Book review: Daniel Pinchbeck - 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl

If you are looking for the state of the art in New Age hokum, you need look no farther than 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, by Daniel Pinchbeck. In this tome, Pinchbeck parlays his post-9/11 traumatic stress disorder and tales of globe-trotting drug abuse into a "thought experiment" on the nature of the eschaton prophesied for 2012. Pinchbeck claims that writing 2012 was a meditation on the nature of the coming transcendence, an academic quest to help save humanity from itself. Yet it reads more like the meandering drug travelogues that comprised his first work, Breaking Open the Head, with much more New Age mysticism and social novelty theory thrown in. Oddly enough, very little of 2012 is actually Pinchbeck's own wisdom; it is more a collection of all the bits and pieces of prophetic detritus he lapped up from other crackpot visionaries and social theorists along the way.

The thesis of the book itself -- that the great cycle of the Mayan calendar is ending and there is an "impending shift in the nature of the psyche" on the way -- is not even his. He cribbed it from Terence McKenna, who cribbed it from Jose Arguelles, who supposedly cribbed it from the Mayans themselves, which is corroborated by scholars like John Major Jenkins (Alignment 2012) and Lawrence Joseph, who lectures on the topic and just released the book... wait for it... Apocalypse 2012. Just take a quick search for 2012 on Amazon.com and you can see all the junk that floats to the top for yourself. Can we say millennial bandwagon here? This is starting to sound less like a prophecy and more like the great cash cow of the New Age. And though each of these 2012 prophets sees different things happening at the omega date, Pinchbeck astutely puts his money on complexity of consciousness evolving, an idea he cribbed from Vernadsky. In short, Pinchbeck's cribbed theory states that our outdated nation-state paradigms will crumble and our collective psyche will be catapulted into a noosphere of radically new consciousness. This sounds suspiciously like, "People will care less about national identity and spend more time chatting on the internet," to me -- and he needs a Mayan calendar and bunch of head-slamming psychotropics to tell him this?

Despite having a stale topic that was half-baked to begin with, and only a handful of occult theorists to back him up on the precise date, Pinchbeck puts all his intellectual muscle to the self-realizing task of visiting these occult theorists to presumably do drugs with them and/or dissect the nature of reality, whichever comes first. But to Pinchbeck, dissecting the nature of reality starts with quantum physics and quickly devolves into every tried and true go-to well for mystical gibberish, including psychedelics, Stonehenge, crop circles, astrology, UFOs, channeling, alien entities, Maya cosmology, phi, psi, Santo Daime, the Hopi, and all the other bits of crazy mythology that New Age "get it" types have been flogging for years. All of this is wrapped in the narrative of his personal journey to find "truth" about the coming transcendence, a journey which becomes less academic exercise and more self-obsessed descent into paranoid psychosis the further along he gets. In many ways Pinchbeck's trip mirrors McKenna's own journey up the river, including the descent into timewave psychosis that consumed McKenna in the years after La Chorrera.

Though he claims 2012 is a work of rationalism, Pinchbeck never met an abstract symbol system he didn't immediately embrace, and naively greets every flimsy correlation between quantum physics, German social theory and crop circles with a gush of pseudo-intellectual glee, seriously thinking that he is on to something big. The fact that Pinchbeck so eagerly laps up every isomorphic archetype from every New Age school of wisdom and dumps them all into a bucket labeled "my rational case to be made" is very disappointing indeed. I was actually hoping for more from someone who presents himself as an intellectual trying to make a rational case, but this is not the work of an intellectual. This is the work of someone who deals out the superficial wisdom of other people's cracked-out philosophies like cards in his magic 2012 deck.

To his credit, Pinchbeck is a fluid writer and has taken enough drugs to write fluidly about drugs, so if you like reading about drugs and the crazy people who do too many you'll definitely find something to like here. But to his downfall, Pinchbeck obsessively over-intellectualizes everything, sometimes to absurd levels, and in the process both alienates the reader and completely misses sight of the "real" truth. For example, given Pinchbeck's fascination with crop circles and the musings of Gebser, I'm tempted to make similar revelations about the mysterious aesthetic convergence of urban musical ritual and spontaneous graphic representation of archetypal form. Surely the spray-painted images that pop up around our cities must tell us something about the coming transcendence of consciousness. How else can you explain the fact that these cryptic glyphs occur with increasing frequency in urban areas all over the globe, and yet nobody ever sees anyone painting them? Are we really supposed to assume that a handful of guerrilla artists somehow manage to drag ladders and paint cans through densely populated cities in the dead of night, painting elaborate murals in alien scripts on train cars and warehouses all over the globe without anyone ever noticing?

But this is what you get when you take the deluded self-important notions of a New York intellectual and pit them against the overblown psychotic absurdity of the psychedelic experience. In his elaborate attempt to convince us all that we stand at the doorway of great cataclysm and great change, Pinchbeck reflexively goes back to abstract theory and invokes social philosophers like Nietzsche, Marcuse, Gebser, and whoever else he can find to support his argument that our current paradigms are becoming toxic. Gee, thanks for explaining all that Mr. Downer, but some positive solutions please? Oh right, the collective psyche must be elevated with the return of Quetzalcoatl. We must all embrace a new integral planet-wide spirituality based on... the New Age dithering of Daniel Pinchbeck? This is Pinchbeck's explicit dilemma within the text. Has he been chosen by mystical forces to be a channel for this New Age prophecy? Will he damage his family by pursuing his destiny to become famous and have sex with a lot of women? I'm sure the suspense is killing you, but I will say this: If he is the channel for the new paradigm then he has five years to put up or shut up, because I'm tired of psychedelic prophets creeping up on the scene every few years promising to elevate global consciousness, yet never delivering the goods.

Clearly this is a time of great change on our planet, but what time isn't? I can see this myself without having to wade through page after page of integral theory and crop-circles and the tale of this man's superficially deluded life. The primary problem with this text is that Pinchbeck falls into the classic Tim Leary trap of thinking human consciousness can evolve if people just think differently. This is a flat fallacy, and Leary pretty much proved this one for me himself, because if he was right we'd be fighting our wars with flower power and living happily ever after in the Age of Aquarius. While it is true that individuals can rapidly change their behaviors (ref. brainwashing), and cultures can rapidly change their values if new ideologies are imposed by revolution or dictator (ref. China), even Pinchbeck should know that human consciousness is biological and evolves slowly over many generations. Even soft models of linguistic consciousness or political consciousness take some serious time and work to advance and trickle down through an entire species (ref. democracy). Tipping points in cultural ideologies come along at a crawl, inching forward on the ebb and tide of order and chaos, too slow and diversified across individual cultures for the species at large to notice on a daily basis, and certainly not arriving on-date as scheduled by the Mayan calendar. Pinchbeck may perceive some kind of rapid evolution brewing in the heady mixture of modern times, and he's obviously a perceptive guy, but it seems to me you can write a book at any time in human history claiming we are coming to a turning point and you would be right. However, that does not make you the chosen vessel of change; it just means you have finally opened your eyes to the way the world works. Welcome to the club, brother.