by Daniel Pinchbeck
Book Review by Cate Montana

From a shamanic perspective, the psychic blockade that prevents otherwise intelligent adults from considering the future of our world - our obvious lack of future, if we continue our present path - reveals an occult dimension. It is like a programming error written into the software designed for the modern mind, which has endless energy to expend on the trivial and treacly, sports statistics or shoe sale, but no time to spare for the torments of the Third World, for the mass extinction of species to perpetuate a way of life without a future, for the imminent exhaustion of false fuel reserves, or for the fine print of the Patriot Act. This psychic blockade is reinforced by a vast propaganda machine spewing out crude as well as sophisticated distractions, encouraging individuals to see themselves as alienated spectators of their culture, rather than active participants in a planetary ecology.

Out of all the numerous underlined and highlighted passages in my dog-eared copy of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, the above paragraph was the one that raised the hairs on the back of my neck. For it answered a many decades-old question I’ve had about Western society’s apparently blind and indifferent rush towards self-extermination.

There’s more going on than simple stupidity, and 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl gives some stunning insights into the larger forces at work. We have tried to block ourselves from knowing the truth about who and what we are, and have created all sorts of fearful ideas that have taken form to assist us keeping these blocks in place. Our refusal to open our minds to the occult dimensions of life has sown the seeds of our destruction. Similarly, our willingness to engage what has been hidden from view will engender illumination, a shattering of the illusion of separation, and thus ensure our survival. Indeed, diving into the depths of the unknown - the shadow side of consciousness we have run from - will open the doors to human transformation.

2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl is a book about transformation. It gives us all sorts of material, and thus reasons, to want to choose transformation. And Pinchbeck leads by example. He is not separate from his book, nor is he immune to the often shattering psychological impact his discoveries and connections have on the human ego. But he is willing to plunge beyond his own psychic blockades to grasp the truths that Quetzalcoatl offers.

From Glastonbury to Burning Man, crop circles to alien abductions, from indigenous mythologies and plant shamanism to humanities’ present ecological, ideological, and theological crises, Pinchbeck rounds up an amazing amount of apparently disparate material to reveal the unified message behind the legendary return of the feathered serpent god at the end of the Mayan calendar, Dec. 21, 2012. His dedication to using intuition and his sensitivity to resonance enables a fascinating and comprehensive synthesis to take place, where Quetzalcoatl "as a symbol, unifies perceived opposites – heaven and earth, spirit and matter, light and dark, science and myth."

2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl also offers the rare view of a once arrogant, intellectual male - an "atheist in Manhattan" enjoying the shallow pleasures of journalistic elitism profiling celebs, artists, and the intelligentsia for The New Yorker - being humbled in front of the alter of Life, driven to his intellectual and emotional knees by his personal, stunning psychedelic journeys with Ayahuasca and other shamanic plants in the Amazon, and then haunted and obsessed by the quest these experiences send him on.

As much Pinchbeck’s personal journey reconciling the inner dark and the inner light, the inner masculine and the inner feminine, as it is an explication of the Mayan Long Count and the "Second Coming" of Quetzalcoatl, this is where the book’s power lies. Pinchbeck is us. This is everyone’s journey. Quetzalcoatl is waiting for us all.