But the date also served as both the inspiration for the title of my blog, and also for the theme of this first posting. Long before the Mayan calendar hysteria started, I had often pondered just what we would want to leave to posterity if we knew that the end of human civilization was imminent. What enduring artifacts would we like to leave behind - perhaps for some distant future (and possibly non-human) civilization to discover and ponder? What would we want these to say about us, and the type of existence that we had? Would there be some type of final lesson that we would want to bequeath to a future civilization - a lesson perhaps that we had wished we had learnt much sooner?
The lesson might be a negative one, along the lines of: "We messed up. And here's how we did it. Don't repeat these mistakes!" Or it might be a positive one, highlighting the things that we thought were the most glorious aspects of our collective existence. Perhaps there would even be positive lessons to leave behind: prescriptions for how future societies (and individuals) can find the truly good life and what comprise genuinely important and meaningful goals. We might set our sights a little lower, and decide instead to leave behind a "time capsule" with summary characteristics of our collective experience and accumulated knowledge, preserved in some relatively translatable form (like the maps, mathematical symbols, and "Sounds of Earth" recordings put into the interstellar Voyager probes in 1977).
I am certain that, if we truly do want to leave behind a legacy for future posterity, it will have to be an intentional one. The sobering lessons from the Life After People television programs have been that the physical evidences of our existence on Earth will begin to fade from the moment that our civilization ends, and, in geologic time, will almost certainly be destined to disappear entirely. Even within the relatively tiny timespan that makes up human existence, there have been civilizations which have risen and fell, and all but faded from the memory of later generations. As an Egyptian temple priest once explained to the Greek lawgiver Solon, more than two thousand years ago:
Whereas just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the other requisites of civilized life, after the usual interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education, and so you have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either amongst us or among yourselves.
We flatter ourselves that the progress of our own civilization has given it a firmer hold on posterity, but I suspect that its accumulated knowledge and memory, too, could easily succumb to an extensive disaster or series of disasters, whether natural or man-made. And then the survivors of only a few generations later, upon encountering scattered physical evidences of the technical marvels which had been possessed by this "lost civilization", might regard them, uncomprehendingly, as the characters did in the science fiction novel A Canticle for Liebowitz : religious relics which possess supernatural or symbolic power.
If, then, some civilization wanted to preserve a message for future posterity - something that would endure the ravages of time, and that could be interpreted by a future civilization, perhaps populated with a people (or species) completely unlike those that made up its own - how would it do so? The message would probably have to be simple - perhaps relying upon mathematical or other symbols - but also substantive: it would have to "mean" something - carry something of real value to its future recipients. A lesson, a warning, a revelation.
Of course, there have been legends in our own past of civilizations, secret societies, or religious fraternities that have attempted to do exactly that. Some have suggested that the monoliths which are scattered throughout our planet, such as the pyramids, are examples of attempts at such simple, but enduring messages. The title that I have selected for this blog is another example, on a smaller scale: the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus. Legend has it that Hermes Trismegistus was a prophet - of Egyptian or even Atlantean origin - who became a god through the wisdom that he had acquired. The Emerald Tablet - ascribed to him - purports to contain fundamental alchemical secrets within its thirteen to fifteen simple verses.
I don't begin to claim that the Emerald Tablet is a legitimate example of the preservation of lost or arcane wisdom. Alchemy has had a perennial allure to minds who hunger after hidden knowledge, but it is no doubt rife with chicanery, as so many (if not all) of these purported "secret doctrines" are. But still, I am tantalized by the idea that a medium not unlike this one might be our own recourse, someday, should we ever feel that our collective time on earth is drawing to an end.
And so, at the purported end of an epoch in human civilization, and (I hope) the beginning of a new one, I think it fitting to raise the question, which may very well be a recurring theme in future posts on this blog: What is our central message - what is it that we would like the unknown (and perhaps distant heirs) to our civilization to learn from our experience? And, of equally critical importance - how do we convey it?
