Time and the Technosphere

The preface is an autobiography of ideas. Argüelles recalls the Harmonic Convergence of 1987, the stock market crash that October and his son's death in a car accident ten days later, which he says released him from leading an ordinary life. Then came books of inner voyages and, with his wife Lloydine, the Dreamspell, a set of tools for a time he calls the fourth dimension.

This is where the detail that matters to calendar users appears. In 1988, a leap year, while putting together an everyday Maya calendar, Argüelles noticed that making room for February 29 would knock his cycle of year bearers out of step. Rereading the books of Chilam Balam, he concluded that the leap year had never been counted, and began leaving the day out. That is the source of the gap, growing by one day every four years, between the Dreamspell and the traditional count.

The theory has three terms. The biosphere is the life of the planet; the technosphere, the layer of machines, cities and systems humankind has built on top of it; the noosphere, an idea he takes from Vladimir Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin, is the planet's layer of mind, the state that would come after history.

The engine of that passage would be time. Argüelles contrasts an artificial time, 12:60, of the twelve uneven months and the clock, with a natural time, 13:20, the matrix of the tzolk'in. Caught in the first, humankind would have fallen out of tune with nature, which would explain its materialism, its hurry and the ruin of the planet.

The middle chapters read history through this lens. The 12:60 civilization would have peaked in the 56 years from Hiroshima, in 1945, to the attacks of September 11, 2001, with which the book opens and which it treats as the inevitable event marking the end of artificial time.

The author takes this reading far. He goes as far as describing the attacks as an instrument of the noosphere, and devotes pages to the Quran and the Islamic lunar calendar, which he sets against the Gregorian one. The history of calendar reform, from Gregory XIII to the twentieth-century movement for a world calendar, appears as a hidden history.

The solution is spelled out plainly: change the calendar. Thirteen moons of 28 days, plus one day outside the count, would put humankind back into natural time, and switching calendars would be the simplest way to shift how people think.

The closing chapters describe human beings as chips of the noosphere, give a practical road map for the transition, with a peace of culture and a peace of the biosphere, and end with a prayer. The appendices offer a critique of the Gregorian calendar, the history of the thirteen-moon movement, the prophecy of Pacal Votan and a numerical code of nineteen drawn from the Quran.

At one point only. Next to the reading, the Chart shows the person's Dreamspell Kin, for those who know that other count. For people born on February 29, it notes that the Dreamspell leaves that day out, and this preface is what explains why.

The rest stays out. The Law of Time, the 12:60 and the 13:20, and the thirteen-moon calendar are the author's creations, with no root in the count of the daykeepers, who count February 29 like any other day.

The Law of Time cannot be tested. It is a reading of the world presented as a scientific discovery, and its proofs are coincidences of numbers and dates.

The reading of the 2001 attacks, and the passages that cast religions and groups of countries as forces of good and evil, call for caution. And the book says little about the Maya: the Maya calendar is the starting point of a theory that is the author's own.