New Dawn Magazine: We may have entered a new epoch, or so some scientists are telling us. The Anthropocene is a geological epoch characterised by the noticeable impact of humanity on the surface of the Earth. The previous epoch was the interglacial Holocene, which began after the fourth ice age. The Anthropocene is said to have begun with the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century. Others argue that substantial human influence on the lithosphere began up to 15,000 BP (BP=Before Present, the scale used for large periods of time) when human activity left its first traces on the rock record. Others specify 1945 as a clear date, due to the sudden arrival of radioactive material in the rock strata from the explosion of atomic bombs. As a term, Anthropocene reminds me of esoteric concepts of humanity’s ages and cycles, aeons and epochs. A belief in cosmic cycles has been specified as one of the typical characteristics of esotericism. This categorising of history and prehistory is one of several examples where religious and esoteric ideas exist in a symbiosis with scientific and secular ideas. Scientific concepts such as the ages of stone, bronze and iron owe their existence to myth; modern esoteric ideas of human development, of cosmic ages and cycles, draw on the scientific knowledge of the period.
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