This whole Crystal Skull-2012-Mayan Calendar-Aztec Curses nonsense needs to come to an end. The Aztecs and the Mayans were certainly advanced people in their own way and they deserve our respect and recognition. However, if they were not prescient enough to foresee the coming of Pizarro or the seemingly random collapse of their entire empire, what can they possibly offer modern humans in terms of accurate and useful prophecy? I posit that the answer is nothing.

Humanity, unlike the rest of the natural world, is obsessed with its own demise. Consciousness seems to come with an angry hooting ape attached to its back. That ape likes to remind a great many people in a most impolite fashion that we are going to die someday. For some reason this ape also thinks that we are all going to die together and that this demise is just around the corner. Look at any number of myths and stories from any number of cultures. The apocalyptic scenario is ubiquitous across all of them. You’ve got floods and fire and the leviathan of the Bible and similar events in the other Abrahamic traditions. You’ve also got Ragnarok from the Vikings, flood myths from Native Americans, apocalypse in the form of cold and darkness from Asia. This method of thinking is everywhere.

Here in the “modern” West, minds seem to occupy two primary spaces. The first involves the Biblical Apocalypse scenario with Jesus and the Devil engaging in some badass kung fu for our souls. The second camp seems obsessed with 2012 and the strange ‘artifacts’ of ancient cultures such as The Crystal Skulls. Somehow, like a Venn Diagram of idiocy, there is overlap. I’ve heard of and talked to people that are simultaneously very worried about 2012 and who are, at the same time, awaiting the return of Christ-Jesus, Lord of Hosts. Trying to wrap my head around that is like trying to grasp a lively fly betwixt chopsticks.

The Crystal Skulls themselves are terribly interesting until you actually read about the legitimate experiments performed on them: experiments that have all said that they were created sometime in the mid 19th century with rotary tools. And yet, people still pray to these things and fear them. Rather than look at ourselves, many of us still look to the sky and to the ancient world looking for our doom.

But, I ask, if the ‘ancients’ were so goddamn wise, why are they all dead and gone? Maybe they, like us, were all just phenomenally lazy. Maybe some things never really change.