This month’s speaker is Howard Young, founder of the Princeton Framework, and an independent researcher focused on the story of human knowledge. His talk for us is titled “Mythology is Not Nonsense.”
Taken literally, mythology appears rooted more deeply in human imagination rather than in facts and lived experiences. Being proposed here is that mythological themes were instead founded during the last Ice Age in a most ancient form of ritual communication about the sky. Evolutionary advantage was gained with an understanding, even a vague one, of the sun, moon, planets and stars. People living at the end of the Ice Age witnessed huge cosmic bursts followed by giant tsunamis across the globe. Such incidents were themselves memorialized in rituals before, generations later, early artists and authors tried to make sense of any older, ritualized, accounts which had survived. Understanding this change from ritual to writing opens the door for a fresh insight into ancient myths and the religions which followed.
Howard read a 2007 academic paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) by Richard Firestone et al, documenting a huge cosmic burst over North America and Northern Europe, occurring around 12,850 years ago that resulted in the breakup of the last Ice Age and the re-writing of the world’s coastlines and climate. This paper reinforced his views on the origin of mythology, with common cataclysmic themes shared across many cultures, and prompted him to begin writing and presenting his thoughts and ideas to critical free-thinking audiences.
Additional reading:
An Immense Mystery Older Than Stonehenge
A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea
This meeting requires advance registration.
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYqcOyspjwuGtGLcIGY0SqhXF3gwOiESb4E
After registering, you’ll receive a confirmation email with the link to join the meeting.
Come early and join us for social time at 1:00 pm (the Zoom confirmation start time will say 1:00).
The program will start at 1:30 pm.
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Published on 1/11/22