[link to news.yahoo.com]

People who are expecting the world to end on December 21 - the so-called 'Mayan Apocalypse' - should be in for a pleasant disappointment.

The 'prophecy' does not stem from the Mayans at all - or date from thousands of years ago. Instead, the beliefs come from two New Age books in the Seventies and Eighties. The two books predict outcomes as surreal as a 'upgrade' to human consciousness predicted by a spirit from the seventh century. The date itself comes from a prophecy based on a magic mushroom trip.

“December 21st will be just another Friday morning,” said Andrew Wilson, Assistant Head of Social Studies at the University of Derby. “A hippy guru called Jose Arguelles associated the date with the Mayan calendar in a book called The Mayan Factor in 1987. But it's an obsolete form of the calendar, which had not been used since the year 1100AD.”
[Related: 20-year-old global warming prediction 'was accurate']

“He claimed to be channelling various spirits, including the spirit of a Mayan king from the seventh century. He predicted a ‘shift in human consciousness’ - mass enlightenment.” The actual date of December 21 first appeared in an earlier work - a 1975 book by Terence McKenna, a writer known for his descriptions of “machine elves” seen while under the influence of drugs.