Once the autumnal equinox arrives, and the
days grow both shorter and cooler, everyone is back at school... Millions
return complacent to their day care-like “prisons,” under the tutelage of the panderers
of blandness and mediocrity that are so characteristic of modern education –
especially at the university and “higher” academic levels in the private
sector. Impressionable young adults return to the mind-numbing drill that
crushes their spirit, blunts their enthusiasm for the world, and kills their
imagination. In other words, back to school!
In times past, this sorry state of affairs
didn’t exist. And, the further back in time we go, let’s say the Iron Age or
earlier, what we call school, or even education, had a completely different character
than it has today. Unlike what our Corporate purveyors of mediocrity tells us,
people 4,000 years ago were not as illiterate and uneducated as we are today...
They had far more educational opportunities than in our present times of
illusory “free choice” and the debt bondage students are subjected to (with the
latter, the students’ parents are in hock for the principle and interest also).
Granted, since the golden age of Greece, 9th
to 4th Century B.C., education, as a whole has been neglected,
curtailed, and eventually restricted to a few elites (as it is today). But even
the decadence of the Greeks, and later the Romans, was not the standard of
earlier times, when writing was in its heyday.
I realize that the common fable runs
counter to what I have just exposed. Academicians insist, because they’ve been
drumming this nonsense into us for at least two hundred years now, that
throughout History no one could read or write (because to them, History, since
time immemorial, is one single, unchanging bore). Since every assessment and
judgment about the past is based on present prejudices (a priori judgments), the reasoning goes that knowledge, or
information, is power. And, because our current leaders are a bunch of
sniveling girlie-men, they figure that by keeping the population ignorant and
stupid, in other words, by lying to them, they’ll retain all the power (esp.
the political power). Can anyone deny that this is so?
There are few things that are further from
the truth than this particular lie... that in the past everyone, except for the
scribes or the high priests, were illiterate (Kings, on the whole, especially
in Europe, have been illiterate until a century or so ago). This seminal lie,
whose purpose is to make us modern folk appear somehow “exceptional,” if not
exceptionally lucky, is intended to prevent us from having any interest in
matters past... and to thus have us both despise and ignore all previous human
wisdom. Because any impartial survey of what people in the past actually knew,
would dwarf what we know today...
Take whatever art or wisdom you choose,
and today we live in the darkest age in all of human history, an age filled
with superstition and outright lies passing themselves off as “truths,” an age
of pygmies instead of giants. The only thing one can point to as “advanced” in
this Dark Age, is the equally dark “technology” that forms the new
materialistic religion of today. If that is the only virtue of our times, and
of our civilization, that pretty much says it all... since technology is
precisely the dehumanizing driver that has turned us into superstitious
Neanderthals in the first place.
We Don’t Do That at KAOS
Have we forgotten our prime directive
again? Ignorance is our badge of pride, conceit our attitude, and brazen
disregard and carelessness our modus operandi. That’s how exceptional we are!
Did I neglect to mention laziness, which is the encapsulation of all the
preceding traits? Without ignorance manifested as laziness, where would
Monsanto (insert your favorite "Criminal Class Conspiracy" here!) be today? Out
of whose pockets would the sugar and trans fat industries get the bulk of their
revenues?
Thanks to the reversal of values inherent
in History (in the passing of Time itself, if not of ongoing Evolution), we
have taken on all of the past’s worse tendencies and assumed them as virtues.
Especially all of the decadent tendencies apparent since the 15th
Century A.D., since our vaunted Renaissance period. The “glorious” Renaissance
was nothing more than the end of something, like the Middle Ages, it was the
beginning of the strictly abstract, limited intellectual view of the world we
hold today. We can begin to analyze History along evolutionary lines only once
we accept that every age has its Leitmotif.
What I call “evolutionary streams” or tendencies (something I’ll delve into
with more detail in the future). Since the 15th Century, few people
have been lucky enough to see the gods... much less admit to their existence...
Doesn’t that seem odd to anyone?
We moderns like to think that all that
talk about “the gods,” and all that polytheistic gobbledygook that ancient
people went on and on about, was some kind of delusion, or worse, an out and
out lie (we assume it was all contrived by the priests to placate the masses,
and keep them from rebelling).
It’s typical modern non-thinking and
wrongheadedness to assume so, however... Why would the people of the past lie? What
was their compulsion? To impress whom exactly? Certainly not God, whom they saw
manifested in myriad ways in everything around them – from the stars, to the
wind, to the trees and animals, even to the rocks and stones! Lies are a modern
confection, just like “high technology.” It should not surprise us then, when the
demon or demigod that brought us lies also brought us high technology.
Knowing that every person had a personal
and collective relationship with a living god should not only make us jealous,
it should make us stop and think for a change. Shouldn’t the fact that you
don’t see God anymore give you pause?
Well, Freddie wasn’t so timid, or loathe
to speak the truth, when he pronounced a certain deity done for. If God’s not
around, he must be either be MIA, or Dead... or both! Given our so-called
civilization’s maturity, he was not wrong... If gods breed civilizations, then
a dead and decaying one no longer has a caretaker, now does it?
The Literacy Rate Today and Five Thousand
Years Ago
Aren’t our modern misconceptions, superstitions,
and “damnable lies,” just wonderful? I mean statistics... I always hate to have
to resort to lies to prove a point, but with science being as dead as God and
all, what’s the alternative? Certainly not the UN and UNESCO... but what else
is there?
According to the above authority, the
global literacy rate for all people aged 15 and above is 86.3%. The global
literacy rate for all males is 90.0% and the rate for all females is 82.7% (funny
how the much smarter sex is still behind – so much for feminism, I guess). For
the nationalist and racists among us, the statistics are slanted to their way
of thinking too... Africa’s literacy rate hovers around 64% and in the “developed
nations” have a 99.2% literacy rate. I personally don’t buy this last
statistic, but there it is, the only clue as to our vaunted “superiority” as a
race and a nation. And finally, according to UNESCO, there are “only” 781
Million people living on our planet who are illiterate – in other words, many
times the reputed population of the Late Bronze Age! Go figure!
Was global literacy in the Late Bronze Age
actually lower than it is today? I doubt it. If it was, it was probably only slightly
“statistically” lower. Writing by that time had been around a while, maybe a
few thousand years. And by contrast, writing in the Renaissance period was
something new, which explains why in the Europe of that time the literacy rate
was close to 10%... it only reached 30% for adult males in the 18th
Century (and they call that “progress”). Did it take more than a few thousand
years for people in the past to assimilate a new learning? I doubt it, not if
it meant their survival (or their immediate creature comfort).
As a result, it seems to me that people
from the Bronze Age already were accustomed to writing, and therefore reading
(why else would you have libraries if people didn’t read – and every capital,
every temple had them!). And the presumption that there was an active effort to
suppress new knowledge is really a throwback to the nightmare of the Roman
Church’s early history, their crusade to spread ignorance in all its guises,
and foist famine and poverty on the population of Europe, since the Fall of
Rome. These were not the prime directives of earlier civilizations... only of
our current one.
The argument against reality is always the
same: Only an elite, upper crust, had access to writing, and they kept that to
themselves in order to keep power to themselves. But this is just us today
projecting our own vile tendencies into the past. It’s stupid and shoddy
thinking, if I may categorize it more realistically. People in the past didn’t
survive for millennia being as stupid and wanton as we are today... especially
if you believe the myth that things were “tougher” in the past without a soft
sofa and a remote in hand...
The only reasonable, even credible
argument against literacy in our distant past is that Natural Selection is a
fantasy and Evolution also. Evolution seems to only permit the stupid to
survive and flourish (I can buy that! Since all evidence points to this being
the case. We, and our modern culture, are living proof that greed and stupidity
– they’re actually the same thing! – trumps wisdom and innate intelligence).
The question then begs, why is there Wisdom and intelligence to begin with?
That’s fodder for another day... Right
now, we want to focus on how this literacy was manifest in a time and place
like the end of the Ancient Egyptian civilization.
Writing as the Substitute for Memory
My proposition is that until the Persian
conquest (525 B.C.), or let’s be even more controversial, until Alexander the
Great conquered the Black Land (332 B.C.) – two dark and nefarious developments
in the de-evolution and demise of Ancient Egypt, the literacy rate was 100%.
That’s the ostensible rate of literacy possible when a community believes in
such Utopian nonsense as collective justice...
But we have to start at the beginning, and
ask why? If necessity is the mother of invention, what caused writing to be
necessary? My take is that it had to do with something BIG, namely, something
that affected every single person in a direct and almost brutal and tragic way.
How else could one describe both the loss of the ancient clairvoyance and the
loss of the prodigious memory humans had collectively before the Iron Age?
We’re experiencing the end of that cycle –
the loss of memory due to distraction – in our present time. Folks, let’s not
kid ourselves, the plague-like advent of Alzheimer’s is not a coincidence. Going
forward, memory as we know it today, will be a thing of the past – literally!
Yes, it’s hard to believe, especially in
this day and age when we can’t remember what we just said, and we have totally
forgotten what we had for lunch, that people in the past had an oral tradition.
What does this imply? To pass on to your progeny the sacred science you
possessed, you had to speak about it (in lieu of having a well-formed written
corpus to rely on, as the anthropologist and archaeologists claim did not
exist). A gifted, rich memory was therefore essential to pass on wisdom from
one generation to the next. The mental capacity that every single individual on
this planet inherited the moment they were born. This was knowledge transfer at
the macro level, how one generation obtained the bounty of the last. The
question is: How rich was this memory in real terms?
My own theory is that it was
astronomically long. In other words, it was as long as the stellar cycles
themselves (esp. up until the Iron Age when script and counting became more
prevalent).
The often quoted and much misunderstood
“one day as a thousand years” is a reference to this epoch when we possessed a memory
that stretched back far and wide to grasp details of events long past. Three
thousand years ago, and earlier, we could remember what had taken place one
thousand years before our birth. According to ancient tradition, this was
possible due to our blood, our ancestry (this puts “heredity” in a whole new
level of importance than the mere passing on of physical traits as our modern
science guesses at).
The ancients knew that our very memory was
carried in the blood (today, we would say it was a biological imperative).
According to the Ancient Egyptians, the blood in our veins held the very memory
of our ancestors, back across fourteen generations.
The reason why memory then was fourteen “generations”
long (of approx. 200 years or so for each generation, or nearly 1500 years), is
due to the effects of the lunar cycle on human biology (actually consciousness,
since you can’t have biology without it). The moon completes its phases in 28
days, composed of two periods of 14 days of waxing moon and waning moon. The
interweaving of the female and male elements that support sexual reproduction
on this planet of ours is guided by each fourteen-day period of waxing and
waning moon phases. Just ask any menstruating woman you know!
Since this was so, it’s clear that writing
was not needed until such time as human memory, the capacity to recollect past
events, the names of the ancestors to be worshiped (and thanked for their
wisdom), etc., was being lost. The ancients could remember the position of the
stars and planets over unimaginable periods of time – some say across the full
Precession of the Equinoxes (or what astronomers call “axial precession” –
typical of the mental midgets of today to reduce a practical, descriptive term
into a meaningless garble). This “precession” through all the signs of the
Zodiac, takes approx. 25,920 years... (we’ll get into this meaty subject
soon!).
As time passed and memory began to wane
(until a “day was one hundred years”) the clear and present danger of memory
loss was real. The ancients knew that in due course their people would also
lose this precious memory, and all would be forgotten... What was a mother to
do? The solution was to preserve “collective memory” in writing, and thus the
written word became the antidote to amnesia on a grand scale...
Back to School in Ancient Egypt
How do I envision what education was like
back in the 15th Century B.C.? Before attempting to describe what
that might have looked like, let us keep things in perspective. By the Late
Bronze Age, before the “great collapse” historians now recognized occurred in
the 13th to 11th Century B.C., before the onset of the
Iron Age, the Two Lands was already far advanced in a long process of
decadence.
By the reign of Thutmose III (Djehutmose
or Thutmosis III), approx. 1479-1425 B.C., Ancient Egypt had already surpassed
its last golden age (which arguably took place during the Middle Kingdom).
Nevertheless, what decadence was to them, would be to us a glorious golden age,
which is why Egyptologist ascribe the Ancient Egyptian golden age to someone
like Amunhotep III (Amenhotep or Amenophis III) or the much later Rameses II.
Schooling in Ancient Egypt was likely
taken as a very serious thing, although I see it as a very natural and organic
process. And, I’m sure the Ancient Egyptians were not the only ones following
that same process with their own geographical and cultural slant to it... I do
have to say, that my prejudice leans toward the Ancient Egyptian’s approach
because they seem to me to be the only civilization or culture of the time
(despite their decadence) that was the more practical in its approach and
efficiency. Think of them as the Germans of the Late Bronze Age, because they
had a great deal of respect for universal education and a high regard for
practicality, all at the same time! We have organized schools today not thanks
to the Greek Mysteries and the “Academia” of Plato or Pythagoras, but thanks to
the House of Life (Per Ankh) of the Black People!
So... did little children get carted off
to school like they are today? Probably not. Instruction most likely took place
at home during the formative years, and when the teaching exceeded the level of
parental capabilities, there was the option to “go further” by other means. Schooling
did not take place, until later in the child’s life, and specifically for those
sons and daughters of the temple or religious caste, in a building or structure
for that purpose. Unlike today, there was no formal instruction at all for
children under seven or eight years of age. It was after that age that
children, both boys and girls, were taught how to read and write. The Per Ankh
(House of Life) was indeed a school, but a mystery school within the temple,
and therefore for initiates or aspirants to become adepts of the Sacred
Mysteries (i.e., Sacred Science or esoteric teachings) and not meant for the
hoi polloi.
It’s impossible to say what “universal”
instruction consisted of. For the “profession” of scribe we have ample evidence
of workbooks, or manuals, that scribes were asked to copy from, but we have no
such “evidence” for other fields of endeavor. Imitation was the method used
early on in a child’s education, but it’s not inconceivable that by late
childhood or early adolescence teachers were required to advance the
development of the child. Perhaps Socrates learned the “Socratic method,” from
the Ancient Egyptians.
Whatever the case may be, we have to keep
in mind that our current intellectual way of thinking, our materialistic
approach, was not in vogue then. That’s why I say instruction was more
“organic,” because what was taught had to be practical. Therefore, religious
training must have been introduced early on in the process, and then the
everyday arts necessary for civilized life were added on.
Everything started with the neteru (the
gods), and teaching at first, in the early years must have had a tremendous oral
component, such as storytelling, singing, music and dancing, all of it related
to the Mysteries of the Temple (I can easily imagine Yoga, Meditation, Astrology,
Prayer, and other religious practices being introduced early in the child’s
life) and the Arts (plastic arts such as sculpture, clay, stone and
woodworking, even painting and drawing).
At the same time, mundane activities such
as planting, caring for plants and animals, harvesting, food preparation,
washing, sowing and mending, and thousands of other practical activities
centered around the hearth and home must have made up the “curriculum” (i.e.,
everything practical, and therefore the antithesis of the totally abstract,
useless, and illusory teaching that goes on today from Kindergarten to graduate
school). I know this litany will not sit well with all the pseudo-feminists out
there, because education in that remote time, for both sexes, must have taken
on the form of a compendium of “home economics,” as that term was used half a
century ago and earlier in our own recent history. The Ancient Egyptians at the
time in question seemed to have already had an apparent “division of labor”
between the sexes.
Does all this sound Utopian? Of course it
does! Because the Ancient Egyptians lived in the last Utopia (i.e., the “New
Atlantis,” or the Eutopia of myth and legend) – a paradise on earth. That’s why
today we still dream of these things (our better angels still remember!). We
long for these ideals in our own time because we lost them in our plunge into
matter and Materialism (the Fall)... Now there’s a thought to keep close to
your heart and to consider, again and again (especially when some tin-horned
dictator makes promises he or she will never keep).
