The year 2012, What do modern day Mayans say?

Some predict that the end of the world is going to be December 21 of 2012. A lot of hype and intrigue surround the Mayan calendar.

 According to a report in the UK Telegraph the modern day Mayan don’t put any stock into what is being said about 2012. “The famous Mayan prophecy inspired an excellent story,” he said in a recent interview about what he calls the “mother of all disaster films”.

 But such a “prophecy” is news to the modern Maya in Guatemala and Mexico. Instead, they view the burgeoning end-of-the-world 2012 industry with a mixture of confusion, exasperation and anger at what is perceived as a Western distortion of their traditions and beliefs.

 ”There is no concept of apocalypse in the Mayan culture,” Jesus Gomez, head of the Guatemalan confederation of Mayan priests and spiritual guides, told The Sunday Telegraph.

 Cirilo Perez, an adviser to Guatemala’s President Alvaro Colom is a prominent ajq’ij – literally a “day counter”, a wise man who makes predictions and advice on the most propitious dates to marry, plant or harvest. He decried the commercial exploitation of Mayan culture by outsiders.

 ”This has all become business but there is no desire to understand,” he said. “When foreigners, or even some Guatemalans, see us, they think ‘Look at the Maya, how nice, how pretty’, but they don’t understand us.”

 Mayan elder Chile Pixtun recalled how he was bombarded with questions about the end of the world during a recent trip to Britain. “Man, they had me fed up with this stuff,” he said, his frustration clear.

 The Maya make up about half of Guatemala’s 13 million people and many live on less than $2 a day as subsistence farmers – an unimaginably far cry from the colossal budget lavished on 2012, which stars John Cusack, Woody Harrelson and the British actress, Thandie Newton.

 In neighboring Mexico, the Maya are concentrated in the Yucatan peninsula, a popular tourist destination but where local farmer are struggling with drought-like conditions.

 ”If I went to Mayan-speaking communities and asked people what is going to happen in 2012, they wouldn’t have any idea,” said Jose Huchim, a Mayan archaeologist in the Yucatan. “That the world is going to end? They wouldn’t believe you. We have real concerns these days, like rain.”

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We are just going to have to sit back and wait to see what happens in 2012.

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