reply to post by theabsolutetruth
Some will say forseen, some will say predicted...
The Milky Way itself was much venerated by the Maya. They called it the World Tree (also tree of life), which was represented by a tall and majestic
flowering tree, the Ceiba. The Milky Way was also called the Wakah Chan. Wak means "Six" or "Erect". Chan or K'an means "Four", "Serpent" or
The Maya portrayed the Ecliptic in their artwork as a Double-Headed Serpent. The ecliptic is the path of the sun in the sky which is marked by the
constellations of fixed stars. Here the moon and the planets can be found because they are bound, like the Earth, to the sun.
The ecliptic crosses over the Milky Way at a 61 degree angle, forming a celestial cross that the Maya mythologized as their Sacred Tree, or
Crossroads. The dark rift begins in the nuclear bulge of the Milky Way, which is the visually large area in which the center of our Milky Way galaxy
is located. The sun, every year, moves once around the ecliptic; it thus crosses through the dark rift and the nuclear bulge once every year. The
exact date on which this happens has been shifting, due to a slow movement called the precession of the equinoxes. This astronomical phenomenon is
caused by the slow wobbling of the earth on its axis, with one wobble completed in approximately 26,000 years.
The shifting is best defined by using one of the solar year’s quarter points, such as the equinox; thus, the precession of the equinox. However, the
shifting applies equally to the solstices. As a result, the position of the December solstice sun has been slowly shifting along the ecliptic for
thousands of years, converging with, crossing over, and slowly passing background features such as stars, constellations and, most importantly, the
bright band of the Milky Way. The December solstice sun will, in fact, be aligned with the dark rift in the Milky Way in the years around 2012. A
striking fact in all of this is that the 13-baktun cycle of the Maya’s Long Count calendar – a period of 5,125.36 years – ends on the December
solstice of 2012, December 21, 2012.