Is Time an Art Form?

Would a new calendar establish the basis for a harmonic future?

King Arthur and the twelve knights of the Round Table, like Jesus and his twelve disciples, or Quetzalcoatl and his twelve companion gods, all conceal a calendrical puzzle.

In recent newsletters, I reviewed some ideas from Jose Arguelles who wrote The Mayan Factor, Earth Ascending, and other books. He was an inspiration for 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. One central focus of Arguelles’ research was the calendar. He proposed that the calendar is deeply significant — a foundational tool or technology — even though we generally overlook this.

We tend to think of calendars as superfluous, unimportant. But our calendar defines how we, as a community, relate to time and space. Our method of keeping time is intrinsic to our consciousness.

Arguelles called the calendar a “meta-programming device for the human mind.” He saw the calendar we use today, the Gregorian, as an instrument for chaos and disharmony because it disconnects us from natural cycles. Months were meant to be “moon-ths” originally. But Gregorian months have an arbitrary number of days and ignore the lunar cycles.

A “Post-Technological” World?

Jose also predicted that the future would be “post-technological.” I know this is hard to imagine from where we are now. What did he mean?

“Post-technology,” to me, suggests a range of possible outcomes. A systemic collapse of post-industrial civilization might lead to a circumstance where those who survive the crash revert to the human-scaled technologies of the Middle Ages or earlier, as a survival imperative. This is what peak oil theorist James Howard Kunstler and dark ecologist Paul Kingsnorth predict will happen, more or less, over the next few hundred years, as we run out of energy and resources.

Rather than a fast or slow burn-out, we could choose to build a more resilient, post-technological world.