The Mayan Prophecy
by Steve Alten
(Quercus, R114.95)
In the year 2000 the world was supposed to end, reason being, according to websites, that most computer programmes omitted the first two digits when presenting a date. So in a scenario where the year 1999 would be dated, ’99 would instead be used. This would have presented a tricky predicament since the year 2000 would have had to be represented as ’00, which would result in a negative number rendered if deductions were to be made to it.
On January 1, 2000, computers were supposed to crash, banks shut down and information systems malfunction in what would have proven to be Earth’s one-way ticket to digital hell and anarchy.
Well, so much for that.
The Mayan case, however, is a different story.
The Maya derived their calendar from their predecessors, the Olmec, who, without satellites or computers, calculated the solar year to be 365.2420 days.
“Let me restate this so you can grasp the implications: The 3 000-year-old Mayan Calendar is a 10 000th of a day more accurate than the calendar the world uses today!” Alten writes, adding a faint hint of foreboding to the air.
Three of the Maya calendars were used to calculate “The Day of the Dead”, 4 Ahau, 3 Kankin, December 21, 2012.
They believed in the great cycles: the rise of civilisations at the beginning of a new age, followed by their cleansing that marks the end of it, preparing them for the next.
At the moment, the planet is in the process of moving from the age of Pisces to that of Aquarius, which, astronomically, is a matter of the Sun’s movement and how the constellations are seen from earth.
Alten takes ancient wonders, namely Teotihuacan, the Temples of Angkor in Cambodia, Stonehenge, the inscribing on the Nazca desert, the pyramids of Giza and the Kukulcan pyramid in Chichen Itza, and convinces you there is, arguably, no explanation why and how these structures were made.
Along with the fascinating theories presented in the first two-thirds of the book, he throws in an enthralling love affair between a psychiatrist-in-training, Dominique Vazquez, and a seemingly insane yet captivating mental patient, Michael Gabriel.
Michael’s parents dedicated their lives to the study of the Mayan prophecy, which ultimately led to him to being institutionalised under circumstances that are not quite what they seem.
As “The Day of the Dead” nears, Michael has to find a way to escape from the mental facility so he can resume his parents’ work and save humankind. He sees Dominique, inexperienced and of Mayan decent, as the perfect person to help him abscond.
The only way to do this is to convince her, and thus the reader, that the prophecy is indeed true.
The first two-thirds of the book is an intoxicating cocktail of passion, drama, suspense and fact/fiction delivered with stern pontification.
By the time you get to the last third of the book, and civilisation is meant to come to a cataclysmic end, concepts are introduced that kill the momentum and realism of the story altogether. Alten, as a matter of consequence, had to connect the ancient wonders to the Mayan prophecy in a way that made both the world’s demise and rescue sensible. Unfortunately, there’s very little sense in what leads up to the end.
Alten still keeps you guessing when it comes to the relationship between Dominique and Michael, but, alas, it is not because of them that you are reading the book in the first place.
In the beginning, the story is believable. By the time you are done with it, you will want to throw the book, along with its concepts, out the window.