2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (2006) book

Daniel Pinchbeck's 2006 book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl is one of the key texts in the global debate around whether the world will end, according to the Mayan Long Count calendar, in December 2012. Pinchbeck is not the most objective of authors on this subject since his book is essentially predicated on the assumption that hallucinogenic (psychedelic) substances such as were used by Mayan shamans, produce knowledge of future events that can or must be accepted as valid.

There is no reason to believe that someone's drug-induced vision of a future has any basis in reality or that the same vision can be reproduced by another person. Further, there is no actual evidence to link the cyclical Long Count calendar with any ancient Mayan prophecy on the subject of the world's end when calendar reaches the end of its current cycle and starts over again. As I have noted elsewhere on this blog, not even the ancient Mayans when the calendar was still in use, believed that the world would end in 2012.

Like any good doomsdayer, Pinchbeck attempts to link his own predictions with current extrapolations about future global collapse with the Mayan Long Count calendar countdown. The problem, however, is that those scientific models are based on scientific observations and at the earliest the models are predicting drastic effects around 2050, well after 2012. In a newspaper article I read about his book ("Cult figure on a mission to unlock the mysteries of 2012", Jamie Portman, Vancouver Sun, November 27, 2009), Pinchbeck did not even list nuclear armageddon as a more likely causal scenario for global destruction brought about through competition for depleted resources by an overpopulated world.

While Pinchbeck has an outstanding resume as an author, I think anyone who spends a great deal of time dissecting crop circles and their relationship to the Mayan calendar as well as their own personal life, is not the most objective analyst of the historical record.