2012, end of the world

The Chilam Balam are a group of post-conquest Mayan prophetic histories transcribed in a modified form of the Spanish alphabet. Their authorship is ascribed to a chilam balam, or jaguar prophet.^[1] The Chilam Balam of Tizimin has been translated four times in the 20th century, with many disputes over the meaning of its passages. One passage in particular is relevant to the interpretation of the 13th b’ak’tun:

lic u tal oxlahun bak chem, ti u cenic u (tzan a cen/ba nacom)i (ciac/cha’) a ba yum(il/t)exe

Maud Worcester Makemson, an archaeoastronomer, believed that this line referred to the “tremendously important event of the arrival of 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 Kankin in the not too distant future”,^[2] Her translation of the line, runs:

Presently B’ak’tun 13 shall come sailing, figuratively speaking, bringing the ornaments of which I have spoken from your ancestors.

Her version of the text continues, “Then the god will come to visit his little ones. Perhaps ‘After Death’ will be the subject of his discourse.” Makemson was still relying on her own dating of 13.0.0.0.0 to 1752 and therefore the “not too distant future” in her annotations meant a few years after the scribe in Tizimin recorded his Chilam Balam.^[3] The more recent translation of Munro S. Edmonson does not support this reading; he considers the Long Count almost entirely absent from the book, since the 360-day tun was supplanted in the 1750s by a 365-day Christian year, and a 24-round may system was being implemented.^[4] He translates the line as follows:

…like the coming of 13 sail-ships. When the captains dress themselves, your fathers will be taken.^[5]

Other Chilam Balam books contain references to the 13th b’ak’tun, but it is unclear if these are in the past or future; for example, oxhun bakam u katunil (thirteen bakam of k’atuns) in the Chilam Balam of Chumayel.^[6] Bolon Yokte’ K’uh appears in in the Chilam Balam of Chumayel to signify an apparent battle and victory over Spanish invaders.^[7]

Citations

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After a visit to Italy, Nostredame began to move away from medicine and toward the occult. Following popular trends, he wrote an almanac for 1550, for the first time Latinizing his name from Nostredame to Nostradamus. He was so encouraged by the almanac’s success that he decided to write one or more annually. Taken together, they are known to have contained at least 6,338 prophecies,^[2][10] as well as at least eleven annual calendars, all of them starting on 1 January and not, as is sometimes supposed, in March. It was mainly in response to the almanacs that the nobility and other prominent persons from far away soon started asking for horoscopes and “psychic” advice from him, though he generally expected his clients to supply the birth charts on which these would be based, rather than calculating them himself as a professional astrologer would have done. When obliged to attempt this himself on the basis of the published tables of the day, he always made numerous errors, and never adjusted the figures for his clients’ place or time of birth.^[4][6] (Refer to the analysis of these charts by Brind’Amour, 1993, and compare Gruber’s comprehensive critique of Nostradamus’ horoscope for Crown Prince Rudolph Maximilian.)^[11]

He then began his project of writing a book of one thousand mainly French quatrains,^[12] which constitute the largely undated prophecies for which he is most famous today. Feeling vulnerable to religious fanatics,^[2] however, he devised a method of obscuring his meaning by using “Virgilianized” syntax, word games and a mixture of other languages such as Greek, Italian, Latin, and Provençal.^[2] For technical reasons connected with their publication in three installments (the publisher of the third and last installment seems to have been unwilling to start it in the middle of a “Century,” or book of 100 verses), the last fifty-eight quatrains of the seventh “Century” have not survived into any extant edition.

The quatrains, published in a book titled Les Propheties (The Prophecies), received a mixed reaction when they were published. Some people thought Nostradamus was a servant of evil, a fake, or insane, while many of the elite thought his quatrains were spiritually-inspired prophecies – as, in the light of their post-Biblical sources, Nostradamus himself was indeed prone to claim. Catherine de Médicis, the queen consort of King Henri II of France, was one of Nostradamus’ greatest admirers. After reading his almanacs for 1555, which hinted at unnamed threats to the royal family, she summoned him to Paris to explain them and to draw up horoscopes for her children. At the time, he feared that he would be beheaded,^[13] but by the time of his death in 1566, Catherine had made him Counselor and Physician-in-Ordinary to her son, the young King Charles IX of France.

Some accounts of Nostradamus’s life state that he was afraid of being persecuted for heresy by the Inquisition, but neither prophecy nor astrology fell in this bracket, and he would have been in danger only if he had practiced magic to support them. In fact, his relationship with the Church was always excellent.^[14] His brief imprisonment at Marignane in late 1561 came about purely because he had published his 1562 almanac without the prior permission of a bishop, contrary to a recent royal decree.^[15]

Notes

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.