Author and pioneering researcher of Mayan cosmology John Major Jenkins has passed away.
He is credited with having helped raise awareness of the Mayan culture and was one of the primary forces behind the popularization of the now-infamous 2012 date.
However, as Jenkins stressed over the years on C2C and wrote about on his website back in 2010, his work never indicated that there was to be some kind of catastrophic event at the proverbial the end of the Mayan calendar.
On the contrary, Jenkins believed that the 2012 date was important because it occurred during a rare celestial alignment that was seen by the Mayans as merely the end of a cycle and the opportunity for a spiritual rebirth.
Despite frequently attempting to explain this interpretation of what the 2012 date meant, his research was unfortunately conflated by doomsday prophets and adopted by those who simply wished to profit off of just such an idea, including the makers of a big budget doomsday movie titled simply 2012.
In the years that followed the controversial date, Jenkins expressed frustration over how his work had become so misinterpreted by both the mainstream and esoteric community who, together, had turned 2012 into a false panic akin to Y2K rather than an important aspect of Mayan culture.
With the furor surrounding 2012 having long since passed, one hopes that Jenkins' work will be looked at in a new light and seen for what it was rather than the sensationalized version that, much to his chagrin, became a part of the zeitgeist during the 2000's.
For more on the work of John Major Jenkins, check out his website, which John's family plans to keep online in perpetuity in order to preserve his remarkable research and writings.