Natural History
By Walter Cruttenden
Author of the
Lost Star of Myth And Time
This was one of the topics of conversation at the
recent
“Conference on Precession and Ancient Knowledge” held
October 4-5, 2008 at the University of California, San Diego.
Speakers included David Hatcher Childress (Secrets of the Olmec), Dr.
Joscelyn Godwin (Atlantis Studies), Dr. Robert Schoch (The Cosmic
Psyche), John Anthony West (Egyptian Cosmology), Laird Scranton (The
Dogon), Dr. William Sullivan (Pre-Incan Wisdom), Marie D. Jones
(Science of the Higher Ages), John Dering (The Cosmic Influence),
Dr. Carmen Boulter (Ancient Mother Cultures), John Burke (Inside
Megalithic Structures) and Walter Cruttenden (Mythology of Hamlet’s
Mill). For more info go to:
www.CPAKonline.com
One of the problems with modern history theory is that some of
the largest and most formidable structures appear out of context.
Take the great pyramid at Giza for example. It is still today the
most massive stone building in the world, and with 70 ton blocks in
the ceiling of the upper chamber, it is one of the most difficult to
understand. It is engineered so that the four faces align with the
cardinal directions to a precision of less than one twentieth of one
degree, something most modern engineers wouldn’t even attempt. Yet
it is built near the very beginning of Egyptian civilization, at a
time when mankind supposedly just emerged from a hunter-gatherer
lifestyle. We weren’t supposed to have had advanced engineering
knowledge or any sophisticated tools at that time, and yet there it
is - something of mythic proportions, oddly placed at the beginning
of recorded history.
Photo courtesy of J.Razniak, Copyright by World-Mysteries.com
And then things seem to go backwards. Each dynasty appears a bit
more corrupt than the prior and the art and architecture becomes
almost gaudy in the later kingdoms. In the words of rebel
Egyptologist John Anthony West, “Egypt seems to be at its height
near the beginning and then it declines”. In fact, it degrades to
the point that everything stops working by the time of the worldwide
Dark Ages. Why didn’t Egypt evolve? For that matter, why didn’t
ancient Greece, Harappa, Mohenjodaro, the entire Indus Valley, or
Mesopotamia with all its glory, evolve into something greater? They
all fell – to dust.
Pyramid El Castillo, Chichen Itza
Photo Copyright by World-Mysteries.com
Another befuddling historical fact is the pyramids of South
America. For a long time it was thought that strange structures like
pyramids and ziggurats were found in abundance only near the “cradle
of civilization” around the eastern Mediterranean because this is
close to where mankind first emerged out of Africa and where he
first developed agriculture, in the “fertile crescent”. Hence, it
was thought these oddly massive structures were early attempts at
building great tombs or temples and that people living in close
proximity to one another were just trying to do out do each other.
Never mind that pyramidal structures and complex chambers are more
difficult to build than square or rectangular buildings, or that
constructing things out of massive stones took a lot more planning,
calculation and resource management than building something small
out of bricks. Now a greater enigma has appeared. We find pyramids
in Caral, Peru that predate the Great pyramid.
Image Source: Wikipedia.com Copyright by Håkan Svensson Xauxa
The Caral pyramids in the arid Supe Valley,
some 20 km from the Pacific coast.
Carbon dating of woven material found between the stones shows
that the six pyramids in Caral are at least 4,700 years old, about
200 years older than those on the Giza plateau. This has only been
acknowledged in the last few years but it raises all sorts of
questions for traditional historians. Why are people on a completely
different continent building the same types of complex structures
when they aren’t supposed to be communicating with one another? And
how can South American people be as advanced as the Middle Eastern
cultures yet be so far removed from the “cradle of civilization”?
Shouldn’t it have taken thousands of years for mankind to make it to
this distant land or to independently evolve to the same level of
engineering skill? Alas, this and every other ancient culture in
South America declined just like their Middle Eastern counterparts.
But why?
If we look back just a few hundred years it is easy to see how
things improve incrementally. Personal transportation moves from
horse and buggy to early bicycles and then crude cars – and within a
hundred years to very finely built sports and luxury machines with a
wide assortment of variety and amenities. Communication goes from
pony express, to telegraph, to wire line telephone to wireless cell
phone in the same time period. Seems logical and normal. Why then do
all the pre-Dark Age civilizations decline while all the post Dark
Age civilizations evolve? Is there something wrong with ancient
history?
A friend of mine, Lynn Walker at Still Point, recently told me,
“History never made any sense to me - ever! I thought everything was
so disorganized from curriculum to the organization of the subject
matter taught in school from 1st grade through college. That is -
until I heard about the Great Year.”
The Great Year
Giorgio de Santillana, the former professor of the history of
science at MIT, tells us that most ancient cultures believed
consciousness and history were not linear but cyclical, meaning they
would rise and fall over long periods of time. In his landmark work,
Hamlet’s Mill, Giorgio and co-author Hertha von Dechend, showed that
the myth and folklore of over 30 ancient cultures around the world
spoke of a vast cycle of time with alternating Dark and Golden Ages
that moved with the precession of the equinox. Plato called this the
“Great Year”.
Ancient cultures from the Pacific Islands to Scandinavia, and
most parts in between, not only belived that history ebbed and
flowed but many of the pre-Dark Age cultures actually predicting
their own decline. The Romans even joked about it as the Roman
historian Suetonius tells us, “Saturn’s golden age has passed,
Saturn’s age could never last. Now while Ceasar holds the stage,
this must be an Iron Age”. The eerie thing is – they were right! Of
course most of us were taught that this is just a fairy tale and
there was no Golden Age. The dominant teaching nowadays is that
history is driven by evolution and therefore anything that came
before us must be more primitive. But the widespread decline of
ancient civilizations is undeniable fact and it makes the Great Year
theory of history worth considering.
This article does not allow space to get into the orbital
dynamics and mechanisms of the ebb and flow of light that might
indirectly cause the rise and fall according to the ancients (as
described in my book in
Lost Star of Myth And Time). But suffice it
to say that just as each day waxes and wanes with light due to the
earth’s celestial motion upon its axis (causing 99% of all life to
move from a conscious to subconscious state every night), and just
as the year warms and cools with the seasons (causing billions of
life forms to migrate, spawn, live and die) due to the motion of the
tilted earth orbiting the sun, so too did ancient cultures believe
in a third motion, a motion of the solar system through the cosmos
that would bring about a changes in consciousness on an unimaginable
scale.
The problem with the Great Year is our expectations. People
expect to find gizmos and gadgets as evidence of a higher age -
thinking that without these there could be no advanced civilization.
But perhaps the Ancients valued things differently than we do today
or perhaps they had knowledge that we don’t realize? One historian
friend of mine studying migratory patterns of mammals recently
suggested that what we see as an early nomadic way of life, where
people moved with nature and lived off the land, may have actually
been a lifestyle of choice. He believes people of 10,000 years ago
had developed a high state of consciousness but “chose” to embrace a
migratory lifestyle. He would argue that they could have decided to
stay in one place and evolve fixed agricultural methods, crop
rotation, irrigation, cooling and heating systems to temper the
changing climate, etc but that they simply found it more convenient,
and perhaps exciting, to vary their environment instead. They just
picked up and moved – all the while thinking it natural.
We find such a pattern in the history of the local Agua Caliente
Indians that reside near my home outside of Palm Springs,
California. Here, the 11,000-foot mountains surround our little
sea-level desert. Up until just recently the indigenous tribe spent
its winters on the desert floor enjoying an idyllic life style in
the midst of a natural oasis. In the summer they would move to camps
almost a mile high where streams, meadows, pine and cedar forests
and game abound. Both are incredibly beautiful in their season. For
better or for worse they traded this in for casinos and an urban
lifestyle of endless modern problems.
Anthropologists would say that hunter-gatherers were simplistic
nomads, which makes it sound like they did not know where they were
going and leaves to question the sudden appearance of megalithic
structures and sciences around 3000BC. Did these things really
spring out of a primitive mind? Just as “migratory” animals seek
ideal conditions so might we find that certain natural people would
deliberately adjust their climate and food sources not unlike the
way we adjust our thermostats or restock our refrigerators. Of
course this natural system only works in a bounteous world of
limited population but such are the tales of the last great Golden
Age. As Hesiod tells us, “When the earth gave freely of itself… and
death was like sleep”.
Personally, I find the idea of a Great Year quite appealing. It
conforms to the myth and folklore of the Ancients themselves, which
speak of the rise and fall of consciousness over a series of ages,
flowing like the seasons, as the natural order of history. In such a
scenario, the relatively recent phenomenon of cities and states and
their numerous structures (last 5000 years) is a reflection of a
people that became so populous or so lost they were no longer able
to live in communion with nature. Today’s world considers our
histories of a long lost Golden age to be simple fairytales. Are all
our ancestor’s stories really wrong? Or have we forgotten part our
true history?
Copyright by Walter Cruttenden.
Presented with permission of the author.
Walter Cruttenden is the Director of the
Binary Research Institute, an archaeoastronomy think tank
located in Newport Beach, California. His focus is on the astronomy,
mythology and artifacts of ancient cultures, with an emphasis on
history theory and cycles of consciousness. He is the author of
Lost Star of Myth And Time,
St. Lynn’s Press, a studied look at ancient cultures throughout the
world and their belief in a vast cycle of time with alternating Dark
and Golden Ages. Cruttenden wrote and produced the award-winning
documentary,
The Great Year, narrated by James Earl Jones, a film that looks at the
myth and folklore of ancient cultures and seeks to find the message
that these cultures left for modern man.
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