Author: Synthia Andrews and Colin Andrews
Publisher: Alpha, 2008
Price: £10.99
Isbn: 9781592578030

This is a horrible book to behold: the design is vile, the text is broken into bite-size pieces with a cross-head every dozen or 20 lines, there are silly little ‘explanatory’ boxes on nearly every page – and they are themed with cutesy headings like ‘Cosmic Caution’ and ‘Codex Cues’, and the thoroughly mysteri­ously named ‘Celestial Connect­ions’, which tell us amazing facts, such as that “The Maya of today are doctors, lawyers, farmers, architects, artists and more, and in general occupy all levels of the social strata”. And then there are the cartoons, of a humour no sharper than that lettuce quietly composting at the back of your fridge. This is before one hits the text – reading age: eight – and its approach to logical argument as a series of acausal meaningful coincid­ences. Complete idiot’s guide indeed, and one is left wondering if the ‘idiot’ is identifying the publisher, the designer, the authors or the intended reader.

Paradoxically, for a book intended for the (if only slightly) differently abled, this is a hard read. For one thing – partly, one suspects, a result of dicing up the material into handy spoonsful – it’s strangely organised. One is given swathes of information about Mayan world-views, maths, divination and astrology, and, of course, their sundry calendars. How reliable this is, is open to question: the bibliography contains works from but a handful of academic publishers and a plethora of dodgy New Age ones. Meanwhile, we’re left wondering what bearing Mayan window designs or their lethal ball games have to do with 2012, and never find out.

When we come to some of the more curious beliefs associated with Apocalypse 2012, we hear, for example, of an inexplicably invisible ‘photon belt’ surrounding the Pleiades – where else? (To astronomers, this is an open star cluster some 440 light years distant.) But, say the authors, there’s no evidence this photon belt exists. Well, no: it’s invisible, and the one thing we know about photons is that they emit light. But “it’s a common 2012 theme,” and its proponents suggest it is a belt of “spiritual energy” that “comes from other dimens­ions and is assisting a spiritual awakening on the planet”. On the other hand it may cause “the interruption of electricity and… social upheaval”. This ‘inform­ation’ is scattered in several chunks across four chapters and 40 pages. Irritating enough, but more so is the authors’ fudging, even pusillanimous attitude to the meaning, significance, or even sense in such claims.

This is pretty much how they treat all the tendentious and sometimes plain mad assertions that have been made about 2012 – in fragments, and without doing what a guide is supposed to do, which is guide us.
What one wants from an ‘idiot’s guide’ to 2012 is to learn (a) what’s reliably known, from expert academic sources, about the ancient Mayan world, (b) what’s being claimed, by whom, and on what evidence, about what 2012 ‘means’, and (c) whether or not we can trust any of it. This we do not get here or, if we do get it, it is retrievable only by several readings, is hedged about by equivocations, and is not always based on trustworthy sources. A 12-page chapter called ‘A Healthy Dose of Skepticism’ two-thirds of the way through doesn’t cut quite enough ice after screeds of channelling of the Pleiadeans, waffle from Edgar Cayce, and the obligatory turn by, guess who, Nostradamus.

And as one reads on through the last third of this tome it becomes apparent that the authors actually do think a great change is a-comin’. All human suffer­ing is there, from global warming to plagues and diseases, and pages of helpful advice on how to make ready for the Doom, including a section on ‘Finding Your Inner Scout’ and the observ­ation that it’s useful to know how to tie lots of different knots.

Be prepared!

Possibly, and perhaps predictably, the most entertaining chapter is on crop circles, seen here as ‘signs from the meta-conscious mind’, which cobbles together most of the weirdest things you’ve ever heard about the origins of field art. One Celestial Connect­ion here is a true gem among Questions to Which the Answer is ‘No’: “Since the crop circle designs are harvested with the rest of the fields, many of us have been eating these plants in our cereal, bread, and other products. Is this another way of awakening humanity?”

Someone, please, give us the book that this should have been.