The day of the purported Mayan apocalypse is finally upon us, and fanatical mystics and tourists have flocked to ancient Mayan holy sites such as Chichen Itza in southern Mexico awaiting such surreal outcomes as alien saviors, an "upgrade" to human consciousness, and more.
Everyone from lawyers and businessmen, to artists, New-Agers and hippies have gathered around the Maya ruins in Chichen Itza, believing it to be the wellspring for all things doomsday.
"There is an explosion of consciousness through this," said Shambala Songstar, a Californian musician who gave his age as "eternal," reported the Huffington Post.
"We are becoming billionaires of energy. Opening to receive more light and more joy," he said.
Many gathered at the Maya site aren't anticipating the apocalypse at all, and believe the Dec. 21 date has a more positive significance, denoting the dawning of a new age for humanity rather than the end of days.
"It's not the end of the world, it's an awakening of consciousness and good and love and spirituality - and it's been happening for a while," said 53-year-old Mary Lou Anderson, an information technology consultant from Las Vegas, Associated Press reported.
With the arrival of the supposed Mayan end of times on Dec. 21, anxiety and fear are running high, inspiring some wild predictions and behavior. People are frantically preparing for Armageddon the world over, flocking to such far off spiritual destinations as Bugarach, France and Mount Rtanj, Serbia to await alien saviors, a new dawn that will "upgrade" human consciousness, a door opening up another dimension and other surreal phenomena to occur
Police recently arrested nearly 1,000 members of a Christian group, Almighty God, or "Eastern Lightning," for distributing information both in printed form and online to promote its belief that the world will end on Dec. 21, according to the BBC.
The quasi-religious group is a charismatic organization that strongly opposes the current Chinese regime. State-run forces claim the group has been urging its followers to "exterminate the great red dragon" and "found a country under the rule of Almighty God," and China's state-run media has deemed the collective an "evil cult."
The group believes in the Mayan long count calendar and has said the apocalypse will occur Dec. 21. Almighty God contends after Armageddon the world will go completely dark for three whole days,
Founded in the 1980′s, the Almighty God group believes that Jesus Christ has already returned to Earth, and that has come back in the form of a woman. The woman purportedly lives in central China. The group also urges members to overthrow communism.
The majority of the rumors concerning the Dec. 21 Mayan apocalypse stem from a misinterpretation of the Maya calendar, wrongly assuming that the 13th bak'tun (or 144,000-day cycle) of the Mayan Long Count calendar wrapping up on Dec. 21 marks the end of a cycle of creation. However, as Space.com notes, "the ancient Maya probably would not have thought the world was going to end Friday, rather, they likely would simply have celebrated and rolled the calendar over to a new bak'tun."
"It's not the end of the calendar," professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley Rosemary Joyce said. "It's the end of a cycle. It rolls over, like an odometer."
An expert on the Maya, William Saturno, also believes the people wouldn't have thought Dec. 21 marked the end of the world. Saturno conducted a study earlier this year in Guatemala and discovered new notes about the Mayan calendar written on the walls of an ancient structure explaining how the calendars operated. The evidence suggested the Mayans foresaw a hug, otherworldly progression of time.
"They were looking at the way these cycles were turning. The Maya calendar is going to keep going and keep going for billions, trillions, octillions of years into the future, a huge number that we can't even wrap our heads around," Saturno said.
"The ancient Maya predicted the world would continue, that 7,000 years from now, things would be exactly like this. We keep looking for endings. The Maya were looking for a guarantee that nothing would change. It's an entirely different mindset," he concluded.
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