Prophecy Postponed?

I find this time we are in now to be unprecedented, weird, disorienting. Perhaps most of you agree? This month, we reach ten years since “2012,” the prophetic end of the Mayan Long Count calendar. One of my books — my favorite, probably my great work until this point — explored this prophetic threshold.

2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl came out in 2006 — I was forty years old at the time — and made a cultural impact. I was careful not to state anything too specific or definitive about what the future would hold: I knew that I did not know. And in fact, in that book and subsequent attempts, such as the film I made with Joao Amorim and Giancarlo Canavesio, 2012: Time for Change, I entertained various possibilities.

For a number of years, I had the exhilarating sense of being at the center of something — an emergent cultural and social movement, a horizon of magical possibility. I also felt a tremendous weight of responsibility and pressure that, I see in retrospect, became too much for me to bear. I cracked under that pressure. Looking back, I wonder if I was somehow possessed — I know we don’t believe in possession in our culture, but shamanic traditions take it seriously. I still feel a lot of regret and pain over mistakes that I made. It has been humbling.

In 2003, while researching my 2012 book, I visited the Amazon in Brazil to work with the Santo Daime…