Erikka Askeland: That’s yet another apocalypse over with

IF YOU are reading this, the world has not ended. I could have told you so.

But there’s nothing like the spectre of a looming doomsday to start the squirrels leaping about the back of some people’s brains.

Most sensible people regarded the end of the Mayan long calendar cycle yesterday as just a failing of the clever, but clearly not perfect, ancients. According to their otherwise quite advanced time measures, found on monuments which are a littered around the former Mayan stomping grounds of Central America, their cycle of 5,125 years started on about 
11 August, 3114BC, which scholars have estimated would bring us to 21 December, 2012.

The more literal minded – or perhaps the malignly manipulative – among us reckoned that the end of the Mayan calendar actually meant the end. Combine what must be humanity’s inbuilt tendency for apocalyptic thinking with the rampant error-strewn postings and gossiping of the internet, and the whole shambles led to 11-year-olds writing to Nasa asking if they should kill themselves beforehand just to be safe.

But we must love the concept of the apocalypse, because it has been around for as long as humans became able to utter the phrase “the end is nigh”.

The list of dates on which the world was supposed to come to a crashing termination is so long, you might as well not even start shaking a stick at it. In recent memory, there were those predicting the turn of the millennium as being the cause for the big one – either because our computers crashed (due to more faulty calendar makers who forgot to think longer term) – or because no-one remembered what to call the first ten years of a millennium and so we all had to die. Thankfully, someone came up with the phrase “noughties”.

You would think that the various crazies who have managed to persuade people that the world is ending on a certain date would be deeply embarrassed when the date passes and nothing happens. Except for some reason, they often aren’t. Leon Festinger, an American social psychologist, coined the term “cognitive dissonance” – the weird feeling you get when faced with two completely opposing beliefs – in his 1956 book, When Prophecy Fails. It recounts the tale of a UFO cult, led by former Scientologist and Chicago housewife Dorothy Martin, whose members believed even more fervently that the aliens had been planning to rescue her followers from an epic flood that would destroy the earth on 21 December, 1954, even when it did not happen. Because they had invested so much into what Martin told them – selling their possessions and cutting ties with family – the fact the flood didn’t come and the aliens from the planet Clarion didn’t show up could be argued away.

Martin told them that instead, God had called off the destruction of the world at the last minute. Which was very thoughtful of Him.

OK, so it is probably a bit creepy that both the Mayans and Martin chose 21 December for an apocalypse, but there are just so many dates that have passed with very little to show for them, it is really just the law of averages.

Every mainstream world religion has at its core an eschatological end-of-days belief. The Muslims call it Qiyamat. Buddhists expect humans will degenerate dramatically until about 2300, taking after each other with swords until the arrival of an exalted Buddha. Christians of course expect a whole bunch of fun things to happen – there will be the anti-Christ, the tribulations, and the rapture. It was this last particular event that worried me when I was growing up. What if my mum and sister were called up to the clouds to meet the Lord and I wasn’t? I imagined sitting there, minding my own business, only to realise that nope, everyone was gone.

At my church there was also a widely held expectation that airlines insisted that there could only be one Christian pilot in the cockpit, so that if one suddenly evaporated there was a more reliable atheist left to fly the plane.

But it turns out, even though the Mayans devised a calendar that ran out after 5,000 and some years, they didn’t think about it as the start of a cataclysm as some doom-mongers have insisted. Rather, passage of a major cycle of time was considered to be something to celebrate.

Sounds like a good a reason as any to me. Cheers, Mayans.