Megaliths for the New Age

On building the new calendrical broadcast.

If our current civilization has any megalithic structures, it’s not obvious what or where they are. We don’t have any new pyramids; there are no new Stonehenges constructed to glorify the equinoctial movements; even the mysterious sculptures/constructions that do appear out of nowhere are eventually revealed to be transient art projects. It may seem that current society has lost preoccupation with building enormous, enigmatic monuments, but that’s not entirely true. It’s not that megaliths aren’t being built today, it’s that they possess a certain condition of hyperobjectivity—that is to say, they are not as easily recognized as the megaliths of thousands of years ago.

Megaliths are those architectural feats such as the Great Pyramids, Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, Gobekli Tepe, etc. They are stone structures built by prehistoric civilizations that are incomprehensibly massive in scale and enigmatic to contemplate. They are also most notably designed to reify the astronomical patterns of the celestial luminaries and other planets. To build a megalith is to expend inordinate amounts of human energy. Archaeologists have, for centuries, attempted to understand what different megaliths around the globe are for and how they were built. The mysteries of the megaliths are a compounding phenomena that turn up with every new excavation more questions than answers—no matter how sophisticated our archaeological technology becomes. At this point, it is far more plausible to say that megaliths have so many uses that they are not necessarily for any one utilitarian purpose, but rather they function as megastructures by which a civilization orients itself in a particular epoch.

The sphinx / pyramids / Gobekli Tepe / Teotihuacan megaliths are notable for their sheer size, mystery, and celestially alignment. The megastructures of our current era will not resemble these previous-age monuments in appearance, but they do possess the same conditional characteristics: built with exorbitant amounts of energy expenditure, longevity beyond the civilization that built it, and ability to tell time.

Megalithic structures are built for the express purpose of defining an era, situating human society in a particular time and place to acknowledge the epoch we are collectively experiencing. Megalithic super-structures are gargantuan feats of human energy and ability that are meant to outlast the groups that build them. They are meant to witness the extended time horizon of an era in the stead of people with relatively minuscule lifetimes. Our civilizational megastructures are built to glorify the era that we will not live to see to completion.

Diagram of the celestial alignments of Serpent Mound.

Accepting this premise, there remains, still, a question about why a human civilization would need a megalithic structure to situate itself in a given era. The answer lies in astrology and the observance of the precession of the equinoxes. Humanity lives by the consistency of the luminaries—the Sun and Moon—because they are the life force upon which our survival depends. The agrarian man lives by the rhythms of the Sun, both daily and seasonal, but stretching further back before humanity widely adopted farming, the hunter gatherers had to have lived by the lunar cycle for strategic hunting. Societies build themselves around the forces that are bigger than they are out of respect and homage. Usually, the megastructures of prior eras are constructed to align with the Sun, and, in particular, the Sun during the solstices and equinoxes. Serpent Mound and the Great Pyramids are the most notable examples of these celestial alignments. 

Moreover, it has been theorized that these alignments also correspond to different astrological ages, which is determined by the precession of the equinoxes (AKA axial precession). The equinoxes do not occur at fixed points in space, and, in fact, we are approaching a time when the true first day of Spring in the northern hemisphere will occur around February 20th every year. The exaggerated time horizon of the precession of the equinox makes it nearly impossible for people to observe, and this is why megalithic structures are built: to tell time that lasts beyond a single human’s, or a single generation’s perception. Unfortunately, the precession of the equinox is now totally imperceptible to us because of our abandonment of the old Julian calendar. This simply means that it’s now more important than ever to build up new megastructures to acknowledge where we are in the precessional shift that occurs with or without our calendrical knowledge.

Precession—Ancestors and Archetypes. Iona Miller.

The building of these megastructures are not always conscious, or, rather, it’s more likely that the coming epochal shift is being collectively channeled into the building. This brings us back to the question at hand: what is/are the megastructure(s) of our current age?

In the 1960s and 70s, the popular New Age hypothesis about the dawning of the Age of Aquarius was put forth as an idea that we are collectively shifting into a new era of civilization. According to Earth’s axial precession—the movement of Earth’s axis that shifts the autumnal and vernal equinoxes in relation to the fixed star constellations of our solar system—we are on the precipice of a new age, defined by the zodiacal constellations and understood from ancient texts to be the Age of Aquarius. And so, this new age requires of us a new megalithic super-structure to situate us firmly in our the Aquarian context. That megalith is Bitcoin. 

 Bitcoin is energy transmuted into a rare material. It is a structure made up of blocks that are organized according to a strict format and binary encoding. Beyond the allegorical similarities, Bitcoin is also megalithic in the sense that it places us squarely in the Age of Aquarius. Aquarius, according to the Ancients, is the sign of the collective; and Aquarius according to our modern interpretation, is the sign of the network. The Age of Aquarius will be known as the era of decentralization: society ruled by collectives that are bound together by the networks in which they participate.

It’s fun to speculate about the pseudonymous identity of Satoshi Nakamoto and whether or not he was some hermetic/gnostic genius who was anticipating the Age of Aquarius, but it’s not likely that Bitcoin is being built with the express intention of playing the role of our age’s megalith. This goes back to the idea that megastructures are almost always channeling the zeitgeist, and those who build are not necessarily aware of the larger purpose these monuments will serve. As the Earth’s axis takes us to a place of perfect networked coalescence, we are carried toward that collective fate through a preoccupation with decentralized, nodal ways of being. Energy flows toward building the perfect participatory network. The perfection will likely not be reached by those of us living today, but eventually it will and it will also outlast all of us. To those living a thousand years from now—those who will be so immersed that they won’t even know they are fish in water—the decentralized protocol will serve as the wayfinding monument to the epoch.

Image of South American polygonal masonry contrasted with an image of a Bitcoin block just after being mined.

Hear more of this discussion on Hell Money Podcast’s Bitcoin Is a Megastructure.