The 19A0s

As usual, it isn’t clear to me whether people have heard of a particular thing, so I may or may not be telling you about something you already know, but here goes anyway.

I’ll start with the Phantom Time Hypothesis. This is the belief, promoted by the Bavarian historian Heribert Illig, that the years 611-914 CE are fabricated and that we therefore currently live not in the year 2021 but the early eighteenth century. This is a conspiracy “theory” that Otto III of the Holy Roman Empire persuaded the Pope to alter the year in order to put them in the year 2000 AD, and I use Anno Domini rather than Common Era here deliberately because they were said to have fabricated this system themselves. Further, Illig claims that the Emperor Charlemagne never existed, which is a bit of a blow to every European because we’re all supposed to be descended from him, so presumably we don’t exist? Evidence supporting this hypothesis include the relative scarcity of archaeological finds from the seventh to the tenth century CE, the similarity between architecture of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages and the failure of the Gregorian calendar to line up with the Julian calendar as it was in Roman times despite being corrected from 1582 onwards. There are huge problems with this hypothesis which amount to sound refutation. Outside Europe, the calendars match up absolutely fine, for instance the Mayan, Muslim and Jewish calendars, astronomical events such as conjunctions and eclipses still occur when they’d be expected and tree rings from the alleged period also fit the consensus view of history. For instance, on 3rd May 1715 there was a total eclipse of the Sun in Britain, which should’ve been three years ago according to this idea. There is indeed a discrepancy between the eleven days lost to the calendar when we adopted it in Britain, but that’s because it was intended to align with the Council of Nicea in 325 CE and not the start of the Christian era and some days had already been lost by that point.

Heribert Illig has connections with Immanuel Velikovsky’s beliefs that Venus used to be a comet that became a planet during the Bronze Age. Velikovsky was a psychiatrist born in Tsarist Russia to a Lithuanian Jewish family who practiced psychiatry in the British Mandate of Palestine. I was a fan of his ideas as a child but later came to realise that they make absolutely no sense, although it is interesting that he made various predictions about the solar system which turned out to be correct. Velikovsky sought to refute Freud’s claim that the Pharaoh Akhnaton was the founder of Judaism, an idea which incidentally I have wondered about myself because of Psalm 104, which is also why Freud thought this was so. This led him to investigate the chronology of Ancient Egypt and because of the apparent discrepancy between the apparently dateable events in the Hebrew Bible, he chose to revise that to resolve the problem, so it’s based on a faith-based approach to history. In order to explain events such as the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the Plagues of Egypt, he posited that various astronomical catastrophes had taken place which led to happenings such as rains of burning hydrocarbons, and further, revised geology to make the claim that crude oil deposits were of recent origin and came from Venus.

So that’s two movements which seek to revise history. I don’t really understand why Illig should have made his revisions under the influence of Velikovsky. Maybe having come to question the idea of historical records being accurate, he ended up being unable to leave history alone and it planted the seeds of doubt in his mind about another period. I also don’t know what Illig now thinks about Velikovsky’s ideas, that is, whether he also believes history followed the accounts in the Hebrew Bible rather than other evidence or whether he just thinks the Dark Ages never happened.

Now there is a joke “belief” called “Last Thursdayism” which is taken from an earlier hypothesis called the Omphalos Theory. There are in fact two major schools of thought referred to as the Omphalos Hypothesis: this is the one which has nothing to do with psychogeography, Christopher Marlowe or the Isle of Dogs. This Omphalos “Theory” originated in the mid-nineteenth century and is named after the Greek word for navel, ομφαλος, because the fundamental question he attempted to answer can be summed up thus: did Eve and Adam have navels, since they weren’t born? It’s a response to the theory of evolution and amounts to the belief that God created the world in medias res, with wear on the teeth of hippos, all the fossils in place, the first humans as adults with navels and all their teeth and so on, a few thousand years ago. There’s an obvious theological problem with this, which is that one is supposed to believe that God doesn’t lie but this would basically have made the world one big lie. It’s still believed to some extent by creationists who hold that light from distant stars and galaxies was created in transit, although there are a couple of alternative hypotheses here that space is hyperbolic and we’re near the centre and that the speed of light is slowing down, which they also evoke to explain how Methuselah and his contemporaries came to live so much longer than we do nowadays. Of course the simple thing would be just to accept the findings of science, but no, apparently not. I actually used to know a geneticist who believed all this, and it saddened me that anyone could get a PhD in a life science while accepting this rubbish, when probably quite talented, previously well-educated and intelligent people probably didn’t even get bachelor’s degrees in biology. There’s no justice.

Last Thursdayism is a joke, and as its name suggests is the idea that the Universe was created last Thursday, with apparently consistent but false memories intact. This is of course possible in the sense that it doesn’t actually contradict any evidence whatsoever, just as it wouldn’t if it was last Wednesday or a few moments ago, but of course it’s untestable and nobody takes it seriously anyway. It’s generally used as a rejoinder to Young Earth Creationists, although it has strong affinities with Descartes’ method of radical doubt because it would also be very much his kind of thing to attempt to disprove (and he’d be bound to use the ontological argument to do so).

There’s another, rather niche, claim made along similar lines to the Phantom Time Hypothesis on a much smaller scale, which I assume also to be a joke attempting to parody it, referred to as “The 19A0s”. Before I go into that, it reminds me a little of the difficulty I used to have in accepting that there were years after 1984, which if I’m honest still feels like the present to me, and everything after it is just made up. This is of course due to the influence of a certain dystopian novel which I’ve written about elsewhere on this blog. It would be rather Orwellian either to make up extra years which never happened or to convince everyone that it will always be 1984 in the same way as “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia”. This is just an unusually long December. I think the reason I find 1984 so magnetic isn’t so much to do with anything particularly major that happened during that year as that it was very much focussed on in advance at George Orwell’s instigation, and that it’s in the early part of my reminiscence bump and was the last full calendar year before I became adult, so maybe it isn’t entirely mentally healthy that I do this, although of course it is only a joke. Frankie Goes To Hollywood aren’t in the charts any more, Thatcher and Reagan are no longer in office and the ZX Spectrum is not currently the most popular microcomputer in the UK. Strange but true.

The 19A0s is kind of vaguely similar to this idea. I’m not sure where it originates, but it may be here. It isn’t a massively popular idea but a few people have taken it up and run with it. This page (which at least on this browser-machine-O/S is screwed up a little) mentions the Phantom Time Hypothesis, so I think it probably is inspired by it. The idea is that there is a lost decade between the late 1970s and the early 1980s, although it doesn’t seem to have lasted ten years. The dates in question are 28th February 1978 and 15th December 1983, a 2116-day period which for me includes the start of my own reminiscence bump. The language used in these links is rather obscurantist and I think pseudo-intellectual, but I think I can glean a few ideas from it. One is that whatever happened during this time was so traumatic that we’ve all been induced to forget it. Another is that it seems to be a psychogeographical project, or at least something like one. Psychogeography is a kind of playful, nomadic, surrealist, situationist approach to walking around a town or city which attempts to construct a new realistic narrative, perhaps to experience the urban landscape as art, but in this case by making associations between cultural artifacts such as the video Elpe by the Norwegian group Röyksopp and the DVNO video:

I’m not sure this is actually succeeding in saying something or if it’s more a kind of playful pseudo-intellectual chewing gum, but I do find myself drawn to it. What I’d project onto it would be the impression of a break between the post-war era and the “greed is good” world, which as I never tire of reminding you I went into here. As you can gather from the link, the apparent dislocation of 1979 is not in fact as abrupt as it seems. To make the post-war consensus, Keynesian world continue past 1979, I had to posit no less than seven changes in history, one of which was pre-Victorian. The seeds of the 1980s were sown more than a century and a half previously, and even that could be seen as the chains of cause and effect merely becoming discernible rather than an initial change.

One difference between the 19A0s and Phantom Time is that whereas the latter supposes unreal time which was inserted, the former imagines that there was a real period which was removed. I think one reason for the project is a kind of nostalgia which attempts to extend the period of a particular kind of design and iconography to more than it occupied in reality. Again, I have a lot of sympathy with this, and after all, it has nostalgia value for me too.

One suggestion made in the BoingBoing link is to search for the string “19A0”, which is phonetically identical to the year “1980”. In hexadecimal this string corresponds to the decimal number 6560, and it will occur from place to place. The idea is to treat this as “residue” in the Mandela Effect sense of the word. At the moment, in the personalised view of Google I’m presented with, many of the links I’m served with are in fact to do with the project, but I also get a spanner, a Thai letter like an sideways S, some two-coloured irregular shapes and references to the ‘Dune’ universe (Duniverse?).

To summarise then, this appears to be a parody art project a bit like the K Foundation or the Illuminati Trilogy, somewhat influenced by psychogeography and Situationism, and satire on the Phantom Time Hypothesis, but there’s remarkably little material available. It doesn’t seem to have been very successful, which I think is a pity because it really looks like it could’ve ridden on the coat tails of Vaporwave, but sadly it didn’t. It amounts to another of those things which I find interesting but is for some reason not appealing to most other people.