The Thousand-Year News Cycle

Who today can possibly imagine events, from catastrophes to weather phenomena (what’s the difference), to worldwide, historical happenings unfolding in a predictable, almost orderly manner? No one can, of course, because we believe all events, including cosmic ones, are random and are therefore unexpected (not to mention, unpredictable). But is that really so? Or is that another of the modern delusions we superstitious humans harbor with such care and delight?

To people in Antiquity (from 500 B.C. on back to the dawn of time), the future was NOT dark – it was full of light – and fairly straightforward to discern. It was full of light (and maybe even sweetness) because they themselves shone that light on into the future. By simple acts of piousness – by making offerings to the gods – by making sacrifices, the people themselves shone their love from the past into the future. As we all know, although we may often forget the fact, light is a purified form of love... so there’s significance to the sacred imperative: “Shine your love into the future!”

Now, there’s a sacred duty to consider next time... Today, we’re tackling other conundrums. And, what can be more fun than deciphering another riddle from the past? After all, it’s just more light into the gloom of the present.

We all know that if you go deep enough into the past, the farther you go, the scantier the “record” gets. Not too far back into the past there comes a time, rather very late in human existence, when there are no records at all. Roughly speaking, it’s tough to find any records (esp. written ones) that predate the Late Bronze Age. By the way, modern primates don’t use the tripartite division for Early, Middle, and Late Bronze Age anymore – now it’s all just one color – the Bronze Age.

You leave the room for ten minutes and these knuckleheads rearrange all the furniture without telling anyone. It was probably too much to have to think about! Things ought to be “simple” for consumption by the modern herd-animal... And, more historical detail certainly wasn’t going to help promote the political nonsense of the day, that is, to prove the argument that human beings are violent savages and that war is a natural human activity that’s been going on since time immemorial. So... they’ve discarded whole tracts of History!

Let’s not let scholars and academicians bore us with their “expertise,” or lack thereof... For ancient people there really was no such thing as History, at least, as we understand it today. History only begins to exist when “individuals” come to the fore... when someone named “King X” claims something or other to himself (in its earliest manifestation, this claim was usually a divine one... “King X is the son of god X, etc.”). But this conspicuous individuality is relatively late in the course of our development and evolution as human beings on this planet – very, very late, indeed. In fact, it just happened a couple of centuries ago...

Moreover, why does it seem as if through vast stretches of time nothing much took place? Was it because things were more static in the past? Outside of Ancient Egypt, there are no major empires attested to before the end of the Bronze Age – the last thousand years before the Iron Age. Likewise, before then, there were no wars to speak of either. Practically no wars are attested to until the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age. Now, they call that critical transition period, the Bronze Age “collapse” (how apropos). What’s the deal?

The past must have been dull without wars and famines... But if there were no wars, there must have been something going on... Why didn’t folks in our ancient past record the “news of the day”? Was it because there was no need to, since their news-cycle was a thousand years long...?

History Is The Record Of Our Egoism

In Antiquity, and more so before the Classical Period, from which we get most of our “history,” there was no news – not in the sense we understand the word “news” today, as “a report or information of a recent event.” Not even reports of events past, in other regions, kingdoms, or cities were reported. The reason is mainly because such events were not of an unexpected nature. The death of a beloved or hated monarch was not a newsworthy event. The ancients knew people died and it was simply a matter of time that such-and-such a king would kick the bucket, and invariably, they eventually did! When or how it actually took place was totally irrelevant to the ongoing course of life, and even to “matters of state” between kingdoms, such as they were in olden times (diplomacy is an ancient art, and while it is not practiced today, since it requires brains to do that, in the past, diplomacy had nothing of the unforeseen in it).

Let me give you a concrete example: Herodotus, who lived in the early 5^th Century B.C., went out (like journalists of the past century used to do) and actually talked to people and tried to “see” things for himself before writing things down. But he was the exception, the oddball... Events, like the death of the monarch, the start of the last war, all these things were written down after the fact, and usually way after the fact (it was by then old news, and very cold news!). Then again, by the 5^th Century B.C. it was way late in the course of things anyway, and the danger at that time was that by then memory flagged. People’s memories weren’t as robust as their ancestors’, they couldn’t remember what took place a thousand years ago anymore because their memory stretched back only a century and not much more. Things had to be written down, or they’d surely be forgotten.

As hard as it may be to believe today, when events seem so sudden and haphazard, not to mention frightening and revolting at the same time, there used to be a one thousand-year news cycle. That’s how long events of any import were actually remembered by large numbers of people around, let’s say, 5,000 B.C. (and earlier in time, of course). You can say that “oral tradition” had something to do with the retention of great events in the collective memory of a people, tribe, or clan, etc., and you wouldn’t be wrong, but there was more to it than that. Individual people actually remembered stuff – they had memory (something we lack today).

The clarity and concreteness of the memory enjoyed by our ancestors back then is something we have no inkling about today when we use the word “memory” as a function of remembering some past event. If you have a clear picture of even a single event that you alone witnessed before you were four or five-years-old, you have the quality of memory reserved to less than 1% of the human population. If you can remember anything before you were seven-years old, with the clarity of today’s experience, you have a great memory, perhaps as good as 5% to 10% of the human population. The rest of us can’t actually remember what we had yesterday for lunch...

I Don’t Remember, I Don’t Recall...

I’m talking here about a genuine, independent memory, not the “false memory” so prevalent today, which is not a memory at all, but a logical connection made of and buttressed by testimony from other witnesses present, or material evidence, including photographic images, which are contemporaneous with the “event” remembered. Such evidence may be used in court, but alas, reality is never present in a court of law – that’s just institutionalized theater. Here we’re dealing with the real deal, and a genuine memory is something precious – something held within the living soul (i.e., it’s not something you lie about, claiming it as a memory, in order not to pay for damages).

And speaking of courtrooms... here’s another factor for which memory was a substantial contributor – Justice. Memory was the glue bringing people, the tribe, or clan together by being the arbiter of fairness in dealings between individuals of the community – both in the sharing of material resources and in imparting punishment. 

The old Biblical condemnation: “The sins of the father shall be visited upon his children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation...” is telling us something real. It was possible to condemn someone’s family or clan (and at that time, “blood ties” were stronger than they are today) over many generations because people remembered back across the generations to what each individual did (or how they behaved with respect to their obligations to Jehovah). This kind of “justice” was indeed possible only thanks to the thousand-year, or by that time, the hundred-year “news-cycle.”

Memory of injustices, blood feuds, poor dealings, etc. were kept alive by each member of a community across generations, so it was very hard to get away with petite or even grand larceny (much less something more unsettling, like murder). People having the ability to remember everything about “you,” your family, your ancestors, and also the life of the community itself, pretty much kept everyone in line. Tough to finagle your way out of a bind, when everyone knows what you and your ancestors have done! (Kind of like our current Police State, in America and Europe, wherein cameras and false testimony play the part collective memory once did, in order to condemn everyone for jaywalking, or worse, littering).

Although “tradition” and “history” was handed down from ancestors to descendants in a long, unbroken chain, through chants, music, folklore, legends, and especially myths, giving ancient people a leg up on us modern, mindless sheep, nevertheless, in the past, people had already an intuitive knowledge of events to begin with.

By “events” I don’t just mean human events, those actions by people either individually or in concert, which affected the community. Such actions were rare, since people then were guided by a more or less intuitive consciousness – they were guided by leaders. And, even without these leaders, people knew how to act and did so, generally, in a beneficent manner.

You could say their lives were ruled by the gods (the neteru) in the sense that the great cycles of nature were repeated over and over again, with very slight variations, and these disparities were not considered significant. Which explains why Ancient Egyptians didn’t even record the appearance of supernovas in the night time skies, since to their way of thinking, it was not an “accident” which brought the phenomenon about, and as a result, it was not newsworthy!

Memory As Identity

Memory was, in more ways than one, the great common pillar of identity for ancient people (external features of race and ethnicity had nothing to do with it!). In other words, people didn’t flock together because they had the same colored feathers, so to speak. Not at all, folks got together because they shared a common memory, which was attached to the geography of the region in which they lived (the rocks and stones also helped them remember). They congregated and were united in their lives by shared feelings brought on by those events which they experienced together (both good and bad, although I have my doubts such a judgement was ever made in light of most events).

There were several reasons why this lengthy “news cycle,” this prodigious memory, was a gift enjoyed by the populace at large. They had help, naturally... and I don’t mean simply the help of the gods (although that was always a factor). One of these factors was that, as a matter of course, nothing much unexpected ever took place – that’s why ancient people didn’t have History, or any need for such an artificiality to explain what had gone before.

Naturally, nothing unexpected or unpredictable occurs today either, it just seems that way to us because we live enmeshed in superstition and fear and we’re constantly surrounded by a bubble of distraction that insulates us from the real world. Further, we shy away from “connecting-the-dots,” especially the more obvious ones, because we fear reality with every fiber of our being. Despite the fact that the vast majority of people today are convinced that things “just happen,” nothing could be further from the truth.

To the modern way of reckoning, almost everything that takes place around us is an accident, or some kind of a “coincidence.” This pseudo-fact keeps us in the dark and relieves us of all responsibility (and what is superstition, if not the dire flight from responsibility?). The modern idea of a coincidence would not only be a totally alien concept to someone living in 5,000 B.C., but a factual impossibility. And nothing to them was “foreign” when it came to nature, her eternal cycles, and the fabric of her Reality. Therefore, that “consistency” in reality still remains in place today. We simply choose not to look at reality in any of its manifestations... perhaps it’s the repetition that bores us (we’d rather digress into the repetition of the 24-hour news-cycle and get distracted from having to pay attention to her Reality).

Living under the illusion that “shit happens,” separates us from reality, and it gives us leave to not pay attention to what’s going on. People in ancient times didn’t have that luxury – knowing what’s going on was likely the razor thin difference between life and death. But we no longer live under “Damocles’ sword” hanging by a horse’s hair over our heads, or so we tell ourselves. You can believe whatever you want, but that usually doesn’t change the facts on the ground... (of course we live under worse delusions than Damocles’ sword, we just don’t want to own up to it!).

I’d Be Lazy If I Weren’t So Tired...

And so it goes... It’s a kind of laziness that’s endemic to our time, a stupor, a sleeping through things which gives us a false sense of security (why else would we be so cock-ready to give up our political freedoms and our human rights to be protected from “others” who are allegedly after our ill-gotten “wealth” and privilege). We simply don’t want to be bothered... and since most of us don’t wish any ill to anyone, when something bad happens, and we hear about it on the radio, the tube, or on the Internet, then it seems to us like something “out of the blue.” Or we chalk it up to “divine intervention.”

But seriously folks, we’re just living in denial. Is war and famine something that happens out of the blue? Another accident? Like global warming...? As if the weather were not a reflection, and true echo, of what we’re doing: “This last super-storm, I had nothing to do with it! I just consume gasoline and plastic like it’s going out of style, and run the electricity and water all day long... What’s wrong with that??”

Yeah, heard that, done that...  Our long-gone ancestors didn’t live in our superstitious times, of course. Such mumbo-jumbo would have probably driven them mad. In our phony reality, wherein everything that happens has a “hidden cause,” which is magically out of our control, we can continue to be oblivious to the consequences (since we’re ultimately responsible for what we do, if we were to fess up, we’d have to discard this “magical” cause for our troubles, and own up to what our actions are really doing – not a ticket for political success!).

The ancients didn’t live under the illusion that things “just happen” without “rhyme or reason,” as we claim to ourselves today. Human beings at that time were not easily surprised or overwhelmed by events because they were not detached from their natural environment the way we are today. To us, it’s our neighbors fault, our government’s fault, or God’s fault, and if he weren’t dead, we’d be vociferously claiming we have no control over what God does... Can a weasel be more specious than that? (I apologize for the insult to weasels...)

Were ancient peoples to be surprised that a storm came in? That an earthquake struck? Hardly. Nothing nature could throw at them, including the rare famine or drought, was ever going to catch them unawares (especially since they knew they had created the earthquakes and famines themselves!). This was simply not possible since they were in constant union with the external world, not only through their gods, but also the lesser natural and elemental spirits which inhabit the ground, the rocks, the trees, the streams, and the wind.

Not to mention, they had a memory that went back centuries, and they knew that when their ancestors did such-and-such, then something “bad” happened. And, since they weren’t knuckleheads like we are today, they didn’t repeat stupid behavior ad nausea merely to “make money,” or cheat someone (which is really the same thing).

Memory Is Our Conscience

Even without consulting their oracles or their gods, our ancestors would know days or weeks in advance when a storm was brewing (and more accurately than our Met Service does), and likewise would know months in advance, if not actually years in advance, when a drought was inevitable. Most of the time, humans were successful in avoiding these pitfalls, at least, until more recent times, let’s say, around the Middle Ages, and then into the Renaissance, when people, especially in Europe, no longer had anything but a tenuous link to their natural surroundings.

Well, by the Middle Ages the gods were gone... we simply abandoned them! Yet, people were still in touch with nature. For a time, even onto the 14^th Century A.D., they had traditional folklore, folk wisdom and apotropaic magic to rely on. But this knowledge was being permanently lost thanks to the witch hunts, book burnings, and the lies and superstitions introduced by the Roman Church (not to mention the internecine wars and crusades they fanned over the continent with glee and abandon for centuries).

If it rained a thousand years ago, it’s going to rain again! Where’s the surprise in that? If you’re going to burn down your surrounding forest, no birds will be around (and other animals) to fend off bad weather and colder winters (life maintains the temperature of the planet constant – death both rises and lowers the temperature). Likewise, if you burn the forests of the entire planet, then the weather is going to change... and it won’t be for the “better.” What’s “news” about that?

There’s nothing complicated or magical about it. We just think it’s “magical” because we have succumbed to the Big Lie we tell ourselves (i.e., we’re not responsible for anything we do, and collectively, for anything that takes place). As I said, we can make the lie a plausible one as long as we sever our connections to the real world... to our “little voice” inside. To our memory! Memory, as I’ve explained, is a kind of “conscience” and if you can shut that off, you can do any gruesome thing without sensing its immediate consequences.

Losing our Memory is what our “modern,” materialistic life-style brings with it. We’re dependent entirely on an artificial environment generated by electricity, we have nary a conscious connection to the natural world as it is... Of course, despite our denial, we have a connection to the natural world, and a deep one at that, so deep in fact that we can’t escape its consequences. We simply prefer to ignore the consequences, hoping someone “downwind” or “downstream” will bear the brunt of it.

In the meantime, we’d rather remain blissfully asleep and unbothered.