Much is being made of certain crop circles which appear to refer to the Maya calendar cycle, and thus the much spoken-of prophecies for the year 2012, when the calendar end-date arrives. However, are some articles recently circulated on the Net misleading, or indeed entirely wrong? And what is the story behind the alleged authors? GEOFF STRAY, author of recent 2012 bible ‘Beyond 2012’, investigates…


A comment on the ‘Aztec/Maya Crop Circle Connection’ articles of ‘C. Lewis’ and the ‘Anonymous Australian Scientist’ which have appeared on the Internet recently…

You may have seen the article on Crop Circle Connector:

http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2005/Waylands/mayancomputer.html

or elsewhere, e.g.:

http://www.finalfrontier.ws/2012/showthread.php?t=791

The article is entitled ‘The Aztec-Mayan Calendar Meets Modern Computers’, by C. Lewis, and is about the Waylands Smithy and Woolstone/Uffington crop formations of 2005. Now there is also a follow-on article by an anonymous ‘Australian scientist’ on Linda Moulton Howe's site that is based on the article, which is in turn based on another article by C. Lewis posted on Crop Circle Connector last year (about the 2004 Silbury "Doomsday" formation):

http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2004/silburyhill2/silburyhill2004b.html (access to members only).

First, a look at the C. Lewis 2005 article:

The 2005 article is based on the 2004 article findings, and I reviewed the Lewis 2004 article for Swirled News last year (see: http://www.swirlednews.com/article.asp?artID=748). Lewis's article this year corrects one of the faults I pointed out in his 2004 essay - the 2012.9 has been altered to 2012.973, seemingly in response to my point in the Swirled News article that 2012.9 equates to November 24th 2012, not December 21st. However, as we shall see in studying the ‘Australian scientist’, this is not accurate enough, and would lead to an end-date for the Maya calendar of December 22nd - one day out. Lewis also alters the encoded date of last year's formation, which was given in his article last year as 2004.6, and is changed to 2004.306 in this year's article. This seems to be in response to my point (in the Swirled News article) that 2004.6 plus 8.67 365-day years also gives an incorrect end-point.

In brief, last year's article did not survive close scrutiny and was faulted; therefore extrapolations from it in this year's article are meaningless, despite updates, for reasons given below.

Next, we wonder who this C. Lewis is, and what his credentials are for this kind of Maya mathematics. The clue is in this year's article, where he signs himself "Best wishes, C. Lewis ("Out of the Silent Planet", 1939)". In 1938, the celebrated Cambridge professor and Christian author, C. S. Lewis wrote a book called ‘Out of the Silent Planet’, in which he tells the tale of:

"Dr Ransom, a Cambridge academic [who] is abducted and taken on a spaceship to the red planet of Malacandra, which he knows as Mars. His captors are plotting to plunder the planet's treasures and plan to offer Ransom as a sacrifice to the creatures who live there. Ransom discovers he has come from the 'silent planet' - Earth - whose tragic story is known throughout the universe..." (from Amazon.co.uk).

C. S. Lewis died in 1963, so the author C. Lewis is masquerading as a dead Christianity-obsessed Cambridge professor who was abducted and taken to Mars... We shall have more to say on this later.

As for the parts of this year's article that don't rely on last year's one:

The two sets of five hyphenated numbers CAN be extrapolated from the crop formation using the method described, but ‘Lewis’ says "Two broad arrows tell us in which direction left-right to read the binary code". Sure enough, the number sets he gives are a result of reading left-to-right, but since the top half of the formation (as shown in the photograph accompanying the article) is a mirror-image of the bottom half, when we look at the arrow there, it is actually pointing from right-to-left, so that his number series would come out completely different (11-5-14-5-11 instead of 13-10-7-10-13, and 7-10-13-10-7 instead of 14-5-11-5-14). This means that his complex further extrapolations are rendered redundant.

Lewis's whole theory is based on the supposition that the current "Maya century", or 52-year Calendar Round, ends on December 21st 2012. The 2012 end-date is based on the "end-point" or the date of 13.0.0.0.0 in the Maya Long Count Calendar. This is a completely different calendar from the 52-year Calendar Round, and there was a lot of variation across the lands inhabited by the Maya and Aztecs as to when the Calendar Round re-started. John Major Jenkins gives several of the variations in his book ‘Tzolkin’. There is only one known variation that re-starts in 2012, and that is the ‘Tikal’ version, which re-starts not in December 2012, but on April 2nd 2012. This fact destroys all the complex theorising of said Mr. ‘C. Lewis’.

Now to cover the article on Linda Moulton Howe's site, by the anonymous ‘Australian scientist’:

The article is based on the C. Lewis articles, with some additions, but he repeats Lewis's mis-reading of the arrow directions and therefore mis-reads any encoded dates such as "mid-August 2007” and "mid-summer 2009".

The Aussie egg-head explains what Lewis hinted at in his notes section, admitting a "nagging 13-day sloppiness somewhere in my math that I cannot pinpoint", but still has no explanation for the discrepancy. However, when the discrepancy is explained it is meaningless anyway, not only because it refers to a Gregorian, rather than Maya year, and a non-existent Maya century start-point and end-point (see below), but because it also fails to account for the fact that the Silbury 2004 formation appeared on 2nd August and the Waylands Smithy 2005 formation appeared on 9th August, not the same date, which is implied.

However, like C. Lewis, this ‘Australian scientist’ also shows his ignorance of Maya calendar sytems, when he states that "The current ‘Mayan century’ will END on December 21, 2012, or 2012.973 in our calendar system... It BEGAN exactly 52 years ago on 1960.973, again in our calendar system." [Captials our emphasis - SN] This interval equates to exactly 52 years by the Gregorian calendar (with 13 leap days over the 52 years between 1960 and 2012), but the Maya century consisted of 365-day years, WITH NO LEAP DAYS. What is more, the lab-coated Aussie also falls into the same trap as Lewis by confusing the end-point of the Long Count calendar with that of the 52-haab Calendar Round, the end of which varied with every Maya and Aztec group. As with Lewis, this one oversight destroys the entire page of theorising. Apart from these errors, there is also the error of forgetting that 2012 itself is a leap year, as is 1960, so in fact, 2012.973, applied to a 366-day year, equates to 22nd December, not the 21st... Oops!

The Australian coverage of the Woolstone Hill 2005 formation is additional to the Lewis material, and it mis-reports the ‘galactive superwave theory’ of Paul LaViolette as being an event that occurs every 5120 years, whereas LaViolette actually claims that it happens approximately every 26,000 years, "with the possibility of a 13,000-year recurrence interval". (‘Earth Under Fire’, LaViolette, 1997 p.301).

As for the crop formation at Marden, the central symbol - a ‘head’ - is only suggestive (in my opinion) of the logo on the Maya elders' ‘Saq Be’ website, and not identical to it.

So, is there any Maya or Aztec symbolism to be found in either the Waylands Smithy formation, or the Uffington White Horse formation? The Waylands Smithy formation, apart from the ‘G’ symbols, which have already been connected to the Maya symbol for the galaxy (the symbol is also widely used in ancient Greek art), has a simple numerical connection to Maya calendrics. There are 20 of the G symbols around the edge, and in each of the four quadrants there are 13 lines, making a total of 52.

13, 20 and 52 are the base numbers for Maya calendars, since there are 260 days in the sacred Tzolkin (13 x 20) and 260 katuns in the 13-baktun cycle that ends in 2012, which also consists of 5200 tuns (360-day years). Each katun is 20 tuns in length, and there was a Short-Count calendar that consisted of 13 katuns of 20 tuns each (totalling 260 tuns). There are 52 haabs in the Calendar Round.

The Uffington formation has only 16 ‘G’ symbols, which is not significant. There seem to be 72 ‘feathers’ around it, and there are classically said to be 72 years in one degree of precession, which is what the Long Count is measuring, but I can see nothing more meaningful than that.

In conclusion, I think there is a distinct possibility that the Australian scientist is one and the same as C. Lewis. A trilogy of Lewis's science fiction works are now available as one book, and the first is the ‘Out of the Silent Planet’ mentioned by C. Lewis. The second, ‘Perelandra’, also involves the same Cambridge professor as the protagonist:

"In a harrowing scene from his science fiction novel ‘Perelandra’, the protagonist, Prof. Elwin Ransom, battles a mad scientist horribly disfigured by his lust for power. Lewis writes: "What was before him appeared no longer a creature of corrupted will. It was corruption itself to which will was attached only as an instrument."

(From an online review at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/147/11.0.html).

The third story, ‘That Hideous Strength’, is about a decapitated head.

If an "anonymous Australian scientist" rings a bell in the hoax department, this could be why: Early in 2004, an ‘internet hysteria’ of imminent doom was created by an anonymous Australian scientist - an astronomer, who claimed that the Earth was about to impacted by an asteroid. He was initially calling himself ‘Aussie bloke’, but later claimed to be a Dr. Gartrell, who is a genuine Australian astronomer, and who denied the whole thing. See this link:

http://www.rense.com/general53/hag.htm, or Google ‘Aussie bloke’ for more.

STOP PRESS: I have just been able to confirm from another source that ‘C. Lewis’ IS, in fact, the ‘Australian scientist’ referred to on Linda Moulton Howe's website.

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Information and ordering details for Geoff’s book ‘Beyond 2012: Catastrophe or Ecstasy?’, can be found at:

www.vitalsignspublishing.co.uk