-:- the house of the sky -:-
-:- the future of mythical floods -:-
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What, then, is to become of the House of the Sky when the Age of Silicon is ushered in? In a world where Christian, Islamic and Buddhist dogma has bullied the vast majority of the population into literalist atheism and the subtle models and metaphors of ancient times have disappeared, from where can the next Age's attendant mythology come, and how are we to understand the Fifth Flooding of the World which is surely to come? For even though we have lost the ability to comprehend this beautiful mythology of the Flood, it does not stop happening. The World Mill still turns, the Rainmaker still makes rain, and the Sacrificial Lamb still dies every midsummer. The Fisher Of Men still points the way to wisdom. And soon the Age of Aquarius - the Water Bearer - will be upon us.
The key year, it seems, may well be 2012AD, the year predicted to be the end date in the Mayan Long Count, and also they year in which information levels possessed by mankind will explode to new heights. Already we can see the floodwaters beginning to surge. Christian and Buddhist dogmatic beliefs are largely on the wane - at least they are in Europe, Japan and isolated coastal parts of the USA (such as New York and California) - and the risings of Islamic Fundamentalism across the Arab world and Christian Fundamentalism in the vast interior of the USA are in no way strengths of those religions. Rather they are a weakness and a death knell, just as they were for the European Christian Fundamentalists three hundred years ago, and the Zoroastrian Fundamentalists in Iran some seventeen hundred years ago.
In both academia and popular culture, Aquarius' oncoming watery influence is causing the feminine to return to the centre of our spiritual traditions, and individualistic interpretations of phenomena both sacred and profane are on the rise. We are re-examining the roles of many of the ancient females, such as Mary Magdalene and the Sun Goddesses of Europe. We're mixing high Celtic civilisation with Siberian shamanism, and Amazonian ayahuasca visions with Greek philosophy. We are syncretising our world and our beliefs, melding them into new shapes. We no longer need to swim with the fishes in the main stream of organised religion. Their worlds are slipping and starting to shake and the Ocean waters are flooding into their hallowed halls and bringing with them a free-wheeling, construct-it-yourself kind of spirituality and belief which seems fairly unstoppable.
More than the collapse of a mythological or religious system is the fact that the sky is no longer the distant dome that envelopes our flat earth cosmos. The sky is an interactive field of experience with true depth in which we and all the other stars and planets float gracefully. We have walked upon the Moon. Already our silicon machines have visited the majority of our planets and are beginning to charge out into interstellar space (*13). And we will surely follow. Mankind has been talking about colonies on Mars and the Moon for decades, as well as interstellar travel. Perhaps with the doubling of information every second that is predicted for the post-2012AD era, this might be possible. We would look back on the tiny beacon of light that is Planet Earth from our vantage point in space, and it would seem that we would no longer need our House of the Sky.
What relevance would the effects of the precessing poles of an obscure planet many millions of miles away have to a Martian colonist, or an interstellar space traveller? On what foundation could our voyagers build their House? They would have become the House itself, no longer looking up into the roof which is the dome of the sky, but would truly be travelling within that sky.
The answer is simple - the foundations of the New House of the Sky could be the Earth itself. As mankind begins to migrate into space, the vast expanse of space would flood into our 'world', our set of experiences, perceptions and methods of finding our rightful place in the cosmos. The rapidly increasing levels of information would also flood our world, such that we would either become extreme specialists in our newly created world or we would find new ways to process information, and new ways of understanding the cosmos, just as we did with each previous successive flooding.
The House Poles would not be founded, then, on any sense of the rocky fundament of the flat Earth, but on the binding sense of 'home' that mankind will always attribute to our little rocky planet. The Poles themselves would stretch on out to infinity, and the roof would become a four dimensional entity in which our spaceships - our own little Noah's Arks - could float and voyage into the vast expansive unknown.
And as for the flood? We would be living in it. The vast expanse of the sky itself.
From the Future:
In the Beginning, there was the Word, and the Word was... Space. And there was the House of the Sky, newly built from the wreckage of the previous world which had been destroyed by a violent flood of information. And the Water Bearer floated through the House of the Sky that she had created and cast her waters all around it, so that the very cosmos itself became like a womb for the rebirth of mankind. She appealed to those timid voyagers on their tiny planet to come forth in their Arks and explore her body, to seek new worlds and new experiences, to develop their own individual experiences of the divine, the numinous and the infinite.
And they came, they wheeled around the space that she had created, they lusted after adventure, they sought knowledge wherever they could and added it to their infinite banks. They became fruitful and multiplied across worlds, making local mythologies and local religions, but never losing sight of the Foundations of the House of the Sky that the Water Bearer had made. And she charged them with one task only, and spoke to them, saying: "Never lose sight of your home planet, never forget where you came from. For in that moment, there will be a Great Flood that will wash away the House of the Sky that I have built for you. The Earth will disappear and you will lose your home forever.
"It won't be such a great cataclysm. For many of you, it won't matter, but it will always be there deep in your psyches as a remembrance, as the Goat of Memory ushers in the Age of Capricorn..."
(c) Bruce Rimell, June 2005
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