Funny how inspiration permeates my mind, and then inspiration will appear in my personal physical universe shortly afterwards. After writing this, an incredible speculative book called 'Fingerprints of the Gods' by Graham Hancock fell into my hands, and i have been absorbed in the mystery of the cycles of birth, death, and regeneration of civilization. After a little more concrete inspiration, this is what i have to throw out nowadays:
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Nazca lines rawk! And crop circles have this sort of otherworldly fractal genius that is really hard to comprehend. But who would go to such trouble to do such things in secret? Humans have a propensity towards fame, not discretion.
And regarding the disparity between the apparent age of human culture and the advanced creations of ancient peoples, it may be necessary for our conceptions to endure a Copernican retooling.
Only in the last couple hundred years did we come to the conclusion that human life has existed for more than five thousand years, and perhaps we can move beyond this sort of cultural amnesia that plagues the farthest reaches of our conscious memory.
What was human culture like before this? Was there a huge bifurcation point at which ancient society came to terms with some sort of cataclysm? What relevance do the myths of Noah's Ark and the destruction of the Tower of Babel hold? How did the recent receding Ice Age shape our world? Why all the corroborating tales of aliens and flying saucers? Was 'The Flood' just a metaphor?
With a planet hospitable to human life, and with the auto-pilot of human evolution arguably pointed towards increasing complexity and intelligence, you'd figure us to be a resilient species capable of surviving the most radical changes that may occur in our climate and biosphere. If armageddon were to come knocking next week, you'd figure we'd make some arrangements so that our unique human knowledge and our divine sentience wouldn't be wiped from the universe. It's in our nature to self-preserve, most of all our particular heritage. So it would not be shocking for me to think that armageddon has occurred previously on this planet, maybe once, maybe many times, and that we have taken steps to try and keep the transmission of knowledge and of our species alive. It is a lonely universe, after all, and we seem to be rather blessed with a very human-friendly planet.
And i find it interesting that certain things keep creeping up in our symbolism that could be attributed to this. To speculate on a possibility, the four horsemen of the apocalypse might be related to the four fundamental elements, which might relay some knowledge of the nature of each apocalypse. Fire might equate to a celestial impact or volcanic eruption, water might be a global oceanic flood, wind could be a reign of hurricanes, earth could be a period of massive quakes.
It seems like we're just chilling on this very stable planet, but the fact is that it's a very chaotic sytem on this chunk of rock orbiting this really hot ball of gas. And on the surface of this rock we are surfing the lithosphere. Maybe geologically speaking we are in the eye of the storm. I mean, fuck, look at a mountain the next time you see one. A lot of force goes into making one, and we assume that this happens gradually and glacially over long stretches of time. But my nagging insecurity says that these could be created in spurts by geologic events that are rather significant in magnitude. Spurts that have the potential to be rather disruptive to fragile human culture.
Could it be that we're just settling in complacently to a period of relative stability? Could it have been that there was an equally advanced civilization in an earlier period, and that something really big came and wiped most of them out along with most of our historical, cultural and technological transmission, making us almost start from scratch again, aside from whatever knowledge was saved?
With nothing surviving this cataclysm other than these huge masonry monuments of geometric design embedded with pictographic code? Or an elite group of people that have retained, retransmitted, and taught the technologies of wisdom, language and science? The ones revered in myth as old, white tunic-wearing, flowing-bearded gods?
Are these technologies something that were independently discovered and invented, or do they show signs of being disseminated by a sort of celestial cult capable of aweing the new humans with their miraculous heavenly powers? Makes you wonder what exactly is going on to generate all these religious metaphors. We're a rather pragmatic species, and what we now consider to be myth was probably given serious weight at another time, probably for a good reason.
What the heck happened to our collective memory in our distant past? Were we just hazily stoned, sleepwalking through time until the advent of agriculture and writing? Or did something really widespread happen? Something that would have killed the dinosaurs off, but we were too smart to let ourselves become completely extinct? Unfortunately, though, the vast majority of humanity was probably doomed to die, but for the benefit of sentience and humanity, structures were erected and people were given knowledge and sent to the corners of the earth to hopefully repropogate after the turmoil was over. Perhaps.
Consider the fact that homo sapiens has been around for quite a while, yet only in the last few thousand years have our numbers built up to the point where we have the density to operate as a sort of global processor, a brain of sorts that can generate meta-technologies such as lingua frincas, a global informational network and transportation matrix, satellites, computers, and transnational protocols. Things that could aid in cooperation to avoid a total meltdown in the face of apocalypse, or an ability to generate resources and concentrate manpower in projects in order to stamp our indelible image onto the obscure sands of deep history.
Yet we are a species that thrives in our particular biosphere, so it can easily be speculated that in a previous era we would have been able to expand to the logistical limits of our biological vessel population-wise. And then you can speculate that at a vague point in our recent past (recent to me being 10-15K years ago), a lot of us were wiped out at a point where we maintained a high level of knowledge, only to reappear on these sites of archaelogical wonder to stroke our goatees and wonder, whodunit?
And then you have a sort of concurrent dispersal of our species and resettling around the same time period, with multiple points of origin giving birth to new centers of civilization, the Exodus / Diaspora myth. The theory of a single cradle of civilization or birthplace of humankind has never come to a conclusive answer.
Similarly we have the debate of the 'missing link'. Is it possible that we colonized planet earth? Seeing as we have developed the skill of space travel ourself, it doesn't seem to far-fetched an idea to seek out other hospitable planets and colonize them too.
Is it a matter of
Pangea/Panthalassa behaving genetically as a cosmic embryo that there are similarities between artifacts in South America and Africa, as there are between Polynesia and South America, as well as Africa and Polynesia, or could it be that our uniquely human trait of creating backup copies and storing them in multiple safety deposit boxes applies to storing backup copies of our civilization as well? I ask you to kindly pack that in your pipe and smoke it.
Any connection between the Olmec temples and the necropolis of Giza? Any wisdom to the military's belief in decentralized nodes in a network contributing to the long-term stability of a system? Any sort of ancient precedent to hypertext? Any significance that the pyramids of Giza are placed at the delta point of the Nile river valley?
Here's some more trippy cud for your mind to chew on. I've heard a speculation that the layout of monuments in Washington D.C. correspond to the constellation of Aquarius. Can anybody with a knowledge of the city verify this for me? Is there any connection between George Washington being a 34th degree Mason and his monument being an
obelisk (rare for a US city), and the
Great Seal of the United States containing a pyramid? Any correlation with the veneration the Egyptians had for their Pharaohs with the veneration we have with our Founding Fathers? Especially considering the temples and monuments we build to them. The Lincoln Memorial reminds me of the temple of Ramses II, tres bizzare. The Ankh reminds me of the Crucifix.
And if so, feel free to speculate on the cultural association of Christ with the fish (Age of Pisces), and of his predecessor Abraham with the ram (Age of Aries). Or that the ram is mentioned in almost every book of the Old Testament but nowhere in the New Testament? Or that the Temple of Karnak at Luxor's principle icons are rams? (2000BC) Or that the Age of Taurus coincided with the bull-cult on Minoan Crete (3500 B.C.) or the veneration of the bull as the incarnation of the early dynastic gods Osiris and Ra? Flavor of the epoch, or a far-reaching meme?
(An Age corresponds to the zodiac constellation that the vernal equinoctal sunrise occurs in. It follows a path of precession, going backwards through the signs, changing every couple thousand years. It can function as a clock on a very macro level.)
I don't know exactly what people from different ages and cultures see when they look up at the stars, but there is definitely a resonance with our astronomical zodiac that goes beyond witty astrology columns in alternative weeklies. Ancient cultures may not have used the same symbology to describe the stars, but i won't rule it out. Mainly that the time period that is described by the precession of the sun through the zodiac can point to the existence of a culture long before our conceived notions, and it may point to cycles that change in our climate or are caused as a result of earth's 'wobble' or the magnetic fields, which change every couple thousand years.
Pardon my ramblings, but i'm really interested in this stuff, and i feel like sharing it. I don't go for the kooky new age shit, i like to look at things from an anthropological viewpoint, with some open-minded speculation of course. I think we are very technically skilled species; however in our perspectives we have a major tendency to overlook points-of-view outside our own. Our world is far from flat, as we are far from solving all the mysteries of our universe. We've only just begun, and i'm trying to lay out the pieces of this big puzzle in a logical way so i can get a feel for what the picture will look like when it's all put together, but for now, all i can tell are which pieces fit on the edge.
Last mystery: what is the significance of the year 2012? Why do so many cultures point to this as a convergent/divergent locus?
[ 07 June 2002: Message edited by: liquidocean ]
