We all remember the meme from 8 years ago. The end of the world was going to happen on the 21st of December 2012. Of course, as a meme, this was a simplified and exaggerated version of a prediction. Seeing as there wasn’t some world-ending event on that day, or even really any big news or drama at all. Everyone kinda shrugged it off and carried on their way.
But I’m making the claim that 2012 actually happened! Just not all at once on that day and not in the fantastic memefied version that most of us heard about.
The Mayan Long Count
The date 21st December 2012 came about because this is when the 13th baktun in the Mayan Calendar ended. The intricate calendar devised by the Mayans spanned over 5000 years. This date somehow got tangled up in New Age theorising, in large part thanks to Terrence McKenna.
Ethnobotanist, psilocybin guru and Berkley alumni; Terrence McKenna had devised a theory based on the 64 Hexagrams of the I Ching. He purported to find patterns in the quality of time. The theory suggests that time does not act linearly, but can ‘travel’ at different speeds and is more pregnant with novelty at some times than at others.
He mapped his Novelty Timewave theory onto human history and predicted that there would be a point of infinite novelty on the 21st of December 2012, or close enough for him to link it to the end of the Mayan Calendar.
A lot of stuff was said about this date over the years, including that it would mark the End of the World. But most of the predictions seemed to suggest something more akin to the human race ascending to a higher plane of reality.
But when the 21st of December 2012 came around, because the world didn’t end, or every human on the planet didn’t spontaneously ejaculate etheric light from all of their chakras whilst rising slowly into the sky, we all shrugged it off as another silly meme.
But guys we did ascend to a different plane of reality. And 2012 was the midpoint of that ascension. What the hippies said would happen did. It’s just that when stuff like that actually happens we still have to live our mundane little lives. Our ascension didn’t feel particularly special on the evening of 21.12.12.
Shifts in Human History Don’t Happen Overnight
So maybe the New Age theorists weren’t exactly right in their predictions. There was no global awakening of consciousness, there was no sudden moment where we all found Christ in our hearts, sudden onset of ecstasy didn’t spread across the entire planet. Alas.
But we did ascend to a different plane of reality. That plane of reality is the digital plane, the internet.
Yes, what I am saying is that 2012 happened because we all have smartphones now and we didn’t in 2004. Groundbreaking stuff, right?
But hear me out.
We are now fully consumed by the digital plane of reality and we really weren’t in 2004. Almost every aspect of our lives now intersects with the internet. Ordering food, finding a date, finding your way around town, buying anything. For most of us 90% of our news, entertainment, and information come through digital means. The computers we now have in our pockets are more powerful than the world’s leading supercomputer, the size of a bus, 30 years ago. Everything we do is run through huge digital networks that span every corner of the planet.
It might not seem like it because it has happened in such small and incremental steps but our minds, our sense of privacy, sense of identity, of self, friendship, power, work; our sense of life have all been blown inside out over the last 16 years as we slowly but surely ascended from the physical plane of reality to the digital.
The effect of being permanently plugged into the various dopamine-hacking apps and social media platforms has been massive. All you have to do is look around at the state of the world to see what kind of effect it’s having on us on a cultural level, let alone a personal one.
We’re fully here now. We are plugged into the internet. There’s no turning back. And I am quite sure that if you took a pill that could somehow take you from 1995 consciousness to 2020 consciousness it would feel something similar to coming up on strong acid.
Our eyes travel out to a thousand different sights in the world every day. Our ears can hear sounds from across the globe. Our senses and our nervous system have been stretched out through vast artificial networks and then been bombarded with signals of fear, comedy, lust, jealousy, guilt, fun, buy, Buy, BUY, every time we take our phones out of our pockets.
Had this transformation happened all at once on 21st of December 2012 perhaps the world would have ended as we all went mad with the sudden overload of stimulation that would have hit us like a garbage truckload full of clicks, likes and retweets.
But it didn’t. It happened slowly, is still happening. And 2012 was the turning point.
2012 happened but it was as slow and boring or as exciting and thrilling as each of our lives have been over the past 16 years.
The Venus Retrograde Cycle
In short. Apparently, the Mayans were pretty hot on their Venus tracking. Some think that the end of the Mayan Long Count coincides with the Transit of Venus in 2012.
That little black dot in the upper right of the Sun is Venus.
Image from NASA.
Every 120 years or so Venus crosses the path of the Sun, kinda like an eclipse. But after 120 years it does it again after 8, then another 120 before it happens again. The Transit of Venus always occurs during Venus Retrograde. And every 8 years Venus retrogrades in the same sign.
So in 2004 and 2012, there were Venus Retrogrades which crossed the face of the Sun. Both happened in Gemini. This year was the first Venus Rx in Gemini since 2012.
It wasn’t long after 2004 that what we think of as smartphones started entering the market. Starting off with Blackberries and then moving onto iPhones in 2007. By 2012 smartphones were pretty ubiquitous, and most phones were on the internet. By 2020 it’s not easy to survive without one.
It was also around 2004 that social media started. MySpace was already blowing up. Facebook and Twitter in 2006. By 2012 even your mum had facebook. By 2020 social media has transformed the political landscape and the owners are some of the most powerful people on the planet, well maybe not Tom from MySpace.
If the Venus cycle is linked to the 2012 phenomenon then 2020 is a step in that process.
The 21st of December 2020
If the 21st of December 2012 was the moment, or at least the midpoint, of our ascension into the digital plane, it happened with much more of a whimper than a bang. Nothing of major import actually happened and there wasn’t much in terms of interesting astrology going on on that day either.
The 21st of December 2020 though. That is packed full of crazy unprecedented astrology during a crazy unprecedented year in human history.
Jupiter and Saturn are conjunct in the very first degree of Aquarius on the 21st of December 2020. Jupiter and Saturn conjunct once every 20 years or so, but they haven’t come together in Aquarius since 1405.
There is a lot of astrology this year pointing towards some kind of new beginning that only comes around every few hundred years. But this new beginning is one that has already been developing for over one and a half decades.
Massive shifts in human history don’t happen overnight. And when they do happen it doesn’t necessarily feel immediately extraordinary. Much, or arguably most, of our world now exists on the digital plane of reality. 2012 happened. It didn’t happen in the way we were told it was going to by the New Agers or by those mocking them, but it happened.
And this year exactly, to the day, 8 years after the 21st of December 2012, we have an historic conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn in the first degree of Aquarius. This is indicative, at the very least, of a new cultural cycle that’ll play out over the next 20 years. But the symbolism is pointing towards it being like a first step into the new world we find ourselves in. One we’ve spent at least 16 years transitioning into. And this might – just might – be a little easier to notice than the midpoint 8 years ago.
