We still do not have a clear view of the religion of the 21st Century people of Great Britain. Their habit of recording things only on electronic devices means that all we have preserved are a series of documents in increasingly small formats, dedicated to a protective deity called "The Guardian", and a another set of documents that seemed to have identified the Solar God with naked women.
We know that the Britons had a routine on Sundays of paying homage to their large metallic altars. These they washed and polished, and occasionally stacked them out on the long ritual trackways between their major settlements. But their major ceremonial sites were visited maybe 3 or 4 times a year.
The major festival seems to have been a week after the Winter Solstice, when they carried offerings of evergreen trees to these sites and threw them into large metal ritual containers. We have no idea why they did this.
Their other ritual was to take all kinds of plastic and metal possessions and throw them into similar containers. As far as we can understand, their belief was that these possessions were an offering to an incredibly powerful deity that lived beyond the eastern sun rise, that took these offerings and renewed them. It is is an incredibly powerful illustration of a belief in the possibilities of death and rebirth - of decline and renewal.
But something, it seems, went wrong. The deity decided it did not want the offerings any more, and the worshippers had to keep their oblations to themselves. At the same time, they appear to have entered a time of decline through a cataclysmic event they called "the Brexit". As a result, they hoarded their offerings, often having to patch up clothes using a method called "sewing" which, during their easy times, they had neglected.
And so the British civilisation declined. The ritual sites were no longer used. And the story of the divinity China, which happily took the used belongings of the British and brought them shiny new possessions, sank slowly away beyond the eastern horizon.
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A sound review, but one that is plagued with errors.
ReplyDeleteThe people of early 21st Century Britain were a materialistic lot who placed their faith in money (a form of currency exchanged between individuals and organisations to get things) and being totally free to do just as they liked. There were a few individuals who spoke of some sort of concept of 'community' (whatever that was) and our "Common Life", these people of both genders tended to wear Purple Garments and wear gold or brass ornaments called a Pectoral Cross. They appear to have been served with a group of acolytes, who wore black garments with a very strange afinitty with Canine creatures called a "Dog Collar". The seemed to be tasked to round up individuals a bit like sheep and corral them into buildings on at least one day a week, where they shared rituals, which appear (from historic evidence) to consume human remains? I'm not sure of the efficacy of this, but I understood that it was customary for several thousand years.
Historic evidence points to a gradual decline in this conduct as the older members of the adherents to these customs died out and were ritually burned in a sort of site akin to a 'Barbie' (a customs that lasted for several generations) attended by more ritual. But the custom became obsolete when the laws on recycling everything in the 23rd Century mean that disposal of remains were now by evaporation and an apparent send upwards on a Ladder towards the clouds.
Off course, all of this is surmise, because all records of the actual event were destroyed by the great fire of Earth in 2455 caused by our Martian ancestors arriving on clouds of and with some strange four headed beasts.
Nowadays, we pop up to Jerusalem or the Holy Mountain and pay our respects by lighting a fag and smoking the remains of our immediate predecessors in life, while ensuring any usable body parts are put into their replacement androids. Isn't history interesting? Particularly when it is about people doing stuff that we can't really imagine without laughing.