Author Archives: Eric Francis

As I may have mentioned, I am now up to the written portion. Audio is done and edited and being posted to the website now. We are going to wait until the written reports are done before opening up the site. That will be some time around next weekend. I am making good progress, approximately one sign per day, but this is stuff that has to be written carefully, editing as I go.

One representation of the Tzolk

On Wednesday night, I got involved in a side project — delving into one particular theory of the Mayan calendar that has been irritating me for years. Using various books, contacting a few different mentors and working with information I already understood, I began to debunk that particular theory and started to move onto others that made more sense. All of this, by the way, is in preparation for my audio on 13.0.0.0.0 — that is, the turnover of the calendar on 12/21/12. This is the fifth in the Top Five Events of 2012 series, and I expect to do that some time over the weekend.

In the past 48 hours of reading, conversations and thought, I’ve gained a new understanding of both the Mayan tzolk’in (the short count or 260-day calendar) and the long count, which for our purposes goes back 5,125 years. (It actually goes back to the big bang but I am going to skip that for now.)

The long count is the one that is doing some very interesting stuff in 2012 (and has been since March 9, 2011, though this has not received much press). I will get into that shortly; it’s utterly amazing. It turns out that the long count is not merely a linear progression of days. The 13th baktun ends on 12/21/12 — a baktun is 144,000 days, and 13 of them are 1.89 million days. There are all kinds of structures, patterns and rhythms within those flows of days, and we seem to be living them out in palpable ways.

Now, I’ve been collecting information on these calendars going back to 1986. Yet all of a sudden I am feeling the bug bite me — I know it’s time to learn daykeeping in the Mesoamerican tradition. I will be speaking to my two friends who have devoted their lives to daykeeping to see what I can get going in this space, the diary connected to the 2012 annual edition.

Okay — it is back to the Leo written report.

I’ve pulled an all-nighter diving into various Mayan calendar theories. An evening of discovery, focusing mainly on the astronomy. Those old Mesoamerican ways of timekeeping are really cool. They are systems that are based on multiple cycles, and track time by the overlays of the cycles. It keeps their mind on the meta level. I think that part of our problem with time is time itself — that it’s in the nature of linear time to compress like this. The nature of the older methods used in our part of the world would inherently take the mind to a different level, due to playing with metacycles. It’s a more spacious version of time, capable of gracefully moving through long phases. Given this, it’s likely that 12/21/12 coincides with a time pulse of some kind. There is nothing specific to predict this except the calendar itself, and a slightly wider cosmology than Western culture tends toward. It’s easy to see why the presence of the date has given rise to so many visions — that would even seem to be the point.