A widespread eschatological belief that the end of the Maya Long Count calendar on 21 December 2012 would bring catastrophe or transformation, rejected by scholars and astronomers.
Key Facts
- Key date
- 21 December 2012
- Maya Long Count cycle length
- 5,126 years years
- Main commemorative sites
- Chichén Itzá (Mexico) and Tikal (Guatemala)
- Countries involved (Maya region)
- Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador
- Proposed doomsday scenarios
- Solar maximum, black hole, Nibiru collision, core heating
Cause → Event → Consequence
The end-date of a 5,126-year cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar fell on 21 December 2012, prompting New Age interpreters and doomsday theorists to attach eschatological significance to the date, proposing various astronomical and numerological scenarios ranging from spiritual transformation to global catastrophe.
On 21 December 2012, commemorative festivities were held at Chichén Itzá and Tikal in the Maya heartland, while globally the date attracted intense public attention due to predictions of cataclysmic events such as a collision with the planet Nibiru, interaction with a supermassive black hole, or the arrival of a solar maximum.
Scholars across multiple disciplines publicly refuted the predictions; Mayan experts clarified that no classical Maya texts forecast doom and that the calendar-end interpretation distorted their history, while astronomers dismissed the proposed scenarios as pseudoscience, and the date passed without incident.