Secret_History

Chapter 1: The Nature of the Quest 39
Another solution was to fill up the entire zone with messages in all known
languages and semiotic systems, reasoning that it was statistically probable that at
least one of these messages would be comprehensible to the future visitors. Even if
only part of one of the messages was decipherable, it would still act as a sort of
Rosetta stone, allowing the visitors to translate all the rest. Yet even this solution
presupposed a form of cultural continuity, however weak it would be.
The only remaining solution was to institute a sort of ‘priesthood‘ of nuclear
scientists, anthropologists, linguists and psychologists supposed to perpetuate itself
by co-opting new members. This caste would keep alive the knowledge of the
danger, creating myths and legends about it. Even though, in the passage of time,
these ‘priests’ would probably lose a precise notion of the peril that they were
committed to protect humanity from, there would still survive, even in a future state
of barbarism, obscure but efficacious taboos.
It is curious to see that, having been presented with a choice of various types of
universal language, the choice finally fell on a ‘narrative’ solution, thus reproposing
what REALLY DID HAPPEN MILLENNIA AGO (my emphasis).
Egyptian has disappeared, as well as any other perfect and holy primordial
language, and what remains of all this is only myths, tales without a code, or whose
code has long been lost. Yet they are still capable of keeping us in a state of vigil in
our desperate effort at decipherment. 24
It is extraordinarily significant to me that Eco has suggested so clearly here the
idea that our ancient ancestors may have been faced with the knowledge of a very
great peril to mankind and “brain-stormed” for a solution as to how to transmit this
information to future generations. And it is with this idea that we come back to the
myths that formed the foundation for said religions and form a “working
hypothesis” that such stories are the “narratives” provided by our ancestors to
warn us about something, as defined by Thomas Sebeok in his report to the Office
of Nuclear Waste Isolation. And here we find the problem: We cannot just read
these things, put the pieces together like a regular puzzle and thereby discover the
answer. We have to deeply analyze the stories, discover the various versions and
their inversion; and, by tracking the roots of words, discover their relations. In
such a way, we just MIGHT be able to discover what it is our ancestors knew and
what they have so desperately tried to tell us.
Alchemy and the Enclave in the Pyrenees
Nowadays, our materialistic science derides alchemists as misguided mystics
who followed a dream of discovering a substance that could transform base metals
into gold. Yes, they admit that much scientific discovery was accomplished in
24 Eco, Umberto, The Search For The Perfect Language, (Oxford: Blackwell 1995) p. 177, emphasis
mine.