GODSPLAY - EVOLUTION OF ENLIGHTENMENT

Researching Godsplay, a non-fiction project I have been working on for just over a year now, I set out to find out more about God and not unexpected, along the way I discovered so much more about man and mankind.

Surprisingly all our mainstream religions made their appearance less than 2500 years ago - and all of them bar none emerged within a window period of around 1000 years.

Philosopher Karl Jaspers named the period (starting around 600 BCE) as the Axial Age, the time period during which all major religions and philosophies developed in order to answer questions that previous more animist traditions had not fulfilled.

According to the Judaic Bible (Christian Old Testament), creation took place less than 5000 years ago - a little after the oldest known depiction of a wheeled vehicle (Bronocice pot, Funnelbeaker culture) in 3500 BCE, and with the Tournettes - the earliest form of potter’s wheel - pre-dating biblical creation by about 1000 years.

On the biblical timeline, Moses is believed to have led the Israelites out of Egypt to the promised land less than 3500 years ago, Judaism first appeared as a religion in Greek records during the Hellenistic period around 300 BCE, and at some point around 200 BCE the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) was canonized.

Interestingly, the Judaic Bible or Christian Old Testament, considered by many to be the direct word of God and among the most sacred texts ever conceived, seems to be a far-fetched and at times shocking account covering the evolution of the Jewish nation, making it rather surprising that it underpins the faith of the three largest religions on Earth, two of them being sworn enemies in modern times.

But what grew to be of most interest to me was the periods of time before 5000 years ago. How did man become aware of a God and why? Was religion or at least faith passed down from earlier civilizations? On my quest to try find out more, some incredible revelations were made.

Firstly it seems at least some of the stories in the Old Testament originated from much earlier times, most notably the story of Noah and the flood which can be found in the Epic of Gilgamesh from ancient Sumeria, (the earliest existing version dating from about 4150 years ago), and in a multitude of similar references to an epic deluge recorded at many unrelated sites, all over the world.

All of these accounts which are incredibly similar seem to refer to the same event which a handful of inspired scholars such as Graham Hancock and a groundswell of others are now associating with the Younger Dryas, a cataclysmic event which took place at the end of the last Ice Age around 12 800 years ago, when temperatures which had been steadily rising plummeted back down to ranges similar to the last Glacial Maximum about 20 000 years earlier.

Leading experts and scholars believe that the cataclysmic event giving rise to the Younger Dryas resulted from a large asteroid crashing down into the massive ice sheets covering Canada, giving rise to global floods of an unbelievable scale, raising sea-levels on planet Earth by almost 100m within a window of 24 hours, scouring the North Americas of almost all traces of life in general and humanity in particular, in much the same way a continental sized Tsunami would, causing destruction and death all over the planet and reducing mankind back to hunter gatherers and causing the extinction of many species all over the world, including the mammoth.

A few thousand years on, we see the emergence of new, incredible civilizations at specific locations all around the world, most notably the Middle East (with hubs in Egypt, Turkey and ancient Mesopotamia, in India (with hubs around the Ancient Indus Valley), all over central & southern China and the Far East, Meso-america and some neighbouring islands, and Australasia.

Noteworthy within these new civilizations as depicted in surviving artwork and artifacts, are the arrival of ‘Gods’ who played significant roles in fast tracking development and evolution. These Gods as depicted all over in the ancient world were strikingly similar in appearance, all with long hair and long flowing beards, and all carrying exactly the same little man-bags. Coincidence? Highly unlikely.

The quantum leap in human evolution around these times gave birth to the theory of the missing link, and also provided justification for some spectacular and far-fetched hypothises such as ancient astronaut theory and the theories of Zacharia Sitchen and Emmanuel Velikofsky.

But could there be a much simpler answer than that of ancient aliens or planets colliding? Would it not be much more plausible to believe there had been an ancient global civilization prior to the Younger Dryas? A civilization probably at least as technologically advanced as ours in the present day. A civilization that looked to the stars to understand the universe and meaning of life, and then became aware of a celestial body headed their way which stood to wipe out all mankind.

And on becoming aware, they built great structures which would firstly withstand the mind boggling destruction which would follow, secondly would stand the tests of time and thirdly, would inform future generations with the intellect and knowledge to understand, what had caused their demise, as a warning for mankind that the Universe is a very dangerous place.

They say that in the event of a mass extinction event, all civilization would be destroyed since ‘civilized’ men are not trained or geared for survival. If human life were to survive at all, those most likely to survive would be the most primitive and most isolated of our species, the remaining hunter gatherers. They are used to struggling and fighting simply to stay alive. But if there was some highly advanced ancient civilization, could at least some of them have managed to stay alive and play a role in the further evolution of mankind?

In the story from the Bible, we learn that Noah built an ark, and along with all species of animal life on the planet, he and his family were saved. Could there be any truth in this - that Noah and his family were the survivors of an ancient civilization?

To try distill an answer to this question, I look to modern man, civilization and knowledge. We know an asteroid destroyed the dinosaurs. We know there have been five mass extinction events and we are fully aware of the dangers facing mankind from the skies. We know about the Torrid asteroid belt, a massive belt containing hundreds of thousands of asteroids some of which, experts believe, would easily be large enough to cause a mass extinction event if ever to collide with Earth. We know that Earth passes through the Torrid asteroid belt twice a year every year (around June and October) and the belt is so vast that each time it takes twelve days for Earth to pass through the danger zone.

There can be little doubt that those with the knowledge and resources are aware of these facts and even as we speak, have or are busy constructing solutions both to protect the continuance of life on earth, and more significantly to provide a way of escaping the cataclysm, should it strike. In other words, world leaders and those with the resources have or are busy building arks. Should anyone doubt this fact, one need simply to look at the efforts related to space exploration and the single-minded interest in the colonization of Mars. ...For the furtherance of knowledge? Not as likely as for the salvation of privileged society. But obviously if this was the truth, it would never be disclosed to the public. Humanity is unlikely to take kindly to the concept of the 1% setting themselves up for selective evacuation from a doomed planet.

Continuing with this line of reason, say this was the plan, and say there was a mass extinction event which they managed somehow to escape and survive, and then generations later, were able to return to earth - to find the only human survivors primitive hunter gatherers. What would they do and how would they act? To try understand, we simply need to look back to the age of the voyages of discovery, when the powers of Europe set out to discover ‘the New World’.

The European cultures were far advanced to those of the countries and continents they were targeting. And as history records, the indigenous populations were oppressed, exploited, enslaved and abused, but were also very instrumental in the development and building of civilization in the new world. The reason they were vulnerable to such abuse and exploitation was directly due to the vast chasm which existed between the indigenous and invading cultures. And that chasm was not really that big 400 to 500 years ago. What would it have been like had the voyages of discovery been postponed to today’s era, when intruders would have arrived by helicopters with highly sophisticated tools and weapons. Could there be any doubt that they would have been perceived as gods or demons? Could there be any doubt that this is what happened about 12 000 years ago?

Considering that the earliest evidence of humankind is 6 million years old, that the earliest tools discovered have been dated to 3.3 million years old, that social learning and language acquisition has been dated back to 2 million years ago, that our earliest descendants were playing with fire 1.7 million years ago and we were wearing clothes not long after; that man’s first brush with spirituality is evident in burial rituals carried out 300 00 years ago, and that megalithic structures pre-dating history required far more technological proficiency than that evident in the great ancient history dynasties, could there be any doubt that the journey of mankind on Earth has been little else but a continuous cycle of Groundhogs Days, a hypothesis seemingly supported by the substance and stories of ancient myths and legends which apparently far outdate ancient history and civilizations.

So are there any lessons which should be learnt from the roads we have travelled? And the question of all questions: where and how does God fit into the whole picture? These questions and many many others are covered extensively in Godsplay, which as a result of the sheer volume of information, has expanded from the book originally planned into a series, the first of which if all goes to plan, will be published before Christmas this year.