Dustin Thomason: 12.21

“Thought you weren’t back till next week,” Chel said. “Is everything okay?”

Stanton pulled the printout from his pocket and gave it to her.

2012 Group Breaks Silence

Saturday, June 22, 2013, 9:52 a.m.

FBI sources have verified that a letter received two days ago by the Los Angeles Times was sent from the southern highlands of Guatemala. It was most likely written by a member of the cultlike 2012 group once led by Colton Shetter, who has now been confirmed dead by the Guatemalan police.

According to the four-page letter, Shetter was tried by and excommunicated from the group he founded for his murder of researcher Rolando Chacon at the December 2012 raid at the Getty Museum. It is alleged that, following his trial, Shetter attempted to maintain his power using force and was killed in a fight with other members of the group. Using details given in the letter, Guatemalan authorities discovered Shetter’s body buried near Lake Izabal, one of the largest lakes in Guatemala. In what appears to have been a kind of ritual sacrifice, reminiscent of the ancient Maya themselves, Shetter’s heart and all his other organs had been cut out of his body.

The now infamous 2012 group’s whereabouts remain unknown, but the letter suggests it is now being led by Dr. Victor Granning. It indicates Granning plans to return the “Cannibalism Codex” to the Guatemalan village of Kiaqix, situated very close to the discovered ruins at Kanuataba, where experts believe the book was written. Granning believes that the exhibition of the codex close to its point of origin will bring much-needed support to the local indígenas affected by Thane’s disease, by invigorating tourism in the area.

The letter also states that Dr. Granning has made an important new discovery in the codex and that he therefore wants the book displayed for the “millions of new Believers to see.” The former UCLA professor and controversial icon, still sought by authorities for his role in the raid, claims to have found a mistake in the previously calculated date of the end of the ancient Long Count cycle. He now believes the correct date for the end of the thirteenth cycle of the calendar is November 28, 2020.

Chel stopped reading. Somewhere in the far reaches of this jungle, Victor was trying to make amends. Even in his absence, he’d become a kind of mythical figure among the Believers. Many on the new fringe considered his anti-city, anti-technology writings prophetic.

“He’s giving the codex back to you,” Stanton said.

There were no easy answers for what had happened—certainly not for how the legacy of her people had ended up in Chel’s hands. Whatever recalculations Victor might have made, who was to say some version of his 2012 predictions hadn’t already come true, and they were now living in the world he’d dreamed?

Sama giggled, and Chel stared into her little girl’s eyes.

It didn’t really matter anymore.

Chel was surrounded by the people she loved. And she was home.

She handed the article to her mother. Ha’ana took a quick glance and crumpled it up. “Come to Grandma, child,” she said, picking up Sama from the bassinet. “We have more important things to worry about, don’t we?”

WHEN I FIRST ENCOUNTERED PRIONS (PRONOUNCED “PREEONS”) IN medical school, I became fascinated by these tiny proteins that had baffled scientists for fifty years. They served no apparent function in the brain, violated the central dogma of molecular biology stating that reproduction could only happen through the transfer of DNA or RNA, and caused incurable diseases, including mad cow.

As I read everything I could about prions, I learned that more than 150 people had died as a result of consuming infected beef during the mad cow epidemic, and that some scientists believe many more Britons have been exposed and millions more may still get sick. In my reading, I soon came upon another disease prions caused: fatal familial insomnia (FFI). While the disease primarily affects families in Italy and Germany, several new “sporadic” cases are discovered every year in other parts of the world, including Central America.

After learning that “kuru,” the first known cluster of prion disease, was found in the South Fore people of Papua New Guinea, and was transmitted through the practice of ritual cannibalism, the idea for 12.21 took shape.

THE STORY OF HOW the date 12/21/12 became so important in the eyes of millions of people, and assumed the place it has in the cultural consciousness, is still a mystery to me. Beginning in the mid-1970s, new-age writers speculated that the end of the Maya Long Count would represent a major day for human civilization, ushering in a global shift in consciousness. Through “visionaries” like José Argüelles and Terence McKenna, 12/21/12 was linked to astrology, environmental causes, new-age mysticism, spiritual “synchronization,” and growing skepticism about the role of technology in human lives.

But this belief in the importance of the ancient calendar turn took some very strange forms as it spread. Some adherents began to associate it with doomsday theories, claiming that 12/21 would lead to astronomical alignments, collisions with other planets and stars, and reversal of the earth’s magnetic poles. In recent years, groups of believers have left their homes and built vast compounds—in the jungles of Mexico, in the mountains of the Himalayas—in which to try to survive the apocalypse they believe is coming.

Still, I have found no evidence that the ancient Maya themselves believed the turn of the thirteenth cycle was any different from their other important calendar turns, all of which they feared and revered. The Long Count is actually a base-twenty calendar, and continues on for another 2,700 years. The original mention of the importance of the end of the thirteenth cycle, which the inscription written at Tortuguero, Mexico, reinforces, comes from the Popol Vuh. There it is written that the last Long Count ended at the completion of its thirteenth cycle, and this has led some to believe that the current one will as well.

DESPITE THE WIDE SPREAD popularization of the word, even among scholars, the abandonment of water-deprived cities in the lowlands at the end of the first millennium was likely not a civilization-wide Maya “collapse.” Over a period of several centuries, at the end of the classic era, cities that had once flourished were slowly abandoned for smaller villages and more fertile ground.

Still, since the nineteenth century, when explorers rediscovered abandoned ruins buried deep in the overgrown jungles of Honduras and Guatemala, theories have circulated about what led the Maya to leave their incredible metropolises, never to return. Pollen samples from the Copán Valley and El Petén, locations of some of the largest ancient settlements, indicate that they were almost completely devoid of human life by the middle of the thirteenth century, after centuries of obsolescence.

Most Mayanists now agree that overpopulation, drought, and destructive farming practices leading to deforestation were major contributors to the dwindling population. Other possibilities are more hotly contested. Recently, scholars like Jared Diamond have argued that ongoing violence between the Maya cities was a major factor, and pointed out that fighting reached a peak in the period leading up to the end of the classic.

Evidence for cannibalism among the Maya is controversial and limited. But at the ruins of late classic Tikal, Mayanist Peter Harrison discovered a cooking pit beneath an ancient house that contained human bones with charring and tooth marks. It seems likely that if cannibalism did take place in the lowlands, it was not a signifi cant cultural practice, but rather happened only in times of desperation, when other food supplies were exhausted.