{Velikovsky’s dating of the cataclysms was too recent, but otherwise he was close to correct.}
There appear to have been two Great Floods at about 3,300 BC & 2,600 BC. The Triune planets of the Saturn Configuration appear to have been visible near Earth between the Floods and possibly lasting a few decades after the second Flood with Jupiter in Saturn's place. That's my best guess for now, but I need to analyse the evidence available, to see if my guess is backed up. I've been checking out the mythological evidence lately. I started to check for myths relating to Jupiter, then to the laybrinth, which was said to be connected to Jupiter. Now I've selected excerpts relating to Deluge, which means Flood, to look for key evidence there. Following are myth article excerpts relating to Deluge. My comments are in italics in curly brackets.
https://www.thunderbolts.info/forum3/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1042
https://www.thunderbolts.info/forum3/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1042&start=15
SATURN 101
Velikovsky first pointed the way to Saturn in one short section of an article titled _On Saturn and the Flood_ in the Fall, 1979, issue of Kronos. It read:
"This memory of the seven days of light preceding the Deluge(10) is a most important indication of the physical cause of the catastrophe. The intense light, filling the sky, points to a source in a nova within the solar system.
{My present theory is that the possible Saturn nova occurred just before the start of the first Flood, called the Great Flood, which submerged all of the land, because the supercontinent was all lowland with no mountains, until late in the Flood. Before the Saturn nova, the Earth was likely in relative darkness, with Saturn being barely visible. Very few humans survived the first Flood, so there would not have been many legends about it from around the world. The more common legends likely relate to the second Flood, which drowned fewer people and fewer animals. The Saturn Configuration Triunes became visible after the Great Flood, when both the Ice Age and the Golden Age, Paradise, or Garden of Eden, started at the same time. The Ice Age started on mountaintops and gradually spread out over the next 5 centuries or so. Human civilization started at lower latitudes, mostly just north of the equator. The Tower of Babel supposedly was built and destroyed about 300 years after the Great Flood. The tower was likely a myth about the polar plasma column that myths say connected the Triune planets with the Earth. That may be when Saturn left the Configuration, or it may be that the column reformed after that and Saturn didn't leave until the second Flood at the Younger Dryas. Let's see if anything noteworthy can be found in the following excerpts.}
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. 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.
{This was the Age after the Great Flood, before the Younger Dryas Flood.}
SATURNISTS PLAY MARBLES Excerpted from the Kronia List
EV WROTE: One item which might be of interest ... in light of ... the Deluge myth is the possibility that the raven released by Noah might symbolize Mars, as the dove definitely symbolizes Venus. This possibility was first raised by Dave to me in a private conversation. At the time, it rang a familiar chord since I knew Nergal and Apollo were symbolized by ravens. Since that time I have found that virtually every Martian hero was given a raven form, the most obvious example being the American Indian hero Raven.
DWARDU ADDS: And don't forget the Egyptian Horus.
TIA ACHESON ASKS: Raven was Mars? I thought Raven was the creator, the ruler, the wisest one. Wouldn't that be Saturn? So tell me who was Saturn in the American Indian legends?
DAVE T ANSWERS: Yes, in later accounts it is easy to mistake the trickster figure for the Saturnian creator, since the warrior-hero was a builder or "maker" of things. I made that mistake more than once in writing The Saturn Myth. I had simply not realized how the more passive creator or universal sovereign faded into the background over the centuries. Ritual activity and storytelling naturally required a focus on ACTIVITY, and unlike the displaced sovereign, the planet Mars provided innumerable vivid episodes, perfect for storytelling. As a rule, once storytelling was dissociated from its earlier ritual contexts, becoming a pleasurable pastime around campfires, the background figure would simply disappear. This is one of many reasons why, to find original contexts, all recurring story elements must be referred to their earliest documented expressions.
{Venus and Mars positions were very unstable between Saturn and the Earth. Earth was also somewhat unstable. The chaotic motions, along with dust and plasma partially obscuring parts of the Configuration, and great noises transmitted to the Earth, gave the impression of dragons and monsters threatening the Earth. In the Biblical Flood myth, Noah likely represented Saturn, the raven was Mars and the dove was Venus. This was likely the Younger Dryas Flood, because Mars and Venus didn't become visible until after the Great Flood and didn't move off of the axis between Earth and Saturn, until shortly before Saturn's departure around the time of the YD Flood.}
THE GOLDEN AGE: VARIATIONS ON A THEME By Dwardu Cardona and Dave Talbott
CARDONA: ... The Deluge is said to have drowned Earth in its waters. "Earth," here, can be understood as the CELESTIAL earth. But what was there that was seen in the sky during this event that was interpreted as water. Why water? Fire (light mixed with darkness) would have been more appropriate had the event been strictly celestial. But if water DID descend on Earth during this particular event, then the celestial apparition could have been interpreted as a like-event.
True - the Garden said to have been "east of Eden" - a mistranslation, incidentally - WAS a celestial apparition. But what was there in this celestial apparition that lent itself to the interpretation that this object was a "garden," and that this "garden" contained all the trees and fruits, etcetera, required for mankind's bliss? Was it not conditions on Earth during this period that lent the celestial apparition its imagery? The statement "as in heaven, so on Earth" has echoed down through the ages. I would like to rectify that to: "As on Earth, so in heaven." After all the celestial cow, the celestial bull, the witch's broom, etcetera, were "named" after terrestrial animals and objects and not vice versa. There would have been no celestial cow had there not been a terrestrial one. And so forth.
DAVE TALBOTT ALSO RESPONDS:
Here is my position in a nutshell: all of the players in archetypal myth are celestial; the theater itself is in the sky, not on our earth. Only in later storytelling are the archetypal figures brought down to earth, to occupy local regions as imagined "ancestors" of the nations telling the stories. To this principle I am aware of no exceptions. Saturn's timeless epoch means the absence of any discernible cosmic cycles. The ancestral paradise watered by the four rivers is, in truth, the land of the gods, and this means nothing other than the WHEEL of the "sun" god Saturn, as strange as the idea may sound. But you cannot separate the world of the observers from their unique mythical interpretations of cosmic events. For example: if observers perceived in Saturn's crescent a "bull of heaven", or a "great cow of heaven" that IS evidence that the myth-makers were familiar with the species!
So yes, a "rigorous consistency would require that Eden, the Golden Age, the eternal spring, and the timeless time refer to events in the sky," but I'd remove the phrase, "not on earth," since the earth is immediately implicated if there were no discernible cosmic cycles. What imagination PERCEIVED in extraordinary cosmic events was a function both of human psychology and the full range of natural experience before, during, and after the events. Hence, there are two tiers of "terrestrial" experience that must be considered in any comprehensive explanation of myth. It is one thing to say that Saturn's rule began with a "timeless epoch." But the fact that races around the world regarded this as the ideal or standard, and strove relentlessly to re-capture that condition gives us more than a reconstruction of cosmic events. It tells us something about the mythmakers themselves.
Similarly, when the mythmakers say that Saturn's epoch was "neither hot nor cold," the implication is that human experience is contributing to the interpretation. In the same way, the accounts of heaven-shattering thunder, associated with the lightning of the gods, surely implies reverberating sounds on earth. And in all likelihood, the outpouring of cometary material associated with the "deluge" involved a descent of a horrendous cloud of ice on the Earth, helping to prompt the mythical interpretation. But the mythical figure who rides out the storm of the deluge is, beyond question, a celestial player in the original story.
Lastly, I commend Mel for his cautionary note on the comparative method, suggesting that human psychology might tend to "extract common distortions." In fact, there would be no patterns of myths were there no 'common distortions." It is through distortion that the language of myth arises. If Saturn's crescent is just an abstract form in the sky there is no myth. It is the distorting lens of human perception that enables imagination to see the crescent as the horns of a cosmic bull.
While certain pictographs may preserve literal images, myths generally do not. Hence, the methodology for reconstructing events from myth does not rely on literalism. Rather, it means finding the underlying form or event expressed by the distortion, and this process is aided by two key facts: 1) that certain abstract forms, having nothing to do with our sky today, are preserved in remarkably similar pictographs around the world, and 2) that widely divergent mythical themes, when traced to their roots, consistently converge on these underlying forms, providing the needed proof that the forms were there.
The key to reconstructing events is thus provided by logic and probability, not by a "literal" interpretation of myth. And the reconstruction rests most fundamentally on recurring patterns that would not/could not have arisen under our sky but would be EXPECTED under the hypothesized conditions.
{The cometary outpouring of a cloud of ice is something I hadn't noticed before. The comet was likely Venus, which again was not independent of Saturn until near the Younger Dryas.}
THE NATURAL REFERENCES OF MYTH By Dave Talbott
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.
{There was a conflagration, or wildfire, just before the Younger Dryas Flood. The dragon was comet Venus at that same time.}
THE DEMANDS OF THE SATURNIAN CONFIGURATION THEORY: Part III
THE WATERY VORTEX ... 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.
{Cardona was fooled by incorrect conventional dating methods into believing the Ice Ages were much earlier than they were. Hunt was right. These are signs of the Younger Dryas Flood.}
THE DEMANDS OF THE SATURNIAN CONFIGURATION THEORY: Part II
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...
{Ra was Saturn. Osiris was Jupiter. When the Saturn Configuration was visible during the Golden Age, the stars were not visible, for the same reason that stars are not now visible in the daytime. When Saturn left our vicinity, stars started to become visible.}