mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== From: lippard at skyblu.ccit.arizona.edu (James J. Lippard) Newsgroups: talk.origins Subject: DAVID N. TALBOTT: Hoist, Clueless & 'Nihilated (1/2) Date: 14 Jul 1994 00:06 MST Organization: University of Arizona Lines: 466 Message-ID: <14JUL199400062396 at skyblu.ccit.arizona.edu> +--------------------------------------------------+ | * * * IMPORTANT NOTICE * * * | | | | In accordance with the Truth in Labeling | | Statutes, this posting is WARRANTED to be | | a GOOD FAITH effort to INFORM and to be free | | of DISINFORMATION else the writer would regret | | to embitter the t.o. howler monkeys or join | | Number Six in The Village | | | +--------------------------------------------------+ DAVID N. TALBOTT: Hoist, Clueless & 'Nihilated CONTENTS ESPRIT d'ESCALIER QUA PROLEGOMENON MISSING: 20,000 ICE LAYERS? INTRODUCTION THE GINENTHAL FACTOR THE COMET VENUS DELUSION THE UNFAMILIAR SKY GODS, PLANETS AND ACID TESTS CONCLUDING REMARKS POLAR SATURN? Additional References People believe whatever they read. Something magical happens once it's put down on paper. They figure no one would go to the trouble of writing it down if it wasn't the truth. Eugene Morris Jerome in Neil Simon, _Biloxi Blues_ ESPRIT d'ESCALIER QUA PROLEGOMENON These remarks were written after the main text was completed. The crucial fact about Ellenberger's relations with the "Saturnists" (and other Velikovskites) is that he is an ideological turncoat from a movement in which he was an insider. Unlike many before him, he has not "gone off into that good night," after being censured and censored, and left his former colleagues free to promulgate and purvey their collective delusion to a naive and largely unsuspecting public. He was, however, content to let AEON do its thing, when it replaced KRONOS in 1988, until Talbott phoned him one night to prevail upon him to serve as Devil's Advocate in consideration of a complimentary subscription. Ellenberger's ire was raised when his contributions were subjected to unexplained deletions and unreasonable delays in publication. For example, George Talbott's notorious "Candor at Last!" attacking Ellenberger was published immediately in AEON II:4 while Ellenberger's invited comments on tippe top Earth had been in the queue for two years, finally being published in AEON II:5. The "Saturnists" are as fond of Ellenberger as many Germans are of _das schreckliche Maedchen aus Passau_ who delved into her neighbors' activities during the Nazi era and uncovered many not-so-nice behaviors. Lest anyone be misled by Cochrane's posturing about AEON's editorial policies, consider the following: in the first 16 issues, three people (Talbott, Cochrane & Cardona) account for 34% of the articles, 44% of article pages, 7 of the 9 longest articles (30-40 pp.) and 6 of the next 10 longest (25-29 pp.). The average article was 19 pp. with 34% greater than average. These statistics suggest the possibility of at least the appearance of a conflict of interest between editor-contributors and nonresident-contributors. Contrary to Cochrane saying Ellenberger's invited memoir (20 + 32 pp., est'd.) does not fit AEON's scope, it fits into the personal reminiscence genre to which Cardona (53 pp. in 2 parts), de Grazia (29 pp.), and Jueneman (32 pp.) have contributed. Closely related is the serialization of Vorhees' biography of Velikovsky (90 pp. to date). When the length of Ellenberger's memoir for AEON III:1 became a concern, Cochrane adamantly refused to relax the type format standards: 6.25" line and 5.5 lines/inch. However, standards are as rigid as the editor wishes; Talbott's 47-page "The Great Comet Venus, Pt. 1" for AEON III:5 has smaller type, 6.75" line and 6.5 lines/inch. The difference between Ellenberger's memoir and the others is that, while they (except de Grazia) write panegyrics to Velikovsky, his methodology and the Velikovsky controversy myth, Ellenberger's candid insider's account is a panegyric to truth and the scientific method. It is regrettable that t.o posts are not subject to a "truth-checker" analogous to a "spell-checker" considering the plethora of bald-faced lies posted by Talbott, Cochrane and Grubaugh, some of which have been corrected by Lippard and Ellenberger. It is fair to say that their respect for the truth shows they have all the scruples of a grifter who will say anything he thinks is necessary to turn the con. For example, it was a lie 1) for Talbott to imply that Ellenberger had never read S. MYTH or AEON when they used to talk about them on the phone in '88-'89, 2) for Cochrane to repeatedly identify Ellenberger as "secretary" for KRONOS after he had been corrected and considering that no such position ever existed on the staff and 3) for Grubaugh to denigrate Ellenberger's mathematico-analytical acumen when this specious charge is flatly refuted by Ellenberger's 2 Sep '93 letter and 3 Sep '93 card correcting several errors in Grubaugh's unpublished Appendix F on magnetism in the polar configuration in which, e.g., Grubaugh had evaluated 10R**2 as (10R)**2, not realizing that the original expression should have been 10R**3. Contrary to the thrust of Talbott's and Cochrane's posts contra Ellenberger, he has no problem maintaining cordial, reciprocal relations with people, e.g., Zysman, Bauer, Forrest, Stiebing, McKinnon, Slabinski and Van Flandern, with whom he disagrees on legitimately debatable points. Having been forewarned, please consider the following arguments and rebuttals as well as those in earlier posts (19 May, 1, 4, 9, 20, 23, 30 June) which have not been reinforced by subsequent discussion, but which are as relevant as ever. In other words, brevity prevents reiterating all the previous lines of argument which Cochrane and Talbott have chosen to ignore. And lest anyone be deceived by the seemingly rational appeals of Cochrane and Talbott, do not think for a millisecond that a debate with a "Saturnist" is any different than a debate with a flat- or hollow-earther. Carl Sagan once noted "There are many cases where the belief system is so absurd that scientists dismiss it instantly but never commit their arguments to print" (PLAYBOY, Jul '78). If one person's reasoned assessment is another's insult, _c'est la vie_! INTRODUCTION What a colossal perversity Talbott offers as his 3 Jul, 456 line, "Response to Ellenberger" in which he tries to make a case for Ellenberger being an ogre and malefactor when obviously all Talbott does is project his own methodological shortcomings on his adversary. The only redeeming feature of Talbott's posting is that 36% of it consists of quoting Ellenberger's 20 Jun critique "Talbott's Shared Delusion" and blank lines. He dismisses the "Conclusion" as merely "FINAL PROCLAMATIONS AND INSULTS," but perhaps he really cannot fully face the conclusion's cruel truth: "The 'Saturnists' interpretation of myth is methodologically unsound and totally unconstrained by the laws of physics....The 'Saturnists' do not explain anything that cannot be explained more economically by conventional scholarship. Most, if not all, of the sky-combat and Venus-comet imagery and the general fear of comets can be explained by Clube & Napier's model...of earth's episodic, energetic interaction with the dense portion of the Taurid-Encke complex during the Holocene, which was the stimulus for periods of eschatological enthusiasm in the Bible-- real comets, real firestorms out of the sky (often 40 days after proto- Encke was spotted), all relatable by archaic reasoning to Venus, and all astronomically feasible....Given their myriad failings, they are clueless in the mythosphere." Talbott has no right to expect mainstream scholars to respect his "research program" as long as he has no respect for theirs as he remarked cavalierly in a 1977 interview: "As a matter of fact, I'm going to go ahead with the writing of a second volume, called THE CATACLYSM, and not even worry about the physics of it all" [RCN Newsletter #3]. Here he also stated, as he refrained from so doing in THE SATURN MYTH, "There were no seasons" in the Golden Age ruled by Kronos/Saturn. Talbott is the last person on Earth to accuse anyone of "argument by proclamation" considering that in S. MYTH the diurnally revolving crescent motif, from Ellenberger's reading, is pure conjecture. May I add at this late date that once David Griffard reminded me that, to a behaviorist, God is an intermittent reinforcer? On this basis, Clube & Napier's model, in which proto-Encke and its scourge did not wreak havoc on Earth at every passage--just sometimes--is a better motivator for religious beliefs than a hulking presence in the northern sky proposed by Talbott and his "Saturnists." Interestingly, early descriptions of Satan quoted by Neil Forsyth in THE OLD ENEMY: Satan and the Combat Myth (Princeton, 1987) are obviously recognizable as comets to the astronomically-informed, but Forsyth never makes the connection. Lending further support to Clube & Napier, in the June ASTRONOMY NOW, Stuart Clark reports on the impending crash of Shoemaker-Levy 9 into Jupiter and asks "Is it possible that these kinds of impacts [i.e., Tunguska in 1908 and Revelstoke in 1965] go largely unnoticed in the annals of history? In his books, THE COSMIC SERPENT and THE COSMIC WINTER, Victor Clube has searched ancient records and claims to have found the recorded accounts of previous impacts. If impacts are as common as could be inferred from Clube's findings, it is simply a matter of time until the Earth is threatened again" ["Could it happen to planet Earth?" pp. 45-46]. See, too, Jack B. Hartung, "Giordano Bruno, the June 1975 Meteoroid Storm, Encke and Other Taurid Complex Objects," ICARUS 104, 1993, 280-290. I am grateful to Tim Thompson and Andrew MacRae for dealing with Talbott's listing of supposed planetary anomalies that are used to justify interest in a putative polar configuration and which has been a cottage industry at AEON engaged in by Fred Hall (d.), Charles Ginenthal, and Don Patten. Talbott and the "Saturnists" (and other varieties of Velikovskians cum "planetary catastrophists") confuse revolutionary discoveries with the merely unexpected. What freaked me out in an exchange with Talbott in AEON was his citing as evidence for the former existence of the polar configuration the STATIC deviation of the geoid (relative to a spheroid with flattening 1/298.25) of ca. +18 m. at 90 deg. N. and ca. -28 m. at 90 deg. S. [D. King-Hele et al., NATURE 286, 24 Jl 1980, 377-8] with no awareness of the ramifications of the ONGOING post-glacial rebound in Laurentia and Fennoscandia. (See KRONOS X:3, p. 5 & AEON I:6, p. 110). Postglacial rebound is discussed in a recent issue of SCIENCE: W. R. Peltier, "Ice Age Paleotopography," 8 July 1994, 195-201. The "Saturnists" seem to be oblivious to any information that interferes with their folly. Invariably, discussions with "Saturnists" end up reminding me of Daniel Cohen's description of dealing with cranks [quoted by Henry Bauer in BEYOND VELIKOVSKY, p. 149] "Suddenly one must deal with a mind that cares little for evidence and even less for logic." Talbott claims Ellenberger argues "by insult and proclamation," but Ellenberger's 10-point expose' of Talbott's irredeemably flawed methodology gives examples and references to world-class scholars. In PENSEE days a one-sentence dismissal of an argument against Velikovsky reinforced by a reference to some obscure source in the Velikovksy literature was accepted practice. Now Ellenberger's use and extension of this model is called "argument by proclamation." GOOD GRIEF. Talbott concludes "LEROY WILL NOT CONFRONT THE ARGUMENT." I submit that it is Talbott who will not confront the arguments that impeach his methodology based on naive, literal interpretation of myth and religious iconography. No obligation accrues to anyone to debate a topic that is based on flawed, if not erroneous, methodology until the problems are corrected or resolved. Based on my twenty-one years experience with David Talbott's mind-set and methodological shortcomings starting with PENSEE in 1973, he and his "Saturnists" are a classic example of "the power of a wrong theory to deceive our senses and our mind," as Michael Shermer discusses in "How Thinking Goes Wrong," SKEPTIC 2:3 (1994) 42- 49. Joscelyn Godwin provides further insight into the "Saturnist"-like mind-set: "Perhaps it requires the obsessional type, with a one-track mind and an utter conviction of his own rightness, to pursue such studies through hundreds of sources in a dozen languages. But the great temptation to such a person is to become so enraptured by his own theory that he uses it as a Procrustean bed onto which all the world's myths, legends, and religions are to be accommodated. The situation is exacerbated if his theory has come to him not by simple thinking but through some illuminative or mystical experience" [ARKTOS: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival (1993)]. I have no intention of lending an air of legitimacy to Talbott's delusion by "debating" on his terms. As Shermer sagely notes, the burden of proof rests with "the person making the extraordinary claim." Talbott has no right to expect to debate anyone until he has assembled what might pass for a _prima facie_ case; mythological exegesis alone just "does not hack it," not in 1950, not in 1980, and not in 1994. Let him first produce some valid, independent PHYSICAL evidence indicating the former existence of the so-called "polar configuration." To my knowledge no such evidence exists. Can any neutral(?) party, excluding Rick Smith, read Talbott's response and accept his arguments? In keeping with the primary rule of exposition, i.e., assert-- support, that E. Comp. & Rhetoric 101 drills into college freshmen, or at least did in 1960, I have endeavored to honor this precept except for the exemption allowed common knowledge. However, if I have fallen short by oversight, inadvertence or inattention, I would be happy to make good when prompted. THE COMET VENUS DELUSION It is not entirely clear that Talbott did not write his response under the influence of some mind-altering substance, perhaps the "weed" invoked in "Saturday Night Live" skits, because he writes that Ellenberger's 20 Jun critique is based on "the first installment of...'The Great Comet Venus.'" This is patently false since Talbott's 12 Jun posting had nothing to do with Venus. Talbott emphatically denies as "PURE DISINFORMATION" ever having discussed Earth swapping moons when this is a major topic in his 12 Jun posting. Possibly the above suggested "weed" is the same substance that prompted Cochrane recently to discuss at length Rose's Afar triangle fantasy (AEON II:4) as though it were his brittle ice buffoonery (AEON III:1). The mind boggles at the prospect of dealing with someone evidently functioning in an alternate reality while pretending to be conducting a rational discussion. Since Talbott mentions his "The Great Comet Venus" which has been offered to t.o readers, among others, let me take this opportunity to emphasize again the recent realization that Venus is too massive for it ever to have had a tail as ordinary comets do. Therefore, all of the world-wide traditions associating a Venus-deity (not necessarily the planet, general semanticists take note) with comets must be understood in some way that associates Venus with a real comet or comets--which is what Clube & Napier have been trying to explain to Velikovskians and their ilk since 1982 when THE COSMIC SERPENT came out, with vanishingly small effect. In COSMIC WINTER, they wrote: "The Babylonian Venus was therefore the planet as long ago as 1600-1700 BC. This need not be a difficulty for a purely cometary hypothesis since Inanna, 'crowned with great horns', would be a brilliant morning and evening star both in her planetary aspect as Venus and in her divine aspect as the giant comet: evidence for such duality exists in the dual naming of planets by the Babylonians" (p. 203). Interestingly, Talbott fails to note that recently Carlos Trenary has revealed that certain Mayan glyphs previously associated with Venus actually relate to meteor showers. "The importance of spectacular meteor showers in world mythology, and especially with regard to Mesoamerican mythology has gone unrecognized." Chac is the god of the fiery rain. Many cultures around the world identified meteorites as "star dung." The so-called Dresden eclipse table may also have functioned as a Leonid shower predictor judging by embedded 33 yr. period with a 91 d. correction ["Universal Meteor Shower Metaphors & Their Occurrence in Mesoamerican Astronomy," ARCHAEOASTRONOMY X (College Park, 1987-88) 98-116]. This interest in the Leonids does not necessarily undermine the former importance of the Taurids because the Leonids apparently are a younger stream whose displays would naturally be greater than the older Taurids, which nonetheless have been the pre- eminent fireball source during the present era, as Clube documents. Perhaps Talbott ignores Trenary's paper because it was tainted by being publicized in Ellenberger's 23 April 1993 postcard which he claims he reads even though they "do not hack it." Since I have read "The Great Comet Venus" and am an acknowledged expert on the Velikovsky controversy, let me note the following: 1) Talbott meant to say "This Week" when he mentioned "Parade Magazine" (p. 2, n. 5), 2) the stated diameters for Earth and Venus are incorrect (p. 3), and 3) his quote of Shapley in his 5/27/46 letter to Kallen is improper: whereas Talbott writes "If Velikovsky is right, the rest of us are crazy" (p. 5), Shapley actually wrote "In other words, if Dr. Velikovsky is right, the rest of us are crazy. And seriously, that may be the case. It is, however, improbable." This puts Shapley's attitude in a much different light than is typically conveyed by pro-Velikovsky commentators. Griffard was the only Velikovskian to quote Shapley fairly, in HORUS I:3 (1985) 9, to my knowledge. GODS, PLANETS AND ACID TESTS According to Talbott, "...most mainstream scholars did not discern a relationship of early gods and later planets" and this perplexes him since it conflicts with his pre-conceived Velikovskian notion. However, there is nothing to be perplexed about because, except for Sun and Moon, the early gods had nothing to do with planets. Once one becomes familiar with the history of religion, one realizes that what Talbott considers "early" is not so early at all. In THE SKY-RELIGION IN EGYPT, Wainwright delves into the religion of the Egyptians before they entered the Nile valley; yet Talbott's Egyptian sources are all from Dynastic times, long after the early religion had been assimilated into the Nile valley cults. In ARCHAIC COSMOS, Lyle describes how the early Indo- Europeans projected the human body onto the cosmos to organize their description of it. Talbott dismisses all this scholarship as part of Ellenberger's "argument by insult and proclamation." When one gets beyond the astrologically motivated association of planets with certain deities, one learns, e.g., that Ninurta, the Mesopotamian Saturn, means "Lord Plow" and Marduk, associated with Jupiter, means "Bull Calf of Utu" or "son of the Sun" although by the time Marduk became the head of the pantheon his lineage had been altered by the priests so he was formally the son of Enki/Ea. Very little of Mesopotamian religion, according to Jacobsen, pertains to the sky insofar as planets are concerned. But the "Saturnists" will have none of this. For them all that is important is that, e.g., Ninurta was Saturn; but to those who worshipped Ninurta, he was, e.g., god of the rising sun, war, hunting, and agriculture whose star was Antares and whose planet was Saturn. Talbott and Cochrane once wrote: "Ancient religious and mythological texts provided the primary sources for WORLDS IN COLLISION; and in the end, it will be these sources that offer the acid test of his thesis" (KRONOS X:1, p. 26). Acid tests are usually considered to be more robust than the vagaries of mythological exegesis. In PHYSICS AS METAPHOR, Roger S. Jones offered the following eloquently phrased dictum: "The acid test of any scientific theory is, first and foremost, its agreement with the FACTS of the physical world. It is empiricism, not aesthetics, that is the backbone of science. Any theory, no matter how beautiful, will be rejected as soon as it is found incapable of corroborating the facts of nature" (p. 207). Similarly, David Leveson in A SENSE OF THE EARTH (1971) remarks "In scientific as opposed to pseudo-scientific polemic, evidence has priority over hypothesis. That is, hypothesis must conform to evidence, not evidence to hypothesis." And do not forget, "It is not possible to understand the relation of myth to reality without some INDEPENDENT knowledge of the reality" (TLS, 4-14-72), a caveat that Talbott and his "Saturnists" resist with the tenacity of a 14 lb. tabby cat contemplating its first bath. The "polar configuration" and the "Saturn myth" do not even have the substance of the cotton candy sold under the gumtree on the Big Rock Candy Mountain. With a nod to John North in the June 25, 1976 TLS where he reviewed VELIKOVSKY RECONSIDERED and gave me my first taste of well- inspired indignation, "the fact is that the whole of the ramshackle edifice of nonsense comprising the ["Saturnian"] corpus is purported to have a historical...foundation, but that it has none." Alternatives are never, well, almost never, considered and the interpretation comes before the evidence which is never allowed to get in the way of hypothesis. The "Saturnists" so admire Velikovsky, as is clear from Cochrane's postings, that they slavishly ape Velikovsky's flawed methodology based on the planetary identification of certain gods. They use Jensen's DIE KOSMOLOGIE DER BABYLONIER (1890) to show Ninurta/Ninib was associated with Saturn and compared to Anu; but when Talbott notes Jensen's identification of Ninib (which Talbott renders "Saturn," a common ploy; cf. p. 33 with Lewy and Ninurta) as "the sun on the horizon" he says Jensen "offered no explanation for the proposed connection" (SATURN MYTH, p. 40) thereby ignoring Jensen's Appendix II, "Ninib, die Ostsonne," pp. 457-75. [Since I have reportedly never read Talbott's book, I really do not know what is on p. 40. In fact, I'm so ignorant of his book that I could not have commented on its contents in KRONOS XI:1 (1985), 101, and do not know it prints "parhelion" for "halo" (p. 60, line 22), prints "run" for "sun" (p. 63, line 8), prints "Gaea" for "Rhea" (p. 81, line 4), quotes Jeremias' "Sin und Nergal sind = Saturn und Mars" as "Sin = Saturn" (p. 231), as though Jeremias was describing simple identities, and renders Butterworth's "Dioscuri" and "disposed" as "Dioskoroi" and "dispersed," etc. Not that all these errors are important, but they do suggest more than a superficial familiarity with the book. Actually, in 1980 I never looked forward to reading a book more than I did THE SATURN MYTH and I was never more disappointed in the reading, either. Later I found the following reviews: "Talbott's complex, mazelike narrative utterly fails to convince" (PUB. WEEK., Feb. 1, 1980) and "Implicit throughout is the naive supposition that the ancients...were not capable of thinking metaphorically" (LIB. J., June 1, 1980). And it is less than genuous for Talbott to carry on as though I did not "get [my] hands on...HAMLET'S MILL" until 1988 when my copy was obtained from either PENSEE or its successor RESEARCH COMMUNICATIONS NETWORK in the mid- 70's.] POLAR SATURN? "Saturnists" are quite adept at finding apparent anomalies, and correspondingly maladept at finding their explanation even when it resides in the same source, as with Ninib as the east sun, above. The best example is the question in HAMLET'S MILL "What has Saturn, the far-out planet, to do with the pole?" (Ch. VIII, p. 136). This is part of the license "Saturnists" use to believe Saturn was literally at the pole of the equator. But the anomaly's resolution in Ch. XVII, p. 235, in terms of the SKAMBHA, the frame of the cosmos, evidently escaped their attention, even Talbott's attention in his present response where this issue occurs in adjacent paragraphs (between Pts. 1 & 2)! "Once the reader has made the adjustment needed to think of the frame instead of the 'pillar' he will understand easily many queer scenes which would be strictly against nature....why a force planning...to unhinge a mill...does not have to go 'up'--or 'down'--all the way to the pole to do it" (H. MILL, p. 235). In the frame, or SKAMBHA, as in a column and beam structure, all the parts are connected to the whole. Contrary to Steve Talbott's (Dave's brother) exhortation in PENSEE VII, Dave and the rest of the "Saturnists" fail to get into our ancestors' world and see it on its own terms. Instead, they thoughtlessly project modern concepts on ancient descriptions oblivious to nuance, metaphor and context. And if they had read H. MILL as carefully as they wish others to read their repetitive pilpul, they would know that Kronos' seat at the pole of the equator was not the most exalted place in the sky (Hint: see Ch. IX, p. 143). They also fail to distinguish properly between the sky-god Kronos, whose seat was at the pole, and the planet named after him or who was the sky-god's planetary manifestation. In this failing they are in the good company of such scholars as H. Lewy and H. von Dechend. This failing, among others, including the distinction between a deity's functional role and its manifestations, leads to their erroneously conflating many different gods as Saturn, but which were different since in the Mesopotamian pantheon they had different identifying sacred numbers: An/Anu (60), Ninurta (50), Ea/Enki (40), Sin (30), and Utu/Shamash (20), which, as Ernest McClain explains, were derived from musical harmony theory before the gods were associated with planets. Talbott's unhesitating rejection of McClain's revolutionary work on harmonics and ancient cosmology demonstrates in spades his intellectual arrogance and ingrained defiant ignorance. While McClain works in obscurity, he has always had academic allies and recently H. Reiche, H. von Dechend and A.D. Kilmer recognized the vast possibilities inherent in his insights, while S. Parpola is favorably disposed to this work. Godwin, cited above, also discusses the early competition between polar and solar traditions and how this produced a confusion when polar constellations were superseded by the zodiac. Another source of confusion with the theological names for planets is that, as Jastrow relates, the names for Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn originally belonged to local solar deities who were subordinated to Shamash, the dominant solar deity, as a result of political consolidation. N.B.: Our ancestors passed down two contrasting themes regarding the sky. The polar tradition came from those who used a lunar calendar and revered the pole as the center. The solar tradition, from those who used a solar calendar and revered the zenith as the "center." Pole and zenith are not the same. Neither myth nor logic is honored by conflating these two incommensurable themes which is the source of the "ambiguity between the Pole and the Sun" noted by E.A.S. Butterworth in THE TREE AT THE NAVEL OF THE EARTH (1970). According to Godwin, "In his SATURNALIA, Macrobius relates the signs of the zodiac to the twelve labors of Hercules, the sun god who works all year, dies at the winter solstice, and is reborn from his ashes in the spring" and C.F. Dupuis, the 18th century French savant, "found the zodiacal cycle reflected in the episodes of Bacchus's life...as well as in those of Cadmus, Phaeton, and of course Hercules" [THE THEOSOPHICAL ENLIGHTENMENT (SUNY, in press)]. Why do Talbott and his "Saturnists" ignore these competing intellectual antecedents? And why do they insist that "Sun and Saturn" by Morris Jastrow, Jr., shows that to the ancients Sun = Saturn when only an association, not an out-and-out identity, is adduced? For a copy of "Sun and Saturn," send a SASE marked "Jastrow" to Leroy Ellenberger, 3929A Utah St., St. Louis, MO 63116 or $1.00 in lieu of SASE for foreign mail. For a collection of the notorious postcards mark a SASE "postcards"; for both items use 2 stamps or send $2.00. As an aside, some readers may recall two articles by an art history professor in KRONOS arguing first that Jerusalem is the "City of Venus" (III:3) and later, the "City of Saturn" (X:2). Recently, in "'As it Is Above, So Shall it Be Below': The Blueprint of Civilization," J. Saul describes the topography of Jerusalem making it the "City of the Great Bear": "...the Temple Mount corresponds to the body of the Great Bear...while the City of David is the terrestrial image of the 'tail'" [ARCHAEOASTRONOMY XI (1989-1993) 104-107]. Cf. Campbell, p. 87; Butterworth, pp. 88-89. When Talbott noted the northern location of the celestial Jerusalem (S. MYTH, p. 106), his frame of reference, naturally, was the polar configuration; but since the Great Bear/Big Dipper is irrelevant to the polar configuration, the topography of the terrestrial Jerusalem serves as another refutation of the p.c., unless somebody brought in the ancient equivalent of C-9 Cats one night and regraded the city to conform to the post-p.c. world order. "Yeah, that's the ticket!" Lest anyone feels superior about modern religion being better than ancient pagan cults, recently in a fascinating paper on the Assyrian Tree of Life, Simo Parpola (Univ. of Helsinki) allows that Assyro- Babylonian religion did not disappear or die out; it was absorbed by Judaism. Parpola means that despite the pantheon of gods suggesting polytheism, in the event Mesopotamian religion was a variety of monotheism! Jim Lippard _Skeptic_ magazine: lippard at ccit.arizona.edu ftp://ftp.rtd.com/pub/zines/skeptic/ Tucson, Arizona http://www.rtd.com/~lippard/skeptics-society.html From: lippard at skyblu.ccit.arizona.edu (James J. Lippard) Newsgroups: talk.origins Subject: DAVID N. TALBOTT: Hoist, Clueless & 'Nihilated (2/2) Date: 14 Jul 1994 00:52 MST Organization: University of Arizona Lines: 327 Message-ID: <14JUL199400522691 at skyblu.ccit.arizona.edu> MISSING: 20,000 ICE LAYERS? With his egregiously ridiculous remark "For all I know, 20,000 'years' worth of ice layers--or a lot more than that--could have been melted off in an anomalous Arctic 'summer,' leaving not a trace...", Talbott betrays the defiant ignorance suggested by his failure between April and July 1989 to read Mewhinney's monograph "Ice Cores and Common Sense" (since published in C&AH XII:1 & XII:2 in 1990). No one can read Mewhinney, or Ellenberger in KRONOS X:1 (1984) 97-102, or any of the key primary ice core papers, e.g., Hammer et al., J. GLACIOLOGY 20 (1978) 3- 26; idem., NATURE 288 (20 Nov 1980) 230-235 and Dansgaard et al., SCIENCE 218 (24 Dec 1982) 1273-1277, for meaning and give Talbott's ignorant musing any credence whatsoever. Note that in Nov. '91 at Haliburton, the "Saturnists" quashed playing the tape of Ellenberger reading "Litmus Tests in the Ice" that was on the program. Such massive melting, distinct from seasonal melting that seldom, if ever, obliterates a whole year in the Arctic, would be obvious by any one of a number of tests, e.g., melt water would saturate the voids between ice grains affecting the light transmission through the sample cores. Such gross uncomformities are not seen. The core-to-core comparison between sites in Greenland preserve similar signal profiles indicating no gross disappearance of ice pack. At this late date, absurd methodological questions such as Talbott raises are beyond the pale of reasonable scientific discourse. John Needham, formerly president, NYSE, would recognize such a question as one of those "goddamn stupid questions" that practical men find difficult to answer civilly; see INSTITUTIONAL INVESTOR, June 1987, p. 269. But, of course, the number of ice layers is irrelevant to the question of whether or not the Golden Age had seasons because, as my 30 Jun post noted, the botanical evidence presented by the mere existence of plants whose seeds require a cold, dormant spell to germinate guarantees the continuity of the seasons in the Holocene and before. Aaah! What power in a REAL interdisciplinary synthesis, "Ye succkerrs!" THE GINENTHAL FACTOR Those who recall Lippard posting Ellenberger's section "Magnetism, Dynamos and Neptune" which was arbitrarily deleted from Part I of his memoir in AEON III:1, will recognize Charles Ginenthal as one who does not believe in planetary magnetic dynamos. He is an unreconstructed chapter-and- verse diehard Velikovskian who, e.g., does not understand escape velocity, does not believe plate spreading occurs on Iceland, does not believe the greenhouse effect heats Venus and does not accept the well- known distinction between craters and calderas, making all circular features on Venus volcanoes. He boasts about confronting Richard Grieve on cratering at Toronto in 1990, but Blythe Robertson was the name on the program and the man on the platform. In AEON I:6 he argued that Venus was young on the basis of the atmospheric chemistry in the clouds. He believes both that the Greenland ice contains the debris deposited on Earth by Venus at 3500 B.P. and that the Greenland ice is less than 2,000 years old. During Ellenberger's keynote address to the C.S.I.S. at Haliburton, Ontario, in August 1992, Ginenthal led the audience rebellion when the subadiabatic temperature gradient below Venus's clouds, indicating the lower atmosphere is stable against convection, was presented as evidence against Velikovsky's youthful Venus rent by massive, ongoing volcanism. At this same meeting, Ginenthal delivered three talks, all of which were marred by his failure to understand key aspects of the models he was discussing and/or criticizing. His similar performance at Toronto in 1990 disqualified him as a presenter at any meeting organized by Milton Zysman. Van Flandern recently demolished a whole laundry list of Ginenthal's pet notions in META RES. BULL. 2:4 (1993). When Ginenthal presented his "electro-gravitic theory" in AEON he made his prediction of Neptune's magnetic field a "crucial test." He predicted Earth/5000, but the actual is ca. 7/16 of Earth, or 7,000 times greater than predicted. Three times AEON stifled Ellenberger's reporting this failure. This was known when he tap-danced and dissembled in AEON II:4 (1991) and he's still at it in VELIKOVSKIAN I:2 (1993) where he mindlessly rationalizes the failure in order to avoid admitting the truth. His rationalization mostly involves the interaction between the solar wind and Neptune's magnetosphere which is beside the point. Like a true pseudoscientist, as I learned from debunking his notions in AEON I:6 and II:2, Ginenthal is interested in evidence only insofar as he can use it to support his theory, tending to ignore, explain away or deny the validity of all evidence that opposes his unfounded beliefs. For Talbott to enlist Ginenthal to support his incredibly warped outlook testifies to his scientific bankruptcy. He might just as well quote the comedian Prof. Irwin Corey, the specialist in doubletalk. When Ginenthal's posturing is compared with its content, he emerges as another "ignoramus masquerading as a sage," as Bauer characterized his subject in BEYOND VELIKOVSKY, Ch. 7. Ginenthal discusses physics as Talbott discusses myth and as Grubaugh discusses numerical integrations- -all with the assurance and understanding of the virgin architect describing the "privy chapel." In fact, anyone who discusses myth with Talbott, as I have, cannot help but be reminded of the fellow who can recite the Apostles' Creed faster than the guy in the Federal Express commercials, but who does not have a clue as to what Christianity is all about. Since Ginenthal has not learned anything new since 1984 when he was new to Velikovsky and we corresponded briefly about the state of Venus, I cannot believe his articles in VELIKOVSKIAN, which he founded, have or will reveal valid problems in bristlecone pine dendrochronology or the Greenland ice cores. The fact that the top 80,000 annual layers in the new Summit cores can be counted by the naked eye ought to count for something toward the validity of absolute ice core chronology. The Hypsithermal (not Hypis...) is just another name for the well-known Atlantic period that followed the Boreal, according to H.H. Lamb, CLIMATIC HISTORY AND THE FUTURE (1977). Anyone who has skied Hawaii or Chile should have no problem understanding how high altitude arctic ice survived this climatic optimum between 6000 B.C. and 3000 B.C. THE UNFAMILIAR SKY Talbott believes our ancestors witnessed an unfamiliar sky. I agree along with Clube, but cannot accept Talbott's model because it is without a doubt physically impossible as the refutation by Victor Slabinski, astrodynamicist in the communications satellite industry (INTELSAT, Wash. D.C.), which was invited by AEON makes perfectly clear--all Grubaugh's handwaving and algebraic manipulation notwithstanding. [In 1981 Slabinski refuted Peter Warlow's tippe top Earth inversion model in J. PHYS. A and has successfully defended his refutation ever since against the challenges by dynamically-challenged hardcore Velikovskians in Britain. "Euler," according to Dominique Francois Jean Arago, "calculated without apparent effort, as men breathe, or as eagles sustain themselves in the wind." If Arago could have known Slabinski, he would say "Slabinski solves triple integrals in his head without apparent effort,...or falcons sustain themselves...." Although Slabinski is not infallible, his error rate is vanishingly small and, unlike Grubaugh, he usually finds his own mistakes and readily admits them.] Talbott became so fixated on his impossible model that he has not been able to step aside and assess feasible alternatives as they subsequently arise. The sky during an active Taurid phase would have been plenty unfamiliar or alien. According to Clube in a recent anthology: "...the issue at the heart of theological debate these last two thousand years, namely, the fundamental question raised by Plato and his successors down the ages [is] whether the 'revolutions' of an invisible circulation in space sometimes affect the Earth." Clube's model has been enthusiastically embraced by Fred Hoyle. Taurid influence on ancient religion should be sought in lore associated with storm gods (whose activities heretofore have not concerned Velikovsky- inspired researchers). Although the imagery NECESSARILY engendered by Clube's model of Earth interacting with the Taurid complex is neither fully described by him nor readily imagined by most non-specialist readers, Moe Mandelkehr has developed a feasible physical model in the context of Clube's general scenario, as I announced at Haliburton in 1992 and as Mandelkehr alluded elsewhere [C&CR XIV (1992) 37], that FULLY accounts for ALL the mythic imagery juggled so maladroitly by "Saturnists" in their polar configuration fantasy. Like Bob Kobres, whose "Comets and the Bronze Age Collapse" appeared in C&C Workshop '92:1, Mandelkehr's Taurid complex researches began independent of Clube & Napier's parallel work. As Mandelkehr suggested in his three papers in the British Velikovsky Journal [SISR V:3 (1980/81), C&CR IX (1987) & C&CR X (1988)], Earth participated in some spectacular celestial fireworks ca. 2300 B.C. His detailed envisioning of the IMAGERY is elucidated in THE ANSWERED RIDDLE: A Thesis on the Meaning of Myth (unpub. ms.) which he has shared with Ellenberger on a confidential basis pending its acceptance for publication. Rest assured Mandelkehr delivers the goods in a way that will leave the "Saturnists" dumbfounded. Roger Ashton's "The Bedrock of Myth," suppressed at AEON, also interprets the polar configuration IMAGERY without planets, but the full impact of his brilliant insights is blunted by the fact that his proposed mechanism is impossible because natural light sources such as the Sun cannot produce coherent, i.e., laser, light essential for making holograms. Possibly Ashton's imagery can be reclaimed from Mandelkehr's model. CONCLUDING REMARKS If Talbott fully appreciated the nature and power of McClain's harmonico-musical insights, he would know that this Sumerian numerology, which is NOT predicted by the Saturn thesis, HAS influenced GLOBAL mythology and permeates certain Platonic dialogues, the Old and New Testaments, and the Koran. Contrary to Talbott, there is no inability on Ellenberger's part. The inability rests wholly with Talbott who, lacking capacity, stands clueless in the mythosphere. Talbott is also wrong that Ellenberger is "the meanest fellow any of us have ever met" because that distinction rightfully belongs to Lew Greenberg, as anyone can verify by comparing Ellenberger's forthright memoir (AEON III:1) with Greenberg's malicious rejoinder (AEON III:2). However, since Cochrane deigned to print Greenberg's malicious assault, perhaps he should flip a coin with Greenberg to break the tie for the title of "meanest...". There is a difference between spit-in-the-eye tenacity exhibited by Ellenberger and the mendacious, mean-spirited revisionism dispensed by people such as Greenberg. Ellenberger is not "mean," just irreverent and relentless in the pursuit of truth and the exposure of ostentatious incompetence, hypocrisy and evil, as M. Scott Peck conceives evil in PEOPLE OF THE LIE (NY, 1983). "People who are evil attack others instead of facing their own failures." And need it be said that the eleven references listed in my 20 Jun reply to Cochrane under "The Parthian Shot" and the 14 t.o regulars who have been sent supplemental background information mailings would not be expected to agree with Talbott's personality assessment? There is also the need to challenge the appearance of legitimacy created by professors of physics, anthropology, philosophy, classics and English who uncritically lend their names to "Saturnist" activities. The duplicity Ellenberger experienced with his memoir was presaged by the similar treatment accorded Ashton in the suppression of his anti- Saturn "The Bedrock of Myth." Reflecting upon his "Bedrock" experience, Ashton wrote Ellenberger: "Talbott's reason for not publishing the article was that he wanted such topics only far later when his own ideas could be fully discussed. This translates into never because as you know Velikovskians have a nearly limitless talent for wasting everyone's time with convoluted crazy arguments. Were Velikovskianism a sane scholarly enterprise such an article as mine would be published as soon as written for the purely practical reason that this could deflect valuable effort from useless channels....[A] Saturnist will hang onto impossible polarity with a stubbornness that increases with every rebuttal..." (5/v/1993). For all of Talbott's bluster and bravado in his attempt to demonize and discredit Ellenberger, one would be hard-pressed to imagine that, in mid-June when Joel Carlinsky visited Talbott, he was pre-occupied with a fear that Ellenberger would show up at AEON's meeting at Thanksgiving. Talbott's pre-occupation with the demon Ellenberger so impressed Carlinsky that one of the first things he did when he got home was to phone Ellenberger and see/hear for himself what the ogre in St. Louis had to say in his defense. Ellenberger made it quite clear that when good faith communication breaks down after many futile exchanges he does not suffer fools gladly or mince words about the worth of absurd notions foisted on gentle readers by people who have no respect for physical evidence or competence in the fields in which they claim expertise. The parallel work of McClain, von Dechend and Clube (the leading Taurid complex researcher) is by no means mutually exclusive, as von Dechend tended to believe with respect to hers and McClain's work until recently. Harmonic numerology developed at an early date and merged, in a sense, with the themes in H. MILL based on precession of the equinoxes. This is suggested by the fact that both McClain and von Dechend/Reiche can explain the Atlantis myth with their respective models. Then along comes the Taurid-based cataclysms putting a catastrophic overlay to all that pre-existing uniformitarian wisdom based on music and precession. To the ancients, the "harmony of the spheres" was more potent an idea than a mere poetic allusion. Separating the various strands is an immense task that is not made any easier by the persistence of alternatives that are so absurd that they should never have been published in the first place. Neo-catastrophists from the Velikovsky-inspired school have a choice to make: Seneca: "_Quota pars operis tanti nobis committitur?_" or Pope Paul IV: "_Mundus vult decipi ergo decipiatur._" This is a choice between reason and unreason--whether Velikovskians will transfer their interest to a sensible research program and join ranks with Clube, Mandelkehr, Kobres, von Dechend, Reiche, Worthen, Zysman, Ashton, McClain, et al. or continue to defend a corrupt methodology while promulgating such unequivocal nonsense as the polar configuration and worse. The choice of reason is not easy to make, as I experienced between 1980 and 1983; but some choice will be made in any event. Hopefully the foregoing will point the way for the honestly perplexed who realize that, with his response to Ellenberger, Talbott is hoist by his own petard and that collectively the "Saturnists" are clueless in the mythosphere. Can anyone believe that Talbott's "Saturnism" has validity? As I wrote to Grubaugh 3 Sept. '93: "Revere the wisdom of John 8:32; but as M. Scott Peck notes, "Nobody said you wouldn't be damned mad first!" Ironically, when one is knee deep in the hoopla, it is hard to know if hearts of the world will understand. Does Grace Slick know the answer? Acknowledgments: I am most grateful to Jim Lippard for his willingness to be, as Cochrane says, my dupe and mentee and for his patience with my penchant for incremental, asymptotic writing habits. The several posts done by Rob Day and Ben Dehner are also greatly appreciated. Had it not been for the masterful hegemony of Harald A. T. Reiche, Classicist at M.I.T., who impressed me with the validity of the wisdom revealed in HAMLET'S MILL, I would not be a "player" today; but I refuse to acquiesce to the Saturnists' delusion now that I see what the REAL possibilities are. Milton Zysman deserves credit for organizing a conference in Toronto in 1990, where Victor Clube, as the keynote speaker, put fire and brimstone into his "puny meteor shower model" making it a viable alternative to "right-running" Velikovskians, a task made all the easier by the absence of Talbott, Cochrane, Cardona and Rose. Leroy Ellenberger, B.S., M.S., M.B.A., formerly Sr. Editor & Exec. Sec'y, KRONOS, Confidant to Velikovsky (4/78--11/79) and student of Russell Ackoff TEL.: 314-772-4286 13 July 1994 Additional References Asher, Clube, Napier, and Steel, "Coherent Catastrophism," _Vistas in Astronomy_ 38 (1994) 1-27. E.A.S. Butterworth, _The Tree at the Navel of the Earth_ (Berlin, 1970). Reviewed in TLS, Mar. 3, 1972. J. Campbell, _The Mythic Image_ (Princeton, 1974). V. Clube, "Cometary Catastrophes & the Ideas of Immanuel Velikovsky," _SIS Review_ V:4 (1980/81) 106-111. S.V.M. Clube, "Hazards from Space: Comets in History and Science," in W. Glen, ed., _The Mass-Extinction Debates: How Science Works in a Crisis_ (Stanford, 1994), 152-169. A significant advance beyond his books. Written originally for _Natural History_ who lost heart. C. L. Ellenberger, "Celestial Hazard vs. Celestial Fantasy," _C&C Review_ XIV (1992) 41-44. Main text for Ellenberger's 1992 Haliburton address, where no "Saturnist" principals attended. F. Hoyle, _The Origin of the Universe and the Origin of Religion_ (Wakefield & London, 1993). T. Jacobsen, _The Treasures of Darkness_ (New Haven, 1976). M. Jastrow, Jr., _The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria_ (Boston, 1898). B. Kobres, "The Path of a Comet and Phaethon's Ride," _The World & I_ (forthcoming). E. Lyle, _Archaic Cosmos: Polarity, space & time_ (Edinburgh, 1990). E.G. McClain, _The Myth of Invariance: The Origin of the Gods, Mathematics and Music from the Rg Veda to Plato_ (York Beach, 1976/1984). E.G. McClain, _The Pythagorean Plato: Prelude to the Song Itself_ (York Beach, 1978); see review by S. Levarie in _Music Q._ LXIV:3 (1978), 402- 407. E.G. McClain, _Meditations through the Quran: Tonal Images in an Oral Culture_ (York Beach, 1981). E.G. McClain, "Music Theory and Ancient Cosmology," _The World & I_ (Feb. 1994), 370-391. S. Parpola, "The Assyrian Tree of Life: Tracing the Origin of Jewish Monotheism and Greek Philosophy," _JNES_ 52:3 (1993) 161-208. H.A.T. Reiche, "The Language of Archaic Astronomy: A Clue to the Atlantis Myth?" (corrected) in K. Brecher & M. Feirtag, eds., _Astronomy of the Ancients_ 2nd. (New York, 1993) 153-189. Wm. I. Thompson, _Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth & Science_ (NY, 1989), esp. Ch. 1, "Rapunzel: Cosmology Lost." T.D. Worthen, _The Myth of Replacement: Stars, Gods and Order in the Universe_ (Tucson, 1991). Jim Lippard _Skeptic_ magazine: lippard at ccit.arizona.edu ftp://ftp.rtd.com/pub/zines/skeptic/ Tucson, Arizona http://www.rtd.com/~lippard/skeptics-society.html