I was thinking that I lacked the information to follow up on the dialogue with Don Quotays. So, yesterday I put off writing and this morning, Marius, who has not contacted me in some time, had sent a timely boon on time into the crackpot email box. This is an extensive treatment ad I will confine my commentary and answers to brackets. I am most lucky in my readers.

Yes, I know, I was not supposed to do any more of these. But Don and Marius compelled me.

-James

…

Hello James,

It has been a while. I've been busy learning, preparing, and building - which is what I'm writing to you about today.

**"It takes more power to build than to burn."**

I've stumbled upon the Apple streaming series based on Asimov's Foundation. It is visually excellent and somewhat woke in its messaging, but altogether an enjoyable watch.

The pretext of this universe is that there is a great galactic empire, ruled by an elite (WASPs naturally) that is headed for collapse. A plucky scientist has used "psychohistory" - a method of detecting trends in the language to create a loose narrative of future events. This is in use today, by a man named Clif High, who has been calling the playbook of the elites very accurately for the last few years.

[The great trend in American English over the past 150 years has been the change in word meaning from service to freedom, in such a way as to convince the tax farmed subject of USG that the empire services him rather than he the empire. This has such expressions as the change from indented to indentured at the beginning of the arc to the most recent practice of categorizing the hitting of a pedestrian by a train as “trespass incident” rather than a pedestrian incident.]

The bigger theme, however, is the concept of a great solar year.

It takes 200k years for our solar system to travel around the galactic center. During which time, we experience an Iron, Bronze, Silver, and Gold Age - each lasting 25k years. At the peak of the golden age, the same cycle happens in reverse, leading us back into an iron age. During each 25k years, we travel through each of the astrological signs - lasting approximately 2k years each for a total of 12 signs.

In our current time, we are leaving the ascending iron age and entering the ascending bronze age. In more granular detail, we are leaving the age of Pisces (age of schooling - everyone following) to the age of Aquarius (age of knowledge).

The supposition is that when we are closer to the galactic center, we receive more energy from the sun, giving us greater powers as human beings. As we descend into the dark ages (bronze, Iron), we become more dense, stupid, and brutish until, of course, we ascend again.

The Asimov series, Foundation, appears to be based around this concept. The huge centralized empire keeping a sort of Pax Romana will disintegrate, leading to wars, suffering, a loss of knowledge, and a calcifying of humans into mere beasts of burden to maintain a standard of living for the powerful elite.

The protagonist, a paleface scientist, who spearheads a diverse array of other cultures (Woke Primer), has mathematically proven this to be a certainty and is exiled by the emperor to create a "Foundation" of human knowledge to soften the descent.

The logic is a series of repositories of hidden knowledge to rebuild faster and thus shorten the inevitable coming dark ages.

[Babylonian, Hellenic, Roman, Islamic, Turkic, French and British conquerors have, in various times, and seemingly on a lore collection instinct conducted such collection projects, to include meathead Marc Antony’s stocking of the library of Pergamus.]

It seems to me that all these stories, from Halo, to Atlantis, to Foundation, to Star Wars, all tell the same tale - the rise and fall of the human species. If these things are simply fiction, how can so many authors have essentially the same vision?

[It is in our shared mythic core. See Ovid’s Metamorpheses and Howard’s Hyperborian and Atlantean yarns.]

It's beyond a doubt to me that these galactic empires have existed, and we are simply remembering history - or more politically correct – OurStory.

[Gilgamesh, Beowulf, which I suggest is our second oldest tale, The Iliad, Odyssey, Argonautica, Aenied, these are all migratory myths of man in a fallen state seeking rejuvenation.]

From what I've been able to determine from my reading of history, human beings had an advanced civilization here on earth - e.g., Tartaria.

[I have seen some Tartaria videos bout how 18th and 19th century building in America was simply the clearing of brush and the restoration of the top levels of more ancient buildings. The arguments generally lean on the small number of “colonists” who supposedly built these edifices. Thus the lie that there were no European slaves in English America when in fact there were millions, serves to buttress this notion. That said, much evidence for Pre-Columbian construction and Bronze Age mining is lying in plain site in North America, denied by academics. See the works of Arlington Mallory.]

It was wiped out and enslaved by the Annunaki/Eloheim/Gods/Titans et al., and reduced to a shadow of what it once was.

[Somehow, I expect the larger Nenderthal brain might be a legacy of a fallen higher race.]

The ancient Talmud texts and Old Testaments refer to dealing with these beings, who were brutal warlords and drug addicts that wanted nothing more than to consume us.

[The complete Book of Enoch, Gilgamesh and the legend of Minos point as well to such a direction.]

Which comes back to the concept of it being easier to destroy than create.

These beings, which may be demons or more likely simply powerful extraterrestrials, have no power to create. They can only destroy. Like Tolkien mentioned:

**“The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real things of its own. I don't think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them.” - J.R.R. Tolkien**

Do these beings consume us (adrenochrome? smoking the abdominal fats of humans and devouring the creative potential of children) to retain their power, even as the natural cycles of the great solar year would cause it to wane?

[Human sacrifice from Abraham down and its gradual decline is an argument for an elite that once openly demanded human children. In Homer and Ovid, the characterization of dragons as machine like, of flying chariots, of titans and gods having ichor for blood that itself is deadly to humanity, the slaying of the python being the most profound, and the various monstrous titans such as the hundred eyed jailer of Io and many-headed hydras sound like distorted memories of fighter jets. Thunderbirds in Amerindian lore, the weight of Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s weapons, and the silver-tongued automatons that assist Hephasteus in his workshop also come to mind as possible muddled recollections or technology.]

[As for fats, consider that the Spanish conquistadors rendered the body fat of Amerindian foes slain in battle, to serve as salves to close their own wounds!]

Supposedly this is the case, that the bronze age collapse was an alien invasion that wiped out our greatest center of our species' development - Atlantis - by sinking it into the sea.

[I favor something like the Younger Dryas Event or the melting ice caps at the start of the Middle Stone Age for accounting for Atlantis. Anthropologist Robert Sepher has done an excellent job tracing Atlantean migration.]

There is spurious evidence to suggest that Atlantis is indeed Antarctica. Hence why it is verboten to visit.

[I have long been suspicious of this and think that H.P. Lovecraft was also.]

If this were the case, and humans descended into a period of darkness, where we were harvested by an oppressive elite of aliens and their chosen servants, it would stand to reason why the world is the way it is.

Apparently, these aliens, the Eloheim (which is where we get the words aloha, hello, etc., from - as a greeting to these beings of power), would travel from world to world, harvesting the creative energy of the host population to fuel their own diminishing power.

They left for some reason when the earth entered the depths of its iron age. It was at this time the greatest of human sacrifices were recorded, such as in Mesoamerica. They were consuming more innocent blood for diminishing returns.

[This is logical reasoning.]

At some point, they left, leaving behind a ruling class to "tend the farm" while they were gone.

This ruling class adopted their policies of blood-drinking, sacrifice, and human farming in anticipation of their masters' return.

As they are aware of this secret of our immortality (the continuous cycle of birth and rebirth), the elite have sought to keep us dense and stupid - in short, to keep us in the dark age and prevent humanity from rising.

[Whatever the origin of our elites, nation state governance methods mostly originate with herding people out of the hinterlands who conquered farming people and domesticated and controlled those farmers according to the principals of animal husbandry [house-binding]. John Keegan in his omnibus History of Warfare points out how nomad horseman achieved victory over civilized armies from 1700 B.C. to A.D.1400 by herding tactics modified for use against human enemies.]

This will not last. We are so much more powerful than we know. It is all smoke and mirrors.

A true brotherhood of humanity would be a force to be reckoned with, and once we learn their technology, we will be able to contest for our own autonomy.

[My cynic heart suspects that we might already—at our upper echelons—become like them.]

As I have stated here before, I am not as nihilistic as you - I don't see humans as being intrinsically evil or self-serving. I think this is a sickness of the soul that corrupts the civilized man.

[Yes, agree and also that nihilism, which is not something I am found of, is a bitter bi-product of our own rulers poisoning our compassion through misuse. Look at how much harm only recently, has been heaped upon us in the name of caring. I see humans as generally neutral in terms of good and evil and note that our rulers’ key method of domestication is to promote evil under the guise of good, which has rendered most police and soldiers for instance, into tools for evil.]

Which is to say, modern humans are steers and heifers being cultivated for the benefit of a parasitic elite - whether human or not.

I believe the most important tool in achieving greatness is - Imaginative Intelligence.

[Is it not telling that imagination is the key target of academia? As it was in the Soviet Union? Even in speculative fiction, a genre which has lost market share over my life time, if one were to write a time travel novel that posited something other than the Grandfather Paradox, few people could tolerate that premise. I have noted that the constant war against conspiracy Theories is an attack on imagination.]

I can perceive a human race built around our best traits - fearless, courageous, and proud.

We were that once, and we will be again.

What would that look like to you?

[I wrote about this in Nightsong of the Nords, final volume of the trilogy that begins with Reverent Chandler, Who Writes the Songs of Night. At this point I suggest a compromise of remnant human traits that have survived our domestication.]

I know how you view it in a primitive setting - as a state of barbarism - but I have only read your dystopias such as Organa - where a single masculine archetype is able to break the slave matrix.

[Of course, that is the dream.]

What would that look like if we were to do it as a species?

[To fulfill our design it must be an extra solar migration, a concept that most scientists and science fiction advocates now regard as impossible. Asimov’s possibilities have been reduced to Phillip K. Dick’s probabilities. That most of our technology is devoted to gossip and pleasure is astounding.]

If we are to spread out and conquer the stars - it will take balls, brain, and brawn.

[It occurs that this is why we are being systematically emasculated across the full spectrum, that our earthly stewards are bound to a pact to keep us grounded, if for no other reason than to prevent our escape from their plantation.]

We are currently slaves to a centralized system of money magic - this will be swept away - I am sure of it. I can see that all we need to do is let the Tower of Babel fester. We must build our own foundation, repositories of knowledge (akin to the Dead Sea Scrolls - or any of these Nepalese monasteries of old books), and we will outlast our oppressors.

[I heartily agree, and I’m not hearty about much.]

I see a decentralized world, of healthy barbarism.

[Honor and courage for instance, come to us exclusively from the barbaric sphere, not from the growing of grain and building of population centers.]

It starts with having healthy people, robust of frame and strong of mind, with free energy, real nutrition, distributed manufacturing, and sound currency.

I do have faith in humanity - not the pond scum of today's people - but of what we were, and what we can be again.

[Homer’s heroes allude to this when they recall their mightier ancestors. Beowulf, when he is mourned by the matrons at his funeral is recognized as the last savior of an embattled race, the 12 princes riding around his tomb at the funeral judged unfit by posterity for the defense of his patrimony.]

What do you think?

[I think, and I feel, that you have written a very compelling case for optimism. I have specifically dealt with your thesis in Holiday Blue, most of which is serialized on this site. Science-Fiction by older authors which has dealt with this concept I list below. Thank you so much Marius.]

Regards,

Marius

…

Sir, as my body fails comprehensively and I have been denied the basic agency of a biped, now crawling on all fours or dragging about like a beached seal, I hope for your brighter visions of the future, rather than mine as seen through a glass darkly.

Marius is the author of a profound book of poetry I reviewed some years ago under the guest authors and book review tags.

Some titles that bear on Marius’ call for hope and/or Atlantis:

-The Magic Goes Away, author forgotten

-Hadon of Ancient Opar, Phillip Jose Farmer

-Hegira, Greg Bear

-The Book of the New Sun, 4 volumes, Gene Wolfe

-Litany of the Long Sun, 4 volumes, Gene Wolfe

-Saga of the Short Sun, 3 volumes, Gene Wolfe

-Jannisaries, Pournelle and a coauthor