Sunset on Eden

Short Story by David Guthrie ©2009

 

The Eden Lectures Year 5MM207

Professor Murna Martin, Professor of First Age Studies, University of Kaitaia

Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, distinguished guests, lades and gentlemen.  It is indeed an honour to be invited to deliver this tenth Eden Lecture. However, in addressing the subject, Sunset on Eden, I do hold out a challenge to the title of the lecture series itself. When the Eden chair was endowed by President Varo it was the universal perception that the First Age was a time of humanity’s ‘eden’, a time of wondrous perfection. My research over the past decade, however, dispels this as an illusion. The sunset that came upon the First Age was a product of the profound faults inherent in that age. Believe me, it was no Eden. We were guilty of romanticisation based on inadequate understanding and information. This lecture, I hope will go some way to redressing the balance of judgment without denigrating the achievements of that age.

It is extraordinary for us living today that until 100 years ago on this day we knew nothing at all of the first age of humanity – not even of its existence. That it was a sophisticated society, with a degree of knowledge exceeding in many areas that which we ourselves had developed over one hundred thousand years came as an even greater shock. The book that was found in a perfect state of preservation was, at first dismissed as a fake, premised on the basis that the technology clearly evident in its production displayed features that we knew nothing about. It could not possibly have been the work of primitive humans, as its finders maintained. Nevertheless, the script challenged scholars even in their scepticism. It took ten years to translate: the publication of the transcript rocked the very foundations of our society. 

For many years the book was dismissed as a forgery. Such an age obviously never existed, for no other evidence of it had ever surfaced. As we did uncover evidence and documentary material from the age, shock piled on shock. Most profound has been the discovery that our culture, religion and values are all rooted in those of the First Age. We date our Second Age to the vision and charisma of St Winston of Brisbane, bishop of that small group of settlements. For at least the last ten thousand years, the scholarly consensus indicated that the message he preached, the stories he told, the values he maintained and the episcopal order he established, eventually world-wide, were either his complete creative invention or else rooted in folk legend with no base in historical reality. So the discovery in the high country of continental New Zealand (forgive me if I use First Age geographical terminology) of “The Bible” came as a culture-shock beyond imagining. The controversy that raged for thirty years around its authenticity arose because we could simply not believe that it could possibly be real. That a society of humans existed in the form described in its pages was shock enough. Once its authenticity was established beyond question, we had to come to terms with the realisation that our episcopal tradition had been maintained for around 400,000 years without writing, bishop succeeding bishop passing on the tradition so accurately that it was still both recognisable and in all essentials intact when it emerged into the light of our own age. These millennia we had always assumed to be a time of the ‘Darkness’, devoid of the light of knowledge. Instead, it was a time when key knowledge and traditions were conserved and protected and always, through everything, with a faith that assured each generation that there would come a time when the darkness ended and the light would dawn.

Once we became convinced that the book was genuine, the search began for more evidence that such a culture existed. For twenty years nothing at all came to light. Most of this searching focused on the northern hemisphere. We now know that hundreds of millennia of ice many kilometres thick has obliterated even the most minute of evidence of such a culture in the north. Although archaeologists have uncovered sites and artefacts now in the more temperate southern hemisphere, it was not until we recognised the central significance of New Zealand that the breakthrough occurred as material of monumental importance came to light, revolutionising even further our understanding of that age. Why New Zealand? It was this question that first called me into the field of First Age studies.

The significance of New Zealand cannot be underestimated for without its evidence we would have remained permanently in the dark about the existence of this age, or, had we uncovered the other archaeological sites, we would have been unable to understand their importance or interpret what they were saying to us. That New Zealand gifted us this understanding and interpretation was due to an accident of geography. It is important for us to realise that the geographical shape of the planet as we know it today differs markedly from that experienced during the First Age. Australia was an island continent, unjoined to the Indian subcontinent, while New Zealand, which at the time lay quite close to Australia, had not yet risen to be a continent but was a chain of islands. This explains why the discoveries are being made only on the high country areas of the continent.

Gradually, over these past fifty years, we have been able to piece together a comprehensive picture of the progression of the First Age the commencement of which we date now to the emergence of what proved to be its only successful culture, lasting all but a brief period at the end of the age – a span of 52,000 years by our reckoning – that developed on the Australian continent. The fact that we now date our years from this commencement of the First Age and refer to ourselves as the Second Age is testimony itself to the impact of the discoveries. So the First Age lasted approximately 52,000 years. However, it only came to be technologically sophisticated, and produce the amazing array of wisdom, insight and knowledge it accumulated, over the last five thousand of those years. It reached its peak of power, wealth, knowledge and sophistication at the start of the fifty third millennium – then disappeared totally within the space of a mere decade or two: disappeared not only abruptly but entirely with only one exception. Almost immediately, and with a speed unparalleled in our geological experience, the Great Ice Age gripped the planet, lasting 400,000 years until the emergence of our own Age. When I commenced my research it was the universal viewpoint that it was the Great Ice Age itself that brought the First Age to an end. This thesis did not satisfy me. The ice age, even geologically rapid as it was, could not have formed so quickly as to prevent at least some adaptation to the conditions. Furthermore, it did not explain haw it came about that the culture disappeared at exactly the same time everywhere, including areas not then or since touched by the ice. As I gathered the evidence in the light of the findings from New Zealand, two facts became clearly evident: first, the end preceded the ice age; second, that the end was a direct product of the age’s own actions and not a failure to adapt to a changing climate. Looking over the progression, it is now apparent that the age was doomed from the time it developed its civilisations and could not, under any circumstances, have existed very much longer than it did.

I consider this the most important and timely of all my findings for, in the way a pendulum always swings, from outright rejection our people have gone to enamoured embrace, romanticising the First Age as humanity’s golden era, perfect and unsullied by all the stresses and strains of our contemporary existence. In reality, the First Age was a global disaster. It not only brought about its own destruction, but also pulled down most of the planet with it. Today, only six species of mammal remain that existed at that time; only 3% overall of our fauna and 10% of our flora are direct descendants of the vast abundance that existed during the First Age. Many were wiped out by the actions of the First Age cultures even before it extinguished itself. As graphic evidence of creatures we had never imagined came to light, I grieved constantly over what richness has been denied to us. To be real, the First Age was not one of gold but of lead – inducing lead poisoning over the whole planet.

To say this is not to disparage the magnificence of their creations, the awesome extent of their knowledge that even today far exceeds our own. The values, the wisdom and the very faith we hold is come to us as transmitted by the church through the countless generations of the Darkness, and without that transmission our age may never have come into being, or, had it done so, would be unrecognisably different to what we know and treasure. What we owe the First Age is immeasurable. Yet the knowledge that has come to us from New Zealand may be confronting us with the biggest challenge of our 100,000 year history and contain seeds that could end in our own destruction. I am constantly reminded of the mythological story found at the beginning of The Bible, of eating of the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

My research began, as I indicated earlier, with my interest in why it was that New Zealand was the only place from which significant evidence was arising. It became apparent that social life continued on these islands for nearly a century after it disappeared in every other part of the world. The geographical fact was that these islands were the most isolated seat of significant settlement of any part of the world and, in addition, was fertile enough to maintain for a lengthy period what was, for that time, a relatively small population. Through its isolation it avoided the worst of the catastrophes that decimated all other parts of the planet. In evaluating the significance of what happened in these islands we do have to take into account that it was the church that acted to preserve records and comment on what was happening both locally and globally, so that the picture of what emerges must be evaluated as being from one particular perspective and biased to its own actions and achievements. We do not possess any archives that counterbalance those left to us by the church. That said, we know that its episcopal leadership had the vision and confidence in the future to recognise that the knowledge and wisdom accumulated during their age needed preservation for a future new beginning, so they committed vast quantities of material into sealed archives. Tragically, most of their work has perished. They could not have foreseen both the length of time that would lie ahead until conditions were possible for their recovery, nor the geological developments that were to occur in their region. That any records survived at all is both fortunate and a tribute to the quality of their actions.

Not only did the New Zealand bishops ensure the preservation of records: it is now clear that it was their actions that enabled the church’s order and tradition to be maintained through the Darkness. It appears, that at the time of the crisis, the church was splintered into two principal Episcopal organizations and a myriad of other independent or semi-independent sects of which nothing now is known.  In addition to the church, there were many other religious systems, so that there was no social cohesion, a fact that may underlie the inability of the societies to respond to the very obvious challenges they faced at a global level. At the crisis, though, the two Episcopal divisions put aside their differences and became one body, committed to sustaining their society and preparing for the Darkness that  descended on the planet.

All this is by way of preliminary remarks, setting the stage for the development of my topic for this lecture: Sunset on Eden.

What I have to relate to you has emerged only over the last eighteen months as key texts have been translated. Much is still unclear, but we can now, with confidence, provide at least the outline and sequence of events.  By the beginning of the fifty-third millennium, as stated earlier, the age was already a setting sun. We cannot conceive today of the number of humans inhabiting the planet, a number many factors beyond what the planet could have sustained for even a short period longer. Then, additionally, it was a rampantly greedy society, celebrating consumption for its own sake, measuring its success, in fact, by the extent of its consumption even though the awareness existed that in doing so it was destroying its own future. In our terms it was a fundamentally unethical society, unjust to its roots, exhausting both non-renewable resources with complete abandonment and utilising renewable resources at a faster rate than they could be renewed.  In its last stages, the age built its golden era upon the exploitation of a plentiful and easily obtained source of energy, but one that was non-renewable. It became so dependent upon this resource, oil from fossils, that, when the supply was cut off, the entire society imploded. This, however, is to get ahead of the story. There is one final element that was to make its end final. In addition to oil, it is now apparent that this society had discovered some form of energy at present unknown to us, something of gigantic power but exceedingly dangerous. It is a matter of deep concern to me, as I hope it shall be to you all at the conclusion of my address, that our own scientists have begun the quest of this power source for our own use.

To understand the trigger that set off the disaster we must realise that it was a world dominated by two large empires, one on the Eurasian continent and one on the American continent. All trace of the Eurasian empire has disappeared. We do not know its extent, whether it occupied the whole or only part of the continent, even where its heartland lay. The Empire on the American continent has likewise vanished completely insofar as its homeland is concerned and again, we do not know its extent. However, archaeological discoveries reveal that the empire extended over most of the planet outside Eurasia and may even have occupied parts of Eurasia. We know it boasted that it controlled fifty states which would indicate its global reach. It was extremely powerful and wealthy but during its final years was governed by militarists.

In contrast, the Eurasian empire seems during these closing decades to have been much the weaker of the two, less wealthy and certainly did not have a global empire. It was this imbalance, however, that provided the trigger for the final collapse of the First Age. The terrible power referred to earlier could be converted into weaponry of stupefying destructiveness and the empires had the capacity, apparently, to deliver this explosive anywhere on earth. There had been a period during which the threat of this kind of warfare had receded but, in an effort to extend its power and influence, the weaker empire resurrected the threat. It may well have been a bluff but the militarists in the American empire, who appear at the time to have been loosing their grip on power, took advantage of the situation to consolidate their control and focussed all the energy and resources of their empire in an arms race to maintain dominance. The cost of this action and the diversion of resources exacerbated the other weaknesses in the empire and the economy imploded, this happening across the entire world and affecting even the Eurasian empire. Billions of people were made poor while the militarist elite became vastly richer, their extravagant lifestyle setting off a massive revolt in which large numbers of the elite were slaughtered and their wealth looted.

In an attempt to put an end to this revolt, which was affecting both empires, their leaderships at first adopted brutal methods of suppression but when this failed, agreed secretly between them to commence what was meant to be a phoney war against each other for control of the Arctic region which was rich in untapped resources. The intent was to divert the attention of their peoples towards nationalistic fervour and away from the internal strife. However, by the very nature of the political arrangement, the military leaders themselves were not made aware of the real strategy and very quickly the Arctic War became real and deadly.

Ironically, though, the original aim was successful as indeed the populations in both warring camps focused on the conflict and ceased the revolt against the elites. What the empire leaders did not calculate on, however, was that the success was so dramatic that in all other parts of the globe governments took the same line of action. Localised conflict erupted in almost every part of the planet. All form of international order broke down, including trade – and most significantly, all commerce in oil.

At this point occurred a dramatic shift in the global balance of power. The American empire was totally dependant on the international traffic of oil. At the point when this traffic ceased, that empire had expended all its reserves in the conflict and underwent complete paralysis, economically and militarily. On the other had, the Eurasian empire was rich in oil resource within its own borders. In rapid time it inflicted a decisive and humiliating defeat on its rival and became the dominant power. The American empire dissolved in chaos, dragging down its global dependants with it. Oil became a commodity unobtainable at any price for most of the world.

While this was to seal the fate of the First Age, it also facilitated the preservation of the records that have come to light in the last generation in New Zealand. Remote as it was, New Zealand became isolated from the rest of the globe. It remained, however, in electronic communication so continued to be aware of what was happening outside its waters.

Panic now seized the global population as disease, famine and social disintegration caused deaths that were in the millions daily. Cities everywhere became unliveable as all utilities broke down and violence rampant. Among these utilities were hundreds of power plants that utilised the energy behind the weaponry. Although many, perhaps most, were shut down safely, dozens in various parts of the world simply failed, with catastrophic results. It was this that brought about the demise of the Eurasian empire and the end of all order. These events explain why, even today, high levels of radioactivity in many parts of the northern hemisphere have made substantial areas unable to support normal life. It is clear that even had the Great Ice Age not intervened, most of the northern hemisphere of the planet would not have been habitable for several hundred thousand years.

Evidence of what happened from this point onwards is unclear because all communication ceased between New Zealand and the outside world. So far as we can piece together evidence from outside New Zealand, it does appear that some form of deadly disease, possibly released from experimental laboratories killed off all or most of the remaining global population. It seems that New Zealand escaped this final blow for at least a century, at which time, when radical disease did appear, it was in a much weaker form and allowed a remnant population to continue. That the latitudes not covered in ice did gradually repopulate over the next 400,000 years is known, but it is uncertain whether this arose from indigenous remnants or migration from New Zealand.  That the core tradition developed in New Zealand was to become universal in all parts of the globe prior to the beginning of our age may indicate the latter option.

Whatever the scenario, what is now apparent is that a tiny population of humans, living under extreme conditions maintained a precious tradition against all odds, sustained by a strong and vibrant religious hope and a church that maintained its order throughout the vast length of time to the beginning of our own age, seeding us with all our central beliefs, values and basic knowledge. We today, are the beneficiaries of their wisdom, faith and determination to both survive and transmit their precious tradition. What is extraordinary is that they never lost their faith in the future, and because of that, we are what we are now.
Without question, the new evidence emerging now almost daily will reveal more detail about the First Age and its sunset years. It is a near-miracle that we can even use the imagery of sunset with its corollary of sunrise, a sunrise that may have taken 400,000 years to happen but did happen. As we learn more of the First Age we are also alerted to issues and trends present in our Second Age that could bring us to a sunset time if we do not learn the lessons of that remote past. However, above all else, we now look back on that age with profound thanksgiving for without their achievements what we now have may never have come to pass.

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