Some of the calendars were designed for everyday practical applications such as agricultural timing while others were more esoteric and were used for divinatory, religious and magical functions. The Maya's time keeping skills were technologically advanced. The 52 year Haab calendar was used to track of the seasons. For divination purposes, they devised the 260 day sacred Tzolk'in calendar. They had many individual names for different spans of time. A Baktun was used to describe a period of about 394 years. Their single largest measurement of time is an Alautun, which is a mind-boggling  23,040,000,000 days! To the Mayans, time keeping was of utmost importance. They understood time as being cyclical in nature. They saw cycles within cycles.  Modern man sees time as being linear.

The Great Cycle.

The Mayan civilization's grandest calendar is known as the Long Count Calendar. It is composed of a colossal time period of 13 Baktuns. A Baktun represents a time span of exactly 394 years. Clearly, the calendar's function is to track a very large period of time, in the order of thousands of years.  More precisely, this astonishing Long Count Calendar loops in an enormous 5125 time circle, identified by the ancient Mayans as a Great Cycle. The current calendar rotation commenced on August 11, 3114 B.C. and will come to a sudden and cryptic conclusion on December 21, 2012.  It is widely accepted that this end-date is the most accurate. The Mayan Calendar was correlated with the western Gregorian calendar by calendric experts about a century ago. It has since been verified and most scholars accept December 12, 2012 as the ending of the Mayan Calendar. However, there are some who disagree on the 2012 date. A recent thesis by a Berlin scientist suggests that the actual end-date is December 21 2220, based on recent recalculations. The earliest calculation is one by Dr. Carl Johan Calleman, who places the calendar end-date at October 28, 2011.  In any case, the final completion of a giant Great Cycle signifies the termination of one World Age, as recounted in the Mayan bible, the Popol Vuh. When the Mayan calendar completes a full rotation, a new World Age presumably begins. According to the Mayan creation account, there have been three previous World Ages, all culminating in terrible worldwide disaster. The end of the Mayan calendar may usher in a new and exciting world era, or something so ominous, that we can only speculate. What is certain is that we are collectively and rapidly approaching the grand finale of the mystifying and timeless Mayan Long Count calendar.

The Aztec Calendar.

The original Aztec Sun calendar is comprised of a huge stone disc, weighing a massive 25 tons and is a gigantic 12 feet in diameter. It is a working 365 day solar year calendar. Like the Maya Long Count calendar, it is also a World Age calendar. The Aztecs referred to the World Ages as Suns. The four center squares symbolize the four prior World Ages. In the First Sun, Age of Jaguar, the world was destroyed by jaguars. The second World Age was destroyed by powerful hurricane type weather. The Third Sun was the Age of Fire and it was destroyed by fire coming down from the sky. This coincides perfectly with the Mayan Third World Age vision of fiery stones raining down upon earth. The last Aztec age, the Fourth Sun, was wiped out by a flood. The circle in the center of the calendar displays the Aztec sun god Tonatiuh, and it is the Fifth Sun. According to the Aztecs, we currently live in the age of Tonatiuh, which represents movement. This Fifth Sun will end on December 12, 2012. They believed that the last Sun, our current World Age, would be destroyed by earthquakes.

Global Climate Shift.

Did anything unusual happen 5125 years ago, at the end of the last Great Calendar Cycle?  Scientists researching the Peruvian Andes Mountains conclude that something very strange did happen around 5000 years ago. They recently discovered physical evidence supporting a sudden and quite drastic change in the global climate.  What they found was a frozen plant specimen, in such great condition, that they were able to successfully extract DNA samples from it and date it. The global climate had shifted so abruptly, that the ancient plant was still nicely preserved by the sudden snowfall, 5200 years later. Scientists say that there have been a minimum of five large scale Ice Ages. These drastic earth events have occurred within the span of billions of years and they have been proven to happen on quite a regular basis.