The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology

Jose Arguelles's book is a primary text of modern esoteric numerology, not a work of Maya scholarship, and this record states that plainly: Arguelles reinterpreted the ancient Maya calendar as a countdown toward planetary transformation, an invention that directly inspired the 1987 Harmonic Convergence event and the wider New Age Mayan calendar movement that followed it. Its documented significance is as the origin point of that modern movement, checkable against the movement's own acknowledged debt to this book, not as a claim that its reading of the Maya calendar reflects how the Maya themselves understood it. Use it to document Arguelles's own reinterpretation and the modern movement it launched; it is not a source on historical or ancient Maya religion, cosmology or calendrics, which needs Maya specialist scholarship such as Coe and Houston's The Maya.