Ma Nature doesn’t do straight lines, and if we think she does it’s only because we’re too close up. While this idea may apply across the physical world it also appears to extend into less tangible areas and concepts too, such as history. In the same way that the horizon is actually circular as opposed to horizontal, how would our perspectives change if we considered that world history is perhaps not quite as linear as we like to think? 

It’s something of a contentious point. We don’t like to have our preconceptions messed with – at different times various civilisations and cultures have all falsely claimed to be the so-called cradle of civilisation. Yet recorded history only goes back 5,000 years or so at most and there are enough trails and anomalies of one kind of another to indicate that a different, larger picture is there for the viewing. The cosmos is a big as the mind will allow.

Clearly space itself is far too big and dark to make any sense of, but some of the myriad machinations inside it are becoming more comprehensible to us. As with time-lapse photography, speed things up and we can begin to discern a pattern at work, one that is not linear in the way we imagine.

One of the issues that compounds the joy that has been 2020 is that we don’t have any decent context large enough for our existential troubles. Superficially, there are obvious reasons why the wheels are coming off but, really, they appear more as symptoms than causes. There are – must be – underlying factors that we don’t take into account. We don’t take them into account because we don’t see them, and we don’t see them because they are too big and don’t form part of the narrative of modernity. Plato saw them though, but he was one of the last. 

He spoke of a vast planetary cycle which he called the Great Year, and it’s a good, simple analogy for something that becomes a lot more complex the closer you get. So we shall keep a respectable distance, unlike the seers of India who were somehow able to grasp and record the impossibly macroscopic in microscopic detail thousands of years ago. But that’s another story, a PhD even. Or a book.

Briefly then, as a day has its phases and a year its seasons, there is another, larger wheel turning in our corner of Creation that also has its seasons. The previous post referred to a dynamic model of the solar system, with all the planets barrelling along in the sun’s wake and definitely going somewhere. What we don’t see, but the ancient sages did, is where we are going, and that the journey describes an immense circle in space. The influences at various times during this circular sojourn manifest on earth as ages which, in turn, provide the governing backdrop to human evolution and its undulating civilisations. This prospect alone brings up myriad questions in the questioning mind. People ask why it took me a decade to write The Other Side of the Fish, well….it takes time to eff the ineffable.

And so, this cycle of 24,000 years has its seasons of ascending and descending ages – 12,000 years in each direction. According to the wisdom of the wise, also plastered across the art and philosophies of the ancient world, we have already emerged from a dark hibernation of ignorance and materialism. However, as is often the case after a deep sleep, we are drowsy, confused and many of us don’t want to wake up at all. (Make sleep great again!) But we have to and we will. There is no choice in the matter. The alarm has been ringing for quite a while now and will get louder until we do. The universe does not need our opinion.