The Legend of the Seven Sleepers: Waking up in a New World

Justine Huxley, Cofounder of Kincentric Leadership reflects on what it would be like to wake up in three centuries time, as the seven sleepers did in an old legend.

The 27th of July is known as the Feast of the Seven Sleepers, and in Northern Europe has become known as the day which predicts how the weather will be for the remainder of the summer.  If 27th July has stable weather, it heralds a sunny August.  If unstable, we are in for a changeable or rainy time.  For those of us in Europe and elsewhere, record temperatures, unprecedented wildfires and thousands dying of heat stroke (while others celebrate with ice-cream and mass trips to the beach) make this all the more poignant.  

Told in both Christian and Islamic traditions, the story of the seven sleepers, tells of a group of young men who were persecuted by the Romans for practicing Christianity.  They were given the chance to renounce their faith, but refused. Rather than submit, they gave away their possessions and withdrew to a mountain cave to live a life of seclusion and prayer.  This angered the ruler who ordered the entrance of the cave sealed, with the men inside.  Many years passed as the empire changed around them. Eventually, after 300 years (or 309 lunar years) had passed, the cave was reopened by a farmer wanting to use it as a cattle pen.  Inside the men were found not dead, but miracullously just asleep, and on waking believed only a single day had passed.  When one of the seven walked to the nearby city to buy food for his friends, his old era coins were no longer accepted as currency, and he witnessed how the whole world had changed.  The faith they had been persecuted for practicing was now established as the religion of the day.  

The forerunners of any major change in consciousness might perhaps imagine this moment when the new worldview has properly taken root.  Many of us involved in building a movement for Earth consciousness are seeing animist approaches beginning to touch the mainstream, and that is very exciting.  The spread of nature governance and campaigns for legal rights and personhood for rivers, oceans, forests and more reflects this.  As scientists decode more and more animal and plant languages and cultures, we sense the possible beginning of the end of human supremacy.  We see the rise of nature based solutions; sense how biomimicry is  opening doors; and rejoice in the experimental art and music that aspires to be a cocreation with non-human nature.  But we also see how little those innovations touch the dark forces that hold us in the grip of an extractive economy.  We see the backlash of nationalism, intensifying culture wars, and escalating global conflict.  In the midst of this fracturing landscape it is hard to envisage how kinship with each other and a living, intelligent Earth could ever become the foundation of human values in a way powerful enough to make a difference.

None of us are likely to have the experience of falling asleep and waking up 300 years into the future when the Earth has recovered from decades of burning, flooding and fighting, and human culture has evolved into a collaboration with the intelligence of a living Earth.  But for many of us in this movement, that new planetary era is what we are focused on.  We plant the seeds of a different way to live - in societies, communities, hearts and minds - seeds we hope will be passed down the generations, survive the fire and begin to flourish when conditions have changed.     

Perhaps we can remember the legend of the seven sleepers and give it new meaning.  Perhaps it can become one of the storytelling technologies that help our children and our children's children keep the faith.  Though they will be battling many forms of darkness, watching a ‘Great Dying’ on many levels and on a scale that will break us, perhaps this tale can be a reminder that what is rejected and seems impossible in one century becomes the established norm in the next.    

Like the seven sleepers (and their 8th companion, a dog), one day, if collectively we begin to take responsibility for our Earth, whether it is 300 years ahead or 700, perhaps what we dream of will have become simply how it is, and these times of decay will be behind us in history. 

So today, when you look to the skies to sense into how August will unfold, remember the seven sleepers, and know that one day, children will be born who know only this: a world where Earth is revered as sacred and loved as kin, where people listen to and are guided by Her many, diverse intelligences, and where we live the knowledge of our interbeing, as one part of a dazzling, intricate web of life, stretching far beyond our individual lives in the vast mystery of space and time.   

Justine Huxley Co-founder, Kincentric Leadership