Is Using Mayan Calendars for the Keitz Avoda Zara?

Unfortunately, many of the Sukkot Ge'ula predictions have not come to pass. We hope and pray for Mashiah's arrival every day despite prior disappointments.

Not too long ago, I told about a certain rav who gave a shiur about certain Ge'ula predictions, and among the other Kosher sources, he mentioned the Mayan calendar ending in 2012.

I mentioned at the time that I wasn't too keen on the idea, but could using such sources actually be Avoda Zara?

I'm not sure, and I certainly don't want to accuse anyone of this, but here's a quote from Fox News in a recent article that may provide a possible answer to that question:

But most archaeologists, astronomers and Maya say the only thing likely to hit Earth is a meteor shower of New Age philosophy, pop astronomy, Internet doomsday rumors and TV specials such as one on the History Channel which mixes "predictions" from Nostradamus and the Mayas and asks: "Is 2012 the year the cosmic clock finally winds down to zero days, zero hope?"

It may sound all too much like other doomsday scenarios of recent decades — the 1987 Harmonic Convergence, the Jupiter Effect or "Planet X." But this one has some grains of archaeological basis.

One of them is Monument Six.

Found at an obscure ruin in southern Mexico during highway construction in the 1960s, the stone tablet almost didn't survive; the site was largely paved over and parts of the tablet were looted.

It's unique in that the remaining parts contain the equivalent of the date 2012. The inscription describes something that is supposed to occur in 2012 involving Bolon Yokte, a mysterious Mayan god associated with both war and creation.

However — shades of Indiana Jones — erosion and a crack in the stone make the end of the passage almost illegible.

Archaeologist Guillermo Bernal of Mexico's National Autonomous University interprets the last eroded glyphs as maybe saying, "He will descend from the sky."

Again, I'm not ח"ו accusing anyone of Avoda Zara - I'm just saying that we should perhaps be more careful in the future about using this concept.