Happy New B'ak'tun!
BY ALPER ÖZKAN (MSN/PhDII)
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to my very first column for the Sixth Sun! As you all know, the recent apocalypse (all evidence regarding the cause of which points toward the Large Hadron Collider, likely by initiation of a vacuum decay event) culminated in the destruction and subsequent recreation of all humanity, since the fool in charge of the process chose the neutral ending again instead of going for the law route. As such, please do keep in mind that your entire life prior to this December 21 was an illusion created as part of the reconstruction process, and enjoy the resulting existential despair! That aside, before I kick up another storm of not-so-obscure references to popular video games, I believe I owe my readers (or lack thereof) an explanation regarding what this apocalypse nonsense was all about, so let me announce that the bulk of this week's column will be devoted to just that.
The Mayans were an interesting folk, if you can look away from the whole "ritualistic mass slaughter of innocents in order to feed the sun" business the Aztecs had going on and keep your eyes on the Mayans themselves. Despite lacking a sophisticated taste for blood and having little in the way of fashion trends involving flayed human skins worn by god-mimes, the Mayans had developed quite an advanced civilization in the olden days, and no surprisingly advanced ancient civilization is complete with an unnecessarily convoluted timekeeping system: it is plainly obvious, for example, that Hindu myths feature a time scale that could only be kept by the gods themselves, and the sexagenary cycle of Chinese tradition is little better (this, by the way, is where you get birth signs like "metal dragon" from). Even Egyptians, constrained to relative calendrical sanity due to the yearly flooding of the Nile, coped by coming up with a separate god for every situation the sun could be in (Khepri while it's rising, Atum during the evening, Ra-Horakhty in between, and others besides) and some it most certainly couldn't (i.e., underground). Only Sumerian and, later, Roman calendars seem fairly mundane to us (though the Roman calendar initially had no winter, sparing no months to this terrible season and skipping straight from December to March -- a schedule I very much expect Bilkent to follow), but that is mostly because our current calendar is based on them: I am quite certain that if we end up wiping ourselves out in one way or another (too bad we missed the chance last Friday, huh?), archeologists who find our remains millennia hence will reconstruct our calendrical system and some arrogant student columnist will casually disregard the hard work of thousands across untold centuries as the senseless blather of an insane civilization.
In any case, the Mayans utilized several calendars, and the one clamored about in the past few weeks is a curious one that is called the Long Count and revolves around 20, a sacred number to them (other calendars utilize 13, another sacred number, in addition to 20). Accordingly, 20 "days" (K'in) made a "month" (Winal) of sorts, 18 such months made a year (Tun, which gives you 360 days to a year, further adjusted by the Mayan solar calendar), 20 years was a century (K'atun) and 20 centuries a millennium (B'ak'tun, which you may have heard of by now, and by the way please do ignore the etymologies of "century" and "millennium" for the time being). Last Wednesday, for example, was 12.19.19.17.18 in Long Count. Thursday, the supposed apocalypse eve, was 12.19.19.17.19 (note how the day-count increases). Day of the apocalypse? 13.0.0.0.0 (note also how the Mayan system goes from 0 to 19 and not from 1 to 20). It's a New Year's (well, B'ak'tun's) Day, not the end of the world. As for the claims that the calendar ends there, I must mention that the Long Count had dates in store for a great many more years -- it was not limited to five digits, so when you reached 19.19.19.17.19 (which corresponds to October 12, 4772), you would simply mark the next day as 1.0.0.0.0.0. The Mayans themselves predicted events far after our little apocalypse, so they at least weren't expecting the world to end anytime soon -- one should consider them wiser than us. Still, the apocalypse rumors did have a sliver of truth in them: there apparently exists a Mayan text stating that the gods messed up their previous attempt to create a world at around this time (can't blame them, there are worse ways to go when it comes to amateur world-creation -- see for example what happened with Izanami and Hinokagutsuchi), which resulted in a redo that did not end well for the folk who were already there. But then, worrying about how it could happen again is about as sane as worrying about how the meteor that did the dinosaurs in might have called in friends -- I don't know about you, but I trust the Mayan gods not to miscreate the world twice (well, all right, the previous attempt was actually their third, but I'm sure the fourth time's the charm).
However, the fact remains that new B'ak'tuns are not events you experience often: they come once in about 400 years, so this was the only one you'll see (no, brain uploading, stem cell-based biological immortality, self-replicating nanomachines or whatever other transhuman lifeline you were hoping for won't come out during your time). That being so, I have taken the time to decide on New B'ak'tun's resolutions for myself: I shall see to it that I learn an additional language, finish my gargantuan backlist of unread, unwatched or unplayed media and start writing my thesis…during the next 394 years.