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Saturn
consuming own children
'The fact remains that no scholar has ever been able to establish
a date for the creation of any myth.'[1]
The most widespread or universal of myths
are thought to be the most venerable, and seem to share a common
memory of quite specific events with similar symbolic language and
the same 'literary motifs'.
Noah saw that the earth had tilted, and that
its destruction was near, and cried out in a bitter voice "Tell
me what is being done on the earth that the earth is so afflicted
and shaken ..."
In our discussion of the nature and differences
of history and myth, we saw that for some strange reason, and at
some undetermined date, it appears that certain archaic, worldwide
myths were, as Hapgood says, 'co-opted to serve as vehicles for
a body of complex technical data.' Much of this data seems to concern
the precession of the equinoxes.
Conventional historical thinking has maintained that Hipparchus,
the Greek scholar who passed away some time after 127 BC, made the
'notable discovery' of the precession of the equinoxes, as the result
of 'painstaking observations, worked upon by an acute mind', according
to the Encyclopedia Britannica.
So what is the precession of the equinoxes? Without trying to explain
it myself, I've looked long and hard for a simple explanation to
describe it. In a caption to a diagram in his valuable investigative
work, Fingerprints of the Gods, Graham Hancock explains it as follows:
During the course of each year the earth's
movement along its orbit causes the stellar background against which
the sun is seen to rise to change from month to month: Aquarius
- Pisces - Aries - Taurus - Gemini - Cancer - Leo, etc, etc.
Thus we know the months representing each of the so-called 'sun-signs'.
But the precession of the vernal equinox itself is something of
a different magnitude.
At present, on the vernal equinox, the sun rises due east between
Pisces and Aquarius. The effect of precession is to cause the 'vernal
point' to be reached fractionally earlier in the orbit each year
with the result that it very gradually shifts through all 12 houses
of the zodiac, spending 2160 years 'in' each sign and making a complete
circuit in 25,920 years. The direction of this 'precessional drift',
in opposition to the annual 'path of the sun', is Leo - Cancer -
Gemini - Taurus - Aries - Pisces - Aquarius.
Hancock uses as example the 'Age' to which
geologists recently ascribed the Sphinx and the alignment of the
Pyramids at Giza:
To give one example, the 'Age of Leo', i.e.
2160 years during which the sun on the vernal equinox rose against
the stellar background of the constellation of Leo, lasted from
10,970 until 8810 BC. We live today in the astrological no man's
land at the end of the 'Age of Pisces', on the threshold of the
'New Age' of Aquarius. Traditionally these times of transition between
one age and the next have been regarded as ill-omened.[1]
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In
her work The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, archeo-astronomer Jane
B. Sellers contends that the Egyptians not only understood the nature
of precession, but incorporated a group of key numbers into the
Osiris myth as 'excess baggage'. [Misquote
- see 3]
These
numbers, to those who recognize them for what they are, offer an
'eternal calculus by which surprisingly exact values can be derived
for the following':
1. The time required for the earth's slow
precessional wobble to cause the position of sunrise on the vernal
equinox to complete a shift of one degree along the ecliptic (in
relation to the stellar background);
2. The time required for the sun to pass through one full zodiacal
segment of thirty degrees;
3. The time required for the sun to pass through two full zodiacal
segments (totaling 60 degrees);
4. The time required to bring about the 'Great Return', i.e. for
the sun to shift three hundred and sixty degrees along the ecliptic,
thus fulfilling one complete precessional cycle or 'Great Year'.[1]
The precessional numbers from the Osiris myth are 360, 72, 30 and
12. They are also to be found in other mythological bodies of work.
Sellers is one of the first serious scholars to have tested the
theory advanced by Santillana and von Deschend in Hamlet's Mill,
and has drawn attention to the need to use astronomy and precession
for the proper study of ancient Egypt and its religion. She writes:
'Archeologists by and large lack an understanding of precession,
and this affects their conclusions concerning ancient myths, ancient
gods and ancient temple alignments ... For astronomers precession
is a well-established fact; those working in the field of ancient
man have a responsibility to attain an understanding of it.'
We
could go on discussing the mechanics of precession in much more
detail, but we'd soon get more technical than necessary. What is
clear is that mankind's awareness of precession is older than is
conventionally thought. Furthermore, the details of precession appear
to have been incorporated into mankind's earliest universal myths,
which gives them an aura of vast antiquity indeed. The fact that
the knowledge was preserved as meticulously, and 'seeded' so cleverly
as it was, suggests its importance to those who we have lost to
the mists of prehistory.
Most of the major civilizations have their own variations on precession,
the cycle of vast ages of time and eerily, the global cataclysms
that appear to separate them. Immanuel Velikovsky, author of Worlds
in Collision, writes:
Aristarchus of Samos in the third century before the present era
taught that in a period of 2,484 years the earth undergoes two destructions
- of combustion and deluge ... Hesiod, one of the earliest Greek
authors, wrote about four ages and four generations of men that
were destroyed by the wrath of the planetary gods. The third age
was the age of bronze; when it was destroyed by Zeus, a new generation
repeopled the earth, and using bronze for arms and tools, they began
to use iron too. The heroes of the Trojan War were of this fourth
generation. Then a new destruction was decreed, and after that came
'yet another generation, the fifth, of men who are upon the bounteous
earth' - the generation of iron.
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The Furies
Analogous traditions of four expired ages
persist on the shores of the Bengal Sea and in the highland of Tibet
- the present age is the fifth. The sacred Hindu book Bhagavata
Purana tells of four ages and of the pralayas or cataclysms in which,
in various epochs, mankind was nearly destroyed; the fifth is is
that of the present. In Visuddhi-Magga it is said that 'there are
three destructions: the destruction by water, the destruction by
fire, the destruction by wind,' but there are seven ages, each of
which is separated from the previous one by a world catastrophe.
Reference to ages and catastrophes is found in Avesta (Zend Avesta),
the sacred scriptures of Mazdaism, the ancient religion of the Persians.
Zoroaster, the prophet of Mazdaism, speaks of 'the signs, wonders,
and perplexity which are manifested in the world at the end of each
millennium.
The Chinese call the perished ages kis and number ten kis from the
beginning of the world until Confucius. In the ancient Chinese encyclopedia,
Sing-li-tas-tsiuen-chou, the general convulsions of nature are discussed.
Because of the periodicity of these convulsions, the span of time
between two catastrophes is regarded as a 'great year'. As during
a year, so during a world age, the cosmic mechanism winds itself
up and 'in a general convulsion of nature, the sea is carried out
of its bed, mountains spring up from the ground, rivers change their
course, human beings and everything are ruined, and the ancient
traces effaced.
In the chronicles of the Mexican kingdom it
is said: 'The ancients knew that before the present sky and earth
were formed, man was already created and life had manifested itself
four times. The Mayas counted their ages by the names of their consecutive
suns. These were called Water Sun, Earthquake Sun, Hurricane Sun,
Fire Sun. 'These suns mark the epochs to which are attributed the
various catastrophes the world has suffered.'[2]
We can go on. To Hawaii, and Iceland, and
the Israelites, to Buddhism, and the aborigines of Borneo. Sometimes
there are seven ages, often five, sometimes three, or ten ages.
But each is separated from the next by world cataclysms, and they
are often characterized by one of the elements.
Though every one of the four elements participated in each of the
catastrophes; deluge, hurricane, earthquake, and fire gave their
names to the catastrophes because of the predominance of one of
them in the upheavals.
Interpreted by the modern dating system, the Mayan calendars not
only depict the length of each of the 'suns' and nature of each
of the catastrophes, but they also calculate the end of the present,
fifth sun.
The day will be 4 Ahau 3 Kankin, and it will be ruled by the Sun
God, or ninth Lord of the Night. The moon will be eight days old,
and it will be the third lunation in a series of six.
The date corresponds to 23 December AD 2012.
Modern astrologers who have 'charted the Mayan
date for the end of the Fifth Sun calculate that there will be a
most peculiar arrangement of planets at the time, indeed and arrangement
so peculiar that 'it can only occur once in 45,200 years ... from
this extraordinary pattern we might well expect an extraordinary
effect'.'[1]
The Maya were not the only ones to study planetary
calendars when working out the dates of the catastrophes that ravaged
the world. And they were not the only ones to use their learning
to date the end of the next age.
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'I
Berosus, interpreter of Bellus, affirm that all the earth inherits
will be consigned to flame when the five planets assemble in Cancer,
so arranged in one row that a straight line may pass through their
spheres.'
It is now known that when Jupiter, Saturn
and Mars line up, shortwave radio frequencies are disturbed. There
is, in addition, a strange and unexplained correlation between this
conjunction and violent electrical disturbances in the earth's upper
atmosphere.
These effects have led scientists to surmise that the solar system
has a certain 'cosmic-electrical balance mechanism that extends
a billion miles from the centre of our solar system. Such an electrical
balance is not accounted for in current astrophysical theories.'[1]
In the third century BC, Berosus, the Chaldean
historian, astronomer and seer, made a deep study of the omens he
believed would presage the final destruction of the world. Chaldean
scholars, amongst which Berosus was eminent, knew that the planetary
system is not rigid and that planets undergo changes. They counted
the earth amongst the planets and knew that an eclipse is the earth's
shadow falling on the moon. Only fragments remain of what he wrote,
such as a quotation by Seneca, in his work Naturales quaestiones.
Seneca wrote:
'Berosus, the translator of Bel, attributed to the planets the cause
of these perturbations. His certainty in this matter was so great
as to fix the dates of the universal conflagration and deluge. Everything
terrestrial, he says, will be burned, when the stars which now follow
different orbits will reunite in the sign of Cancer, and will place
themselves in one line, so that a straight line would pass through
the centres of all these globes. The deluge will come when the same
planets will have conjunction in Capricorn.'
It has been said, I don't remember by whom,
that in times of conflagration people living near the seas and in
the deep valleys may be amongst the survivors; in times of deluge
those living atop the hills and the mountains may live.
![... more on Troubled Times](Pix/tsunami.gif)
GOD GAVE NOAH
THE RAINBOW SIGN;
NO MORE WATER, THE FIRE NEXT TIME.
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