THE GOLDEN AGE - EYE OF ZEUS

Eye in the Sky, Crescent, Thunderbolt, Saturn, Jupiter

I had thought that Saturn Theorists identified Zeus as either the planet Jupiter or the planet Mars. But in the following video, it appears that Ev Cochrane is identifying Zeus with the planet Saturn, or rather with the Saturn Configuration, in which red Mars was in front of white Venus (which made Venus look like a band around Mars) and both were in front of yellow(?) Saturn. The configuration had the appearance of a large eye, a Cyclopean eye in the sky. The Eye of Ra of ancient Egypt was the same as the Eye of Zeus of ancient Greece. When Saturn left the configuration late in the Golden Age (and moved to its present orbit), Jupiter, which had been possibly hidden behind Saturn, became visible, so Jupiter was thought to be Saturn rejuvenated. It looks like the Thunderbolts team may not have made any videos about Jupiter’s appearance in myths. I zeroed in on this video because I expected it to discuss Jupiter, but it doesn’t. I transcribed Ev’s talk from the video, starting about half way through it. I’ll intersperse comments in italics within his talk.

Ev Cochrane: The Eye of Zeus - youtube.com/watch?v=8B72EqtsLVc

For us, Zeus was a towering celestial form, visible to all and perfectly concrete in nature. The terrifying fireworks associated with the God's heaven-spanning Thunderbolt in turn were firmly grounded and witnessed cataclysmic events, and as such can be expected to have close parallels around the globe. Is it possible to demonstrate this remarkable claim?

{Ev and Dave Talbott had a way of making the awesome sight in the ancient sky seem mundane, because of their scholarly word usage. As I understand it, mostly all that was visible of Zeus was his huge eyeball. At least that’s what’s shown in this video. Ev says the fireworks from that eye was terrifying and must have been seen by all people around the world, but I think he meant all people in the northern hemisphere, since the planetary configuration was a northern polar sky scene. As I said above, the Eye of Ra was the same thing.}

The proof is in the pudding, as they say, or in the present case, in our published works on a subject now amounting to many thousands of pages. Consider the conundrum presented by Zeus's Cyclopean eye, reputedly capable of seeing everything that happens on earth, but also of hurling lightning and thunderbolts. Witness Aescheluss's statement: "The jealous eye of God hurls the lightning down." With apparent reference to this formulaic expression preserved by the great dramatists, the Greek grammarian Hesychius observed that the phrase "eye of Zeus" meant a flash of lightning. In order to understand the imagery and question, it's first necessary to identify an obvious celestial prototype for Zeus's lightning hurling eye, obvious, that is, for prehistoric sky watchers around the globe. Consider the image depicted in figure one, analogs of which were commonplace in the ancient Near East. Can it be doubted that were such an astronomical apparition to present itself in the northern circumpolar heaven, traditions of the sky god's Cyclopian eye would be virtually certain to follow?

{So Ev is asking us viewers to imagine seeing the polar configuration planets in the sky, like in this image below, and ask ourselves what would be the first thing it would remind us of. Obviously, an eye. The “all-seeing eye” continued to be taught to peoples until recent centuries. Saturn would have looked about 4 times bigger than the Moon does now, while Venus and Mars in front would have looked probably no bigger than the present Moon. He was referring to the image on the left, which was apparently from ancient Sumer. The image on the right is how the Thunderbolts team interpreted the Sumerian drawing. The crescent shape on the bottom of the “eye” was apparently the sunlit portion of Saturn. Saturn itself gave off some light, but it also reflected sunlight. As the Earth rotated, the crescent would have appeared to turn around Saturn, but it was only when the crescent was on the bottom of Saturn that the planetary configuration was most visible, which was at night. During daylight, it was much less noticeable, just as the Moon is less noticeable in the daytime, but shines very brightly at night.}

{The following illustration indicates that when there is a crescent Moon, the angle between the Sun, Earth and Moon averages 45 degrees. Since the angle at the Sun would be near zero degrees, and since the total degrees in a triangle is 180, the angle at the Moon would average near 135 degrees. If the Saturn crescent was similar to the crescent Moon, the angle from Earth to Saturn to the Sun would have been about 135 degrees.}

https://www.astronomynotes.com/nakedeye/s13.htm

{Ev continued as follows.}

Now consider the image depicted in Figure 2, a close variation on the previous image, whereupon lightning-like filaments radiate across the disk of the sun {He means the “first sun”, which was the Saturn configuration}. It is our view that the global traditions of the lightning-emanating eye find their origin here.

{He’s referring to the image above on the left, which is again probably from ancient Sumer. The image on the right is the Thunderbolts team’s interpretation of a similar image having 8 rays instead of 4. There were apparently initially 4 rays, but later they increased to 8 and possibly other numbers at times. The wavy lines in the left image are interpreted as lightning, or bright arc-mode plasma, flowing from Venus toward Saturn’s circumference.}

It will be noted that the central eye here is composed of the conjoined orbs {orbs means spheres} of Mars and Venus. Note further that the Greek word for lightning, “asterope”, preserves the inherent link to a material celestial body, inasmuch as Greek “aster” denotes “star”. This etymology alone offers compelling circumstantial evidence for the conclusion that the Greek concept of lightning was quite literally a star-based phenomenon.

{I agree that by the ancient Greeks calling lightning “star stuff” it suggests that the ancients saw lightning-like flows coming from a star-like body, and Venus was the first body to be called a star, apparently because it had prominent rays going out from its circumference.}

It is Jane Harrison, perhaps, who has devoted the most ink to Zeus's Thunderbolt. She too would deny that the god and his all-powerful bolt ever actually existed. Quote: “Mighty Zeus, we may dismiss. He is the product of a late anthropomorphism. ... Thunder is a reality, a sound actually heard, lightning no less a reality, actually seen, but the third shaft, the Thunderbolt? There is no such thing. Yet by a sort of irony, it is the non-existent thunderbolt that Greek art most frequently depicts." For Talbott and myself, it is simply inconceivable that ancient sky-watchers and myth-makers woke up one morning and suddenly decided to honor their greatest gods by arbitrarily inventing imaginary constructs like Zeus's Cyclopean eye or the Thunderbolt. On the contrary, they were endeavoring to describe an extraordinary celestial apparition, in the case of the Thunderbolt, an awe-inspiring stellar structure with characteristics analogous to those of atmospheric lightning. Indeed, we believe it is possible to identify a specific celestial prototype for Zeus's Thunderbolt in the ancient artworks.

{I think the above images are Figures 3 and 4.}

Consider the image depicted in Figure 3, a Bronze Age cylinder seal supposedly depicting the ancient sun god. Now compare this image to a representative example of Zeus's Thunderbolt in Figure 4. It will be noted that the correspondence is virtually 1 to 1. Indeed, for all practical purposes the two images are identical.

{The Bronze Age sun-god was actually the Saturn configuration, which is what the ancients directly observed, whereas the “Thunderbolt” on the right was how later generations understood what their ancestors described.}

Those who have read Talbott have Thornhill's, Thunderbolts of the Gods, where the ground-breaking experimental findings of Anthony Peratt are outlined, will recognize at once the telltale signs of plasma-based phenomena in these ancient artworks depicting the Thunderbolt. Here I would simply call attention to the telltale hourglass shape of the radiant streamers. Grant the possibility that such a stellar configuration actually appeared in the prehistoric sky, and the pervasive archaic artworks themselves are compelling evidence that this was indeed the case, and you can bet your last drachma that it would be likened to lightning or to a Thunderbolt object. Note further that the hypothetical Thunderbolt was stationed exactly where we would expect to find it, in conjunction with the cyclopean eye in the center of the “solar” {Saturn} disk. It is in this quite literal sense, then, that the sky-god Zeus hurled his star-flung Thunderbolt from his eye. How, then, are we to reconcile the fact that Zeus was the prototypical Thunder-god, and yet the ancient artworks imply that he was also conceptualized as a former “sun”? Simply put, Zeus was both Thunder-god and sun. Hence, we would understand the otherwise anomalous fact that the Indo-European root evident in Zeus's name denoted the Sun in other cultures. It follows accordingly that the sun-gods of other cultures should be described in analogous terms, terms which, must be noted, are wholly anomalous by respect to the present sky, where the sun and lightning are not connected.

The Sumerian sun-god Utu offers a decisive test case here. Sumerian hymns portray the sunrise as accompanied by Thunder and lightning. Consider the following passage. "The Lord Utu, the son of Ningal, thunders over the mountains like a storm."

{The proper translation of “mountains” may be “mountain” (singular), because the polar column that stretched from Earth’s horizon to the Saturn configuration in the northern sky, was often called the “world mountain”.}

Yet another hymn invokes Utu as follows. "Hero emerging from the holy interior of heaven, storm whose splendor covers the Land and is laden with great awesomeness." Here, the ancient sun-god Utu is literally identified as a storm, whose splendor covers the land. Other hymns from the third Millennium BC describe Utu's eye as a source of lightning. Quote. "May everyone praise him together when he raises his eyes flashing like lightning." Far from being isolated examples of figurative language run amok, Sumerian descriptions of the prototypical sunrise routinely emphasizes {their} turbulent nature. Quote. "As my king Utu comes forth, the heavens tremble before him and the earth shakes before him." Now I ask, does this sound like a realistic description of the modern experience of sunrise? On the contrary, no sky-watcher in their right mind would ever mistake the present solar orb for a Thunderbolt-hurling storm god, any more than any myth-maker would describe the sunrise as accompanied by a thunderous roaring and a shaking of heaven and earth. It can scarcely be a coincidence that Sumerian logogram "ud", denoting sun, light, day and Utu himself, also denotes storm, much as we found to be the case with the Indo-European Zeus. The very same conflation between early words denoting sun and lightning storm is to be found in the Mayan languages from the New World as well. Such terminology offers compelling evidence the prototypical “sun” was a prodigious source of lightning, and not to be identified with the present solar orb.

In summary, what is true of Zeus's cyclopean eye and Thunderbolt is true of hundreds of other mythological motifs associated with the god. Not one will trace to the familiar natural world {on Earth}. Rather, each and every archetypal mythological motif has unequivocal celestial determinants and points to a radically different solar system in relatively recent prehistoric times.

{I’ll try to explain this quote from above. "As my king Utu comes forth, the heavens tremble before him and the earth shakes before him." “King Utu” was the Saturn configuration. “Comes forth” means brightens. The configuration was dim during the day and brightened at night, like the Moon does now. The “heavens” were perhaps dust and plasma surrounding the configuration, which perhaps vibrated as it brightened. In order to have heard thunder, the sound must have traveled through the plasma column, called the “world mountain”. Regarding this quote, "May everyone praise him together when he raises his eyes flashing like lightning," the meaning seems to be “… when Zeus’s eye flashes like lightning.”

In the final image below I think is an ancient Greek or Roman sculpture of Jupiter on the left and Planet Jupiter on the right. The main resemblance I can see is the curly forms. When the planet Jupiter departed, the next generations would have only had ancient descriptions and images to go on.}

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