Mystical 2012: The Triple Rebirth of the Sun and the Triple Rebirth of You (cont.)
By Thomas Razzeto

The Triple Rebirth of the Sun

The astronomy of 2012 is metaphorically connected to the Maya’s theme of transformation and rebirth. On the exact day of the winter solstice of 2012, we will have the triple rebirth of the sun. This is just a metaphor and nothing is really going to happen to the sun; it will simply continue to shine and our day will appear to be perfectly normal. Yet a remarkable astronomical event will occur in the sky high above the Maya and also above all of us. While there is a bit more to it, right now I will simply explain why this day can be said to contain the triple rebirth of the sun.

The first rebirth is the daily sunrise. Everyday when the sun sets, it goes below the horizon, seemingly under the ground of the earth, and we are left to endure a dark, cold night. Metaphorically, it can be said that the sun leaves our world and travels into the underworld, where it is said to be dead for the duration of the night. Yet at dawn, it rises above the ground and is reborn into our world bringing forth the light and heat we all need to stay alive. Since the sunrise is so frequent, it is often taken for granted, but all of us of course know that this rebirth is truly vital.

Next, let’s consider the winter solstice. It can be seen as the rebirth of the sun in the time frame of the year since the length of the day will now start to grow longer. If the days were to continue to grow shorter, the cold winter would only tighten its grip and we would all perish. So this rebirth is also vital.

The third rebirth - which I call the galactic rebirth - will require a few pictures to explain. So let’s see what we have.

Night after night, during the summer months, the Maya clearly saw the most spectacular section of the Milky Way. Here they saw a massive ball of light with a dark swath intruding into it. This section of the sky contains the center of the galaxy and that is why it is so bright. There is nothing else in the night sky that looks even remotely like this section of the sky. It is visually quite stunning and very intriguing. The Maya were drawn to it and stories were created about it.

Figure 1. The center region of the Milky Way can easily be seen without a telescope.

The ancient Maya saw the band of the Milky Way as the body of the Sacred Goddess and the bulging ball of light as her pregnant belly. The dark rift was the sacred birth canal, the point of creation, the place where the spiritual world transforms itself into the physical world. Here we find the portal between the physical and the spiritual. This is a very beautiful metaphor! It focuses perfectly on the magic of the human womb, a place where something fantastic seems to appear out of nothing. It takes this miracle that we all have been a part of and expands it to infinity since everything is said to come into existence from this point of origin. As we shall soon see, this is the section of the sky that is most relevant to 2012.

Figure 2. The pregnant belly of the Sacred Goddess and the galactic birth canal.

Due to the orbit of the earth around the sun, from the point of view of earth, the sun appears to travel across the dark rift, the sacred birth canal, once a year. The Maya metaphorically saw the one day of the year when the sun was “seen” in front of the middle of the sacred birth canal as a third type of solar rebirth, the galactic rebirth. Let’s take a look:

Figure 3. The orbit of the earth causes the annual galactic rebirth of the sun.

Figure 4. The sun appears to travel across the galactic birth canal once a year.

Two thousand years ago, the Maya noticed that the sun appeared to travel in front of the dark rift in late November. It did this once a year and each year it did it a little bit closer to the day of the winter solstice. This shift was too small for the Maya to have noticed from one year to the next, but about 70 years later, this difference had accumulated to the point were it was big enough for the Maya to easily detect. Since the occurrence of these two rebirths were slowly getting closer together, the Maya asked the obvious question:

What year in the distant future will have the sun in front of the dark rift on the same day as the winter solstice?

This is the driving question behind the creation of the Maya Long Count calendar! You can already easily see why this event can be seen metaphorically as a triple rebirth of the sun. I call these three rebirths:

1) the daily rebirth

2) the solstice rebirth and

3) the galactic rebirth.

A triple rebirth of the sun happens when all three rebirths happen on the same day. This is the obvious and natural way in which the Maya were attracted to a point in time over two thousand years in their future. This is the main reason that the Maya created their Long Count calendar.

A more complete understanding of why the Maya picked the exact day of the winter solstice of 2012 is revealed in the following screenshot:

Figure 5. Here is the triple rebirth of the sun and the special configuration of the sacred tree.

This is it! This is why the Maya picked this exact day to restart their calendar!

Now that we understand why the astronomy can be used as the foundation of the Maya’s most important metaphor of rebirth, let’s look into the core meaning of that metaphor.