The Harmonic Convergence took place on 16 and 17 August 1987. People gathered at “energy centers” around the world to meditate, chant and drum at the same moment. Margalit Fox of The New York Times described it as the first simultaneous meditation event ever organized across many nations.
Who was behind it
The event was the work of José Argüelles and his wife Lloydine Burris Argüelles, through the Planet Art Network, a peace group the couple had founded in 1983. Argüelles was born Joseph Anthony Argüelles in 1939 and earned a doctorate in art from the University of Chicago. He taught art history at Princeton and other universities before turning to a spiritual system built on calendars. He believed the Gregorian calendar cut the year into unnatural pieces and kept humanity out of step with nature. He died in 2011.
Where the dates came from
Argüelles later tied the dates to the Maya calendar, but they first came from Tony Shearer’s 1971 book Lord of the Dawn, a set of poems in honour of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. Shearer read the Aztec calendar as a run of twenty-two cycles of 52 years, 1,144 years in all. Thirteen “heaven” cycles began in AD 843 and ended in 1519, the year Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico. Nine “hell” cycles then followed, and they closed 468 years later, in August 1987. Shearer passed the dates on to Argüelles, who gave the event its name.
Astrologers added a second reason. They held that most of the planets stood roughly 120 degrees apart in those days, a pattern called a grand trine, which was supposed to favour harmony.
What believers expected
Argüelles told the Associated Press that if 144,000 people meditated together it would set off a cleansing of the Earth lasting until 1992. In his account the Convergence also opened the last 25 years of the Maya Long Count, which he expected to end in 2012 with the start of a new cycle. He also predicted some kind of contact from beyond the Earth. Shirley MacLaine spoke of a “window of light”.
Where it happened
Some 200 sites took part in the United States, among them Mount Shasta in California, Central Park in New York, Chaco Canyon in New Mexico and Sedona in Arizona. Around fifty more joined abroad, including Mount Fuji, Uluru (Ayers Rock), Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid in Egypt. Many thousands came. Shirley MacLaine, John Denver and Timothy Leary were among them, and Johnny Carson had his studio audience chant “om” that day. No confirmed sightings of UFOs were reported.
