Preface:
I once awoke from sleep and inquired to myself of the creation of Earth. Three spirits from within me answered: The Poet, The Priest, and The Scientist. Their voices were nearly all at once, preceding, overlapping, and succeeding one another.
This is what they spoke:
For anything fell in every direction.
There was not time, nor solid ground,
nor origin of any kind to speak of.
This was Chaos, our mother womb of darkness.
A crude mass, a gaping void, was all.
Essence became Will, and
the primeval children were born.
These elements and forces began to
whirl with impatience.
This was the beginning.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first yom.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second yom.
And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
One hundred million years passed; life then emerged. These simple cells had the same, if not greater, desire for life that man finds inside himself today; the innate impulse to continue to live. The inherent knowledge in all living organisms, that very rarely lets us forget that living has pleasure in store for its subjects. The limited resources of space and energy became increasingly smaller in comparison to the cells' growing size; thus competition was born. Nature, herself, as is her disposition, selected from these the strongest, finest, most efficient, beautiful, and intelligent molecules. Such competition continued furthering towards more intricate and complex life.
Super-continents were formed, broke apart, and formed again. The Earth had trodden through multiple near-global glaciations, with periods oscillating between a Snowball Earth and Greenhouse Earth. At this time the spinning of the Earth was quicker, the days only lasted eighteen hours, though there were four hundred eighty-one of them. Eventually came the Precambrian Varangian ice age, and was so severe that Earth's oceans froze over completely, only in the tropics did oceans remain liquid. This lasted for nearly two hundred million years. This was the last big ice age. After this last epoch of ice, life began to advance increasingly fast.
The Earth was four billion years old when the Cambrian explosion occurred.
And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life,
And scarcely had He separated these
and fixed their certain bounds, when all the stars,
which long were pressed and hidden in the mass,
began to gleam out from the plains of heaven
and traversed, with the Gods, bright ether fields;
and lest some part might be bereft of life,
the gleaming waves were filled with twinkling fish;
the earth was covered with wild animals;
the agitated air was filled with birds.
And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
Sexual reproduction had already appeared seven hundred million years before this.
And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
And the evening and the morning were the fifth yom.
Over the next ten million years, the two Ordovician-Silurian extinction events occurred. Taken together, these constituted the second mass extinction event. Soon after, the first of the jawed fishes, Placodermi, developed. Their jaws evolved from the first of their gill arches. Their head and thorax were covered by articulated armored plates, while the rest of the body was scaled or naked. In between three hundred sixty and two hundred eighty-six million years ago was the golden age of sharks. During this time Pangaea formed and lasted for one hundred twenty million years. This is the last time the Earth's continents fused into one.
Two hundred twenty million years ago, the dinosaurs came, and in due course were exterminated by an asteroid; the Earth has been without them for about sixty-five million years. Flowers began to cover the land sixty-five million years before that asteroid ever touched the atmosphere. Twenty to fifteen million years ago, India collided with Asia, and Megatherium Americanum, a giant sloth six meters long, and Argentavis magnificens, a bird of about the same size, roamed South America. In the waters, Megalodon, a gigantic shark the size of a bus swam about.
Saber-toothed tigers appeared and humans began to look as they do today two million years ago. Twenty-five thousand years passed and Dmanisi man/Homo georgicus came from Africa, which had a tiny brain with Homo erectus and Homo habilis characteristics. An individual spent the last years of his life with only one tooth by depending on the kindness and compassion of others to obtain sufficient sustenance.
The Earth's last, most recent, geomagnetic reversal happened seven hundred eighty thousand years ago. Five hundred thousand years ago, Homo erectus in Choukoutien, China began to use charcoal to control fire, though they may not have known how to create or start it. One hundred twenty thousand years ago, Homo sapiens, Homo sapiens idaltu, in Ethiopia's Awash River, Herto village, practiced mortuary rituals and butchered hippos. Their dead bodies were later covered by volcanic rocks.
Jupiter looked down upon the Earth,
a being capable of lofty thought,
intelligent to rule, was wanting still.
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
On earth, the brute creation bends its gaze,
but man was given a lofty countenance,
and was commanded to behold the skies;
and with an upright face may view the stars;
and so it was that shapeless clay put on
the form of man till then unknown to earth.
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
Sexual reproduction had now been flourishing for over a billion years.
And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.
And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth yom.
Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.
And on the seventh yom God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh yom from all his work which he had made.
One hundred thirty thousand years ago, humans developed the hyoid bone which we have kept ever since. The hyoid bone is involved in the production of human speech. It allows a wider range of tongue and laryngeal movements by bracing these structures against each other. It is not present in any of our closest living relatives. Of course, this as well as the emergence of the FOXP2 gene (associated with the development of speech) into our DNA, led primitive communication into contemporary language which is directly related to and connected with highly developed consciousness. For humans think in terms of languages and images which they did not invent. We begin to speak inexplicably rapidly as children because we were given and have an innate ability to learn language. Man began to bury the dead, care for the sick, and used the spear, probably for stabbing rather than throwing.
But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.
And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
"Y-chromosomal Adam" lived in Africa. He was the last common male ancestor of all humans alive today. In accordance with him, we are all his incestuous offspring. He proudly lays dead, splintered in billions of pieces throughout the Earth.
The human psyche as we know it today results from the overpowering ego. The ego is like a muscle, and it has not always been as it is now. All muscles before falling will tense in order to catch or maintain well-being; this is reflex.
And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:
But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
Something traumatic in our past, perhaps including, or simply, our exit of the womb, had caused us to fall and the ego caught us. In order to offset total collapse of our psyches, the ego took control. Since then, the ego is very proud that it saved us; it wants to walk around in flowing robes. It wants complete obedience. Now it is the center of consciousness and wants always to remain so. It despises anything elevated above it.
So that a monument
of such ferocious stock should be retained,
she made that offspring in the shape of man;
but this new race alike despised the Gods,
and by the greed of savage slaughter proved
a sanguinary birth.
And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
For God doth know that in the day ye eat there of, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.
Something deeply traumatized man, a physiological or cognitive trauma, in turn, resulting in psychic trauma which caused our ego to strain in order to not let us fall even more so.
And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden.
And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:
And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
The first ever sculpture was found in Vogelherd, Germany, and is believed to be thirty-two thousand years ago. At this time, stone tools were made in Kota Tampan, Malaysia. Also the first flute is was whittled from bird bone in France. We were aspiring artists and tool makers.
And Adam called his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.
And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.
The human population had yet to reach five million. Nevertheless, this event would inevitably happen some five thousand years later.
And He said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.
How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!
For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.
And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.
A shooting star fell from the sky unto Earth.
When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them,
the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose.
Then the LORD said, "My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days will be a hundred and twenty years."
The Nephilim, or Giants, were on the earth in those days—and also afterward— when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.
"Thus fell one house, but not one house alone
deserved to perish; over all the earth
ferocious deeds prevail—all men conspire
in evil. Let them therefore feel the weight
of dreadful penalties so justly earned,
for such hath my unchanging will ordained."
Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence.
And lest ethereal heights should long remain
less troubled than the earth, the throne of Heaven
was threatened by the Giants; and they piled
mountain on mountain to the lofty stars.
But Jove, omnipotent, shot thunderbolts
through Mount Olympus, and he overturned
from Ossa huge, enormous Pelion.
At this time, fifteen thousand years ago, the last Ice Age had ended. Sea levels across the globe rose and flooded many coastal areas. This caused separation from former mainland areas into islands. Japan separated from Asia mainland. Siberia separated from Alaska. Tasmania separated from Australia. The Java island formed. Sarawak, Malaysia, and Indonesia separated.
And now his thunder bolts
would Jove wide scatter, but he feared the flames,
unnumbered, sacred ether might ignite
and burn the axle of the universe:
and he remembered in the scroll of fate,
there is a time appointed when the sea
and earth and Heavens shall melt, and fire destroy
the universe of mighty labour wrought.
Thus, the wrath of Jove was not content with powers
that emanate from Heaven; he brought to aid
his azure brother, lord of flowing waves,
who called upon the Rivers and the Streams:
and when they entered his impearled abode,
Neptune, their ancient ruler, thus began;
“A long appeal is needless; pour ye forth
in rage of power; open up your fountains;
rush over obstacles; let every stream
pour forth in boundless floods.”
God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways.
So God said to Noah, "I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth.
So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out.
And now one vast expanse,
the land and sea, was mingled in the waste
of endless waves—a sea without a shore.
One desperate man seized on the nearest hill;
another sitting in his curved boat,
And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth.
The drenching rain descends from his wet beard
and hoary locks; dark clouds are on his brows
and from his wings and garments drip the dews:
his great hands press the overhanging clouds;
loudly the thunders roll; the torrents pour;
In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.
And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.
Thus he commands,
and none dissenting all the River Gods
return, and opening up their fountains roll
tumultuous to the deep unfruitful sea.
The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained;
And the waters returned from off the earth continually: and after the end of the hundred and fifty days the waters were abated.
Iris, the messenger of Juno, clad
in many coloured raiment, upward draws
the steaming moisture to renew the clouds.
I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.
Ten thousand years ago, humans in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East developed agriculture. Plant domestication began with cultivation of Neolithic founder crops. This process of food production, coupled later with the domestication of animals, caused a massive increase in human population that has continued to the present. Jericho, modern Israel, had a settlement with about nine-teen thousand people. Worldwide, population had surpassed five million. Life hitherto the agricultural age carried with it the expectancy of death between twenty and twenty-five years. At that time, emotional and mental age did not surpass that of a 13 year-old for most.
The Sahara had now become green with rivers, lakes, cattles, crocodiles, and monsoons. Japan's hunter-gatherer Jōmon culture created the world's earliest pottery. Humans reach Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America, the last continental region to be inhabited by humans, excluding Antarctica.
And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
And while these dreadful bodies lay overwhelmed
in their tremendous bulk, (so fame reports)
the Earth was reeking with the copious blood
of her gigantic sons; and thus replete
with moisture she infused the steaming gore
with life renewed.
And God said unto him, I am God Almighty: be fruitful and multiply; a nation and a company of nations shall be of thee, and kings shall come out of thy loins;
And the land which I gave Abraham and Isaac, to thee I will give it, and to thy seed after thee will I give the land.
Ancient Egypt began with the incipient unification of Nile Valley polities around 3150 BC, and is conventionally thought to have ended in 31 BC when the early Roman Empire conquered and absorbed Ptolemaic Egypt as a state. During their hour of reign, the Egyptians mysteriously made gigantic pyramids appear out of the sand, supposedly spending four years crafting them. They did this wonder by enslaving the Jews.
Then the LORD said unto Moses, Go in unto Pharaoh, and tell him, Thus saith the LORD God of the Hebrews, Let my people go, that they may serve me.
And it came to pass, that at midnight the LORD smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle.
And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead.
And he called for Moses and Aaron by night, and said, Rise up, and get you forth from among my people, both ye and the children of Israel; and go, serve the LORD, as ye have said.
Also take your flocks and your herds, as ye have said, and be gone; and bless me also.
By the reign of Emperor Augustus, in the late 1st century BCE, Rome controlled all the lands surrounding the Mediterranean. Victory passed back and forth between men. A.D. 35: Jesus Christ was crucified and the population of the world reached one billion.
He by the grace of God should taste death for every man.
The Great Fire of Rome started on the night of 18 July in the year 64. It is uncertain who or what actually caused the fire. Tacitus wrote that Nero had Christians arrested and condemned, "not so much for incendiarism as for their hatred of the human race". Christians confessed to the crime, but it is not known whether these were false confessions induced by torture. Suetonius and Cassius Dio favor Nero as the arsonist with an insane desire to destroy the city as his motive. However, major fires that began accidently were common in ancient Rome. In fact, Rome burned again under Vitellius in 69, and under Titus in 80.
These are spots in your feasts of charity, when they feast with you, feeding themselves without fear: clouds they are without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots;
Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever.
In 220 CE, Rome became increasingly decentralized and divided. Throughout the temperate zones of Eurasia, America and North Africa, empires continued to rise and fall. The gradual break-up of the Roman Empire, spanning several centuries after the 2nd century CE, coincided with the spread of Christianity westward from the Middle East. The western Roman Empire fell under the domination of Germanic tribes in the 5th century, and these polities gradually developed into a number of warring states, all associated in one way or another with the Roman Catholic Church. The remaining part of the Roman Empire, in the eastern Mediterranean, would henceforth be the Byzantine Empire. Centuries later, a limited unity would be restored to western Europe through the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire, comprising a number of states in what is now Germany, Italy, and France.
In South America, the 14th and 15th centuries saw the rise of the Inca. The Inca Empire of Tawantinsuyu, with its capital at Cusco, spanned the entire Andes Mountain Range. The Inca were prosperous and advanced, known for an excellent road system and unrivaled masonry.
Outwardly, Europe's Renaissance, beginning in the 14th century, consisted in the rediscovery of the classical world's scientific contributions, and in the economic and social rise of Europe. But the Renaissance also engendered a culture of inquisitiveness which ultimately led to Humanism, the Scientific Revolution, and finally the great transformation of the Industrial Revolution. The Scientific Revolution in the 17th century, however, had no immediate impact on technology; only in the second half of the 18th century did scientific advances begin to be applied to practical invention.
The Europeans also had the technological advantage of horses, steel, and guns that helped them overpower the Aztec and Incan empires, as well as North American cultures. Gold and resources from the Americas began to be stripped from the land, and people shipped them to Europe, while at the same time large numbers of European colonists began to emigrate to the Americas. To meet the great demand for labour in the new colonies, the mass import of Africans as slaves began. Soon much of the Americas had a large racial underclass of slaves. In West Africa, a series of thriving states developed along the coast, becoming prosperous from the exploitation of inferior African peoples.
The Industrial Revolution began in Britain and used new modes of production—the factory, mass production, and mechanization—to manufacture a wide array of goods faster and for less labour than previously. The Age of Reason led to the beginnings of modern democracy in the late-18th century American and French Revolutions. Democracy would grow to have a profound effect on world events and on quality of life.
During the Industrial Revolution, the world economy was soon based on coal, as new methods of transport, such as railways and steamships, effectively shrank the world. Meanwhile, industrial pollution and environmental damage, present since the discovery of fire and the beginning of civilization, accelerated drastically.
The twentieth century contained two world wars, a good amount of human liberation, man's stroll upon the moon, and the development of the capability to destroy ourselves very easily. Then came the rise of the information age, and globalization dramatically increased trade and cultural exchange. Space exploration reached throughout the solar system. A woman taught a Gorilla sign language and continued in communicating with it. The structure of DNA, the very template of life, was discovered, and the human genome was sequenced, promising to eventually change the face of human disease.
Now; The year 2007 Anno Domini. Today humans use roughly six thousand spoken languages. The percentage of the global society's labor pool needed to produce society's food has continued to decrease substantially. The Holocene extinction event continues, as it has been since its commencing thirty to forty thousand years ago, with the observed rate of extinction rising dramatically in the last fifty years. Most biologists believe that we are at this moment at the beginning of a tremendously accelerated anthropogenic mass extinction. One named Wilson estimates that at current rates of human destruction of the biosphere, one-half of all species of life will be extinct in one hundred years.
War has not once stopped plaguing man. Millions starve and indefinite numbers die of disease each day. In other regions, the masses sit in comfort and watch television each night benumbed. A shocking two-thirds of Americans are now classified as overweight or obese. Individuality has become fashion. Mass distribution of art through literature, cinema, and music is sold to the lowest common denominator, consequently lowering man even further intellectually, and inflicting upon the world vulgarity. Nearly every noteworthy artist is dead, and nothing is being done about it. Practicality and progress has never overpowered art and beauty as it does today. Pretentiousness of enigma, intelligence, importance, and value has never been more accepted nor outweighed actuality of possession as much as it does today. The cycle of the lack of responsibility for oneself, revolving with and feeding, the anathemas put on each individual from the controlling high powers of our society's icons, corporations, politics, organized religions, and media sources, is moving faster and growing exponentially to higher degrees every second.
Despite all of this, man still has some desire to progress toward something greater than the present condition. Underlying the complaints, arguments, and terrorism lies the will to move toward perfection. Though, we simply have no unifying idea how to do this as a whole. Man is unintelligent, and man is idle in this sense of progress. In other forms, however, man is not. In this time, the future arrives faster than ever before, and with it we find, as we always have hitherto, no absolute certainty of where we are going. There is a concept that exists for this crisis alone; The Planetary Phase of Civilization. It is defined by the Global Scenario Group (GSG), an environmental organization that specializes in scenario analysis and forecasting. Proponents of the Planetary Phase of Civilization state that it refers to a current historical transition from a world of capitalist states and consumerist societies to a world of increased global connectivity with new global institutions, like the United Nations and the World Trade Organization, new information technologies, environmental change in the biosphere, economic globalization, and shifts in culture and consciousness. While it is generally agreed that some form of planetary society is taking shape and binding the world’s people and biosphere into a common fate, the future character of global society is uncertain and contested. In 1798, Thomas Malthus proposed that while resources tend to grow linearly, population grows exponentially. He also proposed canibalism. The same limited resources of space and energy that became increasingly smaller in comparison to the firsts cells' growing size, producing competition, have begun to take place between the nations. In the past, offensive war was a rather simple conquest of power, riches, and land, and took place out of exceptional ambition, not necessity. As of the last sixty-five years it has been otherwise of the Cold Wars, the edifying wars, or the survival of the fittest wars, happening necessarily to maintain the superpower's well-being. The world is in the midst of such performances this very day. These wars will surpass the average human's imagination with their ferocity and ruthlessness. Nature, herself, as is her disposition, will select from these states the strongest, finest, most efficient, beautiful, and intelligent. On the individual creature level, perhaps coincidence, perhaps not, mysterious declining sperm counts in men are beginning to be found and investigated. Nature may be capping our growth for us. Eugenics is the most logical way, and absolutely necessary, to move into a finer, and existing, human civilization. But every one of us has our numerous and diverse faiths, starting with the simple belief that we will wake up tomorrow.
* * *
I happened to wake, and the faiths of my yesterday were shown to be true. What was not told to me by these three spirits is what the story of which I write contains. What was unknown to me—to the priest, and to the scientist, and what was only a trivial story that the poet had so, blithely passed over, was that there was a similar, yet more brilliant creature than man, living upon the Earth.
:D:D
