David Talbott » Tue Apr 08, 2008 1:26 pm I can remember, around the the mid-eighties, a somewhat poignant conversation with Ev Cochrane, who had read the Saturn Myth in 1980 and subsequently emerged as a superb researcher on the subject. He asked me what I thought of the famous cave art of Europe. I said, simply, nostalgia. The artists were, in their protected environment, celebrating the only natural world they had come to know. Human were not yet glancing backwards at the elaborate sequence of cosmic events from which the myths arose. They simply yearned to recover the pastoral environment that existed before everything changed. As I've learned more about the plasma discharge phenomena involved, it's become all the more obvious that nostalgia is the overriding factor. In the more energetic phases of the discharge activity, those with an open view to the configuration would not survive. Based primarily on the nature of their art, I'd suggest that the cave-bound artists were driven to their habitat by events preceding the complex evolution of the celestial configuration under discussion. Later, when faced with the urgency of the situation and a need to comprehend it in some way (if for no other reason than to anticipate coming events), humans everywhere carved elaborate rock art of the intensely energetic formations. It is apparent that the charged bodies moved toward the south (my suggestion here, with no desire to burden others with it). One of Anthony Peratt's most extraordinary contributions has been his finding that the rock artists consistently used natural shields to the south to protect themselves from the deadly synchrotron radiation. I trust y'all know what happens when you stand out in the open and look at the face of the gorgon or other mythic monster representing an intense discharge phase. A Sumerian phrase for this form in the sky was "the terrifying splendor [glory, power] in the center of An [primeval unity]." But all things considered, it's clear that the situation got sporadically worse with the full fragmentation of the configuration and, eventually, the violent wars of the gods and the displacement of the cosmic theater to the south. David Talbott