2012, namely the end of their Grand Cycle, scheduled to end on
the 21st of December this year. Depending on who you speak to this will
precipitate either the end of the universe in a cataclysm of fire, a new
age with everyone being very nice to each other, or the election of Ron
Paul as President of the United States.
But before we get carried away with the
impending sense of momentous cosmic change, shouldn’t we pause to ask
the all-important question, “Who the heck were the Maya?” just in case
they turn out to be a bunch of jungle bums stoked up on fermented
coconut juice rather than credible prognosticators of the end of
humanity.
Like any semi-barbaric, non-European
people, the Maya are nowadays talked about in the hushed reverential
tones dictated by political correctness as one of the great
civilizations, even though they lacked metal tools and wheels, and
enjoyed a spot of human sacrifice.
Rather than evidence of their
primitiveness, their lack of tools is often cited as proof of their
civilizational superiority, as only a truly higher culture could have
built pyramids with so little in the way of technology. In such
encomiums little is said about the possibility that the threat of human
sacrifice probably served as an extremely important motivator for the
toolless masses.
The key to understanding the Maya is
their astronomy. The basic problem all primitive agricultural societies
face is timekeeping. In the case of Britain, this led to the founding of
Neolithic sites such as Stonehenge, where the stones were aligned to
measure changes in the position of the rising sun and thus the seasons.
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