THOTH ON ANCIENT CIVILIZATION

For Reference

https://www.quora.com/What-did-the-pyramids-look-like-thousands-of-years-ago

ANCIENT CIVILIZATION

The Golden Age occurred after the Great Flood (3300BC) concurrently with the Ice Age, but civilization didn’t develop until the Younger Dryas cataclysm (2600BC) ended the combined Ice Age & Golden Age. Before the Y.D. cataclysm humans had little need for language. After the cataclysm there was a collective yearning for the return of the Golden Age, so people organized in order to improve survival chances and to try to bring back the Golden Age. Megalithic structures were built to resemble the conditions under the Saturn Configuration with its polar column, which resembled a “stairway to heaven”. In the image above you can see that the pyramids resembled stairways to heaven. After the Giza pyramids were built, another cataclysm occurred c. 2300BC due to tsunamis caused by meteor strikes in the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. The flooding caused salt incrustation in the pyramids and the sphinx. The following Thoth excerpts should help explain the development of civilization. I may use some of this material, as well as some from Cardona’s books etc, to compile my chapter on Ancient Civilization for my book in progress at zzzzzzz.substack.com/p/ancient-myths-are-planetary-history. The chapters that are already finished there need sprucing up too. I hope to do that, but not real soon.

Thoth Vol I, No. 1: January 25, 1997
SATURN THEORY OVERVIEW By David Talbott
https://saturniancosmology.org/othergroup/thoth/thoth01.txt
I. The origins of ancient mythology; the birth of the first civilizations; a violent history of the solar system: these are the primary themes of what has been called the "Saturn Theory."
In the broadest sense, what I have proposed is an explanation of the myth-making epoch as a whole. Astronomers and astrophysicists, historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and students of ancient myth and religion are asked to reconsider the most common assumptions about ancient history, including many that have rarely if ever been doubted.
The underlying principles of the theory are these:
1. Major changes in the planetary order, some involving Earth- threatening catastrophes, have occurred within human memory.
2. Through myth, ritual and symbol around the world, our ancestors preserved a global record of these tumultuous events.
3. The first civilizations arose from ritual practices honoring, imitating and memorializing these events and the planetary powers involved.
It should go without saying that if these principles are correct, there is an extraordinary evidential value to the mythical-cosmological underpinnings of the first civilizations. Hence, the communications challenge: this evidential value is virtually never acknowledged by conventional schools.
Nevertheless, the model I have offered holds one advantage that prior catastrophist notions based on ancient testimony have lacked. It is specific enough to be easily disproved on its own ground if wrong. Whatever else one may think of the thesis, it meets this test of a good theory.
THE POLAR CONFIGURATION
The theory holds that a unique congregation of planets preceded the planetary system familiar to us today. For earthbound witnesses, the result was a spectacular, at times highly unified apparition in the heavens, the obsessive focus of human attention around the world.
For more than 20 years, I have claimed that this fear-inspiring image once stretched across the northern sky, towering over ancient starworshippers. I termed this planetary arrangement the polar configuration because it was centered on the north celestial Pole. And I have 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 star worshippers.
A vast field of data is therefore available to the investigator. Remarkably similar pictures of a "sun" in the sky, revealing no similarity to our sun today. A pictographic crescent placed on the orb of the "sun" and a radiant "star" placed squarely in its center. The universal chronicles of a cosmic mountain, a pillar of fire and light rising along the world axis. The myth of a central sun or motionless sun at the celestial pole. Identification of this ancient "sun" with the planet Saturn in early astronomies. A radiant city or temple of heaven, providing the prototype for the sacred habitation on earth. Global memories of a star-goddess with long-flowing hair. An angry goddess raging across the sky with wildly disheveled hair, threatening to destroy the world. A flaming serpent or dragon disturbing the celestial motions or attacking the land. An ancestral warrior or hero, born from the womb of the star-goddess to vanquish the chaos-serpent or dragon.
Is it even possible that such diverse motifs could have a unified explanation? Well, one fact remains uncontested after many years of publishing on this subject. The hypothesized planetary configuration does predict or account for hundreds of ancient themes never before explained--and at a level of detail or specificity that could not be denied. Indeed, I have gone so far as to brashly claim that not a single general motif of ancient myth, ritual or symbolism is left unexplained in the most straightforward way by the model. And that's what I mean when I say the model supports a general theory of ancient symbolism as a whole.
It needs to be emphasized, therefore, that the historical argument for the polar configuration is fully testable against a massive historical record. And I would hope that this will provide some assurance to those unnerved by the source material (ancient testimony): if the model is fundamentally incorrect, the experts on ancient myth and symbolism will have no trouble whatsoever refuting it.
-------------------- Vine Deloria, author of the recently-published book, *Red Earth, White Lies*, has asked a couple of questions which I would like to address. But not in one shot, because the questions are too fundamental for that. I'd like to see if I can divide the issues into segments that could make for useful discussion.
The Saturn theory arose from a "historical argument," in the sense that the argument relates to the human past, as implied by the details of human memory in ancient times and by human artifacts. I shall offer this series of summaries as an exercise in clarifying the historical argument, without the aid of visual presentation.
One obvious and immediate question is whether something as ambiguous as myth could actually qualify as "evidence"? The historical argument focuses on *points of agreement* in the memories of widespread races, suggesting levels of coherence often missed by historians and anthropologists, and raising the possibility that this coherence arises from a core of human experience that has been missed as well.
There is an overarching idea in this argument. We've not only misunderstood the past, we've failed to recognize the consistency of ancient memory in pointing to extraordinary events never considered by modern science. Remarkably, every motive of our early ancestors directs our attention to experiences impossible to comprehend in terms of any natural phenomena occurring today. This consistency will be seen even at the most fundamental levels of human memory, in the most deeply-rooted themes of the first civilizations--
The universal memory of a former age of the gods. The universal memory of an ancestral Golden Age, inaugurating the age of the gods. The universal memory of a celestial "king of the world" whose life inspired the ancestral leap into civilization. Descriptions of the gods as luminaries of immense size and power, wielding weapons of thunder and stone. The universal claim that the ancient world evolved by critical phases or cycles, punctuated by sweeping catastrophe. Global traditions of gods and heroes ruling for a time, then departing amid terrifying spectacles and upheavals. The frequently-stated transfiguration of the departed gods into distant "stars". The identification of these ruling gods with planets in the first astronomies. The relentless urge of starworshippers to draw pictures of celestial forms never seen in our sky. Their desperate yearning to recover the semblance of a lost cosmic order. Their collective efforts to replicate, in architecture, the towering forms claimed to have existed in primeval times. Their festive recreations, through mystery plays and symbolic rites, of cosmic violence and disorder. Their repetition, through ritual sacrifice, of the deaths or ordeals of the gods. Their brutal and ritualistic wars of expansion, celebrated as a repetition of the cosmic devastation wrought in the wars of the gods.
Such motives as these constitute, in fact, the most readily verifiable underpinnings of ancient ritual, myth and symbol. How strange that in their incessant glance backwards, the builders of the first civilizations never remembered anything resembling the natural world in which we live!
What is needed in the face of unusual but widely repeated memories is brutal intellectual honesty. How did human consciousness, emerging from the womb of nature, converge on the same improbable ideas *contradicting* nature? For centuries we've lived under the illusion that our ancestors simply made up explanations of natural phenomena they didn't understand. But that's not the problem. What the myth-makers interpreted or explained through stories and symbols and ritual re- enactments is an unrecognizable world, a world of alien sights and sounds, of celestial forms, of cosmic spectacles and earth-shaking events that do not occur in our world. *That* is the problem.
>From an evaluation of the global themes of ancient cultures, we have hypothesized a world order never imagined by mainstream theory--a world in which *planets* moved on different courses, appearing huge in the sky. Heaven-spanning celestial forms dominated human imagination to the point of obsession at the time of civilization's birth.
Our contention will be that hundreds of ancient themes speak for a unified experience, an experience more specific in context and detail than any of us had ever imagined when we started our research. No universal theme stands alone or in isolation from any of the others. All are connected. All speak for the presence of a coherent memory beneath the surface of seemingly random detail.
In offering these summaries, I am not asking or expecting anyone to embrace the extraordinary theory of planetary history involved, only to consider highly interesting evidence. One of the values of this re- interpretation of evidence is that the model *works*. It explains the subject matter. Even if you do not for an instant believe that the suggested events occurred, merely discovering the active memory will throw remarkable new light on the ancient structures of human consciousness.
In the course of these summaries, questions and challenges will be welcome, and wherever possible I will try to incorporate these into the narrative as we go along.
Dave

THOTH A Catastrophics Newsletter VOL I, No. 2 February 5, 1997
https://saturniancosmology.org/othergroup/thoth/thoth02.txt
SATURN THEORY, OVERVIEW (2) By David Talbott
... I listed several fundamental and universal principles in my first submission. But it occurs to me that, in working from the general to the specific, I did not start at the *most* elementary level. For example, Vine asked the question, How many mythical themes are there? Well, it all depends. At one level--the most fundamental level of all--there is only one story, told with a thousand symbols.
Here is rough paraphrase of "THE ONE STORY TOLD AROUND THE WORLD."
Once the world was quite a different place. In the beginning, we were ruled by the central luminary of the sky, the motionless sun, presiding over an age of natural abundance and cosmic harmony. Creator-king, father of kings, founder of the kingship rites. And this earliest remembered time was the *exemplary* epoch, the Golden Age, the standard for all later generations.
But the ancient order was disrupted and the entire cosmos fell into confusion, when the Universal Monarch tumbled from his appointed station. Then the hordes of chaos were set loose and all of creation slipped into a cosmic night, the gods themselves battling furiously in the heavens.
And yet, from this descent into chaos, a new world emerged, now re-configured, but with the Universal Monarch himself, rejuvenated and transformed, assuming his rightful place in the heavens.
THE END
Is it really possible that this *one story*--a story so pristine and elementary--was remembered around the world? Is it really possible that all of the recurring storylines of world mythology are only a part of this singular story? Yes, I will swear by this. In fact I am eager for a challenge to this sweeping and seemingly outrageous statement. (A challenge will often help me to clarify such statements, in a context of interest to the one issuing the challenge.)
But remember: I DID NOT SAY THAT I GAVE YOU THE WHOLE STORY. For example, I did not mention the mother goddess, and I did not mention the ancestral warrior-hero. Both are inseparable linked to this one story. But we're going for simplicity here.
Now let's go back to the most pervasive motivations of early civilizations, a topic I noted in my earlier submission. Is it possible to reduce the cited motives of ancient cultures to more elementary principles, without falling into the reductionist fallacy? I think it is, indeed, possible. There is a singular principle, for example, that is beyond dispute: the builders of the first civilizations were incessantly looking backwards. In the first expressions of civilization, human imagination was dominated entirely by *things remembered*.
Moreover, two contradictory impulses will be discerned in this alignment to the past, and neither will make any sense in terms of conventional assumptions about human history. One impulse is nostalgia, a yearning for something remembered above all else, but lost. The second impulse is terror: the pervasive, ever-present fear that something terrible that happened in the past will happen again. No civilization in the ancient world failed to express these contrasting motives, reflected in monument-building, commemorative rites, hymns and prayers to the gods, kingship rites, ritual sacrifice, and holy war.
How is this to be explained? One possibility has been consistently overlooked by the specialists--the possibility that celestial events of an unimaginable scale cast their shadow over all of civilization.
But why do nostalgia and terror exist side by side in such a paradoxical relationship? A comparative approach will show that this is no accident, that a unified memory lies behind both of the expressions--the memory of an ancient "paradisal" condition, the mythical "Golden Age," giving way to overwhelming catastrophe, universal darkness, cosmic tumult, and wars of the gods.
Look at the deepest yearning of civilization's builders, and you will see the yearning for paradise, a desperate longing to recover the lost Golden Age. For the Egyptians this was the revered Golden Age of Ra, and for the ancient Sumerians it was the Golden Age of An--a theme reverberating around the world.
But now look at the deepest fears of the same peoples, and you will see the Doomsday anxiety, the terror of the great catastrophe. This is not an isolated memory, but a memory inseparably linked to the theme of the ancestral paradise. The remembered events were not just catastrophic; they were the events that brought the Golden Age to an end, when the sky was overrun by chaos.
Two seemingly incompatible motives trace to a common experience, and both bring us back to the ONE STORY TOLD AROUND THE WORLD. Hence, the implication cannot be avoided. Something extraordinary was remembered by the first skywatchers, something profound and yet unexplained.

Thoth Vol I, No. 4: March 2, 1997
https://saturniancosmology.org/othergroup/thoth/thoth04.txt
SATURN THEORY, OVERVIEW (3) By David Talbott
In seeking out the roots of ancient experience, one will continually face an issue concerning the use of ancient testimony as evidence. How can the disparate threads of memory, expressed in seemingly contradictory symbols, through stories that are often barely intelligible, and in archaic words of uncertain meaning, ever provide a dependable guide for reconstructing cosmic events?
The first essential is to expose the *substratum* of memory, and this can only be accomplished by limiting what counts as evidence. Only broadly-repeated themes are to be included in the early phases of the inquiry, and only the clearest facts, or undisputed principles, qualify as building blocks in the reconstruction.
When I speak of the "historical argument" for the Saturn theory, I am referring to all sources of evidence suggesting *things remembered*. Before the Egyptians, Sumerians, Hindus, or Greeks ever raised a temple, they would consciously and deliberately look backwards to a remembered event. The foundation ceremonies would *reenact* an archetypal occasion in the lives of the gods--the construction of a vast dwelling in primeval times, a "temple" brought forth by the Universal Monarch, a temple "floating on the clouds." Similarly, when the warrior-kings of Egypt and Assyria and numerous other lands launched their campaigns against neighboring peoples, they summoned memories of cosmic catastrophe, when the gods themselves battled in the heavens. Symbolically, foreign armies meant "the fiends of darkness," and were to be dealt with accordingly. The warrior-kings saw themselves defeating neighboring forces in the same way that, in primeval times, the great gods devastated and controlled the Chaos Hordes, when these dark powers overwhelmed the cosmic order.
It is a remarkable fact that the builders of civilization declared, with one voice, that the first cities and first kingdoms organized in the ancient world, the first pictographs drawn on rock or on temple walls, the vast complexes of sacred festivals and rites, had their prototypes in dramatic events occurring in the age of the gods. Ancient art and architecture, hymns and prayers, the origins of writing, the rise of kingship, nationalistic wars of expansion, ritual sacrifice, the first athletic competition, the roots of drama, tragedy, and comedy--and all other forms of collective activity associated with the flowering of civilization--were commemorative in nature, remembering, re-enacting, re-living, and honoring above all else the archetypal events, when the gods themselves ruled the world. Such an idea may seem incomprehensible to us, but there is no escaping the festive and commemorative aspects of emerging civilizations, all pointing *backwards* to remembered events.
Hence, the field of evidence we must draw upon includes literally every feature distinguishing these civilizations from the prior, more pastoral epoch of human history. That is a huge library of evidence!
Moreover, there is a taproot feeding the explosive, upward movement of the first civilizations. That taproot is the ONE STORY TOLD AROUND THE WORLD. Every recurring cultural theme, in truth, is linked in the most explicit ways to this global memory. But don't forget that the memory is at once pristinely simple and highly complex, depending on which level you are looking at. To the figure of the Universal Monarch, the subject of the ONE STORY, I added six additional archetypal figures of myth, brashly asserting that these personalities all intersect with the ONE STORY in highly specific ways, and claiming that the myth-making epoch has not presented us with any other elementary types. If true, this will mean that the pervasive motives of the first civilizations, cited above, must bear a direct relationship to the *remembered activities* of the seven archetypal figures. Hence, this is a testable hypothesis. If it is incorrect, it can and will be easily disproved under the groundrules we have proposed. ...

Thoth Vol I, No. 6: March 16, 1997
https://saturniancosmology.org/othergroup/thoth/thoth06.txt
THE MYTH OF THE GOLDEN AGE (PART 2) By David Talbott
In their myths, rites and hymns the ancient Sumerians contrasted their own time to the earliest remembered age--what they called "the days of old," or "that day," when the gods "gave man abundance, the day when vegetation flourished." This was when the supreme god An "engendered the year of abundance." To this primeval age, every Sumerian priest looked back as the reference for the preferred order of things, which was lost through later conflict and deluge.
In the city of Eridu at the mouth of the Euphrates, the priests recalled a Golden Age prior to familiar history. The predecessors of their race, it was claimed, had formerly reposed in the paradise of Dilmun, called the "Pure Place" of man's genesis. This lost paradise of Dilmun, about which scholars have debated for decades, is strangely reminiscent of the paradise of Eden.
"That place was pure, that place was clean^ت In Dilmun...the lion mangled not. The wolf ravaged not the lambs," the Sumerian texts read. The inhabitants of this paradise lived in a state of near perfection, in communion with the gods, drinking the waters of life and enjoying unbounded prosperity.
Ancient Egypt, an acknowledged cradle of civilization, preserved a remarkably similar memory. Not just in their religious and mythical texts, but in every sacred activity, the Egyptians incessantly looked backwards, to events of the Tep Zepi. The phrase means the "First Time," a time of perfection "before rage or clamor or strife or uproar had come about," as the texts themselves put it. This was the Golden Age of Ra, and the memories of that time echoed through centuries of Egyptian thought. "The land was in abundance," the texts say. "There was no year of hunger. . .Walls did not fall; thorns did not pierce in the time of the Primeval Gods."
Or from another text: "there was no unrighteousness in the land, no crocodile seized, no snake bit in the time of the First Gods."
Cosmic harmony. Abundance. Paradise. To this Golden Age, according to the great nineteenth century scholar Francois Lenormant, the Egyptians "continually looked back with regret and envy." The golden age of Ra was, for the Egyptians, the Great Example setting a standard for all later ages.
A surprising fact emerges. The legend of the Golden Age is as old as civilization. And the implications are well worth pondering. A coherent set of ideas has survived all of the twists and turns of cultural evolution for at least five thousand years--and on every continent. Now that's an astonishing verification of the durability of myth! Many of us had always thought of myth as the outcome of reckless invention--illiterate savages entertaining themselves by contriving magical stories out of nothing. Imagine such a process going on for thousands of years, and ask yourself if any possibility of a universal memory would remain.
Remember that the myth-makers did not just recount a charming tale; they strove desperately to recover what was lost. In the infancy of civilization collective activity reflects a singular reference to the age of the gods--the honoring of the gods through celebration, representation, reenactment, codification, and massive construction activity. In fact, there are numerous grounds for saying that civilization itself was the outcome of this fundamentally religious activity.
Perhaps the most accomplished analyst of mythology in modern times was the late Mircea Eliade, chairman of the Department of History of Religions at the University of Chicago, and editor of the Encyclopedia of Religion. From his meticulous, lifelong survey of the subject, professor Eliade drew a stunning conclusion: literally every component of early civilizations--from religion to art and architecture--expressed symbolically the desire to recover and to re-live the lost Golden Age. That which symbolically transported the participant back to the First Time, the Golden Age, was sacred. That which did not was transient and mundane, of no interest.
Around the world, early man yearned for a return to paradise. Every coronation of a king, every New Year's festival, monumental construction, every recitation of temple hymns and prayers, every holy war, every sacrifice to the gods was motivated by a desire to recapture some aspect of the Golden Age, to live, if only for a symbolic moment, in the original age of the gods.

Thoth Vol I, No. 7: March 23, 1997
https://saturniancosmology.org/othergroup/thoth/thoth07.txt
THE MYTH OF THE UNIVERSAL MONARCH (1) By David Talbott
It's amazing how frequently the earliest-remembered events occur on a mythscape of uncertain location! Where *was* the ancient paradise? Where did the gods and goddesses and heroes of the mythical epoch actually live? Beyond the north wind? Atop the world's highest mountain? In the land of the rising sun? On a lost island in the middle of the sea?
If anything has been proven by the flood of ancient texts that have come to light in the past hundred and fifty years, it is that the central personalities of myth did not, in the original concepts, dwell on earth. The theater in which the great mythical events were first played out was the sky.
Here is an indisputable fact: If you will trace the claimed history of any ancient nation backwards, you will, in every instance, reach a point at which man lives in the shadow of the gods. This distant epoch--what the Egyptians called the "time of the primeval gods"--cries out for clarification. Originally, the gods rule the world. First in an age of gold, but this age is followed by catastrophe and cosmic disharmony. That is the archetypal memory repeated around the world.
In their earliest historical expressions, the gods are celestial through and through. As the stories are told and re-told across the centuries, however, these celestial powers are progressively localized, re-entering the chronicles in increasingly human guise. All of the profound cosmic events expressed in the earliest ritual, symbol, and myth are eventually brought down to earth. In the typical instance, through a relentless process of identification, the gods eventually emerge as legendary *ancestors* of the nation telling the story..
Each of the nations recalling the Golden Age, for example, insisted that their own forefathers had descended from the gods. At first glance, this pervasive claim will appear as sheer arrogance, a nationalistic pride carried to absurd extremes. But the origins of the idea have never been adequately appreciated. In truth, this worldwide racial claim, that "we are descended from the gods," or that "our race was originally divine," or "we were the favored children of the gods," offers a key to the primitive experience: it confirms early man's unqualified sense of connection to the enigmatic celestial powers so vividly portrayed in the myths. And one cannot afford to ignore the equally significant principle: that these celestial powers are *no longer present*, no longer visible and active in the world.
Our subject, in other words, is far more than an enchanting idea. To explore the mythical age of the gods is to confront the driving force of the first civilizations--the most powerful memory in human history
Some of the particulars of this myth are remarkable. All of the well-preserved myths of the Golden Age, for example, say that this magical epoch was distinguished by the rule of a Universal Monarch, a celestial king of the world. On every continent, it was declared that before a king ever ruled on earth, a prototype of kings arose in heaven, and it was this "best of kings" who had founded the original paradise.
For the Egyptians it was the creator-king Ra, for the Sumerians it was the high god An, from whom kingship descended. Similarly, the Hindu Brahma, the Chinese Huang-ti, Mexican Quetzalcoatl, Mayan Itzam Na and numerous counterparts among other nations, all preside over the Golden Age, while establishing the ideals and principles of kingship.
In Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, China, Greece, Italy, northern Europe, pre-Columbian Mexico and Central America--in fact, wherever the institution of kingship arose--the royal genealogies lead backwards to this exemplary ruler, celebrated as the first in a sacred line of kings. The different myths recount in rich detail how the god built a great temple or city in primeval times, invented the alphabet, or taught a new language to a pre-literate race. They say it was he who invented the wheel, introduced the science of agriculture, instituted laws, and taught the true religion--in short, brought to a barbarous race all of the arts of civilization.
There is also a crucial connection here. This "ancestor-king" is so completely identified with the Golden Age that it is impossible to separate the one myth from the other. There is no Golden Age without a founding king, no founding king without a Golden Age!
The fabulous chronology of Egyptian kings or pharaohs offers a telling example. In his sweeping history of ancient Egypt, the Greek historian Herodotus enumerates the early lineage of kings. He tells us that there was a first king of Egypt, and his name was Helios. This first king of Egypt was not a mere mortal! He was a celestial power.
Of course Herodotus was simply translating an Egyptian name into Greek. For the Egyptians, the institution of kingship began with the rule of the primeval sun god Atum or Ra, who, prior to his retirement from the world, founded the Tep Zepi, the First Time, or Golden Age.
In Egypt all of the kingship rites point backwards to the age of Ra, a supreme god celebrated from one end of Egypt to the other as the prototype of kings. Indeed, every historical king's or pharaoh's authority derived from a connection to the ancestral king, for as the best Egyptologists have pointed out, the pharaoh was *accredited as such* by the claim that the blood of Atum-Ra coursed through his veins.
In rites deeply rooted in Egyptian cosmology, each new king symbolically ascended the throne of Ra, took as spouse Ra's own mistress, the mother goddess, wielded Ra's scepter, built temples and cities modeled after Ra's temple or city in the sky, adorned himself with the beard of the god, wore the crown of Ra as his own, and defeated neighboring enemies in just the way that Ra had defeated the hordes of darkness or chaos in the Tep Zepi. Identification of local king and celestial prototype was absolute.
Such is the universal tradition: every king was, in a magical way, the Universal Monarch reborn. And this is why, among all ancient nations, the chroniclers of kingship took such pains to establish the unbroken line of kings: Only by proclaiming that the local king carried the blood of his predecessor, the Universal Monarch, could they certify his suitability for the prescribed function of kings.
Dave

Thoth Vol I, No. 8: April 5, 1997
https://saturniancosmology.org/othergroup/thoth/thoth08.txt
THE MYTH OF THE UNIVERSAL MONARCH (2) By David Talbott
The ancient Sumerians repeatedly proclaimed that kingship had descended directly from the creator-king An, the most ancient and highest god of the pantheon, and the revered founder of the Golden Age.
Consider the myths and images of the Hindu Brahma, Manu or Yama, the Iranian Yima, Danish Frodhi, or Chinese Huang-Ti--all models of the good king, ruling over a primitive paradise. The respective cultures esteemed these mythical figures as *prototypes*. In later ages the chroniclers have such figures ruling on earth. But in the earliest traditions the kingdom is in the sky, and this ancient kingdom of the Universal Monarch is one of the most pervasive archetypes of world mythology.
Natives of Mexico insisted that the great god Quetzalcoatl, a sun god who ruled before the present sun, was their first king and founder of the kingship rites. He not only introduced all of the arts of civilization, but presided over the Golden Age.
The ancient Maya proclaimed that their once-spectacular civilization had its origins in the rule of the creator-king and god of the Golden Age, Itzam Na. At the center of Mayan culture, stood the sovereign chief, announcing himself as something like "the King of Kings and ruler of the world, regent on earth of the great Itzam Na." ...

Thoth Vol I, No. 11: May 3, 1997
https://saturniancosmology.org/othergroup/thoth/thoth11.txt
THE MYTH OF THE CENTRAL SUN (1) By David Talbott
Our next step is particularly vital because it will bring us to the threshold of a reconstruction, a concrete way to begin re-envisioning the past.
In any investigation of the ancient sun god you will inevitably run into a theme of profound influence on ancient thought: You will confront the myth of the central sun--the motionless sun, the sun that did not rise or set, but stood firmly in one place. There is, in fact, a decisive difference between the great luminary celebrated as the king of the world, and the body we call the Sun today: unlike our rising and setting Sun, the archaic sun-god did not move.
Perhaps the idea of a giant but visually stationary body in the sky will seem not just bizarre but impossible to visualize in any practical sense, given a rotating earth. There is an answer to that issue, arising from the ancient traditions themselves, but that answer will only raise other questions, so we've reached a point at which we have to be most attentive to the witnesses themselves.
>From the first stirrings of civilization in the Nile Valley, all of the tribes of Egypt celebrated the memory of Atum or Ra, father of kings, founder of the Tep Zepi or Golden Age.
Without exception Egyptologists have identified Atum-Ra as the rising and setting sun. And that's the first challenge we must meet, because there's a world of difference between the literal meanings of the texts and the familiar translations. ...

Thoth Vol I, No. 12: April 29, 1997
https://saturniancosmology.org/othergroup/thoth/thoth12.txt
THE MYTH OF THE CENTRAL SUN (2) David Talbott
__{ZIGGURAT} ... What, then, of the famous Assyrian and Babylonian god Shamash, the sun god whom we now recognize as Saturn?  A remarkable fact is that Shamash "comes forth" ·(shines) and "goes in" (declines, diminishes) at one spot, the "firm," "stable" or motionless station of supreme "rest".  This place par excellence was symbolized by the top of the ziggurats the famous Babylonian axis-towers constructed as symbolic models of the Cosmos.  Hence, the uppermost level was deemed the "light of Shamash," and the "heart of Shamash," denoting (in the words of E.G. King) the pivot "around which the highest heaven or sphere of the fixed stars revolved.:"  The Babylonian tradition of the polar sun has been preserved up to the twentieth century in the tradition of the Mandaeans of Iraq.

Thoth Vol I, No. 13: May 16, 1997
https://saturniancosmology.org/othergroup/thoth/thoth13.txt
THE MYTH OF THE CENTRAL SUN (3) David Talbott
... Butterworth's insights have a considerable history behind them. The precedence of the cosmic center among the great ancient cultures has been noted and documented by others. Almost a hundred years ago, William F. Warren, in his groundbreaking work, Paradise Found, identified the celestial pole as the home of the supreme god of ancient races. "The religions of all ancient nations...associate the abode of the supreme God with the North Pole, the centre of heaven; or with the celestial space immediately surrounding it. [Yet] no writer on comparative theology has ever brought out the facts which establish this assertion."
In the following years a number of scholars, each focusing on different bodies of evidence, reached the same Conclusion. The controversial and erratic Gerald Massey, in two large works (The Natural Genesis and Ancient Egypt), claimed that the religion and mythology of a polar god was first formulated by the priest-astronomers of ancient Egypt and spread from Egypt to the rest of the world.
In a general survey of ancient language, symbolism, and mythology, John O'Neill (Night of the Gods, two volumes) insisted that mankind's oldest religions centered on a god of the celestial pole.
The renowned Mesoamerican authority, Zelia Nuttall, in Fundamental Principles of Old and New World Civilization, undertook an extensive review of New World astronomical themes, concluding that the highest god was polar. From Mexico she shifted to other civilizations, finding the same unexpected role of a polar god.
Reinforcing the surprising conclusions of these researchers was the subsequent work of others, among them the noted Finno-Ugric authority, Uno Holmberg (Der Baum Des Lebens), who documented the preeminence of the polar god in the ritual of Altaic and neighboring peoples, suggesting ancient origins in Hindu and Mesopotamian cosmologies; Léopold de Saussure (Les Origines de l;'Astronomie Chinoise), who showed that primitive Chinese religion and astronomy honor the celestial pole as the home of the supreme "monarch" of the sky; René Guenon (Le Roi du Monde and Le Symbolisme de la Croix), who sought to outline a universal doctrine centering on the polar gods and principles of ancient man.
In the nineteenth century and early twentieth century these revelations were viewed as highly unorthodox and generally given little attention. But more recently the pioneering historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, together with many of his colleagues, has documented numerous traditions of the cosmic center--the place where it all began--and noted again and again the relations of the cosmic center to the celestial pole.
Most of the writers cited above possessed a common--if unspoken-faith in the ceaseless regularity of the solar system, seeking to explain the polar god in strictly familiar terms: the center of our revolving heavens is the celestial pole; the great god of the center and summit, in view of his role as axis, must have been the star closes to this cosmic pivot.
But then, as we have seen, it's simply impossible to separate the tradition of the polar power from that of the former sun god, the central sun, lighting the world from one spot. So it is not just a matter of ancient star worshippers looking up at the pole and noticing that the circumpolar stars slowly wheel around that center. The mystery is the location of the supreme luminary, the power many nations called "sun", at this improbable station in the sky. How did an idea contradicting all natural experience today, establish itself around the world? ...

Thoth Vol II, No. 1: January 15, 1998
https://saturniancosmology.org/othergroup/thoth/thotii01.txt
VELIKOVSKY'S COMET VENUS (12) By David Talbott
... That the great wars of early civilizations had a ritual character and purpose is often stated, though the connection with REMEMBERED tumult in the sky is rarely confronted. One of the underlying attributes of ritual is its commemorative function--repeating the "exemplary" actions of gods and celestial heroes, with special emphasis on the catastrophic junctures in the biographies of the gods. The motive was announced repeatedly by warrior kings, who saw themselves as extending the "glory" of the ancestral gods, and repeating the devastation that the gods themselves had wrought upon the world. And the gods desired that their ancient deeds be remembered. ...

Thoth Vol II, No. 3: February 15, 1998
https://saturniancosmology.org/othergroup/thoth/thotii01.txt
VELIKOVSKY'S COMET VENUS (14) By David Talbott
THE MYTH OF THE GREAT COMET
In these brief articles we have asked whether Immanuel Velikovsky's comet Venus finds support among Mesoamerican cultures. Our conclusion is that, to a stunning degree, the symbols or hieroglyphs of comets stand in an unexplained conjunction with the planet Venus in Mesoamerica. Not only the five most frequently-occurring hieroglyphs for the comet around the world, but virtually all of the variations on these symbols are attached to each other and to the planet Venus. On their own, the symbols do not provide any basis for the observed merging. But grant the proposed history of a COMET Venus, and all of the enigmas are removed in a single stroke.
In support of this conjunction, we have also cross-referenced the Mesoamerican traditions with more general traditions about comets in other cultures, and found an underlying consistency far too broad to be explained by chance.
Additionally, we have seen that the deepest fears of Mesoamerican culture turn out to be the specific fears which ancient astronomies associated SIMULTANEOUSLY with the arrival of a comet and the risings of Venus, as we should expect: the end of the world, death of kings, overwhelming wars, plague, pestilence, drought. Those who are familiar with our larger thesis will recognize that these fears are not random, but inseparably tied to a more fundamental story: that of the ancient god-king--the celestial "father" of kings--whose death or ordeal brought a former world age to a catastrophic end, and whose "heart-soul" took flight as a comet-like star. This prototypical, cometary heart-soul is nothing other than the planet Venus.
One discovers this equivalence of Venus- and comet-fears in all of the symbolic and ritual contexts by which Mesoamerican cultures expressed their deepest anxieties: we see it in calendars of world ages, in superstitions associated with unexpected disruptions of natural cycles (eclipses, etc.), in massive ritual sacrifice, in relentless war, and in a never-ending stream of commemorative festivals and rites. Repeatedly, the stargazers looked to VENUS as the cause or sign of the very disorder that world myth ascribes to the feared GREAT COMET.
It has long been assumed that the great civilizations of the past oriented themselves to a sky appearing almost exactly like our sky today. I have suggested, however, that an entirely new approach to ancient myth and religion is warranted. Early races were obsessed with a prior "age of the gods," a time unlike any period of human history to follow. It is the living memories of this epoch that reveal the true source of collective fear, as generation after generation anxiously followed the movements of PLANETS. Driven by fear and guilt, the starworshippers incessantly re-enacted the critical junctures in that prior age, when planets moved out of control. There is a reason why the myth of the comet Venus is so deeply entwined with a more general memory of planetary upheaval.
In truth, the evidence for an UNFAMILIAR sky is massive. But to appreciate even the first levels of that evidence one must break the trance of prior teaching and beliefs Evidence must be seen AS evidence, rather than as witness to the absurdity and contradictions of the star worshippers. When clearly-defined patterns of memory are impossible to explain under prevailing assumptions, those assumptions must be re-evaluated.
To comprehend the equation of comet symbols and Venus symbols, one need only ask what we should expect to find if Velikovsky's thesis was fundamentally correct. (I do not accept Velikovsky's Venus chronology or his detailed scenario.) If Venus formerly appeared as a world- threatening comet, but subsequently lost its cometary aspect, should we not find that later fears of comets attached themselves BOTH to the now-peaceful planet Venus and to the wisps of gas periodically coming into view? Wherever systematic, empirical astronomy kept alive the Great Comet's connection with Venus, we should EXPECT that the symbols of comets would pervade the culture's images of that planet. If the thesis is correct, it could not have been otherwise. So we can hardly be surprised to find that, in Mexico, the five universal glyphs of the comet are attached to the planet Venus! That a comet is the ONLY known astronomical reference for these symbols makes the point all the more emphatic.
In terms of our larger thesis, it should not surprise us either that the planet Venus was, in a hundred different ways, the regulator of the fate of kings and kingdoms in Mexico. (The Great Comet DID "determine" the fate of the king's celestial prototype; see earlier discussion of the Saturn theory.) A compelling logic will thus be seen in Venus' definitive mythical role--in regulating the cosmic cycles, ordaining festivals pointing backward to the age of the gods, sending the kingdom's strongest men to war, and sending the victims of war to the sacrificial stone. Given the full story of the Great Comet, we should expect nothing else. And even in the more tempered rituals of daily life, the keeping of the sacred fire, the morning sweeping of the shrine, and other rites too numerous to mention here, one discerns the ever-present memory of a world falling into confusion, but subsequently renewed to the drumbeat of the Dawn Bringer.
When Bob Forrest said that he could find "no direct historical reference" to the Venus-comet, I believe he spoke from conviction. But the language of the first civilizations was not "historical;" it was mythical, having its reference in events no longer occurring. Thus, no civilization could meet Forrest's test. There are no "direct historical references" to the age of the gods, because that age precedes earthbound, historical chronicles.
Did the underlying events implied by the myths and by the ritual acts of remembering actually occur? Given the nature of the language involved, the sheer scale of evidence is stunning; and one might wonder how the Mexican star worshippers were supposed to have told us something more about the remembered catastrophes, without a crash course in the language of modern science.
In taking up such issues, cross referencing is imperative. No approach that isolates each evidential fragment, "explaining" that fragment without explaining parallel evidence pointing to the same unusual conclusion, can diminish the case for a remembered Venus-comet. No self-respecting scholar will lack the imagination to conjure an "explanation" of a particular comet symbol attached to Venus: it is simply too easy to claim that an ancient tribe or race may have accidentally confused a comet tradition with a Venus tradition. But it is the CONSISTENCY of the comet images of Venus that makes the case, and in this sense Forrest's analysis breaks down completely with the very first instance cited. The comet Venus is a global myth, and the one credible explanation of the myth is that Venus DID look like a comet--that it did participate in literally earthshaking events, not that long ago. One only has to follow the evidence to know that this is so.

Thoth Vol II, No. 4: February 28, 1998
https://saturniancosmology.org/othergroup/thoth/thotii04.txt
A HEARTY WELCOME TO AMY By David Talbott
... 7. The first civilizations arose in the shadow of sweeping planetary upheaval, and in these violent events one discovers the experiential taproot beneath ancient myth, ritual, and symbolism. So too, these events will help to illuminate hidden urges and fears that still influence the human psyche today. ...

Thoth Vol II, No. 8: May 15, 1998
https://saturniancosmology.org/othergroup/thoth/thotii08.txt
A BRIEF ORIENTATION David Talbott
... Our work puts a new emphasis on the unusual celestial events reflected in the myths. When you first dive into world mythology, all of your prior training will tell you to dismiss the myth-makers as fabricators or victims of hallucination. But there's another way to see the myths. Ancient man experienced extraordinary events, then strove to remember and to reenact them in every way possible. The result was not only a global mythology, but entirely new forms of human expression. And the whole range of expressions--sacrifices to the gods, wars of conquest, monumental construction, pictographic representations, and endless celebrations of the lost age of the gods--left us a massive reservoir of evidence. These highly novel expressions are, in fact, the distinguishing characteristics of the first civilizations.
... SO YOU ARE CHALLENGING THE IDEA THAT THINGS HAVE NOT REALLY CHANGED THAT MUCH WITHIN THE SOLAR SYSTEM.
Yes, we are challenging an intellectual system as a whole. What is at stake here are the pillars of the modern world view. How could it be that the sky has completely changed in a few thousand years? Our textbooks do not talk about such a thing. When instructing us on the history of the solar system, the evolution of our planet, the birth of man, the origins of civilization, no one speaks of an unstable solar system, of interplanetary upheaval, or of wholesale changes in the celestial order.
__{PYRAMID} ... BUT WHY SHOULD WE BELIEVE THE SKY HAS CHANGED SO DRASTICALLY? The best I can ask for is a willingness to consider an argument. I could show you, for example, that certain celestial images preoccupied ancient man to the point of an obsession. A great cosmic wheel in the sky. The pyramid of the sun. The eye of heaven. Also the ship of heaven, a spiraling serpent, the raging goddess, and four luminous "winds" of the sky. The problem for conventional perspectives is that these images are far, far removed from anything we see in the heavens today. But that is only the beginning of the theoretical challenge. As soon as you realize that far-flung cultures, though employing different symbols, tell a unified story, all of the previous "explanations" of myth collapse.

Thoth Vol II, No. 9: May 31, 1998
https://saturniancosmology.org/othergroup/thoth/thotii09.txt
ON THE USE OF HISTORICAL EVIDENCE David Talbott
... AND HOW DO THE PLANETS FIGURE INTO THIS?
In the most direct way. The great celestial powers first celebrated by man were planets and aspects of planets, all playing concrete roles that can be demonstrated through systematic analysis.
When I started my own investigation in 1972 it was obvious that most mainstream scholars do not admit any meaningful relationship of early gods and later planets. It soon became clear why this is so. The gods are far more dominant, more active, and more violent than could possibly be explained, or illuminated in any way by the present fireflies of light we call planets. We know that the early priest astronomers upheld cosmic traditions dating back to the dawn of civilization. And when the first stargazers of ancient Mesopotamia, China, and Mesoamerica began recording the movements of settled (or nearly settled) planets, they insisted with one voice that these distant bodies once dominated the world as "the gods". The incredible discrepancy between the biographies of these gods and the present little specks in the sky presents a fascinating and unexplained global anomaly.
I'm suggesting, in other words, that we pay serious attention to the profound shift in ancient ideas about gods and planets, a shift occurring some time in the first millennium B.C. Gradually, the "capriciousness" of the gods gave way to fixed and repeated cycles of planets. Whatever you may think of our reconstruction, it cannot be denied that the dramatic change in human perception IS consistent with the claimed transition - a shift from the active and dramatic presence of the gods to the remote, uniform and predictable planetary system we observe today. Until the establishment of stable cycles or patterns, of course, observational, mathematically-based planetary astronomy would be impossible.
Now obviously, the unshakable opinion of astronomers is that the solar system of our ancestors looked very much like it does today. Yet surprisingly, though celestial "sun" and "star" symbols are everywhere, one searches in vain for evidence of PRESENT planetary movements. What we find is thus what we should EXPECT to find if the planetary system changed dramatically within human memory.
David Talbott

Thoth Vol II, No. 10: June 15, 1998
https://saturniancosmology.org/othergroup/thoth/thotii10.txt
THE MEANING OF MYTH Ev Cochrane
Why should anyone care about the message of ancient myth? The most obvious reason, perhaps, is that myth served the role of history, science, literature, and entertainment for many centuries prior to the appearance of advanced civilizations and the development of writing. A study of ancient myth, consequently, will tell us a great deal about the intellectual life of early man. If for no other reason, this should ensure that modern scholars pay careful attention to the favorite myths of our forbears.
There are many different approaches to the study of ancient myth-naturist, Freudian, Jungian, structuralist, etc. No doubt each of the various schools of thought has valid points to make. My own approach to myth attempts to make sense of the ancient traditions surrounding the various celestial bodies. It is well-known, in fact, that the earliest religions of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica were characterized by a preoccupation with celestial phenomena. Of the latter culture, David Kelley has observed:
"It has been clear to all serious students of Mesoamerican culture that there was an intimate relationship between astronomical knowledge, the calendar, and religious beliefs and rituals."
Much the same point could be made with respect to all ancient cultures. Wherever one looks, one finds the same fascination with the heavenly bodies. Throughout the ancient world, for example, comets were looked upon as objects of terror and ominous portent, their appearance said to herald the downfall of kingdoms and the death of kings. The opinion of Synesius, an author of the fourth century A. D., may be taken as typical: "And whenever these comets appear, they are an evil portent, which the diviners and soothsayers appease. They assuredly foretell public disasters, enslavements of nations, desolations of cities, deaths of kings."
Eclipses, similarly, were thought to signal the imminent end of the world, anxious skywatchers performing all sorts of bizarre rituals to appease and banish the evil spirits responsible for the all-encompassing darkness.
How is it possible to understand such widespread beliefs? Modern astronomers, accustomed to seeing comets and eclipses come and go without catastrophic consequences-much less the end of the world!-quite naturally approach these ancient beliefs with a measure of incredulity, much as adults view a child's belief in the bogeyman or Santa Claus. Scholars of ancient myth, likewise, have typically understood such beliefs as the expression of ancient man's primitive mentality and prescientific understanding of the cosmos. Yet such a view overlooks the fact that similar beliefs were common well into the modern period-in this century, in fact-and were shared by the scientific elite of most ancient civilizations. Thus the possibility must be considered that the problem in understanding is not with the ancients, rather with the preconceptions of modern astronomers.
There have been scant few scholars who took seriously the ancient reports of death-bringing comets and apocalyptic eclipses. Among the few who did-Whiston, Vico, Radlof, Donnelly, Beaumont, and Kugler-it was Immanuel Velikovsky who did the most to popularize (some would say discredit forever) the notion that the ancient reports are worthy of careful attention. In WORLDS IN COLLISION, Velikovsky set the stage for a revolution in comparative mythology by suggesting that universally recurring mythical images-such as the war-god, fire-breathing dragon, and witch-reflect ancient man's attempt to commemorate terrifying cataclysms associated with planetary agents.
Nearly twenty years of research has convinced me that Velikovsky was on the right track and that the modern astronomer's refusal to acquaint himself with the message of ancient myth will prove to be a most glaring omission. ...

Thoth Vol II, No. 13: Aug 31, 1998
https://saturniancosmology.org/othergroup/thoth/thotii13.txt
RESPONDING TO A CRITIC By David Talbott
__{PYRAMID} ... The roots of this evolutionary tendency in COMMEMORATIVE practices need to be appreciated. It is a fact that numerous ritual celebrations or re-enactments had the effect, over time, of placing originally CELESTIAL gods on plots of earth. In commemoration of the gods and their attributes, ancient artists and architects fashioned thousands of terrestrial symbols -- temples, cities, and kingdoms patterned after, and NAMED after, the dwelling of the gods. They constructed artificial mounds, pillars, pyramids and towers, reflecting earlier memories of the world mountain or pillar of the sky. So too, they founded innumerable holy sites in the shadow of sacred hills, or above sacred springs, or in proximity to sacred rivers--all made "holy" through symbolic projection, all pointing back to the world mountain, or fountain of the sun, or nether river which had distinguished the age of the gods from all subsequent epochs of human history. ...

Thoth Vol II, No. 17: Oct 31, 1998
https://saturniancosmology.org/othergroup/thoth/thotii17.txt
HALLOWEEN WITCHES AND GIANTS
__{PYRAMID} ... DAVE TALBOTT RESPONDS:
It is my contention that the different "giant" themes can be traced backwards, and the path will always lead you to ancient images of CELESTIAL powers. The fabled age of giants will echo all of the images linked to the age of the gods. The remote land of the giants will be a faint recollection of the land of the gods. Huge edifices claimed to have been built by giants will have their earlier counterpart in the COSMIC temples, cities and kingdoms built by the gods. Wars of the giants will be seen as diluted versions of the wars of the gods, or Clash of the Titans.
Internal consistency is one of the crucial tests of a theory, and any suggestion that the "age of giants" could refer to a period of unusually large human beings must be subject to the consistency test. It is certainly true that around the world, folk traditions associated various cultural remains with the activity of giants. They marveled at pyramids and towers and broken walls of former peoples. Popular Arabic tradition identifies "giants" as the builders of Middle Eastern megaliths. The Greeks proclaimed that a generation of giants had built the great fortifications at Tiryns and Mycenae. Scattered megaliths across Europe invited the same idea. Throughout Mesoamerica and South America it was claimed that the massive remains of earlier cultures had been constructed by giants. Similar ideas will be found in the South Pacific.
Well, it is certainly true that if earlier generations were big enough, then building some of the larger monuments might have been easier. But if this explanation is entertained, should we not apply it also to those remarkably similar instances in which NATURAL features - mountains, gullies, ridges, canyons, and rivers were identified with the former activity of giants? ...

Thoth Vol III, No. 2: Jan 31, 1999
https://saturniancosmology.org/othergroup/thoth/thoiii02.txt
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.
... , 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 ...

Thoth Vol III, No. 17: Dec 15, 1999
https://saturniancosmology.org/othergroup/thoth/thoiii17.txt
THE DEMANDS OF THE SATURNIAN CONFIGURATION THEORY
Excerpts from Dwardu Cardona's SIS Silver Jubilee Paper
... 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.

Thoth Vol IV, No 3: Feb 15, 2000
https://saturniancosmology.org/othergroup/thoth/thotiv03.txt
CONJUNCTION THEMES By Dave Talbott
... 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.) ...

Thoth Vol IV, No 4: Feb 29, 2000
https://saturniancosmology.org/othergroup/thoth/thotiv04.txt
THE NATURAL REFERENCES OF MYTH By Dave Talbott
... 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?
... 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.

Thoth Vol IV, No 9: May 31, 2000
https://saturniancosmology.org/othergroup/thoth/thotiv09.txt
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.
... 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. ...

Thoth Vol IV, No 13: Aug 31, 2000
https://saturniancosmology.org/othergroup/thoth/thotiv13.txt
A LITTLE HISTORY OF THE ELECTRIC UNIVERSE By Wal Thornhill
__{PYRAMID} ... Since then sceptical scholars have shown Velikovsky's historical perspective of cataclysmic events to be wrong. However, his basic premise of planetary encounters has been confirmed and the details fleshed out to an extraordinary degree. Several pioneering researchers in this new field now agree that awe-inspiring planetary encounters did occur in pre-history. To the most ancient civilizations they were a culturally defining memory. They were the inspiration for pyramids, megaliths, statues, totems and sacred rock art. The survivors of global upheaval felt it imperative that the memory be preserved and passed down faithfully to future generations in the expectation that the "gods" would return. The memorialization took the form of architecture, ritual and story to re-enact the apocalyptic power of the planetary gods over human destiny. Such a catastrophic beginning explains why civilization appeared like a thunderclap out of nowhere. Unfortunately, with no reference points in the present behavior of the planets, the stories lost their real meaning.