mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== THOTH A Catastrophics Newsletter VOL I, No. 9 March 31, 1997 EDITOR: Michael Armstrong PUBLISHER: Walter Radtke CONTENTS: THE MYTH OF THE UNIVERSAL MONARCH (3)............David Talbott THE ELECTRICAL SUN: RECONCILING CELESTIAL MECHANICS AND VELIKOVSKIANISM (Part 3)..........Ralph Juergens ----------------------------------------------- Quote of the day: O Lord, grant that we may always be right, for Thou knowest we will never change our minds. Old Scottish Prayer ----------------------------------------------- THE MYTH OF THE UNIVERSAL MONARCH (3) By David Talbott (dtalbott at teleport.com) In exploring ancient images of the Universal Monarch, we now enter the realm of classical thought. Our own civilization owes its greatest debt to Greek and Latin poets, philosophers and historians, who received and interpreted countless mythical traditions of nations throughout the Mediterranean and beyond, often drawing on literary sources that were later lost and are now unavailable to us. According to the Greek poet Hesiod, the present age is but a shadow of a former epoch--called the Golden Age of Kronos. "First of all," Hesiod writes, "the deathless gods who dwell on Olympus made a golden race of mortal men who lived in the time of Kronos, when he was reigning in heaven. And they lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: Miserable age rested not on them. . . The fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint." Kronos was the father of beginnings; in the words of the Orphic poet--the "Lord of the World, First Father." But this harmonious and peaceful epoch, founded by the god-king, gave way to world-ending disaster and devastating wars of the gods (the Clash of the Titans). In honor of the Age of Kronos, the Greeks celebrated an annual festival called the Kronia, during which the celebrants symbolically renewed the epoch of peace and plenty. Each year, according to Lucius Accius, the Greeks held large feasts throughout the towns and countryside, reversing the normal social order, exchanging gifts, enjoying merrymaking free from the normal restraints, with each man waiting on his slaves In this way the Kronia festival symbolically transported the celebrants back in time to a mythic period before law and cultural constraints, when Kronos first ruled the world. According to Plato in his often-studied work, *The Statesman*, man formerly lived in a paradise, under the rule of the creator himself. But the mortal realm, Plato declared, was later separated from the creator, and that was the cause of the evils descending upon the world. So the Greeks, in accord with the universal tradition, remembered the age of Kronos as the *model* for later generation. In *The Laws*, Plato writes that 'we must do all we can to imitate the life which is said to have existed in the days of Kronos...both in private and public life." In the third century B.C. the neoplatonist Porphyry, drawing on the work of the Greek philosopher Dicaearchus, offered a simple explanation for the human yearning for paradise. The source of this yearning is the memory of the Age of Kronos, he wrote, when men "lived a life of leisure, without care or toil, and also--if the doctrine of the most eminent medical men is to be accepted--without disease...And there were no wars or feuds between them. Consequently, this manner of life of theirs naturally came to be longed for by men of later times." Like his many counterparts in the ancient world, Kronos was the acknowledged prototype of kings, his rule in heaven providing the standards for rule on earth. Every Greek king thus bore the universal burden of royalty, for the Greeks applied exactly the same test of the just or good ruler as did other peoples. Homer, most famous of the Greek poets, announced as the ideal "a blameless king whose fame goes up to the wide heaven, maintaining right, and the black earth bears wheat and barley and the trees are laden with fruit...and the people prosper." It was the duty of the king, as the First Father's successor, to renew the Golden Age! One additional aspect of the Kronos image draws our attention. It seems that the former ruler of the sky entered later traditions as a renowned terrestrial king. For in later times it was claimed that Kronos had actually dwelt on earth. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, for example, in remembering the Golden Age, was emphatic on the point: "Kronos ruled on this very earth," he insisted. The same idea was proclaimed in Orphic tradition. The correspondence with the global myth and its evolution over time (as the gods were brought down to earth), is indeed remarkable. But the Greek myth of Kronos brings us to a critical juncture. For this celestial power is identified, and the identity leads inexorably to a series of far-reaching discoveries. All Greek astronomical traditions agreed that Kronos was the planet Saturn. What is now the sixth planet from the Sun stands at the center of the Greek paradise myth. Kronos, the planet Saturn, ruled the heavens for a period, presiding over the Golden Age, then departed as the heavens fell into confusion. How did it happen that a remote planet, now a bare speck in the sky, found its way into such an improbable, yet deeply-rooted memory? Our own names for the planets came from the Romans who gave the outermost visible planet the name Saturn. Latin poets, philosophers, and historians, including Ovid, Virgil, and Seneca, preserved an archaic legend about Saturn. In unison they insisted that long, long ago the now-distant star had ruled as god-king, founding an ancient kingdom, a paradise on earth. The Chronicler Virgil remembered "the life golden Saturn lived on earth, while yet none had heard the clarion blare, none the sword-blades ring." Saturn, the poet proclaimed, "gathered together the unruly race, scattered over mountain heights, and gave them laws, and chose that the land be called Latium...Under his reign were the golden ages men tell of, in such perfect peace he ruled the nations..." The Latin naturalist Seneca repeated the idea more than once: "No wars the nations knew, no trumpets threatening blasts...and the glad Earth herself willingly laid bare her fruitful breast, a mother happy and safe amid such duteous nurslings. But perhaps the most eloquent expressions came from the poet and historian Ovid: "The first millennium was the age of gold . . .No brass-lipped trumpets called, nor clanging swords...and seasons traveled through the years of peace. The innocent earth learned neither spade nor plough; she gave her riches as fruit hangs from the tree...Springtide the single season of the year." What the Greeks called the Kronia, celebrating the fortunate era of Kronos, the Romans termed the Saturnalia, a symbolic renewal of the Saturnia regna or reign of the great god Saturn. As in the Greek festival, the rules of social standing and obligation were temporarily suspended, with all things reverting to the primeval state, as master and slave took their place at one table In remarkable agreement with the myths of other peoples, the Romans regarded Saturn as the model and source of cherished national customs. Tracing their ancestry and national identity to this very god-king, the chroniclers claimed that, in an earlier time, the Latins deemed themselves "Saturnians". "Be not unaware, Virgil writes, "that the Latins are Saturn's race, righteous not by bond or laws, but self-controlled of their own free will and by the custom of their ancient god." Nothing symbolized this ancient tie to Saturn more dramatically than the mythical ancestry of kings. It was for a very clear purpose that the chroniclers exerted themselves on the subject, announcing that the early Latin kings were part of an *unbroken line* leading back through mythical history straight to the god-king Saturn. From the mythical king Latinus the line led upward to Faunus, then to Picus. As Virgil puts it, "Faunus' sire was Picus, and he boasts thee, O Saturn, as his father; thou art first founder of the line. To him by heaven's decree was no son or male descent, cut off..." Since the line of descent was unbroken, Virgil could insist that Augustus Caesar himself be honored as the son of a god, destined to repeat the accomplishments of the founding king-- "Here is Caesar, and all Iulus' seed, destined to pass beneath the sky's mighty vault. This, this is he whom thou so oft hearest promised to thee, Augustus Caesar, son of a god, who shall again set up the Golden Age amid the fields where Saturn once reigned." Just as we have observed among other peoples, Roman mythology preserved the myth of Saturn on two levels. On the one hand, there was the tradition of the celestial Saturn ruling in the sky. "When ancient Saturn had his kingdom in the sky," Virgil wrote, "the deep earth held lucre all in its dark embrace." But the same god was also localized by the Romans as the legendary first king of Latium--a glaring contradiction the chroniclers overcame by asserting that, after the celestial ruler's exile or flight, he had taken up residence in Latium. "I remember how Saturn was received in this land," Ovid wrote. "He had been driven by Jupiter from the celestial realms. From that time the folk long retained the name of Saturnian." At every level, the Roman memory of Saturn resonates with a global tradition of the Universal Monarch. In the very fashion we have observed in other lands, we see the god entering local history as the primeval founding king, ruling an ancestral kingdom. And with the same result: that the nation telling the story then claimed to have *descended* from the god-king himself. The message couldn't be more clear. Long after the mythical age of the gods, every ancient culture continued to honor the great luminary remembered as the king of the world. ------------------------------ THE ELECTRICAL SUN By Ralph Juergens ------------------------------------------------------------------------ EDITOR'S NOTE; The article below continues our republication of ground- breaking work by the late Ralph Juergens, in which he introduces the concept of an electrically powered Sun. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ABSTRACT: The interplanetary medium is capable of confining the electric fields of charged celestial bodies within space-charge sheaths of limited dimensions. This phenomenon explains the success of gravitational theory in describing and predicting orbital motions in the present, relatively stable Solar System. Disruption of space-charge sheaths during close encounters between electrified planetary bodies may account for the catastrophic electromagnetic effects observed and reported by the survivors of near-collisions in ancient times. The known characteristics of the interplanetary medium suggest not only that the sun and the planets are electrically charged, but that the sun itself is the focus of a cosmic electric discharge--the probable source of all its radiant energy. RECONCILING CELESTIAL MECHANICS AND VELIKOVSKIANISM (3) I can find no way to state this diplomatically, so let me be blunt: The modern astrophysical concept that ascribes the sun's energy to thermonuclear reactions deep in the solar interior is contradicted by nearly every observable aspect of the sun. It seems astonishing that in the course of half a century of studies of the sun in context with thermonuclear theory, very few professional astrophysicists have ever expressed the slightest discomfort over discrepancies between observation and theory, or even over the fact that an ad hoc extra theory has had to be devised to explain practically every individual feature of the solar atmosphere. Apparently with a steady hand, Fred Hoyle wrote some years ago: "We should expect on the basis of a straightforward calculation that the Sun would 'end' itself in a simple and rather prosaic way; that with increasing height above the photosphere the density of the solar material would decrease quite rapidly, until it became pretty well negligible only two or three kilometres up ... Instead, the atmosphere is a huge bloated envelope (15)." And today we know that this "bloated envelope" extends out among the planets. Even the photosphere, where theory would suggest the sun ought to "end," fails miserably to conform with expectations. Its opacity almost conspires to prevent the sun from radiating away its internal energy, if that is indeed where the energy comes from. The granular structure of the photosphere is still attributed to "non-stationary convection," even though Minnaert pointed out decades ago that the Reynolds number of the photospheric gas exceeds the critical value by eight powers of ten--which is to say, by a factor of 100 million--and therefore convection currents in the photosphere should be completely turbulent (16). (The convection currents themselves are postulated to explain how all that internal radiant energy is brought to the surface in spite of photospheric opacity.) In the solar atmosphere at intermediate altitudes, astronomers observe an amazing variety of phenomena, none of which can be shown to have any business there if the sun's prime purpose is to shed energy liberated deep in its interior, as the thermonuclear theory would have it. Essential to the received theory is the conviction that inside the sun is a steep temperature gradient, falling toward the photosphere, along which the internal energy flows outward. If we stack this internal temperature gradient against the observed temperature gradient in the solar atmosphere, which falls steeply inward, toward the photosphere, we find we have diagrammed a physical absurdity: The two gradients produce a trough at the photosphere, which implies that thermal energy should collect and become stuck there until it raises the temperature and eliminates the trough. That this does not occur seems to bother no one. But suppose we remove the hypothetical internal temperature gradient. What then? Why then we see that the sun's bloated atmosphere and the "wrong-way" temperature gradient in that atmosphere point strongly to an external source of solar energy. Professor Melvin Cook dared to call attention to this matter in the 1950's (17). However, since he was not a professional astrophysicist, his comment was as unnoted as it was unsolicited. The phenomena of the photosphere, the phenomena of the chromosphere, the phenomena of the corona, and the known characteristics of the interplanetary medium all fit so nicely into a unifying hypothesis based on energy supplied to the sun from the outside that I cannot resist mentioning it here: I believe that the sun behaves as an anode collecting electric current from its environment, and that the energy it radiates is delivered entirely by way of this postulated electrical discharge. C.E.R. Bruce identified an impressive number of solar atmospheric phenomena as electrical-discharge effects as long ago as 1944 (18), and since then he has compiled an impressive record of prediction in the field of astrophysics with a comprehensive theory of cosmic electrical discharges (19). Apparently, however--and puzzlingly, too, in view of some of his conclusions concerning the nature of our galaxy--he does not question the idea that the sun and the stars are thermonuclear engines that live and die totally oblivious of their surroundings. For reasons I can only touch upon here, I would urge Bruce to modify his grand scheme to embrace the idea that stellar energy is electrical in origin. This, to my way of thinking, would finally justify his vision that "it is the breakdown of electric fields ... which has shaped and lit the universe from the beginning (20)." The kind of electric discharge I conceive to be responsible for solar radiation must necessarily be driven by an electric potential in interstellar space--a condition to be expected in a galaxy electrified by the separation of charges on a truly magnificent scale. Just such a situation is postulated by Bruce, who explains the spiral arms of our galaxy as electrical discharges initiated by the breakdown of a radial electric field extending through the entirety of galactic space. And just such a situation could provide the enormously high space potential (negative) that the discharge hypothesis requires. As I see it, then, the sun, already negatively charged to an extremely high electric potential, behaves as an anode and collects more negative charge because its interstellar environment has a potential that is even higher, in the negative sense. It is a matter of relative potentials. By analogy with electrical discharges studied in the laboratory, we can predict certain conditions that should prevail in interplanetary space if the sun is indeed fueled electrically. For now, I would mention only this: The interplanetary medium near the earth seems to be characterized by approximately equal numbers of protons and electrons, which fact identifies it as a true plasma. Farther out--say, near the orbit of Jupiter--the protons should be traveling away from the sun with considerably increased velocities, and the electrons should be present in lesser numbers than the protons. Hopefully, the Grand Tour space probe of the outer planets, which is projected by NASA for the late 1970's, will be instrumented to sample the interplanetary medium, and thus will be able to furnish evidence in support or in refutation of the discharge hypothesis. The presence of thermal electrons from the solar corona as far out as Jupiter would put the idea on very shaky ground, it seems to me. But if protons alone are still being accelerated away from the sun at that distance, no other conclusion could be drawn but that an electric current flows through interplanetary space. Even in the earth's neighborhood, by the way, solar-wind theorists have been experiencing great difficulty in reconciling observations of particle densities and temperatures with Eugene Parker's hypothesis (21) that the solar wind represents material unavoidably boiled off by the sun's hot corona (whose millions-of-degrees temperature, so predictable on the basis of a discharge hypothesis, is unexplained in terms of the conventional theory of stellar energy). Positive ions in the solar wind cross the orbit of the earth with velocities and in numbers close to those predicted by Parker. Solar-wind electrons, on the other hand, seem unacquainted with the rules of the game. In numbers they match the protons pretty well, but they travel rather too slowly and tend to become sidetracked along magnetic field lines (22). Interestingly enough, a solar-wind model that claims better than average success in squaring predictions with observations is that of two Belgian scientists, J. Lemaire and M. Scherer (23). An unusual feature of this model is that it calls for an electric field high in the solar corona to slow electrons and accelerate protons to observed speeds. Even more interesting is a recent summary of solar-wind-speed observations covering a nine-year period. Published in 1971 by J. T. Gosling et al (24), this study shows that "the yearly distributions of solar wind bulk speeds during the years 1962-1970 ... are found to be remarkably constant from year to year. There is no tendency for the solar wind speed to increase with increasing solar activity." This suggests to me that the solar wind is more nearly related to the sun's energy supply, which is also remarkably constant, than to the sunspot cycle. If solar energy actually derived from processes going on inside the sun, one could expect disturbances of the types characteristic of the most active phase of the sunspot cycle to affect the outward flow of the energy; if, however, solar energy did arrive from outside the sun, events upon the solar surface would be much less likely to affect the dissipation of that energy back into space in the form of visible and invisible radiation. The interplanetary medium, considered as a current-carrying channel in an electrical discharge, offers an explanation of the fact that Jupiter radiates several times as much energy as it receives from the sun (25). If Jupiter and its space-charge sheath (magnetosphere) are intercepting energetic primary electrons headed for the sun, the source of the giant planet's excess energy is no longer a mystery. In cosmic rays we have a mystery that has never been solved: where and how are these subatomic particles accelerated to the tremendous kinetic energies they exhibit when they reach the earth? But in the fact that they do reach the earth we find one more important bit of evidence that the earth is negatively charged. And the electric- discharge hypothesis suggests a possible answer to the mystery of cosmic-ray energies. Edward O. Hulburt, writing in The Scientific Monthly (Feb., 1954), noted that the primary cosmic rays deliver a very considerable amount of positive electric charge to the earth. By his calculation, an aggregate positive charge of 7 x 106 coulombs, sufficient to prevent the arrival on earth of any more cosmic-ray protons with energies of 1010 electron-volts or less, would accumulate in only 16 ½ years. Annually, then, the positive charge collected by the earth from this source amounts to more than 4 x 105 coulombs. Hulburt brought out these facts before electrons--negative charges--were discovered in the flux of cosmic rays. Electrons are now detected with more sensitive and more sophisticated devices than were available in the early 1950's, but they have proved to be only about one percent as numerous as protons in the total cosmic-ray population. So, for all practical purposes, Hulburt's calculation is still valid. Cosmic rays, in spite of the fact that they deliver 4 x 105 coulombs of positive charge to the earth each year, continue to arrive in undiminished numbers year after year. Presumably they have "always" done so. If we assume, then, that "always" is a matter of billions of years, we can only conclude either that the earth started out with a negative charge in excess of, say, 1016 coulombs, so that in all those years the cosmic-ray protons haven't yet been able to cancel that negative charge, or the earth picks up at least an equal amount of negative charge each year by some other means. In any case, the earth can be neither electrically neutral nor positively charged; only a negatively charged earth fits the evidence provided by the cosmic rays. At first glance, the solar-discharge idea might seem confounded by the fact that cosmic-ray protons reach the inner parts of the solar system. After all, the hypothesis requires that protons from the sun be accelerated out of the system, and indeed that these protons carry practically all of the discharge current as far as the local disturbance extends into interstellar space. Should not the cosmic rays--the 99 percent of them that are positively charged particles--be turned around and driven out of the system in the same way? But suppose that the sun's driving potential--the drop in potential between the sun and the boundary of its discharge is of the order of 10 billion volts. Then solar protons reaching the boundary would be launched into interstellar space with energies of 10 billion electron-volts. They would be cosmic rays in their own right. Astrophysicists tell us that the sun is a rather mediocre star, as far as radiating energy goes. If it is electrically powered, it would seem reasonable to conclude, at least tentatively, that its mediocrity is attributable in some measure to a relatively unimpressive driving potential. This would mean that hotter, more luminous stars should have driving potentials greater than that of the sun and should consequently expel cosmic rays of greater energies than solar cosmic rays. A star with a driving potential--cathode drop is a more appropriate term--of only 20 billion volts would expel protons energetic enough to reach the sun, arriving with 10 billion electron-volts of energy to spare. Such would be merely average cosmic rays, as we know them here on earth. Actually, particles with energies up to 100 billion billion electrons volts reach the earth from galactic space; to such cosmic rays, the adverse electric field in the sun's postulated 10-billion-volt cathode drop would be less than negligible. What all this suggests to me is that cosmic-ray protons and other atomic nuclei reaching the earth are nothing more nor less than the spent current carriers of stars other than the sun. In this connection, it is interesting to note that the calculated energy density of cosmic rays in our galaxy is comparable to the total energy density of electromagnetic radiation, including starlight. This is what one would expect to be the case if electric stars were responsible. 15. F. Hoyle, Frontiers of Astronomy (Mentor Books, 1957), p. 103. 16. M. Minnaert , Chapter 3 in The Sun, G. P. Kuiper, ed. (University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 171-172. 17. M. A. Cook Bulletin of the University of Utah, Vol. 46, No. 16 (November 30, 1955). 18. C. E. R. Bruce, A New Approach in Astrophysics and Cosmogony (London, 1944). 19. C. E. R. Bruce, Problems of Atmospheric and Space Electricity, S. C. Coroniti, ed., (Elsevier, 1965), pp. 577-96. 20. Private communication, September 21, 1965. 21. E. Parker, Astrophysical Journal, 128 (1958), 664-67. 22. See, for example, M. D. Montgomery et al, EOS Transactions of the American Geophysical Union. Vol. 52, No. 4 (April, 1971), 336; and K. W. Ogilvie et al, Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 76, No. 34 (December 1, 1971) 8165ff. See also J. V. Hollweg, Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 76, No. 31 (November 1, 1971),749lff. 23. J. Lemaire and M. Scherer, Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 76, No. 31 (November 1, 1971), 7479ff. 24. J. T. Gosling, R. T. Hansen, and S. J. Bame, Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 76, No. 7 (March 1, 1971), 1811ff. 25. Science News (June 13, 1970). Ralph Juergens ----------------------------------------------- PLEASE VISIT THE KRONIA COMMUNICATIONS WEBSITE-- http://www.kronia.com/~kronia/ Other suggested Web site URL's for more information about Catastrophics: http://www.ames.net/aeon/ http://www.knowledge.co.uk/xxx/cat/sis/ http://www.flash.net/~cjransom/ http://www.knowledge.co.uk/xxx/cat/velikovskian/ http://www.access.digex.net/~medved/Catastrophism.html http://www.grazian-archive.com/ http://www.tcel.com/~mike/paper.html http://nt.e-z.net/mikamar/default.html ----------------------------------------------- The THOTH electronic newsletter is an outgrowth of an intense discussion that has been going on for several years within a community of scholars interested in astral catastrophics. We have initially narrowed our focus to supporting a reconstruction of recent planetary dislocations that ended a universally remembered "Golden Age." Serious readers must allow some time for these radically different ideas to be fleshed out and for a relevant background to be developed. The general tenor of the ideas and information presented in THOTH is supported by the editor and publisher, but there will always be plenty of room for differences of interpretation that may be included in the articles. Again, we welcome your comments and responses, and any supporting information or relevant submissions. ----------------------------------------------- Michael Armstrong Mikamar Publishing mikamar at e-z.net