Precession: Warning of the Ancients

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]

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.

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.

'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.

GOD GAVE NOAH THE RAINBOW SIGN;
NO MORE WATER, THE FIRE NEXT TIME.

[Apocalypse Aerie] [The Einstein Connection] [Ancient Maps] [Earth Crust Displacement] [Myths of Catastrophism] [History & Science in Myth] [Egypt; The Call of the Sphinx] [India; A Cradle for Civilization] [America; Fear of the Dark] [World Ocean; Path to Atlantis] [Precession; Warning of the Ancients] [Epilogue & Links]
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Copyright © Marc Bergvelt. 1998-2003. All Rights Reserved.

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[1] Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods, Mandarin, 1995
[2] Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision. Victor Golancz Ltd. 1950.
[3] Jane B. Sellers wrote in the guestbook to indicate I quoted what Hancock said, but that he quoted something she never said. The case is heard in the Hall of Ma'at. Author's clarification? Check out Seller's e-book The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt