LOST LESSONS
From dusk to dawn, year after solar year for interminable aeons down the tunnel of time, successive generations of the priestly caste of ancient Egyptian astronomers – known as the Followers of Horus – stared into the star-studded night sky, observing the constellations of the Milky Way until the glare of the rising sun’ s rays made further vigil futile. To the distant barking of crocodiles they studied the celestial bodies as they wheeled across the equinoctial skies and, like prophets to the uninitiated, learned to predict the annual flood of the Nile while recording the subtle progress of the unrelenting precessional drift in what we now refer to as the myths of Ra, Osiris, Thoth and Seth; even to be found, so it is said, in the hieroglyphics of the Book of the Dead. Some believe that wed to and embodied in these annals are messages warning posterity of cataclysms which accompany periodic changes and shifts in the Earth’ s axis, archaic faxes from history’ s infancy. As epochs passed, time blunted memory of previous catastrophes; frescoes faded, parchment crumbled, archives were looted and lost; inquiry and scrutiny degenerated into ritual re-enacted without comprehension until, when the Priest of Neith told Solon about the loss of Atlantis, his words were dismissed as fantasy, their origin and import long forgotten … Now, as the earth quakes underfoot, the lessons must be learnt anew.