Studies recently carried out at Yale, and published last month in the journal Science, have confirmed earlier reports that ketamine offers remarkable, nearly instantaneous relief for people who suffer from forms of major depression impervious to other treatment methods. Interpreting depression as a hardware problem largely caused by the loss of synaptic connections, the researchers argue that ketamine works by encouraging sprightly neural growth in brain regions correlated with memory and mood. Journalistic reports also linked this research with the development of a new vein of antidepressants, including Naurex’s GLYX-13, that have the neurone-fertilising power of ketamine without, as one report describes them, the ‘schizophrenia-like effects’.

Rarely has the new neuro-reductionism been so naked in its repackaging of human experience. Nowhere in the research or the journalism does anyone suggest that heavily depressed people feel better because ketamine sends them on a first-person voyage through profound, sometimes ecstatic, and certainly mind-bending modes of transpersonal consciousness whose subjective power might itself boot the mind out of its most mirthless ruts.

Return trip: A new generation of researchers is heading into the weird world of psychedelic drugs. It could change their minds

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/09/20/oliver-sacks-on-drugs.html/feed 8 http://boingboing.net/2012/08/09/kottke.html http://boingboing.net/2012/08/09/kottke.html#comments Thu, 09 Aug 2012 14:58:09 +0000 Avi Solomon http://boingboing.net/?p=175587 Daniel Kottke lives and works in Palo Alto, Ca. Here, he talks about the genesis of his 1974 trip to India with Steve Jobs.]]>
Daniel Kottke lives and works in Palo Alto, Ca. Here, he talks about the genesis of his 1974 trip to India with Steve Jobs.

Daniel Kottke was one of Apple's first employees, assembling the company's earliest kit computers with Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in a California kitchen. In 1974, Jobs and Kottke backpacked across India in search of themselves; now, they are industry legends. Along the way, he debugged circuit boards, helped design the Apple III and the Mac, and became host of Palo Alto cable TV show The Next Step.

Silicon Valley

Avi Solomon: Why is Silicon Valley home to so much innovation?

Daniel Kottke: You could ask why Silicon Valley exists in the first place!

Hewlett-Packard is the obvious story. Fred Terman was the head of electrical engineering at Stanford and he was a mentor to Hewlett and Packard and the Varian brothers. Varian was a very early Silicon Valley startup. Steve Blank gave a talk called 'The Secret History of Silicon Valley'. I've been here for 30 years and I never knew this stuff. It's all about how the roots of the magic of Silicon Valley came from the war and the need to develop radar. Because I would have thought, "Oh, it's Intel and the integrated circuit".

I was just reading about the 4004, the first ever processor, born right here at Intel 40 years ago. So in World War Two the most important thing in the entire war effort was radar because the Germans had really good bombers and they also had the best radar anti-aircraft scenario. The allies couldn't effectively bomb Germany because the Germans would shoot them down. So there was this huge allied crash program to develop radar and it was based at MIT in Cambridge. Fred Terman had been there during the war, but came west to Stanford at the end of World War Two and brought a whole bunch of the radar guys. At the time radar wasn't digital it was all analog and it was radio, it was microwave.

In fact, the Varian Brothers had invented the Klystron tube, which was essential for radar.

Steve Blank: The Secret History of Silicon Valley

Then you can trace it to Shockley. Shockley invented the transistor at Bell Labs on the East Coast. He came west too and Shockley spawned Fairchild, the traitorous eight engineers who left Shockley because he was such an asshole. Fairchild really was developing the first integrated circuits. Intel was a spinoff of Fairchild. In a sense Apple is a spinoff of Intel because Mike Markkula was the business planner and funder for Apple, and he was an Intel engineer. That's where he made his money from.

So you can trace it all back to Shockley in that sense, on the digital side of the story. Anyway now it's 40 years later, and because there's so much money here and so much venture capital that so many people who want to be entrepreneurs tend to come here more than any other place. That's a large part of it but then there's also the availability of expertise and materials, the parts and pieces that you need. And there's long lead times. I read something recently about how London was the center of world commerce for a very long time through the 1800s but continued to be central long after trading activity had really moved to New York. There's just a long lag time.

In the same way with entrepreneurial activity - I think Bangalore is a huge center of entrepreneurial activity and so is the Boston area, but probably Silicon Valley is still the number one.

Avi: You were talking about sitting at Pete's Coffee shop in Palo Alto and interesting people walking by.

Daniel: Yes, and that's very inspiring. In the same way that the cafes of Paris were a spawning ground for the whole literature movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s now Silicon Valley's a little bit like that for high tech. I think there is a very healthy culture of innovation here that just really took off in the last couple of years. One thing that Silicon Valley has going for it since it's such a nexus is that there's a meet-up going on every single day of the week here in the Bay area, depending on whether it's biotech or whether it's neuro tech or whether it's social networking stuff.

In fact, I went to a meet-up a couple days ago at the Silicon Valley Innovation Institute. Howard Lieberman is the founder, he's a friend of mine. Howard's an old-time guy and he's actually charging $30 for people to come, so he's making money on this. But he doesn't seem to have any problem getting people to come. The meet-ups are a very important component because they bring people together. And you can trace the meetups back to the Home Brew Computer Club.

The Hacker Dojo, founded by David Weekly, which is kind of modeled after the Home Brew Computer Club, is very exciting and is sprouting up in other cities. Then there's Noisebridge and Hacker Spaces which is a generic movement. Anyway, there's so many gatherings like that. You've got the whole Quantified Self movement now, which is all about bio-monitoring tying in with health, and that's a huge growth area. That's all very exciting.

Steve Jobs

Avi: What was Steve Job's unique contribution to Apple?

Daniel: Between Woz and Jobs, Woz was the innovator, the inventor. Steve Jobs was the marketing person. But, even to look back at the Apple ][ that was a lot about product design. That was kind of the seeds of Steve Jobs developing his design talents with the lightweight plastic case, even though it was never intended as anything portable.

The Apple I came right out of the Home Brew Computer Club. Woz wanted something he could bring to the computer club and show off to his friends, and portability was not even a factor except that they were comparing it with big machines that were not going to be portable. The previous generation depended on a big, heavy teletype to interface to the computer and there was no way any of that was portable. So that was what was fueling the excitement back in the Seventies. So then it comes to the Apple ][ and it was definitely Steve Jobs' idea. The Altairs, the Cromemcos, all of that generation were heavy metal boxes. It was brilliant of Steve to find Rod Holt to make a switching power supply, which was a lightweight power supply with no big heavy transformers, and to put the plastic case on it.

So you could actually take the Apple ][ under your arm and carry it somewhere. We never really advertised that but it was part of the appeal. And Steve never forgot that.

Rod Holt's Switching Power Supply for the Apple ][

You can trace the portability aspect into the Macintosh, which had a handle built right into it; that was pretty obvious. Steve also paid a lot of attention to and took a lot of inspiration from Hartmut Esslinger, the founder of Frog Design. The mouse for the Lisa was by Frog Design and they were mocking up Macintosh cases for us in 1982. Then Steve left Apple and Apple lost its way into a profusion of beige boxes.

If you remember the history the next big thing on the landscape was the Macintosh IIcx. That was a highly modular, highly manufacturable computer and that was a landmark. But it wasn't about portability and it wasn't about industrial design, it was about manufacturability. At the same time Compaq was a big success making the PC highly manufacturable and highly modular, and so the Mac IIcx was kind of Apple's answer to that.

But then the next wave was when Steve came back to Apple and now it was the iMac, which had the bubble-shaped plastic. And that was designed by Jonathan Ive, and how fortunate for Steve that he had Jonathan Ive. Jonathan Ive was already on the staff at Apple when Steve came to Apple. So Steve just saw a good thing and latched onto it. Steve's a self-taught guy. But Woz didn't have that kind of vision.

Woz was more about making do with parts; it's all about functionality. Steve Jobs brought the design aspect to it.

Avi: Did your trip with him to India influence his design choices?

Daniel: That's a good question. We didn't encounter any technology at all. I regret that I didn't even have a camera with me, but it's because we were kind of focused on a spiritual journey and getting away from materialism, and didn't want to carry a camera because that was kind of materialistic, right?

Nowadays I would say capturing a story is more about the essence. So whatever it takes to capture stories - video, audio.

Avi: Could you tell us a bit about that trip.

Daniel: That trip came about because Steve and I both got copies of 'Be Here Now' at the same time. 'Be Here Now' was breakthrough book, kind of like the psychedelic culture of America goes to India looking for holy men. That's what 'Be Here Now' represented. They rushed it into print, it came out quite early in 1972. It was a brand new story, and I had never seen anything like that and it just completely blew me away.

Personally I was always a voracious reader; I had never even been exposed to Eastern literature at all; I knew nothing about Buddhism, philosophy, that kind of thing.

'Be Here Now' by Ram Dass aka Richard Alpert

Avi: By Ram Dass, right?

Daniel: Yes, Richard Alpert. He was associated with Tim Leary. In fact the big book that came out recently was 'The Harvard Psychedelic Club'. That was Andrew Weil and Tim Leary and Richard Alpert.

Avi: So you both read 'Be Here Now'?

Daniel: Yes. We both got it in the book store at Reed College. It was such an amazing thing: there was lots to talk about. I can remember asking people, "Well this is very interesting; what else should I read next?" I really had no idea. The next book that showed up was 'Autobiography of a Yogi', which is a very compelling book. I had never seen anything like it, even though it was from the Fifties. That was Paramhansa Yogananada. Very readable book. And then the next one was 'Ramakrishna and his Disciples'. And now we're like in India!

This is the Indian current, right? And then it was Aurobindo and Sai Baba and Ramana Maharshi, right? So that was the genesis of my trick to India with Steve. We had read all these books. Robert Friedland was the head of the student body at Reed and he was part of the 'Be Here Now' scene. I don't even know how he got hooked up with them but he was. Robert had gone to India the previous year in 1971 just before the book came out. And there was a big scene of American hippies in India around Neem Karoli Baba. And it was Robert who told us we should go, and it was the Kumbh Mela.

Robert alone telling us that wouldn't have been quite enough for us to go; the fact that Robert gave us personal references of where to stay in New Delhi, that helped a lot. And add the fact that there was a Kumbh Mela - we were going! Yet still I didn't have any money. It was really Steve, who had now dropped out of Reed and he was earning money at Atari, he had money for a ticket. So Steve says to me, "We should go to India; Robert's fixed us up and it's the Kumbh Mela." And I said, "That sounds great. I don't have any money!"

And Steve said, "Well, I'll lend you the money for the ticket." And I said, "All right!" And that was the trip. It was thanks to Nolan Bushnell, who started Atari and gave Steve his job.

The Haidakhan Baba

Avi: So did that trip change you both in a major way or was it a disappointment or a widening experience?

Daniel: It was a widening experience, because we were 20 years old and traveling the world is an important thing to do.

So it was just in the category of general good travel experiences. In terms of actual real-life experiences there was nothing so earth-shaking. We went to ashrams. The Neem Karoli ashram was completely deserted, so that was a little bit of a disappointment. We went and found Haidakhan Baba who was like a Paul Bunyan. He's like this mythical reincarnating avatar you've probably heard of called Hariakhan Baba. And it was a young guy, and he was a little bit gay, he was wearing his pastel-colored saris and changing his clothes four times a day.

It was funny. It was slightly disappointing in the sense we didn't have a Neem Karoli Baba experience. The story in 'Be Here Now' was all about Bhagavan Das, who was like a stoner hippie from California who went to India and was smoking lots of ganja and he had long dreadlocks, but he had hooked up with Neem Karoli somehow, and there was a scene around Neem Karoli because he was such a popular holy man and Neem Karoli was a very remarkable human being, obviously. Richard Alpert was traveling around India, trying to figure out what it was that LSD did because they just didn't know.

They didn't have any Neurochemistry models for what LSD did except that it mimicked psychosis. But people had religious experiences, of course. Richard Alpert had miracle experiences with Neem Karoli Baba. And then when you got into Autobiography of a Yogi it's all about miracle experiences. And then when you got into Sai Baba and...

Avi: ...It's way exciting when you're in your twenties!

Daniel: Yes, it's very exciting because you're young and you don't know what the world holds in store. I personally was a scientist, very skeptical of psychic phenomenon, very dubious. But I had an open mind. And I thought, "Well if there's something going on here this is very interesting; let's go look at it." So I was disappointed in the sense that I didn't find anything tangible with regard to psychic abilities. You read those Sai Baba books and they're just gushing with all kinds of wild stuff. And now, of course, Sai Baba's passed and the biographies are coming out about what a fraud he was.

Avi: And how much gold he had under his pillow!

Daniel: Yes! So actually that whole era is just now coming to an end because Sai Baba was the last of that generation. You had Maharishi, Rajneesh, Yogi Bhajan, Gururaji.

Avi: They all rode the wave of Westerners!

Daniel: They all rode the wave, right? Sai Baba was the last. My girlfriend at Reed, Elizabeth, who was also very good friends with Steve, and I suspect that she and Steve had a little affair going at one point - because she grew up here in California - anyway, she joined Da Free John's commune, he just died a couple years ago. And the books are coming out about him now. He had a big sex scandal in his life, and he's the one who bought the island in Fiji. He went to Fiji and he knew they would never extradite him, so he just never came back. Anyway, Elizabeth was an insider, and she was very jaded about that whole thing.

So in a sense this is kind of like the end of childhood about the miracle stories about holy men. And yet - here's a good theme: now technology, between the iPhone and the internet and wi-fi and Google, all the knowledge of the world is here in your hand anywhere you are.

That's a complete miracle. The miracle is now happening, and it's technology. If you had somehow missed the last 20 years, what someone can do with their iPhone is magic.

Psychedelics

Avi: Did the availability of Psychedelics trigger this technological creativity?

Daniel: Going back to the Sixties LSD definitely had an influence on my world view and Steve Jobs has been quite outspoken about the value of LSD on the evolution of his thinking. And interestingly Woz definitely never took psychedelics; he may have never even smoked pot. But he's a very unusual case; he's a mutant in a sense. I think the effect of psychedelics on the general culture is well acknowledged. There's a whole shelf full of books: 'What the Dormouse Said', John Markoff's book, that's all about psychedelics and technology. MDMA was just the later wave of that.

MDMA was so powerful because it's not an intoxicant; it leaves you lucid but the reason why it is so valuable for PTSD as a powerful therapeutic tool is because it's not an intoxicant; it's a little bit of an upper, it's related to methamphetamine but it also has some amazing ability to promote empathy, including empathy for yourself, which is what PTSD needs.

My background is in hardware. I always thought I would have a very long, busy career building prototypes and it hasn't been the case. Why? Because the world of technology has just blown past hardware - it's relentlessly moving forward. Personally I was always more identified as a technologist, and I was always very focused on my technical career. I just started going to psychedelics conferences recently, in the last couple years. Why? Because I'm kind of giving up on my technical career. We have a limited time in our lives. I used to always be focused on technical conferences and trying to get my next job but now I go to psychedelics conferences and I find it very invigorating. The people who are interested in psychedelics are the people who are interested in consciousness, which is the most interesting topic of all. It's the biggest overarching topic, okay? Because really when you talk about technology, technology is about communication more than anything. I mean it's about getting things done, but if you look at the meaning of it, from the telegraph to the radio to the telephone to the television, that's all communication. So technology in the service of human communication, that's an immense thread of life on Earth. And it's more true now than ever. If you look at what's happening right now with social networking it's all about communication. And it's very exciting.

Avi: You find the people you want to hang out with and that's a big deal!

Daniel: Yes. It's a huge deal.

Psychedelics and Brain Imaging: Dr Robin Carhart-Harris

I did a show with James Fadiman, whose book is called 'The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide', and one of the topics that came up is that psychedelics are just now having a renaissance in the sense that the very first government-sanctioned studies are just happening now. And Neuroscience has taken so many leaps forward because now we can give psychedelics to people and map their brain second by second and you can see exactly what's going on with functional MRI. So it's just now that the promise of psychedelics from 40 years ago is now still just coming to fruition.That's tremendously exciting.

So it's almost not even about the psychedelics anymore, it's about the confluence of technology and neuroscience in conjunction with the kind of work that Alexander Shulgin does. Shulgin's just published the Shulgin Index, which is a landmark event. You know what that is? It's the first ever large-scale compendium of all psychoactive substances. And he's the man to do it. Shulgin personally synthesized like 240 to 250 new substances and took them himself and wrote about what they did in his notebook.

Avi: It's ironic that the VA is now an early adopter of psychedelics for treating PTSD.

Daniel: It was the VA, which is part of the military that was giving psychedelics to the volunteers in whatever year it was, gave it to Ken Kesey and that had a huge ripple effect on the culture. And the other big huge part of the story is that we now know to take a different tack. The war on cancer has been a huge failure. The war on drugs has been a huge failure, but the war on cancer has also been a huge failure. Even though there's been immense steps forward in medical technology cancer is at an epidemic right now. Brain cancer is now just amazingly high incidence. And many types of cancer nobody even knows.

It's a huge challenge, but what we do know is that the psychedelics are proving very valuable in end of life treatment for terminal cancer - Psilocybin's especially good for that. And Aldous Huxley started that, taking Mescaline when he was dying. Anyway that's a big quality of life issue.

There's a book called 'The Biology of Belief' by Bruce Lipton which makes a very good case that everybody has cancer all the time. Everybody. We have very complex bodies and there are mutations happening all the time. We all have cancer. Your immune system does an amazingly good job dealing with it as a normal course of events. So the immune system is constantly repairing the damage. By the time your cancer shows up as a tumor it means your immune system has not been keeping up with the job.

Well, guess what? What we also know is that your immune system is very responsive to your subconscious, and when you are stressed you're shutting down your immune system because it's the fight or flight system. You're stressed and it's now, "Oh, we can't heal because we have to be fleeing," right? That's what Bruce Lipton is talking about. So psychedelics play an important part of that story because within the picture of learning to relax and promote healthy function of your immune system psychedelics have an important role to play.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/08/09/kottke.html/feed 5 http://boingboing.net/2012/05/04/psychedelic-ad-for-peace-corps.html http://boingboing.net/2012/05/04/psychedelic-ad-for-peace-corps.html#comments Fri, 04 May 2012 23:43:48 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=158738 Image Link. Boing Boing reader MewDeep, who has an awesome Flickr stream of '60s-'70s ad scans, points to this YouTube clip of a notable television commercial from 1968: it's a promo for the Peace Corps, set to "Age of Aquarius." As MewDeep excerpts here, the ad is mentioned in The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, by Thomas Frank.]]>

Image Link. Boing Boing reader MewDeep, who has an awesome Flickr stream of '60s-'70s ad scans, points to this YouTube clip of a notable television commercial from 1968: it's a promo for the Peace Corps, set to "Age of Aquarius." As MewDeep excerpts here, the ad is mentioned in The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, by Thomas Frank.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/05/04/psychedelic-ad-for-peace-corps.html/feed 0 http://boingboing.net/2011/08/15/sex-drugs-and-16th-century-witches.html http://boingboing.net/2011/08/15/sex-drugs-and-16th-century-witches.html#comments Mon, 15 Aug 2011 16:07:55 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=113526 history of witches on drugs.]]> history of witches on drugs.]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/08/15/sex-drugs-and-16th-century-witches.html/feed 4 http://boingboing.net/2011/08/13/the-annotated-apocalypse-anthropologists-tackle-2012.html http://boingboing.net/2011/08/13/the-annotated-apocalypse-anthropologists-tackle-2012.html#comments Sat, 13 Aug 2011 12:00:38 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=113240 It's August of 2011, do you know when your Apocalypse is? There are 1000s of people who think that something important—if not the end or the world, then something—will happen on December 21, 2012.]]>

It's August of 2011, do you know when your Apocalypse is?

There are 1000s of people who think that something important—if not the end or the world, then something—will happen on December 21, 2012. These speculations spring from a well-seasoned cultural melting pot, but a key ingredient is the writings and beliefs of both ancient and modern Maya people. In fact, the folks promoting the 2012 movement often frame themselves as experts in Maya traditions.

Here's the thing, though: There are actual experts in ancient Maya traditions, and actual experts who study the culture and religion of modern Maya living today. These archaeologists and anthropologists have, inadvertently, created some of the pop culture legends that spawned the 2012 movement. But, until very recently, they've largely ignored that movement. This is starting to change, however. Last January, archaeo-astronomers held a symposium on the 2012 phenomenon and those papers were recently published in The Proceedings of the International Astronomy Union. Meanwhile, a new scholarly book, collecting essays on the 2012 phenomenon by Mayanist researchers, is set to be published soon.

One of the researchers featured in that book is John Hoopes, an archaeologist and one of my former professors when I was an anthropology student at The University of Kansas.

Hoopes does field research, digging at archaeological sites in Costa Rica and other parts of Central and South America. But, as a side project, he's also developed some expertise in the way archaeology—and, particularly, pseudo-archaeology—influences pop culture in the United States and Europe. I spoke with him about where 2012 myths come from, why scientists need to study and address pseudo-science movements, and why he thinks the 2012 phenomenon owes as much to H.P. Lovecraft and Aldous Huxley as it does to the ancient Maya.

Maggie Koerth-Baker: I know that you are an archaeologist, but you also have this very meta offshoot of your research that I sort of think of as the cultural anthropology of archeo-mythology. How did you get into that?

John Hoopes: That’s one way to put it. I usually think about it as the ethnography of contemporary culture. It goes a long way back. I was an avid consumer of pseudo-archaeology in high school. I was a sci-fi and fantasy fan. My very first research paper, in 10th grade, was a critical evaluation of the Lost Continent of Atlantis.

JH:The real stuff behind it, it comes in several flavors. The main real stuff are prophecies in The Books of Chilam Balam, the Books of the Jaguar Priest. That's really a set of different manuscripts from colonial Yucatan and it was published in the 1700s. But they recount stories that were collected much earlier, including ones from the time of Spanish arrival. Chilam Balam is a legendary prophet who made various pronouncements that are collected in these books. That's what's referred to as "Mayan prophecies." The scholarly discussion of them goes back to the 1930s.

Then, beginning in the 1970s you also have discussion of a monument called Tortuguero Monument #6. It appears in Linda Schele's work in 1982 [Schele was one of the key researchers in the story of how modern scientists learned to decipher ancient Maya hieroglyphics—MKB] and discussed at the Maya Workshops in late 1990s. As we got closer to 2012, David Stuart published the new translation. [Stuart is a student of Schele's and another key figure in the translation of Mayan writing.—MKB]

It's the only monument known to have the date 13.0.0.0.0—the Mayan date that corresponds to December 21, 2012—on it. The monument is damaged. So it's hard to read and it takes a lot of cleverness to decipher what the text actually says. The preliminary translation came out in the late 1990s. However, the inscription isn't at all clear. There's some discussion about whether it's even a prophecy, but I think it is. It refers to celebration of a god called Bolon Yok'te K'uh. This deity seems to be associated with warfare and with the king of Tortuguero. The most recent translation suggests that whatever they said would happen then was really just the dressing and honoring of this deity, nothing more.

The date 13.0.0.0.0 is a logical extrapolation of how the Mayan Long Count Calendar works. The first published mention of that date was in the 1800s, came from the work of Joseph Goodman. But it wasn't actually written anywhere other than the Tortuguero monument, which was discovered in the 1970s.

JH: It had been something on the edge of my consciousness for a while. The Mayan Factor by Jose Arguelles is a book was part of the New Age Harmonic Convergence of 1987. That came out right as I finished my dissertation. I didn’t pay much attention at the time because everybody had just written it off. By that point, people were joking about New Age and not taking it seriously. But at that time, Arquelles was writing about December 21, 2012. And it just grew from there. I didn’t pay much attention until 1995, which is when I noticed two things.

First, that was the year that the first interactive, graphic Maya calendar orientation program came out on the web and it gave December 21, 2012 as the date that corresponded to the Mayan date of 13.0.0.0.0. Then I got an email from Daniel Pinchbeck. We had a common interest in Burning Man and he contacted me saying that he was writing about Jose Arquelles and 2012 for Rolling Stone. That’s when I realized that this had taken on a life of its own. But I hadn’t really realized until early 2003 that it was something people were still paying any attention to.

JH: He’s made informal statements in email and in conversation with colleagues. And he did write an introduction to a book that's coming out soon, which I have contributed to, called 2012: Decoding the Counterculture Apocalypse. In that, he discusses his inadvertent role in fostering this myth.

It really started with his 1966 book, The Maya. He did two things. First, he was the first Maya specialist to correlate a long count date to a date in the future, rather than in the past. He was trying to figure out what that 13.0.0.0.0 date would be, and he turned out to be wrong. He thought December 24, 2011 and that was later corrected. But he was also the first person to link that date—13.0.0.0.0—to the concept of Armageddon and say that the Maya would have associated that date with the end of the world. I’ve been in pretty regular communication with him over the last several years, and he’s repeated that paragraph in all 8 editions of The Maya. He really thinks the ancient Maya would have thought about it that way. But that’s not everyone’s interpretation. And it’s not mine. That’s just what he thinks.

JH: I think that people are beginning to think that way, but it’s not how they thought before. I don’t think any of the Mayanists saw this coming. They’re taken aback by it. They’re surprised that the statements they make are taken as seriously as this and treated as real beliefs, absolute fact. What they’re really doing is throwing out ideas to make the books interesting. I don’t think Coe was asserting a scientific discovery about Maya prophecies. He was just talking in an informal way about what he thought the ancient Maya might have thought. In the past, those books were intended for academic audiences that understood that, but with the web new audiences have read these books and interpreted them in different ways.

JH: Oh, absolutely. I have a class called Archaeological Myths and Realities and we devote a whole semester to looking at myths that have come out of archaeology and how those play out in popular culture. We also discuss the phenomenon of how people learn about the past. I think a lot of the current generation of high school and college kids learn about archaeology through video gaming. They learn about it through Civilization and Tomb Raider. There are lots and lots of allusions in games to ancient cultures and civilizations, and through science fiction movies. Many people learn about the past through pop culture. And pop culture has popularized some really spurious theories. Think about the History Channel and their series on ancient aliens, for example.

JH: Mainly because I think it gives us an opportunity to see how religious movements begin.

There’s a lot in that mythology that people are referring to as if it is real or as something they want to believe in. It’s been tied together with the Age of Aquarius, the legitimacy of prophecy, and visionary experiences. There’s a lot there that’s similar to the beginnings of other religious traditions. Christianity, for instance, began in the context of messianic prophecies. The LDS church began in the context of speculation about Native Americans and concerns about the end of the world. And the Millerite movement of the 1840s is another one. That gave rise to today’s Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses. William Miller prophesied the second coming for October 1844. And even though it didn’t happen, it still had a lasting legacy because so many people believed. Publications started by Millerites are still the publications of the Jehovah’s Witnesses today. I really think there will be some religious or spiritual movements that come out of the 2012 mythology. If you go into Barnes and Noble and look in the metaphysics or spirituality sections, you’ll find tons of books about 2012. It’s not treated as historical or scientific, but as spiritual.

JH: There’s only three books that represent scholarly critiques, and two scholarly articles. Anthony Aveni is an archeo-astronomer interested in the intersection of astronomy and culture. In his book, The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012, he’s talking about what the real science behind this is. There’s also another book, 2012: Science and Prophecy of the Ancient Maya, by Mark Van Stone, which looks at what the hieroglyphic texts do and don’t say about 2012.

Like I told you, there’s actually only one text that even mentions it. And it’s not complete and not easily interpreted. All the prophecies don’t come from the pre-Columbian texts, but from post-contact documents that are heavily influenced by Christianity. There’s another paper about that contact period that has focused on the role of missionaries in the Yucatan shortly after Spanish conquest. Basically, it’s framing Millenarianism in the context of that post-contact era. Many of those people came to Mexico precisely because they were on the extreme end of ideology and were obsessed with the end of the world. And we know that one of the first things they said to the Indians they found was that the world is ending soon and Jesus is coming. It was a very important part of Spanish colonization. When we hear end of the world prophecies, what they are is synchronistic prophecies where Mayan beliefs and Catholic Millenarian beliefs combined.

JH: I think that scholars in general are very uncomfortable with contemporary belief systems. They’re laden with a lot of emotional baggage. It’s not the purpose of science to generate or support ideology, and so scientists are reasonably cautious and don’t want to contribute to that growth. They’re also just not familiar with it. They won’t touch fringe literature with a 10 foot pole and so they’re completely unaware of how big this phenomenon is. A student of mine has just written an article called “2012 by 2012.” He’s been keeping tabs on the number of books published about this topic and he thinks there will be more than 2000 books out by the time 2012 comes around. It’s been a huge publishing phenomenon.

JH: I think that they’re prepared to take it on in terms of the knowledge that they have. But they’re not well prepared in terms of how it is that we talk to people who are interested in the spiritual aspects of this. I think that actually polarizes the dialogue sometimes. Scientists and academics end up being seen as the bad guys. A lot of this mythology falls into anti-authoritarian mythology. “What the official sources tell you isn’t true. There’s a conspiracy to hide the truth.” The trailer for the 2012 movie said something along the lines of, “If governments knew about a world wide catastrophe, would they tell you?” It raises suspicion of authority. And I don’t think many academics are prepared to deal with people who are hostile to authority and who have made up their minds that scholars are lying or are part of the conspiracy.

JH: I try to be fairly diplomatic about it. I try to realize that these myths play a very important role in people’s lives. They make them feel comfortable, help them feel better. I try to help people develop critical thinking skills, and help them understand that you can’t educate yourself simply by reading the web and watching the History Channel. That it requires a lot of scholarship and reading, and you have to look at the original academic literature. You can’t rely on popular magazines. You have to evaluate the primary information itself. Lots of people can’t afford the academic training they want and so they try to do it themselves and wind up with an autodidactic education that includes a lot of bizarre and totally wrong speculative literature. In fact, a lot of people writing about this are self taught in the same way.

JH: I think it is, but I don’t know of any cultural anthropologists who pursue it. There’s a lot of excellent religious studies work on new religious movements, though. One of my favorite books is The Invention of Sacred Tradition. What they talk about is how people will invent things that they then say have been happening forever. I think it helps us understand the production of culture, how culture is generated. There’s a lot of richness out there that we can see in the creation of new mythologies.

Jesus Potter Harry Christ is another book you should look at. It’s a detailed comparison of Christian myth and the Harry Potter stories, and it comes to the conclusion that, except for the fact that Christian myth has been sanctioned for 2000 years, there’s no difference. Essentially, one could base a whole theology on Harry Potter. And, in fact, I suspect that in the future somebody will. That’s how culture gets created. Myth cycles become the way that people teach morality, values, and behavior. That’s what the Bible does, but Star Trek has that function, too.

JH: Something else covered in that 2012 book I’m in that hasn’t really been talked about in mainstream media … the reality is that this mythology came out of the psychedelic subculture. You can’t ignore that influence. I was talking about this with a TV presenter and her reaction was that they couldn’t say that because they do family programming. A lot of people won’t talk about it because it’s a taboo topic. But we do discuss that in this book. If some of the 2012 theories seem like they were made up by people on drugs, it’s because they were. There’s this huge psychedelic subculture that still exists and that the media doesn’t really report on except to demonize it. But it’s important.

Also, the most recent research I’ve been doing, and I haven’t published on this yet, but I’m finding links between the work of H.P. Lovecraft and influence of that on 2012. Michael Coe was a huge Lovecraft fan, even. I’m working on a manuscript on that right now. But Lovecraft is at the root of a lot of the ideas here, like the cycles of destruction, for instance. That’s not Mayan, that’s Lovecraft. Lovecraft himself had a lot of skepticism and felt that spiritualism was appropriate for fiction but didn’t believe any of it in everyday reality, and he kind of used his fiction as a way to mock those beliefs a little. But now that’s being used as reality.

JH: I hope that that work is happening. In fact, I’ve encouraged some of my students who work with modern Maya to be doing just that. Because what’s happening now is a very active synchretism of the religions of living Maya groups with New Age thought.

Mayan belief has long been synchronistic. In the pre-Columbian era they were influenced by the cultures and beliefs of Teotihuacan, the Toltecs, the Olmecs, and then you get the Spanish and Catholicism, then evangelical Protestantism, and since the 1970s there’s been this influence of the New Age and that’s really intensified now with the 2012 thing.

Essentially, some very enthusiastic hippies have gone into remote Maya villages, bringing their ideas about the New Age, Buddhism, and theosophy. They are introducing them to the Maya themselves, who are in turn producing a new synchretism. I think there are a lot of places that are reinterpreting shamanism along the lines of what Western academics think shamanism to be. That makes it really hard to understand what those people originally believed. The religous studies scholars call it “The Pizza Effect,” it refers to what happens when a culture reflects back to a foreign influence as though it had always been there. The Hare Krishnas, for instance, were an American interpretation of Hinduism and were exported to India, where it became a religious movement in India that hadn’t been there all along.

The name comes from the history of the pizza, which is that the pizza was invented by Italian immigrants in New England creating a quick lunch. But as American tourists went to Italy in search of authentic pizza the restaurateurs were happy to oblige by inventing a history of the pizza in Italy. And now you have this “authentic” Italian pizza coming back to the U.S. I think that’s happening with 2012 as well. You have modern Maya talking about New Age secrets as if those were original parts of Maya culture, but those were things that were learned in the 60s and 70s.

It is authentic. Synchretic beliefs are absolutely authentic. You know, the authenticity argument is really one of, “Do these people authentically believe this,” and the reality is that many, many Maya are authentically evangelical Protestants. Yes, it’s recent. But it doesn’t mean it’s any less authentic. But there’s a difference between authenticity and tradition. And the arbiters of truth and what is tradition are changing. Ironically, this is happening at a point where we know more than we ever did before about ancient texts because we can actually read them so much better. And there’s nothing in there about aliens.