It is possible for a population to forget a global catastrophe within the span of a few generations. The primary mechanism of cope is not self-deception, as many believe, it is Amnesia. People forget huge parts of ongoing reality, of their own near days.
There was, in living memory, a great famine in China and it may be true that a lot of nonchalant cannibalism took place... yet almost no one in Mainland China would find such a narrative believable— despite the best efforts of spiteful hāfu agents. Recently China has purged nearly all Western influences because “[e]very scrap that is left over from the past has to be changed or eliminated because an authentic piece of evidence has the power to crush the official version of the past on which the rulers base their power (Assman, 2008, p.105).”
Memory can be thought of as a kind of terrain that is superimposed over the physical world. We indwell an assemblage of worlds, among them the world that is and the world that came before.
When they diverge there is dissonance. There are specters creeping up from the swamps where strange bones are buried. There are revenants bringing our minds to the contradictions.
We believe there is an authority somewhere that would keep track of the cycles of our world and remind the profane masses— despite our understanding of how cultural memory has been "cleansed" throughout recorded history.
We are told that the Arab emir, ‘Amr ibn al-‘Āṣ, consulted ibn al-Khattab on what to do with the books in the Library of Alexandria. Ibn al-Khattab’s answer came quick to him:
“As for the books you mention, if there is in it what complies with the Book of God [Q’uran], then it is already there and is not needed and if what is in these books contradict the Book of God there is no need for it. And you can then proceed in destroying them.”
‘Amr ibn al-‘Āṣ then ordered that the books should be dispersed in the public baths and to burn them in the bath’s heaters. Al-Qifti adds: “And I was told that at that time several public baths used [the books] for heating, bringing some fame to new public baths which later on were forgotten afterwards and it is said that they had enough heating for six months. One who listens to what has happened can only be amazed!”
Who weaves the thread of memory for us today? Who molds the terrain? Who reports on the facts so that they may be later recorded, faithfully and judiciously? Do you think it was better in the past? No, it was much worse.
“The salient mystery of Dark Ages sets the stage for mass amnesia. People living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. How and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes vitally lost.” — Jane Jacobs
From the older Greek authors, the Pythagoreans and the Stoics, you find definite statements indicating that catastrophes which occurred in the history of the human race and in the history of our Earth were not abnormal events, they were actually dominant ...repeating themselves again and again.
But from the historical records we see that the knowledge of the catastrophes disappeared slowly into oblivion. Plato described cataclysms in several works; he wrote about worlds destroyed and rebuilt.
In his Timaeus he noted that the Greeks do not remember ancient catastrophes, besides the Deluge. He adds that the people of his time, as the priests of Sais told Solon, were unable to remember these catastrophic events.
Plato’s pupil Aristotle refused to believe in catastrophes. The scholarly world has accepted Aristotle’s view that the cosmic organs can never change their motions.
Aristotle argued that those who believe in celestial catastrophes should be brought to trial, and if convicted, punished by death. Now we start to see the true visage of COPE, behind the mask of catatonia.
"Break my immersion in oblivion and I will murder you." say the small souled Aristotles of the world. They regard those that want to remember as evil, deserving of execution. The recognition of the Real would extinguish their flickering ousia, their dim essence.
Because of man’s aversion to knowing his past, science has been greatly rətarded, pretending unreality to be as truth. Darwin's notebooks from the only field trip he ever undertook contain descriptions of cataclysmic disruptions.
He wrote that nothing less than the shaking of the entire frame of the Earth could result in the mass annihilation of life forms that he observed.
Nothing has changed; so powerful is the ideology of cope.
Astronomers have adopted a pseudo-religious role, calming our fears of cosmic annihilation with their model of a clockwork solar system that has been undisturbed for an age beyond human comprehension.
While in reality the earth is alive, it is revelatory, and is governed by ethereal fire— electricity. What do you see, millions of years of “erosion” or a moment of cosmic plasma reaching down from the heavens?
The most intense memories, like those of a super-catastrophe and the immanent super-terror, are beyond the reach of the conscious mind, ever in katabasis of dream and myth. In these coping machines, the dream and the myth vocabulary is likely to approach as close as possible to that ultimate trauma, without it becoming unbearable: it rides on the edge of birth throes, sexual dissolution, cascading death, giga-violence, and all the sublimations of these materia into religious and political events or institutions, but stopping short of blotting out the conscious mind.
“The fact is that catastrophic events have taken place—not just in a cave here or in a cave there, but events of indescribable violence, such that no human being who succeeded to survive could be free from the traumatic effects—traumatic effects, as I say, indescribable.”
”Imagine: suddenly, time is no more time. The day does not move into the night; the ocean does not just beat at the coast of the Atlantic, it moves over the continent; not even moves over the continent: continent and sea just change places.”
”Where were plains, mountains are thrust up in a matter of hours; the air is filled with loud hissing noises of meteorites falling down, and all volcanoes erupting simultaneously—not just the volcanoes that existed, but thousands of new volcanoes coming up and blazing;”
“I feel that the ancients in myth, epic and sacred works have been trying to tell us something about a problem that bothered them a great deal. It appears fairly clear that our ancestors were trying to communicate a deep fear, a terrible anxiety.”
“They where talking about a problem that was so terrible that the most drastic measures to group discipline and/or self-repression were justified. It was a powerful fear.”
”The god those people were writing about was terrifying.”
—Immanuel Velikovsky
The *seduction* of Semele.
(Jupiter-Zeus the sky-father and lightning bearer with Semele, derived from a PIE root meaning 'earth'. Imagine great streaming rainbows of plasma PULLING the earth up towards the sky, forming mountains and plateaus. The seduction of the earth.)
In recent centuries, and ever accelerating, great efforts have been made to make humans forget where we come from and who we are. Our mass amnesia is necessary to the social engineers, to the technocrats and their alchemo-cyberneticians. The control structures we see rising up around us find their foundations in these dark waters.
According to biologist Rupert Sheldrake, collective memory is "inherent to nature" - living systems have a collective memory of all past experiences of the entire species, this memory exists in an invisible but real energy field. Carl Jung called it the 'collective unconscious'.
I invite you to reject the twilight undeath of cope— recognize the ancestral waveform within you. The human mind cannot exist without myth, it forms our connection to the Real. Without myth we are insane. The thing you call 'myth' is your Memory. Remember!
Really wonderful. Thank you.
This is great. Please keep it up.
Although, I'm no longer on twitter, I know where to find your work.