Seeking the Third Story las vegas jan 2012

By David Talbott, taken from his keynote address The Electric Universe
2012 Conference- The Human Story Jan. 6th, 2012

   ow did human history begin?

The evidence may seem too complex for generalization.  But all of history
can be stated as just two stories:

First came the story of mythology filled with cosmic dramas and celestial
wonders. We lived in the presence of the gods.  It was the gods that
determined the fate of the world, demanding allegiance, even as they
called humans to sacrifice.  The gods were unpredictable, when angry they
went to war, or they destroyed their own creation.

Over time however man's quest for deeper meaning in the myths ignited
sparks of spiritual awakening.  And it was from these sparks that the
great religions.  But all of the world's religions shared a tap-root in
mythology.  And not one freed itself entirely from the momentum of the
First Story.

The Second Story arose from doubt, as philosophers, poets and naturalists
began to lose faith in the myths. And, some stopped believing in the gods
altogether.  That was because direct experience under a familiar and
highly predictable sky gave no support to the archaic myths.  Skepticism
inspired closer attention to nature, the essential requirement for the
rise of Science and Technology that would change the world.  Thus came the
heroic completion of the Second Story, with rational science rising to
vanquish myth and magic.

And so the full sweep of human history comes down to just two stories in
competition, a cliché: science vs. myth and religion.  Well into the 20th
Century it seems we were forced to choose. But a few have wondered, could
the myths harbor a truth that we have missed, something yet to be
discovered? Is there a message for science, hidden in the myths and
symbols of deepest antiquity? H

The point that should be made here is that seeking a Third Story requires
us to reinvestigate, reconsider two stories that dominated human
imagination across the whole sweep of human history.  It became my role to
investigate the origins of myth, and to pursue that subject I had to come
to grips with an unexplained mystery.  What was the mythic age of gods and
wonders remembered around the world?

Every culture said the same thing; the gods ruled for a time then they
went away.

The age of gods and wonders was punctuated by disaster. And in the end in
a kind of culminating event the gods departed.  Was it just the power of
human imagination that induced every culture to say the same thing, one
culture after another looking back with this desperate yearning to hold on
to this memory? Was this something that was merely an accidental evolution
of consciousness, or was it in reality related to something that was
actually experienced?

I have the benefit of having been inspired originally by Immanuel
Velikovsky, and Velikovsky was an exceptionally controversial figure.
Probably in 20th century science he was up toward the top in the
controversial quality of his work. He registered a very broad hypothesis
about human history, but it had certain key elements that are very
relevant today.

The first is that the planetary system has been unstable within human
memory.  He said that in dynamic interactions between planets electric
arcs flew between these bodies with disastrous consequences that a ecting
the surfaces of those planets, and he insisted that human memories count
as evidence.

It was insistence on this idea of past planetary instability and the
belief that human memories counted as evidence that disqualified him from
consideration by the scientific community.

I happened to be publishing a student journal called "Pensee" at the time,
in '72, and I had this sense from our conversations with Immanuel
Velikovsky that this was actually an historic juncture, so as I was
envisioning how we might treat the issue of Velikovsky we eventually came
to the idea of putting out a special issue of our student journal
distributed free on Oregon Campuses, and that this could kind of cut
across the political divisions and so on that we were ourselves were
fostering with the kind of material that we were putting out, and that was
Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered.  And from that moment on my own world
just changed completely.

One issue grew into ten, and this series had a remarkable impact around
the world.  It provoked this whole renewal of interest in Velikovsky in
the light of new space-age data coming back in the 70's.

I followed this question then with an incredible enthusiasm, and for a few
years, because of certain things that were arising from my own study, I
was actually living o of adrenaline, realizing that an entirely di erent
assessment of human history and of evidence is possible.

The research method based itself first and foremost on cross cultural
points of agreement- something that can not be ignored.

There is a power in diverse cultures insisting on the same thing at a
level of very specific detail.  The evidence was increasing that there was
a primordial experience.

Attention had to be paid to the earliest sources, for whatever has been
preserved to the point of cross-cultural agreement;  you want to refer it
back to the very first expressions of those themes, as there is a natural
tendency towards evolution over time of the myths, to fragment, to
distort, to localize the message.

There was a point at which I realized there were a 100 mythic archetypes
or points of agreement and that they are all connected, 
	and that after the myth-making epoch 
	there is not a single new archetype. 
That was an
incredible revelation that secured for me the possibility of a unified
theory of myth.  That there must have been something unique that was
experienced around the world that gave rise to this unified complex of
mythic archetypes.

In a sense all of the monumental construction of antiquity is a witness to
something that is simply unknown in human conscience today.  Why were they
all looking back to critical junctures in the age of gods and wonders?  
Every monument that was ever constructed, every temple, every city, always
involved a recreation of a primordial event, and that event did not point
to anything that we can name in natural experience today.

Because Velikovsky had made this seemingly preposterous claim that the
planet Venus appeared in the sky as a great comet, I kept my eye out for
that particular question all the time, and 
	I can only say that not only I but all 
	who have seriously investigated this question 
	with the kind of open mind that is required, 
	have concluded exactly the same thing.

Velikovsky was simply and undeniably correct in saying that the planet
Venus was a terrifying Great Comet, the parent of comets.  In other words,
all of the ideas about comets that humans later discussed or presented or
responded to with fear, for example when they responded with fear to a
wispy comet coming into view, everything that drove them was a result of
that primordial experience with that Great Comet, that Mother of comets .

You can't pursue the mythic archetypes without beginning to notice that
with the naming of planets in relationship to these mythic powers there is
a consistency that has to have an explanation, and there will be no
explanation possible unless the planets were gathered above humanity in a
way that has no conceivable explanation in the sky that we observe today.
So that was the heart of the new way of looking at human history and
planetary history.

What was the age of gods and wonders?

Where did the gods live?

The answer to that question is undeniably based on the early sources: They
lived in the sky.

Why did we stop believing in the gods?  For the simple reason that in the
course of time and with distance from that primordial experience there was
nothing in the human experience of nature that would lend any support to
the myths. All myths became increasingly preposterous.

To gain a sense of the coherence and universality of the myths it's good
to start with some of the absolute fundamentals. To begin, the myth of
primeval paradise, the golden age an age of peace and plenty on earth,
harmony in the sky.

There probably is not a well-documented culture in an earlier time that
failed to document that tradition.  
	And then there was this catastrophic event 
	that brought the age of the gods 
	to its violent conclusion.

And what was the power that appeared in the sky in the intervening phase
of history? 	
	It was a dragon like form, 
	the celestial dragon. 
	What is most significant about this form 
	is that when you investigate it 
	under the rules of cross-cultural investigation, 
	you find that every ancient hieroglyph or symbol 
	relating to the dragon-form within the cultural 
	traditions you're investigating, 
	is a symbol of the comet.
The long flowing hair, long flowing beard, long flowing feathers,
serpentine form, fiery countenance, fiery breath, all are symbols of the
comet.  Don't believe this was an accident.

This is at the heart of our research m e t h o d ;  c o n v e r g e n c e
o n extraordinary detail has to mean shared experience, even if we have
not understood it.

I can thank Velikovsky and, quite frankly, a brief outline I saw from Bill
Mullin way back in 1972. It was a page and a half outline of Velikovsky's
ideas about the planet Saturn that not been included in Worlds in
Collision. He had pulled it from Worlds in Collision in order to present a
more complete hypothesis.  What was so intriguing about it was the idea
that Saturn had this extraordinary role in the earliest remembered time.  
And so I followed that. Saturn was directly tied to the Golden Age as you
can see in this quote about life in the time of Kronos when he ruled in
heaven, Kronos being the Greek name of Saturn

"First of all the deathless gods who dwell on Olympus made a golden race
of mortal men who lived in the time of Kronos when he ruled in heaven" [
Hesiod, Theogony]

Follow the threads and everything you encounter just expands the anomaly,
expands the sense of something out of our familiar experience that was so
much on the mind of the ancients. Today probably not one in a thousand
people know that Helios, an early name for the sun, was in early time the
name of the planet Saturn. Sol was also a name of the planet Saturn.  
Shamash, the Babylonian sun god, was explicitly identified with the planet
Saturn. Scholars that investigate this never dispute it, but why that
would be so is disputed.

On a similar theme, there is an idea of a Great Conjunction that has
nothing to do with what we call a conjunction or even a great conjunction
today. We see the planets gathering within a 30 degree arc of the sky and
call that a great conjunction.  No, the principle inherent and at the
heart of the ancient myths is that the planets stood in one line, such
that one line ran right through the heart of those gathered b o d i e s .  
H e re i s t h e f u l c r u m o f t h e reconstruction: the story of
mythology is the story of what happened with these bodies, and there is no
other story.

On yet another theme, every culture in antiquity tended to have a line of
kings and the claim that they can trace that line back to a mythic first
king. This is where you find the pre-eminence of the planet Saturn as he
appears as the first father, the father of kings.

Why would that be and why would that memory have so preoccupied those who
formulated the rights of kingship, declaring that the blood of that first
ancestor still courses through the veins of our king?

And what was the connection of Saturn to the myth of heaven having been
close to the earth? The entire idea as a universal theme, as a mythic
archetype, makes no sense under any other scenario.

The evidence is overwhelming: there was this forgotten epoch when what
people saw in the sky bore no resemblance to things we see now.

Humans on earth drew pictures of these forms. It was a dynamically
evolving configuration in the sky, pressing in on the earth, obsessively
preoccupying human beings. It's the ability to recognize patterns that
makes it possible for us to reconstruct the ancient heavens, and in every
instance you're looking for patterns that are archetypal, where every
archetype is a defiance of nature as we experience it today.

There is a wheel-like character to this form. This configuration is at the
center of the reconstruction, and is the culmination of an evolutionary
phase that preceded it through which the "participants"  were
progressively clarified, and that included a clarification of the
personalities of the male and female powers.

The female power was the great star in the center of the over-arching
sphere. A smaller star, a small planet actually, much darker and redder,
was the prototype of the warrior hero.

The starburst type was the prototype of the mother goddess, the great
star, the great comet, before it was removed to become the angry goddess,
and so forth.

The configuration evolved through dynamic and at times violent phases over
many years and resulted in a plethora of forms that were individually
incorporated into the myths, all considered to have been aspects of the
various gods.

What makes the reconstruction of those ancient scenes possible are the
drawings that people left on rock walls, the carving of pictures on stone.
Today we have this incredible benefit that the pictures that are recorded
on stone can actually be evaluated under laboratory examination of
electric discharge in a plasma environment.

The cosmic thunderbolt in the antique world provides us with a bridge
between myth and science.  And every fact that you can bring forward
relating to this cosmic thunderbolt is explicit and extraordinary and
anomalous. The warrior god's weapon was not inspired by any practical
function.  And of course it never looks like lightning.  Imagine a warrior
launching an arrow with the configuration seen here, its shape would make
the arrow effectively dysfunctional. [trident shown] But it is a familiar
form to those who know electric discharge in plasma.

There were many variants.  For instance, the tridents of early myth were
forms of the cosmic thunderbolt, as were the smaller [!] thunderbolts seen
grasped in the hands of the gods. It is quite clear that whatever was
being experienced it did go through an extraordinary evolution in the sky.

And now you know why we chose the image of the cosmic thunderbolt for this
conference.

Remembering the End of the World - 1996 David Talbott documentary To learn
more about the reconstruction of the ancient heavens and the role that the
Electric Universe had to play in the evolution of human culture and
consciousness, please visit:

Website and Forum:  Thunderbolts.info