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154 Were the Israelites told to keep counting “fifty years” until some significant divine event, relating either to the Age of the Ram or to the holder of the Rank of Fifty—when every- thing shall turn back to a new beginning? While no obvious answer is offered in those biblical chap- ters, one cannot avoid searching for clues by pursuing a sig- nificant and very similar year-unit on the other side of the world: not fifty, but fifty-two. It was the Secret Number of the Mesoamerican god Quetzalcoatl, who according to Az- tec and Mayan legends gave them civilization, including their three calendars. In The Lost Realms we have identified Quetzalcoatl as the Egyptian god Thoth, whose secret num- ber was fifty-two—a calendrical-based number, for it repre- sented the fifty-two weeks of seven days in a solar year. The oldest of the three Mesoamerican calendars is known as the Long Count: it counted the number of days from a “Day One” that scholars have identified as August 13, 3113 B.c.E. Alongside this continuous but linear calendar there were two cyclical calendars. One, the Haab, was a solar-year calendar of 365 days, divided into 18 months of 20 days each plus an additional 5 special days at year’s end. The other was the Tzolkin, a Sacred Calendar of only 260 days, composed of a 20-day unit rotated 13 times. The two cyclical calendars were then meshed together, as two geared wheels (Fig. 67), to create the Sacred Round of fifty-two years, when these two counts returned to their common starting point and started the counts all over again. This “bundle” of fifty-two years was a most important unit of time, because it was linked to the promise of Quetzal- coatl, who at some point left Mesoamerica, to return on his Sacred Year. The Mesoamerican peoples therefore used to gather on mountains every fifty-two years to expect the promised Return of Quetzalcoatl. (In one such Sacred Year, 1519 a.D., a white-faced and bearded Spaniard, Hernando Cortes, landed on Mexico’s Yucatan coast and was welcomed by the Aztec king Montezuma as the returning god—a costly mistake, as we now know.) In Mesoamerica, the “bundle year” served for a count- down to the promised “Year of Return,” and the question is, THE END OF DAYS