The Destruction of Knowledge

As our technology has gotten more advanced, we have become able to look into the future and into outer space with a view different from that of scientists and thinkers earlier in this century. Similarly, we are now able to look at the past with greater insight and technological know-how. Just as our minds have been able to imagine a future different from that which our grandfathers could envision, we are also able to see a past different from that of the scientists and experts of the turn of the century.

Just as our scope of the universe has been pushed back to the farthest reaches of space, we are now in a position to push back to the farthest reaches of history. And many researchers are doing just that. Atlantis, with its advanced culture, is named in ancient texts. To begin with, it is mentioned in Plato’s dialogues (taken from ancient Egyptian records according to the text), and nearly every ancient culture in the world has myths and legends of an ancient world-before and the cataclysm that destroyed it. The Mayans, Aztecs, and Hopis believed in the destruction of four or more worlds before our own. The destruction of Atlantis may not even be the most recent cataclysm to befall the earth.

The most widely-known books in the world such as the Bible, the Mahabharata, the Koran and even the Tao Te Ching all speak of cataclysms and ancient civilizations that were destroyed. Ancient civilizations and stories about them filled thousands, even hundreds of thousands of volumes of books that were kept in libraries around the world in ancient times. Many ancient libraries were so huge that they were famous among local historians. The library at Alexandria is a well-known example.

Sadly, it is a fact that throughout history, huge archives and libraries have been purposely destroyed. According to the famous astronomer Carl Sagan, a book entitled ‘The True History of Mankind Over the Last 200,000 Years’ once existed and was housed in the great library in Alexandria, Egypt. Unfortunately, this book, along with thousands of others, was burned by fanatical Christians in the third century AD. Any volumes which they might have missed were burned by the Moslems to heat baths a few hundred years later.

All ancient Chinese texts were ordered destroyed in 212 BC by Emperor Chi Huang Ti, the builder of the famous Great Wall of China. Vast amounts of ancient texts—virtually everything pertaining to history, philosophy, and science—were seized and burnt. Whole libraries, including the royal library, were destroyed. Some of the works of Confucius and Mencius were included in this destruction of knowledge.

Fortunately, some books survived because people hid them in various underground caves, and many works were hidden in Taoist temples where they are even now religiously kept and preserved.

The Spanish conquistadors destroyed every Mayan codex that they found. Out of many thousands of Mayan books found by the Spanish, only three or four are known to exist today. Like the fanatical Christian sects of the third century and Emperor Chi Huang Ti in the second century BC, the conquistadors wanted to erase all knowledge of the past and the records preserved it.

Europe and the Mediterranean were plunged into the infamous Dark Ages when the Christian church first split after a series of church councils, beginning with the council of Nicaea in 325 AD. The last Patriarch of the early Christian church, Nestorius, was deposed at the Council of Ephesus in 431 AD He was banished to Libya and the Nestorian church moved eastward. The dispute concerned the early Christian doctrine of reincarnation and the idea that Christ had a dual nature: Jesus was a Master while Christ was the Archangel Melchizedek.

In the aftermath of this struggle, all books in the Byzantine Empire were ordered destroyed except for a newly edited version of the Bible that the Catholic Church was issuing. The library at Alexandria was destroyed at this time, and the great mathematician and philosopher Hypatia was dragged from her chariot by a mob and torn to pieces. The mob went on to bum the library. Thus, the suppression of science and knowledge, particularly of the ancient past, began in earnest.

Knowledge has been suppressed throughout the last 2,000 years. It is sometimes said that history is written by the winners of wars, rather than the losers; given the amount of known war-oriented political propaganda still popular as “history” in this century, we should consider much of ancient history in this light.

Given this suppression, it is astonishing that the few ancient texts that have survived do indeed speak of advanced civilizations and the cataclysms that destroyed them. Similarly, they talk of wise people who lived in harmony with the earth and the natural workings of all things. But at some time in the distant past, man fell out of harmony with nature, and a catastrophe struck the whole earth.

We can see here a startling parallel between the ancient Atlantis “myth” and the situation that modern man now finds himself in. Will modem man survive his own technology and tribalism, or will he destroy himself in the natural workings of his destructive practices and disharmony with the Earth?

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