Do We Know Why We Know - Part 7

In my previous posts of Do We Know Why We Know (Parts 4 and 5), I mentioned Jules Verne’s 1864 novel, Journey To The Center Of The Earth. I recently read it. I chose to read it after thinking there’s more to learn about what’s beneath our feet than we realize. In Part 4 of Do We Know Why We Know, I included three things that would be intentional in this series. We know why we know because of what we learn from the space around us, the space below us, and the space inside us (not thinking of space in the physical sense necessarily). I also believe more than ever that ancient texts like The Bible have much to tell us about, and guide us through understanding, all three categories.

The second intention, what’s beneath our feet, seems much more challenging to get to than the air and space around us. Digging is more difficult than flying it seems. As we blast off up into space, resistance and pressure become less cumbersome, where as digging becomes harder, the deeper we go. There are certainly enough stories of what we might find to persuade us to go deeper inside the planet not to mention what I read in Verne’s 1864 novel, that's not all fiction, as you’ll soon find out.

One of the things becoming glaringly obvious as I write this series is that there seems to be little in ancient texts on how space or the universe has the means to give us a better understanding of Do We Know Why We Know? We have massive rocket programs going on around the world seemingly led by Elon Musk’s SpaceX or at least our media is making us think so. But the rocket game does appear something akin to a game of who has the biggest … rocket? And to what purpose, bragging rights?

 

I was buying into the ‘multi-planetary species’ bit for a while. The theory of overpopulation seemed inevitable at some future epoch given that birth rates had always exceeded death rates. But then COVID hit with effects that have so far hardly been measurable outside of counting people who have contracted the virus and those who have been vaccinated. But surprisingly, already visible is the declining birthrate in countries around the globe. The mathematics of overpopulation was weak before but now just doesn’t work. Is “multi-planetary” even necessary outside of one man’s vision?

Space also is easy as there are no boundaries or legal obstacles to contend with like who owns what piece of space they won’t let anyone enter, visit or investigate. If space travel does become a real thing and not just something wealthy people get to do, those boundaries and legal obstacles will not be far behind. Also, according to Mr. Musk, exploring space (well, let’s call it what it is—launching rockets) is outrageously expensive. Even his company, SpaceX, the most successful one, is apparently struggling to stay solvent. Bankruptcy seems impossible though when coming from the man who is worth more money than any person who has ever lived on the planet—including Solomon. Elon knows a lot about money—and marketing.

What’s apparent to me is that if we want to know more about who we are, we need to look inward. The adage “look in the mirror” seems appropriate and in this case that’s our planet and what is buried beneath our feet. We’ve done a lot of surface archaeology but as far as going inside the sphere of the earth we’ve done the equivalent of sticking a couple of needles in a big haystack to understand what secrets lie inside. I’ve described one of these needles in Part 4, the Kola Superdeep Borehole project in Russia. There are a couple of others, which I’ll briefly describe in the next article. Yes, it’s expensive and complicated and not just from a technological perspective. There is property ownership, national boundaries, and laws to protect the dead, all part of a developed civilization where ownership and power take precedence over all else and create obstacles to digging and drilling into our planet for exploration purposes. Established academia plays a role here too, holding us to what we know, yet every week if not daily some new discovery in the ground tells us something new about ourselves.

None of this comes from blasting into space. Unfortunately, even the thought of what lies inside the earth pales to shaking the ground we stand on with eruptions of power shooting man-made projectiles out of our atmosphere and into space. Why bore when we can blast off? Maybe we’re not the first civilization to face this dilemma. Maybe we have what’s boring upside down?

And, not to forget the third intention of this series, what’s inside us—our unconscious—which Cormac McCarthy’s essay “The Kekule Problem” sheds some light on and how language may have arrived to help us understand our unconscious, which I’ve included in every article. There may seem to be very little connection with what lies beneath our feet and our unconscious or even to what the infinite universe has to offer. But our ancient texts do site us some clues:

“Sheol beneath is stirred up to meet you when you come; it rouses the shades to greet you, all who were leaders of the earth; it raises from their thrones all who were kings of the nations.” – Isaiah 14:9

 And may we not forget,

“All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return. Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth?” – Ecclesiastes 3:20-21

Now this brings me back to what I started with, the classic novel Journey To The Center Of The Earth. This was kind of a whimsical book to choose largely because I had thought it something of a children’s story. I don’t know why as I knew next to nothing about the story outside of the title. The narrative is that of a teenage boy’s (Axel) adventure with his eccentric uncle, Professor Otto Lidenbrock. After deciphering a coded runic message left by the sixteenth century savant-alchemist Arne Saknussemm, they begin a quest to reach the center of the earth through a dormant volcano in Iceland, Snæfelsjökull (Mount Snafell, a real place).

As they descend on their journey into the earth, led by their Icelandic guide Hans Bjilke, many famous (and real) scientists are mentioned and what made them famous.

Sir Humphry Davy was a chemist and an inventor known for the Davy lamp, an early version of the arc lamp. Though the Davy lamp wasn’t described in Journey To The Center Of The Earth, Verne did describe it in other stories he penned. Ruhmkorff lamps, from instrument maker Heinrich Daniel Ruhmkorff, were what the adventurers used to light part of their route in this story. Joseph Paul Gaimard was a scientific leader on the French corvette La Recherche, an expedition to the Arctic Sea in 1835. Henri Milne-Edwards was a renowned zoologist of the day. Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Breau, outside of having a very long name, was a famous biologist at the time of Verne’s book. Sir James Ross discovered the Magnetic North Pole in 1831 (Ross was also a fictional character in Dan Simmons 2007 novel The Terror that was adapted into a 2018 AMC television series). Simeon Denis Poisson was a mathematician who gave his name to the famous Poisson distribution. Joseph Fourier, an Egyptologist and mathematician, was known for investigating the Fourier series. The last I’ll mention here (there are many more) is Georges Cuvier, a naturalist and zoologist and a major figure of the natural sciences in the 19^thcentury.

Though much of the novel is set in Iceland, legend has it that Mr. Verne never visited the country.

On their journey into the earth, the trio gets lost, thirsty and injured. When they run out of water, thinking their end is near, Hans taps into a granite wall. The rock wall separates them from an overhead body of water that then provides them fresh drinking water and is the source of a trickling stream that stays beside them for the next part of their journey.

“The most curious part of Iceland is not what is on the surface, but what is below.” Professor Otto Lidenbrock, Journey to the Center Of The Earth

Not long after that they come upon a vast subterranean cavern and ocean. The description of this cavernous space made me think again of The Truman Show that I described in Part 5 of Do We Know Why We Know. In that part I wrote how the Mesopotamians saw the world as a dome above a disk surrounded by seawater with freshwater beneath the disk or earth’s surface. The ocean they cross, on a log raft that Hans builds, is vast but inside the earth. Eventually they come to a place like that described in the Beatles “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” as in “you drift past the flowers/That grow so incredibly high” or “Cellophane flowers of yellow and green/Towering over your head.” The three sail by “trees of medium height, shaped like parasols, with clear geometrical outlines” where “in the midst of gusts they remained motionless, like a forest of petrified cedars.” Axel went on to describe, “but these were white mushrooms, thirty or forty feet high” and “lycopods (common in the Carboniferous period from fossils), 100 feet high; monster sigillarias (plants found in fossils from the Carboniferous period), tree-ferns as tall as the northern pines.” Through all this I was surprised by how much science Verne included in his tale.

I will not spoil the ending but the reader can guess that they do survive. I won’t tell you how they get out or whether they reach the center of the earth. Only remember from Part 4 of Do We Know How We Know the distance to the center of our planet is 20.9 million feet or almost 4,000 miles—that’s a long way to travel on foot and a log raft.

Before reaching what they think is the other side of the endless sea they pass two leviathan-size sea creatures in battle. “… muzzle of a porpoise, the head of a lizard, the teeth of a crocodile … the most formidable of all the antediluvian creatures—the ichthyosaurus” and “a serpent hidden in the carapace of a turtle … the plesiosaurus.” When they reach the shore on what they think is the other side of this vast ocean, their compass reads like it did when they started as if they’d returned to the same shore they’d launched from? It’s all explained near the end.

There’s still more to talk about but unfortunately my time is up for this round. The most startling is yet to come. Stay tuned for the next part in two weeks.

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Happy New Year (Or Let's Hope So)

I was all set to publish Part 7 of my Do We Know Why We Know? series when I saw a news headline pop up on my phone, “Dr. Bonnie Henry says ‘new game’ with Omicron variant could signal end of COVID-19 pandemic.” I reluctantly slid aside what I had planned—which by the way I’m quite excited about—and decided it was New Year’s Eve and what a great time to express hope, especially as we put an end to this tumultuous year of 2021.

I quickly read the interview that CBC News had conducted with Dr. Henry where she said the latest variant was spreading so quickly that “the virus will eventually become endemic.” Yes, I had to look up the word though it’s not the first time I’d read it. Essentially, it means that the pandemic will not end with the virus disappearing but that enough people will become immune to the virus either from vaccination or natural infection that there will be less transmission and much less COVID-19-related hospitalization and death, as the virus continues to circulate.

I include Dr. Henry because, as most of you know who read my blog, my wife and I moved out to British Columbia from Ontario at the beginning of the pandemic. Since honeymooning in Vancouver at Expo 86, we’d dreamed of living on the west coast. Many rolled their eyes when we told them of our plans, “you two are crazy,” but arrive we did in July of 2020. Since that time, we’ve heard often from Dr. Henry, the Provincial Health Officer of BC. Most strange to me has been the respect held for “Bonnie” by the people of the province who refer to her like she is a friend. Living in Ontario for all of my life, respect for a political office, especially one that has been so prominent and exposed as a health officer during the pandemic, was simply unheard of. But through it all, Dr. Bonnie Henry has remained consistent, making tough, and not necessarily popular, decisions when necessary while remaining a pillar of sensibility within the provincial government and of the BC community at large.

But 2021 has been nothing short of disaster for many here in BC. In the early part of the year, pandemic restrictions such as the mask requirements and the opening and closing of restaurants, theatres, gyms, and churches, played havoc on our human condition. In June, Vancouver and the lower mainland (like Abbotsford where we live), felt the highest recorded temperatures in the area’s history. An unprecedented 800 people died due to the extreme heat. The summer was hot, sunny and dry, the kind of weather we did expect though drought like conditions were imminent.

When September hit, however, it was payback time. Yes, we knew it rained here. It rains a lot as a matter of fact. Double what we were used to in Ontario. That’s the territory; but when it doesn’t stop and it’s heavy (think: monsoon and ark) that’s what late October and early November looked like. By November 14^th the Sumas Prairie area of Abbotsford had many families abandoning their homes as the Nooksack River in Washington State overflowed its banks and flowed northeast into Abbotsford. Breaches in the Sumas Dike had the floodwaters overtake the Sumas Prairie farmland devastating some 1,100 families.

And now as I write this unanticipated wrap up to 2021 here in Abbotsford, we’re in the midst of an extreme freeze for this area that started with a substantial snowfall on Christmas Day—and the snow stayed. I've not seen a snow plow. The temperature dropped to -16°C on December 27^th and hasn’t been above zero since. An indication of how extreme this is, locals in the area don’t even know how to refer to such low temperatures properly, calling them “negative 16.” Mill Lake, where we often walk and run, froze on December 28^th. Ducks and Canada geese have WTF expressions on their frozen beaks. Last year, snow fell on December 14^th, stayed for a couple of days and didn’t snow again or at least not enough to stay for any time. The lowest temperature we saw was -11°C and that for only part of a day. Mill Lake did not freeze over.

Putting pandemic and extreme weather aside, economic trends that drive the economy seem askew. The price of housing has gone berserk. Housing prices continue to skyrocket far exceeding their value—well not everyone’s, somebody’s buying. There seems to be no real precedent for price exceeding value perhaps because value is like beauty—“in the eye of the beholder.” Will this continue? That seems to be anyone’s guess. There are no experts here.

And then there’s the COVID effect on birthrates that’s changing the mathematics of demographics. In 2020, half the states in the U.S. had death rates exceeding birthrates. Deaths are exceeding births throughout much of Europe too. The theories of our planet becoming overpopulated are losing steam. COVID has encouraged us to “stay apart stay safe.” Has it made us afraid to be together? Declining birthrates seem like an obvious result don’t they? What will 2021’s numbers look like?

With such a year is there any doubt we’re glad to see 2021 end?

That’s why when I saw the CBC News report on Dr. Henry’s comments, I found them refreshing. Bonnie’s message is hopeful; good news that the end of the pandemic was in sight just as a new year begins.

Now before I end, my post wouldn’t be complete without a tidbit of history.

The earliest recorded festivities for a New Year’s arrival go back some 4,000 years to ancient Babylon. The Babylonians not only celebrated the coming New Year but the victory of their god Marduk (or Bel for those Old Testament readers) over Tiamat, the goddess of chaos and nature and her evil son, king of the monsters, Kingu. (You can read more about this in my Part 5 of my Do We Know Why We Know series.) The Babylonians called the New Year festivities Atiku that followed the vernal equinox—the date in late March when the day and night are of equal length. Part of the festivities was a ritual known as the royal negative confession. The ritual would have the high priest stand before the statue of Marduk and recite Enuma Elish (the Babylonian creation epic) to the king of Babylon to emphasize Marduk’s superiority over other gods. The priest would take the royal insignia from the king, slap his face and force him to kneel before the statue. The king (Nebuchadnezzar, for instance) would then confirm that he had not misused the power given him by Marduk nor violated the welfare of Babylon or Marduk. The priest would again slap the king, forcing him to cry, to show contrition that would then restore his authority. This ancient ritual seems like an appropriate self-evaluation for a leader; maybe one we should re-introduce.

I wonder how Dr. Bonnie Henry would fair under such a protocol.

I think she would fair very well (she’s endured several metaphorical face slaps already).

With that, Happy New Year and here’s hoping 2022 is the best year yet!

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Looking for some new reading in the New Year?

Get yourself a copy of my novels The Actor, The Drive In and The Musician. You also can follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn or visit my website at www.douglasgardham.com.

Do We Know Why We Know? - Part 6

I do wonder, after reading Cormac McCarthy’s “The Kekule Problem,” whether language has indeed enabled these ancient stories to be drawn out of our unconscious in ways to help us understand who we are, where we came from and what we’ve tried to do to ensure our survival as a species. I ended Part 5 with the Mesopotamian story of Marduk.

In this part, Part 6, I will go through the Egyptian story of Osiris, Isis and Horus but there are a few other things I’d like to include before I get there.

I’ve written briefly in past parts of Do We Know Why We Know about the Nephilim, Anakim and Rephaim. In the article that started this series—A Changing Frame-Of-Reference—I wrote, “And why is there no mention of the pyramids in the Bible? The giant Nephilim people are included.” I also included all three in Part 4 when I wrote, “the soil beneath the earth’s surface,” or how Sheol from (Psalm 6:5) is defined. The Sheol known as the abode of the Rephaim or the dead, the people described as being greater-than-average height and stature as found in Genesis 14:5 and Deuteronomy 2:11 to name two of several instances where the giants are mentioned in the OT. The Rephaim are also referred to as “shades”, “spirits”, or “dead,” while other names of these giants from this ancient text include the Nephilim and the Anakim. Goliath, the giant that David slew, was a Rephaim.

That these giants mentioned in numerous places throughout the OT piqued my curiosity, when the pyramids are not mentioned at all. Why is that? What were the authors’ intentions or the hermeneutics behind including the Nephilim, the Rephaim or the Anakim? We may never know. But recently I discovered that in another book not included in The Bible was The Book of Enoch that includes writing about the Nephilim at length.

What I find interesting here is the apparent association of Enoch, who is mentioned several times in The Bible, to Thoth (the Egyptian god of wisdom and writing) and part of Osiris story I will soon talk about. Enoch is also associated with the Greek god Hermes—messenger of the gods. Together the three represent the figure Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes the Thrice Great). Poking my head a little ways down Lewis Carroll’s rabbit hole from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, I had written about Giordano Bruno who was executed for his ideas around an helio-centric galaxy in Part 3 of Do We Know Why We Know, who was one that thought Hermes Trismegistus was a pagan prophet who foresaw the coming of Christianity. There were several other Christian writers including Augustine who predicted the same thing in their writings.

I’m still in the rabbit hole. Hermes Trismegistus seems may be associated with Atlantis but more of that will have to come in my next update. But some more on Enoch from Genesis 5:24, “Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.” Enoch was one of only two people God took to heaven without them dying. The other was Elijah 2 Kings 2, “Now when the Lord was about to take Elijah up to heaven by a whirlwind, Elijah and Elisha were on their way from Gilgal.”

I will investigate further The Book of Enoch in coming articles but do you know why God took Enoch and Elijah to heaven without them dying? Some believe they are the two people mentioned in Revelations 11:3 that will witness end times, “And I will grant authority to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth.” Leave it to say there’s more to come.

But it’s time to get on with the story of Osiris, Isis and Horace.

Osiris was an old king who had established the Egyptian state when he was young. He was great hero but had become archaic and stubbornly blind. Though he represented the embodiment of Egyptian custom and tradition, which is what the “pyramid” had come to represent, he no longer saw the world as he should, given his position. Osiris, being old and unseeing of what he should, represents culture, as culture seems to be an essence that is old and deliberately blind; culture always seems to be this way. It’s a construct of what came from those who are now dead, the dead who have stopped living and are out of date. Being dead they can’t update themselves, and the living inhabit their corpse like in the Marduk story where the gods inhabited their father Apsu’s corpse, the story I describe in my last article Do We Know Why We Know Osiris is old and not seeing what he should and stubbornly won’t look where he knows he should.

Osiris doesn’t have the energy or the spirit to deal with his brother Seth, who is a scoundrel, a precursor to the western idea of Satan. Osiris knows this but underestimates his brother’s malevolence and strength. Seth wants to be the ruler and take over the kingdom.

In reading history, every stable society is threatened by this stubborn blindness and malice. Every bureaucracy becomes stagnate and lethargic. History has shown this in the rise and fall of empires like the Roman and Ottoman but also in the business world with fortune 500 companies of limited life spans (i.e. Digital Equipment, Compaq). Mention DEC (Digital Equipment Corp) or Compaq to anyone under 30 years of age and they don’t know who you’re talking about. I wrote a paper on what makes a company sustainable years ago in holding what made them successful in the first place (as a start up) being quite opposite to what keeps them going in a sustainable way (systems and procedures).

Osiris ignores Seth. Seth waits in the wings for Osiris to one day make a mistake or show his weakness. When he does, Seth is ready and pounces. He kills Osiris and then cuts him up into pieces that he spreads across the entire Egyptian state. The Egyptians regarded their provinces as pieces of Osiris’s body. Now Osiris is a god and can’t actually die that represents the inherent spirit of structure that can’t be destroyed either; there’s always structure, as the new one replaces the old one. The structure may be different but it’s still structure and always returns. Structure can be hurt and broken into pieces like Osiris; things fall apart because they get old and are under minded by something else. It seems to be what the Egyptians were trying to figure out. Not unlike their predecessors in Mesopotamia with Marduk. The pieces of Osiris are spread over Egypt so he can’t get himself back together; things fall apart and can’t be brought back together.

But the spirit of Osiris lives in the pieces. Order is demolished and chaos emerges in Isis. Isis is Queen of the Underworld. She is chaos. She’s also Osiris’s wife. Osiris and Isis (order and chaos) are together like Apsu and Tiamat from the Mesopotamian story in my last article. The order of Osiris collapses and up comes chaos: Isis—searching. She’s looking for order; chaos cries out for order. Isis goes all around Egypt that’s in a state of chaos, trying to put Osiris, her husband, back together. She finds Osiris’s phallus and uses it to make herself pregnant. The pieces of Osiris are still alive and unite with chaos to produce something new—a new order. That’s the story of the dissolution of structure into chaos and its resurrection, or coming back to life. Isis is pregnant and goes back down into the underworld to give birth to Horus on the advice of Thoth, god of wisdom, as he knows that Seth will try to kill her child. Horus is the son of the great mother and the great father.

A quick side note on Thoth, who I mentioned earlier, being connected with Enoch in Hermes Trismegistus, who is also said to be an engineer from the destroyed Atlantis.

Horus is known as the Egyptian eye and a messianic figure. Much of the mythology that described Horus parallels the Christ story from the Judeans coming out of Egypt and Christians emerging from the Jewish community. There’s influence of Mesopotamian and Egyptian thinking apparent in the development of later ideas on organizing society. Paintings of Isis with Horus on her lap seem similar in content and form to Mary holding infant Christ. The Holy Mother of God and the hero described as a metaphor by Joseph Campbell. This is not only a Christian motif but goes much deeper. “It’s a human motif,” as Jordan Peterson describes.

Isis gives birth to Horus and Horus grows up outside the kingdom in the underworld. He sees what differentiates him from his father Osiris, and like Marduk from my last article, he can see, see like a falcon and is symbolized as such. Birds of prey have better sight than humans.

Horus comes back to fight Seth. A significant difference between Horus and Osiris is that Horus doesn’t underestimate Seth malevolence and knows what he is up against. Horus battles Seth to get the kingdom back. While Horus and Seth are fighting, Seth tears out one of Horus’s eyes. Horus’s eye is torn out but still he defeats Seth banishing him to the nether regions of the kingdom. Horus can’t kill him because, like structure, the malevolent destructive force that threatens structure never dies. It’s always there and can only be removed temporarily.

Horus is king. King god. With his removed eye, one might think he’d pop it back in his head and take his place in the upper most position amongst the pantheon of the gods. But that isn’t what Horus does. He goes back to the underworld where Osiris’s metaphysical existence lies. Horus hands Osiris his eye giving Osiris sight. Osiris regenerates himself only with vision. Horus and Osiris now linked together return to the world to rule jointly. The Egyptians came to believe that the pharaoh, who had an immortal spirit, was the embodiment of the conjunction of Horus and Osiris and gave the pharaoh sovereignty. The Egyptians, like the Mesopotamians I wrote about last time, were trying to puzzle out who should lead civilization. Who should be pharaoh and what does the pharaoh have to be in order for things to work and order to be restored? The pharaoh has to be awake to evil and chaos while embodying Egyptian tradition to place him at the highest pinnacle of society’s structure.

This in a way is similar to the battle of the gods through the centuries with the expectation that the highest possible moral virtue would emerge as a consequence of that competition. That’s the eye on the top of the pyramid that hasn’t yet been part of my pyramid discussion. What’s at the top of the pyramid isn’t the same as what the rest of the pyramid is made of. The pyramid is a representation of structure. Something rises to the top of the pyramid—the eye in this case. The Egyptians figured out what puts something at the top of the pyramid is attention, paying attention. Keep your eyes open; keep watch, which is not the same as thinking. The thing about human beings is that we can see, better than any other mammal. The capacity to see is what we use in the world. More than fifty percent of the human brain’s cortex—the largest part and the ultimate control of—is organized around vision. The brain of most animals is organized around smell. We stand up right and can see a long distance. The human ability to see is what saves us and what saves human communities and that’s what the stories like Marduk and Osiris seem to be trying to tell us.

Why didn’t storytellers just say so? They likely didn’t know how. It’s taken a long time—forever—to figure out. We’re still trying to understand it.

This extends back to the first article I wrote for Do We Know Why We Know and the Cormac McCarthy essay, “The Kekule Problem.” McCarthy describes that our unconscious has been whirling around and developing for two million years or longer and language infected us with the primary purpose to help us understand our unconscious, for less than a hundred thousand years. That is virtually all but an instant in time when we know our universe is 13.8 billion years old; earth is 4.5 billion years old and life on earth is 3.5 billion years old. However long our unconscious has been developing 13.8 billion years or 3.5 billion years the development of language is a mere, smidgen of an instant of that time; we’re still in the beginning of the beginning stages.

I’m still finding out lots. For me, it’s an interesting journey. I hope next to look deeper into Enoch with the potential of learning more on the Greek story of Gaia and Uranus. Maybe some more even on Atlantis. We’ll see.

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More will come in my next post.

Get yourself a copy of The Actor, The Drive In and The Musician and find out what many readers have already discovered. You can follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn or visit my website at www.douglasgardham.com.

Do We Know Why We Know? - Part 5

I ended my last part of the Do We Know Why We Know series alluding to the Osiris and Marduk stories being part of this next article. I was also relieved that my computer woes were behind me and I hadn’t lost any of my work. I won’t be labor the point any more and get right into things. As it turns out there’s too much to include both Osiris and Marduk in a single writing especially after what I discovered.

I’ve chosen Marduk as I recently learned that Bel, who’s mentioned in the Old Testament, is Marduk, the patron god of Babylon. Bel is included in several places in the Old Testament including Jeremiah 51:44, “And I will punish Bel in Babylon, and take out of his mouth what he swallowed”, as well as Jeremiah 50:2 and Isaiah 46:1. Through this search I also learned that there are three additions to The Book of Daniel with more on Bel but are considered deuterocanonical and not considered part of The Bible by Protestant dominations. They were rejected in the 16^thcentury by the Protestant movement because those sections of Daniel were not in Jewish Bibles. There is an extension to Chapter 3 and two additional Chapters, 13 and 14. Chapter 14 is entitled Bel and the Dragon that seems appropriate until you read the text. Tiamat, in the Marduk story, is recognized as a dragon who fights Marduk for control of the world hence my thinking Bel (Marduk) and the Dragon (Tiamat). But in the Daniel story, it is Daniel who destroys both Bel and the dragon. The Daniel chapter is more about Bel the idol than the Marduk story. There’s more here but that’s for another time. The actual Marduk story will come later in this article.

Let me try and set the stage for the Marduk story is relaying to us.

Joseph Campbell wrote, “Mythology … is psychology misread as biography, history, and cosmology.” I haven’t used the word “mythology” in any of the Do We Know Why We Know articles but in the last one I wrote that these “stories may be an explanation on what happened without the availability of writing or language as we know them” and were “filtered by or construed in our unconscious until language further found its way into us.” I’m including this here to keep in mind not only the literality but the interpretation and translation of these stories from ancient times in what they’re saying. There are clues about us but if language infected us as Cormac McCarthy suggested in his essay “The Kekule Problem” to explain our unconscious, which I wrote about in the first Do We Know Why We Know, we are still in the very early stages of understanding what has been constructed in our unconscious in the two million years of its existence, with language seemingly as useful as chopsticks would be to build a house; simply put language may be the tool for the job of deciphering our unconscious but it’s a long way from ideal. But I suppose it’s a start.

In the last article, I briefly mentioned the city of Troy, from Homer’s epic poem The Iliad, that most thought was a story of fiction, until it was discovered at Hisarlik, Turkey in 1870. I mentioned Atlantis as well that hasn’t yet been uncovered but how the Plato story of the legendary, mythical city, from his dialogues of Timaeus and Critias, sank into the ocean in 9,600 B.C. and how this date aligns exactly with the date of the dramatic rise of sea level that is now recognized as the end of the Younger Dryas period 11,600 years ago. The advanced, ancient civilization of Atlantis is somewhere; we just haven’t found it yet or we don’t recognize it for what it is.

What I also think is extremely difficult to understand about knowing what we know, is the conception of what life was like or will be like in the past or the future respectively. I’ll illustrate in a moment. That the time was millennia ago makes it all the more difficult to understand what we knew and were at that time. Like the adage, “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” We only discover parts from the past that we use to decipher the whole.

This is one of the reasons I’ve landed on the Mesopotamian story of Marduk to start with, potentially being the first metastory that some seem to think may be the beginning of our conception of the fundamental structure of reality. The Mesopotamians, like other civilizations, appeared to be trying to get it right in how to organize society to create a sustainable civilization.

When we read the stories, it’s difficult not to put our spin of how we see the world today versus how the people of the time would have seen, heard or even understood things. Think of this today, in youth trying to imagine the world with what’s been developed for our every day lives in the last thirty years. In our home 1990, we didn’t have the Internet and didn’t know anyone that did. I don’t know that I even really knew what it was. We had VHS tapes, CDs, cassettes and albums. Then, it was nearly unimaginable to think we’d soon have more songs than we could listen to in a lifetime contained in a small device we could hold in our hand or put in our pocket. Never mind imagining what we have today in a smart phone that allows us to access the Internet, phone or text anyone anywhere in the world, buy things, take high quality photos and videos, watch almost any movie we want to or listen to any song that has ever been recorded in history that’s affordable to the vast majority of us. We can listen to any and as many songs as we want to at a cost per month that’s less than what one CD would cost in 1990. How does a person who’s twenty today even picture 1990? And that’s only thirty years ago. The Marduk story is eight thousand years old! It’s hardly inconceivable.

Let me continue my pause on the Marduk story a little longer.

I mentioned in Part 4 of Do We Know Why We Know that the pyramids are not mentioned at all in The Bible. It seems strange when in Exodus, great lengths are taken to describe the relatively “simple” construction of the tabernacle where the Ark Of The Covenant was contained. The pyramids were there according to the historic timeline. The powerful King Khufu built the Great Pyramid of Giza in 2,540 B.C. According to Josephus, who I’ve not mentioned yet but wrote about biblical times in his epic The Antiquities of the Jews, includes the word “pyramids” once in Book II, “they set them also to build pyramids.” Interesting here when the word “pyramids” is used, most, I think, would immediately figure the Great Pyramids of Giza.

So if the pyramids were there and only significant enough to warrant one mention between the two epic accounts of the times—The Bible and The Antiquities of the Jews—then maybe it’s not a pyramid thing at all but a people thing. Were the Judeans and Hebrews who wrote The Bible even in Egypt then? Maybe the Judeans and Hebrews didn’t want to include them.

The first Judeans in Egypt came with the First Persian Empire founded by Cyrus the Great in 550 B.C. Apparently Cyrus credited Marduk with the inspiration to allow the Jewish community to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple of Yahweh. There’s much more detail on this but according to the Old Testament (2 Kings 25:22-26) many Judeans took refuge in Egypt with the destruction of Jerusalem and Judah that took place in 597 B.C. after the assassination of Gedaliah, who Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar had appointed governor of Judah.

Additionally, the term Hebrew is first seen in The Bible in Genesis 14:13 of the Old Testament, “Then one who had escaped came and told Abram the Hebrew.” Archeology has related Hebrews to the name of the seminomadic Habiru people found in Egyptian inscriptions of the 13^th and 12^th centuries B.C. as having settled in Egypt. This fits close with Moses leading the liberation of the people of Israel out of Egypt in the 13^th century—the time of Exodus.

With these dates neither the Judeans nor the Hebrews were around for the building of the Great Pyramids.

Then I wondered maybe the pyramids the Hebrews or Judeans worked on from Josephus’s works were the much smaller, man-made brick pyramids that have not fared well over time. But when I looked, even these last pyramids were built in Egypt around 1,700 B.C. If the Judeans didn’t begin to come into Egypt until 597 B.C. and the Hebrews until the 13^thcentury we have a 1,100-year to 500-year gap respectively between when Judeans and the Hebrews were first in Egypt and the construction the man-made brick pyramids. So from Josephus’s writing, maybe the Hebrews or Judeans were repairing the brick-constructed pyramids but they weren’t building them. The pyramids are not likely mentioned in The Bible because the Hebrews and Judeans didn’t build them or want them included.

Now before I leave the pyramids and why I’m even writing about them here, is the construction of the Great Pyramid, the first pyramid built in Egypt, was remarkable. The design, precision, ingenuity and craftsmanship of the Great pyramids are what make them the only Seventh Wonder of the World that’s still in existence and leaves experts to question how the Egyptians even built them. But as incredible a feat as the construction of the first great pyramids were in 2,500 B.C. as building them continued until 1,700 B.C., their construction grew steadily less impressive. Man-made brick replaced the quarried limestone block construction in the later pyramids and the impressive precise construction grew consistently shabbier. Some say this is attributable to the pharaohs’ decline in power and dwindling financial resources. No one seems to know for sure.

Why am I spending so much time on pyramids when I said I was going to talk about Marduk and one of the earliest civilizations to exist?

Well because there seems a connection between the pyramids and the Mesopotamian culture and the story of Marduk. The Mesopotamian existential view of the world had the earth as a disk and the space above it, a dome (I couldn’t help but think of Jim Carrey in The Truman Show when I learned this). Surrounding the disk was seawater and below the earth was fresh water; the disk floated on freshwater. They extended this (potentially from what I wrote earlier about language and our unconscious) to the water, recognizing it as deities: Tiamat (the god of the seawater) and Apsu (the god of the watery deep beneath the earth or fresh water). More on water is coming in a future article; oh, what we don’t know.

I wrote in A Changing Frame-Of-Reference about the pyramids being representative of the spherical earth or a hemisphere and how the height divided by the perimeter is equal to 2Pi. If the Mesopotamia idea of the world was a dome on a disk, which is a hemisphere, the pyramid seems a likely representation of the dome concept of the world. Were pyramids being considered prior to the Egyptians?

Why did I really choose the Marduk story to start? Mesopotamia appears to be the first existence of human society that dates back to 6,000 B.C. Why I mention this is because of what I wrote in Part 4. My three areas of focus for the Do We Know Why We Know series seem to be centred on: the space above us (the universe or everything outside of us), the space below us (the ground we stand on), and, the space inside us (our unconscious and language). The Mesopotamian story is the first to capture these. The space below us is Apsu, the god of fresh water beneath the disk of the earth. The space above the earth and around it is the dome and Tiamat, the goddess of seawater around the disk. Even now, in searching for who we are and where we came from and why we know what we know 8,000 years later, we’ve penetrated the seawater to its greatest depth at the Challenger Deep. There’s a huge focus on the dome and what lies “out there” in space with space agencies around the world like NASA and Spacex but very little (other than the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia) on what lies inside earth and what we stand on beyond what’s just below the surface as are most archeology sites.

I’ll throw in here from my last article that I’ve started reading Jules Verne’s 1864 novel Journey To The Center Of The Earth. I wonder what I’ll find?

Okay, the Marduk story. Mesopotamia became the amalgamation of middle-eastern tribes over many years. The gods of all these tribes warred in an abstract space out of which the metastory of Marduk emerged. Could this be our unconscious?

Apsu and Tiamat are inseparable and often depicted as two serpents entwined together like the double helix of DNA. How did the Mesopotamians know about the building blocks of life? Was it from our unconscious? From Apsu and Tiamat’s combined waters are created a family of unruly gods that Apsu decides he needs to deal with. The gods become upset and choose their resourceful god Ea to save them. Ea casts a spell to make Apsu sleep and then slays him (Apsu represents structure and culture). Tiamat is enraged at the killing of her husband and promises revenge (she represents chaos and nature). The gods are afraid of Tiamat’s reaction to what they’ve done. They know her power and hide, by inhabiting Apsu’s corpse. Tiamat creates an army of dragons and monsters to destroy the gods and takes Kingu her son, the demon of demons, as her consort and establishes him as leader of her army of monsters. Tiamat gives Kingu the Tablet of Destinies that give the bearer great powers and he wears as a breastplate. Ea and his wife Damkina create Marduk who is destined to become king of the gods. Tiamat wants to destroy Marduk and make Kingu the all-powerful one. But Marduk with arrow and net goes after Tiamat and destroys her by filling her up with a wind and killing her with an arrow that splits her in half. He uses each half of her to create the Earth and the heavens that he contains in his net. Marduk kills Kingu and captures the Tablet of Destinies to become the all-powerful. Marduk is all seeing with eyes all around his head and has the magic of speech. Marduk mixes Kingu’s blood with clay from the earth and molds the first human beings entrenching them with the element of evil. He makes human beings to serve the gods. Marduk becomes head of the Babylonian pantheon by the middle of the second millennium B.C.

Again from McCarthy’s “Kekule Problem” of language infecting us with the ability to explain our unconscious; we being the only mammal of five thousand that has language while all the others seem to do fine without it (think of how your cat rules the house). The evil element in human beings from this Mesopotamian story makes us different than all other beings as well. We’re the only creatures capable of deception and malevolence. We see this in the Adam and Eve story, Genesis 3:6-7, “she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” When they knew they were naked, they knew the difference between good and evil and that they could do evil. Was language part of the evil package? Marduk brought the magic of speech to the table. Certainly seems part of allowing us to understand it.

Why is this so important? It appears to be the beginning of our (human beings) conception of the fundamental structure of reality. In this story, the Mesopotamians appear to be doing their best to get it right. They’re looking at how to best organize society. When structure and culture fall, nature and chaos take over until the next order takes control. Their Marduk story illustrates how Marduk got organized against the emergence of chaos and how he mastered it. The gods declare a top dog that has eyes and speech and goes out voluntarily to encapsulate chaos cutting it to pieces to make the world. Isn’t that who should be top dog? That’s the heavenly domain. Now think of the story of David. Transferring the myth existentially to the Emperor of Mesopotamia then becomes the manifestation of Marduk on earth, the sovereign being, and all seeing, all knowing and able with speech. Why should they be king? They pay attention. They speak properly. They keep chaos at bay. They make ingenious things happen as a consequence. Was this what the Mesopotamians were trying to work out? What should be sovereign and why? That Marduk is the mapping for a new society seems implicit in his confrontation with the absolute unknown.

In my next article, I’ll write about Osiris and Isis and the Egyptian story. Then maybe Gaia and Uranus and the Greek story and more on the Judeao-Christian story as I make my way through The Bible. This seems like the beginning of the foundations of what western civilization is predicated upon leading to the sovereignty of the nation and of the individual. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

And is language drawing all of this from our unconscious?

* * *

Again, more is coming in my next posted article.

I hope you’ll get yourself a copy of The Actor, The Drive In and The Musician and take them for a ride. You can follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn or visit my website at www.douglasgardham.com.

Do We Know Why We Know? - Part 4

I tried to start my MacBook but nothing happened. I felt a sudden pressure filling the room that I couldn’t get away from. As I stared at the blank screen, my heartbeat began pound in my ears. The screen remained black. Beating faster, my heart now a belligerent to my brain desired full supremacy. Failed technology seemed not only intent on shutting down my computer but me as well.

I turned the computer off then on again. An icon I’d never seen before appeared in the center of my screen: a picture of a file folder with a flashing question mark—not a good sign. I repeated the off and on again to the same result. The nightmare I had feared had arrived. In disbelief, I could only think of my life’s work in writing being annihilated.

As has happened previously when staring over the edge of the cliff of panic, taunting me to jump, my brain seems to kick into action. A hand seemed to reach inside my chest and ease my pounding heart. I had backed up three days before. I was not in unfamiliar territory either as less than a month before panic had snuck up on me after receiving an emergency message that my wife was lost on a hiking trail; but that’s a story for another time.

At once I was on my phone and Googling the file folder/flashing question mark icon in front of me. I followed the instructions. Still my computer wouldn’t start up.

I called Apple support; my world was slowing. I thought of the sign, “Keep Calm and Carry On” though finding “calm” is tricky.

My experience with Apple has been remarkable. This time was no different.

I share this experience, as it is part of our world today. “My computer doesn’t work, what do I do?” It’s agonizing but part of being the best, smartest, most advanced civilization in history, or more, the best, smartest, and most advanced human beings that have ever lived. At least that’s how many see it; we’re certainly better than our ancestors, right? Today, we carry technology in our hands and pockets that’s equivalent to all the computing available to put the first person to the moon over 50 years ago. Our computers allow us access to information from anywhere in the world about anything known for as long as we have known it—instantly (if it’s not instant in our hyper-active world, we hear “this sucks!”) As the great Charles Dickens wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” When technology is working, as we have come to expect it to, it is usually the best of the times. When technology fails, it isn’t.

Technology failed me as I was finishing Part 3 of Do We Know Why We Know but just before that, one of the topics for this article came in an email from a friend about the archeological site, Gobekli Tepe.

What, you might ask, is Gobekli Tepe and why? Gobekli Tepe is one of the most important archeological sites in the world today. Gobekli Tepe is a Neolithic archeological site near the city of Sanliurfa in Southeastern Anatolia, Turkey. Why? Because it is rewriting our history books as we know them. It seems a perfect way to continue what I started writing about in my article A Changing Frame-Of-Reference.

Neolithic is by definition the later part of the Stone Age where ground or polished stone weapons and tools existed. The Neolithic period preceded the Bronze Age and dates between 10,000 and 4,500 B.C.

The limestone megaliths found at Gobekli Tepe date back 11,600 years. That’s 7,000 years before Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids of Giza, 6,000 years before the invention of writing and 500 years before the development of agriculture. In the megalithic columns found on the site are indications of the earth’s precession (I briefly described precession in A Changing Frame-Of-Reference). Some see Gobekli Tepe as the world’s first observatory. A central column at the site, Column 43, is dated at 10,950 B.C. but there seems to be evidence that parts of Gobekli Tepe date back 14,000 years that place it directly in the time of the Younger Dryas period.

Again, from my A Changing Frame-Of-Reference article where I wrote about Younger Dryas, its revelation and recognition has relevance in the discovery of Gobekli Tepe and what is being revealed about our ancient history. The Younger Dryas was a period of glacial condition globally. Caused by multiple fragments of a giant comet disintegrating and hitting earth plunging the earth’s temperature in 10,800 B.C. (12,800 B.P.). Fragments from the same comet impacting the oceans again in 9,600 B.C. (11,600 B.P.) saw a dramatic rise in temperatures. The science of what happened is still not clear but whatever the cause, the evidence on the ground is not in dispute. The global temperatures soared and the polar ice caps collapsed into the sea causing an enormous pulse of sea level rise. What is astonishing is that the 9,600 B.C. date is the same date that Plato gives for the submergence of Atlantis.

Whoa! Just a second here, where did Atlantis and Plato come from? You were talking about Gobekli Tepe?

You’re paying attention. Good. I haven’t yet mentioned Atlantis or Plato but introduce them here as from another ancient text in perhaps telling us why we know what we know. Written by Plato, a Greek philosopher and an important figure in the development of Western thought, Atlantis is a story that most believe is fiction not unlike what I’ve heard about the stories I’ve been writing about from The Bible.

Atlantis, from Plato’s dialogues of Timaeus and Critias, was an advanced civilization lost to the ocean in 9,600 B.C. It’s hard to believe that date exactly aligns with not only the time Gobekli Tepe existed but also for the enormous rise in sea level of the Younger Dryas period. There are many theories on where Atlantis existed including the archeological site at Gunung Padang in West Java, Indonesia and Santorini, the classic Greek island of Thera. There are also theories of Atlantis in Donana National Park in Andalucia, Spain, Crete in Greece, a Minoan Civilization, and Gibraltar, in the straits of Morocco. There’s much more on Atlantis, which may find a place in a future post.

But what if these ancient stories are not made up but actually took place? The metastory or story within a story perhaps best describes their function that is left to us to figure out. Remember Homer’s epic poem The Iliad and the supposed mythical city of Troy that was found at Hisarlik, Turkey. The stories may be an explanation on what happened without the availability of writing or language as we know them today, filtered by or construed in our unconscious until language further found its way into us to give us a means of explanation; the purpose of which we’ve yet to fully comprehend. What if the ancient stories we read today, though having passed through a multitude of storytellers, are based on what was true? The storytellers and those experiencing the events—as spectacular, fantastic, and impossible, as they seem to our minds today—were limited in what tools (language, writing, pictures) they had at their disposal to formulate a record of what they experienced. We, in a lesser way, experience the same today with the limitations of language in trying to write or speak what we mean.

I used the example previously of the Great Pyramids of Giza not being described in The Bible but surely existed having been built according to the historic timeline nearly a thousand years before biblical times. Were the pyramids originally included in the texts but removed because the Jewish and Hebrew writers did not want to share what they saw as Egyptian greatness, and incredible craftsmanship, with the rest of the world? Or were the pyramids not there in the timelines of the stories of The Bible with the Jewish people coming out of Egypt even longer ago than we know (though that history seems well documented)? I did write about “time” in Do We Know Why We Know and being recognized as a dimensionally measurable thing. The Egyptians were the first to measure time, some time before 1500 B.C., using the sundial, on what we know today.

We’re told in The Bible we’re not supposed to understand, in passages like Philippians 4:7, “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” Or similarly in Psalm 139:6, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it.” But are they related to understanding God as opposed to the stories told by the people about who we are and experiences on this planet. As I wrote in Part 2, we’ve been given this propensity to feed on information. Our brains react to it, according to Jordan Peterson, the same way we react to food; we need to be fed. But then there’s the warning in 2 Timothy 3:7,  “always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.” This leaves me unsettled and in a quandary.

In another part of Psalm 139, verse 15, seems another clue both mythical and magical in speaking to why we know what we know. “My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.” Archeology discoveries are in the earth but most often close to the surface like Gobekli Tepe. But, as the psalm verse indicates, what lies even deeper beneath the ground we stand on?

We have incredible resources leading us into space. That apparent final frontier, “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Hollywood loves it. But does any ancient text describe that that’s where we need to go to find out more about the secrets of life? Psalm 139:15seems pretty clear that it’s “in the depths of the earth.” I’m now in Proverbs in my reading of The Bible but I don’t recall space or planetary travel having yet been mentioned.

So let us go into the earth. Almost two-dozen people to date have descended to Challenger Deep (the deepest known point in the earth’s seabed at 36,200 feet) of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean (including film director James Cameron). But even at that great depth it doesn’t come close to the distance it is to the center of the earth at 20.9 million feet.

What one man imagined lies in the earth can be read in Jules Verne’s science fiction story Journey To The Center Of The Earth. The deepest man has drilled towards the center is with the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia. I’d never heard of it. A scientific drilling project by the Soviet Union started in May 1970 in Pechengsky District on the Kola Peninsula near the Russian border with Norway was to drill as deep as possible into the Earth’s crust. A 9-inch diameter hole was drilled a record 40,230 feet by 1989. Drilling had to stop as higher than expected temperatures of 180°C were reached exceeding the expected 100°C. Along with the higher temperatures, lower density and greater porosity rock, that behaved like plastic, made drilling any farther impossible at that time. That’s thirty years ago!

But they did find fossils of microscopic plankton almost 20,000 feet down. There’s much more to investigate here.

After learning of this limited effort to explore the inside of the only planet humans have ever existed on, I am intrigued further by the text in Psalm 139. What is down there that would cause someone to write such text? This takes me back to Cormac McCarthy’s “The Kekule Problem” on our unconscious and language, the central topic of my three prior articles on Do We Know Why We Know. What would cause the passage of Psalm 139 to remain through the multitude of edits this ancient text has had to have gone through? Why such a limited investigation into earth and obsession and drive into outer space?

This causes me to pause and reflect on the three areas that will be the focus of Do We Know Why We Know going forward. We know because of what we learn from: one, the space above us (the universe and everything outside of us); two, the space below us (when standing on the ground); three, the space inside us (our unconscious). Ancient texts like The Bible have much to feed us.

Space today is our focus. It’s our future, like Columbus sailing the ocean blue for new lands (or a shorter route to India). But it’s also what we see all around us two thirds of every day. (I couldn’t find how long our eyes are open each day on average. I’ve conservatively used two thirds if we sleep for 8 hours every 24). Visually, we consume what’s around us, while our eyes are open (our second most complex organ next to our brain) but have little idea what and how much our brains are recording. That leaves less than one third of our time for the “eyes closed” part of our unconscious that goes on inside of our heads. What’s below our feet, the earth, we cannot see into and maybe part of the reason for its limited exploration. The earth is where we come from and where our body goes when we die. Every thing that we’re made of comes from the earth as written in Ecclesiastes 3:20, “All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return.” Seeing that everything we’re made of and being where we go when this incredible gift of life ends, is it any wonder it gets such little attention?

But maybe there’s more beneath our feet than we realize. The fact that it seems much more challenging to get to than all we see around us, like space, is a significant hindrance but when did that ever stop us. There are certainly enough stories about what we might find to persuade us.

Sheol is known as the abode of the dead and also, the Netherworld, beneath the earth’s surface, beneath our feet. “And the ground opens its mouth and swallows them up with all that belongs to them,” Numbers 16:30 describes Sheol. Interesting is Sheol is known as the abode of the Rephaim, the people described as being greater-than-average height and stature as found in Genesis 14:5 and Deuteronomy 2:11 to name but two of the instances where these giants are mentioned in the Old Testament. The Rephaim are also referred to as “shades”, “spirits”, or “dead”. Other names of the giants in this ancient textinclude the Nephilim (fallen angels) and the Anakim (a race of giants descended from Anak). Goliath, the giant that David slew, was a Rephaim. The earth is sure to offer us much more on these ancient ancestors and who we are.

Interestingly the inner core of our planet is nearly as hot as the surface of the sun. The sun’s surface is estimated to be about 5,500°C where as the earth’s core is about 5,420°C!

“Science, my boy, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.” Jules Verne, Journey To The Center Of The Earth.

More on the earth, the universe and our unconscious, and what the ancient texts tell us in my next article.

But now to finish my Apple story …

The woman from Apple had made an appointment for me locally. Unbelievably, the Apple dealer is across the street from us. Things were coming together though I remained concerned about all my writing on the drive.

‘What if,’ the voice that speaks in the back in my head. A voice that has been there for some time, maybe my whole life, only I listen to it now more than I used to. The voice was repeating a phrase I hear often, “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?” from Matthew 8:26.

I broke down why I was worried. If the drive was toast and I’d lost everything on it, what would I do? My calmer state of mind realized The Actor, The Musician and The Drive In, my first novels, were published. They would be unaffected. My recent work, as I described in A Changing Frame-Of-Reference was on a drive I share with my agent. Also, as I wrote at the beginning of this article, I had my entire drive backed up. Why was I still worried? All I might have lost was what I’d done over the weekend. That wasn’t colossal. But still …

As it turned out, Jeremy, the outstanding tech at Apple, discovered the cable connecting the drive had failed. Everything on the drive was recoverable. Not as good a story as one where everything was lost but, to be sure, that story could remain fictional as far as I was concerned. The bad news was a new cable was a few days away. Most, I think, would have left it there—having done their job—but not Jeremy. He jury-rigged an external drive so by late afternoon I was back and working on my MacBook Pro like nothing had happened but a bad dream.

Osiris and Marduk might be next. Stay tuned.

* * *

There’s much more to come. Who knows where we’ll go. 

Get yourself a copy of The Actor, The Drive In and The Musician my first three books. Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn or visit my website at www.douglasgardham.com.