Long ago, in the sands of ancient Egypt, a god stood proudly before a mythical pharaoh, convinced he had given humanity its greatest gift. This was Thoth, the god of wisdom, and he had just unveiled the wondrous craft of writing.
“Look at the gift that I am giving Humanity,” Thoth proclaimed. He argued that writing was a “wonderful thing” that would allow people to “preserve so much that you would otherwise lose”.
But the pharaoh, surveying this new technology, offered a terrifying prophecy instead of praise.
“No,” the pharaoh replied, “you have not given us a wonderful gift”. Instead, he declared, “You have destroyed the art of memory”. The pharaoh feared that because of this invention, people “will forget everything”. Worse still, he predicted that “words will roam free around the world not accompanied by any wise advice to set them into context”.
This ancient myth speaks directly to the profound shift that occurs when a culture adopts the written word and, consequently, begins to “gradually lose your memory”.
The Art of Preserving the Stars
For civilizations that thrived on oral traditions, the memory was not merely a personal skill but the primary vehicle for preserving complex knowledge across generations. Such cultures were able to preserve information for very long periods of time.
This deep-seated need for cultural memory was especially true for ancient astronomers and storytellers who gazed nightly upon the majesty of the heavens. They tracked cosmic events that unfold far too slowly to be observed within a single human lifetime.
The most astonishing of these observations was the precession of the equinoxes. This slow, majestic cycle results from the Earth’s “wobble” on its axis. This process is so glacial that the entire cycle—the time it takes for the constellations of the zodiac to shift back through their positions—takes roughly 25,920 years.
To observe this cycle, one must track the shift of just one degree every 72 years. This difficulty means that the knowledge had to be carefully passed on.
Encoding Knowledge in Myth
It appears that some ancient culture, identified by scholars as an “almost unbelievable ancestor culture,” worked out the entire process of precession. To ensure this data survived the passage of millennia, they used the most effective vehicle available: the great story.
Human beings love stories, and by encoding complex information—such as the astronomical data of precession—into myths, the knowledge could be preserved, even if the storyteller themselves did not fully understand the underlying science.
This ancient, ancestral knowledge was disseminated worldwide, embedded within a specific system of pressional numbers. The governing number is 72, derived directly from the rate of precession. Related numbers include 108 (72 + 36) and 54 (108 divided by 2).
These specific numbers recur throughout global mythology, suggesting a single common source for this ancestral knowledge:
- In the ancient Egyptian myth of the god Osiris, there were 72 conspirators involved in his killing.
- The Rig Veda, a sacred text, contains references to the massive cycle number of 432,000, which is a direct multiple of 72.
- At Angkor Thom in Cambodia, the bridge depicts figures holding the serpent Vuki, churning the Milky Ocean. There are 54 figures on each side, totaling 108 (a pressional number).
Thus, the knowledge of the stars was protected not by stone tablets or papyrus scrolls, but by the very mechanism the pharaoh sought to save: the art of memory. By treating myths and ancient traditions seriously, we can unlock the information preserved by those who understood that the greatest library resides not on a shelf, but within the faithful repetition of a carefully constructed tale.