Historical Figures

Jose Arguelles

Also Known As Arguelles Surname alone, which is how the Dreamspell sources cite him.

Occultists, Magicians & Esotericists

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "Jose Arguelles." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/historical-figures/jose-arguelles.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). Jose Arguelles. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/historical-figures/jose-arguelles

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-jose-arguelles,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {Jose Arguelles},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/historical-figures/jose-arguelles},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

American art historian, born Joseph Anthony Arguelles, who organized the 1987 Harmonic Convergence and, with his wife Lloydine Arguelles, devised the Dreamspell calendar in 1990, the thirteen month, twenty eight day system behind the Dreamspell kin signs recorded here. His 1987 book The Mayan Factor combined elements of the Maya calendar, the I Ching and shamanism into a numerological framework that fed directly into the emergence of the 2012 phenomenon.

Facts

Origins

Place of Origin

Rochester, Minnesota, United States 1

Defining Moment

Organized the Harmonic Convergence, August 1987, and with Lloydine Arguelles devised the Dreamspell calendar in 1990 1

Identity

Also Known As

Joseph Anthony Arguelles (birth name) 1

Gender

Male 1

Life

Lifespan or Floruit

1939 to 2011 1

Attestation

Historicity

Historically attested 1

Publications

Notable Publicationthe subject's own account

The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology (1987) 2

Learn More

From Art History to the Harmonic Convergence

Jose Arguelles, born Joseph Anthony Arguelles on 24 January 1939 in Rochester, Minnesota, to a Mexican and American family, earned a doctorate in art history and aesthetics from the University of Chicago and spent years teaching at colleges including Princeton University, the University of California, Davis, the San Francisco Art Institute and Evergreen State College. His academic training in art history sat alongside a growing interest in the Maya calendar and in what he read as its implications for human consciousness.

That interest produced his best known book, The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology, published in 1987 in conjunction with the event he organized that August, the Harmonic Convergence, a globally coordinated set of gatherings he presented as marking a pivotal shift in planetary consciousness tied to the Maya calendar. It was among the first events of its kind to draw wide public and media attention to New Age calendar prophecy, and it set the template that later fed into the 2012 phenomenon. Before his calendar work, Arguelles had already published serious academic and popular writing on art history, including studies of Charles Henry's scientific aesthetics and of the psychedelic and consciousness movements of the 1960s, so the turn toward Maya calendar prophecy built on an existing career rather than beginning it from nothing.

The Dreamspell Calendar

In 1990, working with his wife Lloydine Arguelles, he devised the Dreamspell calendar, a perpetual thirteen month, twenty eight day system he presented as a synchronization tool distinct from, and in his account more universally applicable than, the historical Maya calendars it drew loosely on. The calendar assigns each day a named and numbered position, the material the atlas catalogues as the Dreamspell kin; the specific artwork associated with each position is gated to the Arguelleses and to the Foundation for the Law of Time as its publisher, and is not reproduced here.

Arguelles founded the Planet Art Network and the Foundation for the Law of Time to promote Dreamspell and the broader calendar reform project he called the Law of Time. He remained active in that project for the rest of his life and died on 23 March 2011, at seventy two. Mainstream Mayanist scholarship does not treat Dreamspell as a continuation of the historical Maya calendar systems, regarding it instead as a modern invention loosely inspired by them. After his death in 2011 his widow Lloydine and their successor organizations continued to promote Dreamspell and the wider Law of Time project, maintaining an active practitioner community that still marks 26 July each year, the Dreamspell new year, as its central annual observance.

Cross-Tradition Connections