Monthly Archives: January 2025

Even Dragons Have Their Ending

Even Dragons Have Their Ending

The Addresses of His Majesty King Alfred II, His Excellency President J. D. Vance and His Majesty Tsar Nicholas III at the Commemoration of the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of John Tolkien and the Unveiling of His Statue in Oxford, England, 3 January 2042

 

His Majesty King Alfred II

Your Majesty Tsar Nicholas, Your Excellency President Vance, ladies and gentlemen.

The day before yesterday I was crowned the first English King of England for a thousand years. By the grace of God, the English monarchy has returned for the first time since the half-Norman came here in 1042 and through weakness betrayed this land and all these islands into a millennial catastrophe. After French, Welsh, Scottish, Dutch and German Kings, I was crowned King Alfred II. This crowning came after a particularly disgraceful, ignoble and scandalous period in the history of England and all these islands. This was the period of the end of the delusions of empire.

The British Empire essentially ended in 1956 through the betrayal of the United States. And yet after this, one British Prime Minister after another tried to foster British imperial delusions by supporting the same American Empire, however immoral and illegal its acts. That shameful age is over. When that Empire came to its end as a result of its defeat in the then Ukraine, the British elite, known by its Norman name of ‘The Establishment’, ended with it. Since then a new government has formed, come up from the people of this new but very old land, who had been oppressed for a thousand years. Last year Ireland was at last reunited and Scotland and Cymru reclaimed their lost independence.

England has at last been freed from the British elite after a thousand years of captivity. England has become an independent country once more. Our royal capital has left Norman London and returned to Winchester, our political capital has left Norman London and moved to the New Witan, set up in Atherstone. This is a small town on the borders of Warwickshire and Leicestershire, in the very geographical centre of England. Its very name reminds us of Athelney, where King Alfred prepared the triumphant English resistance.

British history with all its injustices against the English, then against the Celtic peoples and then against many other people of the world, in Asia and Africa especially, is over. But it also committed injustices against both the American people under the German kings in the eighteenth century. And against the Russian people from the nineteenth century on under a Germanic queen and kings, overthrowing Tsar Nicholas II through Establishment plotting. That age is over. We ask forgiveness of all these peoples for the iniquities visited on them by the greed and evil of the Norman British Establishment.

Two days ago the history of England began again after its millennial interruption. The new and old royal capital of Winchester is in Hampshire, which like Tolkien’s Worcestershire and neighbouring Warwickshire and Leicestershire, are all shires. The real England is the England of the shires, of the Shire, which was John Tolkien’s inspiration. It is our renewed focus on this real England which is now our hope for the reconstruction of our land.

John Tolkien is one of our inspirations in our battle against the dark, satanic mills of which our poet William Blake wrote. Here I do not mean the dark, satanic mills of industry which still disfigured this land and created the ‘Black Country’, as it was then called, in the childhood of John Tolkien and which he portrayed in the evil of The Lord of the Rings. They are gone. What I mean is the dark, satanic mills of the mind. In this New England, which has finally broken through the rusted old shackles of the British Establishment, we are looking to the inspiration of such as Blake and Tolkien.

We are a Nation now seeking restoration, just as King Alfred I, Alfred the Great, Alfred the Truthteller and Alfred the Wise, England’s Lawgiver, England’s Shepherd and England’s Darling, restored England after the Viking invasion. Like him, we too have suffered a Viking invasion, that of the Northmen in 1066, which then turned into a millennial Viking Occupation. We are now freeing ourselves from this, not only politically and so socially, but, even more importantly in my view, spiritually and so morally.

This means arranging new and friendly relations with the rest of the world, with whom the old British Establishment always cultivated conflictual relations. This means firstly with the Celtic peoples of these islands, and then with the peoples of the new Confederation of Western Europe, of which we are one of the now twenty-four Sovereign Nation members, with the Confederations of North-Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, which are today so closely and amicably tied to the Russian Tsardom, their obsessions with the Soviet past healing. And it also means new and friendly relations with the wider world of the New Fellowship of the Ring, the Alliance of Sovereign Nations, which grew very swiftly out of the Russian-founded BRICS and so quite replaced the old and quite discredited post-War UN.

This is why we are honoured to welcome here today the heads of state of the two largest nations of the world, of the Tsardom of Russia and of the Confederation of Northern America. In three years’ time we in England are looking forward to the military band of our English Army marching in the Great Centenary Victory Parade on Red Square in Moscow to the music of our national flag, The Standard of St George, composed by the genius of Alford. This will be the commemoration of the Victory of the Peoples over Fascism, which victory was won mainly by the East Slav peoples at such huge sacrifice. We honour the victory of your peoples, Tsar Nicholas.

We hope that John Tolkien, who felt so deeply English and so loved the Old England and also its Old English language, those of our national champion and saint, King Alfred the Great, will inspire all of us. John Tolkien once wrote: I should like to save the Shire, if I could – though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull and for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them. And that is exactly what happened. We want to continue to strive against the dragon darkness of Mordor of our recent past and towards the beacon brightness of the Fellowship of the Ring of the Nations of our future. Today we recall the courage of John Tolkien, who one wrote: Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens. Our New England is not faithless.

As another John, our national poet, John Masefield, put it 100 years ago: We are called to re-establish the England ‘of the uplifted heart, that has so often borne beauty, of the idea of holiness, of the brightness that endures, of the truth that blesses, of the peace that burns away all self…The moving of the world with the glory of the English spirit is now the one thing left to us. That is also the vision of our John Tolkien and it is also our vision.

Thank you all for your attention.

 

His Excellency President Vance

Your Majesties King Alfred and Tsar Nicholas, ladies and gentlemen.

Thank you for inviting me here on this historic day in this historic city in this historic land. It is a privilege and an honour.

Over the last seventeen years we have witnessed extraordinary transformations in the arrangement of our world. The old post-Second World War organisations like the UN, EU, NATO, G7 and G20, which today’s children have never even heard of, are gone. Having long ago outlived their purpose, they have been replaced with the Alliance of Sovereign Nations (ASN), which has its roots in the Russian-founded BRICS and ultimately in the international peace proposals of His Majesty Tsar Nicholas II at the end of the century before last.

Today, we see the Big Four, consisting of the Tsardom of Russia, the Empire of China, the Republic of Bharat, formerly known as India, and my own Confederation of Northern America, working together. The expanded group, the ‘Big Ten’, represents the whole world, consisting as it does of Russia, Northern America, China, the Confederation of Western Europe (now twenty-four nations in number), Bharat, the Confederation of South-East Asia, which includes Australia and New Zealand, Latin America, Japan, the Confederation of West Asia and the Organisation of African Unity.

The beginning of these changes came in 2025, when my predecessor, President Donald Trump, sat down to talks with President Vladimir Putin of the then Russian Federation to end the tragic conflict in the old Soviet Ukraine. Those talks ended within twenty-four hours, with the granting of self-determination to all the peoples of the then Ukraine, the south and the east voting to join Russia, others returning to Romania and Hungary, and the formation of a truly independent Kievan Rus in the north and west. Then came at once the dissolution of the warmongering and Nazi NATO, which had caused the conflict. Then President Trump headed to Beijing and the potential conflict over Taiwan was also swiftly resolved, when Taiwan returned to China as an autonomous island-province of the then People’s Republic of China.

The issues in these two areas of contention were easily overcome, compared to the conflict in the Middle East. It took President Trump his full term of four years and involved a third assassination attempt on his life in order to reach a deal. But with the unanimous co-operation of the Big Four to make peace arrangements there, with the formation of a small and peaceful Jewish State, centred on Tel Aviv in the north of the old Israel, a Palestinian State in the south and west of the old Israel, now rebuilt by Chinese Empire, and the status of Jerusalem as a neutral Capital under the control of the Big Four. This was itself an organisation formed in 2025 to put an end to the conflict and stagnation of the old Security Council of the UN, which you may recall.

Donald Trump, who had the same first name as my father and whose name is also my own second name, was born in 1946. Born after the Second World War, which was won mainly by Moscow, he put an end to the long outdated post-Second War settlement. This had become archaic, with its EU, NATO, IMF and alphabet soup of exclusive and aggressive political, military and monetary organisations, which did not represent anyone except the Globalist elite. Donald Trump saw the need for the peoples of the world to decide their own fates and leave the anachronistic post-1945 elitism behind us, as it in no way represented anyone outside that elite.

For these deeds, the then Globalist elite branded Donald a ‘populist’! What greater compliment could there have been! What they considered to be an insult was the guarantee of his success and the success of the people whom he represented. I am one of them. My Scots-Irish family roots go back to the Appalachians, one of the poorest places in Northern America. I got out of it and in this I was greatly aided by Usha, the First Lady, my dear wife, who is here too. It was her Indian wisdom that has always guided me and I wish to thank her publicly today.

It was only after the presidency of Donald Trump, in the early 2030s, that the world scene was really transformed, with the founding of the Confederation of Northern America, the CNA, following the dissolution of the old USA, Canada, Greenland, with just under 400 million people, some 4.5% of the world population. Thus, we saw the unity of our American sphere of influence, just as we saw the unity of the Russian sphere of influence around Russia. Soon after the unity of Northern America came the collapse of the EU, replaced by the Confederation of Western Europe (CWE) and the Confederations of North-Eastern and South-Eastern Europe.

Then came the founding of the Confederation of South-East Asia, which includes Australia and New Zealand, and also of the Confederation of West Asia. Both the CNA and the CWE then set about paying off their massive debts, which had almost bankrupted both of them. It was in this way that the world witnessed the birth of the Security Council of the Alliance of the Nations, popularly known as the ‘Big Ten’, at last a Council representative of our planet.

I speak of all this today because the transformations that we have witnessed over the last seventeen years were envisioned and longed for by the great man whose 150th birth we commemorate today. John Tolkien, born exactly 150 years ago, on January 3, 1892 in what is now South Africa, was a man who had experienced the horrors of the First World War. I have long admired him and especially his work The Lord of the Rings. That was the work which inspired my path towards Catholicism when I was a young man.

John Tolkien’s portrayal of the goodness and innocence of the people of the Shire of Tradition, of my Appalachians, in their struggle for their Sovereignty against the utter evil of Globalist Mordor was key in this. It is my belief that, whatever his personal weaknesses and mistakes in the past, my predecessor President Trump was he who made Gollum fall into the Fire, taking the Ring with him, and when the Ring was destroyed, Sauron lost all his power. For me that is the triumph of our President, whose forebears came from the Hebrides and the Bavarian lands, for he destroyed the Ring of evil which so threatened world peace until 2025 and cast it into the Fire. As John Tolkien wrote and those words are now inscribed on the plinth of his statue outside this very Theatre: Even dragons have their ending.

Donald’s mother, the Gaelic-speaking Mary Anne MacLeod from her very poor home on Lewis, by the white-sanded shores of the remote Outer Hebrides, where they praise Mary and Brigid and Columba, was so proud of her son. She named him Donald after her grandfather. Had she lived to see his work as President from 2025 on, she would have been even prouder of him. Today I say to you together with the Gospel: Blessed are the peacemakers.

Thank you.

 

His Majesty Tsar Nicholas III

Your Majesty King Alfred, Your Excellency President Vance, ladies and gentlemen.

First of all, I would like to thank the Reform Government of the newly independent English Nation and the governing authorities of the University of Oxford for inviting myself and Tsarina Alexandra here today, and also the staff of the Randolph Hotel for their wonderful hospitality. There was a time, and not so long ago, when Russian leaders were not at all welcome here. Glory to God, that dark age is over.

Since the coronation of His Majesty King Alfred in Winchester Cathedral on 1 January, we have been revisiting places in England visited by my most noble, martyred predecessor, Tsar Nicholas II. He was a great anglophile and once dreamed of living in Norfolk as a gentleman farmer. Yesterday I was in Sandringham and Kings Lynn, where we prayed at the consecration of the new church dedicated to Tsar Nicholas and his August Family on land generously donated to us by the Council of Kings Lynn. White and fair, it is called on to become an inspiration to the people who live there in that old Hanseatic town. This evening King Alfred has invited us to a banquet at Buckingham Palace. Tomorrow, we go to the Royal Palace in Winchester in this renewed Kingdom of England, and then on 5th January to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, before we return to Saint Petersburg and our Orthodox Christmas Feast there.

Like President Vance, I too have long been an admirer of the work of John Tolkien, who, as a Christian, was profoundly aware of the great gulf fixed between good and evil. That was the origin of his deep moral sense, which he displayed so fully in all his works and in all his life. At the end of that life he also made a donation to our Russian Orthodox church in Oxford.

John Tolkien began writing in 1917, that fateful year, which was so disastrous in the history of my own country, after the overthrow and then martyrdom of my ancestor Tsar Nicholas II and His August Family. That overthrow was prepared here, only a few hundred yards from where we speak in the Sheldonian Theatre, plotted at University College, which, ironically, by legend, though only by legend, was founded by the sainted King, the Great King Alfred I. That overthrow, or ‘regime-change’ as they used to call it, was plotted by a depraved British Prime Minister, British spies and a renegade Russian prince, a traitor and a transvestite of base morality, typical of the worst fabulously wealthy Russian aristocrats of that age. Today history has turned full circle and exorcised that terrible past.

After 1917 my country was thrown into the Fire of Mordor, so vividly portrayed by John Tolkien, who had passed though that same Fire on the killing fields of the Somme, when the European elite bowed down in worship to its cannibal gods. The massacres which that elite had been performing in its far distant colonies, not least in the Belgian Congo, were revisited on its lands as retribution.

John Tolkien understood that death is the enemy of life, that the kingdom of death is called hell and that it is the devil who keeps the laws in hell. And he portrayed that hell in his books. After 1917, my own forebears suffered directly in torture and death, repression and camps, and then the catastrophes of exactly fifty years ago, after the collapse of the atheist regime, and not least my dear mother, who, as you know, was a Romanov. In those days I was much comforted by the words of John Tolkien:

All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

Thus, I can say that my whole country also went through a Somme, but a Somme which lasted with varying degrees of intensity for 110 years, until 2027. On a theological level, we too were faced with the monumental struggle between the Shire and Mordor, between Life and Death, between what in Russian we call Православие and Кривославие, between Orthodox Christianity and Twisted Christianity, of the Orthodox Church and a pseudo-Church, a Church of a Political Ideology and Corrupt Business. That has been cleansed, not least through the zeal of His Holiness, our Patriarch John of New Jerusalem and All Russia, who has swept away all that filth, which is such a shameful stain in the annals of our Church.

As regards our judgement of the past, we ask all our ancestors what they lived and died for? Did they live and die for Faith, the Tsar and the Fatherland, or not? By Faith we mean Faith in the Redeeming Power of Love; by the Tsar, we mean just Christian government; by the Fatherland we mean all those parts of the world which identify as Russian. Gone is the time of the dead hand of State Religion; of corrupt and merciless Government; and of the Imperialism which oppresses other nations and exploits their resources.

Our task for the last fifteen years, since 2027, has been to rebuild and heal our Russian Shire. Seventeen years ago, the world stood on the brink of World War III. Only that visit to the doors of death softened the hearts of pride. By the prayers of the saints the world drew back from the brink, and with the help of several leaders, real statesmen who stood head and shoulders above the pygmy politicians of that time, we avoided planetary tragedy. Statesmen had learned the lessons of the disastrous World Wars, which had brought to ruination twentieth and early twenty-first century Europe. They steered Europe to Renewal and Resurrection.

The statesmen had not been prejudiced by the propaganda which justifies acts of evil. They had understood the futility of empires, which rise in blind enthusiasm, but always fall in decadence. In particular, they learned this lesson from the fall of the last empire, the American Empire, which had exhausted and bankrupted itself in futile wars and invasions all around the world and which ended in vulgar materialism and frivolous infantilism, in greed and selfishness.

Today we have seen how the world which faced Sauron and Mordor has drawn back from the Ring, which bound them all in Evil. John Tolkien understood that peace on our Middle Earth can only come through the co-operation of the Nations, a Fellowship of the Ring, now called the Alliance of Sovereign Nations, a rebuilding of the many Shires, the best in every nation and people, in ‘sovereignty and freedom, justice and humanity, mercy and compassion’, as my predecessor put it. So too do our statesmen. And so too did our saints.

I would like to end my address to you this day by quoting from the Akathist service to one of those saints, who was also called John. This is St John the Wonderworker, whose lifespan covered much the same years as those of John Tolkien. Born into the Maximovich family in what is now Kievan Rus in 1896, he was exiled and lived in Belgrade and Shanghai, in Western Europe and Western America. We praise him because he was ‘filled with love for his fellow-men and did all possible for their salvation’, because he was the ‘righteous accuser of impiety and false teaching’, because ‘his love knew no bounds of land or race’, because he ‘destroyed lies and exalted truth’ and ‘kept his faith and courage amid unjust persecution’.

And was this not also what John Tolkien tried to do? On this the 150th anniversary of his birth, we thank God for him and for all those who do good, bringing peace to the Nations and Hope for humankind. It is our task to remake this broken world a little nearer to the heart’s desire, knowing that this world is only a shadow of the glory of the world to come, but that Help and Hope are always near.

Thank you for listening.

3 January 2025

 

 

Prehistory, the Flood and History

Dating

Radiometric dating methods currently reckon the age of the Earth to be some 4.5 billion years and the age of the Universe to be nearly 14 billion years. However, scientists modify these figures more or less every generation according to the latest theory. The accuracy of such methods, for example carbon-14 for recent dates, or potassium-argon for long ago, is dubious. Carbon-14 sometimes gives the most contradictory dates for anything more than about 2,500 years old and even before that it can err by up to two or three centuries. As for potassium-argon, it can date a rock formed by lava from a volcanic eruption a few years ago as being 200 million years old.

This imprecision comes about because these dating methods presume that depletion of the element in question is constant. It may not be. Given this inaccuracy, suppose we suspended our disbelief and regarded such dating systems and ‘scientific’ mythologisation regarding Creation as a cultural error? What if we took literally, and not symbolically, the traditional Christian Roman dating system, as used by the Orthodox Church? Whereas the old pagan Roman calendar dated everything from the foundation of pagan Rome in 754 BC, the Christian Roman calendar dates everything from the Creation, dated to 1 September 5509 BC.

In other words, in order to convert to the Christian Roman calendar, we must add 5,508 to the current year, if it is between January and August, and 5,009 to the current year, if it is between September and December. Thus, in December 2024 the Christian Roman date from Creation is 7,533. (Fundamentalist Protestants use the much later Jewish text of the Old Testament and generally date Creation to 22 October 4004 BC, making today 6,028 years from Creation). Most Orthodox Christians treat the date for Creation and the Six ‘Days’ of Creation as purely symbolic, and none of this is a dogma. However, if taken literally, it would have some very interesting implications.

From Prehistory to History

The acceptance of such dating would completely change our understanding of what is known as ‘Prehistory’, more precisely ‘pre-literary history’. For Prehistory was transmitted only orally, as it is the period before writing systems were invented –which was soon after the Flood, as dated  according to the Septuagint (see below). Therefore, taking the Christian Roman calendar, Prehistory would have lasted not billions or millions of years, but only about two millennia, from 7,533 to 5,291 years ago (Genesis 1-5), as the Church’s Septuagint text of the Old Testament dates the Flood to 5,291 years ago, 2,242 years after Creation.

We know little of Prehistory because of the Global Flood of Noah’s time which literally washed it all away, including the corpses of the relatively few people (a few tens of thousands?) then living. However, we do know what was later written down by Moses from the oral tradition passed down from the survivors, the much-mocked Noah and his family, who alone had not consorted with demons. And we should recall that since people lived for hundreds of years (for example, Adam = 930 years, Jared = 962 years, Methuselah = 969 years) oral traditions were basically stories handed down from ancestors, whom they had personally known. Thus, Adam was Noah’s seven times great-grandfather. (For comparison, one of my seven times great-grandfathers was born fewer than 400 years ago, not 2,242 years ago).

For instance, the first Book of Moses records that between the Fall and the Flood people, often called ‘neanderthals’, at first lived primitively in caves and wore animal skins, becoming hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists (see Genesis 3, 23-24 and 4, 1-3). What is clear is that those who had such long lifetimes must have become very skilled and technologically sophisticated, especially because of the presence of half-demon giants (nephilim) with their immense strength (Genesis 6, 1-4). From this period we also have folk memories, recorded universally in folklore with its giants (Genesis 6, 1-4), monsters, dragons, demons (elves, goblins, gnomes etc), angels (fairies), wizards and witches. With a lifetime of many centuries to experience, learn and think, many things became possible. Their civilisation was surely advanced.

In recent years there have been discoveries of complex stone structures now hundreds of feet under the sea, which may indicate that such technological progress took place. Some have interpreted these as confirming the many legends of vanished advanced civilisations, now flooded worlds, such as that of Atlantis. In any case, Genesis 4, 17-20 records the first settlements and towns. Genesis 4, 21 records the first musician. And Genesis 4, 22 records the first use of bronze, dated to about 5,300 years ago by archaeologists, and the use of iron, again showing the progress from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age. Why was it all destroyed by the Flood? Because the Earth had been demonised and, apart from Noah and his family, there was no further possibility of salvation. The existence of the Earth had become senseless until it had been cleansed.

The Flood

In Chapters 5-9 the Book of Genesis records the Universal Flood of 5,291 years ago. This Flood would have formed all geological layers, or strata, of rock, formed for instance from crushed clay (shale), chalk and seashells (limestone) sand (sandstone), mud (mudstone), trees and vegetation (coal) and other geological materials. The Flood, providentially for us, formed ‘petroleum’ (literally ‘rock-oil’), that is, oil, as well as gas from buried sea creatures and coal from buried forests. This also created fossils of animals which drowned instantly and were crushed, for there was no time for decomposition, as with animals which die slowly and naturally. (Fossilisation has hardly ever occurred in recent millennia). The future fossils were buried immediately beneath the floodwaters and the silt they carried – 4.5% of all fossils are of plants, and 95% are of marine creatures, which are also found on mountain peaks. Only 0.5% are of birds, animals and mammals.

The Flood formed the continents and islands, more or less as we know them today, as the original single land mass or ‘Pangea’ (Genesis 1, 9) was separated out as moving tectonic plates divided them. Continental drift began, as mountain chains rose up thousands of metres high from plains through very violent volcanic activity and the movement of the tectonic plates, when ‘the fountains of the great deep burst forth’ (Genesis 7, 11). Meanwhile, mainly in the far north of Europe and North America, there began the Ice Age, the result of floodwaters, heated by volcanic eruptions, condensing and freezing. The volcanic eruptions would also have blocked out the sunlight in those areas and killed the mammoths by asphyxiation through dust particles, which is how they died out. This Ice Age lasted for several hundred years over northern land areas, but it continues today in the Arctic and the Antarctic, though the ice there has been contracting for at least two centuries.

All animals and mammals, including the many which are today extinct, are descended from those in the Ark and developed into different species. They had obviously been selected and entered the Ark when they were very young. These did not include any fish, like ‘the leviathan’ (recorded in Job and the Psalms) and the sea monster (the Book of Jonah, where it was mistranslated as a ‘whale’). However, they would have included ‘dinosaurs’, recorded in the Old Testament as ‘the behemoth’ (Job 40, 15-24) and ‘dragons’, (see especially Daniel 14 in the Septuagint and the Psalms), as also in all folklore. (Did St George later kill the last ‘dragon’?). As Genesis 8, 4 tells us, the Ark was deposited on the mountains of Ararat, in the far west of today’s Turkey near Armenia.

People moved down from here along the rivers and settled in what is now called Mesopotamia (the land between the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates) in today’s Iraq. The Flood is also recorded in garbled legends, like that of the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh, and the other 300 ‘creation myths’ of different peoples worldwide. All humanity is descended from the 8 people, 4 couples, with their huge gene pool of all humanity, who were saved in the Ark. Indeed, genetics tends to confirm the origin of humanity from those eight people. This means that all human-beings are much, much closer to one another than according to the ‘scientific’ version, which dates human-beings back hundreds of thousands of years. In the Septuagint version we are all cousins, descended from only 5,291 years ago through only 200 or so generations.

History Begins

Now we enter recorded history and parallels with the Old Testament. Interestingly, according to archaeologists, the earliest known writing systems appeared about 5,250 years ago. This was just after the Flood, as dated by the Septuagint. At that time Noah planted the first vineyard (Genesis 9,20) and in Genesis 10-11 we read of the building of a great Tower (of Babel) some 5,150 ago. After its collapse, people were scattered (Genesis 11,9) to the ends of the earth, in a confusion of tongues, which led to the development of today’s more than 7,000 languages. People moved north, west, east and south, founding new civilisations in the course of time. Thus:

Stone Age monuments in Europe, like Carnac, Stonehenge, Silbury, Avebury and Skara Brae in Orkney, date back to about 5,100 years ago.

The Indus civilisation began about 4,500 years ago.

The first Egyptian pyramids were built some 4,500 years ago and African civilisations developed, gradually spreading further south. Thus, the Bantu moved into Central Africa some 4,000 years ago, finally arriving in South Africa some 2,400 years ago.

Genesis 11,26 records the birth of Abraham some 4,145 years ago.

The first Chinese dynasty appeared some 4,100 years ago.

The African-looking Olmecs settled in Central America some 3,200 years ago.

Civilisation began in Japan some 2,700 years ago.

The first people reached Tahiti some 2,500 years ago.

Amazonian civilisation began about 2, 500 years ago.

In Australia civilisation appeared some 4,000 years ago.

The Cahotian, Aztec and Inca civilisations in the Americas appeared about 1,000 years ago.

The first people settled in Hawaii some 1,000 years ago.

Finally, people reached New Zealand and Easter Island some 800 years ago.

Most will not be able to suspend their belief in the customary secular system, which since the last century has dated the age of the Universe at billions of years. They will regard the above as fantasy. But if they took it seriously, then very different perspectives would open up before them.