How the ancients remembered.
Whenever we see a documentary or read a history book about the ancient world, one thing that always stands out for me is how the so called âexpertsâ, archeologists, palaeontologists, historians and others, seem to believe that our ancient history is somehow settled.
Yet when we actually look at the evidence,
we see it really isnât.
Think about it.
The only evidence we ever find of earlier humans, are a few bones, stone tools and pottery fragments, some cave paintings perhaps.
But What we do see are their impressive and massive monoliths, temples, pyramids and ruined sacred sites, and a few distant whispers of old stories and oral folklore, passed on across time and generations.
As modern humans, we are obsessed with data.
Our entire world is data driven. We obsessively store information on hard drives and digital âcloudsâ. We assume those things will last forever. But they wonât.
All of that collective human memory will be gone.
In 100 years, very few people, if any, will remember we existed. In 1000 years, 5000 years, 10,000 years, 100,000 years, there will be barely any evidence our species even existed at all.
In the post apocalyptic movies we often see visions of our vast cities standing in ruins, claimed back by nature, overgrown with plants, trees and wildlife. But all of that would happen in less than 5 years once humans were no longer there to tend to them.
In a few hundred years, our concrete sky scrapers would be nothing but dust, our âcloudâ would be long gone, the essential electrical components reduced to carbon and other base minerals.
Our cars, planes, ships and even our plastics, which we assume to be âforeverâ arenât actually forever. All will be gone. Turned back to their base elements.
We live in an entropic system.
All things descend into entropy. All things decay, they get reduced back to their essential components; base minerals, carbon, iron, magnesium, zinc, the very basis of what our entire universe is built from, and it doesnât take very long for it to happen.
The universe claims it all back.
All of this poses some interesting questions.
What if those massive stone monuments, temples, monoliths, pyramids and structures, are far more than just sacred burial sites, or monuments to track the stars?
What if they were actually deep time data storage devices? What if the land itself acted as anchor points for human knowledge?
When we think about it, all of these monuments and structures, like the great pyramid at Giza, Stone Henge, Gobekli-Tepi in Turkey, Chichen Itza in Mexico and similar other ancient sites, all of them have fascinating sacred, religious and acoustic acoustic qualities, which combine with rituals to honour, mark or remember something.
Ritual is how we enshrine memory. Itâs how we remember.
In witchcraft we craft rituals as a way of remembering the dead, marking and remembering certain events, gathering combined knowledge and storing and sharing magickal wisdom. When we ritualise an action, we commit it to routine and memory.
What if all of these structures were meant as memory devices which combined ritual, to enshrine human knowledge and wisdom, across deep time?
Theres lots of ongoing research into this theory and what it can teach us, but every few weeks these important monuments are teaching us more and more.
We are only just scratching the surface of these fascinating monuments. They still have many more secrets to reveal. đ