Off Topic
Graham Hancock
July 4 at 10:54am ·
I’m saddened to hear that John Major Jenkins has passed on – at far too young an age – to the next great adventure. John was a good man, and a brilliant researcher unfairly maligned by academic so-called “skeptics” who completely, and in most cases deliberately, misunderstood and misrepresented his work.
In getting to grips with the mystery of the Mayan calendar, it is only the astronomy that counts – and naked-eye astronomy at that. We are not talking about radio telescopes or astrophysics here.
“With regard to the naked-eye astronomy of the ancient Maya”, I wrote in Magicians of the Gods in 2015, “the real scholars of this subject, amongst whom there is none more pre-eminent than John Major Jenkins, made valiant efforts – for a long while before 2012 – to teach us that what the end-date of the Mayan calendar was based on was in fact the once-in- 26,000-years conjunction of the winter solstice sun with the center of the galaxy, i.e. with the dark rift and nuclear bulge of the Milky Way. Because of the diameter of the sun and the limitations of naked-eye astronomy this conjunction cannot be pinned down to an exact year but is best considered… as a window 80-years wide spanning the period 1960-2040.
“As an artefact of precession, the winter solstice sun was moving slowly and steadily towards its conjunction with the center of the galaxy for thousands of years before 2012 – and in his books, going back at least as far as Maya Cosmogenesis, which he published in 1998, John Major Jenkins made this eminently clear. Diagrams that he offered to his readers showed the journey of the winter solstice sun from 3000 BC, when it was 70 degrees away from the dark-rift crossing point in Sagittarius, through the time of Christ when it had halved the distance that remained for it to travel, to the epoch of 2012 (that 80-year window between 1960 and 2040) when it most closely conjuncts the dark rift, and onwards to AD 5000 when it will have moved 70 degrees past the dark rift.
“More than this, Jenkins meticulously documented why the conjunction of the winter solstice sun with the dark rift in the central bulge of the Milky Way was important in Mayan cosmology – because this was the region of the heavens that the Maya thought of as the place of creation, with the central bulge viewed as the womb or birthplace of the sky. In Maya Cosmogenesis (p.107) he explained the matter as follows: ‘The Maya understood this dense, bright bulge as a Cosmic Centre and Creation Place, a conclusion based solely on naked-eye observation that is, in fact, very true: the centre of our saucer- shaped galaxy lies within this bright and wide part of the Milky Way . . . that hyperdense region out of which the Milky Way and everything in it, including us, has poured.’”
John, your eloquence, your wit, your insights and your warm, friendly, energy will be sorely missed. You leave behind a good name, good works and breakthrough discoveries that offer a wider and deeper understanding of the past.
John Major Jenkins websites: http://johnmajorjenkins.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; and http://alignment2012.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
July 4 at 10:54am ·
I’m saddened to hear that John Major Jenkins has passed on – at far too young an age – to the next great adventure. John was a good man, and a brilliant researcher unfairly maligned by academic so-called “skeptics” who completely, and in most cases deliberately, misunderstood and misrepresented his work.
In getting to grips with the mystery of the Mayan calendar, it is only the astronomy that counts – and naked-eye astronomy at that. We are not talking about radio telescopes or astrophysics here.
“With regard to the naked-eye astronomy of the ancient Maya”, I wrote in Magicians of the Gods in 2015, “the real scholars of this subject, amongst whom there is none more pre-eminent than John Major Jenkins, made valiant efforts – for a long while before 2012 – to teach us that what the end-date of the Mayan calendar was based on was in fact the once-in- 26,000-years conjunction of the winter solstice sun with the center of the galaxy, i.e. with the dark rift and nuclear bulge of the Milky Way. Because of the diameter of the sun and the limitations of naked-eye astronomy this conjunction cannot be pinned down to an exact year but is best considered… as a window 80-years wide spanning the period 1960-2040.
“As an artefact of precession, the winter solstice sun was moving slowly and steadily towards its conjunction with the center of the galaxy for thousands of years before 2012 – and in his books, going back at least as far as Maya Cosmogenesis, which he published in 1998, John Major Jenkins made this eminently clear. Diagrams that he offered to his readers showed the journey of the winter solstice sun from 3000 BC, when it was 70 degrees away from the dark-rift crossing point in Sagittarius, through the time of Christ when it had halved the distance that remained for it to travel, to the epoch of 2012 (that 80-year window between 1960 and 2040) when it most closely conjuncts the dark rift, and onwards to AD 5000 when it will have moved 70 degrees past the dark rift.
“More than this, Jenkins meticulously documented why the conjunction of the winter solstice sun with the dark rift in the central bulge of the Milky Way was important in Mayan cosmology – because this was the region of the heavens that the Maya thought of as the place of creation, with the central bulge viewed as the womb or birthplace of the sky. In Maya Cosmogenesis (p.107) he explained the matter as follows: ‘The Maya understood this dense, bright bulge as a Cosmic Centre and Creation Place, a conclusion based solely on naked-eye observation that is, in fact, very true: the centre of our saucer- shaped galaxy lies within this bright and wide part of the Milky Way . . . that hyperdense region out of which the Milky Way and everything in it, including us, has poured.’”
John, your eloquence, your wit, your insights and your warm, friendly, energy will be sorely missed. You leave behind a good name, good works and breakthrough discoveries that offer a wider and deeper understanding of the past.
John Major Jenkins websites: http://johnmajorjenkins.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; and http://alignment2012.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Off Topic
John Major Jenkins - Reflecting on a Life of Discoveries and Tribulations
.....on Sunday, February 12th of 2017, I (Jonathan Zap) drove from where I live in Boulder to the home of my old friend and colleague, John Major Jenkins, who lives in Windsor, Colorado. It was a beautiful day with Colorado’s glorious high-altitude lighting and unseasonably warm temperatures. The metaphorical weather, however, was out of synch with the actual weather because there were dark, storm clouds massing on the personal horizon of my old friend. John is facing a life-threatening health crisis, and the main purpose of my visit was to record the long conversation you have in front of you, an in-depth reflection on the meaning of John’s most important discoveries, and the triumphs and tribulations of a path of exploration he began when he first visited Mayan ruins at the age of twenty-two.
.....on Sunday, February 12th of 2017, I (Jonathan Zap) drove from where I live in Boulder to the home of my old friend and colleague, John Major Jenkins, who lives in Windsor, Colorado. It was a beautiful day with Colorado’s glorious high-altitude lighting and unseasonably warm temperatures. The metaphorical weather, however, was out of synch with the actual weather because there were dark, storm clouds massing on the personal horizon of my old friend. John is facing a life-threatening health crisis, and the main purpose of my visit was to record the long conversation you have in front of you, an in-depth reflection on the meaning of John’s most important discoveries, and the triumphs and tribulations of a path of exploration he began when he first visited Mayan ruins at the age of twenty-two.