The Sprint to 2012

by Eric Francis Coppolino, January 28, 2008

The astrology of 2008 puts us onto the final approach to 2012. Turn on your radar, buckle up, chuck the ginger ale, and drop your landing gear: the Age of Technology is approaching the runway.

The year 2012 has been tossed around as something special since Jose Arguelles created the Harmonic Convergence in 1987. With that event, he called attention to the Mayan Long Count, a calendar of approximately 1.87 million days used by the Maya in what is now Mexico and Guatemala. Something called the 13th baktun ends on December 21, 2012, concluding a 5,125-year cycle. Notably, this cycle predates the Maya, themselves, whose mathematicians dealt in very long spans of time extending before and after their own existence.

More recently, author John Major Jenkins proposed an astronomical theory for why the Mayans chose our particular era for the cycle to end. He suggests that it involves the alignment of the position of the winter solstice Sun with the dark band that runs through the center of the Milky Way galaxy (called the Road to Xibalba).

Due to the precession effect (that is, the very slow wobble of the Earth on its axis), the winter solstice point gets a little earlier every year (advancing a bit more than a degree per century). The same is true for the first day of all the seasons. The precession effect is usually used to measure the astrological/astronomical age. We are familiar with the concept from the Age of Aquarius theme, wherein the Aries Point (the first degree of the Western zodiac or the first day of spring), is moving into the constellation Aquarius.

Jenkins asks a very good question. Maybe it’s not the constellation that the Aries Point is in that’s the true marker of our cosmic alignment, as we usually think. Maybe it’s the point 90 degrees away, where Capricorn begins. Maybe that’s where we need to be looking for information about an accurate calculation of the cosmic epoch. Most Planet Waves readers are familiar with the Aries Point and its astonishing connections between personal and global events.