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"...All the stories, characters and adventures narrated by mythology concentrate on the active powers among the stars, who are the planets."
Episode 1 Symbols of an Alien Sky
The dance of the planets
So regular and predictable, one may think they've moved like this forever
What a contrast to things claimed by the first astronomers
of ancient Mesopotamia and numerous cultures that followed!
They watched planetary motions with a compulsive fear.
Why would diligent astronomers insist
that the planets were the towering gods of a prior time?
Planets ruled the destiny of kings and kingdoms
and they were the agents of doomsday, the End of the World.
What was it about planets that inspired such reverence and fear?
The Babylonian priest astronomer Berossus
said that planets, moving on different courses than today,
produced world catastrophe.
In Greek, Roman and Gnostic thought,
this was ekpyrosis, a catastrophic meeting of the planets.
But the memory of planetary disorder is echoed by numerous ancient sources.
Plato expressed it, and so did Zoroastrian texts.
The Hindu Mahabharata,
Taoist teachings,
and the Chinese Bamboo Books.
Far from the spotlight, today,
researchers are exploring these questions of planetary history.
They bring wide ranging backgrounds
from comparative mythology to planetary science and plasma physics
All are asking if the solar system may have been unstable in the past,
alive with electrical activity?
Allow this question to be asked
and the doors open to a new understanding of the past,
a planetary history,
and the rise of Civilization itself.
Monumental Cultures
"What is normal in nature and society rarely exites the myth-making imagination, which is more likely to be kindled by the abnormal, some startling catastrophe..."
When we hear the word "civilization,"
most of us think of new technology, economic advances,
rapid communication and expansive metropolitan vistas.
But earlier civilizations are much different,
and they pose a mystery yet to be resolved.
Early civilizations were obsessed with the past.
All looked back to extraordinary events, to an age of gods and wonders.
All insisted that powerful gods ruled for a time, then went away.
Monumental cultures arose, and the monuments themselves
meant much more than a display of technical skill.
A monument commemorates something collectively remembered.
It was obsessive acts of remembering that shaped the early civilizations.
From the cities of Egypt stretched along the Nile
to those of the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia.
From India to Southeast Asia and China
and no less so in the Americas.
From the early predecessors of the Aztecs and the Maya
to the archaic cultures of the central Andes.
All reveal a desperate urge to recover something lost.
Egyptian priests called this lost epoch "The Age of the Primeval Gods."
It began with the rule of an earlier sun-god, Atum who later departed.
Cuneiform texts speak of the god An,
who ruled with terrifying splendor, then fled the scene.
The Greeks celebrated the lost age of Kronos,
but he too was replaced by another power, the towering Zeus.
Sages of India likewise remembered the rule of Brahma,
though the god progressively faded into the background.
So too, the Chinese Cheng Di and Huang Di
The Aztec Ometeotl
and the Mayan Itzamna
All either departed for remote regions or faded from their original prominence.
Remembering the Gods
"The broad spectrum of cultural responses to cataclysmic events attest to the profoundly unsettling impact chaotic events in the skies may have had."
Through festivals and symbolic rites, the cultures remembered the lives of the gods.
With every temple construction, every sacrifice,
every harvest,
every installation of a king,
every royal marriage,
every New Year festival,
the celebrants reenacted critical turns in the lives of the gods themselves.
Were you to remove the stories of the gods,
there would be no cultural content left in the early civilizations.
Who were the gods?
And why did the early astronomers declare
that the most powerful gods were planets?
Here's a clue: The mythic accounts are punctuated by terror and cosmic violence.
Urgent prayers and hymns reenacted the deaths or ordeals of great gods,
recounting how one world age passed violently into another.
"...modern astronomical evidence does not support the common supposition that the night sky has been unchanging for 5,000 years."
At least some of the artistic and mythological themes will be familiar to you.
The myth of Paradise or the Golden Age, for example,
a perfect time before a descent into cosmic disaster.
An exemplary sun, revered as the King of the World, ruling before the present Sun.
A Mother Goddess, a symbol of beauty and of life
A great warrior or a hero born from the womb of that very goddess
to rescue the world from monsters.
That are also unexplained.
Dragons in the Air
"Although people have been probing into facts and stories about the dragon for hundreds of years, the dragon has yet elluded final interpretations."
Perhaps there's no better example of an unexplained mythical theme
than the serpent or dragon.
This remarkable creature with origins in prehistoric times
has no counterpart in the biological world,
yet it was remembered on every habitable continent
and persisted across the millennia into modern times.
Well, we can find amusement in the comic book versions of this monster,
but nothing in nature today will explain the dragon's long, flowing hair,
its fiery breath, its beard,
its twin whiskers,
its wings or effusive feathers,
or its global occurrence as twins,
or its global association with lightning.
Thousands of years after its prehistoric birth,
the monster continues to linger in human fantasy, it will not go away.
But ask yourself, how could the dragon archetype have arisen without provocation?
And should we not wonder if uniquely modern prejudices
are the primary reason the mystery remains unsolved.
With one voice, every ancient culture insisted
that our world was once a much different place.
PLASMA FORMATION IN THE SKY
"Are all these legends a confused account of great events on a planetary scale which were beheld in terror simultaneously by men scattered everywhere over the word?"
Several thousand years ago events of beauty
and terror provoked an explosion of human imagination.
This was the myth-making epoch of human history.
First came the enchanted realm, the theater of venerated gods and goddesses.
The gods were prodigious.
Their celestial habitat towered over the world,
a model for temples and commemorative monuments on Earth.
But the gods grew capricious, one celestial power metamorphosed into another.
Preposterous creatures never seen on Earth roamed the sky.
The gods turned violent as heaven itself fell into chaos.
Then celestial warriors and monsters appeared to battle in the heavens
wielding weapons of thunder, and fire, and stone.
Our challenge will be to account for this outpouring of mythic content.
Meeting the Archetypes
"Past cultures wordwide often shared in a single cosmic vision, and we must not let our own present fragmented fields of knowledge hinder out attempt to recapture that vision."
The eminent psychoanalyst Carl Jung called these deep patterns "The Archetypes."
He saw them as universal structures of the unconscious,
lying beyond rational or scientific explanation.
ARCHETYPE: Dragon-slayer
Yes, the myths seem incomprehensible to us,
but the Archetypes offer a pathway through the confusion,
they are the points of agreement between the far-flung cultures.
And this agreement rises above the carnival of confusion and contradiction.
ARCHETYPE: Pillar or Mountain of the Gods
Every major culture remembered a Cosmic Mountain around which the Heavens turned.
ARCHETYPE: Angry Goddess
And every culture chronicled the terrible aspect of the Mother Goddess.
Were there no common experience, the archetypal agreement would not even be possible.
ARCHETYPE: Ouroboros, the enclosing serpent
All that is required here is a willingness to meet the archetypes
and without fear or prejudice or any advanced assumptions, to hear their message.
ARCHETYPE: Ladder to Heaven
The existence of hundreds of archetypes is a fact,
and it is a fact as well that no archetype
speaks for natural events occuring today, not a single one.
ARCHETYPE: Dying God
At the Dawn of Civilization all of the Archetypes were already present.
"...The extreme preoccupation of most early societies with celestial imagery... appears to be part of a world wide phenomenon."
"Could the prehistoric 'sky' have been much more active than now?"
Today, we are fascinated by the monumental scale of the antique civilizations.
But what were the essential memories that drove the monumental cultures so obsessively?
The threads of evidence trace deep into the prehistoric past,
a world barely recognized but not entirely lost.
More than ten thousand years ago,
Paleolithic artists painted these images on the walls of Lascaux cave in France.
They were realists, with an exceptional eye for detail.
Why these talented artists of the Stone Age disappeared remains a mystery.
But the greater mystery is the epoch that followed.
It seems that Neolithic artists lost the ability to depict nature as we know it.
Accurate representations of nature are present,
but the dominant style produced a carnival of ghostly creatures
and absurd forms never seen in our world.
How did this tendency arise?
Not in one landalone but on every habitable continent.
Absurd? Yes, but what provoked the distinctive patterns?
A stick man with no head, just a duck or other bird on his shoulders?
Hundreds of variations on this theme occur in the American Southwest.
But the pattern doesn't end there.
Notice the twin dots on the two sides of these crudely crafted stick figures.
One instance alone is just a curiosity
but the widespread patterns must have an explanation.
And other details only accent the irrationality.
Recently an answer to these mysteries came from outside traditional archaeology,
from plasma science and laboratory experiments with electric discharge.
Plasma scientist Anthony Peratt of Los Alamos laboratories has shown
that these stick forms recorded electrical events in the sky.
Something like the Northern Lights we see today but a thousand times more energetic.
And he matches the rock art forms precisely
to the configurations taken by electric discharge in the laboratory.
The rock art images are explained as sheets of intense electric current
in the evolution of a plasma discharge.
The central column you see in this stylized representation
is the axis of the discharge.
Wrapped around the axis is a torus or donut-like tubular sheet of charged particles.
The observer sees through the transparent formation: champagne glass above,
squashed bell-shape below, so the plasma density is greatest at the limbs.
Drawn in two dimensions, the formation matches the stick man carved globally
on stone by the thousands.
The two dots under the stick man's arms
are the exceedingly bright high-energy radiation called synchrotron radiation,
emitted from the center of the torus.
The current sheets continually warp as the electric discharge progresses
and this form is not uncommon.
A two dimensional representation might look like this.
Peratt's work has shown that the stick man,
the duck headed version of the American Southwest
and variations from Hawaii to Saudi Arabia is a plasma discharge formation,
a subject on which he's an acknowledged world expert.
Peratt's investigation is entirely independent from our own.
Thousands of rock art images have enabled a supercomputer
to identify formations as seen from different positions on Earth.
The fit that he has documented can not be accidental.
And yet our own investigation, which preceded Peratt's by almost three decades,
converges with his in extraordinary ways
as I shall clarify in the second episode of this series.
For scholars and scientists as a whole, rock art remains an unsolved mystery.
For two hundred years experts have debated over the vast library of images on stone.
Definitive considerations are now in hand, calling for a new perspective
One that follows the compelling evidence
for high-energy electrical events in the ancient sky.
And those who pursue this line of investigation
must not be afraid to ask how the movements of planets
may have contributed to an electrified cosmic environment,
of which science knew nothing only a few decades ago.
IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY
Is it possible that a fundamental mistake has crept into the sciences?
Today we witness an unshakable confidence in the regularity of planetary motions,
but is this confidence truly justified?
I need to take you back about thirty-seven years.
That was when the controversial theorist Immanuel Velikovsky lit a fire for me.
He was the author of the book "Worlds in Collision," first published in 1950,
and several other books that followed.
In these books he reinterpreted both planetary history and human history.
A distinguished scholar, colleague of Albert Einstein,
Velikovsky had claimed that planets formerly moved on unstable courses.
And more than once a planet came close enough to Earth to cause global catastrophe.
Scene from "Remembering the End of the World"
Most astronomers dismissed the book out of hand
and some threatened a boycott of the publisher Macmillan,
forcing the company to drop the book when it was the number one bestseller.
But when the space age arrived our
probes of planets and moons revealed devastated surfaces
inspiring renewed interest in Velikovsky's claims.
With Velikovsky's cooperation, I had the privilege of publishing
a ten issue series on his challenge to science.
Velikovsky said that cosmic catastrophe left its marks on the now-peaceful planets,
our Earth included.
He said that the planet Venus appeared in the sky as a comet
and that its near-collision with the Earth decimated early civilizations.
He said that electricity was highly active in these events.
Planets moved on erratic courses and on occasion they nearly collided
as cosmic lightning bolts flew between the approaching bodies.
and he said that human memories of these events
constitute evidence that science can not afford to ignore.
It soon became clear to me that Velikovsky had opened the door to a new possibility,
perhaps even a new understanding of the mythic archetypes as a whole.
But why did the evidence always seem too preposterous to believe?
Why did all of the archaic cultures stake everything
on memories of the gods as towering bodies in a former sky?
I was particularly enchanted by something Velikovsky proposed
in a work still unpublished at the time.
He claimed that, in the earliest remembered epoch, the planet Saturn dominated the sky,
close to the Earth,
presiding over the mythic Golden Age
It was an outrageous idea and yet I found in it the inspiration for a life's work.
Ancient cultures, the world over, insisted that an exemplary sun once ruled the sky.
For the Egyptians, this former power was the creator Atum-Ra,
ruling from the center and summit of the sky.
In ancient Mesopotamia, we see the primeval sun as a great turning wheel in the heavens
and the astronomers named this body
as the planet Saturn.
It was from the Romans that we received the planet's name,
Saturn,
but an archaic Latin name for Saturn was Sol, the Sun.
In earlier Greek texts, the planet Saturn, called Kronos,
was also named Helios - the Sun.
"Helios and Kronos were one and the same god."
Even the alchemists preserved this preposterous identity.
They called Saturn "The Best Sun".
Best sun, superior sun, exemplary sun ..
the core idea always pointed directly to the axis of the sky,
the celestial pole, around which the heavens visually turned.
As improbable as it may seem,
this is where the Egyptians located their primeval sun-god, Atum.
"The great god lives, fixed in the middle of the sky."
"[Atum was] the arbiter of destiny perched on the top of the world pole. Here must be the node of the universe, the centre of regulation."
This motionless spot in the heavens is precisely where
later astronomical traditions from Greece to Persia and China,
all claimed that Saturn had ruled the world.
A contradiction of every principle we take for granted today.
"What has Saturn, the far-out planet, to do with the Pole? Such figures of speech were an essential part of the technical idiom of archaic astrology."
Ancient chroniclers insisted that the planet Saturn,
now just a speck in the sky, had presided over the Golden Age.
An epoch of abundance, cosmic harmony and grandeur.
The archaic name of Italy was Saturnia
and tradition held that this very name was given to the original site of Rome.
The Sabbath, the special day of rest and reverence was Saturni Dies, Saturn's day.
A day honored throughout the Mediterranean, the Near East and beyond.
The popular Roman festival, Saturnalia,
was a symbolic return to the Saturnia Regna, Saturn's Reign, the Golden Age.
Much symbolic content of our own New Year's and Christmas celebrations
will trace to the Roman Saturnalia and related ancient festivals.
In one form or another, every culture that remembered Saturn's reign
regarded the planet-god as the Father of Kings, the Father of the Nation or the Race,
Ancient traditions identified the Ugaritic and Hebrew El as Saturn.
And it was said that the Israelites once saw themselves as Saturn's children.
In the same way the Greeks invoked Kronos as their first father
and the Romans insisted that they were the true descendants of Saturn,
arriving in Italy through the adventures of the legendary ancestor Aeneas.
"Deign to know the Latins, Saturn's race, a race freely self-controlled as in the olden days [the Golden Age]".
But there was a dark side to Saturn,
reflecting the catastrophic end of the Golden Age.
This was when, in the words of Manilius, Saturn, the First Father,
fell to the opposite end of the World Axis.
This sudden onset of chaos, when heaven itself seemed to fall out of control,
has haunted civilizations across the millennia,
erupting as doomsday anxiety, the fear that what happened once will happen again.
It's almost impossible to believe that ancient people sacrificed their own children,
either symbolically or literally to the planet-god Saturn.
Saturn was remembered as the devourer of his own children
and as Moloch, demanding sacrifice.
and as El or the Elohim commanding Abraham to sacrifice his own son, Isaac.
In the face of evidence that can not be denied,
the reasonable course is to bring the catastrophic source of these memories
into the light of day.
My book "The Saturn Myth," published by Doubleday in 1980,
began the reconstruction of a spectacular formation formerly seen in the sky:
a gathering of planets, looming immense above the ancient witnesses
I was working with the mythic archetypes,
cultures everywhere using different words and different symbols
to describe eerily similar events.
but the planetary model presented in "The Saturn Myth" was far from complete.
Amongst the greatest of enigmas was the cosmic wheel recorded by every ancient culture.
Images of a wheel in the sky, carved on stone, are older than civilization itself.
Many archaeologists see these wheels as an imagined vehicle of the Sun,
rolling across the sky.
But in its most common form, the cosmic wheel doesn't go anywhere.
Often it rests on a stationary pillar
Or atop of a stairway or ladder
Or is turned by a rope while resting on an altar or table.
And the spokes of the wheel are not functional as such;
they are fluid and etheric.
Archaic gods and heroes hold a wheel in their hands.
A cosmic wheel served as the throne of gods,
and cultural heroes, and wise men.
Symbolically replicated in the wheel-thrones of kings on Earth.
The wheel-throne of Buddha underscores our point.
And even the popular footprint of Buddha recalls the same wheel in heaven.
The inspiration did not come from our Sun.
Compare these prehistoric instances of the pictographic wheel
from Ireland and from California.
Different parts of the wheel are clearly evident.
A large circle or sphere, though not always present,
a central star and a smaller darker circle or sphere inside the star-like form.
The images do not depict a single object,
but three objects, as demonstrated here,
where the artist placed the small dark sphere well below the central star.
I can assure you that the placements are not random.
These forms in the sky were planets in close congregation
and immense above the ancient sky-worshippers.
The stories begin with the appearance of this celestial formation
Heaven, when "Heaven was close to the Earth"
The original Unity Of The Sky formed by the Great Conjunction
when a straight line or arrow would "pierce the hearts of the gathered powers".
The Motionless, Superior Sun ruling before the present Sun.
The Father of Kings and first in the mythic line of kings.
And a dying or displaced god.
In later times the first astronomers identified this overarching ruler of the sky.
They claimed it was the planet Saturn,
remembered as the owner of the Cosmic Wheel before the god departed for distant realms.
The astronomical traditions also name the central star as Venus, the Mother Goddess
and they name the darker, reddish sphere as the planet Mars, the cosmic warrior.
In these three hours I intend to demonstrate that the stories of the gods
are the stories of what happens to these celestial bodies.
You're looking at reconstructed images of the formation in the heavens
just a few thousand years ago.
The configuration evolved through many phases, evoking reverence and awe,
a model for kings and kingdoms for thousands of years.
Great temples and cities and sacred mountains
all pointed back to the mythic age of gods and wonders.
Let the world's first astronomers point the way for us.
They knew that what the myths and hymns and prayers called gods
were planets and aspects of planets.
Planets appeared close to the Earth in a heaven-spanning configuration.
Memories of that celestial splendor still surround us,
even if humanity later forgot much more than it remembered.
Reconnecting with our forgotten past will be essential,
essential for our own cultural integrity,
essential for the study of human consciousness
and essential for all of the sciences.
The Cosmic Thunderbolt
Just a few thousand years ago our ancestors witnessed
the gathering of planets close to the Earth.
An explosion of human imagination occurred,
an outpouring of mythology and symbolism that defined cultures for thousands of years
long after the celestial provocation itself was forgotten.
In these early historical times, there are no records of the present planets,
no diaries recording planetary motions or periods,
Planets as we know them today did not exist, these were the gods,
awe-inspiring and at times capricious and terrifying.
Saturn
Early star-worshippers speak of a great Light of Heaven, motionless in the sky.
The Egyptian Atum or Atum-Ra
The Sumerian An
The Babylonian Anu
and enigmatically, early astronomers knew the overarching figure as the planet Saturn
whose story will be a centerpiece of our third episode.
In the beginning the gathered powers were not seen as separated gods
but as the primeval Unity of Heaven, the perfect conjunction
or Great Conjunction of the Golden Age.
A massive sphere hung in the sky
and in its center stood a radiant star surrounded by explosive streamers.
Cultures the world over came to see this star in feminine terms as the Mother Goddess,
the planet Venus.
Remembered as the Great Star, the Mother of all stars.
This was the central eye, heart and soul of the primeval Sun,
his animating life, power and glory and much more.
One of the most enigmatic cultural themes
is the transformation of the life-giving Goddess
into a monstrous form, attacking the world.
This was the terrible Goddess, raging in the sky with wildly disordered hair,
or multiple flailing arms, celestial spectacle radiating a paralyzing light.
When instability and displacement occurred,
the streamers discharging from Venus grew chaotic,
giving the planet a frightful countenance.
The angry goddess was a comet.
The mythic prototype of comets.
Immanuel Velikovsky's Great Comet,
the planet Venus.
Aphrodite Comaetho: "the Comet Venus"
Roman image of Venus as "the comet"
"The ignorant masses of the people had considered Venus as a comet."
Mars
Seen in front of this central star was a smaller, darker, reddish sphere.
This was the mythic warrior,
The masculine "Heart of the Heart"
The "Child in the Womb"
The "Child on the Lap"
The "Pupil of the Eye"
The "Axle of the Cosmic Wheel"
The most active figure of world mythology
Sky-worshippers everywhere knew the identity of this warrior,
the victor over dragons and chaos monsters.
This global identity of Mars as the greatest of warriors
shouts to us an unrecognized history.
Star-in-Crescent
On the great sphere of heaven a bright crescent appeared,
with the orb or star of Venus between its horns.
Things never seen in our sky were once revered around the world.
As the Earth rotated on its axis,
the crescent marked out a cycle of day and night.
Crescent below in the phase of greatest brightness,
crescent above in the phase of dimming.
Though our Sun was present, casting its light on the configuration,
it was not itself in the visual theater of the gods.
I call this "The Polar Configuration" because the Earth itself
rotated in alignment with the forms in the sky,
placing these forms at a celestial pole around which the heavens visually turned.
The configuration evolved through numerous phases.
The number of streamers changed repeatedly,
as did their observed form.
Every change in relative position
produced dramatic changes in the appearance of the configuration.
Electric Universe
In 1996, the Canadian filmmaker Ben Ged Low spent many months in Portland,
producing a 90-minute documentary on the reconstruction.
At that time many dynamic issues were largely unresolved.
But later that year, the Australian physicist Wallace Thornhill
flew to Portland for a 30-day visit.
He convinced me that the forms I'd reconstructed were electrical.
They were plasma discharge streamers, stretching between planets.
He explained that, in a radial electric discharge,
both the number of streamers and their concrete form
will change with the intensity of the discharge.
The whirling forms I'd reconstructed in the common symmetry,
which I'd often laughed about,
did indeed have a physical explanation.
At the time of his visit, Wal Thornhill had devoted more than 25 years
to exploring what he called "The Electric Universe."
His work follows in the traditions of the electrical and plasma science pioneers,
who showed that electricity plays a major role in space.
That galaxies, stars and planets are formed electrically.
That comets, with their bright tails, move through an electric field of the Sun.
His electrical interpretation extended to the origin
of bizarre landscapes on planets and moons
now explained by the well-tested principles of electrical arcing.
In an electric solar system, if two planets or moons approach each other
from regions of different potential, electric discharge will occur,
producing plasma formations stretching between the approaching bodies.
Plasma laboratory experiments can tell us what the formations might look like.
The backbone is typically a column of twisted filaments,
but disks and embedded cylinders also arise to evolve in spectacular ways.
The counterpart to such formations
can be seen in ancient depictions of the cosmic thunderbolt.
But what an outrageous idea,
that exotic formations could arise between planets in close approach!
"The space between the two planets lights up and is set aflame by both planets and produces a train of fire."
"Heavenly fire is spit forth by the planet as crackling charcoal flies from a burning log."
"[Archaic traditions say] that these bolts come from the planet Saturn, just as the inflammatory ones come from Mars."
What then was the relationship of the cosmic thunderbolt
to the magical swords, arrows, clubs and spears of the great warrior-gods?
With a stunning accord, ancient languages identify these weapons
as special forms of the cosmic thunderbolt.
Scholars have already identified the sword and arrows of Apollo
The spear of Zeus
The trident of Poseidon
as aspects of the divine thunderbolt.
The same linkage occurs with the Greek Ares, the Latin Mars,
whose sword was his identity.
Ares (Mars) "darted swift and bright as the thunderbolt terribly flashing from the mignth hand of Zeus."
First came the thunderbolt, the core archetype,
then came its mythic interpretation as a weapon of the warrior-god.
"...A 'derivation' of the sword from a 'root' or archetype in lightning is universal and world wide."
Placed in the hands of the Gods,
the cosmic thunderbolt provides a bridge the Latin Mars,
the Latin Mars,joining the mythic world to the leading edge of plasma science.
POLAR CONFIGURATION
The Dawn of Civilization
One simple truth will change the future of science
and our understanding of human history.
The ancient sky bore no resemblance to the sky we see today.
Above human witnesses, planetary formations hovered close to the Earth.
ARCHETYPE: Mother Goddess as "Great Star" ...with numerous variations
Babylonian star of Ishtar (Venus)
...with enclosed, inidentified sphere
One electrical form metamorphosed into another
in the celestial dance of the mythic star-goddess and the cosmic warrior,
astronomically identified as the planets Venus and Mars.
Ancient observers saw the head of the warrior-king
wrapped in the radiance of the star-goddess, it was his crown of glory.
ARCHETYPE: Star Goddess as Crown
And it was the warrior's magical protection, worn as a helmet or crest, but much more.
The dancing Aztec god wore the rays of Venus as a crest
but also held the so-called half-star of Venus in an outstreched hand.
And he even wore this protective radiance as his skirt.
The theme is universal, the warrior's armor was the radiance of the great star
and that is the explanation for the unexplained "radiate crown of kings".
Greece: Warrior god Apollo
Crown of Antiochos
Roman crown of kingship
Heraldry: "Celestial Crown"
As the forms of the configuration changed, the mythic interpretations changed as well.
ARCHETYPE: "Spread Tail Feathers"
In pictures and words, the ancient chroniclers
recounted the cosmic conjunction of the goddess and the warrior.
ARCHETYPE: Orb (eye) in the "Hand of God"
The goddess was the eye and the warrior was the pupil of the eye.
Two spheres in alignment inspired a mythical interpretation
as an eye and pupil inscribed upon the Hand of God.
In ancient Egypt, the "Hand of Ra" was the Eye goddess Iussaset.
The Egyptian warrior gods were named arit, the "pupil" of the feminine eye.
The five fingers of the hand were the visible aspects
of an eight-spoked wheel in a different phase.
Buddhist symbolists knew that the hand bore a secret relationship
to the eight-spoked dharma-wheel.
Buddha was the motionless axle of the wheel, enthroned upon the hand of heaven,
he was surrounded and protected by the celestial fire of the gods.
Every form that arose provoked a variety of mythical interpretations,
not just a single idea.
The spokes of the wheel were the animating soul and power of the universal sovereign,
exploding into life at sunset, that is the meaning of the mythic "Plant of life".
ARCHETYPE: Goddess as "Plant of Life" Greece: Rosette of Aphrodite (Venus)
Things seen in the sky provoked hundreds of imaginative images
and not one speaks for the events in the heavens today, not a single one.
Even when the concrete form of the cosmic original was forgotten,
the imaginative idea persisted for thousands of years.
ARCHETYPE: "7-Headed Serpent"
Innumerable concrete details would not allow us
to just make up explanations for the myths and symbols.
ARCHETYPE: "Spread Tail Feathers"
Some symbols remained abstract
but more often they added mythical interpretation to the underlined form.
And many mythical images, seemingly incompatible,
will trace to the same tangible form.
Goddess Venus as dove
The plant of life was not just an attractive design element,
it was a form in the sky, inspiring a story of vast influence.
ARCHETYPE: Goddess as "Plant of Life"
In his birth or re-birth the warrior-god emerged from the radiant flower.
Egypt: birth of the Warrior-King
Egypt: Nefertem emerging from the lotus
The diverse mythical interpretations and the larger stories told about these events,
all point to a unified substructure of human memory.
ARCHETYPE: "Wheel of Heaven"
A great wheel turned in the heavens and it was remembered around the world.
Even the modest displacement of the aligned powers was captured in ancient images.
ARCHETYPE: "Displacemente"
Scallop: symbol of Aphrodite's "birth" and departure
Why was the Egyptian goddess identified as the headdress of the warrior-king?
It's the underlined form that gives us the answer.
Warrior Hero
A primeval sun ruled the world shining most brightly in the night sky.
A crescent came to adorn this primeval sun and it certainly was not our moon.
The great star of Venus rested between its horns,
and visually seated within the star, was the planet Mars.
A luminous stream appeared to descend from Mars,
the first form of the cosmic thunderbolt.
Greece: forms of the cosmic thunderbolt
Tibet: forms of the cosmic thunderbolt
Human imagination saw sword or dagger, thrust into the region below.
The warrior-god was his sword,
envisioned also as an axial pin, peg or mooring post of the turning sky.
The same thing as the stem of the plant of life.
And the pillar-like lower limbs of the goddess.
The same form in the sky was seen as a protruding tongue of both the warrior
and the angry goddess.
A pronounced movement of Mars occurred,
close to but not precisely on the planetary axis.
Now the celestial crescent appeared as the horns of the warrior himself,
in his identity as the Bull of Heaven.
ARCHETYPE: "Bull of Heaven"
And it should not surprise us that the foundation post
bore the image of the bull at its apex.
When it reached the Earth, the stream presented the form
of a great pillar or cosmic mountain.
"O Great Mountain (Enlil), whose head rivals the heavens, Whose foundation is laid in the pure abyss. Whose horns gleanm."
Perhaps it is too much to believe that the famous Bull of Heaven
was just the pillar and shining horns,
"I am the bull, the Old One... I support the sky with my horns."
"...the pillar of hte stars, the Bull of Heaven..."
"whose horns shine, the anointed pillar, the Bull of Heaven."
To these events we will trace the worldwide myths of the heaven-lifting cosmic giant,
the first active form of the warrior-hero.
His upraised arms were precisely the same thing as the horns of the Bull of Heaven,
ARCHETYPE: "Cosmic Pillar"
a testament to the integrity of the substructure, the archetypes.
Greece: Heaven-lifting Atlas
THE MYTH OF CREATION
Conical Crowns of the Warrior King
In some phases with the movement of Mars, dust and electrified plasma,
streaming between Mars and Venus, became visible to terrestrial observers,
even small changes in this dusty plasma stream,
were we to view the formation from space,
would create distinctive differences in the appearance of the configuration.
The great kings of ancient times wore conical crowns
in numerous and always enigmatic varieties.
For these revered forms the experts can find no referent in nature today.
Yet the priestly chroniclers of antiquity knew that these crowns
imitated the vestment of the cosmic warrior,
the prototype of the warrior king on Earth.
The Curling Life-Breath
ARCHETYPE: "Curling Life-Breath"
With progressive instability and displacement from the axis,
the stream joining Mars and Venus spiralled outward.
This was the mother goddess herself,
the radiant eye, heart and soul of the primeval sun,
now externalized as a curling lock of hair.
And the earliest sources leave no doubt that it was a visible form in the sky.
Egyptian texts invoked "the lock of hair which circles round about."
The primeval sun god Ra had "the light of the lock of hair on him."
The side lock of the warrior-king mimicked that of his predecessor, the cosmic warrior.
Horus: "He of the Sidelock"
This curling life breath provoked innumerable symbols,
far more than we could include here.
Just one example was the mooring post in the sky
signifying the outflow of the eye and the evolving form of creation itself.
A critical turn came with the removal of the life breath curl
unleashing the terrible goddess and a cosmic crisis.
In his rage, the Hindu Shiva tore out a lock of his hair
from which arose his own dark aspect,
the monster Virabadra
and close by the terrifying form of the angry goddess
whom we recognize as the comet Venus.
The life of the legendary King Nisus resided in a tuft of hair. His death resulted when Aphrodite Comaetho removed the strands of life.
The Greek name Aphodite Comaetho translates astronomically as "the comet Venus."
Chaos Serpent or Dragon
ARCHETYPE: "Chaos Serpent-Dragon"
The medusa archetype was only a nuance away from the celestial serpent or dragon,
with its bright filaments, effusive feathers,
long flowing hair and lightning emanations,
the global symbols of the great comet.
In Egypt, the eye, heart and soul of Ra, departed from the god
to become the fiery Uraeus serpent, rampaging in the heavens.
"The tip of its flame crosses the land from the sky... No one at all can approach her, the streams behind her are flames of fire."
Astronomical traditions throughout the Mediterranean and Near East
confirm that this goddess was the planet Venus.
The ancient Sumerians identified Venus as Inanna,
the serpent or dragon mother, unapproachable in her rage.
"Like a dragon you have deposited venom on the land... Raining the fanned fire down upon the nation."
The disordered comet-like hair of the Chinese dragon was an overriding feature,
as was the discharging sphere or so called night glowing pearl
its spiraling attributes.
And the lightning emanations of the dragon itself.
Long after the remembered events the Aztecs still knew the comet as streaming feathers.
They knew the connection of the comet to a cosmic serpent,
and they remembered the connection of both to the planet Venus.
Creation
From the episodes of disorder a phase of celestial construction emerged,
focused on the activity of the spiraling form or rayed spiral,
remembered as the Serpent of creation.
This was the expanded enclosure of the Mother Goddess herself,
the motherland in the sky, the two subject of the archaic creation legend.
ARCHETYPE: "Serpent of Creation"
The mythic home of gods and heroes lay within an enclosure
formed by the body of the celestial serpent or dragon.
ARCHETYPE: "Oroborus" (Enclosing Serpent)
The evolving forms noted here are provable phases
in the biography of the mother goddess,
largely ignored but confirmed at the level of concrete detail in the early cultures.
The priests of ancient Egypt knew that the White Crown was the Mother Goddess.
"I know my mother, the White Crown."
They knew that the life-breath curl and the revolving lock of hair
were the same goddess.
Isis and Hathor were also named, "the side-lock"
Across all of Egypt, the chroniclers remembered the luminous spiral
with its radial projections as the agent of celestial construction.
Egypt: Serpent of Creation
From north to south, they described the goddess originally "The Eye of Ra"
taking the form of a flaming serpent, whose hieroglyph means goddess.
"The cobra-snake of Ra, who came forth from him - The Eye of Ra. She is the flaming goddess."
And it was this very serpent that came to form an enclosure,
the boundary of Neter Ta, the celestial kingdom.
Meso-American artists understood very well that the fire serpent or dragon,
enclosing the land of the gods, had appeared as a rayed spiral.
Four Streams of Life
The created land of the gods, emerging from the dance of the goddess and the hero,
presented four streams of light and life.
Here was the mother land in the sky,
the celestial model for every kingdom and city on Earth.
The lost land of mythic ancestors,
divided by four rivers or animated by four explosive winds
and turning as a great wheel in the sky.
To be sure, the evolution of myth over time
brought endless elaborations of the archetype,
yet even in the enthusiasm to extend the symbolism,
the substratum of human memory does shine through.
The complexities of the Aztec calendar-wheel
did not eliminate the axial role of the warrior-hero,
or the four exploding streams of life-energy,
or the circumscribing, often double-headed, serpent,
or the identity of that serpent as the fire of the gods.
As a rule, later spiritual traditions did not displace this human memories either,
but found in them the symbolic landscape for expressing insights and beliefs
that would guide later interpretations of myth.
Mountain of the Gods
Lastly, we must acknowledge one of the most pervasive symbols of world mythology.
All mythic traditions agree that the land of the gods
rested on the golden or fiery mountain of heaven.
It is evident that the core symbols of the human yearning,
suffering and devotion across the millennia,
trace to the very events from which the first civilizations themselves arose.
Now the question must be asked:
if the great mythic archetypes are explained by events unknown to our world,
what can the Electric Universe and the leading edge of Plasma Science
tell us about the ancient experience?