Quest Magazine

The 2012 Story: The Myth, Fallacies, and Truth behind the Most Intriguing Date in History

John Major Jenkins
New York: Tarcher Penguin, 2009. 336 pages, $24.95.

The excitement of the new millennium had scarcely faded when it was followed by a new craze—the obsession with 2012 as a date of coming cataclysm or redemption. Particularly since The Da Vinci Code, the mainstream media have been keen to New Age enthusiasms, so they have taken up 2012 with gusto. The History Channel and the Discovery Channel have produced any number of shows on this theme, and practically every publisher in the field of alternative spirituality has made its contribution to the 2012 furor.

Very few of these items are worth discussing, but one recent offering is an exception: John Major Jenkins's 2012 Story. For the last two decades Jenkins has been looking into the Mayan calendar to discover what its end date of December 21, 2012, meant to the ancient Maya and what it might mean to us today. He does so from the unenviable position of the independent scholar, steering a course between daft New Agers on the one hand, who portray this date as the advent of space brothers and dimensional shifts, and academic scholars on the other, who generally march in the equally mindless lockstep of automatic skepticism. The 2012 Story chronicles Jenkins's own findings and experiences.

To begin with, why did this particular date—the winter solstice of 2012—matter so much to the ancient Maya? The classic phase of their civilization ended around a.d. 900, so it was hardly a pressing issue at the time. Jenkins answers this question by sketching out a short history of scholarship in the field, complete with its cast of rogues and geniuses. In short, the Maya had an intricate series of calendars, one of which is based on the baktun, a measure of time encompassing 144,000 days. The Mayans believed that thirteen of these baktuns equaled a great age. The present cycle, they believed, began on August 11, 3114 b.c., and will end on December 21, 2012. (For more on the Mayan calendar, see Barbara J. Sadtler's article 'The Mayan Fascination with Time" in this issue.)

Why the Maya might have chosen the 3114 b.c. date is not entirely clear, particularly since it marks a time that long preceded their own civilization. Jenkins's own theory is that the Maya were actually calculating back from the 2012 date. What, then, was so important about that? According to Jenkins, it marks a point at which the sun at the winter solstice is in the "dark rift" of the Milky Way, a gap in the galaxy (as seen from earth) that corresponds to the galactic center. It is this "galactic alignment," as he calls it, that the Maya believed would herald a regeneration of the age.

The 2012 Story goes on to describe how the date took hold of the popular imagination. This was chiefly the work of Josa Argaelles (who now calls himself Valum Votan), the eccentric prophet of the 1987 Harmonic Convergence, and of the late Terence McKenna, who in the 1990s replaced Timothy Leary as the pope of psychedelia. Both Argaelles and McKenna had their own different but equally convoluted reasons for coming up with this date, which do not entirely jibe with Jenkins's, but he discusses these fully and fairly.

The later part of the book chronicles the public reception of the 2012 date. Jenkins excoriates the cable TV networks for cynically sensationalizing the issue, portraying 2012 as an equivalent of the Christian Doomsday, when in fact, he claims, the Mayans themselves foresaw a time of cyclical renewal. His discussion of the media's treatment of the theme is instructive for anyone who is tempted to take the breathless documentaries of the History Channel and its kin too seriously. I have appeared on some of these myself, and I can testify that the producers asking me the questions offscreen sometimes have trouble keeping a straight face.

Finally, Jenkins provides his own views on this date and what it may mean to us today. Although he is often astute in his criticisms of contemporary civilization, he does not offer much that is new here, and one can go away believing that he thinks indigenous wisdom will save the day for us. To me this seems too simplistic. If the ancient Maya had ways of knowledge that we need to resurrect, they had their share of follies and brutalities as well. Ironically, considering that some are looking to indigenous peoples for answers to our ecological woes, many scholars ascribe the sudden collapse of the Mayan civilization to overexploitation of the environment.

Jenkins also gives more weight to the Traditionalist school—the followers of René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon—than it deserves. The Traditionalists draw a stark and Manichaean contrast between the glories of "traditional" societies and the evils of our own corrupt time. (For more on the Traditionalists, see my article "Against Blavatsky: René Guénon's Critique of Theosophy" in this issue.) Again this is too easy and too negative. If we are sometimes tempts to spurn the advanced civilization that we have created over the last two centuries, it is a temptation that is best avoided. We may need to transcend this civilization, but that does not mean turning our backs on it.

Despite these faults, and despite its frequently clumsy prose, Jenkins's book remains by far the best and most authoritative guide to the 2012 phenomenon. I doubt it will be followed by anything better.

Richard Smoley   

The Lost Teachings of Lama Govinda: Living Wisdom from a Modern Tibetan Master

edited by Richard Power, foreword by Lama Surya Das.
Quest Books, 2007. lviii + 155 pages, paperback, $19.95.

Lama Anagarika Govinda (1898—1985) was a German practitioner and scholar of the highest magnitude of Buddhism and Eastern thought. Few matched his depth and breadth of scholarship, practical understanding, and experiential insight into the intricacies of Buddhism, especially in its Tibetan form. In addition to his eminent autobiography, The Way of the White Clouds, he wrote adeptly on the psychological and transformational significance of early Buddhist philosophy, the symbolic meanings of the stupa, meditation, and the I Ching. With his Indian wife, Li Gotami, he published works on Tibetan art and on consciousness and meditation. Robert Thurman, professor of Buddhism at Columbia University, regards Govinda as "one of the West's greatest minds of the twentieth century."

Lama Surya Das's foreword, written from the perspective of his own spiritual explorations as a young Western seeker in India and Nepal, offers a telling portrait of the great influence Govinda had on him and other Westerners who, from the mid-twentieth century on, became the chief exponents of Buddhism in the West. The editor's broad-ranging introduction traces some of the major events in Govinda's life and shows the extraordinary impact he had on the practitioners and scholars who came under his influence.

The six essays that constitute the central text of the book, several of which were later expanded into full-length books, were recovered from the archives of the Human Dimensions Institute, where they had been delivered in the 1970s. A final chapter consists of question and answer sessions at the institute.

In the first essay, "From Theravada to Zen," Govinda shows how the foundational teachings of the Buddha as recorded in the earliest Pali text (written down some four centuries after the founder's death) shaped Buddhism as it evolved in its journey from India through China to Japan. The author develops the central truth of shunyata (emptiness) as the sine qua non of the highest realization in Buddhism. He calls for practitioners to discover the natural spontaneity of the human mind and to transform the historical Buddha into a direct experience of their own Buddha mind. The dynamic, changing nature of reality is also explored here.

Each of the remaining chapters addresses a particular spiritual, psychological, or philosophical issue of common import in East and West, which, when approached through the perspective of both cultures, results in a more complete, balanced, and accurate view. Govinda writes: "East and West are the two halves of our human consciousness, comparable to the two poles of a magnet, which condition and correspond to each other, and cannot be separated." This being the case, an alternate subtitle for the book might be "The Integration of East and West," or "East and West: How Each Needs the Other."

Drawing on the work of Roberto Assagioli, founder of Psychosynthesis, in the second chapter, Govinda distinguishes between different operations of the human will, for example, egoistic will contrasted with transpersonal will, and emphasizes the importance of the latter in meditation and the life of a realized person.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin forms the focus of the third chapter. Here Govinda bridges the humanities and the physical sciences, indeed spirit and matter. He writes: "The moment we experience [that] the universe is our 'greater body' and penetrate it spiritually, we experience the great transformation; we have attained liberation, the state of nirvana." He notes further that "the 'spirit' can arise in consciousness only when there is a creative force, which connects all factors of life and consciousness and thus makes them into a unity." For Govinda, wisdom lies in the integration of so-called opposites, the transformation of dualities into polarities.

The fourth chapter distinguishes between drug-induced expansion of consciousness, which can lead to psychic disintegration, and a disciplined meditation practice, which carries the potential for spiritual regeneration.

Though there are many references to meditation throughout the book, the sixth chapter addresses the topic directly. The author develops his central insight concerning the integral relationship of matter and spirit by noting that "the special function of meditation is to reunite the inner and the outer world." Govinda takes to task inadequate forms of philosophy and religion that impose mind-made divisions on reality: "In both philosophy and religion the concepts of oneness, of universality, infinity, boundlessness, formlessness, emptiness, changelessness, timelessness, eternity, and similar one-sided abstractions of a purely conceptual type became the summum bonum and the hallmark of an intellectual spirituality, which tried to isolate them from their counterpoles, namely diversity, individuality, form, materiality, movement in time and space, change, growth, transformation, etc." For Govinda, enlightenment always entails the integration of opposites. He summarizes this insight by noting "that universality cannot be experienced except in the individual and that the individual derives its meaning and value from the realization of its universal background and interrelationship."

In a chapter on the I Ching, Govinda demonstrates how this ancient classic of China is not simply a method of predicting the future, even though it has this use in China as well as in many parts of the Western world. Rather it articulates a comprehensive philosophy of life, and is meant "to help us decide our way from the present into the future on the basis of generally prevailing laws."

The Lost Teachings of Lama Govinda concludes with notes, a selected bibliography, and an index. For anyone wanting practical, transformational teaching from a Buddhist perspective, this book serves well.

James E. Royster

The reviewer is professor emeritus of religious studies at Cleveland State University.

D. M. Bennett: The Truth Seeker

produced by Roderick Bradford with Inquiry Media Productions, 2009.
Available from RodBradford@gmail.com. 59 minutes, DVD $20; Blu-Ray $25.

The American freethinker DeRobigne Mortimer Bennett (1818-82) was a defender of civil rights in the great tradition of Thomas Paine. Like most of the Founding Fathers, Paine was a deist, affirming natural rather than revealed religion and morality rather than doctrine and denying that God ever interferes with the laws of nature, propositions with which Bennett would have been fully sympathetic. Paine believed that all human beings have a natural right to freedom—political, intellectual, and spiritual.

In these beliefs, he was closely echoed by D. M. Bennett. Paine's background was Quaker, and Bennett's was Shaker—both groups that set great store on individual liberty and initiative. So both were freethinkers grounded in a moral view of life. These two great defenders of civil rights held views that are basic also to Theosophy: that equality is the essence of life, that human beings have a mind that can embrace the universe (Secret Doctrine 2:17, 105), and that our "future is the future of a thing whose growth and splendor has no limit" as "we are each our own absolute law-giver, the dispenser of glory or gloom to ourselves" (Idyll of the White Lotus).

Like Paine and Annie Besant as well, Bennett expressed his views in print (in a periodical he founded and called The Truth Seeker). And like Besant, Bennett was persecuted for his unconventional ideas and was accused of immorality as an excuse for that persecution. He served time in a New York penitentiary, and after his release he traveled abroad, meeting and being honored by Besant in England. He also visited Henry Steel Olcott and H.P. Blavatsky in India, where he joined the Theosophical Society, whose motto, "There is no religion higher than Truth," was fully in line with his convictions.

For HPB's view of Bennett, see her Collected Works, 4:69, 79-80, 146-48, 285-86, 353, 368-69, 393; 5:119; 10:141n.; a biography-bibliography can be found in 4:625-33. Olcott writes about him in Old Diary Leaves 2:327ff. The Masters' view can be found in Mahatma Letters (chronological edition), 105–06, 114.

Bennett, Paine, and Theosophy are all lights for our own time, possessing the same confidence in our human ability not merely to endure but to prevail. No time is more in need of this confidence than our own.

Paine and Theosophy are both widely known, if not deeply understood. Bennett is not as well recognized. Now, however, an excellent source of insight into his life and ideals is available in a video by Roderick Bradford: D. M. Bennett: The Truth Seeker. It is a complement to a book of the same title, also by Bradford, reviewed in Quest 94.6 (Nov.-Dec. 2006, 236–37). For those more inclined to the visual image than to the printed word, as many of us are, this video is an ideal introduction to its subject. In addition to these two works on Bennett, Bradford, who lives in Allentown, Pennsylvania, has contributed material in The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief (2007) and articles in American History, American Atheist, Free Inquiry, The Truth Seeker, and Quest.

A three-clip preview of the video can be watched at the following URL: http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php. The second clip, "Infidel Abroad," is especially recommended for its references to Blavatsky, Olcott, Besant, and Theosophy.

John Algeo

The reviewer is former president of the Theosophical Society in America.

On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

Stephen T. Asma
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 351 + xii pages, hardcover, $27.95.

My interest in all things macabre drew me to Stephen T. Asma's On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, and I was not disappointed. The book lures readers in with promises of demons, witchcraft, mythical creatures, malformed circus performers, and serial killers. Asma traces the perception of monsters from the melodramatic writings of the ancient world to the cutting-edge transhuman philosophers of the twenty-first century, stopping along the way to have a look at demonic possession, Darwinian natural selection, taxidermy, embryonic morphology, xenophobia, and artificial intelligence. With so many diverse fields of study within its pages, On Monsters is a veritable Hydra-headed demon.

But just like the case of the infamous Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the monstrous fade of On Monsters is but one side of the coin, the other being a comprehensive historical study that spans the realms of physiology, psychology, and religion. This book is far more than a survey of monstrous phenomena—it is a work that explores the social evolution of humankind.

Asma demonstrates that in every era, perceptions of monsters are colored by historical context. In the ancient world monsters were a tool of patriarchal machismo, ready-made beasts for manly heroes to conquer. In the church-dominated medieval period, everything was viewed through a Christian lens; monsters were either demonic abominations or members of deformed races whose baptism and salvation were a very real concern. The Enlightenment severed the cord between physiology and theology, and folded the study of monsters into the fields of medicine and science. Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung established a new era in human psychology, and introduced empathy and emotional pathology into the equation—both of which are critical in the study of serial killers and terrorists, who bear the label "monster" in our contemporary milieu. And postmoderns, in their effort to deconstruct all categories, make monsters of rationalists and theologians who still cling to outdated philosophies.

Asma explores all these categories in light of philosophy, natural history, and popular culture. He cites a wide variety of historical and cultural sources, from Aristotle and St. Augustine to the films of David Lynch and the writings of H. P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick. But he brings his quirky personality to the table, too, which makes On Monsters a thoroughly enjoyable read. His accessible style lends itself well to complex concepts like evolutionary biology and nanotechnology, all of which he demystifies for the benefit of the layperson. Asma also has a keen sense of humor, which is evident in his choice of historical case studies, such as witches who were accused of stealing men's genitalia. He balances this wit with genuine concern and compassion for those who have been persecuted because of their physical appearance or ethnicity or social standing. The book includes a series of drawings courtesy of the author himself, which serve to heighten both the horror and absurdity of the subject matter.

The truth is that On Monsters isn't really about monsters at all. It's a book about us—all of us, throughout history—and how we perceive and react to those creatures, people, and ideologies that we deem to be "monstrous." While our perceptions and technology have evolved over time, Asma is careful to point out that some of the old models still apply. We still enjoy vicarious heroic monster-slaying in video games and comic books, the Catholic Church still employs exorcisms, and the Loch Ness monster continues to draw crowds to the Scottish Highlands. After centuries of trying to tame and "civilize" the horrific, we still haven't succeeded. Asma assures us that the monstrous is alive and well, still breathing its acrid smoke, still wrapping its tentacles around our collective imagination. And no matter how many times we try to kill it, it always comes back for more.

Rev. Seth Ethan Carey

The reviewer is the associate minister of the First Congregational Church in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, and an occasional speaker at the TS. His interests include demonology, theodicy, and esoteric Judeo-Christian traditions.