4 Ahau - 3 Kankin - another 13 Baktuns passed - and the vampires are marching in

4 Ahau - 3 Kankin - another 13 Baktuns passed - and the vampires are marching in

Why this extreme interest in and fascination of the End of the World?

Of course the World does not end on this date, just as it did not end the last tine, 4 Ahau, 8 Cumku, 13.0.0.0.0 in the year 3113 BC, August 13.

Films and modern folk myth with more  or less superstition have focused on the Baktun change in the Mayan calendar. Before that it was of course the Millennium change. And the whole 20th century has seen many expected endings of our World.

Good, bad or catastrofic films depict many scenarios of endings from floods to comets. Fortunately the Earth is often saved by American heroes!

Why this interest in the End? We saw another belief in an ending 1000 years ago in Europe and also around the birth of Christ in the Middle East. I think these anxieties are not simply caused by round dates in our or the Mayan calendar.

Rather such fears tend to occur around the birth of a new high culture or civilization. The Middle Eastern or Oriental civilization started at the time of the birth of Christ. Our civilization around 1000. Another example of such apocalyptic fears was in the beginning of the second Chinese civilization around 200 AD. See http://polybios2100.blogspot.dk/2012/10/civilizations.html?m=1

But such fears could also be a sign of the beginning stagnation and later decline of a civilization. That is what I assume is in the play now. The era of modern scientific thinking is the last stage of the peak of a civilization. The tendencies toward superstition and new religiosity are already clearly to see in the horizon. It is not so that all phases of a civilization or high culture are non-religious and non-mythic in thinking. That is only the case in the later centuries culminating in the around 3 centuries of the Modernity. Here mythos is effectively replaced by logos, the logical scientific thinking.

This phase has not in any of the older civilizations lasted forever. The extremely logical, all too clear thinking becomes insustainable. Superstition and religion or just mythical thinking begin to return. In our case this is evident in phenomena like role plays, the Gothic scene and the interest in the supernatural. Vampires fill films and song texts and are used by some as a religious substitute.

At the same time we may have a vague feeling of the approaching end of not just the era of logos, but also the 1000 year era of cultural explosive creativity.

And because of the return of mythos this vague knowledge manifests itself in the form of apocalyptic myths. The only thing that seems to prolong the era of logical thinking is the fantastic progress resulting from scientific thinking, not least in information technology.

But the myths are already creeping into the Internet....