Revising the Mayan Calendar

2012 Is History Now, but Carl Johan Calleman Is Still Looking for Secrets

It’s rare to find a model of the cosmos that unites science with ancient mythology. It’s even more remarkable to claim that this model has been hidden in the architecture of the Mayan calendar system, waiting to be decoded. In the past ten years Carl Johan Calleman, Ph.D. has written five books to establish his theory that the Mayan calendar chronicles the evolution of the universe and human consciousness from its inception to the present day.

Born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1950, Calleman has said that his career as a scholar and researcher is now in its third phase. The first phase was training and practice as a professional scientist in the years 1974–1993. After obtaining a Ph.D. in Physical Biology under the mentorship of a member of the Nobel committees, he later, as a Senior Researcher at the University of Washington, Seattle, wrote articles in the scientific literature on environmental science, chemistry, and cancer research. Among the prominent places he has lectured at are Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cornell University, the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine, and the World Health Organization.

The second phase of his career, begun in 1993, was dedicated to understanding the ancient Mayan calendar and its underlying mechanisms. A trip to Mexico and Guatemala in 1979 introduced him to the beliefs of ancient indigenous peoples. During this period, long before the Mayan calendar had become a matter of widespread interest, he read in a Michael Coe book that the Mayan calendar would come to an end in the year 2011. (Michael D. Coe is a Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Yale University. Coe’s books include The Maya and Breaking the Maya Code.) This observation sparked a profound question for Calleman: ‘Why would a calendar end?’

In 1998, Mayan Daykeeper Hunbatz Men invited Calleman to speak at a conference in Merida, Yucatan, initiating the third phase of his career. The event inspired him to write The Mayan Calendar, published in 2001, followed by four books on the subject—the latest being, The Nine Waves of Creation: Quantum Physics, Holographic Evolution and the Destiny of Humanity, published in 2016.


The Mayan Calendar

The casual reader might assume that there is something called the ‘Mayan Calendar,’ but this is not exactly true. The Maya used a number of calendars, but the Tzolkin has been called the “master” because it is central to Mayan culture. The oldest of all the Mayan calendars, the Tzolkin is the one to which all other Mayan calendars are synchronized. While it is not a physical object, the Tzolkin symbols can be found carved into the stonework of ancient Mayan pyramids, on stelae, and in the four Mayan codices still existing.

The Tzolkin describes the energies of creation moving through cycles within cycles, based on a 13:20 ratio. It can be illustrated as a wheel within a wheel; the inside round is composed of 13 tones, while the outside round shows 20-day signs, as glyphs. As the wheels turn, the 13 tones and 20 glyphs match to produce a unique energetic signature for each day over a cycle of 260 days. To the Maya, these signatures determine the energetic aspect of that day as well as the life purpose of all the individuals born on that day.

‘The Long Count’ is the name given to the chronology used by the Maya during their Classical Era (AD 300–900) to keep track of the passage of vast tracks of time. Dates were inscribed according to this Long Count on most of the ancient pyramids and stelae. The Mayan calendar is best described as a system of timekeeping tools that work harmoniously together to offer a multi-level view into the nature of existence.

The Mayan calendar reached mass awareness when the news that it would end in 2012 was spread. The 2012 date was the end of 13 baktuns of the Long Count, which amounts to 5,125 years for each baktun.

Scholar and leading researcher of Maya cosmology, calendrics, mythology, and astronomy, John Major Jenkins is the author of dozens of articles and seven books. Recorded on December 9, 2012, Jenkins explained that he believed the famed date of Dec. 21, 2012 marked a period of a new Galactic Alignment. He considered this Alignment to be a major theme in Mayan astronomy and mythology. It is a rare astronomical event where the sun moves to the midline of the galactic equator and into the dark rift of the Milky Way, which in Maya mythology creates the Great Crossroad or Cosmic Tree.

Jenkins noted that there was no doomsday scenario or astrological connection to the event. Instead, it signifies a rebirth, or “transformation and renewal,” at the end of a cycle and the start of a new cycle. Jenkins was not averse to exploring additional meanings within Mayan mythology, declaring, “We are embedded in the larger energy field of the Universe.”


Mechanics of the Nine Waves

Calleman has a different take. In the preface to his book, The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness, he says Nine Waves evolved consciousness. “Human thinking is not something that takes place inside the head of a person in isolation from the rest of the cosmos. Our thinking, and by consequence our actions as well, develop largely through resonance with an evolving cosmic consciousness, mediated by the Earth, whose various energy shifts are described by the Mayan calendar.”

Calleman believes that the structure of the calendar is made visible in the pyramids at Chichen Itza, Tikal, and Palenque. Each of their nine levels is made up of 13 sections, representing seven days and six nights. Days represent light or new awareness and nights represent applications of that awareness. The evolution of consciousness driven by the nine waves began, according to the Maya, 16.4 billion years ago.

The First Cycle—Cellular Consciousness—is characterized by action/reaction expressed by physical laws, chemical compounds, star fields, and solar systems. Each day lasted 1.2 billion years.

Second Cycle—Mammalian—which be-gan 820 million years ago, introduced the first complex cellular life, live birth, birds, reptiles, etc. It expressed consciousness as stimulus/response. Each day consisted of 63.4 million years.

Third Cycle—Familiar—occurred 41 million years ago, as each day lasted 3.2 million years. Consciousness was expressed as individual response and recognition of individuals and family, as opposed to herds, flocks, etc.

Fourth Cycle—Tribal—began 2 million years ago and introduced the mind as a tool for the recognition of similarity and difference. Each day lasted 160,000 years.

Fifth Cycle—Cultural—began 102,000 years ago, with each day lasting 8,000 years. Its evolution produced reasons for all phenomena, including a basis for cultural identification.

Sixth Cycle—National—began in 3115 BC and developed the concept of right and wrong, the basis for law, and the existence of nations. Each day amounted to 397 years.

Seventh Cycle—Planetary—began in AD 1755, with each day lasting 19.7 years. It produced awareness of power, from the development of machinery to the Internet.

Eighth Cycle—Galactic—began on January 5, 1999, with each day lasting 360 days. Its characteristic is awareness of ethics.

Ninth Cycle—Universal—began February 10, 2011, with each day lasting 20 days. This produced conscious co-creation of experience and unity consciousness. It ended on October 28, 2011.


Structure of the Model

To explain the origins of his theory, Calleman states the following in an article about the Tortuguero Monument on his web site: “When I started my independent research on the Mayan calendar late in 1993 not a single inscription from the ancient Maya was actually known that would describe what would happen at its so-called end date. All that was known were the various descriptions of the beginning date of the Long Count, notably in the inscriptions in Palenque, which said that the First Father then ‘erected the World Tree.’

“Irrespective of this dearth of information, I started to develop my theory about the nine levels of evolution, the nine underworlds, and the various days and nights that generated their wave movements. I simply assumed that the significant Mayan pyramids had been built in nine steps, because they were symbolic of nine levels of creation, each affected by seven days, or seven creation gods. I then found that with such a model, an enormous amount of historical facts started to make sense if they were seen as results of cosmic energy shifts.”

Calleman went on to explain additional clues that prompted him to construct his theory, but examining the theory itself is more revealing. Two questions introduce an article written by Calleman, as author of the month for October 2016, on Graham Hancock’s website. If civilization is as old as we’ve been told, how could the same cultural ‘firsts’ in societies so geographically diverse have emerged at the same time? And how, if the brain generates consciousness and thought, could these same societies, based on king-ship, that suddenly constructed pyramids, have evolved independently?

In this article Calleman answers, “The nine waves of the Mayan calendar system, all emanating from the center of the universe and not directly subordinated to the local astronomical cycles of our own solar system, are actually still running. These nine waves have different starting points, frequencies and polarities, and play different roles for the creation of life in the universe, not only biologically but also mentally and spiritually.”

Regarding the questions of civilization, Calleman points out that a number of urban and cultural “firsts” in human history emerged independently within the narrow timeframe of 3200–3000 BCE, equivalent to the Sixth Wave. These were the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Indus Valley civilizations. Why did phenomena related to such factors, such as monarchy, pyramids, and the use of numerals, seem to appear together as a “package?” Logic suggests, he argues, either the cultures were in direct contact or there is such a thing as a human collective consciousness.

It is evident, Calleman claims, that the brain wave frequencies of human individuals correspond with the shells of the earth’s atmospheric-geophysical system, respectively. He cites the best known of these frequencies, the Schumann Resonance, to illustrate that every individual is always in resonance with one of these shells, whatever their state of mind.

There are precedents for notions similar to Calleman’s “global mind,” among them Carl Jung’s collective unconscious with its archetypal motifs, and Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic resonance, which links consciousness to individual animal species, including man. More to the point is the theory proposed by Teilhard de Chardin.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ (1881–1955) was a French idealist philosopher and Jesuit priest who trained as a paleontologist and geologist and took part in the discovery of Peking Man. He conceived the vitalist idea of the Omega Point, a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving, and developed Vladimir Vernadsky’s concept of noosphere. (Wikipedia).

William Ockham, on the Teilhard de Chardin website, posted the following description of the noosphere on August 13, 2013: “The term noosphere derives from the Greek nous (“mind”) and sphaira (“sphere”), and is related to the terms geosphere (inanimate matter) and biosphere (biological life). Under Teilhard’s vision, God created the Big Bang, which created an evolutionary process, starting with the energy of the Big Bang and leading to the increasing “complexification” of matter, to initial life forms, to human consciousness, to a collective human consciousness (the noosphere). The noosphere emerges through, and is constituted by, the interaction of human minds. The noosphere has grown in step with the organization of the human mass in relation to itself as it populates the Earth. As humanity organizes itself in more complex social networks, the higher the noosphere will grow in awareness.”


Cosmic Tree

Calleman’s latest book, The Nine Waves of Creation, advances a new perspective on the origin of the universe and its structure. The content of the opening chapters is based on scientific experiments relating to waves, quantum physics and holographs. He then describes the recent (scientific) discovery of a Cosmic Axis that divides the universe. This, Calleman believes, means that the universe had a structure from its beginning. Further, the two hemispheres divided by the axis are not symmetrical in their content; they can be described as light and dark, i.e., yin and yang.

Calleman believes that the universe did not begin with a random explosion (the Big Bang) but with the emergence of the Central Cosmic Axis, which the ancients called the Tree of Life, and from this the universe gained its structure. The Tree of Life is not a thing but a “pure geometry” that is the “chief organizer of the space-time universe.” This becomes a basic principle in Calleman’s cosmology.

Attempting to integrate science and myth, he uses references to ancient mythologies to bolster his argument that people all over the planet, despite having no contact, downloaded holograms that produced nine-level cosmologies. In these myths, says Calleman, “The universe was perceived as hierarchically organized into nine worlds, underworlds, or levels, created by dragons or serpents.” Independent research has shown that dragons and serpents are ancient, universal symbols for what we would call creative energy.

The Nine Waves deals with a host of issues and explanations derived from the wave model, quantum physics, and frequencies. Among them, historical events and cultural developments relating to each wave are explored. Calleman’s recapitulation of history produces a compelling argument for his model of the evolution of consciousness. With his interpretation of various ancient mythologies, including the Mayan, we have an equally compelling argument that Mayan sacred science corroborates his model in its details.

What we don’t have is unassailable evidence that this model was what the Maya thought to be true or intended to be encoded as the underlying structure of their calendar system. If we go back to Calleman’s statement that he saw the nine-step structure of the Mayan pyramids and “assumed” it might have embodied that meaning; i.e., cosmic evolution, we can speculate that from that point forward, he began assembling data that would conform to his theory.

Calleman has found, or constructed, a universe with purpose, that includes evolution, as his brand of spirituality. But Calleman’s historical timeline is at odds with the bulk of current alternative historical and archaeological investigation, which shows hard evidence that there were civilizations before the Flood, with cities, high technology, and attributes of evolved consciousness. Calleman simply dismisses the argument that the mainstream, dogmatic timeline is completely unsupportable.

His truly admirable achievement is the integration of modern scientific theory with ancient universal mythology. That alone is worth the price of admission, so to speak. His Mayan calendar model is scientifically plausible and mythologically coherent. Fascinating and innovative, it’s no wonder it has resonated for scholars and readers around the world.

By Robert Mendel