NEW YORK, NY -- December 13, 2006--Topping Hollywood box office charts at $15 million after its debut weekend, Mel Gibson's action film Apocalypto is attracting curious audiences and passionate opinions from all sides of the long-standing debate about the demise of the ancient Mayan civilization. Perhaps the most scathing criticism, coming from parents of school-age children to professors to film reviewers from The Hollywood Reporter and the New York Times, is the movie's extreme focus on violence and its complete exclusion of the Maya's brilliant advances in art, science, mathematics and astronomy.

But if Apocalypto is indeed trying to depict the end of a civilization, it completely misses the one thing that does explain it, according to the Maya themselves--the Sacred Mayan Calendar.

Answering that call is the Mayan Calendar Portal (www.maya-portal.net), a new web site that presents the world's first truly global effort to unify knowledge of and interest in the Mayan Calendar. The Portal presents a highly engaging interactive environment that includes information about the basic elements of the Sacred Mayan Calendar, a Mayan birthday calculator, images of sacred Mayan sites by photographer Martin Gray and a number of other supporting sections.

Funded by an international network of individuals and small businesses, the Portal was produced by the US-based communications firm LUCITA® in collaboration with Dr. Carl Johan Calleman, a Swedish author and researcher who has spent the last 25 years studying the Mayan Calendar. The content was meticulously researched using sources such as the books of noted anthropologist and archaeologists David Freidel and Linda Schele. Future plans for the site include expanded informational sections and translation into multiple languages including Spanish and of course, native Mayan dialects.

To honor the Sacred Mayan Calendar itself, the production team chose as the Portal's formal launch date November 24, the first day of what is known in the Calendar as the Fifth Day, a year-long period ruled by the Mayan Lord of Light--more familiar to us in his Aztec form, Quetzalcoatl. According to the Calendar, the energy Quetzalcoatl embodies is that of budding, forward movement, new life. In other words, the new beginning that Jaguar Paw was seeking in Apocalypto.

And it seems the public is ready to embrace the positive, forward-looking lessons the ancient Maya have embedded in their legacy. "Response to the Portal has been tremendous; people are writing in from as far away as Iceland and Australia," said Birgitte Rasine, producer of the Portal. "We're seeing an explosion of interest in a topic that we frankly thought would take a lot longer to permeate mainstream audiences. People are exploring the Calendar rings, finding out their Mayan birthdays, even sharing the site with their children, some of whom are coming home crying because they're learning in school that according to the Maya, the world will end in 2012. That's of course not the case, and only reflects the dangerous misinterpretation and misinformation about other cultures that persists in our own society and educational systems."

"The Mayan Calendar, viewed from the meticulous and comprehensive analysis of researchers like Dr. Carl Johan Calleman, has a great deal to say for our crisis-weary world," said Robin A. Ely MD, a practitioner of integrative medicine and one of the major sponsors of the Portal.

Dr. Calleman goes even further: he explains that the Calendar, used by the Maya for 2500 years, is not merely a calendar, but a system of structuring time in such a way that may help us understand the rise and fall of entire civilizations. "The Mayan Calendar," he says, "is a structure and system that allows us to unify science and spirituality in a way that has not been explored previously. The prospect of unifying the two could have profound consequences for human society. And given the considerable attention that the Mayan culture is now attracting, I feel it is important that people are given access to reliable information about this calendar."

With all this interest in a culture that survived for over a thousand years in a hostile tropical environment, and contemporary imagination running wild over the 2012 prophecies, modern society may indeed have something to learn from the Maya and their Sacred Calendar.

Note to editors:

For more information about the Mayan Calendar Portal, please visit http://maya-portal.net.

About LUCITÀ

LUCITÀ is a socially responsible visual communications company providing high-end design, production and communications consultancy services to domestic and international business, non-profit, academic and government entities that strive to improve the world we live in. A signatory member of the Global Compact, the company is based in Milford, Connecticut. For more information about LUCITÀ, please visit http://www.lucita.net.

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