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_ON STABLE AND UNSTABLE WORLDS _Dave Talbott. _We return now to the thread on physical issues facing the Saturn theory. The challenge under discussion is that of reconciliation - a rapprochement between the historical argument on the one hand and physical theory on the other. As we have seen, the unusual nature of the hypothesized events offers us a certain advantage. These events are so specifically defined that the tests are both clear and unequivocal. This principle, essential to the historical argument, also applies to all domains of physical evidence. Grant the extraordinary hypothesis, and you WILL NOT DOUBT that the events left a trail of distinct physical markers - evidence which the specialists have simply failed to recognize. We have described a congregation of planets close to the earth and dominating the ancient sky. If this extraordinary claim is true, then there is a vital line of discovery available to us. It is available to us whether or not we see this path for what it is On this path lies all of the critical evidence left by the events, all of the dynamical principles either known or yet to be discovered - everything that is needed to reconcile the historical argument and physical theory. The path is there because truth is unified. But will we see the evidence for what it is?
_In launching this review, we discussed the issue of Kepler's Third Law, which seems to exclude the very planetary alignment so fundamental to the theory. But then, as we saw, there is a unique principle of collinear equilibrium that radically alters the dynamic challenge. Put planets in line, and in sufficiently close proximity to each other, and there will be for each planet a mathematical equilibrium position along that line, at which each will have the same period as all the others. The planets stay in line until perturbed. But mathematical equilibrium does not mean that a collinear configuration would endure for more than a briefest moment, since equilibrium can be either stable or unstable. Once the collinear principle was acknowledged, it did not take 48 hours for the critics to retort that elimination of the Kepler objection doesn't make any difference. "The collinear positions are unstable", they said. Indeed, one critic even asserted that the equilibrium positions made the problems "worse". Confusion was aggravated by Robert Grubaugh's use of the word "stable" for collinear equilibrium, and it was his position that this stability could be demonstrated mathematically. What he actually demonstrated, I now believe, is that the mass ratios involved in the configuration work to the advantage of endurance, but not stability. His own computer simulation shows instability under the accepted definition. ANY perturbation begins an unraveling of the in-line condition, which is the definition of instability. Working with an archaic computer, he had simply not run the simulation long enough to watch unraveling happen under the influence of disturbance For those who have not followed these discussions, let me give my present understanding of the terminology (with the caveat that this is not my field of expertise!).
_Stability and instability can be visualized by simple analogies. If the object in question is a sphere, then instability is a round hill. There is a mathematical equilibrium point on the top of the hill, but in the real world the sphere will always roll off. The steeper the hill, the more explosive the instability. The "flatter" the top of the hill, the longer it will take for the ball to roll off. If I am understanding Grubaugh's position correctly, with two gas giants acting on much smaller planets in the collinear system, the mass ratios reduce the disruptive influence of a perturbation. But mass ratios cannot eliminate instability, only slow its effects. The collinear position is still a hill In contrast, stability is a valley or well. The deeper the well, the greater the force directing the sphere to the low point of the well, and the more energy it will take to remove the sphere from the well. Though mathematicians have debated the stability of collinear equilibrium positions into this century, I am satisfied that such positions are unstable under the accepted definition of the term. To the majority of critics there was nothing more one needed to know. "Collinear equilibrium is unstable, and the Saturnian configuration is impossible," they announced with one voice. "It's over!" shouted Professor Paul Gans, one of the best known debunkers on the Internet discussion group, talk-origins. During the several-week span of the discussion on talk-origins, I do not recall any skeptic allowing for a qualification of that pronouncement. It happened, however, that a fellow named Robert Bass had wandered by the talk group and he saw my name. I had known him from some 20 years earlier, when he wrote a couple of articles on solar system stability for the journal Pensee, which I was had published from 1972 to 1974. He wrote me a friendly note and that rekindled an old relationship.
_Dr. Bass is a Rhodes Scholar, a highly accomplished mathematician, and former chairman of the departments of mathematics and astronomy at Brigham Young University. I had the opportunity to discuss the stability question with Dr. Bass at length. Numerous critics had insisted that the way to determine stability of the claimed Saturnian system was to run a computer simulation. But there is a more appropriate test, Bass told me. He proposed to approach collinear equilibrium analytically, noting that the critics were making a mistake in simply writing off the equilibrium as unstable, since there can always be secondary forces coming into the equation in a critical way, and that requires one to understand the "configuration" of instability. So Bass developed what those in higher mathematics call a 20-dimensional matrix (something I'd prefer NOT to understand), and through a rigorous analysis determined what he called "the directions of stability and instability" in collinear equilibrium positions. The results were potentially far-reaching. What follows is my own best effort at describing the dynamic considerations by analogy. The collinear equilibrium position is not a hill, and it is not a valley or well. It is a "saddlepoint", a configuration which simultaneously acts like a well AND a hill, though the hill will win out and the sphere will, under even the most minute disturbance, roll off the saddle point. I came to see the saddle point in terms of intersecting stable and unstable configurations, a hill and valley. On one axis of the "saddle", you have the valley, and on the other you have the hill. Look at the shape of a saddle lengthwise and in profile, and you see a valley. But a cross-section at any point will reveal a hill. The low point of the valley is the high point of a hill. That is the "saddlepoint". So it can only be unstable, though the sphere placed at that point will only role off in one of two directions. That's a lot different dynamically than a round hill, as we'll see in a moment. But first it is crucial that one see the significance of equilibrium itself. Imagine a marble on a perfectly smooth and frictionless saddle point, and you will easily visualize why the equilibrium position is unstable. The existence of a mathematical zero point does not mean that, practically speaking, the marble will stay there. But equally important is the energy factor - which may be a little easier to visualize if we increase the size of the sphere. Imagine a bowling ball placed on a saddle point. Ask yourself how much energy is needed to HOLD the ball at that equilibrium point. Then compare that to the amount of energy needed to STOP a bowling ball falling at hundreds of miles per hour. That is the significance of equilibrium. Of course, to appreciate the scale of forces at stake, you have to imagine, not bowling balls, but PLANETS in equilibrium versus PLANETS moving away from equilibrium at THOUSANDS of miles per hour. So long as the original objection to the in-line system (based on Kepler) dominated discussion, there was no answer to the momentum problem in terms acceptable to those accredited in the affected fields. But once collinear equilibrium entered the picture, the ground shifted dramatically. As Bass observed, it was no longer appropriate to ignore secondary forces. So Bass conducted a mathematical experiment analyzing the effect of "tidal friction", which arises from the tidal distortion of one body gravitationally by another body. Analytically, by determining the directions of stability and instability at the "saddle point", Dr. Bass was able to visualize the effect of tidal friction on collinear equilibrium. It was his conclusion that this secondary force operates in the direction of stability. If that is correct, then the system will only unravel when a perturbing force is greater than the effects of tidal friction. In other words, ANY force working in the direction of stability means that the system is stable, even if the valley or well of stability is exceedingly shallow. This will remain true until a greater force is introduced, acting in the direction of instability. Of course the scale of tidal friction will typically be extremely small, but in the hypothesized assembly of planets, these bodies were unusually close together. And this not only makes a large difference, it could support the idea of a collinear system going on virtually forever. (In fact, however, the Saturn model is NOT dependent on long duration of any phase in the dynamic evolution of the system.) The physicist Robert Driscoll, who has spent much of his life working with electromagnetic principles, also expressed interest in collinear equilibrium. Under Newton's laws, the force of gravity varies with the inverse square of the distance between two bodies. And interestingly, the lapse rate of magnetic force between the poles of two magnets follows the same inverse square principle. But when two objects, both possessing dipolar magnetic fields, talk to each other dynamically, there is something more.. With the interaction of two sets of DIPOLES, the resulting strength of the magnetic "push" or "pull" between the two bodies will vary at the inverse 4TH POWER of distance. This unique gradient, according to Driscoll, will operate in the direction of collinear stability. But such expert testimony does not provide us with any final solutions. Some of Driscoll's work has been published in the journal AEON, but it has only invited further exploration, and Dr. Bass' work relative to tidal friction was a preliminary study subject to review by others. These specialists have, however, given us one definitive answer on a crucial point. Those who simply asserted that the Saturnian system would be unstable - and therefore "impossible - were incorrect. That presumption ignored any and all forces which would act in the direction of stability. Of course all of this needs much more investigation, and I have little doubt that many of the most significant revelations still lie ahead of us . In this review, we have not yet looked at the work of Wal Thornhill and others on the "electric universe". Tidal friction and magnetic interactions are within the parameters of conventional theory. Their effects on a LIVABLE Earth would necessarily be extremely small. But there is a common assumption - what might be called a sacred principle of science - which must ultimately be challenged. It is always assumed that "gravity" is a constant. In truth, NO ONE can claim to know this, and there is significant evidence to the contrary (and we will get to it shortly). The remembered Saturnian system was alive with electric effects, and if I am hearing Wal Thornhill correctly, these effects are a direct indication that there was no gravitational "constant" within the system. Is it possible, then, that there is a much larger theoretical arena for exploring collinear stability and collinear instability? Both stability and instability MUST be included in the hypothesis if one is to account for the planetary system's origins, its spectacular disruption, it's transient reconfiguration, and its ultimate demise. ---
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_THE WARRING GODDESS ATHENA _By Dave Talbott. _As a follow-up to the previous discussion of James Fitton, I shall attempt to illustrate a principle of methodology. How does one evaluate the explanatory power of the Saturn theory in the concrete terms we have suggested? Since Fitton criticized Velikovsky for claiming the Greek Athena was Venus, I will employ this goddess as our test case, though any well-documented goddess figure could be approached in the same way. Our reference for now is a "snapshot" of the Saturnian configuration on the Kronia Communications website. Go to the page on the "Saturn theory" at www.kronia.com. This snapshot resolves a more complex, evolving planetary configuration into a single glimpse, taken from our notebook, "Symbols of an Alien Sky". Our subject is the central "star" of Venus, seen in the center of the gas giant Saturn, with luminous streamers radiating from Venus to spread visually across the much larger sphere of Saturn. In our previous discussion, I presented a list of mythical attributes attached to this unique form of Venus. It is my contention not only that these forms are essential to the Venus or goddess-archetype, but that no comprehension of the archetype is even possible apart from the explicit contexts suggested in this illustration. These contexts include, 1) CENTRALITY in relationship to another body remembered as the universal sovereign, 2) Comet-like STREAMERS exploding into light as the Sun set and the surrounding sky darkened, and 3) the appearance of a darker or reddish smaller body in front of (i.e., visually inside) the sphere of Venus, this body being identifiable through comparative analysis as the planet Mars, the archetypal warrior-hero.
_The primary mythical forms (among a larger list of secondary symbols) are: _1) Great Star, Great Comet _2) Long-haired, fiery-haired goddess _3) Radiant heart, soul, or "life" of the primeval sun or universal sovereign god (Saturn) _4) Visible glory, radiance, majesty, splendor, power, or strength of the primeval sun _5) Nave (hub) and spokes of the "sun" wheel (Saturn's wheel) _7) Radiant eye of the "sun"; eye with streaming "tears" _8) Rayed crown worn by the warrior-hero (Mars) _9) Feathered headdress worn by the warrior-hero _10) Shield or protection of the warrior-hero For the sake of focus in the limited space allowed here, we'll look at two motifs - number 7 and number 10 - to illustrate the comparative test. Then, in our next submission, we'll show the crucial connections to the other symbolic forms.
_THE EYE GODDESS. _It seems that around the world ancient races identified the planet Venus as "the Eye," or "Great Eye," though the speck of light we know as Venus today does not stand in relation to another body in any way that might suggest a central eye. (On considering our illustration of Venus in relation to Saturn, however, the most common statement we receive from people is, "That looks like an eye!") In fact, the Sumerian Inanna and Akkadian Ishtar, both identified with Venus, are the commonly acknowledged prototypes of the famous "eye goddesses" whose influence reached as far as northern Europe. (A good introduction is OGS Crawford's classic work, THE EYE GODDESS.) On the other side of the world, the Maya knew Venus as "Nohoch Ich" "Great Eye." In the Hervey Islands of the Pacific, Venus was called "Tamatanui", the "eye of Tane" (ancestral great king). The ancient Chinese term for Venus is connected with a root meaning "Eye of the Ancestor." (This information came to me from Eric Miller, who spent many years investigating Chinese imagery of Venus.) And the Ringa-Ringaroo of Australia remembered the planet Venus as "Mimungoona", "The Big Eye". This widespread identity of Venus as the "eye" is surely the key to understanding why the Egyptian goddesses Isis, Hathor, Sekhmet, and others commonly identified with the Mediterranean Astarte/Aphrodite/ Venus were invoked throughout ancient Egypt as "the Eye of Ra". More specifically, as I have noted elsewhere, the Egyptian language implies a SMALLER orb appearing squarely in the center of a LARGER sphere. The texts describe the Eye shining "with splendors on the forehead of Ra". (The "splendors" of the Eye must be understood in substantive terms, as the streamers radiating from central orb; see #4 above.) It is also worth noting that the respected Egyptologist Rudolf Anthes investigated the Egyptian Eye-motif in great detail, concluding that the Eye goddess was the planet Venus. Of course, he drew this conclusion without the benefit of the global comparative analysis which secures the case beyond any reasonable doubt. Immanuel Velikovsky, in identifying Athena with Venus, never discussed the eye motif, but the very presence of such an unusual theme attached to Venus can hardly be ignored in an investigation of the Greek goddess. There are at least four epithets of Athena which are suggestive of the connection to the eye goddess. Athena is the "flashing-eyed", the "strong-eyed", the "owl-eyed" (or bright-eyed) and the "Gorgon-eyed", Are these epithets to be taken as loose metaphors, whose precise meaning has been lost over time? Or are they echoes of an ancient theme (EYE-goddess), which the experts on Athena have missed? In his DESCRIPTION OF GREECE (3.18.2), Pausanias gives a form of Athena as "Ophthalmitis" "Goddess of the Eye". That alone should give us a strong indication of the connection to the worldwide theme of Venus as central Eye. Obviously we cannot here pursue all of the leads, but let us simply take one, that of Athena as Glaukopis, the "owl-eyed" goddess. Will comparative analysis give us grounds for connecting this Athena epithet to the attributes of the more widespread Eye goddess? In "Symbols of an Alien Sky", I have noted that the general trend of symbolism over time was toward increasingly naturalistic representation. And thus, in the course of giving the central eye-star a human form (as goddess), the symbolists DUPLICATED it, since single eyes do not occur in nature. Put two pictographs of the Venus-eye together, and you have the beginnings of anthropomorphic representation, a trend which can be easily documented. But something else happens. The "head" of the goddess so represented takes on a strange resemblance to an "owl" ("Symbols", pages 90-91). As shown by Marija Gimbutas and others, the ancient eye goddess does, in fact, pass into the figure of an "owl" goddess. From eye goddess to owl goddess: nothing more is needed in order to explain the owl-eyed Athene, a goddess who was also REPRESENTED by, or as, an owl, One such representation of the "owl of Athena" is given on page 91. Note that the form of the owl-eyes is precisely that which we have given as the original eye-star of Venus. Of course, to the experts, this aspect of Athene seems to bear no connection to the other attributes of the goddess. If our hypothesis is correct, that will be because these specialists have yet to discern the connection between the later symbol and the celestial object originally symbolized. Such regional symbols DO NOT EXPLAIN THEMSELVES, but are explained in the most concrete way by the hypothesized celestial form, as it is reflected in evolving symbolic patterns.
_THE SHIELD GODDESS _Of all the symbols of Athena, none is more prominent than the AEGIS, the famous "shield" on which artists frequently portrayed the head of the Gorgon Medusa, with which Athena herself is so intimately associated. Is it possible, then, that there is a simple, but unrecognized connection between the "owl-eyed" Athena and the "Gorgon-eyed" Athena? In the general tradition, the central star of Venus and its effusion of "radiance" was the protection of the warrior-hero (Mars), who is represented by the innermost orb in the pictographs under discussion. You see this, for example, in the role of Egyptian goddesses as "the Great Protectress". To stand inside the radiant eye (goddess) was to find the unassailable position. Thus, Egyptian texts proclaim, " He is Horus encircled with the protection of his Eye". "My refuge is my Eye, my protection is my Eye". But while Egyptologists acknowledge the identity of Eye and goddess, they have nothing to tell us about the meaning of this enigmatic language. What, then, was the "protection" enjoyed by the hero, when he occupied that desired position INSIDE the eye? It was nothing other than the jetting of luminous or "fiery" material outward, presenting the appearance of explosive, UNAPPROACHABLE streams. Of the Egyptian Eye goddess Sekhmet, the texts declare, "It is a flame which drives away on its account.... No one at all can approach her, the streams behind her are flames of fire." (The streams stretch up the polar axis BEHIND Venus.) Similarly, The Sumerian "Exaltation of Inanna" speaks of those "who dare not proceed before [Inanna's] terrible countenance". The texts depict the goddess "clothed in radiance." And it was said that the world stood in "fear and trembling at [her] tempestuous radiance." In considering these images, I trust the reader will appreciate why translators, despite the power and explicitness of the images, do not take them seriously - they simply find NO REFERENCE FOR THEM in our sky today. On our earth, great warriors represented this protective function by duplicating the image on their shields. I have given an example on page 92, which shows all of the hypothesized components and precisely replicates both the Eye-goddess pictographs and the eye form of the "owl of Athena" on the previous page. The innermost orb will mean the warrior hero (Mars), protected by the blazing radiance of the central star or "comet". All that is needed in an investigation of this sort is that one uncover the underlying forms. No selectivity is required in order to take the tests in one direction (eye motif), or another direction (shield motif). One will either find the precise form predicted by the model, or one will find something else, thereby challenging the model as a unified theory. [As a footnote I should mention that Ev Cochrane has sent to me a few notes on the Athena-eye connection. Until I received these notes, I did not know that Athena was called Eriopis ("strong eyed") or Gorgopis ("Gorgon-eyed"). As it turns out, both epithets will figure crucially in our next installment, dealing with the eye as the power or "strength" of the primeval sun (#4 in our list of symbols above) and as the head of the feminine chaos monster (Gorgon/Medusa) in an unstable phase of the configuration.] ---
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_VISUALIZING COLLINEAR SYSTEMS _By Dave Talbott _Continuing our introductory review of physical issues facing the Saturn theory. We have noted two fundamental principles: 1) the existence of collinear equilibrium positions, and 2) the potential role of secondary forces in stabilizing collinear equilibrium. In both instances, as we saw, the initial pronouncements we received from scientific critics proved to be either incorrect, or highly misleading. That situation is significant not only because our mission is to reconcile the historical argument with VERIFIABLE physical data, but also because it never hurts to be reminded how frequently authoritative pronouncements on matters of physical plausibility turn out to be incorrect. Now let's move to some other issues relating to collinear conditions. Perhaps the space program can help here. To study the Sun, the international SOHO satellite was placed in a collinear relationship to Earth and the Sun (actually, a "halo orbit" around the collinear equilibrium position called Lagrange 1), so that as the Earth revolves around the Sun, the satellite remains between the Sun and the Earth. Discounting the movement around L1, you have-
_EARTH _SOHO
_EARTH SOHO SUN SOHO EARTH
_SOHO _EARTH
_The SOHO satellite, therefore, gives us a good illustration of collinear equilibrium and why the usual implication of Kepler's Third Law doesn't apply when two or more bodies are acting on a third. If SOHO were moving independently around the Sun, then its orbital period at that distance would be LESS than that of the Earth, which would seem to make the above arrangement impossible. But in fact SOHO is not moving independently; it is also revolving around the Earth once for each orbit of the Earth around the Sun. (Again, bear in mind that I am oversimplifying here since SOHO is not AT the collinear equilibrium position, but circles around the position described, a matter to which we will return in discussing the role of Mars in the Saturn model.) Now this brings us to what was unquestionably the biggest mistake made by the dynamicist Robert Grubaugh in his initial presentation, a mistake which he alone seems to have recognized. In the journal AEON, Grubaugh proposed an ancient system of planets in collinear equilibrium as it moved around the Sun. And he visualized the configuration holding the same angle in relation to the Sun throughout its orbit, yielding a constant crescent on Saturn. For simplification here, I will include only Jupiter-Saturn-Earth through a quarter orbit -
_Earth _Saturn _Jupiter _Earth _Saturn
_Jupiter SUN
_As you can see, in inertial space - which is defined by the background stars - the system is not only moving around the primary (the Sun), but the Earth and Saturn are also moving synchronously around Jupiter. This is where the problem comes in, and ones definitions depend entirely on reference points. To illustrate the problem you need to see the contradiction between Grubaugh's mathematical calculation of collinear equilibrium and his visualization of the system. Grubaugh's mathematical analysis involved CO-ROTATIONAL references, in which RELATIVE motions are a key to the concept of "revolution". The revolution of the secondary system is defined by its motion in relation to a radius from the primary. Hence, the crucial question: within a co-rotational frame of reference, is the illustrated planetary system actually doing what Grubaugh described mathematically? To clarify the co-rotational principle, let's go back to the illustration of the SOHO satellite. Imagine a line from the Sun through SOHO to the Earth, with the Sun being the primary center of rotation, and the Earth being the secondary center of rotation. In a co-rotational frame, what is the rotation of the secondary system in relation to the primary? The answer is NONE. While the secondary system IS revolving in the inertial frame, it is not revolving in a co-rotational frame. To get rotation in a co-rotational sense, the line from Earth to SOHO would independently rotate around a point on the radius from the Sun FASTER than the planetary system moved around the Sun. To visualize the principle, imagine a bicycle wheel with a smaller wheel attached to its rim. If the small wheel is locked into place. the secondary wheel will still be turning once in inertial space with each revolution of the larger wheel. But it will NOT be rotating in terms of the co-rotational references. In fact, in co-rotational terms, to get the smaller wheel to revolve ONCE with each revolution of the larger wheel, it will have to revolve TWICE in inertial space. Now look at Grubaugh's first illustration of a synchronous system. His calculations, using co-rotational references, were for a full revolution of the secondary system with each revolution around the Sun. But what he illustrated shows NO revolution co-rotationally, since the angle from the Sun to Jupiter to the Earth is retained throughout. To illustrate the equilibrium conditions he had calculated co-rotationally, he would have had to show the system revolving twice against the background stars for each revolution of the system around the Sun. But to the contrary, his illustration showed a constant Sun-Jupiter-Saturn angle of 135 degrees. While numerous critics certainly noticed that the illustrated condition doesn't work dynamically, none seemed to realize the actual nature of the problem. Dr. Victor Slabinski, an accomplished celestial dynamicist, published in AEON a critique of Grubaugh's model, showing that the angle illustrated could not be maintained. But unless I am sorely mistaken, he did not realize that the illustration failed to represent Grubaugh's own co-rotational mathematics. It was Grubaugh himself who realized this, much to his embarrassment. In retrospect, the error is easy to recognize, though at the time of the initial presentation, the emotional intensity of Internet discussions seems to have prevented all participants from diagnosing the situation correctly. I recall, for example, one qualified expert taking figures from Grubaugh and running a computer simulation with the Sun-Jupiter-Saturn angle initially at 90 degrees-
_Jupiter Saturn _Sun
_After a quarter turn of the system around the Sun, it looked like this-
_Saturn Jupiter Sun
_Is this a clue or what? Yet, searching through my archives of discussion on the Internet newsgroup talk-origins, I cannot find any indication that critics detected what has now become the obvious. In fact, the simulation showed exactly what Grubaugh had calculated co-rotationally, but not what he had illustrated visually. In the mathematical frame he was employing, the J-S system independently rotates 90 degrees as the entire system rotates 90 degrees around the Sun, so that in inertial space Jupiter and Saturn have revolved a total of 180 degrees.
_Revolution of J-S around the Sun = 90 degrees
_Independent rotation of J-S = 90 degrees
_Total J-S rotation in inertial space = 180 degrees
_This means two full revolutions in inertial space for each revolution of the system around the Sun. In his first presentation of the idea, Grubaugh did not illustrate correctly what he had calculated mathematically! Well, it could have been a lot worse if any of the critics had picked up on the flaw! But instead, four years after Grubaugh's initial presentation, we still find the loudest of critics celebrating Dr. Slabinski's "refutation" of Grubaugh, completely unaware of the actual situation or the meaning of co-rotational references mathematically. In truth, there was no refutation of Grubaugh, only a refutation of the ILLUSTRATED condition, with no discernment of the underlying mistake. Of course, other issues immediately arise. What Grubaugh's first illustration suggested was the possibility of a LASTING crescent on Saturn, due to the enduring Sun-to-Saturn-to-Earth angle. But if, in fact, the planetary system revolved in relation to the radius from the Sun, a crescent on Saturn (as seen from the Earth) would only be temporary, though obviously it would last much longer than the crescent Moon in our sky today. While the Saturn model does not specify duration of the Saturnian crescent, certain constraints must be acknowledged. (I never found any evidence of a Saturn-crescent moving through cyclical "phases", for example, so the effect of these consideration may be to compress our sense of time in the more complex evolution of the system). We'll return to that issue later in this series. Additionally, we must confront the matter of the Earth's polar alignment to the collinear system, which surely requires a continual precession of the Earth's axis as the planets moved around the Sun. Or does it? That issue, too, became a hot topic in Internet discussions, as we shall see. ---
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_THE "TERRIFYING GLORY" OF VENUS _By Dave Talbott. _In our prior installment on the Greek goddess Athena, we noted two relationships of the goddess under the tests of our planetary model: the connection to the ancient eye-goddess, and the connection to the "shield" in which the warrior-hero finds his protection. Our purpose was to illustrate how an independent researcher might follow the logical tests of the Saturn model in any direction. Given the specificity of the model itself, the tests leave little room for ambiguity or selective perception. They are also virtually limitless. And each poses the same question: would these deeply connected memories be possible if the claimed events never occurred? In this brief series, our reference has been a "snapshot" of the Saturnian configuration on the Kronia Communications website. You will find the illustration at www.kronia.com/html/saturn_theory.html
_A more general background is provided by the notebook "Symbols of an Alien Sky", to which we have frequently referred in this series. Before moving on, I shall offer a few more observations concerning Athena's equation with the central "star" of Venus depicted in the illustration. In this phase of the evolving configuration, Venus stands visually in the center of the gas giant Saturn, discharging luminous streams of material in every direction. In reference to this phase, I listed these testable mythical forms of Venus-- _1) Great Star, Great Comet _2) Long-haired, fiery-haired goddess _3) Radiant heart, soul, or "life" of the primeval sun or universal sovereign god (Saturn) _4) Visible glory, radiance, majesty, splendor, power, or strength of the primeval sun _5) Nave (hub) and spokes of the "sun" wheel (Saturn's wheel) _7) Radiant eye of the "sun"; eye with streaming "tears" _8) Rayed crown worn by the warrior-hero (Mars) _9) Feathered headdress worn by the warrior-hero _10) Shield or protection of the warrior-hero _While conventional understanding would see only irreconcilable natural and man-made objects behind these symbolic forms, our model implies that, despite their seeming differences, each and every one refers us back to the SAME form in the sky. Of course this would be inconceivable were no external reference present to inspire the wide range of mythical interpretations. Hence, if it can be confirmed that all of listed symbols DO explicitly refer to the form we have illustrated, the logical case for its presence in the ancient sky is settled. For this reason, in discussion of the hypothesized configuration, I have continually emphasized the concreteness of the ancient images. Consider, for example, items three and four in our list. What was meant by the "life" of the ancient sun? And what was the "power" or "glory" of the sun, so often invoked in ancient sources? Lacking any concrete references, even the best scholars have failed to notice the libraries of evidence bearing directly on the question. The "life" - the "heart" and "soul" - of the ancient sun god is a GODDESS. And not a goddess in the abstract, but in the precise form of a radiant star drawn in the center of a larger circle or sphere. You can see this for yourself - and abundantly so - in the birthplace of astronomy. The Babylonian goddess Ishtar, who gave "life" to the gods (and symbolically to the ruling king), was the planet Venus. Her star was not located in an ambiguous "sky", but precisely in the center of the great wheel of Shamash, the "sun" god, identified by Babylonian astronomers as the planet Saturn. But what was meant by the "life"-giving attribute of the goddess? Allow ancient words and images to mean what they say, and its significance is clear. It means the luminous material steaming outward to visually animate the larger sphere of Saturn. ("Symbols of an Alien Sky," pp 81 ff. Here Wal Thornhill's model of the electrically discharging Venus is vital!). In the daily cycle, as the sky darkened, these streams exploded into light, "bringing to life" the sun god and the celestial theater as a whole. The effusive streamers WERE the "life" of the sun god, to whom the goddess was so intimately linked. Remove the central star and you are, in fact, looking at the mythical "death" of the sovereign power, when his heart and soul departed from him to take on a much different appearance. Indeed, this very idea - the departure of the heart-soul - emphasizes how quickly the acid tests expand the domain of evidence, no matter where one starts an investigation. We are not just dealing with static forms, but sequences of events as well. So we should expect to find the same critical sequence apparent in all of the images we have listed above. A considerable field of evidence will tell us what happened to the streamers of the discharging Venus when the planet was removed from its collinear position They became chaotic, undulating, or serpentine, presenting the terrifying countenance of Venus as the lamenting or violent goddess, raging in the sky with wildly disheveled hair. That is, in fact, the core identity of Venus in the period of cosmic upheaval, following the "death" of the universal sovereign. Of course volumes could, and have, been written on the raging goddess, but we must limit ourselves to just one example here, the one which would appear to be the LEAST tangible and most ambiguous of the listed images, I refer to item four: "Visible glory, radiance, majesty, splendor, power, or strength of the primeval sun". What does that concept have to do with a GODDESS, or with the PLANET VENUS? Well, the answer is - everything! And this is a particularly telling example because even the best experts have failed to explain why the visible "Glory" of a masculine power should so consistently appear in feminine form. Why was the feminine Glory of the ancient sun distinct from the sun god himself? More specifically, why the association with the planet Venus? And more specifically still, why did it depart from the god to become a monstrous, raging power in the heavens? Though we can only give the briefest summary here, there is no escaping the concrete meanings of the words. Sumerian texts celebrate the "terrifying glory" of Inanna (Venus), invoking the goddess as "the Light of the World", "the Amazement of the Lands", "the Radiant Star", "Great Light", and "Queen of Heaven". The texts depict the goddess "clothed in radiance". And it was said that the world stood in "fear and trembling at [her] tempestuous radiance". That is what I mean by concrete imagery attached to the "Glory" in early texts. The language is significant in more ways than one. The Sumerian word for the Glory or radiance in which Inanna clothed herself is melammu. The Akkadian term is sallammu and astronomical texts employ this very word for a COMET. Thus, the placement of the star of "Glory" is crucial under any reasonable test of our model. Both the texts and artistic renderings locate the star in the CENTER of "Heaven" - an absurdity in relation to the appearance of Venus in today's sky But the word translated as "Heaven" is the Sumerian An (Akkadian Anu), referring to the highest god in the pantheon. More specifically, An is the prototype of kings and founder of the Golden Age, the god we have identified (and more than one specialist has also identified) as the planet Saturn. In invoking the "terrifying glory in the center of An", the texts give us the very placement predicted by the model. Of equal significance are the artistic depictions of the star of Ishtar, the Babylonian Venus, showing the sphere of Venus placed squarely in the center of a much larger circle or sphere and radiating streams of light to the circumference of the larger body. That is the true meaning of the star of Glory in the ancient world, a meaning that can be confirmed by any researcher willing to investigate the subject with any seriousness. (The fact that the artists depicted Venus and other planets as SPHERES is no small matter either, since it is flatly impossible to detect the sphericity of a planet in today's sky.) A counterpart to the Mesopotamian image will be the Hebrew Shekinah, called the "indwelling," the feminine "Glory" of God. The Persian Zend Avesta speaks of the "awful Kingly Glory" ("Kavaem Hvareno") which "clave unto the bright Yima" during the Golden Age. As we have noted elsewhere, Yima is to be identified with the planet Saturn. According to Avestan tradition, the Glory departed from Yima with the end of the Golden Age, That was when "the glory was seen to flee away from him". And strangely, on its departure, the Glory took the form of a female chaos monster, remembered as "that most powerful, fiendish Drug, that demon baleful". This turns out to be a key, for we are reminded that the goddess Inanna, the Sumerian star of terrifying glory, was also transformed into a world threatening dragon. "Like a dragon you have deposited venom on the land... Raining the fanned fire down upon the nation... With a roaring storm you roar; with Thunder you continually thunder". The Hindus remembered the Face of Glory, called "Kirttimukha", said to have been born from the EYE OF SHIVA. It was lion-headed and its "mane, disheveled, spread far and wide into space". Authorities have recognized the Face of Glory as the "terrible aspect" of the Supreme Goddess Devi. This, in turn, draws our attention to the Egyptian goddess Tefnut, the central Eye and "Majesty" of Ra. When the Eye-goddess departed from Ra, she took on a raging countenance, appearing as a giant LION HEAD, with FLAMING, SMOKING MANE. Virtually identical images are attached to the Egyptian Sekhmet, also called the Eye and Majesty of Ra. In her departure, Sekhmet is simultaneously depicted in leonine form and as a fiery tempest - "a circling star, which scatters its flame in fire". Though we are merely skimming the service here, perhaps the reader has already surmised the connection with the Greek goddess Athena, whose acknowledged alter ego is none other than the famous Gorgon Medusa. Indeed, the terrifying head of Medusa, with disheveled, undulating, serpentine hair is the commonly-cited counterpart to the Hindu Kirttimukha or Face of Glory. Where, then (harking back to our previous discussion of Athena), should we expect to find the head of Medusa, but exactly where Greek artists so frequently depicted it - squarely in the center of the aegis or warrior shield? We are, in other words, dealing with a coherence of symbolism entirely missed by the specialists. On the one hand, we have the Greek image of the shield noted previously, with its central sphere and radiating lines of force, and on the other hand we have the shield revealing in its very center the head of Medusa - terrible aspect of Athena - performing precisely the role we should expect
of the angry goddess. (Readers are referred to our earlier discussion of Venus as shield-goddess and protectress.) Both the Hindu Kirttimukha and the Medusa-head possessed the power to ward off evil, reminding us of the more ancient role of the goddess' terrifying countenance in fending off the celestial powers of darkness. Of the raging goddess Sekhmet, Egyptian texts say, "No one at all can approach her, the streams behind her are flames of fire". So too, the Sumerian Inanna, clothed in radiance: her enemies "dare not proceed before [her] terrible countenance". These prototypes will surely explain why, in more earthbound rituals, both the Kirttimukha and the Medusa head took the form of a gruesome "mask" placed as protection over the threshold. Symbolically, the frightful countenance of the angry goddess' "Glory" also means DEFENSE (= shield of the hero in his conjunction with the goddess.) The same concept will be seen in the Gorgon-like T'ao T'ieh of the Chinese, which the leading authority Ananda Commaraswamy identifies with both the Kirttimukha and the Gorgonian or Medusa head. Indeed, even in the Americas one encounters the same underlying concept in rites of such Aztec goddesses as Cihuacoatl and Toci. Of the goddess Cihuacoatl, the Aztecs sang - "She is our mother, a goddess of war, our mother a goddess of war, an example and a companion from the home of our ancestors... She appears when war is waged, she protects us in war that we shall not be destroyed... She comes adorned in the ancient manner with the eagle crest." (Compare the familiar, comet-like "crest" of Athena.) In Aztec ritual, the flayed "skin" of the mother goddess (provided by specially-selected sacrificial victims) was donned by warriors, not unlike the head of Medusa on the shield or over the threshold, the wildly disheveled hair deliberately presented as an emblem of terror - a weapon-mask-shield against all enemies. That Cihuacoatl herself was the "example" - meaning the PROTOTYPE - is all we need to know to see the link between later commemorative or ritual practices and the ancient role of the goddess. By comparing such motifs as these one will discover coherent, cross-cultural memories never imagined by conventional theorists. Only in OUR world do a "shield" and a frightening "mask" play different practical and magical roles. In the archetypal realms of world mythology, the two concepts are indistinguishable - both referring to the radiating "Glory" of the mother goddess Venus when, in the phase of cosmic upheaval and the wars of the gods, the goddess took on her terrifying, world-threatening, cometary aspect. ---
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_MARS ROCKS IN ANCIENT MYTH AND MODERN SCIENCE: Part I of II _By Ev Cochrane _On June 28th, 1911, the inhabitants of Nakhla, Egypt, were treated to a spectacular meteor shower. As it turns out, one of these rocks almost certainly came from the planet Mars, nearly 50 million miles away. The difficulty in dislodging a meteorite from the red planet, much less transporting one to Earth, has prompted several noted authorities to doubt their Martian origin. The meteorite's chemical imprint, however, not unlike the DNA evidence in a murder trial, leaves little doubt about its place of origin. Nor did this rock alone make the journey. To date, ten Martian meteorites have been identified, half of them being observed falls. The recognition that these rocks hail from Mars has been called one of the most important findings of the space age. Meteorites have long aroused interest, being objects of worship in numerous ancient cultures, their heavenly origin no doubt contributing to their numinous appeal. That meteorites were extraterrestrial in nature was certainly known to the sky-watchers of Mesopotamia, China, and Greece. At some point, however, this knowledge became lost. Thomas Jefferson, for example, was in the majority in rejecting the possibility that rocks could fall from the sky. Confronted with a report of a meteorite-fall in Connecticut, Jefferson is said to have quipped: "It is easier to believe that Yankee professors would lie than that stones would fall from heaven." And this was in 1807! Reviewing the history of meteoritics, Dodd commented upon this strange turn of events: "That meteorites came from beyond the Earth is both a very old and a new idea…The ancient Greeks and Chinese also regarded meteorites as objects from the heavens, but this perception, like so much else of value, was lost to Western culture during the long intellectual night that we call the Dark Ages…Although several important meteorite falls were recovered and described during the second half of the eighteenth century, the few men who suggested that they came from beyond the Earth were either ridiculed or ignored." It is not surprising, perhaps, given this history, that disbelief and hostility originally greeted the proposal that meteorites could make their way to Earth from Mars. The idea that meteorites from Mars could impact Earth is not new. Several decades prior to these relatively recent and wholly unexpected developments, Immanuel Velikovsky claimed that rocks from Mars had only recently menaced the Earth. Velikovsky drew this conclusion upon the basis of ancient testimony, which described Mars as participating in spectacular cataclysms involving the Earth and various neighboring bodies. In Worlds in Collision, Velikovsky described the events associated with the near passage of Venus and Mars as follows: "When Mars clashed with Venus, asteroids, meteorites, and gases were torn from [Venus' comet-like tail], and began a semi-independent existence, some following the orbit of Mars, some other paths. These swarms of meteorites with their gaseous appendages were newborn comets; flying in bands and taking various shapes, they made an uncanny impression. Those which followed Mars closely looked like a troop following their leader. They also ran along different orbits, grew quickly from small to giant size, and terrorized the peoples of the earth." Velikovsky's thesis, needless to say, met with nearly unanimous hostility and disbelief among astronomers. A reappraisal of the evidence bearing on the question, however, suggests that Velikovsky deserves great credit for anticipating the Martian origin of certain meteorites. And if the author of Worlds in Collision was on the right track with regards to the spectacular circumstances behind the arrival of these meteorites, their significance for a proper understanding of the evolution of the solar system far surpasses anything imagined by conventional astronomers. In what follows, we will first review the evidence which suggests that these meteorites are actually from Mars. We will then summarize and briefly examine the various theories as to how the rocks came to be expelled from the red planet and make their way to the Earth. Then we will return to Velikovsky's thesis of planetary catastrophism, offering further support for the idea that Mars only recently moved in very close proximity to the Earth, raining forth extraterrestrial debris of one form or another, including fiery bolides.
_THE SNC-METEORITES _The SNC-meteorites take their name from Shergotty, Nakhla and Chassigny, three different but closely related achondritic classes of igneous rock. The basaltic shergottites resemble eucrites in mineralogy and are regarded as the product of volcanic flows (lavas). Their name derives from Shergotty, India, the scene in 1865 of the fall of several meteorites. Included in this class are the following meteorites: Shergotty, Zagami, EET79001, ALH77005, and LEW88516, the latter two bodies being Lherzolites. The nakhlites, on the other hand, are pyroxenites consisting mainly of augite. They received their name from an Egyptian site - El Nakhla el Baharia - where over 40 stones fell in 1911. Included in this class are the following rocks: Nakhla, Lafayette, and Governador Valadares. The lone Chassigny meteorite is a dunite consisting mainly of iron-rich olivine. It fell in France in 1815. The tenth Martian rock, ALH84001, has only recently been identified as Martian in nature. It is a cataclastic, coarse-grained orthopyroxenite and is thought to have properties unique among these bodies. Although visually dissimilar, the three classes of meteorites share numerous features in common. Most of these rocks contain iron-rich silicates and iron oxides, clear evidence that they were created in a rather iron-rich environment. And all of the SNCs show very similar oxygen-isotope compositions, these abundances being distinct from those characteristic of the Earth or Moon. The SNCs are also similar in their relatively young ages. By measuring the decay products of various radioactive isotopes in igneous rocks, it is thought to be possible to determine how long ago the rocks solidified. Known as the crystallization age, the measures obtained for the Nahklites and Chassigny were on the order of ~1.3 billion years, compared to the 4.4 to 4.6 Gyr typical of meteorites of the igneous variety. This age is unique among all meteorites-the youngest lunar meteorites are > 3.0 Gyr - and clearly marks these particular rocks as anomalous. Inasmuch as it is commonly believed that only planets could retain the high internal temperatures necessary to produce magmas billions of years after accretion, a planet was sought as the parent of these particular meteorites. According to Dodd, these crystallization age analyses have "shown beyond reasonable doubt that all of them [the SNCs] come from the same body, certainly a planet and probably Mars." The SNCs also share high volatile contents. This feature likewise supports the hypothesis that these bodies originated on a large body with a gravitational field great enough to retain volatiles. For various reasons, a body larger than the Moon is believed to be required. Rare earth element analysis can also be brought to bear on the question of the meteorites' place of origin. It indicates the presence of garnet materials in the source region of the shergottites, which suggests a source region pressure of > 40 kbars, consistent with the view that the SNC parent body was likely larger than the Moon. Several other characteristics of these rocks are of interest. The individual minerals show some disturbance at ~180 million years in the U-Pb, Rb-Sr, and Ar-Ar clocks. This is thought by some to represent the date of impact which ejected the SNCs from their parent body. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, analysis of the noble gases trapped in some of the shergottites (EETA79001 and ALHA77005) has revealed the clear signature of Mars. According to McSween, "the measured abundances and isotopic compositions of Ar, Kr, Xe, and N are unique among meteorites and closely resemble the composition of the Martian atmosphere analyzed by Viking." Dodd likewise acknowledges the probable Martian character of these noble gases, adding that "the only plausible explanation for this observation is that the meteorite trapped these atmospheric gases during shock melting." In addition to the noble gases, one of the meteorites in question shows traces of nitrogen with an unusual isotopic composition consistent with a Martian origin. Here Pepin and Carr report: "Subsequent laboratory work on EETA 79001 revealed a pronounced enrichment of 15N, consistent with the isotopically heavy nitrogen that distinguishes the atmosphere of Mars from virtually all other volatile reservoirs in the solar system." This last finding was deemed particularly significant by McSween. Several other characteristics of these meteorites are also consistent with a Martian origin. One of the SNCs – Nakhla - shows traces of water, for example (Mars is known to have once had large amounts of water, now apparently gone). Iron-bearing minerals in various shergottites, similarly, are just barely magnetized, implying that the parent body had a weak magnetic field (recent measurements of Mars' magnetic field suggest that it is most probably quite weak).
_SCENARIOS OF EJECTION AND TRANSPORT _If it is generally agreed that the SNCs are indeed from Mars, the means of their ejection off our red neighbor and transport to Earth has been a subject of much speculation and controversy. As noted earlier, leading authorities question whether it is possible for an impact to dislodge appropriate-sized rocks with enough force to overcome the gravity of the planet. Here Wasson offered the following observation: "The key unresolved question is whether an impact could eject > 10-m blocks from Mars with velocities in excess of the escape velocity of 5 km times s^-1." McSween, similarly, with reference to the prevailing view that the SNCs originated from Mars, observes that "this particular consensus is not universally held, however, because of the serious (some would say insurmountable) problems in removing rocks of a suitable size from the Martian surface."
_McSween summarizes the problem as follows: "It has generally been supposed that any smaller fragments that could be ejected from planets by impact mechanisms would have experienced such a high degree of shock that they would be pulverized, melted, or even vaporized. Yet no other natural means of meteoroid ejection seems possible. The energy of rapidly expanding gases during volcanic eruptions is too small to accelerate fragments to planetary escape velocities, and other geologic phenomena are even less capable launching mechanisms." The conventional view is that a meteorite impact released the rocks from Mars millions of years ago. Vickery and Melosh, for example, offered the following opinion: "The dynamically most plausible explanation for the martian origin of the SNC meteorites is that they were ejected from Mars in a single, very large magnitude event ~200 Ma ago." Others, however, have criticized this view. Pointing to various discrepancies in the cosmic ray exposure ages of the respective meteorites [this measure is thought to represent the time spent as small bodies orbiting in space and exposed to cosmic radiation], McSween argues that it is unlikely that such data can be reconciled with a single impact scenario. Shergotty and ALHA 77005, for example, have exposure values of 2.6 million years, while that of EETA 79001 is only 0.5 m.y. The nakhlites and Chassigny, on the other hand, have exposure ages of 11 million years. How are we to explain these findings if the meteorites were all ejected in one impact-event 200 million years ago? Various scenarios have been advanced to account for the exposure-data. One possibility-discussed by Vickery and Melosh - is to assume that the various SNCs were originally part of a much larger body which subsequently became fragmented in space at times corresponding to their cosmic-ray exposure ages. Dissenting from the chronology of Vickery and Melosh, McSween elaborated upon this hypothesis as follows: "[In the most likely scenario] one event at 11 m.y. ago could eject a number of small to moderately sized fragments from various locations around the crater perimeter. The smaller ones immediately recorded cosmic ray exposure, but the larger ones were unaffected until subsequent breakup in space at 2.5 and 0.5 m.y. ago. In this model, ejected fragments would be in the size range of approximately 1-20 m, and the major impact that caused shock metamorphism in the shergottites would not have been the ejection event." More recent attempts to accommodate the data from cosmic ray analyses have held that three different impact events were involved. A. Banin et al., for example, argue as follows: "Using rare gas data for SNC meteorites, Ott (1988) argued that the introduction of the (Martian) atmosphere component by shock must have occurred rather recently and cannot be ascribed to a 180 Myr event. This contradicts the model originally proposed by Nyquist et al. (1979) according to which the SNC meteorites were ejected from the parent body in a single major impact event 180 Myr ago in fragments large enough to be shielded from cosmic-ray exposure since that time. The new evidence suggests that it is more likely that SNC meteorites were ejected from Mars in three considerably smaller impact events at times corresponding to the three groups of cosmic ray exposure ages, i.e., 0.5 Myr ejection of EETA 79001, 2.6 Myr ago ejection of Shergotty, Zagami and ALHA 77005, and 11-Myr ago ejection of the nakhlites and Chassigny (Bogard et al. 1984)." It is noteworthy, however, that this scenario involving three separate events was discarded by Vickery and Melosh in no uncertain terms. Other problems arise from the fact that the various SNCs experienced different degrees of shock. The shergottites, for example, show clear evidence of intense shock, yet the nakhlites and Chassigny do not. This is hardly what would be expected if these rocks were dislodged from Mars as a result of a single major impact. Warren summarized this objection as follows: "The main argument against a Mars-SNC connection has always been that ejection off a planet is expected to entail extremely high shock pressures. Yet these meteorites, which are up to 40 kg in mass, show only low to moderate degrees of shock." According to Dodd, the finding of lightly shocked lunar meteorites in Antarctica alleviates - but does not entirely remove - the objection that meteorites could make their way from Mars to Earth: "The Antarctic finds indicate that recognizable meteoritic material can make its way from the moon to the Earth, but they do not prove that virtually unshocked samples could make a longer trip from a bigger body. The problem of delivering SNC meteorites remains a serious objection to a planetary source for such meteorites." How then did these meteorites come to be ejected and make their way to the Earth? One proposal suggested that oblique impacts - upon ricocheting - could eject large fragments and accelerate them to escape velocity. Another model held that impacts on Mars would vaporize permafrost thereby providing additional acceleration to the ejecting fragments. For various reasons, these models have since been abandoned. H. Melosh, an early critic of the idea that the SNCs could be Martian in origin, offered a model whereby it is possible for planetary impacts to eject a requisite amount of near-surface material without significant shocking through a process known as spallation. This hypothesis has since been supported by various experimental tests and is currently regarded as the most likely explanation for the ejection of the SNCs from Mars. Briefly, it is known that upon meteorite-impact the surface of a planetary body is subject to varying degrees of stress. At the site of the impact, the impacting body would be pulverized and/or vaporized, producing a wave of stress whose force drops off sharply with distance. Rocks close to the site of impact are melted or pulverized. At a certain distance, however, the various shock waves act so as to cancel out each other to some extent. McSween summarizes this phenomenon as follows: "Rocks very near the ground surface experience several kinds of shock waves that partially cancel each other. This area of wave interference offers a shelter from the full force of the shock wave. Calculations indicate that some of this near-surface material will spall off as relatively unshocked fragments and can be accelerated to high speeds." Alas, there are problems with this theory as well. According to the spallation model, the size of the ejecta fragments is directly dependent on the size of the impact and thus on the size of the resulting crater. As we have seen, Melosh himself favored a single impact event at ~180 million years involving an ejection of all SNC bodies in pieces on the order of 6-7 meters, the latter constraint being required in order to account for the shielding from cosmic rays. In order to eject this much rock a fairly large impact is necessary, and thus Melosh sought a crater on the order of 100 km in diameter. Craters of this size, however, are exceedingly rare in areas of recent volcanic activity (datable to ~200 million years). If, on the other hand, one favors the ejection of modestly sized rocks (meter or submeter-sized) from much younger sites (10-12 million years old)-the view currently defended by McSween - the dynamical problems associated with large impacts are diminished, as is the necessity of finding craters 100 km in diameter (one 30 km in diameter would do, although this represents the largest crater known to be included in the "young" terrain of Mars). Here, however, one is presented with a question as to why SNCs resulting from such relatively minor impacts would be over-represented compared with those expected from major impacts observable elsewhere on Mars (i.e., if spallation is directly dependent upon the size of the impact, one would expect SNCs resulting from larger impacts in older terrain to predominate)? Stated another way, if most of the Martian terrain is known to be much older than ~180 million years, and it is known to be the site of the largest impacts, where are the SNCs from those regions?
_McSween admitted the theoretical difficulty presented by the predominance of younger rocks in a recent review: "It is perplexing that all of the martian geological units from which we have samples are very young…because geological units of these ages constitute only a small portion of the surface of Mars…The problem of having so many young meteorites is especially acute, particularly if multiple impact events are postulated to explain the groupings of cosmic-ray exposure ages. Areas volcanically resurfaced during the Amazonian period (which is thought to encompass rocks of 1.3 Ga and younger) amount to only 16% of the martian surface, and late Amazonian (corresponding to 180-Ma old rocks) volcanic activity constitutes a mere 2%." In short, the currently favored theory as to the origin of the SNCs requires that three (or four) separate impacts somehow managed to strike a mere 16% of the Martian surface, all within a geologically short period of time (some eleven million years). Probability alone would appear to argue against this view. Other problems arise regarding the meteorites' means and time of transport to Earth. For example, if one is to believe the currently prevailing view that three separate impact events are required to explain the rocks' ejection from Mars, one is greeted with the remarkable coincidence that meteorites originating from events millions of years ago-and millions of years apart-managed to descend upon Earth within a period of about a century or so in order to be observed by man. It must be admitted, however, that very little is known about the amount of time required to get the SNCs to the Earth. According to McSween, who cites Wetherill's model, roughly one third of the ejected material would reach Earth within 10 million years. Granted the difficulties of accounting for the ejection and transport of these odd meteorites, Dodd, perhaps, summarized the opinion of many astronomers when he wrote as follows: "Just how these meteorites escaped from Mars remains unclear, but most meteoriticists are now quite sure that they did." ---
_MERCURY IN MYTHOLOGY _By Dave Talbott _Harold Tresman asked: As a non-expert in mythology can somebody tell me the role of Mercury, 'Messenger of the Gods' was in all these events.
_DAVE TALBOTT replied: For years I tried to find the distinction between "Mercury" as messenger and the "warrior-hero" (Mars) as messenger. I could never find a basis for separating the two. Eventually, I concluded that the effort was misplaced, that there is no distinction between the stories. It's a bit like Sol and Saturn, or Helios and Kronos. They hold the same story and are in fact the same gods. But why is one story or identity attached to two different celestial bodies? It's simply the way symbolism evolved. When the ancient celestial order dissolved, every body seen in the sky was asked to play a role as SYMBOL of what was remembered but no longer present. Our Sun became the natural symbol of the former central luminary, Saturn, thus receiving Saturn's name as well. The Moon took its name from the primeval crescent on Saturn. The star Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, took its name from the radiant Venus, the "prototype" of stars visible in the sky before any stars were seen (while the very words for "star" descended from the Venus-goddess as well). All of the constellations received their names from the gods (or attributes of gods) in the former epoch. While Heracles was a Greek name of Mars, it also became the name of a constellation. There was a Bull of Heaven (pillar and crescent) long before the Bull gave its name to the vaguely-defined star group now called Taurus. It was only natural that a little star eventually discovered as a companion to our Sun should be assigned those attributes of the warrior hero relating to the hero's role as tiny companion (messenger, scribe, servant, assistant) to the primeval sun, Saturn. As a general rule, in the progressive elaboration of symbolism, the attributes of the symbolic object will tend to scale down the original story. Aspects of the original story which cannot be meaningfully expressed by the familiar symbolic object will tend to be shed over time. The world mountain was also the "underworld" river and the luminous nether "wind". But once its name was attached to a sacred, commemorative, local mountain, the idea that THAT mountain could be a river or a wind would make no sense. Though the history of the warrior hero included much more than his role as "little companion" to the primeval sun, the unique position of Mercury tended to highlight that role in its relation to our Sun. The planet can be viewed as one of many natural symbols in our world pointing back to attributes of the warrior-hero in the myth-making epoch. ---
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_MARS ROCKS IN ANCIENT MYTH AND MODERN SCIENCE: Part II _By Ev Cochrane _The Ancient Testimony _An entirely different explanation for the presence of Martian meteorites upon Earth emerges upon consideration of ancient literature. As I have documented elsewhere, the planet Mars was worshiped by most ancient peoples. It follows that the red planet was the subject of much attention by ancient sky-watchers, who regarded it as an malevolent force to be feared and propitiated. Indeed, Mars was associated with spectacular disasters of one form or another, not the least of which was a great flood of water descending from the sky. Following Velikovsky's lead-but also modifying and elaborating upon his conclusions and chronology-I have confirmed that the ancients described Mars as being much closer in recent times, close enough, in fact, to dominate the skies. Various Babylonian omens, for example, associate Mars with prodigious eclipses of the Sun. Consider the following omen: "If the Sun goes down (by a Darkness/Eclipse) and Mars stands in its place, there will be an Usurpator." As a result of such reports, Gossman concluded that "Mars [was] the star of the Darkness/Eclipse." Given Mars' current orbit, an association between that planet and eclipses is difficult to understand, the red planet never being in a position to be involved in eclipses of the sun. Yet if Mars only recently moved upon a different orbit, one much closer to the Earth, the Babylon reports become easier to understand. And the same is true with regards to the presence of Martian meteorites upon terrestrial landscape. Is there any ancient testimony associating Mars with meteorites, or with the hurling of stones from heaven? Indeed there is, and it is quite compelling. The most extensive analysis of the ancient traditions surrounding meteorites is that of Judith Bjorkman. Bjorkman showed that the ancient Babylonians, among others, held surprisingly sophisticated views about the nature of meteorites. Bjorkman summarized her findings as follows: "The texts show that the peoples of the ancient Near East knew of and were able to describe shooting stars, meteors, fireballs, meteor showers, and comets. They were also aware of the extra-terrestrial origin of meteorites, including iron meteorites." While there are many points of interest in these ancient texts, not the least of which is the association of meteorites with eclipses of the Sun, we are primarily interested here in reports concerning Mars. Suffice it to say that the ancient Babylonians specifically referred to meteorites falling from the planet Mars, making such objects the subject of various omens. Witness the following example: "If in the sky a meteor (train) from a planet [Mustabarru mutanu=Mars] appears: destruction of cattle will occur in the land." Yet another text has the following passage: "If a fireball [meteor] (coming from) Mars is seen..." If such reports reflect reliable eye-witness testimony-the view defended by Bjorkman - and meteorites were indeed witnessed emanating from or circling Mars, it stands to reason that the various gods identified with the red planet might likewise be associated with the hurling of rocks, with celestial demons of one form or another, or with various other phenomena typically associated with the fall of meteorites. And such is indeed the case.
_Nergal and Indra _The dreadful war-god Nergal - expressly identified with the planet Mars-is associated with a demonic entourage in various Babylonian texts. Thus, an early hymn to Nergal invokes him as the "leader and sender of evil demons." A hymn quoted by Velikovsky describes the cohorts of Nergal/Mars as follows: "Great giants, raging demons, with awesome numbers, run at his right and at his left." If such hymns celebrate various celestial prodigies associated with the warrior-planet, as appears most probable, it is possible that meteoritic phenomena inspired a portion of their imagery. Nergal is elsewhere described as hurling great rocks from heaven. A hymn translated by Bollenrucher reads as follows: "You hurl the towering stone, shattering all plants. You hurl the stone in fury, shattering the plants in rage." In the image of the planet Mars hurling great rocks from heaven it is possible to see a reference to the fall of meteorites. The Vedic counterpart to the Babylonian Nergal, as I have documented, was the war-god Indra. Like Nergal/Mars, Indra was intimately associated with eclipses of the "Sun" and various other extraordinary celestial disturbances. And like Nergal, Indra was described as hurling great bolides. Indra's celestial missiles were described as follows in one Vedic hymn: "Thou hurlest forth from heaven the iron missile." A similar passage is the following: "And men have faith in Indra, the resplendent one, what time he hurleth down his bolt, his dart of death." Commenting on this passage, Griffith-the editor of the Rig Veda-notes that: "In this verse Indra is represented as a terrible God, and in the following verse as sometimes sending 'affliction'." As is well-known, Indra's weapon of choice was the vajra, typically understood as a thunderbolt. Indra's heaven-hurled weapon, however, is elsewhere said to be composed of metal or stone. Here Gonda observes: "Although Indra's weapon is usually explicitly designated by the term vajra, and vajra is generally described as metallic (ayasa), it is incidentally spoken of as a rock (parvata) or 'stone of, or: from, the heavens' (divo asmanam)." In Vedic hymns the word vajra is frequently paired with the epithet adrivant, literally "possessing stones (rocks) or a stone (rock)." Here scholars have traditionally assumed that this was an allusion to Indra's hurling rocks, as with a sling. Yet, whether we regard Indra's sky-borne missile as being composed of iron or stone, it is obvious that by vajra no ordinary "lightning-stroke" is meant, as the fall of stones does not typically accompany the latter phenomenon. How then are we to interpret Indra's heaven-hurled "stone"? If we approach the matter from the standpoint of comparative religion, we find that many ancient peoples likewise described "thunderbolts" as stones thrown from heaven. Blinkenberg, for example, in his landmark study of the thunderweapon in ancient lore, summarized the ancient conception of lightning as follows: "The lightning, then, is produced by a stone which shoots down from heaven to earth." Meteors, in accordance with this belief, were identified with thunderstones throughout the ancient world. G. Wainright, surveying the conceptions of the ancient Egyptians, concluded that: "In religion the meteorite and the thunderbolt are the same thing." Virtually identical beliefs prevailed in aboriginal Mesoamerica. If the original reference for Indra's heaven-hurled bolt was to a meteor-like object, both descriptions of the vajra-rock and metallic rock-would be equally appropriate, many meteorites being composed of iron. The planet Mars, moreover, was regarded as the iron-planet par excellence by ancient sky-watchers and medieval alchemists alike. Other hymns suggest that Indra was associated with a meteoritic phenomenon spanning the visible heavens. Thus, various passages in the Rig Veda relate that Indra's gargantuan form dominated the skies, extending from heaven to earth: "The heaven itself attained not to thy greatness when with one hip of thine the earth was shadowed." Griffith compares this passage to another in which Indra announces: "One side of me is in the sky, and I have drawn the other down." Gonda, similarly, cites I:103:1, which likewise places a part of Indra in heaven and the rest over earth. Here Gonda points out that, "both parts combine so as to form a ketu (which may mean 'ensign', but also 'an unusual phenomenon such as a comet or meteor')." The unusual apparition associated with Indra's ketu, quite possibly, was a string of fiery meteorites hovering over the Earth like the proverbial sword of Damocles, thus uniting, as it were, heaven and earth. If Indra was the planet Mars, as the evidence seems to indicate, we have here an apparent reference to meteorites being strung out between Mars and the Earth. Also relevant here is Indra's intimate association with the Maruts, described in the Rig Veda as a celestial troop, as "men of heaven". It is with the aid of the Maruts that Indra accomplishes his greatest feats. Identifying Indra with Mars, Velikovsky speculated that the Maruts had some relation to meteoritic phenomena, perhaps being meteorites attending the red planet. Velikovsky's conjecture receives support from the fact that the Maruts are said to shine in heaven like blazing fires, or like brilliant snakes. They were also much feared for the terrible noise and commotion they wrought in heaven: "At their coming heaven as it were roars with fear." Does this not recall the terrible noise which frequently accompanies meteorites as they enter the Earth's atmosphere? The Maruts are elsewhere said to hurl down rocks from heaven. A Vedic hymn quoted by Velikovsky reads as follows: "You the powerful, who shine with your spears, shaking even what is unshakable by strength... Hurling the stone in the flight... All beings are afraid of the Maruts. May your march be brilliant, O Maruts... Shining like snakes. May that straightforward shaft of yours, O Maruts, bounteous givers, be far from us, and far the stone which you hurl!" A similar passage is the following: "This hymn will I make for the Marut host who bright in native splendor cast the mountains down... They gleam with lightning, Heroes, Casters of the Stone, wind-rapid Maruts, overthrowers of the hills, oft through desire to rain coming with storm of hail, roaring in onset, violent and exceedingly strong... O Bounteous radiant Maruts, Heroes of the sky..."
_Rudra _The Maruts are elsewhere associated with the war-god Rudra, the latter known to share numerous features in common with Indra, various authorities suspecting an original identity of the two gods. Rudra is repeatedly invoked as the father of the Maruts; the celestial host, in turn, was called variously rudrah or rudriyah, "Rudra's sons" or "Rudra's men". Rudra's archetypal role as a leader of a host of demonic beings earned him the name Bhutipati. The demonic beings, like Rudra himself, were described as riding the wind, roaring, and being of a brilliant red color. Ernst Arbman, upon observing that the Maruts represent an essential aspect of Rudra's cult, confesses that he is at a loss to explain their original significance. Various Vedic hymns speak of the evil associated with Rudra's "arrows" or missiles, which rain forth from heaven, slaying men and cattle. If the Maruts are to be understood as a meteoritic phenomenon, as Velikovsky proposed, the passages which associate Rudra with the fall of rocks from heaven become readily understandable. Consider the following Vedic hymn: "Father of the Maruts... O Rudra, praised, be gracious to the singer: let thy hosts spare us and smite down another... May Rudra's missile turn aside and spare us, the great wrath of the impetuous One avoid us." Here Rudra is described by the very same epithet as Indra and Nergal – impetuous - as indeed are Mars-gods throughout the ancient world, a testament, in all likelihood, to the irascible and fickle nature typically accorded the red planet. A similar passage reads as follows: "To Rudra we bring these songs, whose bow is firm and strong, the self-dependent God with swiftly-flying shafts … the Conqueror whom none may overcome, armed with sharp-pointed weapons: may he hear our call … May thy bright arrow which, shot down by thee from heaven, flieth upon the earth, pass us uninjured by... Slay us not, nor abandon us, O Rudra." Apparent here is the ominous specter of the god, dealing out death indiscriminately with his heaven-hurled shafts or "arrows". Yet another passage from the Rig Veda: "To the strong Rudra bring we these our songs of praise, to him the Lord of Heroes, … Him with the braided hair we call with reverence down, the wild-boar of the sky, the red, the dazzling shape... To him the Marut's father... Far be thy dart that killeth men or cattle: thy bliss be with us, O thou Lord of Heroes." Throughout the Rig Veda and later Vedic tradition, Rudra's malefic nature is everywhere apparent. Macdonell summarizes this aspect of his cult as follows: "Malevolence is frequently attributed to Rudra in the R.V.; for the hymns addressed to him chiefly express fear of his terrible shafts and deprecation of his wrath. He is implored not to slay or injure … to avert his great malevolence and his bolt from his worshipers... His ill will and anger are deprecated... He once even receives the epithet 'man-slaying' [as does Ares and many another Martian god] … Rudra's malevolence is still more prominent in the later Vedic texts... He is invoked not to assail his worshipers with celestial fire and to cause the lightning to descend elsewhere. He is even said to assail with fever, cough, and poison... Even the gods were afraid of the strung bow and the arrows of Rudra, lest he should destroy them. Under the name of Mahadeva he is said to slay cattle... His hosts, which attack man and beast with disease and death receive the bloody entrails of the victim ... as their peculiar share of the sacrifice." Who or what, then, is Rudra? As the red boar of heaven, Rudra is to be identified with the planet Mars. His very name reflects his color-unique among the planets and relatively rare among prominent celestial bodies-the most likely etymology tracing it to an ancient word for "red" or "ruddy". As I have documented elsewhere, numerous ancient gods identified with Mars were named with a word signifying "red". Here the Celtic war-god Rudiobus offers a case in point, identified by the ancients with the Latin god Mars and sharing a root in common with Rudra. It is also noteworthy that Rudra's darts are specifically associated with the death of cattle, the very calamity associated with Martian meteorites in Babylonian omens. Indeed, Rudra's intimate association with the destruction of cattle was proverbial in Vedic and later Indian tradition. How are we to interpret Rudra's involvement with the death of cattle? Although it is probable that much of the bovine imagery associated with the escapades of Rudra/Mars is celestial in nature - witness the universality of the Bull of Heaven motive - it is not impossible that Martian meteorites actually discomfited terrestrial cattle. Support for this conjecture comes from the fact that one of the stones which fell at Shergotty is said to have killed a dog. It is also significant that Rudra is intimately associated with the onset of sickness and pestilence. As I have documented elsewhere, the planet Mars was associated with pestilence throughout the ancient world. Here the pestilence-bringing "arrows" of Rudra offer a striking parallel to those associated with other Martian gods-the Greek Apollo, for example. In light of the Vedic hymns crediting Rudra's bolides with the destruction of cattle and the onset of disease, the possibility presents itself that Martian meteorites brought unusual pathogens in their wake, afflicting cattle as well as man. Whether there is any truth to this conjecture is difficult to say apart from the finding of pathogens in future Mars explorations, but it is intriguing to find that the idea that meteorites could produce sickness or pestilence is surprisingly widespread. Thus, in his discussion of the folklore surrounding meteorites Frazer cites the Namaqua tribe of Africa, who "are greatly afraid of the meteor which is vulgarly called a falling star, for they consider it a sign that sickness is coming upon the cattle, and to escape it they will immediately drive them to some other parts of the country. They call out to the star how many cattle they have, and beg of it not to send sickness." This Namaquan prayer bears comparison with the Vedic prayers offered Rudra. And once again we recall the Babylonian omen associated with the planet Mars: "If in the sky a meteor (train) from a planet [Mustabarru mutanu=Mars] appears: destruction of cattle will occur in the land."
_Conclusion _In this essay we have reviewed two radically different theories in an attempt to explain the anomaly presented by the finding of Mars-rocks upon the Earth. The first, which we may term the conventional theory, speculates that one or several major meteoritic impacts upon Mars dislodged rocks from its surface-in the case of the nakhlites and Chassigny, without shocking the rocks to any significant extent-whereupon they began their long voyage towards Earth. These impacts are thought to have occurred many millions of years ago (two to two hundred, depending on various interpretations of the conflicting radiometric data presented by the meteorites in question). According to this scenario, the handful of SNCs witnessed to have fallen to Earth in the past century and a half arrived millions of years after their ejection off the red planet, these small rocks enduring the 50 million mile odyssey through space practically unscathed. A central tenet of the conventional theory, it goes without saying, holds that Mars has always moved upon its present orbit since it congealed from the primordial soup that was to become the solar system several billion years ago. A wholly different explanation for the finding of Martian meteorites on terrestrial landscape results from a catastrophist theory of the recent history of the solar system. According to Velikovsky, the planet Mars only recently moved in close proximity to the Earth, participating in several spectacular cataclysms involving the Earth and its planetary neighbors. During these cataclysmic events, Mars was seen to hurl great bolides towards Earth, the capture of which was presumably made easy by the near passage of the red planet. If Velikovsky's thesis is valid, the prospect of finding Mars-rocks upon the Earth is readily understandable-nay inevitable. Velikovsky's theory, as we have seen, rests upon ancient testimony from around the world. At the heart of the controversy surrounding his ideas lies the simple question: Can we, or can we not, take seriously the ancient reports surrounding the respective planets? As we have documented here and elsewhere, ancient testimony corroborates Velikovsky's general thesis of planetary-catastrophism again and again, often in more dramatic fashion than the pioneer himself ever realized. Thus, eye-witness reports of Martian meteorites falling to Earth-far from being confined to the last 150 years-actually go back several thousand years. ---
_SACRIFICE AND AMNESIA _By Dave Talbott _A couple of comments recently concerning sacrifice and the phenomenon of amnesia have, I think, inverted the truth of the matter. Velikovsky spoke of amnesia in the wake of cosmic catastrophe. The memory of terrifying events, he suggested, was repressed because humankind could not deal with the depth of the trauma. Therefore, we could not recognize the true source of our own urge to act out cosmic violence. Here is an alternative way of viewing cosmic catastrophe and the role of amnesia. We did not forget the world falling out of control, but remembered these events to the point of obsession. The entire sweep of ritual activity at the dawn of civilization shows a preoccupation with the dramas of creation, destruction and renewal. Ritual practices were, in fact, a deliberate exercise in remembering. But this preoccupation, expressing a sense of universal rupture, could only foster a *forgetfulness* at the deepest level of human awareness - that level at which one recognizes the kinship of all life, the brotherhood of man, the unity of creation.
_From the dawn of civilization onward, ancient ritual is filled with mnemonic devices. It is filled with the symbols of catastrophe. Nowhere in the world can you find an early culture that did not look back to the age of the gods in wonder and terror. But fixation on the past is the one thing *certain* to obstruct human awareness at the level of spiritual connectedness. _In one form or another, all of the early religions cultivated the principle of sacrifice. If sacrifice entails "the failure of amnesia," as has been suggested, then the failure was complete from the very beginning, and the amnesia concept is essentially irrelevant. But there is another sense in which one could say that sacrifice *means* amnesia. In the elaborated memories of the Golden Age or ancestral paradise, there is no sacrifice, no war, no sickness or death, no division of nation against nation, and no division of language between man and animal, or between man and man. And thus, no need for ritual cleansing or defense. Whatever the natural conditions may have been during this celebrated epoch, they were sufficient to plant in collective memory a root metaphor for benevolent creation, cosmic harmony, and the unity of life, a discernment of "*that* place," *that* time" now standing outside of human perception, but to which philosophy, mysticism, moral teaching and higher religion would seek to direct human attention. In the wake of catastrophe, the ancestral paradise is certainly not forgotten, since the yearning for paradise is an overarching motive. But the eruption of sacrificial rites speaks volumes for forgetfulness in its deepest spiritual sense. The direct human response to catastrophe is a rush to "renew" the world through ritual practices, but it is not the world of kinship that is achieved; it is the world of division and of combat, of relentless bargaining with the gods. In the fixation on catastrophe, we ratified a human perception of our relationship to creation. We saw huge and terrifying forces outside ourselves, and clouds of chaos. Cosmic catastrophe was the proof of rupture. The world was not a safe place, and the gods could not be trusted except in the most tentative sense, under conditions which must be re-created by rites of sacrifice. The emerging consciousness was driven toward ritual forms of cleansing, purifying, and renewing the world, whereas, under the analogy of the Golden Age, no such renewal was necessary. The principle of sacrifice must be considered against the collective contest with chaos. Wherever you look in the ancient world you will see the sense of threat, the shadow of catastrophe, the ever-present "fiends of darkness" (chaos clouds) whose invasion is always imminent. While many forms of sacrifice involved the slaughter of animal and human victims, the broader concept included a vast range of rites in which the practitioners deliberately "gave up" something to the gods, to purchase something in return. Offerings of food and possessions, various forms of abstinence and renunciation, scarification and bloodletting, circumcision, castration and shaving the head were all included in the bargain. I think the purpose is clear. It was to secure a truce with the gods, a new lease on life, to make the world whole again, however tentative the bargain . That is the fundamental meaning of sacrifice - "to make holy." Under this kind of contract with the gods, there can be no holiness without some form of loss, even if someone else, a "scapegoat," is preferred. That this sense of necessity attached itself to THINGS REMEMBERED should not be overlooked. If the Golden Age provided later philosophy with one analogy, cosmic catastrophe provided another - confirming a universal rupture - and in its ritualized repetition, it would continue to feed the most profound sense of conflict, insufficiency, and danger, inviting the deeper form of forgetfulness, without which the investment in sacrifice could not have arisen. ---
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_POLAR CONFIGURATION DISCUSSION _From kroniatalk _Dr Emilio Spedicato wrote: We are looking now at the dynamics of the polar configuration. There is one free parameter and it is impossible to explore numerically the behaviour for all values of the parameter. For some reasonable values it seems that the alignment is destroyed after a few months. However since the bodies are close one should take into account also the tidal forces and it seems that NO ONE has ever implemented these forces for a similar dynamical system. We hope to be able to do this in a next future.
_Dave Talbott added: Actually, Dr. Robert Bass did undertake a preliminary analysis of tidal friction, and he concluded that it worked in the direction of stability - a significant consideration if the planets were extremely close together, as we have hypothesized.
_Dr Spedicato: The equilibrium equations suggest anyway that the original diameter of Venus had to be greater, otherwise Mars would cover completely Venus. This implies in my view that Venus during the collapse of the configuration lost mass. A loss of mass could be explained if Venus had a catastrophic interaction with Jupiter (possibly a grazing impact), which I think should be considered also in terms of the births of Venus myths and the evidence that Venus for a time had a cometary aspect.
_Dave said: While the cometary aspect of Venus may indeed have caused it to look larger than it does today, it needs to be understood that what happens to Mars visually in relation to Venus depends on the position of the terrestrial observer. For an observer beneath the 45th parallel, as Mars moves toward the Earth it does not occlude Venus, but moves visually BELOW Venus. When it as large as Venus, it is almost or entirely below the sphere of Venus, depending on the precise location of the observer. In the past, several folks ... have made the error of assuming the observer to be squarely on the axis. But in fact the small size of Mars enables the observer beneath the 45th parallel to see "over" Mars as it approaches the Earth, thus causing it to descend visually. Of the participating planets, only Mars has a size enabling it to do what the myths claim of it ("descent of the hero").
_Ev Cochrane adds: Like Dave, I found this statement most puzzling. In fact, as I have demonstrated using high tech computer simulations, Mars fits neatly within the visual outline of the much larger Venus when located in relative close proximity to Venus. ---
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_SATURN CONFIGURATION DISCUSSION _Wal Thornhill, Robert Lugibihl, Dwardu Cardona _Robert & Dwardu, I just wanted to express my appreciation of the questions and answers in this thread. Dwardu's caveat about whether Saturn was captured by the Sun is important. In my opinion, stories about the primordial darkness, "purple dawn", Saturn's appearance, and first appearance of the stars are the places to look for clues. It seems to me that the Sun must either have been at great distance from the Saturnian system or else there was an obscuring cloud of dust preventing the Sun from having much effect on the light in the sky at an early epoch.
_Robert Lugibihl wrote: Is it your opinion then that the timeless era occurred when Earth was a satellite of Saturn
_CARDONA REPLIES: Yes.
_ROBERT: and that the advent of day and night occurred when this Saturnian configuration (Saturn, Earth, Mars, Venus) was captured by the Sun?
_CARDONA: IF the Saturnian system was captured by the Sun (and please note the emphasis). This IS a possibility but NOT a certainty. If the Saturnian system was NOT captured by the Sun, the advent of day and night would have commenced at the clearing of the Saturnian nebular cloud within which the Saturnian system was enshrouded. In any case, whether the Saturnian system was, or was not, captured by the Sun, the Saturnian nebular, or placental, cloud would still have shielded the Sun from view until after Saturn's flare-up which, among other things, blew the placental cloud out of existence.
_ROBERT: And did the Golden Age begin with this capture?
_CARDONA: It is difficult to say WHEN the Golden Age COMMENCED. How does one calculate that? All I can say is that the Golden Age stretched over that period during which the Saturnian configuration was complete - that is with Venus and Mars in place at the centre of the Saturnian orb, but BEFORE the first visible descent of Venus and Mars.
_ROBERT: Also, is it your opinion that the Golden Age never experienced a true night as we experience today due to the close proximity of Saturn?
_CARDONA: That is correct.
_ROBERT: So day and night began when the Saturnian configuration was captured by the Sun, right?
_CARDONA: Again, IF the Saturnian system was captured by the Sun. But still, as stated above, day and night were instituted when Saturn's nebular cloud was blown away by Saturn's flare-up.
_ROBERT PREVIOUSLY: At what point does massive flooding come into the scenario? ... Do you believe that great quantities of water fell from the sky and/or world pillar in conjunction with the break-up?
_CARDONA: From the world pillar during the break-up, definitely - despite Ted Holden's objection of many moons ago.
_ROBERT PREVIOUSLY: How long do you estimate the breakup took to occur, from the first disturbances at the twilight of the Golden Age to the relatively settled configuration we see today?
_CARDONA (ALSO PREVIOUSLY): That's anybody's guess.
_ROBERT: Would you consider throwing out a ballpark figure? 15,000 years? More?
_CARDONA: Heavens, no! A much shorter time than that. Not even a century.
_ROBERT PREVIOUSLY: At what point did Saturn's rings become visible ... during the Golden Age, during the breakup or after the breakup?
_CARDONA (ALSO PREVIOUSLY): Depends WHICH ring(s) you are alluding to. Saturn "grew" and "lost" more than one set of rings.
_ROBERT: Did Saturn possess rings during the timeless era?
_CARDONA: No.
_ROBERT: During the Golden Age?
_CARDONA: Yes. ---
_ANOMOLOUS OUTBURSTS _Ev Cochrane, Amy Acheson, Wal Thornhill
_Ev Cochrane says: An item that might be of interest in light of our recent discussion with respect to the "nova" of 1054 and the difficulty of distinguishing a comet from a "new star." As is well-known, a brilliant comet appeared in the skies during the funeral games celebrated shortly after the death of Julius Caesar. We know it to have been a comet since Chinese sources from the same year clearly describe a comet. Yet it not without interest that various Latin writers called it a "new star". Part of the confusion, perhaps, stems from the propensity of comets to undergo anomalous outbursts. Here's a quote from a recent book devoted to Caesar's comet: "The July sighting in 44 was of an extremely bright, star-like object, surrounded by a slight radial coma, that maintained its high luminosity for at most seven days. This almost certainly the signature of an 'anomalous outburst'. Despite the name, anomalous outbursts are not particularly rare. Vsekhsvyatskii estimates that out of 79 recent comets, 59 have had outbursts. Even Comet 1P/Halley underwent a 9 magnitude increase in luminosity, on 15 February 1991, when it was some 14 A.U. out from the Sun." (J. Ramsey & A. Licht, "The Comet of 44 BC and Caesar's Funeral Games," 1997, p. 72). ---
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_SATURNIAN STUDIES _by Dave Talbott and Kronians
_Clark Whelton writes: Well, I'm curious. Has any Saturnist said that there HAVE been global disasters of celestial origin -- or changes in the celestial order -- in the last 3,000 years? Dave, may I ask your opinion on this subject?
_Dave Talbott responds: Though this question is outside my own expertise, I'd like to see the issue investigated from all vantage points, including retrocalculations, archaeology, climatology, geology, and direct ancient testimony. All I can say with certainty is that I've never found a symbolic or mythological theme whose origins could be fixed within the last 3,000 years (unless conventional chronologies are off to an earth-shaking extent). All identifiable themes appear to point back to the origins of civilization and beyond. How long was the transitional period between the mythical age of (highly capricious) planetary gods and the later epoch of predictable planetary motions? My wild guess would be that sometime between 1500 B.C and 1,000 BC the planetary system settled into its present highly stable arrangement. But this transitional period may well have been characterized by a series of terrestrial disturbances, some of them global. In this regard, I'm open to considering any possibility backed by a systematic presentation of evidence. One certainty is that the mythological evidence Velikovsky drew upon to support the Venus and Mars events in Worlds and Collision belongs to a period of history prior to the development of writing, kingship, temple-building, and other ritual practices associated with the rise of civilization. We can know this with certainty because the stories and images of Venus and Mars are deeply embedded in all such practices. And they are woven into the collective memories of Saturn's reign.
_Karen Josephson joins in: I'm not a great historian, but it seems that the historic calendar changes (and related historic statements), as well as the "angular chronology" I previously mentioned, would infer a very impressive incident. And all the reading I've done indicates that this occurred about 700 BC -- which would definitely be within the 3000 year BP timeframe. kaj
_Ted Bond adds: Kaj, I'm so glad to hear somebody say this. I've been waiting to say it myself but still hadn't worked up the courage!
_Dave Talbott answers: But keep in mind that the original question related to unstable planets causing terrestrial disturbances within the past 3,000 years. A near approach of planets in the past 3,000 years would have generated a large volume of eyewitness accounts identifying the body, since early astronomy did preserve the link of gods and planets. I think that Ev, Dwardu and I would all agree that such evidence is lacking, and we came to our respective conclusions independently. [Caveat: if it turns out that retrocalculations do not match "6th century" observations of planetary motions, I will happily reconsider my own tentative conclusions.] This does not take anything away from legitimate evidence of later terrestrial disturbances, which should be systematically explored. And certainly the electric universe allows residual effects long after the era of profound planetary instability, which WAS remembered around the world and left us with a massive body of evidence that CAN be systematically investigated. ---
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_SATURN AND VENUS _By Ted Bond, Ev Cochrane, Dave Talbott _TED BOND SAYS: The Jewish religion, in its origins, aimed to put an end to planet-worship, especially of Saturn and Venus, who were worshiped together, and with it the universal practice of human sacrifice, e.g. the practice of putting the first-born through the fire, strictly forbidden in Deuteronomy. The Jews were thus the first people to introduce the notion of an "invisible" god, something new, strange, and to many incomprehensible. Sacrifice did continue, however, as a religious practice, but of beasts rather than humans. In a passage in Exodus, God still demands the firstborn of all animals as "his", but the firstborn of humans are "redeemed". (This was presumably the firstborn of the "female", since it was tied to the opening of the womb. Note that Isaac, whose hand was stayed, was the firstborn not of Abraham but of Sarah.) It seems that this Semitic people had been worshipers of Saturn, as their very name, 'people of Israel' shows, as well as the use of the word 'Elohim' (plural of El[=Saturn]) for the divinity in passages in the Torah. And what other explanation is there of the fact that the Jewish day begins at sundown? For the Jews the disappearance of Saturn as the Sun of Night, and eventually of the altered Venus-Ishtar-Inanna-Astarte (&c.), earlier the benign mother goddess, as a fiery light in the sky and an agent of destruction, were of supreme importance. These were two very bright 'stars' that had disappeared from the sky. Isaiah (14: 1-13), apparently alluding to Babylon, says "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God." ... Now in the Isaiah passage what is presumably the Hebrew name 'Shahar' is translated into Greek as 'Phosphorus' and into Latin and hence into English as 'Lucifer', which were the Greek and Latin names, respectively, for the morning star.
_DAVE TALBOTT SAYS: This is correct, and it's an obvious source of much later confusion. It was Babylonian priest-astronomers who later clarified planetary identifications for the Greeks, so that the planets acquired new names with direct links to the earlier, and much more reliable, traditions of Mesopotamia. Ted Bond was correct in noting the inherent contradiction in identifying Venus with the source of "devil" imagery (Lucifer). Venus is the archetypal feminine figure, but this root identity could hold only insofar as wandering tribes retained the link of gods and planets. Many peoples--including the Egyptians and Greeks--did not; they preserved only the stories of extraordinary powers and forms dominating the sky in a prior epoch. Preserving the stories did not require clear skies and observational disciplines under conditions of a shifting celestial order. But maintaining planetary identifications certainly did require such disciplines. Insofar as nations did not preserve the link of god and planet, their imagination was permitted to attach any mythical name whatever to planets and stars in later times--in the same way that, still later, we attached mythical names to Uranus, Neptune and Pluto as these planets were observed with telescopes. Similarly, all of the major stars and constellations, named long after the mythical age of the gods, achieved their symbolic identifications by the same process of projection, just as local mountains and rivers acquired their sacred names from mythical powers, inviting horrendous later confusion between archetype and symbol. The original planetary SOURCE of the myths is a much different matter, and the extraordinary discipline of the Babylonians was crucial to our ability to connect the mythical archetypes to the roles of named planets.
_TED: Was this a mistranslation, or was Isaiah mistakenly compounding Venus and Saturn, the two fallen light-giving gods? For in English Lucifer is standardly identified with the fallen angel who became Satan or the Devil and, to the best of my knowledge, this Lucifer has never been identified with Venus.
_EV COCHRANE ADDS: Venus was, in fact, depicted as "horned". Cultures from around the ancient world compared Venus to a long-horned cow. Even the much later Babylonian astronomical texts speak of the horns of Venus, a fact which has led many astronomers to consider the possibility that the ancients viewed the phases of Venus. Venus was also called Lucifer by numerous Biblical commentators and scholars. Even so, I believe that the passage in Isaiah properly refers to the planet Mars, not Venus.
_TED: Finally, the pre-Christian religion of Europe, which survived, vilified as witchcraft, well into the Christian era, had two divinities, the Horned Man and the Queen of Heaven--who but Saturn and Venus? And this Horned Man, worshiped by the 'witches', became the Devil of medieval Christianity!
_DAVE: Yes indeed. That the Queen of Heaven was Venus can be established beyond dispute. The consistency and reliability of the identification is also a basis of our confidence in the comparative approach. By drawing our attention to the substratum of human memory, it helps us to avoid being misled by localized contradictions.
_TED: Neither do I myself have any doubt that the golden heifers inscribed with the tetragrammaton, set up by Jeroboam at Dan and Beth-El with the proclamation "Behold thy gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt," symbolized the same planetary god represented by the Egyptians as a celestial heifer - Hathor - who all agree was the planet Venus.
_DAVE: Yes again. The equation, celestial heifer = Venus, is highly reliable. It belongs to the root mythical identity of the mother goddess, and no other planet competes with Venus for this role in early astronomy. It is the comparative approach which enables one to work through local elaborations and contradictions to find dependable patterns of this sort. Under this approach it will be seen that there is a highly coherent original story of the mother goddess, always leading us to the planet Venus--despite the numerous, more random, projections of goddess-attributes onto other celestial and terrestrial objects in later times.
_TED: Was Baal Venus or Saturn or both? Should the breakup of the polar configuration and all the planetary activity connected with it be brought forward in time, so as to be in living memory of the early Jews and confused in legend by the later prophets?
_EV: The identification of Baal is a very thorny problem. The difficulty arises from the fact that Baal is simply a name meaning "Lord" and that there were many different Baals in the ancient Near East. None of them, to the best of my knowledge, were identified with the planet Venus. Rather, the latter was identified with Baal's consort, Baalit. Some Baals, such as Baal Hadad, would appear to be identified with the planet Mars. As for your last question, I don't see any reason to bring the breakup of the polar configuration forward in time. ---
http://saturniancosmology.org/files/thoth/thoth.1999.11.txt
_COSMIC SYMBOLS _By Dave Talbott _RITES OF KINGSHIP Saturnians didn't invent the "rites of Kings." In their earliest expressions, kingship rites are overwhelmingly COMMEMORATIVE. Same goes for the ritual aspects of war and sacrifice in their earliest documented expressions. The question isn't whether certain motives found in kingship rites (power, cooperation, allegiance, fear, whatever) may have existed among earlier human tribes--that would only require them to have been human. The question is: in the distinctive, heavily documented rituals of kingship, what is being commemorated? You don't have to believe a word of the "Saturnian" explanation to see that there are a hundred recurring patterns focusing on clearly presented cosmic images, including these most obvious motifs-- 1) Celebration of the king as part of a blood-line tracing back to the rule of the central luminary himself, in a golden age; 2) The role of the king as the source of natural abundance (the duty to restore the golden age, or a semblance thereof); 3) The king's symbolic marriage to a mother goddess, identified as the eye-heart-soul of the central luminary; 4) The goddess in her terrible aspect as flaming serpent or dragon, raging in the sky; 5) The role of the king as the warrior-son, born in the eye-heart-soul of the central luminary; 6) The role of the warrior-son in defeating or pacifying the raging serpent-dragon; 7) Assimilation of kingship rites to memories of sweeping cosmic catastrophe, involving the death or ordeal of a primeval, celestial king, whose rejuvenation was synchronous with the regeneration of nature following the catastrophe;
Symbolic assimilation of neighboring tribes to the chaos hordes or retinue of the serpent-dragon. These cosmological images, constituting a vast complex of kingship rites, are not present in the prior phases of human history. And the images do not answer to anything in our sky today. Therefore, the verifiable coherence of the images, each inseparably connected to the others, is an issue that cannot be swept aside.
_THE SPIRAL: The spiral form depicted in the Egyptian eye-glyph is also a part of many other sacred symbols, including glyphs of the White Crown and Red Crown. Nothing in our sky today can begin to represent the power of the idea. The depicted spiral is the vehicle by which the creator-king fashions his dwelling in heaven, the polar enclosure. In the Egyptian system, the spiral means "to fashion or create", in specific reference to the fashioning of the cosmic dwelling. The subject is the spiraling Venus comet, also depicted by the Sumerian pictograph for the goddess Inanna (Venus). The spiraling "tail" (enclosing serpent-dragon) comes to form the enclosure or boundary of the land of the gods.
_HEAVENLY TWINS IN EGYPT: Shu and Tefnut are two of my favorite mythical figures, and are intimately tied to the differentiation of the unified Atum (something we've discussed at some length in earlier threads). "From one god, I became three," Atum declares. That declaration signifies the birth of Shu and Tefnut, as the unified Atum is transformed into Ra, Shu, and Tefnut. For newcomers unfamiliar with the general thesis, Ra = Saturn, the primeval sun god and creator-king; Tefnut = mother goddess Venus, the central eye-heart-soul of Atum; and Shu = Mars, warrior-hero and unborn child in the womb (i.e., pupil of the eye). In his birth, Shu descends to become the world pillar supporting Atum-Ra. The eye goddess, in turn, spirals out as the uraeus serpent, ultimately coming to form the polar enclosure. The different motifs are summarized in the notebook, "Symbols of an Alien Sky", which presents a series of "snapshots" of the polar configuration, supplemented by numerous ancient drawings and explanatory text. Ancient symbolism was multi-layered. The great mythical motifs were projected onto every available form in nature, be it a local mountain (symbol of the world mountain), or a prominent star group. Most of the diverse figures of the mother goddess and warrior hero are paired in various ways, to represent the cosmic twins in later art. The good and evil brothers, dark and light, male and female, above and below, two faces looking in opposite directions, right and left - all are included in the mix. As I've suggested previously, these motifs are explicable by the concrete play of light and shadow off the polar configuration as the Earth turned on its axis. Hence, I would say that Gemini has a global myth behind it, tying the constellation symbolically to the memory of creation. ---
_RITUAL BALL GAMES _Dave Davis, Dwardu Cardona, Dave Talbott
_DAVE DAVIS: Stecchini claimed that ball games were derived from the idea that the zodiacal band in the sky, 7o on either side of the ecliptic, in which the sun & planets moved, was a celestial ball game, the planets bouncing off the "walls" which bounded the band. He particularly cites the Mayan Chichan Itza arena as based on this idea ... any thoughts on this?
_DWARDU CARDONA: Ball games, especially those once played in Mesoamerica, were definitely celestially inspired. However, I do not accept Stecchini's interpretation. Rather, I assume that these ball games derived from the once shifting planets within the Saturnian configuration.
_DAVE TALBOTT: Yes indeed, and not to forget that any interpretation of ritual ball games identifying the ricocheting "balls" with planets (Stecchini), is faced with the enigma that in our sky today, planets and stars to not look like spheres. The naked eye simply cannot make out their spherical shape. That planets were, in fact, anciently represented as spheres, is one of the more fundamental levels of evidence that the planets were formerly seen up close and personal. ---
http://saturniancosmology.org/files/thoth/thoth.1999.12.txt
_BY JOVE _By Dave Talbott _"Saturn" (the Universal Monarch) has both elder and younger aspects. I think it may have been Macrobius who said that the younger Saturn is Jupiter and the elder Jupiter is Saturn. (Be that as it may, I didn't invent the idea!) :>). The principle is inherent in Greek approaches to the two gods. Though Kronos and Zeus were clearly two different planets in Greek times, their biographies nevertheless overlap. Zeus is acknowledged to be the younger form of Kronos, of course. However, the two aspects are impossible to miss: Kronos is never portrayed as a victor over world-threatening dragons of darkness. You see the same thing in the relationship of Osiris to Ra. Osiris is inseparably connected to Ra as the son of Ra, and the "second Ra", but he is certainly not IDENTICAL to Ra. The Egyptians remembered Atum-Ra as the central sun presiding over the creation and the First Time; and they gave detailed accounts of the god's first appearance. No such story is told of Osiris. Conversely, Ra has virtually disappeared in connection with the Osiris story, as recounted in the Sed Festival ritual and numerous other accounts. This is a story of cosmic transition - death, dismemberment, resurrection, and transfiguration. For all intents and purposes Atum-Ra is not even around at the more critical junctures, any more than Anu or Shamash are involved in the cosmic ordeal confronting Marduk (Jupiter) in the Babylonian Akitu festival. (Anu has already fled the scene when Marduk confronts the dragon Tiamat.) Nor do any of the great "sun" gods - with whom the planet Saturn was identified - figure directly in this "second half of the story". It is always the younger form of the Universal Monarch that we see emerging victorious from the period of cosmic darkness. At some point you have to reckon with the underlying pattern here, for which there MUST be an explanation. It is interesting to note that the Babylonian priests of Marduk/Jupiter, in listing various tribal names of the god, include the name Asar, which happens to be the name of the Egyptian Osiris. Taken alone, I would not make a point of this, nor of the fact that various Egyptologists (among them, E.A.W. Budge) HAVE linked Osiris to Jupiter. The line of reasoning is really much more fundamental and based on world patterns which do not seem to allow for any other identification. Who could deny that the best-known Jupiter figures are "born" from Saturn-figures, and are seen as the younger and triumphant forms of the father. Possible physical explanations for the sequence may vary, but I do not see how the fundamental paternal relationship could be denied. And in ancient myth, the idea "to be born from" is a very literal idea, one certainly not suggestive of a personality arriving from elsewhere in the sky. The seeming paradox is actually the key. Are we dealing with one sovereign power, or two? The fact that both answers are correct is a direct pointer to the solution. One mythical figure progressively separates into two aspects precisely because these two aspects became two separate planets. It was no doubt easy for the Greeks to see Kronos and Jupiter as separate, even warring powers, despite their paternity. It was easy to identify Kronos, the displaced form, with the powers of cosmic rebellion, because the very existence of two different planets worked against the idea of one underlying personality. But the Egyptian material, of course, preceded all observational astronomy and all ideas of separate "planets". So the emphasis is naturally on the manifestation of the elder in the new form of the younger. Nevertheless, you will still find in Greek sources many indications of the original idea - one sovereign power manifesting himself in a succession of "forms". In Orphic cosmology Dionysos will be seen as the supreme power finding form in successive personalities or "bodies" of the primary gods. Before the dismemberment of Dionysos at the hands of the Titans, "he became a youthful Zeus, an aged Kronos, a babe, a youth". In the pairing of Kronos and Zeus you will never find the "elder" and "youthful" roles reversed, despite the fact that Zeus was often presented as a sovereign power encompassing all of the creative roles elsewhere reserved for Kronos (including even the "castration" of his own father, a story element in the bios of BOTH gods). An interesting comparison would be the Hindu Brahma, though the Hindus achieved a far more elevated philosophical concept. In the course of creation, Brahma manifest himself in a succession of forms, DISCARDING PREVIOUS BODIES in the juncture between world ages. That is one very natural interpretation in the sequence we are dealing with. Because the story clearly arose before astronomy and was told without reference to remote planets on predictable orbits, it can help to illuminate those traditions which WERE influenced by later planetary identities. The new form of the god displaced in the world-changing crisis is always Jupiter. And that is the fundamental character of the Egyptian god Osiris, I believe.
_DWARDU CARDONA ASKS: If Cochrane is correct in that Indra was Mars (with which you agree), then so must have been the Greek Zeus. Their mythological profile is identical. Who, then, in your scenario, would stand for the planet Jupiter in Greek mythology?
_TALBOTT RESPONDS: There is no question in my mind about the equation of Indra and Mars. In the case of Indra, there are so many documented Martian attributes and episodes as to make the case airtight. Indra is a more authentic, more obviously cosmic version of Heracles, the latter's cosmic stature being progressively diminished over time (as was Indra's in many later traditions). For several years I tentatively accepted the conventional scholarly identification of Indra with Zeus. It was in the early eighties that Ev suggested an identity with Mars, and that made me curious enough to investigate. The result was a hands-down victory for the Martian identity. Moreover, the entire basis for any equation with Zeus collapsed. Oversimplifying, it is the difference between a sovereign god (Jupiter) who HURLS lightning as a weapon against chaos, and a god (Mars) who IS or PERSONIFIES the lightning-weapon itself - this "lightning" being represented in the form of an arrow, dart, sword, spear, trident, phallus, etc. Mars is the vertical, electrically active, piercing weapon in service of the sovereign power. Such a statement cannot be made about Zeus, who IS the sovereign power, allowing for not even a hint of another master.
_Zeus, of course, was the Greek name of the planet Jupiter. While numerous warrior-hero figures were progressively brought down to earth, or humanized and diminished over time, there was also a tendency for the sovereign power to fall into the background, due to his more passive role. (Contrast the incredibly active role of the warrior-hero, which provided endless story content for the myth-makers.) This growing vacuum was often filled by the most revered hero-figure. You will see these tendencies clearly in the case of Indra. While his worshipers sought to elevate his stature above all other gods, the less devout chroniclers progressively reduced his stature to a more human, or even demonic form. But from start to finish the STORY is the story of Mars. ---
_ASTROBIOLOGY _by Ev Cochrane, Dwardu Cardona, and Dave Talbott
_EV COCHRANE WROTE: I have long argued for the possibility that microorganisms migrated between Mars and Earth. Such a cross-seeding is much easier to imagine, needless to say, if the two planets were close neighbors only a few thousand years ago, as per the Saturn theory.
_DWARDU CARDONA OBJECTS: What I would like to know is how such cross-seeding between Earth and Mars could have taken place during Saturnian configuration times when, according to Talbott, Mars was raining red-hot debris on Earth in that continuous stream that was the polar column.
_DAVE TALBOTT REPLIES: Dwardu, I think I may have misled you with something I said about the "redness" of Mars. I believe that removal of Martian atmosphere and oceans preceded its acquisition of the reddish hue with which so many Martian figures are associated. The very first forms of the warrior-hero do not seem to suggest this redness, but in the case of the more active phases of the figure, including his terrible aspect (Set, Typhon), redness is a dominant feature. Rather than speak of "red-hot" material streaming toward the Earth, I've expressed the suspicion that lower levels of Arctic or Antarctic ice include water and dust pulled from Mars. More than one rock identified as Martian has been removed form Antarctic ice, but that does not take into account any of the much larger volume of Martian rock that would have been removed from deeper levels by an electrical discharge capable of creating the stupendous Valles Marineris (the deeper material would lack the chemical signature of surface material identified by the Viking probes of the soil). From what Wal has described dynamically in electrical interactions, I can imagine active transport of atmosphere and dust without necessarily killing off all microorganisms. ---
http://saturniancosmology.org/files/thoth/thoth.1999.13.txt
_STAR WORDS _A Kronia discussion
_TED BOND says: I have just discovered that throughout the whole range of the Indo-European language group, the words for star are cognate, starting (!) with the Sanskrit 'star' (yes!). It is clear that these words are also cognate with many of the names (Ishtar, Astarte, Asherah, Ashteroth) of the goddess identified with the planet Venus. The radiant Venus may have been at one time the only star-shaped light visible in the sky, and the star-words may be derived from the proper name rather than vice versa. A most extraordinary thing however, is that the word 'disaster' said to derive, via French from the "Italian" disastro derived in turn from the Latin 'astrum', a star OR planet. But 'dis-' is a "Latin" prefix signifying deviation. Is there no attestation for a Latin 'disastrum' (deviating star or planet)? (The suggestion here should be obvious.) The Shorter Oxford Dictionary (based on the O.E.D.) does not mention an Italian origin for the French, but goes directly from the French to Latin 'astrum' and Greek 'astron'. In fact, according to this dictionary, until 1669, 'disaster' had the sense 'an obnoxious planet'!
_ROGER WESCOTT jumps in: Ted Bond rightly perceives a connection between Indo-European nouns cognate with English "star" and Semitic names like Akkadian Ishtar. Most historical linguists, adhering to conventional chronology, either descry lexical coincidence here or derive the I.E. from the Sem. forms. I am inclined, rather, to regard the Sem. forms as borrowings from I.E., for 4 reasons: (1) these forms are wide-spread in I.E. but not in Sem.; (2)revised chronology no longer requires us to regard written Akkadian as older than Hittite; (3) I.E., unlike Sem., permits an internal etymology for "star", relating it to English "stare" and other verbs expressing strength and persistence; and (4) Afrasian language families related to Sem., such as Cushitic and Ancient Egyptian, fail to exhibit forms with this shape and meaning (as they should if the form were primarily Afrasian).
_EV COCHRANE adds: As a matter of fact, I was just researching this particular issue this past month. According to Wilhelm Eilers' book on planet-names, there is no connection between the IE word "star" and the Semitic words Ishtar/Astarte/etc. As is well-known, such a derivation has been proposed on several occasions in this century but has long since been abandoned. So far as I'm aware, there is no agreed upon root for Ishtar/Astarte. According to Eilers and the other authorities I've consulted, the English word "star" is derived from the same root as "strewn", although I don't have the root in front of me at the moment. Thus I would be most interested to learn how Dr. Wescott relates "star" to the word "stare" (which root?) and which Semitic root he would offer as a source for Ishtar/Astarte.
_ROGER clarifies: All etymologies are probabilistic at best. Besides "strew", the English forms most likely to be cognate with "star" are "strong" and "steady", to either or both of which "stare" may be related.
_EV says: It goes without saying, of course (but I'll go ahead and say it just the same), that the Saturn theory would expect a relation between early words for "star" and Venus, since Venus presented the appearance of a giant star against the backdrop of Saturn. In this sense, Venus was the original prototype for "star" and could serve as the "star" par excellence in ancient nomenclature. As I have documented elsewhere, in various languages--such as Mayan and Polynesian--the word for "star" also means "Venus." Thus I would love to see Dr. Wescott (or anyone else) prove that the IE word "star" is cognate with Ishtar/Astarte.
_DAVE TALBOTT adds: Here is a personal opinion concerning S-T-R roots in the Indo-European languages. Virtually ALL are related, but in many cases the relationships will not be evident to the experts because these experts remain unaware of the archetype around which entire complexes of meanings arose. The source of the archetype was in the sky, but it is not there now, and the experts have not even suspected that a celestial reference might have existed - once - which could unify the picture completely. So they search about "down here," wrestling with concepts that cannot (on their own, in the absence of the celestial reference) be reconciled. They do not believe that "cataSTRophe" has anything to do with "STaR" because it is known that the former derives from the Greek "STRrophe", meaning a turning or twisting motion with specific references to the turning motions of dancers in Greek choral odes. They cannot imagine any linkage between this meaning and the root concept "STRength," to which the word STaR does appear to be clearly related. Nor does the "turning" motion of dancers suggest any connection to the concept "to STaRe," with which the word STaR is also connected. The Saturn theory, on the other hand, reconstructs an archetype which can account for the full range of STR-meanings. The subject is Venus and Mars in conjunction, together constituting the Great Star, the prototypical star depicted in the center of the archaic "sun" god (Saturn). The radiant STReams or STRahlen [German "rays"] of this StaR are the life and "STRength" of the sun. This star can be said to "STaRe" only because it is the sun god's central eye. When considering the origins of the word "catastrophe" and the meaning of the Greek "strophe", it is inappropriate for the experts to ignore the connection of sacred dances to celestial phenomena, since all such ritual performances repeated critical junctures in the lives of GODS. The turning, twisting motion ("strophe") of the prototypical star is legendary and is the basis of the global connection of this star, Venus, to the simple curl, spiral, and whorl. And speaking of the turning motion of Venus, if cataSTRophe is in fact connected to the same root as STaR, then so must the word apoSTRophe, since it expresses the same Greek root. The expected connection is definitely there. Aphrodite (Venus) was CALLED Apostrophia. A loose counterpart would be the Latin Venus as Verticordia--the turning or whirling heart. Our apostrophe is a mark or STRoke made with a STRophe or turning motion. Its form is virtually identical to the more elementary forms of the ancient Sumerian Venus-sign. And of course it has the same form as our COMMA which is surely linked to the "cometary" COMA of the Great Star. The archetypal Great Star is strictly synonymous with the archetypal Great Comet, But what is unified at the level of archetypes is too easily fragmented with the specialization and fragmentation of language in the ABSENCE of the original celestial references. To sort through the maze of modern words expressing the S-T-R root I would STaRt
with these most fundamental associations of the Great Star: 1. It is the life, power, glory, strength, and majesty of the archaic sun god: the god's central, radiant eye, heart, and soul. In rites and symbols of kingship it will be represented as the feminine "anima" of kings, the very force which Jung himself identified with the goddess Venus. The radiant streamers of the central star, the "Queen of heaven", ANIMATE the sun god. In the waxing and waning of these streamers in the daily cycle, the ancient symbolists saw the nuances of "life"--of being and non-being. I cannot see how the Latin "exsiSTeRe" from which our word "existence" is derived, could have its root in any concept other than the "appearance" or "coming out" of the STaR that was the life of the sun god. It also seems abundantly clear that our word "is", Latin "est", Greek "esti", Sanskrit "asti" related to the life-giving "presence" of the central star. 2. The definitive motion of Venus is represented pictographically by the curl, spiral, and whorl. That is the motion to which to the Greek STRophe must be referred. Hence, the STRophe cannot be legitimately separated from the language of the Great Star. 3. The dominant activity of the Great Star includes scattering and clearing. The explosion of radiating material is a STRewing of luminous ejecta into surrounding space, but in the subsequent clearing of the sky, the Great Star is the "broom" (comet) sweeping away the clouds of chaos. The broom is a clump of STRaw, German STRoh, an acknowledged hieroglyph for the COMET. (The hieroglyphic twisted STRoh or STRaw of the "comet" will be the STRahlen, or STReaming radiance.) 4. The coming into existence (Latin "exsiSTeRe") of the Great Star is the first "activity" in the history of the gods. The first form of "divinity" in Mesopotamia is the Sumerian sign of An. It is the 8-pointed star, signifying the "life" and "radiance" in the center of An. The "tears" shed by the central, solitary "Eye" of Atum in the opening event of the Egyptian creation legend will denote the same celestial form. The event means (in the words of the Egyptians themselves) "the beginning of coming into existence".) In calling this central star the "GREAT star" we refer specifically to its role as the "first", the primeval model, the prototype. Invariably, cosmic history will STaRt with this effusion of radiant STReamers or STRahlen. Most fundamentally, our word "STaRt" means the beginning of motion or activity, and that is a core concept in the Great Star imagery. ---
http://saturniancosmology.org/files/thoth/thoth.1999.14.txt
_THE MYTHIC ROOTS OF LANGUAGE _Dave Talbott _Language points back to its source, and the source is unified. The first systematic, written languages are rooted in the urge of ancient peoples to restore and to re-live the original "wholeness" of the world. Language arose as an integral component of sacred activity. Our word "sacred" itself comes from the Latin "sacer", "holy", the core idea of which is "wholeness". To honor the wholeness of the First Time is to "remember". Written language emerged from ritual practices, as an instrument of remembering--of this principle I am highly confident. The common assumption, however, is that the early languages reflect little more than separate fragments of human experience. And this is where we must confront the fundamental mistake of conventional etymology, I believe. The experts will see a thousand discrete objects and rudimentary human experiences associated with them. And they will assume that, from the primitive sounds linked to these experiential fragments, ancient cultures gradually forged the first systematic languages. Though this may be a reasonable assumption, given other assumptions about the nature of human origins, the Saturn model offers a radically different possibility--that the ancient languages arose with remarkable suddenness, as an effect of intensely experienced events, and with unified references in the sky. Unified references can only mean a unified substratum of language, no less significant than the unified substratum of the rites, myths, and celestial symbols to which language is so indebted. Moreover, the myths, rites, and symbols preserve countless nuances of the original experience, and together they offer a useful guide for exposing the underpinnings of language itself. A range of seemingly DIFFERENT meanings, connected to similar or identical roots, will reflect the things which human imagination saw in celestial forms no longer present and events no longer occurring. In the cosmic pillar imagination will see a mountain AND a river, though in our world a mountain does not look like a river. In the spiraling Venus it will see a serpent AND the spiraling sidelock worn by the warrior-hero, though a serpent "down here" does not look like a lock of hair. In the polar enclosure it will see a circular serpent (uroborus) AND a cosmic city. In the four-fold "radiance" of Venus it will see four pillars of the sky AND four luminous "winds". But remove the celestial references, and the similar or identical words they inspired will have little or no common link, and attempts to relate them will appear far-fetched at best. It is a fundamental mistake, I believe, to separate the study of language origins from the study of myth. The first languages speak for the "defining" events in the mythical age of the gods -- the archetypes. But the true unity of these first expressions will remain unnoticed until the celestial references are fully acknowledged. The origins of written language take us back to the Golden Age of Saturn--the forms and aspects of the primeval Unity--and the more complex episodes which followed the Saturnian epoch. To remember does not just mean to recall; it means symbolically to re-live or recreate the organic whole, which was lost through catastrophe. In its original ritual contexts, this is a very "Saturnian" concept--to "re-MEMBER", to re-constitute symbolically the "limbs" or distinct aspects of the original Unity. But wait! What is the basis for this not-so-subtle suggestion of an archaic linkage of words which, as far as I am aware, no self-respecting etymologist would countenance? Is there any ground for suspecting a connection between the Latin "membrum", the limbs or constituents of a whole, and "memor", remembering? I do not mean to insult the experts. But the question deserves to be investigated from a new vantage point, one outside all familiar boundaries. A conceptual relationship is not only intimated by the root meaning of sacred activity, but by the earliest language relating to "words" (the instrument of remembering) and "limbs". Egyptian religious texts, for example, celebrate the VISIBLE words spoken by the creator-god, identifying these "words" with the forms and aspects of creation itself. This identity is embedded in both the Egyptian language and in the declarations of the religious texts. The "words" shouted by the creator, the Unity, meant nothing else than the god's radiant "limbs". Once such connections are noted, is it appropriate to treat the ideas (words/memory and limbs) as wholly disconnected? And if the ideas ARE clearly connected in the earliest expressions of language, is it reasonable to ignore the possibility that these very connections might have echoed into more recent languages as identical or similar roots, the nature of the original connections (celestial references) having been lost? I am convinced that we are surrounded by the echoes of myth-making imagination, and that language (even modern English, despite the millennia separating our time from the roots of myth) offers unlimited opportunity to explore the connections. But to discuss this possibility one must suspend certain "rules" of etymology. Specifically, one must suspend any assumption which could not be correct if the hypothesized age of Saturn and the planetary gods actually occurred. Though giving this benefit of the doubt to the Saturn model asks a lot from the specialists, a new idea cannot be properly assessed without confronting its logical implications.
_Ev Cochrane says: I would offer the following thoughts from a trained linguist - Rens van der Slujis. Dr. van der Slujis is from the Netherlands and wrote to me from out of nowhere about how much he had benefited from his chance stumbling across the Saturn theory on my web site. Here are his comments:
_Dr. van der Slujis: "You seem quite convinced that the Saturn theory will influence linguistic theory greatly. It is not altogether clear to me what you're pointing at with these words. In my view, language must already have arisen long before the celestial events began to happen, so that the impact of the Saturn theory on our speculations with respect to the origin of language might be negligible.
_Dave Talbott responds: I do not believe that the languages familiar to us can be traced back to, or will point back to, any systematic language prior to the polar configuration. Myth, rites, pictographs, sacred architecture, and written language appear to have emerged simultaneously, and they appear to be so fully entwined as to preclude a primitive formulation of one in isolation from the others. This doesn't mean that certain building blocks of language couldn't have existed previously, but even on that question I suspect that we're in for some surprises. In the Egyptian hieroglyphic system, for example, one finds numerous connections of rudimentary building blocks to aspects of the polar configuration, and I now believe that this includes the full range of hieroglyphs themselves. There are no terrestrial references. Though most (but not all) of the SYMBOLS are drawn from nature and from human activity, the THING SYMBOLIZED, when investigated, always turns out to be an attribute of the configuration, standing in a defined relationship to other aspects of the configuration. And in a sense, this shouldn't surprise us, considering that the entire focus of the earliest sources is religious. The sources celebrate only two things: 1) the forms and activities of the gods, and 2) a human connection to the gods, particularly through the person of the king, who is seen as the priest or servant of the universal sovereign. The royal and priestly function of the sacred written language is, however, progressively extended, democratized, and specialized, and that appears to be part of a rapid process of fragmentation in the absence of the original celestial references. In fact, it is in the very nature of language that it will evolve more rapidly toward localization and specialization than the myths and symbols. And this is why the nuances of specific word roots did not contribute significantly to the development of the Saturn model. Recurring myths and symbols retained a more complete sense of context than would be easily noted in the anatomy of words. But once the larger patterns and the model accounting for them are clear, however, the anatomy of words always seemed to provide the specific link that was asked for (though in fact we have not explored one percent of the potential here). It needs to be emphasized that if the model is correct, the ground rules for the investigation of language will need to change also. It has always been assumed that the original references in the development of language will be found "down here". And when two or more nuances of a word are present, the specialist will always look for the "true root" in a singular thing or quality, assuming that the additional nuances linked to the root came later. And if there is no reasonable way to account for different meanings attached to the same word, it is assumed that two DIFFERENT lineages are involved. They are not actually the same root at all. That two different meanings are expressed by the same word then becomes an accident. The Saturn theory, however, permits us to believe that the most ancient core of language is unified because the original references are unified. Numerous, seemingly incompatible meanings will gather around the same root because the reference is a single thing or event in the sky, onto which human imagination projected a wide range of interpretations. Venus, the feminine "heart" of the sun, is also the radiant "soul", but also the eye, the nave of the sun wheel, the navel, the "breast" of the sky and much, much more. When we see ancient word-roots reflecting a range of meanings, in correspondence with the diverse mythical interpretations attached to a single form in the sky, we do not believe we are looking at an accidental convergence. (The other side of this point is that, if the Saturn theory is correct, a systematic investigation should reveal hundreds of examples of this principle within the Indo-European languages alone, and the same kinds of convergence should be present in all other major language groups. But it will be essential that the investigator know the Saturn model like the back of his hand, or more actual connections will be missed than are identified)
_Dr. van der Slujis continues: The only linguistic traces certainly left by the Saturn phenomenon are the so called homonyms: identical roots with apparently different meanings. In many cases, it will appear that both meanings stem from one original meaning, which became fragmented after the polar configuration had been distorted, i.e., in like way as all divine epithets and stories became fragmented. Different phenomena which had formerly been seen as an organic unity from the vantage-point of the polar configuration now missed an obvious link, so that the formal identity was now felt as a mere coincidence. From Pokorny's etymological dictionary I collected a number of examples to illustrate this: The root *g(w)er means 'mountain', while another root *g(w)er means 'heavy, mill' and still another root *g(w)er-u means 'rod, spear'. A palatalised velar is reconstructed in *gwer 'be hot, lighten up'. The latter form can in an earlier stage of Proto-Indo-European easily be connected with the former ones, for the difference between plain velars and palatalised velars seems a secondary innovation, perhaps involving the phonematisation of the labialisation [Do you agree with this Dave?]. My point is clear: whereas no single natural object or phenomenon comprises the notions of 'mill, spear, enlightenment' and 'mountain' all in one, the polar configuration is exactly what we are looking for. It is stated elsewhere that the celestial pillar, supporting Saturn's heaven, was variously interpreted as a mountain, a sword and a glowing stream. The combination of pillar and wheel led in broad cycles to the metamorphic mill. [other examples provided] Further examples can easily be collected from the respective dictionaries.
_Dave Talbott adds: This is a good summary of the reasoning process, using one of the equations we have mentioned frequently. I would add that there are probably more symbolic identities attached to the cosmic column than Dr. van der Slujis is aware (e.g., path of souls, bridge, phallus, erect serpent, wind of the below, boar, tusk, single leg, upraised arm, stem of the plant of life, trunk of the tree of life.) Also, the good doctor's point below may be answered quite convincingly as he is able to consider the larger imagery of the configuration to which the column was inseparably connected.
_Dr. van der Slujis: Nevertheless, one must be aware that the argument only goes insofar as homonymous roots are restricted to ones that can be connected with help of the Saturn thesis. Consider a case of ten homonymous roots, three of which can be associated as shown above. The point is not convincing in such a case, because seven homonyms are not adequately explained.
_Talbott: I think we can all accept this point with respect to homonyms, and I would imagine that with the full flowering of language in our own time, virtually all homonyms would represent accidental convergences. But the Saturn theory would predict that the farther back you look, the more a unified complex of meanings will be seen around the homonyms. (Also, many variations which would appear to involve separate distinct word-roots should turn out to reflect the different mythical nuances of the same celestial form.) In fact, certain unique and highly "incongruous" equations should be found more than once within the SAME language, but around DIFFERENT roots. The same "absurdity" evident in one root should also appear in connection with other roots. The Egyptian system will provide excellent examples of this, I believe. Here is just one: The model says that the sidelock of the warrior-hero is the spiraling serpent, and that both are an explicit form of the mother goddess. At least a half dozen instances could be given of this "absurd" equation in Egypt-where one word, such as "shen", means "hair", but is the name of a serpent as well. (Some time back I posted a listing, and could dig it up if anyone is interested.) It is the global imagery of the "hairy" serpent that will account for the seemingly ludicrous juxtaposition of words and symbols.
_Dr. van der Slujis: On the other hand, the argument can be strengthened with the help of other language families. When a like nucleus of virtually unconnected homonyms can be shown to occur not only in the Indo-European area, but elsewhere, structural typology demands an explanation in terms of historical-genetic relationship. If that can be shown--and we have good reasons to assume that it can - linguistics has contributed its part to the establishment of the Saturn theory. Lots of work remains to be done here."
_Talbott: No doubt about it. And we need some well-trained linguists to help us sift through the material. The wind-water-pillar-mountain would be a good principle to explore around the world, precisely because it's so incongruous in the absence of the celestial reference. Egyptian Shu is the nether wind (the wind below the central sun Re), the pillar supporting Re, the world mountain or primeval hill, and the "waterway." As Shu-Anhur, he is represented by the spear. (And that is only the beginning.) Sumerian Enlil is the "wind" but also the Great Mountain. Greek Boreas is the "North wind", the erect serpent (impregnating the goddess), and the primeval "bor" or mountain. (We also find around Boreas the boreal path of souls and other symbols of the column, perhaps even the boar, if the word doctors will permit it; that the boar is identified symbolically with Mars and the polar mountain is well established.) Hindu Indra is the wind or smoke rising along the world axis, but also a shining pillar. The same pillar is called the phallus of Shiva, but elsewhere it becomes the polar mountain of Meru. Aztec Ce Acatl is a heaven-supporting pillar, but also the "wind". ---
http://saturniancosmology.org/files/thoth/thoth.1999.14.txt
_Ev Cochrane says: If the truth be known, the Saturn theory suffers from an embarrassment of riches with respect to evidence which supports the central tenets of the theory. Early descriptions of the "sun" and various planets from Mesopotamia and elsewhere describe them as occupying "impossible" positions and moving in a manner which defies astronomical reality (as currently understood, that is). The ancient sun god, for example, is said to "rise" and "set" upon the same sacred mountain. The planet Venus is described as standing at the "heart of heaven" or within the crescent of Sin. Mars is pointed to as a principle agent behind "eclipses" of the ancient sun god.2 While not one of these scenarios is possible given the current order of the solar system, each is perfectly consistent with the history of the respective planets in the polar configuration as reconstructed by the Saturnists.
http://www.ames.net/cochrane/SIS/sis.html ---
http://saturniancosmology.org/files/thoth/thoth.1999.15.txt
_MYTHIC ROOTS OF LANGUAGE part II _By Dave Talbott
_Roger Wescott says: The word "comma" has a root "kop" ("to strike or mark"). So there is a semantic connection with "apostrophe" et al., even though that connection isn't morphological.
_Dave Talbott responds: The meaning of the root "kop" to strike, brings the "comma" into alignment symbolically with the Great Star/Great Comet Venus, though I would add the sense of the "break" in a linear sequence, which is the effect of both the comma and the coma (comet). The "punctuation" of a sentence is analogous to the "punctuation" of history. You can see this in the dual meanings of the word "period" (Greek ("periodos"), for example. In Greek thought a full circuit or cycle of time is the "period". A period also denotes the completion of a sentence. Similarly, in a sentence, the "break" of the comma is curiously analogous to the function of the archetypal coma/comet, whose most active and dramatic history signifies the break between two phases (phrases?) of history. Though the great star/great comet is the primary reference in symbols of beauty or "comeliness" (more Venus-comet language), it is invariably associated with endings and beginnings, presiding over the end of one age and the beginning of another. (Thus, the two most dramatic symbols of the comet in its terrible aspect are the raging or lamenting goddess and the raging serpent, always appearing in the sky with the collapse of a former epoch.) This does not mean that the similar functions of the coma and comma were consciously recognized by the Greeks, though I wouldn't discount that possibility. Of course most etymologists would fall off their chair in seeing the "coma/comma" connection implied in my note above. But I suspect that a search through more archaic roots would reveal some surprising parallels between the Greek "kome" (hair, hair star, comet) and "kop" ("strike"). I would look for a complex of K-M and K-P roots with a range of meanings roughly paralleling the complex of meanings around the S-T-R root. One parallel would be that between "kop" and the S-T-R word "strike", including the related words "stroke" and "streak". In seeking out a specific bridge between "kome" and "kop" I'd consider the full complex of Great Star/Great comet motifs, but perhaps concentrate first on word roots around the concepts of the cap, cape, cloak, head, and hair. While I could give several reasons for this suggestion, much of the logic comes down to this: the "kome", "hair", of Venus is the "cap" of the warrior-hero, and the cap does seem to be connected to "comma", i.e., the root "kop". The warrior-king dons the radiance or "hair" of the Great Star as his crown of glory (see, e.g., the Egyptian king's "wig" or "headdress", which turns out to be a form of the great goddess) Symbolically, the cap IS the radiance, the streaming hair of the goddess. Thus, among numerous cultures, the warrior's helmet or cap is inseparable from its "crest", a tuft of streaming hair or some symbolic variant thereof. The sacred sidelock or topknot of the warrior pertains to the same imagery, in which the hair of the head, or cap, IS the coma, the "radiance" of the goddess. (The spiraling sidelock of the warrior-king Horus is "Hensektet" a name of Isis and Hathor, for example.) Verifiable symbolic connections can lead to a recognition of numerous morphological connections where the roots would otherwise be treated as unrelated. With respect to the subject at hand, I believe that the conjunction of symbols will trace back to the beginnings of language--and specifically to the conjunction of Mars and Venus in the model we have presented. The role of Venus as headdress or cap cannot be understood apart from the relationship of Venus to the ONE WHO WEARS IT, the warrior-king. So I would expect to find a complex of meanings around the K-P root which will suggest SIMIULTANEOUSLY the cap, the top, the head, the crown or crown of the head, and hair (coma), as in the German "Kopf" It is by donning the radiance, the crown or cometary "hair" of Venus, that Mars becomes the king of the world, the legitimate "head", the cap-tain. One connection I would explore is that to "copper" (German Kupfer, Latin cuprum, the metal of Cyprus, Greek Kypros), since the "radiance" of the Great Star took the color of copper ore, i.e., brilliant turquoise. Copper ore (such as malachite) was used to produce the turquoise color of the Venus-eye-goddess symbols in both Egypt and Mesopotamia. And Aphrodite was called the "copper" goddess, the Cyprian. Hence, that would be a connection of the Venus-coma to a K-P root worth considering. Also, it's hard for me to imagine that root meanings around the word "comma" would not be related to its spiraling form, which IS the form of the Venus goddess as the spiraling lifebreath (exhaled heart-soul, displaced eye) The same form is represented by the apostrophe. Thus Aphrodite, the planet Venus, is called "Apostrophia". But she is also called "Comaetho"--the "long haired" (star), an epithet resonating with the global symbolism of the comet as the "long-haired star." Thus we find both the spiraling comma-form and the coma attached to one and the same planet goddess.
_THE ACID TEST _We've noted on numerous occasions that one of the advantages of the Saturn model is that it can be subjected to numerous tests. Under many such tests, the implications of the model will be so far from anything anticipated under conventional assumptions that they can be regarded as ACID tests. And the most compelling acid tests will be those so specific and unusual that no false theory could consistently pass them. When it comes to word associations, one could spend a lifetime applying various tests to the model. We've discussed the imagery of the polar column and the word associations predicted by that feature of the Saturn model. But there are many others. And why not look for the most extraordinary tests first, those in which the model would predict associations so unique one would not even dream of them in the absence of the hypothesized events? (Again, the force of the logic involved here will be lost on those who are not familiar with the details of the model. I will use as a reference the notebook "Symbols of an Alien Sky.") Consider, for example, the remarkable image of Mars in relation to the discharging Venus. Here we have the small planet directly in front of a blast of light (Venus discharge), putting the Martian hemisphere facing the earth into a dark shadow. As we have illustrated this condition, Mars appears as a dark reddish brown object against the brilliant sphere of Venus and its discharge streamers. Add to this unique condition the centrality of the juxtaposed spheres in relation to the much larger sphere of Saturn and you have a highly unique set of relationships-and literally nothing in common with observed phenomena in our sky today. Yet around the world we find ancient pictographs corresponding precisely to this condition-including the enigmatic small dark circle or sphere inside the central star and radiant streamers. (Symbols, pp. 73ff.) Conventional experts will call these images "sun" pictographs, though it is simply inconceivable that people, in both the Old World and the New, would draw the Sun in our sky that way. On the other hand, if you yourself were to represent this aspect of the Saturn model in line drawings, these are surely typical of the pictures you would draw. Moreover, if ancient language arose as a direct reflection of these extraordinary events, how likely is it that words relating to the unique role of Mars would fail to provide us with some explicit confirmation of the implied associations, including the shadow-effect on Mars? A few weeks ago we talked briefly about ancient imagery of the Greek omphalos or navel, which neatly represents the conjunction of Mars and Venus in the model. The raised boss or knob of the omphalos will be the sphere of Mars, and the golden band around this boss will be the planet Venus (gold typically representing "brilliance" in the ancient world). The juxtaposed spheres of Venus and Mars do indeed look like the "navel" of Saturn--as many people viewing the illustration have observed. (Of course it takes the huge sphere of Saturn to create the "navel" affect. The concept of centrality, which is crucial to all such images, is meaningless apart from this relationship.) The Greek omphalos is the Latin "umbilicus", meaning navel, middle, center. In honor of this numinous "middle"-point, a central district in Italy was named "Umbria". As we've noted previously, the umbilicus is presented on numerous ancient shields, and the depicted central boss or hemispheric protuberance of the shield can only represent the warrior-hero himself, the "navel-born" god, the celebrated axle of the Saturnian wheel (Symbols, p. 92). Thus, it is not surprising at all to find that the Latins called this central boss on the shield the "umbo.". And our own language has retained the connection to the darkly shadowed appearance of Mars: our word "umber", from the Latin "umbra", means "dark dusky brown or dark reddish brown". But where is the natural basis for the connection of a central hemisphere or boss to "dark reddish brown"? While nature today offers no connection, the Saturn model certainly does! Indeed, the Latin "umbra" means "shadow" or "shade", which can hardly come as a surprise, since it is the distinctive shadow which produces the dark reddish "umber" of Mars. And of course, the language of astronomy has preserved the original idea intact: "umbra" means "the complete or perfect shadow of an opaque body, as a planet, where the direct light from the source of illumination is completely cut off". That is exactly the role of Mars in the model. We might note also that archaically, our word "umbrage" (a very Martian expression), meant a "shadowy appearance". The archaic word "umbrose" meant "full of shade", and our word "umbrella", identical to the shade in ancient symbolism, comes from the same root. Also, since the umbilicus was frequently presented as the center of flower, it is significant that this center of inflorescence is called "umbella", a word equivalent to "umbra" the shadow. We thus find a complex of words around an ancient root, in which a navel, or a central boss, or the center of flower reveals an enigmatic relationship to the concept of a "shadow" and "dark reddish brown". Though this qualifies as a unique prediction of the Saturn model it would hardly qualify as an EXPECTED connection under the common assumptions of etymologists. It thus exemplifies the kind of testing which the specialists must be challenged to conduct on their own, to determine if similar associations are present in other languages. ---
http://saturniancosmology.org/files/thoth/thoth.1999.16.txt
_MYTHIC ROOTS OF LANGUAGE part III _By Dave Talbott _More than once I've expressed the belief that the echoes of an original unity pervade our language. The patterns, however, will not be recognized until one sees the true source of the unity in a planetary configuration. My contention has been that this configuration was an obsessive focus of human attention in the crucial phase of language formulation. To illustrate the point it may be useful to go back to the "first condition", the earliest-remembered time and the concepts which it inspired. These integrated concepts were reflected in written language at its inception and, as a whole, they cannot be understood apart from the Saturn model. Prior assumptions of historians, anthropologists, and etymologists cannot account for the complex of meanings attached to those ancient words describing the primeval condition, the age of Saturn. Keeping to the most fundamental concepts, here are some of the archetypal themes one might explore in relation to the language of the First Time: Chaos, Water, Seed, Sky, Formlessness, One, All, Unity, Conjunction, Rest, Peace, Whole, Holy, Universe, Wheel, Cycle, Becoming, Turning, Time, Heaven, High, Hollow, Void, Chasm, Yawning. This may look like a rather long list, and yet the underlying principles are both simple and unified. The age of Saturn means the transition from primeval chaos to order, from non-differentiation to diversity, from formlessness to form, from inactivity to activity, from no-time to time, from a pre-dawn glow to a cycle of day and night. That is what the archetypal "creation" myth is about, and Saturn is the creator-king. But the meanings of the ancient words need to be clarified. What does "formless" mean, for example? What does "chaos", or its "yawning" aspect, mean? Present experience offers no basis for visualizing any of these concepts in terms of the archaic STORY itself. As interpreted by the Saturn model, these concepts are vitally connected, and it is only to be expected that the concepts would be embedded in the meanings of ancient words--even the building blocks of language itself--and carried forward to retain at least some of the archaic nuances even into modern times. Where this has occurred the observed patterns will appear anomalous. That doesn't mean that you can decipher the connections by simply tracking down the roots of the English words. In fact, some of the root meanings behind the English words listed here would immediately mislead you. Our words "heaven" and "high", for example, will trace to more archaic words relating to the "heaping up" of a "hill" or "mountain", and that could be confusing if you are not already quite familiar with the model. So too, our word "sky" will trace to ancient concepts of a watery "cloud" which is extremely significant to the model but can leave one confused if the model is not clear. Instead of taking on the whole list in one shot, I'll start with a few of the basics.
_CHAOS AND THE RISE OF NEGATIVES. _The earliest-remembered condition is the state of "not". That is the most fundamental meaning behind the words that are translated as "chaos", and it provides the first tier in an evolving ancient language of negatives. It means the condition out of which an exemplary order, the model for all sacred order, arose. The negative state of chaos must be interpreted specifically in terms of the contrast between that state and what followed. It is the condition before motion, activity, differentiation, time, order, form. The Saturn model defines this as an EXPERIENCED condition of the world, not a primitive speculation on "how it all began". Hence, if language arose from these experiences in the direct and literal sense we are claiming, the root meanings of negatives should reveal the remarkable nuances of this earliest condition - though we certainly would not expect these embedded meanings under the normal theories of language formation. There is no malice, evil, or suffering implied by this original state of chaos, just an "absence of", in contrast to the distinct attributes of the revered order emerging from chaos. In the Egyptian creation accounts, this negative condition is applied to both the creator and the primeval "waters" of chaos. The god emerges from the waters, and the waters from which he appears are his own essence. The creator (Atum, Re, Khepera) recalls his original "state of inactivity" and the "inert watery mass" of his "father" Nu (with which he himself was closely identified). He was "alone" in these cosmic waters. He "had no companion" to work with him. And in this state of "not" he had "no resting place". There is a great deal of meaning in these images of the cosmic waters, and perhaps we can return to certain details later. The relationship of Atum to this original state of "not" is emphasized by the fact that the hieroglyphs used for his name, "tem" mean (among other things) "not". You see this relationship most prominently in the use of the n-sound (secondarily, the m-sound) in the hieroglyphic system. The essence of the formless god is "water", which appears in both a singular and a plural sense. The waters are the undifferentiated "plurality" of the unified state, the primeval condition of "not". These are, in fact, the core meanings of the hieroglyph for the n-sound, which is a simple wavy line. The meanings are expressed explicitly through all of the common n-roots in the hieroglyphic system-n, ni, an, nu, nun, na, enen, nini, and a large number of variants: primeval waters, undifferentiated plurality, negative state prior to "creation"..
_PRIMAL UNITY: THE "ONE" AND THE "ALL". _The creator-god personifies the state of undifferentiated "chaos", but emerges from that state in an event called "creation". Originally, he appears as a solitary god, called "the god One" in the Egyptian texts. He is the "all-containing" god, though other powers are clearly present within him as latent potential. "I came into being of myself in the midst of the Primeval Waters", states the god in the Book of the Dead. More than once the Coffin Texts recall the time when Atum "was alone, before he had repeated himself" (referring to the process of subsequent differentiation). He "was alone in the Primeval Waters", the texts say. "I was the Primeval Waters, he who had no companion when my name came into existence". (As I will note in a subsequent post, the "name" coming into existence is nothing else than the gods created "form", and only this celebrated form will make sense of the statement that the god was previously "without form" and without a visible "name".) Atum can thus be translated (and IS often translated) as "the All" in the fundamental sense of the original Unity holding all that was later differentiated in the creation. The Greek Ouranos is "all-containing heaven", as is his counterpart, the Hindu Varuna. The name of the Sumerian creator An (Akkadian Anu) is translated "heaven", but An contains within himself the divine male and female powers which are subsequently highly active as independent powers. It would be absurd, therefore, to separate the Egyptian concept of the "god One" from the related idea of "the All", and we should expect any language tracing to these concepts to reflect the underlying equation. The original condition of "heaven" (when "heaven was close to the earth") means literally the visible sphere of the universal sovereign in the beginning. The Saturn model interprets this as the gas giant looming huge in the sky, extremely close to the Earth. The planetary system moved through a gaseous, highly electrified environment, viewed imaginatively as cosmic "waters". Insofar as this environment reflected ambient light of the Sun, it was experienced only as a diffuse and benign glow--a shimmering, water-like cloud from which the gas giant appeared to emerge.
_CREATION. _All myths relating to what arose from chaos are "creation" myths, perhaps the most misunderstood concept in all of world mythology. It is the creation that produces the First Time or "beginning" of time, form, and motion--events which occur in direct relationship to the emergence of secondary powers from the unified god. Atum, the All, spits out or exhales the female power Tefnut and the masculine power Shu--"and from one god I became three", he says. (This is the specific meaning of the reference above to when the god "repeated himself".) The "three" are Atum-Re (the archaic "sun" god, whom we now know to be Saturn), the god Shu (first form of the warrior-hero, identifiable astronomically with Mars) and the goddess Tefnut (first form of the divine mother, the planet Venus). For the concepts listed above to begin to make sense, we only need to understand the idea which underlies Saturn's identity as the primeval "Unity"--
_CONJUNCTION. _Here again we have a fundamental concept that is either misunderstood or completely overlooked in common treatments of the creation legend. The "unity" of the creator-king cannot be separated from the principle of conjunction. In his original unified state Atum has a single, central eye, which means the goddess prior to differentiation. The eye has a "pupil" which is the unborn warrior hero. But the experts have not considered the principle of conjunction because they are seeing neither the ancient concepts nor the language in the concrete terms explicitly given by the ancient texts themselves. The primeval conjunction means first and foremost the visible alignment of celestial powers (Saturn, Venus, Mars, extremely close to the earth) producing the image of a unified, "all-containing" power in the sky, a god standing "alone" in the cosmic waters. Even after differentiation of these powers, they continue to stand in conjunction, though the alignment is then more dynamic, the activity of goddess and hero revealing a marked contrast to the more passive, "resting" quality of the sovereign himself. The primary powers, together with a company of lesser lights, "gather" or stand "together" in the sky--a "congregation" of gods, or divine "assembly". As such they are attributes or aspects of the unified creator-king, remembered as his own radiant "limbs". Apart from the principle of conjunction or "standing together", the concepts are entirely meaningless. Since there are so many lines of potential linguistic inquiry we might pursue, I'll limit my initial comments to the five core ideas listed below, which I believe are still evident in our language today: Before we take up some of the related words, it will be helpful to be sure that the archaic concepts we claim to be still reflected in modern language are clear: 1. ONE. Original relationship of the number one to the concept "the whole" rather than to the counting of separate items or units of anything. 2. ALL. Relationship of the root concept "all" to "one" and "unity". 3. NO, NOT. Foundation of the negative in the original unity. 4. CONJUNCTION. Relationship of the original unity to "gathered" or "joined" powers, subsequently differentiated. (Again, the mythical "Great Conjunction" of Saturn's golden age IS the unity of the sovereign god.) 5. PRIMEVAL CONDITION. The subject is a former world. The universally-remembered condition no longer exists. We also need to put an exclamation point to the contrast between the principles suggested here and all conventional suppositions. It is commonly assumed, for example, that one of the primary catalysts for language development was the act of counting. In contrast, I will suggest that the language of numbers possesses such a direct relationship to imagery of an evolving planetary configuration as to entirely discredit the common view. Moreover, once discerned, the original pattern will leap out from our own language today, despite the millennia of evolution and fragmentation which preceded it. Consider these English words and roots, and the five-fold pattern suggested above should become quite obvious to you--The English indefinite article "a" is a phonetic variant of "an" derived from the Old English "an" meaning "one", German "ein", Latin "unus", Greek "oine" Our word "unity" comes from the Latin "un(us)", "one", "together", "joined". As a general rule the language of the number "one" appears to be derived from the language of "the all" or the whole, not from the counting of separate "things". Our word "unit" is said to be a back formation from "unity"; "integer" comes from the Latin word meaning "whole" (as seen in our word "integral", "belonging to the whole"). I am also quite confident that our words "single" and "number" both trace back to concepts relating to the undifferentiated "all" rather than to any primitive idea of counting--"one of this and two of that", etc. The word "alone" is derived from Middle English "al one", "all (whole) one". (I'll take up our word "sole" shortly and suggest a similar relationship. The archaic reference, I believe, will be the primeval, unified power who "stands alone".) The English prefix "an-" is borrowed from Latin and means "not", "without", "lacking". Our prefix "un", is akin to Latin "in" Greek "an" meaning "not". "Un" is also a prefix meaning to reverse, remove, or deprive, akin to the Old English "and", Latin "ante", Greek "anti", and Sanskrit "anti", "opposite of", "against". Thus, the meanings include both a negative condition and a "return" to a negative condition from something that is "ordered", as in "un-do" (As I said above, the original state of formlessness, prior to the emergence of the created "order", is negative, but with no sense of violence or catastrophe. The un-doing of creation, the "return to chaos", is invariably catastrophic. But we'll get to that.) The roots "anti" and "ante" also mean "before", "prior". The word "conjunction", Latin "conjunctus", from the root "jungere", means "to unite", "to be joined or yoked as one". We use the Latin word "ana" for information placed "together", items constituting a coherent whole (as in Americana), i.e., the "conjunction" principle. Our word "and" is the German "und", the Sanskrit "anti". We call the word a "conjunction", and the word itself MEANS "together with", or the conjunction of two or more parts of a whole. (Other words called "conjunctions"--but, or, nor, for, so, yet, while--do indeed join thoughts in a sentence, but the words themselves do not MEAN a joining in the more direct sense of "and".) For the time being, at least, I do not propose to follow the various lineages backward to establish a more complete and definitive profile. It should be sufficient to note that there is simply no way to separate the meanings of these words and roots from the listed five principles relating to the "original condition". Obviously this fact does not require one to believe that the roots are all connected (though some of the connections would be beyond dispute, such as the kinship of our words "one" and "unity"). What about the relationship of our word "one" to the Latin roots "an" and "in", with the meaning "not"? Of the original kinship I am highly confident, but if anyone knows of verifiable facts which would discredit the proposed relationship I'd like to hear from them. The fact that the Sanskrit "anti" mean "and", but also the negative, certainly provides a clue, The relationship to the Latin "anti", "ante", in reference to PRIOR conditions or events, or an undoing to return to a prior condition, should also be investigated. The point here is that patterns which will appear meaningless in the absence of the Saturn model may become highly meaningful as one explores the implications of the model. And if exploration lends support to common lineages, two crucial questions arise: 1) can you see anything in the familiar natural world which might have prompted the full complex of relationships? 2) if you grant the Saturn model, would you EXPECT such relationships? ---
_CATASTROPHIC WORD ORIGINS _A Kroniatalk Discussion
_Roger Wescott said (previously): ... The word "comma" has a root "kop" ("to strike or mark"). So there is a semantic connection with "apostrophe" et al., even though that connection isn't morphological. All best! --Roger To which Mark Newbrook responded: WHY ARE SEMANTIC CONNECTIONS IMPORTANT IF WORDS ARE NOT COGNATE OR OTHERWISE MORPHOLOGICALLY CONNECTED? I SUPPOSE RW MEANS MERELY THAT THESE WORDS WERE AT SOME TIME IN THE SAME SEMANTIC FIELD (WHEN USED MORE 'LITERALLY'?) - WHICH IS NOT WITHOUT INTEREST.
_DAVE TALBOTT: From the vantage point of the Saturn model, I suspect that semantic relationships were originally much broader and more complex than generally supposed, but progressively narrowed due to distance from the original celestial references. It was these original references which made the complexity meaningful. The respective fields would include a broad range of meanings linked to identifiable celestial forms and events which are no longer visible. This is a point that needs to be illustrated concretely, and a few days ago I offered an example with respect to the "omphalos/umbilicus" and the shadow effect on Mars. Here the integrated meanings include the center, navel, nave, knob or boss, shadow, dark, red. The connections as a whole are not prompted by natural experience familiar to us today, but they would be expected under the Saturn theory.
_Dave Talbott (previously): The meaning of the root "kop" to strike, brings the "comma" into alignment symbolically with the Great Star/Great Comet Venus, though I would add the sense of the "break" in a linear sequence, which is the effect of both the comma and the coma (comet).
_Mark Newbrook: IS THIS MEANT SERIOUSLY? A DOUBLE MEANING FOR comma (ON WHAT EVIDENCE) AND AN ETYMOLOGICAL LINK WITH coma/comet (DITTO)? Not a "double" meaning. A triple meaning (for starters), which I interpret as a reflection of broader semantic relationships than generally imagined. If my underlying assumption is correct we should find many instances in which, enigmatically, quite different roots carry forward the SAME complex of nuances. Here, the nuances would be: 1) to strike, 2) a break in a sequence, and 3) a spiraling or turning stroke or mark. In the symbolism of the Great Star/Great Comet these concepts are inseparably connected. I find it significant, therefore, that both the comet and comma reflect the same complex of ideas or functions, despite the fact that natural experience today seems to offer little or no support for the integrated meanings. I also SUSPECT an etymological connection of "kop"(comma) and "kom" (coma, comet). I've suggested privately to others that we should look for the possibility of an archaic feminine and masculine relationship between the two roots, reflecting the relationship between the masculine and feminine aspects of the Great Star. Remember that the archetypal "star" represents the conjunction of Mars and Venus--the masculine is lodged within the feminine, then separates to become an independent power. Since both conjunction and separation (the famous "birth of the hero", for example) are so prominent in the symbolism of the hero and goddess, I simply cannot believe that language would fail to reflect this relationship in very fundamental ways. On this question I'll have a lot more to say and am prepared to voice a hundred "suspicions" that may or may not prove fruitful.
_Roger Wescott (private note): Dave, linguists who recognize consonantal apophony accept kop- and kom- as related, like pa/ma or skip/skim in English.
_DAVE: This revelation accords so well with my original suspicions that I would like to pursue the connection further, with specific reference to the feminine and masculine nuances of the Great Star. The radiating "splendor" of the Great Star is the "kom", generally a feminine principle. Is it possible that the goddess' counterpart, the warrior-hero, might reveal an archaic relationship to "kop" as the head, the one who wears the "kom" as hair, headdress, or crown, and wields the "kom" as a weapon or emblem of power and authority? When you think about it, it's hard not to notice that the p- and m- sounds do seem to carry respective masculine and feminine associations (as in pa and ma for that matter). So my first guess would be that the principle of apophany Roger noted did indeed have its reference in the conjunction of male and female aspects in the Great Star.
_From Pam Hanna: One small comment on Dave T's article which I wanted to mention - about the word "sacred" - not to contradict "holy" & "wholeness" but to insert that 'sacer' (from my Partridge 'Word Origins') has 3 important full compounds: 'sacerdos' a priest; 'sacrificium,' an offering to a god; 'sacrilegus,' a stealer of sacred things. Sacerdotal, sacristy, sacrament, - all relate to sacrifice, i.e. sacred does mean 'holy' and may mean 'wholeness,' but i believe the wholeness would derive from sacrifice. The priest is sacrificer, and he sacrifices in the sacristy which is holy because that's where he sacrifices. "Sacramentus" is "... a deposit made to the Gods, hence, from the accompanying oath...." Hyam Maccoby stressed this ... in *The Sacred Executioner.* And i believe it relates directly to Catastrophic word origins. We've already established that one of the human reactions to the polar configuration was to initiate blood sacrifice. They couldn't feel holy and whole without blood sacrifice, que no?
_Dave Talbott said: More than once I've expressed the belief that the echoes of an original unity pervade our language. The patterns, however, will not be recognized until one sees the true source of the unity in a planetary configuration. My contention has been that this configuration was an obsessive focus of human attention in the crucial phase of language formulation. ---
http://saturniancosmology.org/files/thoth/thoth.1999.17.txt
_THE DEMANDS OF THE SATURNIAN CONFIGURATION THEORY _Excerpts from Dwardu Cardona's SIS Silver Jubilee Paper Summaries by Amy Acheson
_INTRODUCTION _I will make no apologies here for the fact that this theory was constructed on the basis of the mytho-historical record rather than through astrophysical considerations. I will only say in passing that, other than its mythological content, the mytho-historical record also incorporates the world-wide astronomical beliefs of our ancient forefathers, and that these beliefs coincide with their mytho-religious convictions. Ancient astronomical beliefs can therefore be considered together with mythology as a unified whole regardless of the fact that what comes to light in an in-depth research of such subjects ends up describing a Solar System that was entirely alien to the one we now inhabit. Be that as it may, the outlandishness of what my research was uncovering made me disbelieve the entire thing and I must honestly say that it was not until I had read Hamlet's Mill that I finally accepted all that I had unearthed. If, as I reasoned at the time, scholars of the caliber of Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, the authors of Hamlet's Mill, had been able to unearth the same set of bizarre situations, I could not be that far off the mark myself.
_Amy adds: The full introduction can be found at the following SIS Silver Jubilee website, and the full paper is scheduled to be published early next year by the SIS Review. http://www.knowledge.co.uk/sis/silver/
_CARDONA: What do I mean by 'demands'? Theories do not stand, if they are to stand at all, in isolation. They raise certain demands. For instance, the theory concerning the nuclear fueling of the Sun demands that the Sun shed a vast amount of neutrinos. To date, only about one third of the predicted amount have been detected. The theory concerning the Big Bang demands a vast amount of matter that should be there. To date, this so-called dark matter is still being looked for. These two theories should not be allowed to stand, but because science is optimistic in that it will eventually detect both the missing neutrinos and the missing dark matter, they are "allowed" to stand. Personally, I shall not use similar optimism as a crutch. ... On the contrary, I aim to present a series of demands which this theory raises, both within itself as also through hard science, and how these can be met. The list is not meant to be comprehensive, but it should suffice to illustrate the significance and consequence of the evidence. ... I neither have the space nor the time to deal with all the planets that once constituted the Saturnian configuration. I have therefore decided to concentrate on the two most important bodies of the alignment - namely Saturn and the earth itself. ...
_THE AGE OF DARKNESS _My version of the Saturnian scenario posits that man's earliest memory of the sky above him was one in which the planet Saturn was the only visible celestial body which was seen looming large in the sky in an all-pervading darkness -- an endless night. One of the most persistent of beliefs among the civilizations of the ancient nations ... is that during a time usually remembered as 'the beginning' Earth had been engulfed in darkness. Time and again ... we are told that 'in the beginning' there was no Sun, no Moon, no stars.
_Amy: Here Cardona supplies a sampling of the enormous number of myths from every continent on earth which support this thesis of a common beginning to all creation stories. He adds that this darkness was primarily in the sky, but that it also affected the earth below, with Saturn radiating feebly above, in the words of the Linga Purana, 'like a glow-worm.'
_CARDONA: ... keep in mind now that the Saturn theory posits that Saturn and Earth shared the same axis of rotation, so that Saturn, at this time the only luminary visible in the sky, was not seen to rise and set, but remained ever visible, fixed to one spot in Earth's north celestial sphere. Add to this the perpetual night ... and mankind would have been kept from being able to tell the passage of time. This, then, becomes one of the theory's first demands, because, if mankind was not able to tell the passage of time during this period, the mytho-historical record itself should tell us as much. Does it?
_THE TIMELESS ERA _Amy: Cardona recounts many myths which not only explicitly claim that time once did not exist, but others which refer to an era when there was no time, and several in which the terms 'time' and 'year' and 'day' are strangely equivalent. He ends up recounting the Chinese record of an age in which 'the day and night had not yet been divided.'
_CARDONA: ... the first demand raised by our interpretation of the mytho-historical record is actually met by that same record ... [and] the demand we have just seen being met raises another -- because, since the record does treat of an era during which time did not exist, it should also treat of a following era during which time was recognized as having begun. Do we find such records among the beliefs of the ancients?
_THE BEGINNING OF TIME _Not only do such records exist, but quite a few of them connect the beginning of time directly with Saturn.
_Amy: Here Cardona reveals a sampling of myths which both make connections between Saturn and time and reveal Saturn as the originator of time. He points out that conventional mythologists have also noticed this connection, and have taken great pains to explain it away.
_CARDONA: ... as far back as 1875, attempts were being made to justify the phenomenon by appealing to the planet's present lagging orbital pace. ... However, slow as Saturn might move, it "moves", and, in that respect, it is no different than the other planets. Besides, why would the "beginning" of time be associated with the planets solely because of its slow pace? Or, better still, why would Saturn's sluggish amble have led to the belief that time "must" have had a beginning -- that, at one period of the ages, time did not exist? Or why would Saturn have been chosen to represent the year? If any celestial body can presently claim the right to represent the year, it surely would have been the Sun. ... our ancient forebears ... would hardly have even noticed the planet Saturn if it appeared , like now, as nothing but a pin point of light in the night sky, let alone have noticed its slow advance across the night sky.
_THE SATURNIAN SUN _CARDONA: One of the themes I wish to touch upon concerns the model's prediction that Saturn had once shone as a virtual sun. More than that, the model also posits that what past mythologists have identified as a bevy of sun-gods - such as the Assyro-Babylonian Shamash, the Egyptian Ra, the Indic Surya, the Greek Helios - are actually misidentified Saturnian suns. In the case of Shamash, of course, the issue is at once settled by appealing to those very ancients who venerated the god ... despite the objection of most modern mythologists, the case is really closed since the Assyro-Babylonians themselves vouched for the identity of Shamash as a name of the planet we call Saturn.
_Amy: Cardona then discusses the identification of the Egyptian Ra with the sun, an identification he personally found more difficult to accept.
_CARDONA: And yet, here is precisely where the method I have been expounding proved itself - because, if the theory demanded that Ra was really a personification of Saturn rather than the Sun, it should also demand that the characteristics and motions ascribed to Ra will not be found to fit those of the Sun.
_Amy: Quoting from Jastrow, Boll, Budge, and the Pyramid texts, CARDONA describes the characteristics and motions of Ra, as a deity that reigned within the Circles, then further identifies this Circle as the "Duat" the "underworld", which, according to Budge, was located "away beyond the earth, probably in the sky."
_CARDONA: It is thus obvious that, whatever Ra once signified, it was a celestial body that resided within a circle or band or ring - nay, within a nest of concentric circles or bands or rings. As we all know, the Sun does not send forth its rays into a circle; it does not reside in a ring or nest of rings. The planet Saturn, however, does. . . . under certain conditions, the Sun is seen to be surrounded by . . . atmospheric refraction which lends a halo to the solar orb. But not only is this too rare an apparition to have earned Ra his title of 'Governor of the Circle,' it is also a phenomenon which is restricted to the northern regions and hardly, if ever, seen at the latitude of Egypt. But there is more.
_Amy: Cardona recounts the widespread and unusual belief by many ancient cultures that Saturn was the "night sun" or the "sun of night." Saturn was also remembered as a 'radiant green disk' and Cardona quotes an Egyptian hymn which refer to Saturn's 'beams of emerald light.'
_CARDONA: Consider further the motions of the celestial object called Ra. In a statement found in one of the Coffin Texts, the deity is addressed with these words: 'You shall go up upon the great West side of the sky and go down upon the great East side of the earth.' Is this not contrary to what the Sun does? Does the Sun 'go up' in the west? Does it 'go down' in the east? Thus Faulkner, who translated this passage, could not help stating that this 'unexpected reversal of the points of the compass is incomprehensible' - and ended up by blaming what to him was an inconsistency on 'a blunder in an early copy which no one has noticed or at least attempted to correct.' This explanation, however, presupposes that there must be other texts which give the rising and setting of Ra correctly. But, as David Talbott has indicated, 'wherever the direction of the [sun] ship's movement is explicitly connected with the phases of morning and evening, the texts always reverse the direction expected by the solar interpretation. More than that, when sailing in his ship, or boat, Ra is said to move down at dawn, and 'upstream' at night contrary to what we see the Sun doing in our sky. How, then, can mythologists continue to perpetuate the lie that the Egyptian Ra was a personification of the Sun? ---
http://saturniancosmology.org/files/thoth/thoth.1999.18.txt
_THE DEMANDS OF THE SATURNIAN CONFIGURATION THEORY: Part II _Excerpts from Dwardu Cardona's SIS Silver Jubilee Paper Summaries by Amy Acheson
_AMY ACHESON: Part I of this paper recounted many of the unusual global attributes of the planet/god Saturn as portrayed in mytho-historical records from all over the world. Among these were Saturn's connection with an age of darkness, Saturn as supreme ruler of The Golden Age, Saturn's association with the beginning of time, Saturn as motionless, Saturn as the sun and Saturn as the sun of night. This section of the paper concluded with these phrases concerning another unusual behavior of Saturn:
_DWARDU CARDONA WROTE: Consider further the motions of the celestial object called Ra. In a statement found in one of the Coffin Texts, the deity is addressed with these words: 'You shall go up upon the great West side of the sky and go down upon the great East side of the earth.' Is this not contrary to what the Sun does? Does the Sun 'go up' in the west? Does it 'go down' in the east? Thus Faulkner, who translated this passage, could not help stating that this 'unexpected reversal of the points of the compass is incomprehensible' - and ended up by blaming what to him was an inconsistency or 'a blunder in an early copy which no one has noticed or at least attempted to correct.' This explanation, however, presupposes that there must be other texts which give the rising and setting of Ra correctly. But, as David Talbott has indicated, 'wherever the direction of the [sun] ship's movement is explicitly connected with the phases of morning and evening, the texts always reverse the direction expected by the solar interpretation. More than that, when sailing in his ship, or boat, Ra is said to move down at dawn, and 'upstream' at night contrary to what we see the Sun doing in our sky. How, then, can mythologists continue to perpetuate the lie that the Egyptian Ra was a personification of the Sun?
_CARDONA CONTINUES: _THE POLAR STATION _But hold on - someone may have already noticed. If, as the model assumes, Saturn appeared motionless in the earth's north celestial sphere, how could it have been seen to rise and set, even if contrary to the way the Sun does? This is a point that troubled me for some time until, with Dave Talbott, I came to realize that the fault lay with mythologists and not mythology. Or, to state it more correctly, the fault lay with those who had translated the ancient myths. Not that I blame them because, after all, they only had the arrangement of the present sky to work with. In short, when it comes to the Egyptian Ra, the terms 'rising' and 'setting' were actually mistranslations. If we were to translate the Egyptian texts concerning Ra literally, and forget about what the Sun is supposed to do, we find that the light of the god is simply said to 'come forth' and 'recede'. The god himself 'comes out' and 'goes in.' Egyptologists, of course, will claim that this was the way in which the Egyptians alluded to the rising and setting of the Sun - and, as I said, one cannot really blame them. But, as Talbott noted, when we say today that the moon comes out at night, we do not really mean that it rises, but that it grows bright. And so, also, with Ra - the god did not rise and set; he simply grew bright and dimmed. And this is vindicated by the additional fact that the god was said to come forth and recede while remaining em hetep, that is, 'at rest' or 'in one spot.' And, in fact, it was this immobility of Saturn, stated of the god and of the planet, that made me realize very early in my research, together with Talbott, but independent of him, that Saturn once occupied a stable position in Earth's north celestial sphere.
_AMY: Cardona then quotes Assyro-Babylonian, Hebrew, and Egyptian sources which translate the meaning of local names for Saturn as 'the steady planet' and 'the resting planet'. He speaks of rituals in which Saturn is referred to as 'without motion' and 'without movement.' He quotes the Makiritare Indians of Venezuela, 'Wanadi is like a sun that never sets.'
_CARDONA: . . . If Ra was the Sun, as mythologists would have us believe, why was it said to have been without movement? Unless I am mistaken, there are only two ways in which the planet Saturn could have appeared suspended motionless in the sky without rising and setting. The first, and most believable, is to assume, as Lynn Rose has done, that Earth orbited Saturn in phase-lock, very much as the Moon does in relation to Earth, thus always pointing the same hemisphere toward Saturn.
_AMY: The second way in which Saturn could have appeared suspended motionless in the sky is if it were stationed at the celestial pole. Cardona quotes from Egyptian, Chinese, Babylonian, Iranian, and Celtic myths, a few of the many hundreds of traditions which place Saturn in the north. He quotes Lynn Rose in Lynn's belief that after the phase-lock era of Saturn came to a close, the ancients knew of no other "immovable station of the sky" in which to place Saturn, so universally revised their myths to locate Saturn at the pole. Cardona also mentioned as a possibility David Talbott's suggestion that Saturn may have moved from phase-lock to polar station. Either way, Cardona says that the polar position of Saturn is an integral part of global mythology.
_CARDONA: What is of additional importance, however, is the fact that the record of the ancients does not describe this strange situation always in the same manner, but, on the contrary, in a hundred different ways which speaks against a diffusionist borrowing of the belief. ---
http://saturniancosmology.org/files/thoth/thotiv01.txt
_THE DEMANDS OF THE SATURNIAN CONFIGURATION THEORY: Part III _Excerpts from Dwardu Cardona's SIS Silver Jubilee Paper
_Summaries by Amy Acheson _AMY ACHESON: Part I of this paper recounted many of the unusual global attributes of the planet/god Saturn as portrayed in mytho-historical records from all over the world. Among these were Saturn's connection with an age of darkness, Saturn as supreme ruler of The Golden Age, Saturn's association with the beginning of time, Saturn as motionless, Saturn as the sun and Saturn as the sun of night. Part II concerned the postulate that the mytho-historical record places Saturn at the Earth's north pole. Cardona stresses that this information is not taken from a single story, but is expressed in hundreds of different ways in hundreds of different stories told over the world. In part III, Cardona explores the nature of this northern configuration from both a mythical and physical perspective:
_DWARDU CARDONA: But what of the demands which this postulate raises? Can they, too, be met? The postulate concerning the former polar station of the planet Saturn raises more than one demand, but I will only touch upon one-and it will serve to show that physical requirements, as well as those which the mytho-historical record itself answers, can be met.
_THE LITHIC BULGE _We all know how terrestrial tides are raised; they are caused by the attraction of the Sun and Moon on Earth's oceanic waters. . . . Now consider: With the massive Saturn in proximity to Earth, the tides that would have been raised should have exceeded those at present. And since Earth's tides are aggravated when the attractive force of the Moon is added to that of the Sun, it stands to reason that the additional pull of Venus and Mars, which the theory dictates to have been in direct line with Saturn and Earth, should have raised the northern tide even more. More than that, with Saturn having been positioned in Earth's north celestial sphere, terrestrial tides should have accumulated at Earth's north polar region. The hydrosphere, moreover, would not have been the only terrestrial element to respond to Saturn's attractive force. The atmosphere should also have piled up at Earth's northern areas. And so, also, should have Earth's crust. This, then is what the Saturnian thesis demands. Do we find it so? Well, let's be fair now. What was, no longer is, so that we cannot now take a trip up north to see if the water of the world is actually piled up in a tide around the north pole. Earth's crust, however, is a different mater. Earth's hydrosphere and atmosphere would have easily-although not necessarily suddenly - have rebounded to settle in a more uniform shell around the world Earth's crust, on the other hand, would have taken a much longer period to re-adjust to the new conditions. And since the scenario we have been positing is theorized to have played its drama just prior to the rise of civilization, we should expect this northern lithic bulge not to have yet subsided.
_AMY: Cardona discusses how this lithic bulge fits into several theories of planetary catastrophism, including phase-lock theories and theories involving planets other than Saturn.
_CARDONA: Is there any evidence of a remnant of such a tidal bulge in Earth's north polar region? Of course there is ... The real shape of Earth ... is better described as a triaxial spheroid rather than an oblate one, with the bulge of its pearshape measured in meters rather than kilometers. But as a residue, or remnant, of a former greater uplift of land even meters are of significance. As Frederick Hall asked: "What pulled Earth out of shape from above its north pole? The small dimensions of this shift indicate the pull was short term (as in centuries to millennia) rather than eons. Furthermore the effect is relaxing, and in geological terms the distorting influence must have been remarkably recent." . . . Now it is true that Earth's present pear-shape could be explained through different causes than that proposed by the Saturnian configuration theory. But that is not the issue now, is it? What rightly concerns us here is that the theory demands such a state of affairs, and the demand is met.
_THE AXIS MUNDI _One of the most mysterious of elements that can he retrieved from the mytho-historical record concerning the Saturnian configuration is what seems to have appeared, at least at first, as a tapered swath of light which stretched all the way down from the configuration to touch Earth at its northern horizon. Having received the generic name of axis mundi, this appendage is also recognized as the polar column and cosmic tree. It was even known as the world mountain which ... is not to he confused with the lithic bulge we have just discussed. This tapering appendage has been explained in various ways. Rose compared it to the so-called flux tube which stretches between Jupiter and its satellite, Io. In his own Martian, as opposed to a Saturnian, model, Jueneman sees the axis as a colossal Rankine vortex. David Talbott, on the other hand, had originally explained the polar column as a stream of debris stretching between Saturn and Earth, but later amended this to a stream of debris attracted from Mars toward Earth Additionally, Wallace Thornhill believes he has recognized this ethereal pillar as a sustained plasma discharge in the form of Birkeland current.
_AMY: Here Cardona disagrees with Talbott's interpretation on the basis that such an occurrence would have depleted Mars of its rubble and that Martian meteorites have not yet been found in the northern regions of the Earth.
_CARDONA: What Thornhill's explanation has going for it ... is the fact that galaxies exhibit what Thornhill terms plasma focus characteristics at their centre during their active, or quasar, phase by emitting beams of particles in the form of twisted vortices.' These vortices bear a remarkable similarity to the posited axis mundi deduced from the mytho-historical record Moreover, such a beam in the form of a filament of light has now not only been detected ... but even photographed. And, together with the beam, we now have the first actual photograph of an extra-solar planet, a member of a double-star system known as TMR-1. What the photograph shows is what appears to be a runaway planet, jettisoned by the double stars together with what has been described as 'a thin filament of gas' extending all the way from the planet to its primaries. Anyone living on that planet . . . would see a swath of light stretching all the way from the horizon to the double sun very much like our ancestors would have seen a similar swath of light stretching .. from Earth's northern horizon to the Saturnian configuration. Those who used to tell us that such a phenomenon is not physically possible can now be silenced. One other aspect of Thornhill's postulate that fits well with the mytho-historical record is that magnetic fields tend to twist Birkeland currents into 'ropes,' making the structure appear like entwined snakes. As I will indicate below, this structure is important because, during its fina1 phase, the Saturnian axis developed exactly that form.
_AMY: Cardona then expresses his opinion that, although Thornhill's Birkeland currents fit most of the criteria of the polar column, they would not be able to suck material up from the earth, which he believes the myths describe. Cardona prefers Fred Jueneman's proposed Rankine vortex, an interplanetary tornado, as an explanation for the axis mundi.
_CARDONA: _THE WHIRLING COLUMN _Once again, I cannot here present the entire string of evidential sources which attest to the whirling motion of the cosmic pillar. Instead I will merely present the opinion of four authorities on the subject . . . DC Santillana and von Dechend are two of many who came to the conclusion that the axis did twist and turn--although they seemed somewhat unsure of whether it did so slowly or rapidly-even if to them the axis was anything but an actual physical entity. So, incidentally, did Elmer Suhr when he speaks of the 'whirling cosmic column' and 'the whirling column of the cosmos.' In fact, Suhr goes on to stress: 'It is especially important to think of the cosmic column not as a static post but as a constantly whirling crucible...' Talbott, of course, also recognized this fact when he wrote that 'the cosmic mountain in many creation epics is presented as a churning, serpentine column rising along the world axis...' it is more than obvious from descriptions of the Saturnian axis, as well as prehistoric Petroglyphs, that the polar column was a visible entity rather than a deduced abstraction. This was so much so that, in some cases, the axis was even pictured as a ladder reaching to the Saturnian sun.
_Amy: Cardona mentioned that he finds it difficult to reconcile a the whirling motion of the axis with Suhr's interpretation of the cosmic pillar as the cone-shaped shadow which the moon sends to the Earth during a solar eclipse.
_CARDONA: _THE ENTWINED SERPENTS _. . . the cosmic pillar was often described as having had the form of a serpent or celestial dragon.... And, as [Talbott] continues to inform us, "in several lands the word for 'mountain' is the same as the word for 'serpent' or 'dragon,' though our natural world offers no basis for the equivalence.' For examples, Talbott offers the following: 'In Mexico, Nahuatl "can" means 'serpent' but also 'mountain' ... and [the] Egyptian Set is the primordial serpent or dragon, but "set" also means 'mountain," and '[the] ancient Sumerian dragon ... was the Kur ... but "kur" also possessed the meaning 'mountain" ... [The Greek] Boreas is the primeval serpent ... but etymologists connect the serpent-dragon's name with a primitive "bora", 'mountain'." As Suhr tells us: "Among primitive peoples there are signs of the column in the form of a python or dragon rising from the level of the earth to the clouds.' In fact, Suhr adds that, among the Murngin people of northern Australia, the great python 'is the most impressive representative of the column.' In China '[a] dragon ascending from the earth to the clouds can serve as the whirling column--which no doubt accounts for so many dragons on pillars." A serpent, or dragon, on the other hand, is not exactly the same thing as a pair of entwined serpents. So, if we are going to keep to the motif of Thornhill's Birkeland current, where do we look to find the cosmic pillar described as a pair of entwined serpents or, at least, a serpent entwined around a vertical prominence? In this respect, we only have to turn our attention to that object which the Greeks referred to as the caduceus--two serpents entwined around a central shaft--which Suhr also recognized as representative of the cosmic axis. Nor must we think of the caduceus as a uniquely Greek invention since the symbol was also popular in the east, including Mesopotamia. A fourth century BC relief from Greece depicts a cylindrical altar with a snake coiled around it ... the word 'altar,' although derived from Latin, has its phonetic equivalent in the Arabic Al-Tur which means 'The Mountain' This connection did not escape Talbott who has provided some intriguing insights concerning the associations shared between the altar, the world mountain, the cosmic pillar, and other Saturnian elements. Other examples of this motif are encountered in depictions of Mithras, shown with a serpent coiled around him in spiral fashion, and in that of the Mithraic Kronos, or Aion, who is likewise shown within the coils of a spiraling snake. A variant of the same motif is to be found in the serpent-footed Yahweh on coins of the Hellenistic period ... Yahweh originated as a personification of Saturn ... As Heidel tells us: 'That Yahweh and Saturn were identical was a belief widely accepted in antiquity...' This can be verified through Tacitus who had it recorded that the Jews worshiped the planet Saturn as their god. I mention all this, here, because the image of Yahweh reproduced on the coins mentioned above do not merely show him as serpent-footed, but with both serpentine legs entwined together, thus conforming to the demands of our model. ... Since we have opted for Jueneman's Rankine vortex in lieu of Thornhill's Birkeland current--sat least temporarily--how do we account for the image of the serpentine nature under this scheme? The answer is easy enough. As Jueneman himself explained: "Terrestrial tornadoes occasionally exhibit smaller counter-rotating vortices in close ... proximity to the primary whirlwind. 0n a much vaster scale, similar counter-rotating catenulate bolus flows would have snaked around the polar column in filamentary fashion, first in a counterclockwise, then in a clockwise direction in a slow oscillation." It is, therefore, this bolus flow that would have given the planetary tornado, or Rankine vortex, its serpentine quality.
_THE WATERY VORTEX _AMY: Cardona proposes, if the polar column were actually a colossal tornado, that the Saturn theory demands that this, too, should be part of the mytho-historical record. That is, the tornado would have sucked large amounts of waters from the Earth and ancient man should have been aware of this, if not from observing the column itself, then at least from observing what happened when the column was severed.
_CARDONA: . . . among the Australian Aborigines, the great python is the most impressive representative of the polar column. It is therefore significant that this python is not only believed to tower up to the level of the clouds, but that he also 'brings about rain and flood.' The Efe pygmies of the Ituri forest tell of a deluge of water which gushed forth as a mighty river when their version of the Cosmic Tree, which was the polar column, was felled. Similarly, the Arawak Indians of the Guinas tell of a wondrous tree which Sigu cut down. From its stump, water gushed out in such quantity as to cause a deluge. This tale is also found among the traditions of the Cuna, who tell of their mischief-maker, the Tapir, chopping down the Saltwater Tree from which salt water gushed out to form the oceans of the world. Thus, Velikovsky was correct when he surmised that the water of the Deluge would have been salty, but not, as he believed, because the salt, or at least its chlorine content, originated from Saturn. The water was salty because it came from the same oceanic water the vortex had sucked up in the first place.
_THE FLOOD FROM THE NORTH _AMY: Cardona moves on to the next demand of the Saturn Theory. If the Deluge was the result of the collapse of a colossal tornado situated in the north, then the mytho-historical record must also contain this information. And it does. Among others, three American Indian tribes, the Wintus, the Wichita, and the Pawnee, tell different legends of the flood, but in each case the deluge arrives from the north.
_CARDONA: But what of the hard sciences? Is the evidence there? Once again, I can only mention a few items here, but that an enormous flood had once swept down from the north to scour the land surface of North America has been suggested by J. Harlan Bretz. So, similarly, with C. Warren Hunt who speaks of evidence pointing to a flood from the north, excavating the land as it went before it emptied into Lake Bonneville. That Lake Bonneville itself also burst its bounds to cause a secondary flood has been documented by Robert Jarred and Harold Malde. What is of additional interest here is that the area once covered by this lake constitutes a vast salt deposit 100 square miles in extent. Similar signs of a vast scouring flood from the north have also been discovered in Siberia. It is, of course, theorized that this flood was due to the catastrophic melting of the northern ice cap at the end of the Ice Age. I, on the other hand, claim that, at this time, the northern ice cap had not yet been formed
_THE CHURNING OF THE OCEAN _One of the most dramatic images of the concept under discussion, and one which brings various of our motifs together in one place, is invoked by the Indic myth, from the Mahabharata and the Bhagavata Purana, concerning the production of amrita (or ambrosia). In brief the myth is this: In an effort to produce this divine nectar, both gods and demons used Mount Mandara as a churning stick. Winding the serpent Vasuki, also known as Ananta, around Mount Mandara, the gods (at one end) and the demons (at the other) grasped hold of Vasuki by the head and tail and, pulling him back and forth, were able to rotate Mount Mandara fast enough to whisk the sea into an ocean of milk from which amrita was produced. Now, to be sure, in most visual representations of the myth in question, Mount Mara is depicted not in the form of a mountain, but in that of a pillar, thus validating our conviction that the mythic World Mountain and the Axis Mundi were one and the same. In fact, it has long been known to Indologists that Mount Mandara stood for the axis of the world. The second thing we notice is hardly worth mentioning, and that is that this cosmic pillar did twist and churn. In Vasuki we recognize the bolus flow wrapped around the central vortex -- and here it is interesting to note that this entity was 'associated with the north,' thus locating the entire action in that locality. Finally, in the divinities' churning by pulling at the coiled Vasuki this way and that way, an echo is retained of the clockwise/counterclockwise rotation of the bolus flow as described by Jueneman. The elements contained in the myth of the churning of the ocean must not be thought of as uniquely Hindu in origin. In the Hindu myth, for instance, we see that Mandara was placed on the back of a tortoise. In Chinese mythology, it is Shang-ti who is depicted as standing on the celestial tortoise, while the serpent was said to have encircled the tortoise. Shang-ti's title was The Holy and Propitious Prince of the North Pole, who is usually represented as surrounded by a halo, both of which have special meaning to this study. It is also noteworthy that the symbolism of the tortoise and serpent goes at least as far back as the Han dynasty and was used as an emblem for the northern region of the world. More than that, as Lord of the Centre, Shang-ti was also revered as Huang-ti, who is perhaps better known as the Yellow Lord or Yellow Emperor. The Yellow Emperor has long been acknowledged to be an avatar of Saturn. And in the Japanese Kojiki we learn of the Heavenly Jeweled Spear which joined heaven to Earth and which acted as the churning stick responsible for the surfacing of the mythical -- one might as well say celestial -- island of Onogoro. ---
http://saturniancosmology.org/files/thoth/thotiv02.txt
_THE DEMANDS OF THE SATURNIAN CONFIGURATION THEORY: Part II _Excerpts from Dwardu Cardona's SIS Silver Jubilee Paper
_Summaries by Amy Acheson _AMY ACHESON: Part I of this paper recounted many of the unusual global attributes of the planet/god Saturn as portrayed in mytho-historical records from all over the world. Among these were Saturn's connection with an age of darkness, Saturn as supreme ruler of The Golden Age, Saturn's association with the beginning of time, Saturn as motionless, Saturn as the sun and Saturn as the sun of night. Part II concerned the postulate that the mytho-historical record places Saturn at the Earth's north pole. Cardona stresses that this information is not taken from a single story, but is expressed in hundreds of different ways in hundreds of different stories told over the world. Part III discussed the lithic bulge as a physical remnant of a recent, short-term force acting in the direction of Earth's north pole. Cardona presented mytho-historical evidence for a polar column at Earth's north pole and discussed the theoretical interpretations of several catastrophists. He expressed his personal preference of interpreting the polar column as a Rankine vortex. Part IV concludes this paper.
_CARDONA: THE ARCTIC CARNAGE _Meanwhile, does not this scenario, involving a tornado of planetary proportions, raise even more demands? . . . we are all acquainted with the destructive force that tornadoes exhibit. Should not Saturn's Rankine vortex, therefore, have left signs of an even greater destruction? This would have been especially so since this titanic maelstrom would have wrought its devastation while laterally standing still. A full exposition concerning the history of the axis mundi requires a volume [by itself]. . . . I point to . . . the Arctic muck, or frozen soil, which 'covers no less than one seventh of the land surface of earth,' all of which encircles the Arctic Ocean and lies within the Arctic Circle. Composed mainly of silt, sand, pebbles, and boulders, it is often accompanied by 'preserved, semi-decayed, or fully decayed vegetable and animal matter.' Its depth, in some places, 'has always caused even the most open-minded geologists to boggle.' The Russians, who have conducted prolonged studies on this muck, have in some places drilled down to more than 4000 feet without reaching rock bottom. Entire forests have been found buried in this area, including plum trees complete with their leaves and fruits, to say nothing of palm trees and huge exotic ferns. . . . animals [have been] found buried in this muck, the most noteworthy and famous of which, needless to say, is the mammoth. Let's face it, as George Gaylord Simpson was astute enough to realize, catastrophic events at the end of the Pleistocene were not only much more severe in North than in South America, they also affected a much larger proportion of animals.
_AMY: Cardona quotes various researchers defining the puzzle of how so much surface material could have been transported so far and piled so deep, with no apparent highland source or sufficient drainage.
_CARDONA: . . . But consider now the model being discussed and tested. Would not such a colossal vortex as posited above have scoured the land, year-in year-out, uprooting . . . trees . . . sizable chunks of rock, [and] boulders, which would have swirled around, grinding relentlessly against each other; breaking apart into ever smaller pieces, and smaller still until ground into sand and silt? And what is the area that is now filled with the Arctic Ocean if not an immense basin scoured out of the living rock?
_AMY: Cardona describes the Arctic muck of Siberia, Alaska and the Arctic islands, emphasizing the "vast remains of torn and broken mammoths" as "evidence of an atmospheric tempest of unprecedented dimensions."
_CARDONA: . . . Entire forests in an uprooted condition, bituminous trunks and fossilized charcoal, are everywhere intermingled with petrified ash, and veins of ice, and sand that has turned into sandstone. Among this colossal devastation are found the skeletons of mammoths, rhinoceroses, bison, and horses.
_AMY: Cardona compares his own thesis to other catastrophic theories, and especially to the non-polar theories, concluding that:
_CARDONA: . . . on this topic, I have the additional evidence of the mytho-historical record on my side-as the theory, in fact, continues to demand. What is this evidence? Does it, for instance, have anything to say re the catastrophic demise of the mammoths in the north? . . . Are elephants [mammoths] . . . mentioned in the record in connection with the polar vortex? In the Mahabharata we read that Mandara, that churning mountain, was 'crowded with tusked animals.' Moreover, when the churning began, . . . great trees spun off, were crushed against one another, lightning flashed forth, a fire blazed burning the elephants and other beasts, 'and all the various creatures there lost their life's breath.' The water pouring from above eventually dowsed the fire and flowed into the ocean. Thus we can see that we have here the entire spectrum of the devastation -- the whirlwind, the uprooted forest, the carnage, the fire, and the ensuing flood. Does this not tally with is found in Earth's northern regions?
_AMY: Cardona quotes mytho-historical records which caution that man cannot approach the vortex, this golden mountain, and he suspects that, at first, the animals didn't approach it, either.
_CARDONA: . . . But in the end, when the planets were displaced from their polar alignment, the funnel of the polar column was dislodged from its axial locus. Swirling now in corkscrew fashion, writhing like a serpent in travail, it went berserk and overstepped the bounds within which it had been contained for ages. Taken unawares, beasts fell prone to it. Man, apparently, was just that much smarter.
_THE ONSLAUGHT OF ICE _The penultimate question I wish to raise concerns the freezing of the . . . Arctic muck or permafrost. How did it all freeze? Where did the ice come from? . . . Is it traceable to the planet Saturn or Earth's primeval position in relation to Saturn? Can this demand also be met? This is an easy question to answer. The Greeks, for instance, had long associated . . . Saturn, with snow and hail. In fact, Saturn was renowned for being 'cold' and 'moist.' This seemingly-odd belief is not met only among the Greeks. Abu Ma'sar also had it stated that Saturn's nature is cold. . . . Alcabitius likewise recorded that 'he [Saturn] is bad, masculine, in daytime cold...' Epigenes of Byzantium classified Saturn as 'cold and windy.' Dorotheus also talks of 'cold Saturn.' Pliny wrote that 'Saturn is of a cold and frozen nature,' while Virgil spoke of 'Saturn's cold star.' We can thus be close to certain that when the Zunis of New Mexico refer to Awonawilona as having also been associated with cold, they were reiterating an archaic testimonial concerning the planet Saturn's affiliation with snow and ice. This is all the more made clear since Awonawilona means All-Father Father, an epithet which elsewhere was reserved for the Saturnian deity. Thus Kronos/Saturn was referred to as First Father, while Odin was known as All-father, the very same name of the Zuni Awonawilona. Mythologists have never been able to supply a convincing theory to explain why the planet Saturn and its deity should be associated with cold, snow, and ice. A telling clue comes from William of Conches who tells us that 'Saturn is called cold not because he is inherently cold himself but because he causes cold.'
_AMY: Cardona discusses this connection between Saturn and cold with respect to the Greek and Persian mytho-historical record, and then adds this story told by the Modoc Indians of southern Oregon and northern California:
_CARDONA: . . . the Chief of the Sky Spirits drilled a hole in the sky with a rotating stone through which he pushed snow and ice to form a mound which almost touched the sky. . . . the drilling of the sky with a rotating stone is too similar to the churning of the ocean by Mount Madara to escape our notice. Destruction of the world by cold is also met with among the marginal, forest, and southern Andean peoples. As Dolph Hooker informs us: ". . . we cannot find evidence that Earth's climate grew cold before the advent of an ice age; . . . on the contrary, climate grew colder only after the ice arrived and only to the extent that the ice itself refrigerated the Earth..." As Hooker also tells us: "Obviously the perma-frost accumulated from the bottom upward--not by freezing from the top downward.' What this means is that the detritus which forms the permafrost was frozen as it was being laid down. Am I here advocating that the ice which caused the so-called Ice Age came from the planet Saturn? Not really. What I am claiming is that the snow, ice, and sleet came from the axial vortex when it was severed for the last time because that is where a vast quantity of terrestrial moisture had been stored. But why, and how, then did it freeze to fall as snow, and ice, and sleet? As mentioned earlier, this all transpired during the break-up of the Saturnian configuration. Saturn, Venus, and Mars were thrown out of axial alignment. And so was Earth. Its axis shifted to take up the alignment it now possesses. Do we find this also contained in the mytho-historical record? Is this demand also met?
_EARTH'S SHIFTING AXIS _. . . The Muria, a tribe of the Bastar State in the Central Provinces of India . . . tell without ambiguity how Mahapurub turned the world topsy-turvy. . . . [the record] of the Hopi . . . is one of the best to illustrate the subject under discussion. As these Indians narrate: '. . . .the world, with no one to control it, teetered off balance, spun around crazily, then rolled over twice. Mountains plunged into seas with a great splash, seas and lakes sloshed over the land; and as the world spun through cold and lifeless space it froze into solid ice..' How would these Indians have known that the teetering of the world would cause seas and lakes to slosh over the land? How would they have known that a shifting of earth's axis could freeze it into solid ice? Actually, had I any faith in the accuracy of counting the annual layers of ice retrieved in cores drilled out of Greenland's ice fields, I would even be able to date the event for you.
_SATURN'S DEPARTURE _. . . I do not need to tell that Saturn is no longer in Earth's proximity. The theory then demands that somewhere in the record Saturn's removal from Earth's proximity should be encountered. And so we find as, for example, with the tale of Quetzelcoatl, whose 'paladins' died from the cold through the snow that fell upon them just before the god took off on his serpent raft to be seen no more. I mention this one myth because, as one can see, it ties in nicely with Saturn's removal at the very time when Earth, teetering off balance, was deluged with the onslaught of ice that ushered in the so-called Ice Age. . . . having said so much about the Egyptian Ra toward the beginning of this treatise, it should perhaps be fitting for me to end with him. Thus, in an Egyptian myth, Ra is made to say: 'Weary indeed are my limbs and they fail me. I shall go forth... Henceforth my dwelling place must be in the heavens. No longer will I reign upon the earth.' And: 'I have determined to cause myself to be uplifted into the sky, to join the blessed gods and to renounce rule of the world' . . . Then Ra raised himself from the back of the goddess Nut into the sky. So here I must ask: if Ra was truly the Sun, where had it been prior to its ascent into the sky? And if, as mythologists tell us, Nut was the goddess of the sky, what would it mean that the Sun rose from the back of the sky (i.e. Nut) into the sky? What does it mean that, before ascending into the sky, the Sun had reigned upon Earth? What does it mean that the Sun once ruled the world? Do we not, in fact, find it stated in an Orphic fragment that 'Saturn dwelt openly on earth among men'? So, also, Dionysus of Halicarnassus who declared that 'Kronos ruled on this very earth.' Besides, as it was written, when Ra removed himself into the sky, 'darkness came on' and 'Ra was borne through darkness.' Does this make sense if Ra was the Sun? Do we see darkness coming on when the Sun rises into the sky? The answer to this mystery is that the sun of night, which had ruled Earth due to its proximity, had now removed itself into the blackness of space. True night, as we now know it, finally descended upon the world. And the stars, which could not have been seen as long as the Saturnian sun of night was shining down on Earth, appeared in all their brilliance for the first time. Do we find this stated in the mytho-historical record? Can this last demand be met? As it is written: '[When Ra left Earth he] went on his way through the realms which are above, and these he divided and set in order. He spake creating words, and called into existence the field of Aalu, and there he caused to assemble a multitude of beings which are beheld in heaven, even the stars...' ---
http://saturniancosmology.org/files/thoth/thotiv03.txt
_CONJUNCTION THEMES _By Dave Talbott _More than one post recently has raised questions about the ancient planetary "conjunction" of Saturn's epoch. Though this subject deserves a more visual treatment than is possible in an email forum, I will register a few observations. I noticed on the videotape of the SIS conference last fall that Professor Lynn Rose made a memorable statement to the effect that one can search through world mythology without confronting the "god-kabob", his phrase for the claimed collinear system. I, on the other hand, do not hesitate to claim that world mythology is nothing else than the story of the "Great Conjunction" of Saturn's epoch and what happened to it. Of hundreds of recurring mythical and symbolic motifs we have identified, not one can be isolated from the conjunction principle. I found Lynn's statement particularly curious since, as one of the more dedicated Velikovskians, he would be among the first to agree that ancient peoples worshiped the planets as the great gods of former times. If so, on what ground could he deny that the images of Venus in the center of the ancient sun god (Saturn), which Ev presented at the very conference in question, imply a principle of "conjunction"? Or how could he deny that the far-famed liaison or "marriage" of the warrior Mars and the Venus-goddess similarly implies a planetary "conjunction"? Grant the identity of god and planet; and you cannot escape the ancient memory of planets juxtaposed in the sky close to the earth. No doubt my suggestion that EVERY recurring theme involves a joining of planets will appear excessive. But the statement is literally true and would be easily challenged if false. Examine any theme in its earliest contexts and you will come face-to-face with the conjunction principle. An example: One might wish to suggest that the myth of the world mountain, a recent subject of discussion, does not really require a conjunction principle, just a cosmic hill and a god on the mountaintop. But there is no world mountain if you take away conjunction. As we have documented, the mountain is the pillar-form of Mars, the warrior-hero, whose first form the Egyptians called Shu (a god identified as "the Primeval Hill") and the Sumerians knew as Enlil (called "Great Mountain"). The reference is to the COSMIC mountain, presenting the appearance of a great pillar supporting the central sun, who is Saturn. It is this pillar-god who, in Atlas fashion, "raises up heaven", and here too the reference is to the huge sphere of Saturn ("all-containing heaven") resting visually above the cosmic column. Nor can the planet Venus be removed from the theme of the world mountain, for the goddess is the celebrated "consort" of the mountain; the "spouse upon the mountain"; the feminine enclosure upon the summit of a masculine column. This radiant "womb" of the goddess signifies the temple, city, or kingdom of heaven, always linked to the peak of the world mountain. Thus the great column is the Mount of Assembly, or Mount of Congregation, the place where the planetary gods dwell, as we see them gathered on Zion (=Tsaphon) and Olympus; conjunction and the gathering of the gods mean the same thing in ancient symbolism. So too, we have the Martian mountain as the single "leg" or lower limbs of the ancient sun; the column as a stream of aether or "air" brought by the warrior-hero to vivify the sun god; or the luminous path of the hero-messenger traveling between worlds. Apart from the conjunction principle, therefore, virtually nothing would be left of the world mountain! Even the lost paradise on the mountaintop would dissolve before us, since (as we've noted on prior occasions) "Paradise" means nothing else than "the Great Conjunction of the Golden Age". But again, one need only look closely to see that ALL mythical themes involve conjunction--Saturn as primeval Unity (he holds within himself the undifferentiated male and female powers); the goddess as the spouse and "indwelling glory" of Saturn; goddess as womb of the hero's birth; hero on the "lap" or "throne" of the goddess; goddess as eye of Saturn and hero as pupil of the eye; goddess as feminine "heart" of Saturn and hero as masculine "heart of the heart"; goddess as animating "soul" of Saturn and hero born from this soul; goddess as plant of life and hero born from the shining blossom; goddess as the hero's crown and hero "born from the crown"; goddess as vase, and hero "born from the jar"; goddess as radiate shield protecting the hero; goddess as omphalos or navel, and hero as "navel-born" god or "husband" of the navel; goddess as nave or hub of the "sun"-wheel, and hero as axle. Once the conjunction principle is fully appreciated, it becomes easy to see that the same principle will account for Jupiter's presence at the summit of the world axis following the displacement of Saturn. Jupiter was there all along, hidden behind Saturn. This will also explain why, in later astrology, a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn was called a "Great Conjunction", and with it the seers anticipated the return of the Golden Age. But remember that the Golden Age did not stand alone in human memory. Two seemingly contradictory tendencies pervaded all of the ancient civilizations: the first was the yearning for a return of paradise; the second was the fear of another Doomsday. The two tendencies are interwoven, for the Doomsday catastrophe means nothing else than the violent end of the Golden Age. Thus, thousands of years after these events, you still see the two motives entwined around the conjunction principle. Let the visible planets gather in the sky and what do the astrologers anticipate? "The Golden Age returns!" and, "Beware, for Doomsday approaches!" It needs to be emphasized that the Saturn model offers a direct correlation between the mythical themes and the primary pictographic and symbolic themes. Just as ALL mythical themes refer back to conjunction, so do the pictographs. Take, for example, the well-known "sun"-signs we have illustrated in the notebook, "Symbols of an Alien Sky". Supposedly, these are just unusual ways of drawing our Sun! But by tracing these images back to the earliest Mesopotamian and Egyptian prototypes it can be seen that these are pictures of THREE ORBS IN CONJUNCTION. The identities of the NAMED planets in the Babylonian system is equally clear, as is the remarkable fact that the artists got the relative sizes correct. (Of this there can be no dispute, whatever you may wish to make of the situation.) These pictures, therefore, offer crucial information on the nature of the planetary conjunction to which the myths refer. In modern times when two or more planets merely enter the same zodiacal sign it is called a "conjunction". That allows a full 30 degrees of leeway--60 times the diameter of the Moon. In fact, three planets literally superimposed upon each other have NEVER been seen since the birth of empirical astronomy. And yet that is, beyond question, the ancient idea displayed pictographically and implied by countless ritual, symbolic and mythical traditions. It is also the condition inherent in the Saturn model (AND it is the principle implied by collinear equilibrium). The planets were aligned such that, in the stable phase, a single line would run through the center of each planet. In this regard, here is an interesting quote concerning the third century Babylonian priest-astronomer Berossus and the relationship of planets to world-ending catastrophe. Though the quote is weakened by the constellational associations, which have no part in the earlier imagery, the persistence of ancient memory is really quite remarkable. "Berossus, interpreter of Belus, affirms that the whole issue is brought about by the course of the planets. So positive is he on the point that he assigns a definite date both for the conflagration and the deluge. All that the earth inherits will, he assures us, be consigned to flame when the planets which now move in different orbits, all assemble in Cancer, so arranged in one row that a straight line may pass through their spheres. When the same gathering takes place in Capricorn, then we are in danger of the deluge." In this single paragraph we see a series of beliefs expressed, all of them ludicrous by modern standards. 1) The planets once moved on different courses than they do now. 2) The great catastrophes recalled by ancient cultures related directly to the movements of planets. 3) Despite their flickering, seemingly formless appearance now, the planets are spheres. [As we've noted before: planets do not look like spheres today; modern theory cannot account for this ancient knowledge] 4) In a former time, the planets stood in conjunction. 5) An overwhelming catastrophe followed this conjunction. 6) Unlike the "conjunctions" familiar to astrologers in later times, the archetypal conjunction (the one affecting the fate of the world) was so perfect as to allow a single line to pass through the planetary spheres. I trust all readers will recognize that memories such as these, impossible to explain within any conventional framework, need no further explanation under the Saturn model.
_TED BOND asks: How could the Great Conjunction have "caused" or "brought about" the destruction of Saturn, . . . given that it was stable for a considerable period of time?
_DAVE TALBOTT: In a nutshell, much of the later anxiety involves nothing else than the POST HOC ERGO PROPTER HOC FALLACY: .after it, therefore on account of it. Or, in terms closer to the language of ancient beliefs: As above so below; as before so again. What followed the ancient condition will be repeated whenever that condition is observed in the sky. There really is no LENGTH associated with the Golden Age tradition, and the planetary conjunction was so fundamental to the images of Doomsday as to make it impossible for ancient astronomers to observe planets approaching each other without fearing the worst. For example, it is known that in the ancient world, when planets came into "conjunction", astronomers would begin to look for the Doomsday comet. This fascinating fear continued into the Middle Ages. All collective fears and aspirations in ancient times point to a prior condition (but never to anything occurring in our familiar world, of course). The explanation for cometary fear in relation to planetary conjunction is simply that the remembered "Doomsday comet" was born from the remembered "Great Conjunction". That the Great Conjunction also defined the Golden Age will explain why BOTH a pervasive fear and a yearning for a return to Paradise are so fully entwined with the conjunction principles in later astrology. ---
http://saturniancosmology.org/files/thoth/thotiv04.txt
_THE NATURAL REFERENCES OF MYTH _By Dave Talbott _(Excerpted from the forthcoming book, WHEN SATURN WAS KING)
_The extent to which world mythology reflects natural occurrences is an issue on which the specialists find little agreement. Despite the many competing interpretations by the different schools, they share a common--usually unspoken--assumption: they assume that no fundamental changes have occurred in the celestial order. Wherever possible they refer the objects of ancient art and myth to objects and events in our familiar world behaving exactly as they do today. The Sun, the Moon, comets, meteors, the pole star, the Great Bear or other constellations, or more terrestrial phenomena such as thunder and lightning, earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanoes, or local mountains, rivers, and common animal forms. If the great mythical dramas do indeed reflect natural events, then we face an inescapable paradox. Despite many years of cross-cultural research, the authors of this book have never found a general mythical theme that could find an explanation in our natural world. There is indeed a "sun" in the ancient sky, but when the imagery is traced to its earliest forms, it neither looks nor behaves like the sun in our sky. There is a crescent "moon", but its character and movement contradict everything about our moon today. While the planet Venus was venerated by all ancient cultures, the earliest memories of Venus simply defy modern observations of the planet. And as for other celebrated forms, one seeks in vain for any meaningful reference at all. Where is the famous fountain of the sun? Where is the ship of heaven? Where is the world mountain, the temple of the sun, or the world tree that spread its branches among the stars? It is precisely such images which have fostered the modern view equating myth with fiction. The storytellers understood nothing about the world in which they lived, we are told. The possibility that myth might reflect events no longer occurring simply does not enter the minds of modern scholars. Of course the skeptic will remind us that all sorts of strange and exotic ideas have been proposed on the basis of myth. He will suggest that you could argue for anything under the sun if all you have to do is select a few myths for support. And who could dispute this point? Bookshelves today are filled with adventurous hypotheses, based in large part on mutually contradictory uses of mythical fragments. But the answer here is to stop the selective use of myth altogether, to apply ground rules, which do not permit the investigator to ignore any commonly held beliefs. In the new approach we shall propose, the inquiry rests from start to finish on globally-recurring themes of myth, deeply-rooted ideas that have survived thousands of years of cultural evolution and tribal mixing. Additionally, this approach will place the highest emphasis on the oldest sources, those originating closest in time to the experiences behind the myths, with the least opportunity for distortion.
_EVENT AND INTERPRETATION _The first step toward understanding the myth-making epoch is to distinguish between the unusual and the imaginative. The events are unusual, while the interpretations are imaginative. We are not asking anyone to believe that a shining temple or city of living "gods" once stood in the center of the sky. We will not claim that a great hero of flesh and blood arose to rid the world of chaos-monsters; or that this very same hero once consorted with a "mother goddess". We WILL ask the reader to consider whether these unexplained and global themes may have roots in uncommon natural events. In its skepticism about such global themes the modern world forgot the elementary distinction between event and mythical interpretation, then tossed out the entire body of evidence. The astonishing fact is that all of the archetypes speak for celestial forms that are not present in our sky, and for events that do not occur in nature today. The resulting situation is untenable. Did early races, for reasons we cannot fathom, simply repudiate all natural experience, in order to celebrate things never seen? Or did the natural world in which the myths arose present a range of sights and sounds unlike anything known in modern times?
_THE ANCIENT STORYTELLER _It's impossible to immerse oneself in the mythical world without realizing that the ancient storyteller himself is certain of the reported events' occurrence, despite the obvious tendency to project imaginative interpretations onto events. A "story" entails both an event and an interpretation. No living dragon ever flew about in the sky. But is it possible that something viewed imaginatively as a "dragon" "did" appear in the sky? To allow this possibility is to open the door to systematic investigation from a radically new vantage point. The urge of ancient peoples to record and to repeat their stories in words reflected the same fundamental impulse we see in all other forms of reenactment and alignment in ancient ritual, art, and architecture. Recitation of the story momentarily transported both the storyteller and the listener backwards to the mythical epoch, which was experienced as more compelling, more "true" than anything that came later. That is why, among all early civilizations, as noted by Mircea Eliade and others, the prodigious events to which the myths refer provided the models for all collective activity-- "One fact strikes us immediately: in such societies the myth is thought to express the absolute truth, because it narrates a sacred history; that is, a transhuman experience revelation which took place at the dawn of the Great Time, in the holy time of the beginnings (in illo tempore). Being real and sacred, the myth becomes exemplary, and consequently repeatable, for it serves as a model, and by the same token as a justification, for all human actions. In other words, a myth is a true history of what came to pass at the beginning of Time, and one which provides the pattern for human behavior... Clearly, what we are dealing with here is a complete reversal of values; whilst current language confuses the myth with 'fables', a man of the traditional societies sees it as the only valid revelation of reality." It needs to be understood as well that the globally-recurring themes appear to be as old as human writing. All of the common signs and symbols we shall review in these volumes appear to precede the full flowering of civilization. This rarely acknowledged fact, which could be easily disproved if incorrect, is of great significance. If our early ancestors were habituated to inventing experience, we should expect an endless stream of new mythical content--new forms and personalities arising as if from nowhere. This absence of invention in historical times forces us to ask how the original "creativity" of myth arose: what unknown ancient experience could have produced the massive story content of myth, including hundreds of underlying themes that have lasted for thousands of years?
_UNIVERSAL THEMES OF MYTH _By following the comparative approach, and by concentrating on the universal themes of myth, a researcher is enabled to focus on the substratum. Nothing will boost the researcher's confidence more than discovering that the roots of myth are not only identifiable, but coherent, each identifiable theme revealing an explicit connection to the same taproot, while revealing verifiable links to the other themes as well. To illustrate this point let us consider just a few human memories whose deep connections to each other are beyond dispute. Though each of the themes listed here will require extensive review and analysis, our immediate interest is in a possibility generally ignored in our time--the possibility of a fully integrated and consistent substructure.
_AGE OF GODS AND WONDERS _It is an interesting fact that every culture remembered a lost "age of the gods", a wondrous epoch clearly distinguished from all that came later. The gods were visibly present, and they radiated power and light--"the majestic race of the immortals", in the account of the Greek poet Hesiod, or "the age of the primeval gods" celebrated by the Egyptians. The gods ruled for a time, then faded from view, took flight, or wandered off. And everywhere will be found the compulsion to commemorate the critical junctures in the biographies of the gods, to carry forward the stories in pictures and words, to fashion replicas of the gods in clay and stone, and to reenact these events at all levels of collective activity. One of the great deceptions in conventional approaches to mythology is the pretense that this is all comprehensible in terms of primitive ignorance and superstition. The issue is far more fundamental than that. What demands explanation is the vividness, the consistency of the images, and the extraordinary passion and devotion with which ancient races sought to re-connect with the gods. Nothing meant more to the ancient world than to recover something distinctly remembered, but lost. There is structure to the stories. Even a superficial review of the world's mythical traditions will show that the different personalities tend to fall into certain categories. Universal sovereign, mother goddess, ancestral warrior, chaos monster: these personalities (as we will illustrate at length) repeatedly expressed the same relationships to each other. Moreover, the age of the gods not only has a familiar ending (the gods go away) it has a common beginning as well:
_GOLDEN AGE _Certain general themes occur on every habitable continent. One is the deeply entrenched myth of a lost Golden Age, a period of natural abundance and cosmic harmony, when humanity lived under the beneficent rule of visible powers in the heavens. In fact, the Golden Age was universally invoked as the opening chapter in the age of the gods, and that is just one of numerous indications of unexplained and globally-repeated structure. The Hindus called it the Krita Yuga or perfect age; the Chinese the Age of Perfect Virtue, the Scandinavians the Peace of Frodhi. For the Egyptians this was the Tep Zepi or "First Time", the beneficent age of Re. The Sumerians knew it as the rule of the sovereign An, "the Days of Abundance"; Greek tradition similarly recalled the prosperous epoch of the god Kronos, when the whole world enjoyed peace and plenty. The Romans celebrated this as the Golden Age of Saturn. In the general tradition, the Golden Age means a timeless epoch before the fall, or before the arrival of discord and war, before the linkage of heaven and earth was broken. Many traditions recall the absence of seasons or of any time-keeping references, claiming that the land produced abundantly without any need for human labor. Skeptics have suggested that these are simply exaggerated local memories of "the good old days". But that claim is answered by comparative study. The theme of the Golden Age cannot be separated from other themes for which such "explanations" are entirely inadequate
_KING OF THE WORLD _Why, for example, did all of the early cultures connect the Golden Age with the rule of a figure remembered as the Universal Monarch--a prototype of kings ruling in the sky before any king ruled on earth? This is hardly a frivolous connection. The Egyptian Atum-Re, the central luminary of the sky, was the founder of the idyllic age, to which every later king or pharaoh traced his lineage. It was the Sumerian An, the Akkadian Anu, who inaugurated the "years of abundance", and from whom the very institution of kingship descended. Similarly, the Hindu Yama, Persian Yima, Norse Frodhi, Chinese Huang-ti, and Mexican Quetzalcoatl are all distinguished as founding kings, the first in a line of kings, and models of the good king. What defined the ideal was the harmonious existence and natural abundance, which marked the god's rule. Hence, human memories of the Golden Age and of the exemplary king are inextricably entwined, implying a substructure we cannot afford to ignore.
_DOOMSDAY _The fear of doomsday, of the orderly world going out of control, ranks perhaps as the deepest of human fears. From the first glimmerings of civilization, every ancient nation kept alive its own tale of universal catastrophe, and if anything deserves to be called a collective memory it is this idea. But how are we to understand it? Various accounts describe the world-ending disaster so differently as to leave mythologists groping for a consensus. In one account a great deluge submerges the race; in another a fiery conflagration, while many myths say a celestial dragon's assault upon the world brought universal darkness. Such divergent story elements make it all too easy to overlook an overarching principle revealed by comparative analysis. The "mother of all catastrophes"--the event which ancient races feared above all else--was that which brought the Golden Age to its violent conclusion. Whether it is the ancestral rule of Re, or the universal kingship of An, or the Golden Age of Kronos (not to mention the numerous variations), the story culminates in earth-shaking catastrophe. But only rarely do psychologists or historians ask whether this pervasive fear might have roots in natural experience as well--a time when the world "did" slip out of control, the stars "did" fall from the sky, and the rain of fire and brimstone "did" overwhelm the world. The Doomsday theme is not an isolated memory, but an integral component in a more complete and unified memory. Indeed, comparative analysis reveals numerous additional points of agreement, including the fate of the Universal Monarch himself--
_DYING OR DISPLACED GOD _The Buddhists tell of the primeval king, during whose prosperous reign a vast wheel turned in the sky, remaining in one spot. This ancient and benevolent ruler was himself "the wheel turning king". But eventually the wheel fell from its established place, the king died, and this golden age was lost. The Zoroastrians spoke of the great cosmic wheel called the Spihr, symbol of the god Zurvan, "Lord of the Long Dominion." It too stood in one place, ever turning. And it was the fall or destruction of this cosmic wheel, which terminated the god's prosperous rule. In whatever terms the local accounts might present the Doomsday story, the consistent result is the death, flight, or displacement of the original sovereign power. The Egyptian Re grows weary and departs the human realm. The Sumerian An flees the scene as chaos overtakes the world. The Greek Kronos is forced from his throne, ending the Golden Age and plunging the world into darkness and discord. For the Romans the fabled Golden age of Saturn ended when, in the words of poet Ovid, "Old Saturn fell to death's dark country." In such fashion did the ancient Paradise give way to cosmic turmoil. And here, too, one aspect of the story invariably merges with another:
_WARS OF THE GODS _As a mythical archetype, the Doomsday catastrophe is not merely a terrestrial disturbance, it is the story of celestial upheaval. The gods themselves battle in the sky so violently as to rearrange the heavens. Their weapons include thunderbolts and stone, flaming "arrows", fire-breathing dragons, and all-consuming wind and flood. The tale is most familiar to us, perhaps, as the famous clash of the Titans, recounted by Hesiod and other Greek poets. This was the catastrophic aftermath of the Golden Age of Kronos, when "wide heaven was shaken and groaned, and high Olympos reeled from its foundation under the charge of the undying gods... So, then, they launched their grievous shafts upon one another, and the cry of both armies as they shouted reached to starry heaven; and they met together with a great battle-cry. Then Zeus ... showed forth all his strength. From Heaven and from Olympos, he came forthwith, hurling his lightning; and the bolts flew thick and fast from his strong hand together with thunder and lightning, whirling an awesome flame". Such images are so common and occur on such a grand scale that historians rarely give them a second look. What do these "exaggerated" tales have to do with real history? In the Norse cataclysm of Ragnarok, the wars of the gods bring an idyllic age to an end, and this is surely one of the keys to understanding the archetype. The wars of the gods occur during, or as, the "break" that separates the Golden Age from the subsequent epoch. Witness, for example, the celestial conflagration of Aztec thought, the catastrophic interlude between world ages. So too in Hindu myth - the universe dissolves in flames, to be regenerated under a new world age. To the same category belong the great conflagrations separating the original rule of the Egyptian Re from the epoch that followed. Typically, scholars will "explain" the cosmic catastrophe theme through more familiar or ordinary events, an eclipse of the Sun or Moon, a local hurricane, earthquake, or volcano. Such "explanations" can only discourage close examination of the stories, with the result that vital, repeated elements are missed. But it is the full complex of themes that must be explained.
_A final example: _DRAGON OF DARKNESS _Nothing could be further removed from our familiar experience than a flying serpent or dragon. And yet it was not long ago that every race on earth remembered the fire-breathing dragon moving among the stars, disturbing the motions of the planets, and threatening to destroy the world. Such was the character of the Babylonian dragon Tiamat, whose attack caused even the gods themselves to flee. The Egyptian counterpart was the raging Uraeus serpent; or Apep, the dragon of darkness. For the Greeks, it was the Python serpent whom Apollo defeated in an earth-shaking encounter, or the great dragon Typhon, under whose attack the heavens reeled. How did it happen that so many diverse cultures recalled--in such vivid and similar terms--a biologically impossible monster? The cosmic serpent or dragon cries out for an explanation, and an explanation must be possible, even if we have missed it. From one land to another such monsters were celebrated as visible forms in the sky. If there is an inherent, irrational tendency of the primitive mind to conjure dragon-like beasts out of nothing, then one must wonder how this irrationality produced such surprising parallels from one land to another--fiery serpents, longhaired or bearded serpents, feathered serpents. The globally-repeated attributes are both impossible and absurd, and nothing in familiar human experience can even begin to account for them. The celestial serpent-dragon takes the form of a great storm or whirlwind, breathes fire and smoke, battles against the gods, and ushers in a period of universal darkness. But these are only a few of the pervasive themes. When, for example, did this chaos monster appear in the sky? It appeared specifically during the break between world ages--following the death or departure of the Universal Monarch, when the Golden Age collapsed--and prior to the renewal of the world. Appearance of the Babylonian Tiamat is synonymous with the flight of the original sovereign An. The Uraeus serpent rages in the sky as a symbol of Re's loss of power. The dethroning of Kronos, founder of the Golden Age, immediately precedes the attack of Typhon.
_CONNECTIONS _With this brief listing of connected memories, we wish to drive home the principles of substructure and integrity. In considering the serpent-dragon, for example, we do not just find an improbable monster, but a monster figuring in a particular story in a particular way, with clearly defined relationships to other personalities. It is simply not useful to examine a mythical theme as if that theme stands on its own. What needs to be explained is the full complex of ideas embedded within a theme, and that will invariably involve repeated and unexplained connections to a larger story. ---
http://saturniancosmology.org/files/thoth/thotiv05.txt
_WORLD MOUNTAIN _By Dave Talbott _When it comes to the model of the "polar configuration" no complete accord should be expected, though the points of agreement between those researching the Saturn theory far outweigh any areas of disagreement. This is particularly true in the case of the mythical "world mountain," about which volumes could be written, while only the Saturn model will account for many and varied themes.
_Dwardu Cardona writes (in a recent issue of THOTH): This tapering appendage has been explained in various ways. Rose compared it to the so-called flux tube which stretches between Jupiter and its satellite, Io. In his own Martian, as opposed to a Saturnian, model, Jueneman sees the axis as a colossal Rankine vortex. David Talbott, on the other hand, had originally explained the polar column as a stream of debris stretching between Saturn and Earth, but later amended this to a stream of debris attracted from Mars toward Earth Additionally, Wallace Thornhill believes he has recognized this ethereal pillar as a sustained plasma discharge in the form of Birkeland current.
_Dave Talbott responds: While acknowledging the advantages of Thornhill's "Birkeland current" explanation of the polar column, Dwardu opts for the vortex or "tornado"-like aspects of the column, as emphasized by Fred Jueneman.
_Amy summarizes: Cardona then expresses his opinion that, although Thornhill's Birkeland currents fit most of the criteria of the polar column, they would not be able to suck material up from the earth, which he believes the myths describe. Cardona prefers Fred Jueneman's proposed Rankine vortex, an interplanetary tornado, as an explanation for the axis mundi.
_Talbott: This, I would say, puts too much emphasis on "disagreement" and a little too much emphasis on the "tornado" aspect of the polar column. In fact, when I first conveyed the idea of the "world mountain" or "world pillar" to Fred Jueneman in the fall of 1972, I specifically used the phrase "tornado-like" to describe the appearance of the column in its "churning", or "writhing" phase. So I do not see later discussion of this tornado-aspect as an alternative "explanation" for the column. Rather, it needs to be distinguished from the column in its more stable or undisturbed aspect. Many images of the cosmic pillar suggest nothing of the violent celestial whirlwind, whirlpool, tornado, or ascending, spiraling serpent you see in connection with a disturbance of the system, when the World Mountain became a "churning" stake, pole, or spear stretching along the axis. I would not want to suggest that the tornado-aspect of the column is an "alternative" to Wal Thornhill's explanation either. I see the column as one of the more striking points of convergence between the historical reconstruction and the plasma physics which Wal has illuminated for us. Ancient descriptions should not be taken as explanations of physical principles. The more violent phases certainly did present the APPEARANCE of a "tornado" overtaking the land of the gods. But the dynamics of a terrestrial tornado do not represent the situation particularly well when you have visible gases, ice, dust, or other material stretching BETWEEN PLANETS. A vortex cannot exist in isolation from the movement of a surrounding medium, while the polar column appears as a discrete, well-focused stream or jet of material retaining a consistent structure over a considerable distance. This itself is most remarkable and should encourage us to look for any analogies either in the laboratory or in other regions of the universe, even if conventional dogma on the behavior of planets offers no encouragement whatsoever. What happened in ancient times WILL find (IS finding) an explanation, as open-minded theorists explore the emerging fields of evidence. In fact, thanks to Wal's summaries of plasma dynamics on the one hand, and recent revelations from the Hubble and Chandra telescopes on the other, we now have possible analogies for the polar column at all levels of observation. Contrast that with the situation only a few years ago. A focusing of energy to transport material over great distances and along a single path has never had any place in conventional theory. What, in Newtonian perspectives, would allow a jet to retain its structure across a vacuum, spanning distances (in the Saturn model) counted in tens of thousands of miles? Electrical phenomena are another matter, however. We know that electromagnetic frequencies ARE focused in a laser beam. We know that plasma focus devices DO produce well-defined jets and a flow of electric current on a linear path. Considering the great volume of historical evidence suggesting highly visible electrical phenomena in the Saturnian configuration, the electrical model is really the hands-down winner, I would say. The fact that a plasma environment will produce spiraling, vortex-like phenomena through which currents flow is also highly relevant to the dynamics of the polar column. Moreover, it can hardly be insignificant that astronomers have recently discovered POLAR or AXIAL jets on a mind-boggling scale: from "jetted stars" to massive galaxies--jets from billions of miles to light-years in length, where the coherent linear structure of the jets defies everything previously believed. The only theorists who anticipated such jets were those of the electrical schools. By comparison, the much, much smaller-scale axial jets in the Saturn model, where the charged bodies are planets, seem very tame indeed. And when you are considering the Saturn version, please do not forget that, at the time I first proposed these axial, interplanetary streams, I had no knowledge of laboratory-based plasma analogies, and the distant stellar and galactic analogies were unknown to science. ---
http://saturniancosmology.org/files/thoth/thotiv06.txt
_PATTERNS OF HUMAN MEMORY _By Michel Tavir, Dave Talbott
_Michel Tavir wrote: Human remembrance, forgetfulness and the good old days: every single person living in coastal Western Europe "knows" that the weather has changed in the past few decades. Every single person "knows" that when they were children, there was always snow at Christmas. Well, sort of. Meteorological records tell us another story: two white Xmas's in the past 50 years or so. Memory and the use humans make of it are very fascinating things indeed.
_Dave Talbott Replied: Gotta disagree with you here concerning the meaning of the "exemplary" epoch, since I believe you are referring to my comments on the Golden Age. Comparative analysis will show that the memory of the Golden Age is much more than a recollection of "the good old days". It is a global idea with very specific content: passage from timelessness to time; rule of the universal sovereign as first king "on earth", a superior, motionless sun in the sky; identification of this "sun" with the first king; paradisal garden divided by four rivers of life; identity of the garden with the turning "wheel" of the sun; identification of the "hub" or "nave" of the wheel with the mother goddess; identification of the "axle" of the wheel with the unborn warrior-hero; placement of a crescent on this same wheel; location of paradise on the summit of a mountain reaching to the center of the sky; identity of the original sovereign with Saturn; identification of the goddess with Venus; identification of the warrior-hero with Mars; violent collapse of the paradisal condition; exile or displacement of the original sovereign; subsequent wars of the gods; subsequent regeneration of the world--to name only the most elementary components of the idea. All of this relates to the matter of memory "and the use humans make of it", which I do see as the key, though not quite in the sense I think you are implying :-). When investigating events witnessed around the world, the patterns of human memory enable us to draw conclusions of a far more specific and dependable sort than could be obtained through physical evidence or physical theory in the absence of human testimony. Initially, almost no one will realize this. But to discover that this is indeed true, it is only necessary to follow the appropriate ground rules. The ground rules are designed to expose the substratum of memory beneath all of the regional fragments, enabling one to speak for the substratum with the highest level of confidence. Quite frankly, this has been the most difficult point for a few of our readers to grasp, and we continue to hear references to "Saturnist's subjective interpretation of myth" and the like (c.f., Lynn Rose's and Peter James' comments at the recent SIS conference). But the purpose of pattern identification is to REMOVE all subjective interpretation, to assure that the reconstruction rests on cross-cultural points of agreement, where the patterns cannot be disputed. For example, no one can dispute that ancient words translated as "the sun" were words for Saturn in ancient astronomies. That's all we need to know, and the fact that one critic or another can guess at an alternative "explanation" to the one offered by the Saturn model is utterly irrelevant to the validity or non-validity of the Saturn model. All anomalies have prompted proposed "explanations" and that includes hundreds of recurring themes. If we had to separate out every theme and base a defense of the Saturn model on our ability to prove our interpretation WITH RESPECT TO THAT THEME ALONE, we would indeed be in trouble! The only issue logically is the predictive power of the Saturn model in relation to the substructure as a whole. Taken as a whole, the global patterns do not just suggest certain external events, they REQUIRE them. To see that this is so, however, one must consider the patterns with sufficient specificity and completeness, eliminating all selective perception. Considered in isolation from the larger patterns, all we can expect is a madhouse of guesses and interpretations. But when it comes to the full substratum, no fundamentally false "explanation" could possibly work. This truth, however, will be recognized only AFTER enough of the substratum has become sufficiently clear to the researcher to eliminate any doubt concerning the underlying coherence of the patterns Once one is willing to consider ALL verifiable patterns, it will become clear that they are all connected to each other, that they are entirely consistent with each other, and that, from top to bottom, they explicitly and flagrantly contradict all patterns in our sky today. Had the planetary forms not appeared in the ancient sky, such detailed and coherent patterns simply could not be there. [The comment which follows is not directed at Michel, who has shown a sincere interest in these issues] When I think about, I'd have to say that we Saturnists have been remarkably tolerant of the more extreme abuses of logic and common sense by certain critics :-) At the SIS conference, AFTER Ev had presented numerous illustrations of global imagery showing Venus smack in the center of the ancient and universal "sun" pictograph, Peter James stood up and drew a picture of a circle with rays, telling the audience that children naturally draw the Sun that way, end of mystery. Did he not HEAR Ev's presentation? :-) Did he not SEE the pictures Ev showed? :-) Did he not wonder why Venus was drawn as a SPHERE in the center of the depicted "sun"? Or why the streamers of Venus were shown reaching across the entire face of the larger body? Did he not wonder why the images are identical to ancient pictures of "Saturn's wheel"? Or wonder if there is any connection between such images and the ancient language of Saturn as "sun"? Peter James is a scholar commanding great respect. But after viewing his SIS comments, I am prompted to ask: If a critic will not even engage the first scratches on the surface in our presentation of acknowledged patterns, are we not permitted to doubt the sincerity of his interest?
_Michel wrote: Sacrifice is a fairly vast notion. I wonder whether sacrifice of animals (found in its "purest" form in clan initiation rituals) and human sacrifice (found in its uttermost form in holy wars - but aren't all wars "holy"?) can be equated. Some hints as to the mythical significance of the former (initiation consisting in the intake of the clan's animal's spirit by sacrificing it) might be found, if I remember well, in Carlos Castaneda's later books.
_Dave replied: Sacrifice does indeed take many different ritual forms, and these collective practices certainly do reflect memories of planetary upheaval. But they also draw our attention to a deeper human tendency, and this tendency, I believe, must be confronted as a pre-condition to any healing deserving of the name. If we peel away the respective ritual forms of sacrifice, we will eventually confront a root idea more fundamental than any collective practice. By the "sacrifice principle" I mean the idea that something (be it yours or mine, a thing, a possession, or life itself) must be given up in order for ME to gain an advantage. How did this idea arise? There is nothing inherent in planetary catastrophe to make ritual sacrifice "logical", unless an underlying premise had already been accepted. (I do realize that more needs to be said to make the point clear.)
_Michel: "The principle of sacrifice involves an obstruction of human awareness, a barrier to the innate sense of the unity of life". this does not seem - repeat seem - to apply to the cannibalistic sacrifice of war prisoners among pre-Portuguese Brazilian Indians - where prisoners received the best and most honourable treatment before they were sacrificed and eaten (hearts first). I would associate this kind of sacrifice with the type of animal sacrifice mentioned above, whereas animal sacrifice in the ancient religions of the Mediterranean (including Judaism) resembles Amerindian human sacrifices, for instance.
_[Dave?:] But keep in mind that the "honorable treatment" you refer to above cannot be separated from the honor being paid to the sacrifice principle itself. The distinctions you make between ritual practices are surely valid, but all forms of sacrifice do express an underlying, uniquely human conflict, or a contradiction in human motivation and perception, if you will. Rather than address the point here, which would unfairly imply that I'm directing the comments toward something you have said, Michel I will post some further notes on the sacrifice principle separately.
_Michel: Not sure I can formulate where the line should be drawn, if a line has to be drawn, that is. Cruelty, maybe? The birth and the success of Christianity reflecting times when people felt pretty sure that the planetary gods had stopped "acting" (or had forgotten that they had been acting) and that they no longer had to be appeased with sacrifices? Nonetheless, the abolition of ritualistic sacrifice didn't keep cruelty away from Christianity, until very recently at least. Incidentally, it seems that ancient Greece, as opposed to most of the cultures and time periods we can turn our eyes to, shunned the practice of cruelty towards fellow humans (not that it was unheard of: the gods of the Pantheon made a generous use of it).
_Dave: I would suggest that when thinking philosophically, no "lines" be drawn in response to the sacrifice principle, since the distinctions between different expressions of the principle are only matters of degree and of variations in the form of projection involved. But an acknowledgment of the sacrifice principle and its effects is, I believe, essential both to constructive self-inquiry and to cultural healing. The value of penetrating to the taproot principle is that, once we discover that the idea is contradicted by another principle we know to be true and do not wish to violate, then only one correction is necessary. On the other hand, if we do not confront the taproot, we will tend to treat some forms of the error as advantageous, some as harmless, and some as unforgivable. And that pretty well encompasses the human condition in all its variations.
_Michel: "Guilt" is a concept extremely peculiar to Judaism and Christianity. As such, I believe, its "bandwidth" is too narrow to be useful when considering events on a planetary scale over such a time range as implied since the Saturn configuration.
_Dave: I do not believe that it is correct to limit the influence of "guilt"-concepts to Judaic-Christian influences. If there is no sense of SOMEBODY'S guilt, there can be no sense of "deserved punishment", and wherever actions or events are seen as deserved punishment, some idea of guilt (either "mine" or "yours") must be present. In fact many instances could be given from around the world in which the "guilty" party is a god. Much of Egyptian and Mesopotamian magic can be seen as early variations on the theme of "casting out the devil". Accordingly, various rites were designed to continue indefinitely the "punishment" of a guilty god or goddess, the male or female form of the chaos monster (witch-burning being the most familiar instance). This is only one variation on the scapegoat principle and that, too, is a form of sacrifice and certainly does involve the projection of guilt. All of this requires something more than a natural event. It requires that human imagination see events in a particular way. I simply do not believe that any experience of "guilt" is possible apart from a prior attraction to the sacrifice principle. (But again, I realize that what I mean by the "sacrifice principle" needs further explanation, and I'll try to get to that.) ---
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_MEMORIES AND SYMBOLS OF PLANETARY UPHEAVAL _By David Talbott [Editor's Note: The following paragraphs are excerpted from the Introduction of the forthcoming volume, WHEN SATURN WAS KING; co-authors David Talbott and Ev Cochrane]
_OF PLANETS AND GODS _It seems that a great gulf stands between the textbook profile of the planets and the descriptions given by the first sky-worshipers. It is known that ancient cultures of both the New World and the Old honored the planets with much pomp and zeal, including human sacrifices on a horrifying scale. And when the priestly astronomers invoked these points of light, they summoned memories of heaven-shattering catastrophe. What was it about these planetary specks that so preoccupied our ancestors, or prompted such pervasive fears? From ancient Babylon to China, from the Mediterranean to the Americas, planets loomed as the dominating powers of the universe. Among the Greeks and Romans we meet planets with remarkably well-defined personalities--old Saturn, the ancient ruler of the heavens; Mars, the impetuous warrior thundering in the sky; Venus, the temperamental goddess with the long-flowing hair, and Jupiter, presiding over the renewal of a world which had fallen into chaos. But the "personalities" of these planets are rooted in much earlier traditions, tracing to the origins of astronomy. In ancient literature the planetary gods are a quarrelsome lot--and often violent. Wars of the gods not only disturb the heavens but threaten to destroy humankind. The planets wield weapons of thunder and fire and stone. Their behavior is not only capricious and unpredictable, but dangerous to human health! What a stark contrast to the placid solar system portrayed in our astronomy textbooks. For centuries now, science has regarded stable and predictable planetary motions as a bedrock principle, to which no credible challenge is conceivable. Yet ancient testimony IS a challenge to modern theory insofar as the testimony is both consistent and worldwide. There is a point at which ancient accounts, by their agreement, WILL weaken one's faith in established doctrines. In these volumes we present global evidence for an alien sky, recorded in pictures and words and ritual reenactments. It was apparently only a few thousand years ago that several planets moved extremely close to the Earth, appearing as massive spheres above us. This was a time of celestial splendor and chaos, of human wonder and overwhelming fear, the measure of which cannot be gauged by anything presently witnessed in the heavens. But now, having lived for millennia beneath a tranquil sky, we are deceived by appearances. It is easy to fall into a trance, easy to assume that natural processes observed today can be projected backwards indefinitely. Indeed, all well-known theorists in the sciences assume without question that observed cycles of the Sun and Moon and planets are virtually identical to the cycles witnessed by our early ancestors. A mere guess has become a dogma--not even a theoretical issue for official science. But have you ever wondered why ancient races insisted, with one voice, that the Sun and stars and planets do not move on their original paths? That was Plato's message more than 2300 years ago. It was also the message of the philosophers Democritus, Zeno, and Anaxagoras. The historian Diodorus of Sicily noted this belief among the Chaldeans. The Babylonian priest-astronomer Berossus said it too: the planets now move on different courses. The same statement is made in the Persian BUNDAHIS, the Hindu PURANAS, and the Chinese BAMBOO BOOKS. But these are only the more familiar voices amid a chorus of ancient witnesses. For the truth is that every culture on earth recalled a prior time of celestial discord, when the sky collapsed violently. To this disruption of the heavens the Greeks gave the name SYNODOS, a word meaning, in its original contexts, "a collision of planets" and "the destruction of the world."
_PLANETARY UPHEAVAL AND HUMAN MEMORY _For many years the leading scientific theorists assumed that evolutionary principles have worked by slow and imperceptible degrees to produce an upward movement over great spans of time--the formation of galaxies, suns and planets, the evolution of a habitable earth, the first appearance of life, arrival of Homo sapiens, emergence of civilization, and the final victory of rational science over myth and superstition. But recently much of this scientific confidence has given way to uncertainty. With the arrival of the space age, we turned our attention--and highly sophisticated technology--to our neighboring planets, and the remote landscapes revealed the unmistakable signature of large-scale violence. We have seen close-up photos of the torn and disfigured surface of Mars, its every square mile littered with freshly-strewn rubble. We have mapped the surface of Venus, a super-heated cauldron now said to have been "turned inside out" by a global catastrophe of unknown origin. And we have observed the devastated moons of Jupiter and Saturn, testifying to celestial encounters more dramatic and unusual than any astronomers had anticipated. Who could deny that earlier theoretical frameworks, predicated on nearly imperceptible linear evolution over many millions of years, are being eroded by an avalanche of new data and new theories? The new theme is evolution by catastrophe, and here the Earth is not the safe place we once imagined. Cometary disasters, global floods or tidal waves, tropical climates giving way to ice ages, sudden extermination of species--once the province of science fiction, the new speculations have given rise to the field of "catastrophics"--the study of EARTH-CHANGING catastrophe. But when did the hypothesized disasters occur? Just twenty years ago the familiar theories, such as the dinosaur-exterminating asteroid claimed by the Alvarez team, placed the catastrophes in a very distant past, many millions of years before the arrival of Homo sapiens--not something we should be particularly concerned about More recently, however, the look of catastrophics has changed dramatically, as one theorist after another has invoked global upheaval within the span of human history. These theorists include the noted astronomer Fred Hoyle, the British astrophysicist Victor Clube and astronomer William Napier, astronomer Tom Van Flandern (former head of the Naval Observatory), archaeologist Mike Baillie, geologist Robert Schoch, geologist C. Warren Hunt, and many others as well. Given the present scientific and scholarly interest in recent catastrophe it is no longer possible for the scientific mainstream to ignore human testimony on these matters. Memories of catastrophe pervade the ancient cultures, and a great wealth of evidence suggests that the eye-witnesses did not invent these stories: they used all of the means available to them to record extraordinary experiences. But historians have not understood the ancient words and symbols because they only listened superficially, then looked to our familiar heavens and found no correspondence. Nothing in the archaic language made sense to them.
_ARCHETYPE AND SYMBOL _Our investigation will concentrate on the patterns of human memory. Mythology, we will seek to show, means things remembered, however clouded by the language of magic and superstition. Since the investigation rests on cross-cultural comparison, a crucial level of evidence will be the archetypes, those deep structures of thought evident in the earliest writing systems and ritual practices, patterns so powerful as to find continuing--even global--cultural expression across thousands of years. It was the distinguished psychoanalyst Carl Jung who first used the term ARCHETYPES in connection with the origins of myth and symbol, suggesting universal patterns too often ignored in prior studies of myth. An archetype is a model or first form, a prototype. In connection with world mythology, it means the original idea or structure of thought--whether it is the root idea behind the "goddess" image, the model of a "good king" or "hero," or the ideal form of a sacred temple or city. To recognize the archetypes in the ancient world is to open up a new and crucial field of investigation. A considerable debt is also owed to the distinguished student of comparative religion, the late Mircea Eliade of the University of Chicago, author of numerous books on the subject and editor in chief of the Encyclopedia of Religion. Perhaps Eliade has done more than any other scholar to show that world mythology rests upon a coherent substratum. It is not the mere collection of disconnected fragments traditionally assumed within the western world. So too, the late Joseph Campbell has probably done the most to awaken popular interest in myth. Following a comparative approach, Campbell brought to light a large number of global themes--the "hero with a thousand faces," the "angry goddess," the "world mountain," renewal through sacrifice, and dozens of other motifs. Each of these impressive researchers came to discern certain unified layers of myth, layers never anticipated by mainstream scholars laboring under traditional cynicism about myth. Perhaps the greatest contribution of these pioneers is their acknowledgment that the common view--seeing myth as random absurdity--will not suffice to explain the layers of coherence. It is vital that the reader keep in mind, however, that by "archetype" we do not mean the unconscious structures of thought to which Jung referred, so much as the original patterns of conscious human experience, to which numerous unconscious ideas and tendencies may indeed trace. It can now be stated with assurance that any one of the acknowledged archetypes, if explored in its full context, will open the door to incredible discovery. But it is also clear that the pioneers of comparative study could not account for the content of myth in terms of any verifiable human experience. And they stopped short of asking the most important question of all: if the natural references of the myths are missing, is it possible that they were present in a former time? Campbell, for example, recognized the worldwide doomsday theme--the idea of a prior age collapsing violently. But he did not relate the memory to anything that may have actually occurred in our world to inspire the universal memory. We, on the other hand, will take a firm stand on behalf of concrete experience. When widely dispersed memories point to an underlying natural event, those memories constitute evidence deserving rigorous study. When we speak of the archetypes as the "substratum of human memory" we refer to the underlying patterns shared by far-flung cultures. In a comparative approach these themes will appear as "points of agreement" shining through despite wildly divergent interpretations, fragmentation, dilution, and localization of myth over time. Were it not for the integrity of the original human experience, these patterns as a whole COULD NOT BE THERE. The mythmakers are telling us we've forgotten what they considered most worthy of remembrance. We've forgotten the age of the gods. By assuming that the sky has remained unchanged over the millennia, we failed to discern the underlying agreement in their testimony. The only appropriate answer to that error is to hear the witnesses without prejudice and to invite the mythic nightmares into the light of day. ---
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_RECONSTRUCTING THE SATURN MODEL _By David Talbott _[Editor's Note: The following paragraphs are excerpted from the Introduction of the forthcoming volume, WHEN SATURN WAS KING; co-authors David Talbott and Ev Cochrane]
_IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY _It was in 1950 that Immanuel Velikovsky published his groundbreaking work, _Worlds in Collision_. triggering one of the most heated scientific controversies in this century. Based on a reading of mythical and historical material from around the world, Velikovsky described a series of catastrophes which he claimed occurred between 1500 BC and 686 BC, and he said that the agents of these disasters were planets moving on erratic courses. Most controversial of all was his claim that a few thousand years ago the planet Venus roamed the heavens as a terrifying "comet," whose catastrophic near collisions with the Earth brought an end to numerous civilizations. In his labors to comprehend early human history, Velikovsky commanded respect from many intellectual giants of the twentieth century: Sigmund Freud and Freud's first pupil Wilhelm Stekel; Harvard historian Robert Pfeifer; Harry Hess, one of the world's most respected geologists; noted French archaeologist, Claude Schaefer; and Albert Einstein, who edited the physics and mathematics section of Velikovsky's "Scripta Universitatis". But this respect from such distinguished scientists and scholars would not redeem Velikovsky in the eyes of the larger scientific community, whose responses ranged from anger to misrepresentation and ridicule. The sweeping dismissal of Velikovsky by science implied that no fundamental aspect of his work had the slightest merit. And yet, even if Velikovsky was only correct at some elementary level, his treatment by the scientific elite will rank as one of the darkest marks on science in modern times. The prospect that major theoretical edifices could collapse under the impact of Velikovsky's revelations is hardly a small matter either.
_THE ESSENTIAL VELIKOVSKY _Velikovsky saw in ancient literature, with its pervasive imagery of disaster and improbable monsters in the sky, a story of planetary instability. And he argued that the records of early cultures permit a reconstruction of the crucial events. Whether Velikovsky was correct in the details of his analysis is another matter. But our first interest is in the fundamental concepts- 1. The planetary system was unstable in geologically recent times, and the present order of the solar system is new. 2 Erratic movements of the planets dramatically affected our Earth. 3. Episodes of interplanetary catastrophe occurred within human memory. 4. World mythology and ancient astronomical traditions preserve vivid accounts of these events. 5. Both Venus and Mars were directly involved in earth-disturbing encounters. 6. The planet Venus took the form of an earth-threatening comet. These vital tenets of Velikovsky's work, we believe, will find converging support from both historical testimony and physical evidence. And certainly one cannot deny that, since the publication of Worlds in Collision, a major shift in scientific perspective has occurred.. When Worlds in Collision appeared in 1950, astronomers and geologists were entirely captivated by 19th century models, in which global catastrophes had no place in the history of the solar system, the evolution of the Earth, or the human past. But under the influence of space age discovery, has it been Velikovskians, or Velikovsky's critics, who have have lost the most ground? In the past two decades the notion of cometary catastrophe has emerged as a great fascination to science, and while this fascination is often focused on an apparent global disaster linked to extinction of the dinosaurs, it now extends as well to speculations on more recent cometary disasters. A good example is the work of the British astronomers, Victor Clube and William Napier, authors of "The Cosmic Serpent", and "Cosmic Winter, offering a theory of doomsday comets that not only sounds a lot like Velikovsky, but IS Velikovskian in more ways than one.
_VELIKOVSKY'S SATURN HYPOTHESIS _In addition to the well-publicized claims of "Worlds in Collision", Velikovsky had, in an unpublished manuscript, set forth an extraordinary idea. He suggested that in the earliest= remembered time, the Earth was joined with other planets in a planetary arrangement vastly different from anything we observe today. He suggested that the Earth was a satellite of the planet Saturn, a planet Velikovsky associated with a former Golden Age or paradisal condition on earth. He identified Saturn as the "dying god" of ancient lore, and he claimed that a disruption of Saturn was responsible for the mythical Deluge, a global catastrophe which brought Saturn's Golden Age to an end and gave rise to a new epoch dominated by the planet Jupiter. But over the last 25 years of his life the details of his Saturn research remained sketchy, and nothing more than a few pages was ever published. Investigation of the Saturn question did not stop with Velikovsky, however. Over the past three decades a few independent researchers, inspired by Velikovsky's speculatons, have pursued the question in great depth, exposing a collective memory far beyond anything suggested by Velikovsky himself.
_A SATURN MODEL _In the broadest sense, the hypothesis we present in these pages will offer a new way of viewing the human past. Our thesis is that the myth-making phase of human history arose as a direct response to natural phenomena no longer present. Astronomers and astrophysicists, historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and students of ancient myth and religion are asked to reconsider common assumptions about the ancient world, including many that have rarely if ever been questioned. We agree with Velikovsky that major changes in the planetary order have occurred within human memory and that our ancestors preserved a global record of tumultuous, Earth-threatening events. Moreover, we intend to demonstrate that the origin of the first civilizations is simply inexplicable apart from ritual practices honoring, imitating, and re-living these extraordinary natural occurrences. The dominant powers celebrated in ancient myths and rites were planets moving close to the earth. That the present order of the solar system may be extraordinarily recent, and that planet-sized bodies appeared gigantic in our sky will not be easily believed in an age accustomed to billion-year scenarios of planet formation and evolution. Nevertheless, the model we shall present has one advantage that prior theories based on ancient testimony have lacked: it is specific enough to be easily falsified if wrong. Whatever else one may think of our reconstruction, it meets that universal test of a good theory. The theory holds that our Earth formerly moved in a congregation of planets unlike anything observed today. For earthbound witnesses, the result was a spectacular and at times highly unified planetary form in the heavens, visually dominated by the gas giant Saturn.
_POLAR CONFIGURATION _A fear-inspiring form, constituted by Saturn and an assembly of planets and moons, stretched across the northern sky, towering over the ancient world. We've termed this the "polar configuration" because it was centered on the north celestial Pole. And we've proposed that the history of this configuration is the history of the ancient gods, recorded in the fantastic stories, pictographs, and ritual reenactments of the first sky worshipers. Included in the evidence we shall consider are the following highly enigmatic patterns which can be documented around the world--* Remarkably similar pictures of a primeval "sun" in the sky, depicted as an immense sphere shining at night. * An astronomically "absurd" crescent placed on the orb of this "sun;" * An equally absurd "star" placed in the center of the "sun." * Universal chronicles of a cosmic mountain, a pillar of fire and light rising along the world axis. * A radiant "city" or "temple" of heaven, providing the prototype for sacred dwellings on earth. * An angry or lamenting goddess, raging across the sky with wildly disheveled hair and threatening to destroy the world. * A fiery serpent or dragon disturbing the celestial motions and throwing the world into darkness. * An ancestral warrior or hero, born from the womb of the star-goddess to vanquish the chaos-serpent or dragon. Is it possible that such diverse images (we've cited only the barest few among hundreds) could have a unified explanation? Our claim will be that the common patterns of world mythology answer to a simple planetary model. And in this sense, our model can properly claim to provide a unified theory of ancient myth and symbolism. It needs to be emphasized, therefore, that this model is fully testable against a massive historical record, and we invite systematic evaluation of the reconstruction by qualified researchers. Additionally, the model will suggest numerous tests within the physical sciences, relating to expected physical markers on planets and moons. If the claimed events occurred, our Earth must have been affected in dramatic ways, and this would include effects so unlikely under the usual assumptions of science as to constitute a series of critical tests. Of course the subject is far too vast to be summarized adequately in a few pages. In several cases the broad themes identified will require separate volumes--they are simply noted, perhaps with an illustration or two. Our immediate goal is to substantiate an underlying idea--that the recurring themes of myth and symbol are not the isolated fragments historians have assumed, but intimately connected pieces of a whole, all tied to identifiable forms in the sky.
_[NOTE ON THE CO-AUTH0RS OF THE PRESENT VOLUME] - David Talbott was serving as publisher of Pensée magazine's "Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered" series in 1972, when he received a two-page summary of Velikovsky's Saturn material. That began an intensive research project to investigate Saturn's place in world mythology. In "The Saturn Myth" (Doubleday, 1980) Talbott presented evidence of the planet Saturn's central role in ancient myths of beginnings The book summarized the mythical Golden Age of Saturn and claimed that a spectacular planetary configuration once towered over mankind. It argued further that this unique planetary arrangement provided the objective source for numerous mythical and symbolic forms recorded by ancient civilizations on every continent (world pillar, world mountain, eye goddess, wheel of the sun, celestial city, bull of heaven, etc.)--images that historians and mythologists have always regarded as metaphors with little if any concrete reference in nature.
_In 1980, Ev Cochrane, then a graduate student at Iowa State University, was pursuing independent research on Velikovsky when a correspondent recommended Talbott's book. His reading of the book led eventually to communication with Talbott and the beginnings of collaboration extending over many years. Cochrane is now the publisher of AEON: A Journal of Myth, Science, and Ancient History, founded by Talbott in 1987. He is also author of the volume, "Martian Metamorphoses", published in 1997, exploring the role of Mars in the ancient planetary configuration. Talbott, in his turn, published a notebook "Symbols of an Alien Sky" in 1997, offering a visual summary of key phases in the evolution of the planetary assembly. Both Talbott and Cochrane have, together with fellow "Saturn theorist," Dwardu Cardona, published many articles in AEON discussing aspects of the hypothesis. The present book begins the authors' efforts to clarify the reconstruction through a series of volumes. ---
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_THUNDERBOLTS OF THE GODS _By Dave Talbott _"It is the thunderbolt that steers the universe!" These are the words of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, living in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. To our ears today, the words are quite meaningless and easy to dismiss along with a thousand other "superstitions" of the ancient world. But in truth they point to an archaic teaching which, were it comprehended in our time, would overturn modern cosmology and transform our understanding of the human past. Cross-cultural analysis will show that the mythic thunderbolt held a most prominent place in the imagination of all early civilizations. But this awesome weapon of the gods is only indirectly connected to the "lightning" familiar to us today. Typically, the ancient stories describe the gods hurling their weapon not against humanity, but against each other, thereby throwing the heavens into turmoil. Universally, the thunderbolt is a symbol of cosmic upheaval - events powerful enough to re-arrange the heavens and change the course of human history. That, at least, is the way the ancient poets and historians remember it. The flaming weapon is most familiar to us in the images of the Greek Zeus (Jupiter), who hurls his bolt across the sky. It is this fiery weapon which proves decisive in the god's confrontations with such chaos powers as the dragon Typhon or the rebel Enceladus. The god Yahweh, in Hebrew accounts, brandishes his lightning bolt against Rahab or Leviathan, the dragon of the deep, as the whole world trembles. Similarly, it is with lighting that the Babylonian Marduk blasts the dragon Tiamat, whose attack threatened to destroy creation. As we trace such images back to their earliest sources, we find that the feared thunderbolt really has nothing to do with local storms or regional events. When the world falls out of control, a sovereign god employs the weapon on behalf of "order" or renewal of the world after devastating catastrophe. When we examine the accounts systematically and in their specific details we see how clearly they exclude the popular interpretations given in our own time. As the ancient chroniclers tell it, even the gods themselves are "scarred" or "wounded" by blasts of lightning. Lightning streaks along the world axis, presenting the form of a luminous pillar in the sky. Repeatedly, we find popular warrior-gods taking the form of the lightning-weapon, while numerous mother goddesses are "impregnated" by the same fiery bolt. Or the lightning-weapon is hurled as a spiraling sphere trailing fire. Among numerous ancient cultures we find thunderbolts appearing as symmetrically arranged "arrows" launched toward the four quarters of the heavens, represented pictographically by a cross of light. Everything about the mythic lightning bolt is enigmatic, as if utterly divorced from natural experience. And yet the symbolism consistently points back to archetypal forms and events. Why was lightning, in the first astronomies, wielded by gods who are identified as planets? Why was the fiery bolt itself often presented with a twisted or corkscrew form? And how do we account for the famous "sulfurous stench" said to accompany the lightning-stroke? Or the universal claim that meteorites or stones ("thunderstones") fell with the lightning of the gods? A modern reader is easily desensitized to such "make believe." Were not all early races the victims of ignorance and wild imagination? All too frequently we grow so accustomed to the fantastic aspects of their accounts that we lose interest in the details. Or worse, we fail to notice the recurring patterns, the most vital keys to discovery. The thunderbolt will illustrate the extent of this dilemma while carrying us well beyond the particular symbol. As we intend to demonstrate, the patterns of ancient memory are simply too powerful, too detailed, and too consistent to be explained in the usual way.
_UNSTABLE SOLAR SYSTEM _Much of the emphasis of this book will be on the dynamic and unpredictable roles of planets and moons, when they moved through highly active electrical fields. Planetary motions observed today are not a reliable guide to solar system history. But it seems that over many centuries observational science came increasingly under the spell of a predictable and uneventful planetary arrangement, and now certain questions are rarely if ever asked. How stable is the solar system? Have the planets always moved on their present courses? For many years, a principle called uniformitarianism has ruled the sciences. The principle says that evolutionary processes occurring in the past can be deduced from processes observed now. It is assumed, for example, that by noting uniform natural processes today, an observer can deduce how long it took the crust of the earth to shift and mountains to rise, for wind and water erosion to occur, and for lava flows and regional floods to sculpt the Earth's unique surface features. With the arrival of the space age, the same principles were applied to the natural events shaping the surfaces of planets and moons. As our probes sent back vivid images of planetary surfaces and the surfaces of the remote moons of Jupiter and Saturn, geologists drew primarily on a count of craters to "date" the surfaces. They simply projected theoretical impact rates backwards across great spans of time, and the results were the presumed "dates" for different surfaces, typically ranging from millions to billions of years. Such suppositions as these have guided data analyses throughout the space age. But are these suppositions really justified? Suffice it to say, if their assumption of uniformity is incorrect, planetary scientists have directed many billions of dollars toward asking the wrong questions. From the nineteenth century onward, the uniformity principle remained unchallenged. Undoubtedly that underlying supposition constrained the thinking of historians as they began to explore the world of our early ancestors and to offer translations of previously unknown ancient texts. Antiquarians--ethnologists, archaeologists, and students of the archaic languages--assumed without question that the celestial forms celebrated in the great "sky religions" answer to the Sun and Moon and other bodies as they appear in our sky today. But what would happen to our understanding of the myth-making age if we set this supposition aside just long enough to ask the question: What were the sky-worshipers seeing in the heavens when they invoked the prodigious forms of the gods? And what did they mean by the gods' awe-inspiring weapons of fire and stone?
_IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY _We would be remiss if we failed to make clear that both authors of this volume were independently inspired by the work of Immanuel Velikovsky, one of the most innovative and controversial theorists of the 20th century. In 1950, Velikovsky's bestseller, Worlds in Collision, presented evidence for global catastrophes in historical times. He wrote that only a few thousand years ago planets moved on erratic courses and more than once the Earth itself was disturbed by errant planets. These upheavals, according to Velikovsky, were memorialized around the world in myth, art, ritual, language, and architecture. Three principles were paramount in Velikovsky's hypothesis: 1. Unstable motions and near-collisions of planets have produced large-scale terrestrial catastrophes on the earth. 2. Ancient cultures preserved massive records of these catastrophes. 3. Taken as a whole, historical records suggest a vital role of electricity: In catastrophic episodes, great bolts of lightning passed between planets.
_Velikovsky's approach was interdisciplinary. He used the insights of a professional psychoanalyst and the methods of a trained historian to investigate the astronomical, mythical, and religious traditions of diverse cultures. He discerned deeply rooted themes which others had failed to see. These cultural records told the story of traumatic events, apparently experienced on a global scale. Using a comparative method, he pieced together a coherent story. In support of his reconstruction he found physical evidence from geology, paleontology, and archeology. He also formulated a series of predictions-consistent with his hypothesis, but unexpected by previous theories. He predicted that the planet Jupiter would emit radio signals; that the planet Venus would be much hotter than astronomers expected; and that craters on the moon would reveal remanent magnetism and radioactive hot spots. Velikovsky's ability to anticipate scientific discovery produced a surprising statement from the renowned geologist Harry Hess (in an open letter to Velikovsky in 1963): "Some of these predictions were said to be impossible when you made them. All of them were predicted long before proof that they were correct came to hand. Conversely I do not know of any specific prediction you made that has since been proven to be false. I suspect the merit lies in that you have a good basic background in the natural sciences and you are quite uninhibited by the prejudices and probability taboos which confine the thinking of most of us." For ourselves, the authors of this work believe that Velikovsky was incorrect on many details of his reconstruction. But his place among the great pioneers of science will be secure if he was merely correct on the underlying tenets of his work: an unstable solar system in geologically recent times; close encounters of planets marked by interplanetary electrical discharges; catastrophic disturbances of the Earth; and human witnesses to these events; all with the most profound effects on human imagination and on the collective activity of early civilizations. In the 50 years since Worlds in Collision was published, the viewpoint of orthodox science has changed dramatically, leading some to say that the only mistake Velikovsky made was presenting his theory at the wrong historical time. Over the intervening decades various innovators began to investigate catastrophic possibilities previously ignored. One of the milestones in this trend was the hypothesis of Leo and Walter Alvarez, claiming dinosaur extinction by asteroidal impact. While the initial response of official science was ridicule, over time the hypothesis began to gain general acceptance within the scientific community. Soon thereafter, the respected biologist Stephen Jay Gould acknowledged the occasional catastrophe in a theory of "punctuated equilibrium." And the British astronomers Victor Clube and William Napier opened the door even further by postulating cometary or asteroidal disasters so recent as to have inspired vivid human stories (myths) of these events. Then several other astronomers, astrophysicists, and geologists added support to such speculations. Among these theorists are the eminent astronomers Fred Hoyle and Tom Van Flandern. According to the latter theorist, an "exploding planet" devastated the surfaces of Mars and other bodies in the solar system, perhaps leaving its scars on human imagination as well.
_And now, a half century after Worlds in Collision, a few well-accredited catastrophists, including dendrochronologist Mike Baillie, are beginning to admit a debt to Velikovsky, usually with the disclaimer that of course he was wrong about unstable planets being involved in these events. This general assessment of Velikovsky is shared openly by the popular science and science fiction writer, Jerry Pournelle, on his website <http://www.jerrypournelle.com/science/moremusings.htm>: "Taken as a whole, Velikovsky's specific hypotheses are, in my judgment, quite beyond belief. On the other hand, his general hypothesis, that there were astronomical terrors in the Bronze Age and memories of them have come down to us in myths and legends, has always seemed to me to be well worth taking seriously and is in fact very probably true." We want to make it clear at the outset that the authors of this upcoming book stand with Velikovsky--if not on all the details of his reconstruction, then certainly on the general principles. When it comes to solar system stability we believe that Velikovsky was fundamentally correct, though it is certainly understandable that many intelligent writers find the errant planets of Worlds in Collision "quite beyond belief." Indeed, belief itself may be the greatest obstacle to objective investigation on this subject, given the inertia of prior assumptions. The very idea that wandering planets could quickly settle into their present highly uniform and predictable orbits is simply too much to countenance under accepted principles of Newtonian gravity and energy conservation. But in fact, the issue can be resolved dispassionately. The belief in uniform planetary motions over millions of years, though understandable, is just a belief. Placed within a wider field of evidence--a field ranging across the global testimony of ancient cultures and into a vast library of space age data--the very foundations of the belief will collapse. Newton developed the concept of gravitation in 1666, eight decades before Franklin flew his kite and more than two centuries before Maxwell wrote his famous equations. Astronomy developed in the gaslight era before electricity was known. In this volume we intend to show that something is missing from the standard treatments of planetary history and celestial dynamics. That missing component is electricity. ---
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_FORTRESS AND LABYRINTH _By Dave Talbot
_Amy asks: Humbaba/Huwawa has the ugliest mug I have ever seen, made up of "intestines" twined around a couple of eyes (see Hamlet's Mill, By Georgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, pg. 291). The authors connect the monster's face and name with intestines and with the labyrinth. They also point out similarities to the Aztec Tlaloc, although Tlaloc's face was formed from two snakes rather than intestines. I can imagine that the superstition that you can read a person's fortune in the windings of steaming intestines also came from this image. Where did it come from? Was it part of the polar configuration?
_Dave responds: Well, I thought I'd take a little time to respond, since I've already stuck my neck out by claiming that, when it comes to the landscape of myths and symbols, all roads lead to the polar configuration. Amy, you're right about the ancient labyrinth and its connection to superstitions regarding entrails and fate. And yes, the labyrinthine "intestines" do have a logical place in the evolution of the polar configuration. The image relates to a rather complex phase, involving the transition from Saturnian to Jovian sovereignty. Here we also meet the terrible goddess (Venus) in her "entangling" aspect, and the legendary perils confronted by the Martian hero.
_As I've noted previously, I find it difficult to discuss these later sequences without the use of pictures, particularly while so much of the earlier symbolism remains to be presented at a sufficient level of detail. It is the earlier images that give the necessary context to comprehend the later evolution of the configuration. The brief comments here are for those familiar with the basic planetary forms of the polar configuration. The general motif involves these common elements, among others: 1) meandering, "drunken" or "crane"-dance of the hero; 2) winding path of the maze or labyrinth; 3) the cross or swastika, the central celestial source from which the sinuous "paths" arose; 4) "bowels" of the cavern entered by the hero; 5) swallowing of the hero by the chaos monster; 6) disheveled and "entangling" hair of the mother goddess in her threatening aspect; 7) winding or unwinding of intestines;
intricate windings of a rope or thread, or an elaborate "knot" which only the hero can undo; and 9) a "riddle" or "paradox" which only the hero can solve--this being the most abstract form in initiation rites, folklore, and later analogies,. In all of these forms we see key sequences in the hero's confrontation with the chaos powers. Though the images are quite diverse and often complex, the root explanation provided by the Saturn model is surprisingly simple. The explanation begins with the planetary alignment of the polar configuration--the juxtaposition of Mars, Venus and Saturn--when four luminous streamers were seen radiating from Venus in the form of an equal-limbed cross. (As I've noted on other occasions, this is the most frequently recorded form of the discharging Venus.) In a phase of intense discharging linked to the onset of instability, these streamers took on a whorl-like appearance, a form that numerous ancient cultures recorded stylistically as the swastika. There is reason to believe that initially the whirling appearance retained its symmetry as the streamers wound up the polar axis. But eventually the displacement of the aligned planets produced an irregular and complex streamer pattern, as Venus and Mars danced around the polar center in awkward motions, due to the visual effects of displacement from the polar axis and the moving position of the observer on a rotating earth. In their labyrinthine windings these streamers acquired the appearance of an impenetrable citadel in the heavens. Fundamentally, that is what the labyrinth means: a great fortress which only the hero, be he Gilgamesh or Theseus, will succeed in entering. There is much more to the ancient imagery of this celestial "stronghold" or "prison". The cavernous "bowels" of the divine habitation, the Gordian Knot, the mythic "cavern" of the hero's initiation or re-birth, and the labyrinth all mean the same thing. Moreover, only a few of the experts have discerned the essential corollary to this theme: the conjunction of the hero and mother goddess. The windings of the labyrinth are, in fact, the very essence of the goddess, and the hero's entry into the labyrinth can not be separated from his conjunction with the great mother. (As I've stated more than once, ALL mythical themes involve the conjunction principle.)
_Thus, the Saturn model provides a series of acid tests. It identifies specific forms in the sky as the objective references for seemingly incompatible mythical and symbolic images. What appear to be DIFFERENT symbols actually refer to the same external form and to the same sequence of events. The imaginative symbols will appear to have no connection to each other in the absence of the external references. But if you grant the concrete forms in the sky--if only for the sake of the obvious tests--then the connections will be EXPECTED. It is this logical expectation that supports the claimed "predictive power" of the model. The model implies entire complexes of symbolic equations that would not be anticipated under any other theory of the past. Since it will take a sizable volume to detail the labyrinth motif, for now I will simply provide a few random notes--Many themes relating to the terrible goddess and the ordeal, initiation, or rebirth of the hero occur in association with the first appearance of Jupiter. In one way or another the motifs of swallowing, cavernous hiding place, wrapping or winding, binding, and imprisonment run through all of the accounts relating to Jupiter's emergence as sovereign power. Ideas as to who was doing what to whom, and how badly, will vary according to highly subjective mythical interpretations.
_A good starting point for confirming the complex of motifs noted above might be Hesiod's Theogony recounting the fate of Kronos and the "birth" of Zeus. But don't expect everything to become immediately clear! Every motif or symbol has a larger context requiring cross-cultural analysis. It is the rigorous comparative approach that enables us to confirm the integrity of the substratum. That a great fortress in the sky would be composed of "intestines" is really quite ridiculous UNTIL one grants something visible in the heavens to prompt the mythical language. In the words of the Babylonians themselves, Humbaba/Huwawa was the guardian of "the fortress of intestines", and more than one specialist has proposed that this mythical fortress was a prototype of the labyrinth. But other crucial associations of the labyrinth are usually overlooked. The swastika at the center of the labyrinth occurs not just in Cretan and Attic art, but among the Hopi Indians as well.
_The most common centerpiece of the labyrinth, of course, is the equal-limbed cross, from which the swastika itself arose, representing the whirling aspect of the cross. One scholar who did not overlook this connection was A. B. Cook. From his extensive study of the theme, he concluded [Zeus, Vol 1, p. 478]: "it seems certain that both Attic and Cretan art presuppose the swastika as the earliest ascertainable form of the Labyrinth." So it is simply inconceivable that the labyrinth motif could be illuminated without simultaneous illuminating the cross and swastika (or vice versa). One theme leads inexorably to another, each adding nuances and perspective: intestines, labyrinth, swastika, dance. There can be no doubt, for example, that the swastika is inseparably connected to the whirling dance of the hero and goddess when the world has slipped into chaos. Moreover, this dance is consistently linked to the labyrinthine passage. Indeed, one of the more common dance patterns in ancient times was that of whirling performers, dancing along a path marked by a labyrinth. Cook, for example, relates the pattern simultaneously to a symbolic "imitation of the sun's movements in the sky" and to a pattern of imitative spiraling dance. The word "labyrinth" often MEANS dance, and the archaic roots of the symbol are acknowledged to have given rise to the "Troy dance" and similar children's games. But again, the relationship of the swastika to the dancing form of the hero (in conjunction with the goddess) will virtually always go unnoticed by the specialists, while nothing in familiar experience today will suggest any link to the complex images of "intestines". Yet curiously, from the Americas to Africa to the South Pacific we find recollections of the dancing trickster-hero "unraveling his own intestines". That such ludicrous imagery would recur from one land to another surely requires an explanation! It is important to note that the labyrinthine dance of the hero has its own unique and awkward form, as we should expect. The dance of the warrior Theseus, most famous for his entry into the Cretan Labyrinth, was called the Crane Dance, a very appropriate image for the visual movements of Mars in relation to the origins of the labyrinth motif. Numerous Hindu myths relating to the "dance of Shiva" are suggestive of the same concepts while adding vital associations. The illustrated movement of the dancing hero's arms and legs mimic the whorl/swastika form of the discharge streamers. The warrior Siva holds his consort Sati above his head (again, as we should EXPECT), and in their violent whirling movement, the body or essence of Sati is dispersed in flame--From Stella Kramrisch, "The Presence of Shiva", pp. 319-20: "He danced exceedingly, his arms flailing the regions. The stars were scattered by the swish of his hair. Death, love, and despair syncopated the escalating speed of his Tandava dance; the earth shook while Siva went on dancing in frenzy, his eyes whirling ... As Siva danced on and on, the body of Sati became lighter and lighter, and he saw that limbs and parts had fallen from it." In the end all that was left was the mystic yoni, the core identity of the goddess (the planet Venus, in the Saturn model).
_A comparative analysis will show that the god's four arms "flailing the regions" are, beyond any reasonable doubt, the arms of the whirling cross or swastika that mark out the four regions or quarters of the celestial habitation. So too, the comet-like "hair" whirling in the heavens will trace to early images, such as those from Sumer, showing the arms of the swastika as the long-flowing hair of female figures. Hence, the presence of a swastika in the center of the labyrinth is a crucial piece of evidence. It needs to be emphasized here that the identification of Shiva's dance with the famous dance of the Theseus will not be justified by a mere reading of popular summaries. Too much is lost in trivial approaches to myth. How, for example, do we know that the dance of Theseus was in conjunction with a GODDESS, since the usual treatments do not mention such a thing? The builder of the labyrinth of Knosos was Daidalos, who constructed the palace-like fortress to imprison and protect the Minotaur. Though the labyrinth became the ground for the Crane Dance of Theseus, we read in the Iliad that Daidalos "once wrought in Knosos broad a dancing-ground for fair-haired Ariadne". But the real key is the golden "thread" of Ariadne, unraveled by Theseus as he danced through the winding passages. For the comparative approach will confirm that the spiraling thread of life and fate is nothing else than the luminous essence of the goddess herself. The hero's unraveling of the "thread" in his meandering dance is in fact a counterpart to Shiva's whirling dispersal of the essence of Sati. The dance of Theseus is in conjunction with the goddess. This is why, as noted by Cook, the labyrinthine dance was said to be "the first occasion on which men and women danced together." Here, as so often is the case, we see the telltale signature of an archetype, the cosmic "first form" to which all imitative or ritual practices direct our attention.
_[An aside: in Egypt one of the key images is that of the red ab-heart of Re, the "heart of carnelian" which Egyptian texts identify with such warrior heroes as Shu and Horus (Mars, in our reconstruction). This innermost masculine heart is presented within (i.e., in conjunction with) the feminine hati-heart of Re, The hieroglyphic image shows a male figure in a dancing posture virtually identical to that of Shiva, who similarly stands in conjunction with the Hindu mother goddess. But none of these images seems to be intelligible to Egyptologists or other specialists. Thus, they do not notice that the swastika itself symbolized the whirling, dancing heart of the ancient sun god (Saturn). And until the underlying equations are recognized, such obvious clues as the placement of a swastika on the HEART of Apollo in familiar Greek representations, will mean virtually nothing to them.] As noted above, a symbol linking the winding path of the labyrinth to a winding rope, cord, or string is the "thread of Ariadne". The Greeks claimed that Theseus' way through the labyrinth was MARKED by this very "golden thread" which he unwound as he entered the cavernous path. [Hero unwinding the golden thread = hero unwinding intestines = hero winding through the passages of the labyrinth = dancing hero and goddess]
_A common association noted by numerous comparative symbolists was that between the labyrinth and symbolic "knots" or elaborate "knotwork", a connection fitting perfectly with the Saturn model's identification of the labyrinthine pathway and the "Gordian Knot". In fact, the symbolic knotwork of Ireland and Scandinavia will often present striking parallels to the labyrinth, and I am fully satisfied that, at root, the two motifs arose from the same experience. Labyrinth and knotwork also overlap in the Chinese image of the p'ang-chang, the "endless knot" or "knot of happiness". Nor can the symbolic "intestines" be separated from this particular theme, for the legends describe the p'ang-chang as a "knot" formed from the INTESTINES of a slain enemy. All of which reminds us again of the "fortress of intestines" to which Humbaba/Huwawa, the enemy slain by Gilgamesh, gave his name. I should hasten to add that the most common association of the labyrinth revealed by cross-cultural comparison was with the mythical cave or cavern entered by the hero (as we should also expect). Thus Dorothy Norman, in The Hero, p. 107, writes: "In those cases where the ritual has been preserved, the labyrinth itself, or a drawing of it, is invariably situated at the entrance of the cave or dwelling". The Saturn model says: labyrinth entered by the hero = cavern of the hero's initiation. In fact all of the predicted symbolic equations or identities noted above can be fully verified by an independent researcher following the keys provided by the Saturn model. The hero untying or finding his way through the "knot", as observed by Chevalier and Gheerbrant, is equivalent to the hero "being swallowed by the monster" -- a universal motif. The disgorging of the hero is simply one more form of the god's victory and release. To untie the knot is to defeat the chaos power. The labyrinth is a "puzzle", a challenge to the hero, and conceptually it is only a short distance to the mythic riddle or paradox, a folklore variant of the same critical juncture in the biography of the hero. When Oedipus answered the riddle of the sphinx correctly, the devouring goddess plunged over the precipice.
_Among those comparative symbolists who have discerned the essential connections (though certainly not accounted for them), I would list J. C. Cooper, who writes in An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols: "[The labyrinth is] related to the symbolism of the cave and with initiation rites, often held in a cavern or crypt, or with funerary rites, all of which are associated with death and rebirth. It also shares the symbolism of the knot in binding and loosing, restricting but uniting. The labyrinth is also thought to have been concerned with the symbolism of the coiled snake [a globally-recognized form of the devouring goddess] or with patterns of entrails divination and the bowels of the earth. The labyrinth in a square depicts the four cardinal points and the cosmos and may be connected with the swastika." Perhaps I should mention in closing that we are now looking ahead to a two and a half-day seminar in September, presenting the convergence of the Saturn model and electric universe. This event will include the first public presentation of several key mythical images and their relation to concrete forms seen in the sky. The labyrinth will be among the featured motifs. The tentative date for the event, which will include about eight presenters, is September 22-24, in Portland, Oregon. Look for an announcement shortly. ---
http://saturniancosmology.org/files/thoth/thotiv11.txt
_LABYRYNTHS _Kronia discussion with Dave Talbott _Michel Tavir asked: Here under our latitudes {Denmark] it is claimed that what is known in the Anglo-Saxon world as "Celtic Knots" was actually brought over by the Vikings when they colonized the coasts of Ireland. If this is true, they are not two separate traditions. On the other hand, I cannot think of a similar "labyrinthic" symbol in Scandinavia before that time. If this is also correct, why did the symbol only turn up so many millennia after the event?
_Dave Talbott responds: That kind of erratic evolution is typical of the fragmentation and diffusion of symbols. And where particular symbolic styles emerge in later times as if from nowhere, it is usually the case that they were imported. Symbolic knotwork design is probably as good an example as any. But here it's crucial to distinguish between the symbol (knotwork in this case) and the archetype to which the symbol directs our attention. The elaboration of symbols over time involves a substantial role of innovation in which regional signatures can be recognized, helping historians to trace various paths of diffusion. My guess would be that the similarities between Scandinavian and Celtic knotwork, which I had mentioned in the same breath, will trace to a single cultural origin. Of course, the absence of a particular symbolic innovation does not take away from the more universal influence of the celestial archetype, which inspired numerous paths of symbolic expression, a number of which I had listed as part of a UNIVERSAL memory. I would not want to suggest that a particular mythical interpretation of an archetype--much less a particular style of representing that interpretation--was universal. In the absence of the direct reference in the sky, human imagination was free to conjure many variations on the received mythical concepts. The purpose of comparative study is to identify the root form (archetype) originally expressed by the entire range of symbols. It is the existence of these archetypes that cannot be explained by any prior theory of human history. As Don Scott had noted, Teutonic mythology was filled with the labyrinthine motifs I listed. In comparative study that would be the significant fact, not the continuity of a particular mode of stylistic representation.
_Dorothy Millard wrote: Here is a subject I love-Celtic Art! I tend to agree with Dave that the two motifs arose from the same experience. The origin of Celtic knotwork is not as easily understood as previously thought. I have been studying this subject for only 2 years, and there seem to be as many trails as there are in a labyrinth.
One of the books I've read, <Maze Patterns>, by Aidan Meehan, traces labyrinths back to the earth goddess myths. How convoluted the earth goddess myths can be! Meehan starts with the chevron, goes through spirals, key patterns (although he doesn't like the term), other goddess symbols, and drawings of plans of court cairns (megalithic tombs) found in Ireland, c. 5000 BC. The cairns supposedly represent the goddess in a pregnant state, and the maze aspect to the tombs is a birth ritual. Then he associates Neolithic carvings with warrior-hero myths. I find it fascinating! But how accurate is it?
_Dave Talbott says These are of course the associations I suggested based on a much broader analysis. But while most scholars can recognize such associations, they cannot produce an intelligible explanation, due primarily to the fact that their interpretations are drawn from the language of nature TODAY, with no thought of the possibility that the myths might have originated beneath a completely different sky. The archaic goddess of the labyrinth (Ariadne-Aphrodite in the Greek tradition) is not an 'earth goddess" in the sense implied by familiar uses of words today. The phrase identifies the goddess herself as the HABITATION of the gods: "God's land," "Holy Land," "city of the sun," "Saturn's earth" (Virgil's phrase) That this dwelling of the gods was in the sky is universally supported by the more ancient texts. It's cavernous shape (the labyrinth) is formed from the spiraling essence of the goddess--the unraveling thread of life, the entangling knot--and it is specifically associated with the "initiation" or symbolic death and re-birth of the hero, as I had also noted. In entering the labyrinthine "bowels" of the cavern, the hero enters the womb of the goddess in her dark and menacing aspect. His re-emergence is his re-birth.
_Dorothy Continues: I also found some history of the origins of knotwork in <Celtic Art -the methods of construction> by George Bain (Dover 1973, originally published by William MacLellan & Co. Ltd., 1951). He concludes that the various patterns that have been used throughout history are imitations of plaiting, weaving, and basketwork. He also states that knotwork interlacing was "peculiar to the Pictish School of Celtic Art," and that Pictish key patterns were similar to key patterns "found in the Ukraine and Yugoslavia dating from 20,000 BC to 15,000," but not like classical Greek key patterns or frets. Borders and panels of interlacing "are to be found in the art of most peoples surrounding the Mediterranean, the Black and Caspian Seas. Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Moors, Persians, Turks, Arabs, Syrians, Hebrews, and North African tribes have used interlacing." According to Bain, "the finest achievement of knotwork interlacing are by the Pictish School," and that "interlacing humans, animals, birds, and reptiles each with interlacing top-knots were developed in East Pictland and Ireland to migrate at a later date to Scandinavia to become a decadent art."
_Dave Replies: . . . I am highly skeptical of the author's interpretation. In all cases I can think of, enduring design elements trace to sacred activity, while sacred activity was, beyond any reasonable doubt, part of a collective act of REMEMBERING. With the explosion of human imagination in the myth-making epoch, all mundane functions such as pottery making, weaving and basketwork became vehicles for something more than the obvious practical functions. That is, the symbolism did not ARISE from the practical function, but from a collective endeavor to hold onto or to recover, if only for a symbolic moment, the lost age of the gods. Nevertheless, I strongly suspect that the references you've given are valuable sources of information, and I hope you will continue with your investigation. ---
http://saturniancosmology.org/files/thoth/thotiv12.txt
_MALE GODS _By Dave Talbott and Rens van der Sluijs _Ev Cochrane recently forwarded to me a note from Rens van der Sluijs, dealing with "the problem of identification of the male gods within the Saturnist framework." Rens van der Sluijs wrote: "My conclusion is that the godly assembly is variously referred to as either One God, having an acting Inner Soul, or Father and Hero-Son. The suffering Mystery God, in so many disguises, being torn apart is the One God, but on a deeper level it is his own acting Inner Soul that kills him. He can thus appear as Warrior and Victim in two separate beings. Mythologically speaking, this implies that the same story can be rendered in various ways. Thus we reach the startling conclusion that Zeus killing Kronos is identical with the various Mars-gods killing the rightful King, whereas the story of the infant Zeus is directly identical with the numerous accounts of young Herakles, et cetera. Jupiter at face value is, therefore, not always simply to be equated with the archetypal Jupiter God that David Talbott had thus far established. When Zeus kills Kronos we envision the Mars God as Inner Soul overcoming the Golden Age God. The soul, i. e. Venus with Mars, subsequently reenters another body, notably the planet Jupiter, and in this way the same Zeus is said to have achieved kingship. As Inner Soul he is then identical with the body of Jupiter as a planet, i. e. the King acquired a new heart, or rather, the heart acquired a new body (sic!). This sounds like ancient mystery language and in fact it is. Nevertheless, it seems to be the only adequate solution and enlightens the ancient lore not a bit. This view predicts that the same divinity can alternately be described from the viewpoint of the acting Inner Soul or from that of the entire god. Methodically, this means that it gets harder to make a divine biography. A divine biography can only be set up once we split the united story in several versions with different role assignments and viewpoints. This is a challenge that I am greedy to face. All of this I hope to address sooner or later in an article, also paying attention to related issues: [1] The story of Kronos castrating and ousting Ouranos is different. This is not the common parricide myth, but describes an earlier transformation in the life of the Golden King, giving birth to Venus, as can be deduced from the themes and attributes involved in the myths. It is not as widespread.
_Dave Talbott Responds: 1. Re: Kronos and Ouranos. Rens is correct here. This is not the parricide myth. It is the story of Saturn's emergence as a separate power, in events synonymous with the birth of the goddess and hero. The subject is the "first activity" of the planetary configuration. Unified heaven (proto-Saturn) gives way to differentiation. In the Egyptian myth the birth of Shu and Tefnut from the originally inert and unified form of Atum gives rise to THREE--Re, Shu and Tefnut--Saturn, Mars and Venus in the Saturn reconstruction. The Hindu system also presents the story of a primeval sacrifice of Unity (first form of Brahma-Prajapati) in connection with the birth of male and female principles. Originally, the male and female powers stood in conjunction. In other words, the variants all answer directly to the Great Conjunction of Saturn's epoch, when Saturn's giant sphere, extremely close to the earth, stood behind the juxtaposed, much smaller spheres of Venus (goddess) and Mars(warrior-hero), these two orbs appearing as the luminous eye, heart or soul of Saturn. The comparative approach will confirm that the severed "testicles" of Ouranos correspond to the "seed" of the Egyptian Atum, holding the goddess and hero in conjunction. This male-female "seed"--the"BEN" stone--typically appears as a single eye (the goddess) together with its "pupil" (hero), though the emerging male and female forms may also be called the "two eyes" in later elaborations of the myth. "Castration" and "blindness" thus go together in archaic symbolism (as Jungian symbolists have already noticed). In the Hindu system as well, the primeval conjunction of Rudra/Shiva and Sati defines the original Unity of heaven. The original male-female seed--the BINDU--is depicted as a small circle in the center of a much larger circle. That is the primeval condition of undifferentiated Unity: unborn goddess and hero in conjunction in the center of the vast sphere called "heaven" the gas giant proto-Saturn). The sign for this condition is among the two or three most common symbols in the world. (It is the sign of Re, for example.) Of course none of this will make sense unless you have the visual imagery very clear in your mind. The human memories trace to concrete forms in the sky, behaving in a highly specific way that can be tested from one culture to another. The fate of the primeval Unity, however, is the most archaic story element, and as such it reveals much less detail than you will find in the more richly elaborated accounts of the goddess and hero. It is a less defined background memory, and rapidly fades over time. That is why one will do best to concentrate on the oldest available sources. The symbolism of the Egyptian Atum and the Sumerian An/Akkadian Anu will give the most reliable data.
_2. Re: Difficulties in establishing a divine biography. Correcto mundo on this point also. The universal sovereign (Saturn-Jupiter) tends to be a passive figure, while the goddess and hero are highly active. In later literature the Martian figure, the warrior-hero, will appear as the servant, messenger, or assistant in the service of a great king. BECAUSE the story was consistently localized, it was impossible for the original relationships to be maintained. Archaically, the hero figure does not just act on behalf of the universal sovereign--he is the masculine, innermost soul of the god, the active voice going forth as a visible "command," the externalized "will" or "desire" of the sovereign. In the margins between the most authentic (earliest) sources, and the highly fragmented (later) sources you will find both versions of the hero--i.e., both the original servant of the universal sovereign and the later "prideful," "foolish," rampaging hero acting AGAINST the sovereign, even "murdering" him. They are same figures. Thus, comparative analysis will reveal that the Greek Eros and Ares, who appear so unlike each other, reflect the SAME archetype. The evolution of the archetype through interpretation and storytelling, however, has taken the two figures in entirely different directions. Eros, the visible, external will or desire of Zeus is thus seen as a little male figure on the shoulders of Zeus--exactly where we should expect him. The poetic treatment of the Mars god Ares, however, will typically emphasize the rogue aspect--the warrior, the fool, the murderer. The ambiguous middle zone will be occupied by Heracles, whose name was also a name for the planet Mars in Greek astronomy. Here the poets have retained many separate traditions relating to the hero's labors on behalf of "great kings," while including as well the accounts of his murderous rampage, all the while attempting to rationalize the behavior. In truth, this ambiguity shows up in virtually all of the well-documented warrior gods around the world, though the chroniclers endlessly strove to separate the heroic and chaos-monster aspects by treating them as independent mythical figures. That way, one figure could represent the enemy (prototype of the devil in all his mythical forms) and the other a standard to be celebrated without ambivalence. (I will return to this tendency as soon possible, in discussing another point raised by Rens.) 3. Zeus and Kronos. Bingo on this one too. The overthrow of Kronos by Zeus refers to the same events which--through nothing more than a subtle twist of interpretation--were seen as the warrior Mars murdering or displacing the elder form of the universal sovereign Saturn. To this observation I would add a further principle, relating to the archetypal "birth of the hero." (I am speaking here not of the first appearance of the hero with the differentiation of the unified sovereign, but the RE-BIRTH of that figure in the great crisis at the conclusion of Saturn's epoch.) Hesiod's story of the birth of Zeus (Jupiter) within a cave is really the story of the HERO "born" in the cave. It was not Jupiter that was carried off by the goddess. It was the unborn hero, as in the universal legend. It is the story of what happens to the masculine, innermost heart of the sovereign, as it passes from the FIRST form of the sovereign (elder god Saturn) to the SECOND (younger god Jupiter). At this juncture, neither form of the sovereign is necessarily visible, while the externalized Martian "soul," "heart," or "will" of the sovereign--the hero--is very visible and highly active. In these events, the focus is on the activity, the transmigrating "soul," not its more passive owner. Remember that in the discussion of the labyrinth motif, I noted that the entry of the hero into the cavernous labyrinth is the story of the hero's re-birth. Typically, a goddess such as Isis, pregnant with the hero, finds a secret hiding place. These myths, I said, relate directly to the transition between Saturnian and Jovian epochs, the dissolution of a world age followed by renewal. Theseus enters the labyrinth where he slays the hidden or imprisoned Minotaur, transcript of the archetypal Bull of Heaven, the primeval form of Saturn. Though a lot of ground would have to be covered to make the equation clear and convincing, there is no doubt in my mind that the archetypal "birth [i.e., rebirth] of the hero" IS the story of the passage from Saturnian to Jovian sovereignty. ---
http://saturniancosmology.org/files/thoth/thotiv13.txt
_A UNIFIED THEORY _By Dave Talbott _Perhaps few claims I've made for the Saturn model will seem more outrageous than the assertion of a unified theory. But all I am really saying is that there was a mythmaking epoch of human history. It had a beginning and an end. Its focus was an unstable congregation of planets close to the earth, moving through phases of beauty, awe, and terror. The "myth-making" epoch was unlike anything which followed. With the drifting away of the planetary gods, attention shifted radically to the tools for remembering. Through mythical representations and reenactments, our ancestors sought to keep alive and to give meaning to experiences more intense than anything experienced in later times. Myth requires an active imagination, but something more as well. Always the myths point to EXTRAORDINARY EVENTS re-defining the course of human history. A study of the archetypes--the first forms and enduring themes of myth--will show that they are already present with the flowering of civilization. AND NONE ARE ADDED OVER THE SUBSEQUENT MILLENNIA. Though quite remarkable from the usual vantage point (which assumes an expanding corpus of myth through history), the fact is expected under the Saturn model. I've stated often that there are hundreds of archetypal themes of myth. But there is, at root, a unifying thread, which I called the "One Story Told Around the World." The statement is indeed preposterous, but of this truth I no longer have any doubt. All of humanity experienced the same events. I believe that a series of snapshots of the polar configuration, together with animations illustrating the seamless connections between the different phases, will do the most to make the outrageous claims believable. It will also lend enough clarity and specificity for readers to see how easily the model will be disproved if our claims are fundamentally false. For a few weeks now I've been musing over the ways to establish the core principles and work outward from there, so that something more than random details will be evident. Though entirely understandable, the popular sense of randomness is the most pervasive misperception of myth. There is no such thing as a random original theme of myth. Randomness enters the picture only as the archetypes are subjected to localization, a process which can only introduce contradictions. As a testament to the unity of world mythology, I list below the archetypal personalities of myth. It's a small list. There are no others.
_UNIVERSAL MONARCH _Though multiple bodies are involved in the planetary configuration, one planet in particular came to be identified as unified power, presiding over cosmic beginnings. That planet was Saturn. In this sense it is not inappropriate to call the archaic god, the subject of the One Story, the god Saturn, so long as it is clearly understood that other planetary powers in the configuration provided distinctive aspects of that god. Our first "snapshot" depicts the universal sovereign just prior to the visual displacement of the planetary bodies in conjunction. It is with their visual displacement that aspects of the unified god begin to emerge as separate powers, becoming the active forces in the "creation" and setting in motion a series of more complex events. With the emergence of distinct and independent forms, arising from aspects of a primeval Unity, other archetypal personalities take the stage, all standing in a fundamental relationship to the sovereign god we have called the Universal Monarch, and all playing distinctive roles in the One Story
_QUEEN OF HEAVEN _Wherever you find the Universal Monarch you will find close at hand the ancient mother goddess--the feminine power whom the Sumerians called Inanna, the Queen of Heaven, and the Babylonians called Ishtar. For the Egyptians the prominent goddess figures include Isis, Hathor, and Sekhmet, each with numerous counterparts in their own and in other lands. Familiar names of the great goddess would include the Greek Aphrodite, Athena, and Artemis, or the Latin Venus, Minerva, and Diana, but many hundreds of counterparts could be named, all expressing a similar complex of ideas. While the goddess will at times appear as the mother of the universal sovereign, the more common role is as the god's daughter or spouse. When the goddess idea is traced to its earliest roots, one notes two crucial themes reflected in the symbolism: 1) The goddess is the central, animating source of the sovereign god's power. She is his "radiance," his "glory," even his "life,"--a role she fills concretely in her capacity as the god's central, luminous eye, heart, or soul. All of the leading Egyptian and Mesopotamian goddesses, for example, reveal this underlying character. 2) The departure of the goddess begins a series of events leading to a descent into chaos, the onset of world-destroying catastrophe and the perceived "death" of the sovereign himself, whose flaming "soul" rages in the sky in the form of the angry, lamenting, or warring goddess. The most common form of the raging goddess is the female serpent or dragon attacking the world. It will be our contention that the full complex of goddess images answers to the role of Venus in the planetary configuration. With a visual model as a reference we will see that the original "beauty" or "radiance" of the great goddess, her "life-giving" attributes; her role as "star" par excellence; her centrality in relation to the universal sovereign; her birth as an independent power; and her terrible aspect, are all rooted in the highly concrete visual appearances of Venus through two prominent phases, one quasi-stable, the other highly unstable, unpredictable, and violent. But a third, most fundamental attribute of the goddess must be mentioned as well: that is her role as the mother of another archetypal figure.
_WARRIOR-HERO _This is the great national hero, originally the Demiurge, the servant of the Universal Monarch, but passing into later myth as the laboring warrior, messenger or servant of a great chief or renowned ruler. He is the Hercules archetype, a figure combining knowledge and brutish strength, quick wit, and episodic foolishness. He defeats the chaos monsters in primordial times, and he reconfigures the world. This is the most active personality in world mythology, clearly dominating the more developed chronicles and epic literature, while the more passive Universal Monarch fades into the background. The warrior-hero is the prototype of the famous tricksters and buffoons of later myth and folklore, flowering into innumerable tribal variations. Noteworthy instances of this warrior archetype would include the Egyptian Shu, Horus and Sept, Sumerian Enki, Damuzi and Ningirsu, Akkadian Ea, Ninurta and Nergal, Hindu Indra, Norse Thor, Greek Ares and Hercules, Latin Mars, Aztec Huitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca, North American Coyote and Raven, to name the barest few among thousands. The comparative approach will identify this warrior figure as the planet Mars. In the Saturn model, that means the innermost circle or sphere in the pictographic representations under discussion. In the myths, Mars' displacement from that visual position is most commonly recorded as the "birth of the hero" and the "descent of the hero," two themes of immense impact on the ancient world. But numerous other themes must be confronted as well. Reducing this complexity to its most crucial details, four principles must be noted here. 1) In the earliest versions of the story, the warrior-hero is born from the womb of the mother goddess, who is Venus. The "birth of the hero" means the displacement of Mars from the position depicted in our initial snapshot of the planetary configuration. 2) Periodic movement of the warrior-hero along the world axis occurs, a motion associated with the visual descent and ascent of the god. This movement along the axis also bears a distinctive relationship to episodes of catastrophe. 3) The reunion, or consorting, of the warrior-hero with the mother goddess was celebrated by every ancient culture_. This pervasive story was rooted in the visual conjunction of Mars and Venus as they drew nearer to each other in the configuration. From this conjunction arose the repeated myth of the hero's liaison with the daughter or spouse of a renowned "king," or the hero consorting with his own mother. 4) In connection with the descent of the god, a cosmic column appeared, a luminous stream stretching along the world axis. This cosmic column will be the world mountain, or the mountain upon which the hero was "exposed" at birth, or the mythic river into which the hero was cast at birth. By this association the hero himself was inseparably linked to the world pillar. Originally, it was his essence as the Atlas figure, supporting the turning sphere of "heaven" (Saturn) upon his shoulders.
_PRIMEVAL SEVEN _These satellite figures are presented in a variety of contexts, as seers or wise men, archangels, patriarchs, children, dwarves, stones, eyes, stars, orbs, heads of the chaos monster. They are the first (but not the only) reason for the sanctity of the number seven in ancient symbolism. We meet these gods as seven stones of fate, or seven demons in Sumerian and Akkadian symbolism; seven eyes of God in the book of Zechariah; seven Watchers of Enoch; seven stars and seven spirits of God in the book of Revelation; Seven Sages of Arabian epic literature, Seven Immortal Fates of the Persians; seven Rishi of the Hindu Vedas. Seven daughters of Aphrodite, or Seven Sisters in Greek myth. Seven heads of the primeval serpent or dragon in Egyptian, Babylonian, Hebrew, Christian, Hindu, and Mesoamerican traditions. In more than one land, constellational astrology eventually localized the Primeval Seven as stars of Ursa Major or the Pleiades. In the Saturn model these will be the seven moons or "satellites" originally seen in the presence of Saturn. (This point cannot really be clarified until we take up the polar enclosure, the visual dwelling of the primeval seven.)
_CHAOS MONSTER _Here we meet the darker, more menacing powers, possessing an often-veiled link to aspects of the mother goddess or warrior-hero. Of these darker creatures none is more prominent than the cosmic serpent or dragon, a monster whose attack upon the world is synchronous with the twilight of the gods, and whose ultimate defeat signals the birth of a new age or, symbolically, a new year. Babylonian Tiamat. Egyptian dragon of Apep. Greek Typhon. But within every culture, endless variations will be found: hundreds of monsters held responsible for the primeval catastrophe, each providing a different nuance, a different accent, a different way of remembering the cosmic agent of Doomsday. Though we must oversimplify things in stating the planetary identifications, the general rule is that the female chaos monster is the terrible aspect of the mother goddess, who is Venus, while the male chaos monster is the terrible aspect of the warrior-hero Mars. Both planets participate directly in the unstable and catastrophic phases, yet paradoxically both are linked to the vanquishing of chaos and renewal of the world. Moreover, the close conjunction or interaction of the two bodies does not allow for an unequivocal distinction between the two, as I will seek to make clear.
_CHAOS HORDES _These are the companions of the monster figures. They are the swarming powers of disorder and calamity, the fiends of darkness--flaming, devouring demons which so many magical rites were contrived to ward off. From the Norse Valkyries to the Greek Erinyes, from the Babylonian Pazuzu-demons to the Egyptian "Fiends of Set," every culture remembered the onslaught of these chaos demons, moving across the heavens as a sky-darkening cloud and ushering in the cosmic night. In their earliest expressions, they do not just announce the primeval catastrophe, they ARE the catastrophe. The chaos hordes signify the cometary debris fields and gas or dust clouds particularly prominent in the unstable phases of the configuration. Mythically, they are to retinues of the goddess and hero in their terrible aspects, while also giving shape to the bodies of these monsters. And yet, in the phases of stability, they become the raw material of creation itself, giving form to a luminous habitation in the heavens. Both the polar column and the polar enclosure are constituted from this raw material, which the Egyptians called the "primeval matter," the alchemists' prima materia.
_REJUVENATED SOVEREIGN _Lastly, there is the compelling personality of the dying and resurrected or transformed god-king, whose return to life is reflected in the dramas of the ancient New Year. As a global symbol, the "New Year" recalls the passing from one age to another, a remembrance often celebrated annually but on many other schedules as well. Though his identity is inseparably tied to the Universal Monarch, the resurrected god nevertheless emerges in distinction from that god as his son. He is simultaneously a younger version, and the rejuvenated form of his father, and his appearance or "reappearance" is synonymous with the renewal of a world which had fallen into darkness and discord. Such appears to be the underlying character of the Egyptian Osiris, Akkadian Marduk; Persian Ahura Mazda; Norse Balder; Hebrew Yahweh; Phoenician Bel, Greek Zeus, Roman Jupiter. This archetypal. renewed god will frequently appear as a more passive figure in contrast to the mother goddess and warrior-hero personalities, both of whom are highly active in the break between world ages and are typically involved directly in the episodes leading to the sovereign god's transfiguration or renewal. It is common in our time to represent the coming of the New Year as the departure of the elder "Father Time"--along with the emergence of the ever-young or new-born babe or "child" of the New Year. We are simply extending an ancient tradition whose meaning we have forgotten. The rejuvenated sovereign is the planet Jupiter, not visible in the illustrated phase (our first snapshot) because it was hidden behind Saturn, but becoming visible with the disruption of the collinear system, and emerging as the apparent re-birth of the original sovereign. Indeed, the identities of Jupiter and Saturn are so intertwined that we are really dealing with two aspects of the same mythical figure--the god-king's original form as Saturn, and his renewed and transformed state as Jupiter. Mythically, the younger Saturn is Jupiter, and the elder Jupiter is Saturn.
_Additional Notes _In the above listing, while we have not separated the chaos monster into its male and female aspects, we do separate the Universal Monarch into his elder and younger versions. So while there are different ways one might distinguish or count the archetypal personalities, we arrive at an acid test. Do the listed categories actually encompass the vast layers of world mythology? While I have no intent to minimize the presence of ambiguous or unexplained details, the significance of the structure should not be minimized either, for the implications are quite astounding. Patterns do not exist without a cause. And that means that an explanation of the patterns must be possible. The implications become all the more astounding as one begins to see that each of the personalities has a defined role in the One Story. As will become clear, each archetypal figure achieves a turn of the prism, putting the focus on a particular aspect of the One Story and providing more colorful action and detail. But throughout these dramas, the core personalities of myth all know each other and interact in highly meaningful ways. The question, therefore, must be asked: what events could have unleashed human imagination in this way, inspiring a story so powerful as to have retained its underlying structure for thousands of years? Structure implies coherence, an integrity between the parts. Clearly, human imagination must have gone wild to have produced the incredible vistas, the complex personalities, and the magical events of world mythology. But structure is there too, and structure means that human imagination was not operating in a vacuum. It is the structure that directs our attention to common experiences and to the external references, without which a unified substratum would be impossible. ---
_CARNIVAL _A Kroniatalk Discussion
_Ted Bond queries: Someone very recently said that Carnival was a New Year's celebration. Carnival of course is in the Spring and is a Spring equinox festival. If it is a New Year's festival it dates from the time when the year began with March (as reflected in the names of the last four months of our year). The Jewish New Year was also originally a Spring festival, according to Genesis. However the Winter solstice festival, which is our Christmas, certainly was dropped on to the pagan Saturnalia (Yule), and this is very close to our New Year. Was there an ancient New Year's festival following closely on the Saturnalia celebrating the arrival of Jupiter (the reborn Saturn) as the Universal Monarch? Can anyone sort this out?
_Michel Tavir responds: Carnival, which emerged from the Saturnalia, symbolized the death of the old year, and took place in the late winter. Practically it was time to pig out on the remains of the last harvest, while they were still edible. Then came the New Year, which until the late middle-ages coincided with the Spring equinox. Some (I think I remember some pope conniving with a French king, maybe François the 1st) found it more politically expedient to move it to shortly after Christmas. There is still a trace of the "original" New Year in the April's Fool day.
_Dave Talbott adds: Ted, you might find of interest Theodore Gaster's little volume, "The New Year". Gaster was one of the true experts on comparative myth and ritual. Our calendar is filled with New Year's celebrations. Even Halloween has to be included. (It traces to the Celtic New Year.) Either a solstice or an equinox timing of "New Year's" celebrations was most logical, though of course the archetypal event being recalled each year had nothing to do with either a solstice or an equinox. This is the way localization of myth works. First there was extraordinary and devastating event, remembered as the End of the World To commemorate the event, together with the subsequent renewal of the world, ancient symbolists re-enacted the fall into chaos, the displacement of the elder Father Time, and the regeneration of the world (Father time reappearing as a newborn babe). In this sense the New Year's festival must be set alongside others celebrations which were not annual but set on longer timetables. The Aztec 52 year cycle is a good example--symbolic destruction of the world followed by a new lease on life for another cycle. The Egyptian Sed Festival is a "New Year's" festival every thirty years, which happens (?) to accord pretty well with a Saturn cycle. Of the New Year's concept, Gaster writes: "... No other festival has been celebrated on so many different dates or in so many seemingly different ways.... The more one examines them, however, the clearer does it become that these observances which seem at first sight so different and diverse are really no more than variations upon the same theme and that though the accompanying emotions may have changed and though he may be completely unconscious of this fact, the behavior of the modern sophisticate on New year's Eve or New year's morn stems ultimately from the same roots as does that of his more primitive brethren." The ancient celebrations were characterized by mock battles in the streets, great commotion, lamentations, joviality, celebrants in disguised, monstrous forms amid the chaotic throngs--and of course (in more than one land), the fall of a flaming wheel down a hill, or the running amok of a "chariot" through the streets (Phaeton revisited). What is most interesting is that, as you follow the celebrations backwards, you see an increasing scale of drama and literalism, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. Attempts to account for a global archetype of this sort through feeble references to the annual course of the Sun only put an exclamation point to the failure of modern scholarship. The experts cannot see beyond the symbol to the thing symbolized. ---