Apocalypse 2012 by Lawrence Joseph:
This is a book of over 300 pages, with not a single picture in it. There are a few notes, but they are not numbered in the text, which makes them totally superfluous – it was probably done this way to disguise the fact that the notes are woefully inadequate for anybody to check up on most of the information presented.
It becomes evident quite early in the book that the author has not understood the work of John Major Jenkins. He refers throughout the book to an event that he says will occur on 21st December 2012. He says that “the Solar system will eclipse – interpose itself so as to block the view from Earth – the centre of the Milky Way” (p.15)- he then goes on to associate the “dark hole at the centre of the galaxy spiral” with the “black hole right at the centre”. There are two basic misunderstandings here:
John Major Jenkins has since admitted that he did not make the distinction (in point 2 above) clear enough in Maya Cosmogenesis 2012, and while others have shared this misunderstanding, Joseph is unique in describing the event that Jenkins called Galactic Alignment, as an eclipse of GC by the solar system (point 1 above). This is a misunderstanding at a level that shows an inability to grasp the most basic understanding of astronomy – an understanding that is essential to anybody who is writing a supposedly authoritative book on this subject. Joseph obviously formed his misunderstanding while reading page xxxix of the introduction to MC2012, which is a brief summary. It is obvious that he didn’t read much beyond the introduction, since he admits on p.45 that he found MC2012 to be full of “complex and frequently far-fetched calculations…” He dismisses the book in one paragraph, although he fails to admit that an understanding of the Galactic Alignment event that he constantly refers to (wrongly as an eclipse of GC by the solar system), was pioneered by Jenkins in this very same book.
Unfortunately, when Apocalypse 2012 was recently reviewed (a whole page) in the Daily Mail (26th Feb 2007), Joseph's "solar system eclipsing GC"misinterpretation is repeated. Another misunderstanding that is passed on to the masses is as follows: "on December 21, 2012, the view from Earth of the centre of the Milky Way will indeed be eclipsed says Lawrence Joseph - an event that happens only once every 26,000 years". This originates on p.36, (where Joseph also gives the time of 11.11 PM universal time, when it should be 11.11 AM). Although this quote at first sounds slightly better, since the"eclipse of the centre of the Milky Way is as viewed from Earth, and the solar system is not mentioned; the event as described is not something that happens only once every 26,000 years - the Sun eclipses the visual centre of the galaxy (the borrom of the dark rift in the central bulge) once every year! The solstice sunrise eclipses the visual centre of the galaxy "once" every 13,000 years, approximately, and the winter solstice sunrise does so "once" every 26,000 years, but it does so on the winter solstice every year for a period of about 36 years - the time it takes to cross the galactic equator. This may seem like nit-picking to some people, but it will allow an astronomer to dismiss the whole subject as incorrect, and thus apparently be "de-bunked". In his efforts to over-simplify, and sound dramatic, Joseph inadvertantly leaves himself and the subject open to derision.
Early in the book, Joseph meets and is influenced by the Barrios brothers, Carlos and Gerrardo. Carlos is famous for his essay, all over the Internet, in which he states “the world will not end” in 2012. However, when Joseph asked him if the worlds would end in 2012, he gave a less certain response: “No. Not necessarily. It could all go quite smoothly in theory.” The Barrios brothers transmit their annoyance at the appropriation of Maya culture, as they see it, since they think that non-Maya archaeologists and more recently, independent researchers, have been reconstructing the knowledge that is rightfully theirs. The Barrios brothers claim to have spent 20 years travelling round remote Maya villages visiting elders, some of who still live in the same caves as their ancestors. They claim to have located six unknown ancient codices among these elders, who are not planning on sharing them with “Anglo-European scholars.” However, it is unclear whether the elders have retained the ability to decode the hieroglyphs and understand what is written on the codices. The Maya obviously have good cause to be very angry with the “cultural imperialists”, since their ancestors were slaughtered by the Anglo-Europeans and practically all the codices were burnt (except four, one of which – the Grolier – is probably a hoax). What is more, this genocide has been continuing until now.
Having said that, it is interesting to note that Carlos Barrios’s information, as it has been repeated all over the Internet, seems uncannily similar to the Aztec version that was promoted by Tony Shearer and Jose Arguelles, in which there is a 25-year period between 1987 – the year of Harmonic Convergence - and 2012. His brother Gerrardo originally was promoting a different version, in which the “13 Heavens cycle” began in 1991, but will “gestate” for nine years until 2001 when it would “begin”. This is the 13-Heaven cycle that Arguelles (and Carlos) inferred would start in 2012. Although the brothers now seem to agree, it seems that their knowledge is not ancient preserved knowledge, but is sourced from the Anglo-Europeans. On p.35, Joseph quotes from Gerrardo’s book, The Maya Cholqij: Gateway to Aligning with the Energies of the Earth that explains the calculation of the Nine Hells cycle from August 17 1519 to August 16 1987. As I have explained already on p.312 of Beyond 2012 (and in the online article, How Did Tony Shearer Calculate Harmonic Convergence? http://www.diagnosis2012.co.uk/harm.htm ), this is wrong because it counts the Nine Hells as 9 x 52 Gregorian years, rather than nine Calendar rounds, each consisting of 52 Maya haabs (365-day years with no leap-day). Cortez met Moctezuma on 16th August 1519 (Julian date) and nine Calendar Rounds later is 4th May 1987 (Gregorian date).
Another indication that the brothers have sourced their “knowledge” from Arguelles is that Joseph explains the Maya calendar as in Gerrardo Barrios’s book, that describes the significance of the number 13 (as did Arguelles), as relating to the 13 major joints of the body, rather than the number of rattles in the tail of the Crotalus durissus rattlesnake. It also says (p.27):
“In the curious Mayan reckoning, a year has 360 days; the remaining 5.25 days (4 x .5 accounting for the leap day) are considered “out of time” and are traditionally devoted to thanksgiving for the previous year and celebration of the year to come. Thus 5,200 of these Mayan years translate to approximately 5125 of our Gregorian years.”
The Maya did not have a leap day until after the arrival of the Spanish. This is an error that Arguelles made. In the Arguelles Dreamspell system, the 26 July every year is called the “Day out of Time”, and Arguelles also adds a leap day every 29 February, in which the Tzolkin (or Cholqij) day is repeated. This totally destroys the continuity of the Tzolkin, which has been kept unbroken by some of the contemporary Maya in the Guatemala highlands. The haab calendar had 365 days, and the extra 5 days were called Uayeb, or “days upon the year”. How much of this is more of Joseph’s misunderstanding, and how much is what is actually said by Gerrardo remains to be seen.
Anyway, Joseph (p.13), says that when he heard about the increased solar activity, and that there would be a solar maximum in 2012, when the Maya 13-baktun cycle ends, he Googled 2012, and found information on blogs, books, music art, ideologies, philosophies, the Bible and the I Ching that all relate to 2012. He obviously was checking out the DiaGnosis2012 website, since this is in the top of the Google listings for 2012 (after Olympic sites). In the book, he goes on to explore some of these subjects, such as solar activity, the Timewave, the Bible Code. It would have been polite to reference the site in the notes, but there is no reference. Joseph actually does mention the site once (not the book, Beyond 2012), on p.123, but somehow confuses the webmaster (myself - Geoff Stray), with Robert Bast, who runs the Survive 2012 website, and Andy McCracken, who runs the Exodus 2006 site. Talking of Ethiopia, he says that Scuttlebutt (whoever he is), “has it that that’s where Robert Bast, the Australian doomsday enthusiast who runs the Dire Gnosis Web site devoted to trumpeting the upcoming 2012 calamity, is staking his claim.” This is another example of sloppy research – in his desire to compress, he has rolled three people into one.
That’s got the moaning out of the way.
There is some interesting material in this book that makes it well worth reading. The author travelled to Hermanus, south Africa, to interview a geophysicist called Pieter Kotze at the Magnetic Observatory, who confirmed that the Earth’s magnetic field is diminishing and that some researchers think this is a sign of an imminent magnetic reversal, but is he not sure himself. If the field is reversing, this will mean that wildlife such as migrating birds and salmon returning to spawning points will become lost; weather will continue to get more chaotic, with fiercer hurricanes, tornados and electrical storms. Kotze went on to describe a 100,000-mile crack in the Earth’s magnetic field called the South Atlantic anomaly, over the ocean between Brazil and South Africa, which is allowing solar energy to enter, which has already damaged satellites. Kotze says that this will increase the likelihood of damage to power-grids during solar storms. He also says that the Ozone hole over Antarctica may be connected with this penetration of solar proton radiation.
Joseph investigates the possibility of the Yellowstone super-volcano erupting, and the possibility is very disturbing. According to Steve Sparks, a professor of geology at the University of Bristol, the huge caldera (200 square miles), can be compared to a balloon – not one full of water, that would ooze out slowly, but one full of gas that would explode with a pinprick. This occurs approximately every 600,000 years, and last happened 640,000 years ago. Monitoring with seismographs and heat detectors all over Yellowstone Park shows that the huge abscess is showing all the signs of being about to burst. This would turn most of Wyoming and Montana into a pile of black, steaming volcanic rubble, poison most of North America with radioactive fallout (since the super-volcano is right on top of a huge uranium deposit), cause the failure of the Asian monsoons, bringing famine and disease to that part of the world, and probably plunge the northern hemisphere into a volcanic winter that could last for several years. The last time a similar scale eruption occurred was the Toba super- volcano, 74,000 years ago, says Joseph, one that he says was triggered by a prior period of global warming, and the volcanic winter triggered a cold snap that plunged the world into an ice age lasting 60,000 years. The Bush administration has just authorised another 10,000 oil wells in Yellowstone, in addition to the existing 5,600, and scientists have proposed drilling very deep holes “to test out a hypothesis that the supervolcano’s hot spot is fuelled by mantle plumes”. This is analogous to pricking the gas-balloon.
Joseph has found a psychic called Anne Stander, living near Johannesburg, South Africa, who specialises in volcanic and seismic predictions. Her group – 123Alert, has a good prediction record, including the eruption of mount St. Helens in March 2005, which surprised geologists, as there was no preceding seismic activity. She predicts that the rising seismic and volcanic activity will peak in 2011, particularly on the Pacific rim, from Alaska down to California and Mexico.
Joseph thinks that 2005 was a key year in the unfolding of increasing earth changes leading to 2012. A cluster of catastrophes was focussed on Central America. Just after Hurrican Rita, the Llamatepec volcano erupted in El Salvador on October 1, and was followed by Hurricane Stan 4 days later affecting El Salvador, Guatemala and southern Mexico. After another 3 days, an earthquake measuring 5.8 on the Richter scale hit Guatemala and El Salvador, and then Hurricane Wilma arrived. Joseph lists the sunspots, flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) of 2005, including a proton blast on January 20 that travelled to earth 50 times faster than normal (p.106), and a solar flare that occurred on September 7, 2005 – an X17 – that was the second largest ever recorded. In fact, there had been at least two flares larger than this – an X22 on April 2, 2001 and an X45 on November 4, 2003 (he mentions this one on p.117).
Joseph says that following a week of intense solar activity, with ten X-class flares, on September 14 2005, a 37-mile crack opened up in Ethiopia, and this is believed by some geologists to be the start of the whole African continent splitting in two. Also in central Africa is the point where all the hurricanes are now thought to originate, (as thunderstorms), which may also be connected to solar activity. Joseph says that some space scientists now believe that the planets have an electromagnetic and gravitational influence on the Sun, and that the Sun “wobbles and also bulges in the direction of the solar System’s centre of mass”. According to Thomas Burgess, a solid-state quantum physicist from Livermore Laboratories in Berkeley California, “the next peak in the planetary tidal force will come late in 2012…” which is coincidentally in the same year as the next solar maximum is due.
Joseph went to Akademgorodok near Novosibirsk, Siberia, to interview Alexey Dmitriev, who authored The Planetophysical State of the Earth and Life. Dmitriev and colleagues used evidence collected by the Voyager satellites and compared it with research compiled in Russian and Western scientific journals, and information from NASA and the ESA (European Space Agency).
Dmitriev states that there are three important energy sources that have been overlooked by orthodox science, and these are: “(1) the dynamic, incremental conditions of the interplanetary medium, (2), energetic effects of the planetary configuration of the solar system, and (3) impulses from the centre of the galaxy.” Dmitriev explains that (as I summarised in Beyond 2012), the solar system has collected a layer of deflected interstellar plasma in the shock wave on the edge of the heliosphere, and this has increased tenfold over the last 20 years. Joseph summarises Dmitriev’s explanation that this is due to the solar system entering “a rough patch, specifically, magnetized strips and striations containing hydrogen, helium, hydroxyl…and other elements, combinations and compounds: space debris, perhaps the result of an exploded star.” This is a kind of “interstellar energy cloud” that has been studied by Vladimir Baranov, who specialised in the hydrodynamics of interplanetary plasma, and Dmitriev says he expects the heliosphere will be travelling through the cloud for the next 3,000 years, but it is interesting that Joseph barely mentions plasma. As I pointed out in Beyond 2012, Dmitriev says that this cloud is causing atmospheric and magnetic changes on all the planets in the solar system, including a huge thunderstorm on Saturn in January 2006, with lightning bolts a thousand times larger than those on Earth, and “Yellowstone-like geysers have for the first time been seen erupting on Encaladus, Saturn’s moon”. Jupiter’s magnetic field has now doubled in size, extending as far as Saturn’s orbit, and has developed a second red spot, which is a huge electromagnetic storm. Dmitriev also says that the bleed-through from the shock wave is responsible for the increasing solar activity.
Joseph claims that in south-western New Mexico, there is a “neo-fascist freemason cabal secretly run out of the Vatican by rogue elements of the CIA”, creating an underground city and building a spaceship to flee the Earth “just before it blows itself apart in December 2012”, and travel to an Earth-like planet in a nearby star-system.
Dmitriev also suggests that Gaia, the living planet, as well as having “lungs” in the form of rain-forests has another organ – a kind of heat-sink in the form of iron-ore deposits, that functions as a conductor of excess energy, passing it from the atmosphere to the Earth’s mantle, but that mankind’s mining of these layers has diminished that function. Dmitriev would not comment on 2012, but said that “the global catastrophe – hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, synchronising and amplifying each other in a positive feedback loop that will spin out of control…should probably happen in ones, not tens, of years.”
While at Novosibirsk, Joseph was shown the Kosyrev mirror, a device designed by physicist Nicolai Kosyrev to investigate telepathy, and facilitate predictions of the future. The Kosyrev theory says that time flows in beams through interstellar space, but these are affected by earth’s magnetic field. Kosyrev studied sacred sites and ascertained that they are mostly built on areas of low magnetic field density. Psychics were then found to perform better at these sites. Kosyrev then designed the mirror, that reduces magnetic field density 500%, and that appears as a metal barrel (containing a mattress). He then continued the experiments using the mirror. The man who revealed the 2012 end-point to the masses, Jose Arguelles (along with other participants) has been cooperating in an experiment with the Kosyrev mirror, in which he has been transmitting thoughts and images from Maya, Toltec and Christian sacred sites in Mexico, that were not disclosed until later. The time of the transmissions was pre-arranged, but they actually started being received by a recipient in the Kosyrev mirror about a month before they were sent!
Considering this revelation, it is surprising that Joseph made no reference to Dmitriev’s claims of effects of the plasma band or interstellar energy cloud on human consciousness, (see Beyond 2012 p.135-136). Dmitriev even went as far as to say that it would cause “the spontaneous mass evolution of Humanity as we now know it”, but Joseph prefers to focus exclusively on the catastrophic effects. Since the English edition of Apocalypse 2012 is subtitled, “An Optimist Investigates the End of Civilization”, I would expect some evidence of that optimism, apart from a jocular and sometimes sarcastic writing style. On p.16, the author claims he is not a catastrophe buff, and on p.17, that his conclusions of the “potentially cataclysmic nature of 2012” are based on unbiased research, but finding the optimism in this book is a bit difficult. In fact the author does admit that if he had been optimnistic, the publisher would probably have rejected the book!
Joseph goes on to consider the possibility of a 63-65 million-year catastrophe cycle in which the solar system’s orbit around a binary companion star brings it into collision with asteroids or a possible 24-26,000-year cycle - an alternative explanation for the phenomena usually interpreted as the precession of the equinoxes – causes the same, or that this is caused by the solar system’s up and down movement while orbiting the solar system. He also considers the asteroid predicted for 2012 according to the Bible Code.
A few more interesting anecdotes include; an Armageddon theme park opening at Megiddo in Israel in 2011-2012 (p.212); the restoration of the Armageddon church at Megiddo: 2010-2012 (p.213); Kabbalistic Rabbi Joseph Michael Levry says that 2012 is the end of an 8-year purification period, that is “a sort of planetary near-death experience” (p.230-231); the laser interferometer space antenna (LISA), will be launched in 2011 (p. 257); the Barrios brothers criticize Jose Arguelles for confusing people over what is Mayan (p.236) (but even Joseph himself has succumbed to this, (p.236), as he refers to Lord Pacal’s tomb as the tomb of Votan - Arguelles confuses Pacal and Votan – Votan was the mythological founder of Palenque, whereas Pacal was a king that lived much later).
Joseph covers McKenna and the Timewave, but fails to realise that in the original 1975 publication of The Invisible Landscape, the end-date was 17th November 2012, and that McKenna moved it forward 34 days to coincide with that of the Maya, (the end-point of the 1993 edition) when he found out about it later. From p.247-249, Joseph lists more 2012 connections that he got from the Dire Gnosis website (without any reference!) – i.e. Raven Hail’s Cherokee calendar, the Peruvian Age of Meeting ourselves Again, as revealed by Joan Parisi Wilcox; the Hopi connection; the Maori creation myth, where Rangi and Papa come back together.
Finally, I found the paragraph in which Joseph tries to be optimistic (p.253-254):
“The reason that doomsday cults were not found in this research is that 2012 is not about death – not from the Mayan perspective, not from the interstellar energy cloud, not from the changing Sun. It is about a major transformation that may entail a great number of deaths, human and otherwise, but unlike most of the doomsday cults, there is nothing in the spirit of 2012 that advocates death as a means to transcendence or anything else. Death is simply what will likely occur, not a recommended solution.”
Oh good!
Although this book has omitted one of the most significant pieces of research on 2012 (Jenkins’ exposition of the Galactic Alignment encoded in Maya myth, architecture, ceremony and ball-game) and has misunderstood the Galactic Alignment process as an “eclipse of GC by the solar system”, it does have several good points. The author has sought out scientists – some, like Dmitriev, very elusive – to add further understanding to what may be about to unfold, and has included interviews with contemporary Maya (although they actually only seemed to produce sour grapes), and has also paid attention to some of the known 2012 links such as the Timewave and the Bible Code, but most of all, the content of the book is relevant! As opposed to Pinchbeck’s book (with its 2 titles), that hardly mentions 2012 (on 20 pages out of 400), at least this book is on topic! Neither is the author a budding guru plugging his own modified calendar, such as Calleman or Arguelles. Nor is he twisting facts to fit his theory, like Geryl and Rattinckx, (though he does ignore information that was too complex for him, and fails to reference web sources that would bring attention to an existing book on the same subject, which he apparently didn't read). The book is also easy to read for the man in the street, comes from a non-New-Age rational perspective, and should broaden the appeal of the subject to enable wider discussion - provided the subject survives the derision he invites by his shoddy inaccurate summary of the galactic alignment event.