The Time I Discussed the End of the World with Montel Williams
One of the benefits of not organizing your books and research files (which I do not) is discovering the unexpected. Happy accidents occur during searches, sometimes taking you in unexpected directions.
I had one such instance this morning. As I was thumbing through old binders for a profile of reincarnation researcher Ian Stevenson (1918–2007), I discovered something else: the transcript of one of my first TV appearances, this one on The Montel Williams Show on November 2, 2007. I was invited on the popular daytime talk show discuss the phenomenon of 2012.
Montel and his staff couldn’t have been more gracious. But I got hit with a surprise. The producers asked me how I wanted to be identified. “Author and historian,” I replied. I was writing my first book, Occult America (2009), at the time.
When the show aired, however, below my name appeared the sole identification, “Believes the World May End In 2012.” I groaned. Years later I joked with a podcast host, “I just want to point out that they said, ‘believes the world may end’ — I’m not some wingnut.”
As Michael Murphy wrote in his 1971 metaphysical novel Golf in the Kingdom: “Play it like it lies.”
Regardless, I’m proud of the appearance and of what I said. Does it withstand the scrutiny of hindsight? You can evaluate the matter for yourself. Below is the transcript. (And I did eventually find the article I was seeking on Stevenson. Reincarnation has strange bedfellows.)
Montel: Well, Mitch Horowitz is a writer and editor that has been studying this entire theory for a long time. I gotta tell you, let me back this up for a second…What started me on this? I saw a special on the History Channel. And I watch the History Channel a lot. I saw the special, and that kind of freaked me out. And then I started digging and started looking. And as I started digging, it becomes scary. ’Cause you’re really — if you start looking into this information, you could have a fatalistic attitude. Mitch, what’s going on? Why don’t you tell them what the I-Ching is. I-Ching is kind of like a Tarot card for Chinese people. Explain it.
Mitch: It can be used that way, but it’s made up from one of the oldest languages known to man. It’s a 5,000-year-old hieroglyphic language. Some people use it for prediction. The ancient Chinese used it to communicate. The interesting thing with the I-Ching is — there was a very brilliant scholar [Terrence McKenna] who turned it into a calendar. He used a very complex method and a lot of complex computer programs to map it out on a timeline [in 1987]. He discovered that the Chinese ended their calendar in the year 2012. It was only later that he learned that the ancient Mayan civilization ended their calendar at the same point. And he began to think, something’s happening.
Montel: Talk a little bit about the oracles. And all the people, the prophecies of our past, you know, they all seem to agree with this same thing, do they not?
Mitch: Yes. There were a number of ancient oracles and prophecies that centered on the year 2012. Some of them were right here on our own continent. The Hopi Indians are the oldest Indian tribe in America. They believed that our generation, the time we’re living in right now, was some kind of period of great transition. The Maya believed the same thing. There were ancient Roman and Greek oracles that also point to our own time period. The incredible thing is these weren’t civilizations that are so terribly far away, but the Mayan and Hopi civilizations, they were right here on the American continent…
Montel: So, the planet — and we — some science seems to think that the last time it may have been in this alignment, there’s so much energy coming from the Milky Way and other things that it wobbled the Earth. This is what some people anticipate. And some of the oracles point to our times with what’s going on in the Middle East, what’s going on in our society, what’s going on with us as a society of people.
Mitch: The oracles do point to our time. But I wanna say one thing. We are living through scary times. But I don’t want people to be scared…
Montel: Right.
Mitch: …because it is possible that these oracles are also pointing to an inner change, to an inner shift in humanity.
Montel: Right.
Mitch: The Maya were concerned with the great cosmos as they were concerned with man’s inner life. We really ought to think about that. It doesn’t necessarily mean hurricanes and volcanoes.
Montel: And this could be a time when man might get a grip and start realizing that we gotta stop killing each other.
Mitch: God willing.
Montel: God willing.
