When we woke up December 21 last year, the same old Christer lawn decorations greeted our gaze outside; laughing nervously, we probably thought, Aha, the Mayans were wrong.  Or, as others, including anthropologists and hieroglyphic experts, were arguing all along, these mesoamericans simply quit planning for a time beyond the Solstice, which they tracked by their observatories, e.g. at Chichen Itza.  Rather, many argued, there would be an "end" only evolutionarily, our species finally attaining Peace.  Well, dream on.

I think it just as probable that these eschatological fantasies merely depict what the Irish poet, Yeats, envisioned in "The Second Coming" ("...the best lack all conviction," &c.).  And Yeats borrowed heavily from yet another "great" work of scripture: the Vedas, the Mahabharata, &c., with their vision of a paradise at the other side of a final Yuga, many thousands of years, the Kali Yuga.  The Shiva Purana, I believe it is, one of the Shiva scriptures, addresses a litany of social dysfunctions and perversions such as Yeats could not dream (although, as Yeats fans know, he was a member of an occult fraternal order and knew the Yuga system of dating time quite well we can be sure).  Just because 12/21/12 has come and gone does not mean the world as we knew it is not ending.