I recently watched a documentary on the History Channel called "Decoding The Past: Mayan Doomsday Prophecy".

The depiction of the Mayan calendar as a 3-piece clockwork was interesting and helped me understand it better. The interpretations of the hieroglyphics from the various interpreters was interesting, but very subjective.

The program indicated that according to the Dresden Codex (one of four surviving Mayan documents procured by a Dresden, Germany library) there is a panel that is interpreted to mean that the outcome of the end of this cosmic cycle (on 21 Dec 2012) will be a flood. The documentary presented a page from the Codex with figures representing a serpent with water coming from it's mouth and a Goddess pouring a bucket of water down upon the king of the underworld. Under the serpent's belly are symbols representing the moon and the sun with water coming from them as well. (This has something to do with an eclipse of the sun and moon preceding the flood).


[Linked Image from metawake.info]


But I thought that the final event according to the Mayans was to be a fire. questionmark

This prompted me to search. I found an excellent paper called "The Maya Flood Myth and the Decapitation of the Cosmic Caiman" by Erik Velasquez Garcia. The paper gives several references of interpretations of flooding as fire:


Quote
Among the Maya groups that left behind written testimonies during the Posclassic and Colonial periods, we find different accounts that revolve around the existence of a flood that wiped out the previous world and allowed for the creation of a new cosmological order. With the K’iche’, for instance, this flooding was produced by Uk’u’x Kaj (“Heart of the Sky”), or Juraqan, Mother and Father of the Gods, in order to annihilate the race of the men of wood (Recinos 1984:94-98; Christenson 2003:85-90). Bartolomé de las Casas (1967, II:507) also mentions that amongst the Q’eqchi’ people from Verapaz, “there was news about a flood and the end of the world, and they called it Butic, which means deluge of many waters and also judgment, and so they believe that another Butic is yet to come, which is another flood and judgment, not of water, but of fire, which they say has to be the end of the world, in which all creatures will fight each other..

A similar passage is contained in the Relación de la ciudad de Mérida (De la Garza 1983, I:72), which confirms the belief in successive floods of water and fire.

devil or rain questionmark