2012: The Mayan medicine wheel

Have you ever heard about the “Mayan medicine wheel”? If you are a Mayanist you have not, but if you are a new ager you may have heard about it… Here is another crazy idea found on Bast’s 2012 forum. Djwaglmuffin has this to say:

I figured this out after listening to a Lakotah elder named Larry Salway. He made the designations of races in accordance to the cardinal directions and elemental affinities.

White-North-Europe-Fire
Black-South-Africa-Water
Red-West-South America and North America-Earth
Yellow-East-Asia-Air

The Mayan medicine wheel (as well as the pentacle) has a middle color which is green; Green is the result when each element comes together to create and Green is the color of life. I think it’s interesting that to progress around the medicine wheel you go:
Yellow-black-red-white-Green
Each 25K solar procession is marked by a some kind of cataclysm ending each age and yet the new age comes up in it’s place giving us a new peice of the puzzle and how we live out lives. We’re in the fourth age (according to the mayan medicine wheel) and in the bible it says that we will be tried by fire; Fire and white is the fourth age. We enter into green. The reason I say this is because I think it’s interesting how everything is becoming more envirnmentally sound and “green.” I don’t think we’re going to just wake up one day and eveything will come into it’s place, though. It seems that the only way to get us to wake up to this truth is to beat us over the head with it. The Hopi state that those who are willing to change will be blessed bu those who are not will drop dead from their own fear. I wonder who it could be.

Also, they also talk about how the sun will rise in the west; I really think this odes to Pole reversal. I think this will destabalize the magnetic field setting wildfires all over the planet for days; maybe even weeks but it’s the trial period and we have to deal with it. If this didn’t make any sense, let me know. it’s times like these I had my own computer so i can draw diagrams.

I am not an expert on the Hopi but this is what Wikipedia says about the medicine wheel: They “were constructed by laying stones in a particular pattern on the ground. Most medicine wheels follow the basic pattern of having a center of stone(s), and surrounding that is an outer ring of stones with “spokes”, or lines of rocks radiating from the center.” On a very basic level these patterns can be found in many places of the world and the causeway system at “my” site Ichmul resembles such a pattern, but I would never dream of calling it a medicin wheel.

Djwaglmuffin’s description of the Hopi medicin wheel appears to be accurate but he/she conflates this with the Maya view of directional colours, etc. I only wonder (since I am not an expert) why the Hopi associates cardinal directions with “races”. First of all, that appears to be a completely Eurocentric perspective. The labeling of people as White, Yellow, Black and Red races cannot possibly have a Hopi origin but a European origin (as do the idea of race in the first place). The directions these “races” are located also derive from the perspective of Europe. From a Hopi perspective Africa is just as well to the east and Asia to the west, etc. Even the elements (fire, air, earth and water) sound too Greek to me. Hence this is not an “ancient wisdom”. It is probably quite recent but perhaps mixed with earlier Precolumbian ideas.

He/she continues with a bogus idea that there are solar precision cycles of roughly 25,000 years that correspond to an age that is marked by a cataclysm. According to this “Mayan medicine wheel” we are in the fourth age, soon to enter the fifth (green). I assume this occurs on December 21, 2012 then. This is apparently because we are “envirnmentally sound and “green””. Should not a Green race appear if we follow the logic of conflating the Hopi medicine wheel with Maya cosmology? No, instead we are all environmentally sound and green in our minds. This is yet another example of how to interpret “ancient wisdom” from contemporary problems.

Because the Hopi says the sun will rise in the west this is also evidence of a polar shift (a common fantasy among 2012ers). Yes, polar wander do occur but not on the magnitude and speed proposed by various hoaxers. Now, the Hopi (and the Maya) cardinal directions are not laid out after our magnetic poles, but from the ecliptic. It is the east-west axis that is important to them. For the Maya north and south are just the sun’s left and right side. In any case, from what I can tell if a polar shift did occur (not just a geomagnetic reversal), east would still be east in relation to the sun. The sun would still move from east to west. For the sun to rise in the west, should not the earth stop in its orbit and move backwards or begin to rotate backwards around its own axis? I do not know what those possibilities would be called. Maybe the polar shift idea includes a reversal of earth’s rotation around its axis, but does it really matter when the idea is bogus in the first place?