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 III, No. 10 July 30, 1999 EDITOR: Amy Acheson PUBLISHER: Michael Armstrong LIST MANAGER: Brian Stewart CONTENTS PLAYING THE JOKERS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . by Mel Acheson SATURN AND VENUS . . . . . . .Ted Bond, Ev Cochrane, Dave Talbott SEEING PINK . . . . . . . . . By Michael Armstrong, Wal Thornhill SAHARA'S ABRUPT DESERTIFICATION - I . . . . . . .By Wal Thornhill SAHARA'S ABRUPT DESERTIFICATION - II . . . . . . By Wal Thornhill ---------------------------------------------- PLAYING THE JOKERS By Mel Acheson The house of cards which is modern astronomy contains two jokers. Both lie in the foundation; both are being played; and the house is doomed to collapse. The first joker is the assumption that redshift is entirely a doppler effect. Upon this card is founded the idea of the expanding universe and the theory of the Big Bang. Halton Arp's observations of physical connections among objects with different redshifts knocks this joker over. The further discovery that redshifts are quantised in cluster-specific sequences tosses it onto the discard pile. The second joker is the assumption that electrical phenomena are insignificant on an astronomical scale, that gravitation alone shapes the structure of the universe. Hannes Alfvén tilted that card with his observations that plasmas are not neutral superconductors: they propagate charge separation, current flow, and electrical forces over large distances. Other researchers are flattening this joker by amassing evidence of plasma activity in a multiplicity of forms throughout the universe, at every scale. A common characteristic connects these jokers: The currently- popular theories are built on the assumption of isolation. A galaxy is an "island universe", wrapped in its own gravitational field, idly spinning in nothingness. A star is a ball of gas balanced between the pull of its own gravity and the push of its own radiation. The revolutionary aspect of the joker-flattening evidence is that stars and galaxies are connected and interacting. Galaxies eject clouds, jets, and quasars that evolve into companion galaxies and clusters. Many of these remain connected to the parent galaxy with fingers of radio and x-ray radiation. Stars form in pinched segments of galaxy-wide lightning discharges and resonate to the variations in current and potential. Instead of a universe of individual particles that can be described in isolation, there is a universe of populations of mutual influences and of evolving correlations. Levels of statistical and historical ordering emerge beyond and above the individual level. The deterministic equations of establishment theories are valid only insofar as conditions of isolation are approximated. They require closing one's eyes to aggregates and to connections and to bigger pictures. Ultimately, one must close one's eyes to the universe or else watch the house of cards fall. Mel Acheson thoth at whidbey.com ---------------------------------------------- SATURN AND VENUS By Ted Bond, Ev Cochrane, Dave Talbott TED BOND SAYS: The Jewish religion, in its origins, aimed to put an end to planet-worship, especially of Saturn and Venus, who were worshipped together, and with it the universal practice of human sacrifice, e.g. the practice of putting the first-born through the fire, strictly forbidden in Deuteronomy. The Jews were thus the first people to introduce the notion of an _invisible_ god, something new, strange, and to many incomprehensible. Sacrifice did continue, however, as a religious practice, but of beasts rather than humans. In a passage in Exodus, God still demands the firstborn of all animals as _his_, but the firstborn of humans are _redeemed_. (This was presumably the firstborn of the _female_, since it was tied to the opening of the womb. Note that Isaac, whose hand was stayed, was the firstborn not of Abraham but of Sarah.) It seems that this Semitic people had been worshippers of Saturn, as their very name, 'people of Israel' shows, as well as the use of the word 'Elohim' (plural of El[=Saturn]) for the divinity in passages in the Torah. And what other explanation is there of the fact that the Jewish day begins at sundown? For the Jews the disappearance of Saturn as the Sun of Night, and eventually of the altered Venus-Ishtar-Inanna-Astarte (&c.), earlier the benign mother goddess, as a fiery light in the sky and an agent of destruction, were of supreme importance. These were two very bright 'stars' that had disappeared from the sky. Isaiah (14: 1-13), apparently alluding to Babylon, says "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God." ... Now in the Isaiah passage what is presumably the Hebrew name 'Shahar' is translated into Greek as 'Phosphorus' and into Latin and hence into English as 'Lucifer', which were the Greek and Latin names, respectively, for the morning star. DAVE TALBOTT SAYS: This is correct, and it's an obvious source of much later confusion. It was Babylonian priest-astronomers who later clarified planetary identifications for the Greeks, so that the planets acquired new names with direct links to the earlier, and much more reliable, traditions of Mesopotamia. Ted Bond was correct in noting the inherent contradiction in identifying Venus with the source of "devil" imagery (Lucifer). Venus is the archetypal feminine figure, but this root identity could hold only insofar as wandering tribes retained the link of gods and planets. Many peoples--including the Egyptians and Greeks--did not; they preserved only the stories of extraordinary powers and forms dominating the sky in a prior epoch. Preserving the stories did not require clear skies and observational disciplines under conditions of a shifting celestial order. But maintaining planetary identifications certainly did require such disciplines. Insofar as nations did not preserve the link of god and planet, their imagination was permitted to attach any mythical name whatever to planets and stars in later times--in the same way that, still later, we attached mythical names to Uranus, Neptune and Pluto as these planets were observed with telescopes. Similarly, all of the major stars and constellations, named long after the mythical age of the gods, achieved their symbolic identifications by the same process of projection, just as local mountains and rivers acquired their sacred names from mythical powers, inviting horrendous later confusion between archetype and symbol. The original planetary SOURCE of the myths is a much different matter, and the extraordinary discipline of the Babylonians was crucial to our ability to connect the mythical archetypes to the roles of named planets. TED: Was this a mistranslation, or was Isaiah mistakenly compounding Venus and Saturn, the two fallen light-giving gods? For in English Lucifer is standardly identified with the fallen angel who became Satan or the Devil and, to the best of my knowledge, this Lucifer has never been identified with Venus. EV COCHRANE ADDS: Venus was, in fact, depicted as "horned". Cultures from around the ancient world compared Venus to a long-horned cow. Even the much later Babylonian astronomical texts speak of the horns of Venus, a fact which has led many astronomers to consider the possibility that the ancients viewed the phases of Venus. Venus was also called Lucifer by numerous Biblical commentators and scholars. Even so, I believe that the passage in Isaiah properly refers to the planet Mars, not Venus. TED: Finally, the pre-Christian religion of Europe, which survived, vilified as witchcraft, well into the Christian era, had two divinities, the Horned Man and the Queen of Heaven--who but Saturn and Venus? And this Horned Man, worshipped by the 'witches', became the Devil of medieval Christianity! DAVE: Yes indeed. That the Queen of Heaven was Venus can be established beyond dispute. The consistency and reliability of the identification is also a basis of our confidence in the comparative approach. By drawing our attention to the substratum of human memory, it helps us to avoid being misled by localized contradictions. TED: Neither do I myself have any doubt that the golden heifers inscribed with the tetragrammaton, set up by Jeroboam at Dan and Beth-El with the proclamation "Behold thy gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt," symbolized the same planetary god represented by the Egyptians as a celestial heifer- -Hathor, who all agree was the planet Venus. DAVE: Yes again. The equation, celestial heifer = Venus, is highly reliable. It belongs to the root mythical identity of the mother goddess, and no other planet competes with Venus for this role in early astronomy. It is the comparative approach which enables one to work through local elaborations and contradictions to find dependable patterns of this sort. Under this approach it will be seen that there is a highly coherent original story of the mother goddess, always leading us to the planet Venus--despite the numerous, more random, projections of goddess-attributes onto other celestial and terrestrial objects in later times. TED: Was Baal Venus or Saturn or both? Should the breakup of the polar configuration and all the planetary activity connected with it be brought forward in time, so as to be in living memory of the early Jews and confused in legend by the later prophets? EV: The identification of Baal is a very thorny problem. The difficulty arises from the fact that Baal is simply a name meaning "Lord" and that there were many different Baals in the ancient Near East. None of them, to the best of my knowledge, were identified with the planet Venus. Rather, the latter was identified with Baal's consort, Baalit. Some Baals, such as Baal Hadad, would appear to be identified with the planet Mars. As for your last question, I don't see any reason to bring the breakup of the polar configuration forward in time. ---------------------------------------------- SEEING PINK By Michael Armstrong, Wal Thornhill MICHAEL ARMSTRONG WROTE: Wal, Now, what have you done to those poor Australian astronomers? Not only have they convinced themselves that they are seeing black holes, but they are seeing them as bright pink! AND they're only "pretty certain" that black isn't pink! See article below: WAL THORNHILL ANSWERS: Michael, I think it must be the "Priscilla syndrome", - it comes from being too long on mountain tops in the Australian outback. :-> Seriously though, BLACK HOLES DO NOT EXIST! So it is quite possible that what they are looking at is the plasmoid that gives rise to the phenomena attributed to a black hole. It will radiate across the entire electromagnetic spectrum so the perceived colour will depend on many factors that we can only guess at. Of course, experiments with plasma focus devices and study of the "black hole" spectrum will give us some clues. Note that the distance of the BH seems wildly overstated and was therefore presumably calculated using its apparent redshift. Halton Arp has annihilated that simplistic notion. So, estimates of the luminosity of the black hole will also be exaggerated by many orders of magnitude. For example if the "black hole" is 1000 times closer than the astronomers say (a figure used by Arp in a recent discovery) then the luminosity can be a million times less to give the effects seen. Wal Thornhill ************** THE ARTICLE: The Oregonian May 19, 1999 An unexplained pink shade found near the void of some black holes. Australian astronomers have found that some black holes look bright pink. They reported that the "pink holes" are more than a billion light-years away. "These pink things were quite easy to find, said Paul Francis of Australian National University. "The hard bit was proving that they are black holes. It took the combined power of four of Australia's best telescopes to identify what they were." How could black holes, which have such intense gravity fields that they suck in light, be pink? "We really don't have the foggiest idea." Francis said. "We're pretty certain that it isn't the black holes themselves that are pink." Instead, the pink light may be coming from gas "just outside the black holes." Black holes, which act like cosmic vacuum cleaners, are the remnants of massive stars, or even galaxies, that have exhausted all their nuclear fuel and collapsed into themselves. ---------------------------------------------- SAHARA'S ABRUPT DESERTIFICATION -- I Comments by Wal Thornhill The following item was sent to me by a friend and member of the Canberra Astronomical Society. Of particular interest are the "abrupt" climate changes that are attributed to that arm waving catch-all beloved of climatologists, the unquantifiable "feedback" mechanisms in our weather systems. The suggested change of about 0.5 degree in the Earth's axial tilt seems ludicrously small to bring about the changes noted. The switch from precipitation and moderate temperatures to aridity and high temperatures sounds very much like an episode of Earth's relocation in the solar system to an orbit closer to the Sun. That is a simple cause and effect relationship. Unfortunately for the climatologists, the rules of their game don't allow it at present. I would like to know where all of the sand came from too. Wal Thornhill American Geophysical Union Public Information Office 2000 Florida Avenue, NW Washington, D.C. 20009 (For Immediate Release: July 7, 1999) Sahara's abrupt desertification started by changes in Earth's orbit, accelerated by atmospheric and vegetation feedbacks WASHINGTON -- One of the most striking climate changes of the past 11,000 years caused the abrupt desertification of the Saharan and Arabia regions midway through that period. The resulting loss of the Sahara to agricultural pursuits may be an important reason that civilizations were founded along the valleys of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates. German scientists, employing a new climate system model, have concluded that this desertification was initiated by subtle changes in the Earth's orbit and strongly amplified by resulting atmospheric and vegetation feedbacks in the subtropics. The timing of this transition was, they report, mainly governed by a global interplay among atmosphere, ocean, sea ice, and vegetation. Their research is published in the July 15 issue of Geophysical Research Letters. The researchers, headed by Martin Claussen of the Potsdam- Institut Fuer Klimafolgenforschung (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research) employed a model of intermediate complexity to analyze climate feedbacks during the past several thousand years of the current, or Holocene, era. Called CLIMBER-2 (for CLIMate and BiosphERe, version 2.1), the model led to the conclusion that the desertification of North Africa began abruptly 5,440 years ago (+/- 30 years). Before that time, the Sahara was covered by annual grasses and low shrubs, as evidenced by fossilized pollen. The transition to today's arid climate was not gradual, but occurred in two specific episodes. The first, which was less severe, occurred between 6,700 and 5,500 years ago. The second, which was brutal, lasted from 4,000 to 3,600 years ago. Summer temperatures increased sharply, and precipitation decreased, according to carbon-14 dating. This event devastated ancient civilizations and their socio-economic systems. The change from the mid-Holocene climate to that of today was Initiated by changes in the Earth's orbit and the tilt of Earth's axis. Some 9,000 years ago, Earth's tilt was 24.14 degrees, as compared with the current 23.45 degrees, and perihelion, the point in the Earth's orbit that is closest to the Sun, occurred at the end of July, as compared with early January now. At that time, the Northern Hemisphere received more summer sunlight, which amplified the African and Indian summer monsoon. The changes in Earth's orbit occurred gradually, however, whereas the evolution of North Africa's climate and vegetation were abrupt. Claussen and his colleagues believe that various feedback mechanisms within Earth's climate system amplified and modified the effects touched off by the orbital changes. By modeling the impact of climate, oceans, and vegetation both separately and in various combinations, the researchers concluded that oceans played only a minor role in the Sahara's desertification. ---------------------------------------------- SAHARA'S ABRUPT DESERTIFICATION -- II By Wal Thornhill On 12 July I wrote: ... I would like to know where all of the sand [in the Sahara] came from too. As if in answer to my rhetorical question, on the 16th I saw a featured article in New Scientist of 10 July titled "The riddle of the Sands". The subtext reads: "Deep in the Sahara lie vast deposits of incredibly pure glass. Nothing on Earth could have created them." It mentions the green glass forming the heart of a scarab found in Tutankhamen's tomb that is made of such glass. Walter Alter had written about this subject on 7 April and it was reprinted in Thoth III-8: ... An Italian geologist has taken a close look at the beautiful translucent scarab in a pectoral, or necklace, found by Howard Carter among the treasures of Tutankhamen. Carter thought the scarab was carved of greenish-yellow chalcedony. However, measuring its refraction revealed to Vincenzo De Michele that the gem consists of Libyan desert glass. This is a fused natural glass, formed by cooling molten sand. It results from the impact of a meteorite or comet or a low-altitude explosion in the atmosphere. What makes the scarab even more astonishing is that the nearest source of Libyan desert glass is 500 miles west of the Nile, in the Western desert. Half of this distance lies beyond any known oasis. The glass is scattered over an area 15 miles in diameter. However, no meteor crater has been found, and the event responsible for the glass remains mysterious. In March this year, I wrote: ... When I look at exposed strata on Earth, with the sharp physical and colour (often implying chemical) differences we see, I am more disposed to the extraterrestrial origin theory. That is particularly the case when a distinctive sequence appears globally. When we find stratification on the Moon and smaller, tectonically inert and unweathered objects we should be highly sceptical of geological models of their formation. ... On 2 June this year, a NASA report said: ... Hammergren found that very elongated asteroids are never seen to be rotating faster than once every four hours. In contrast, more spherical asteroids can rotate as fast as once every 2.3 hours. Such evidence, Hammergren said, provides strong support for the theory that most asteroids are not tightly-bonded solid chunks of rock, but rather are loose aggregates of material, sometimes called "rubble piles." On 24 June I replied to a query from Dick Gagel: ... In an Electric Universe scenario a comet will be destroyed before it hits the Earth by a discharge between the two. That is what I believe happened in Tunguska. That is not to say that the electric discharge itself would not be catastrophic - and we could cop a lot of glass fragments (tektites) and sand from the disrupted comet. When the two June items are combined, and the distinction between comets and asteroids acknowledged to be purely one of ellipticity of orbits, then the probability of disruption by an electrical discharge becomes much greater. The melting of incoming material may then be explained by the action of an electric arc in space rather than ballistic heating in the Earth's atmosphere. The New Scientist report is very interesting in this regard: "... The story that has begun to emerge since is both astonishing and mysterious. These glittering shards are the purest natural silica glass any one has ever found. And there may be more than 1400 tonnes of the stuff spread across a vast area of the desert. Some pieces contain tiny bubbles, wispy white deposits and swirling black patterns that hint at a tumultuous origin. Where on earth did this it [sic] from? Tiny pieces of silica glass are fairly common in nature. When volcanic lava cools suddenly-as red-hot magma pours into the sea, for instance-molecules of silica in the lava freeze at random, creating an amorphous mass that resembles broken glass. But these materials are about 75 per cent amorphous silica at most. The rest is made up of crystals of quartz and oxides such as aluminium and iron. The desert glass is totally different: "It's the purest natural glass in the world," says Vincenzo de Michele, keeper of minerals at Milan's Museum of Natural History, "with a silica content of 98 per cent. This purity gives the desert glass some remarkable properties. ... you can heat the material to 1700 sC before it begins to melt - over 500 sC higher than other natural glasses. ... It can be dropped into cold water even when it is red hot and it doesn't disintegrate ... Stroll across the desert site and you'll come across great big chunks of glass- some are larger than bowling balls and weigh as much as 26 kilograms. These massive pieces of [sic] dwarf lumps of natural glass found elsewhere. Also scattered about the site are clusters of sharp glass chips-the debris of prehistoric workshops-and ancient glass tools such as knives and hatchets, evidence of early interest in the silica glass. ... Geologists have dreamt up some pretty bizarre theories to explain the origins of this remarkable material." One suggestion is that the glass may have formed at the bottom of a warm volcanic lake. But there were no hydroxide ions usually found in such glass and "geologists dated the glass at 28.5 million years old [while] the dried-up remains of the ancient lakes ... near the site turned out to be far too young-just 9000 years old." Another idea is that it may be volcanic but the whitish inclusions are minerals that form at much higher temperatures than are present in a volcano. And to cap it all, the dark samples are rich in iridium, typical of meteorites. So the only explanation seems to be that the glass was formed upon impact of a meteorite into the desert. Certainly, some of the silica contains shocked quartz crystals which bolsters the impact theory but it does not explain the purity of the glass. Also, it must be remembered that impacts cause little melting and there is no impact crater in the vicinity. Any heating of the meteorite itself in the atmosphere causes mere superficial melting. I believe the best explanation, given the purity of the glass, the size of some of the melts, and the presence of meteoritic elements - is heating in a plasma arc in space. Crystals embedded in a melt are a feature of chondritic meteorites and the shocked crystals would have retained the memory of their violent history - torn from the surface of a planet or moon by an interplanetary thunderbolt. In this connection then it is noteworthy that the Apollo 15 astronauts found clear green glass at Hadley's rille on the Moon. And from Apollo 11; "All of the silicate minerals are unusually transparent and clear, because of the complete absence of hydrothermal alteration or weakening." Science Vol 167, No. 3918, 30 Jan 1970, p. 449. From the same issue (p.742) comes the estimate that each kg of moon dust contains no less than 40,000 glass spherules ranging in size from .03 mm to .75 mm. Many of the spherules have been impacted by tiny "micrometeorites". The report states "It is not known why the impacted particles resemble in color and appearance the kind of material from which so many spherules appear to have originated". But I detail on my CD the mechanisms that can create this effect in a plasma arc in space to produce chondritic meteorites. The stratification found in the lunar soil indicates many episodes of deposition to form the regolith. The interplanetary discharge model has material electrically excavated from one body (the anode) and accelerated toward another body (the cathode) in the form of a self-contained plasmoid, rather like ball- lightning. The matter trapped therein will suffer extremely complex interactions. One effect is the melting, vapourization and ionization of matter nearest the axis of the arc. Electromagnetic sorting of ions by mass is then possible, yielding some regions of high purity. Other regions will not be heated to the same extent so that the final result may be a chaotic and violent mixing of solids, liquids and gases to form the matter that finally lands on the cathode or remains in space as meteors, asteroids and comets. Juergens went so far as to suggest that the lunar highlands were implanted in such a manner! I would merely say that it is not necessary to resort to problematic melting by impacts to produce the glass discovered on both the Moon and the Earth. Of course, geological dating of the glass is meaningless if this scenario is correct. And the drying up of the lakes in the Sahara 9000 years ago may give some measure of how old the Saturnian stories may be. Wal Thornhill ---------------------------------------------- PLEASE VISIT THE KRONIA COMMUNICATIONS WEBSITE: http://www.kronia.com Other suggested Web site URL's for more information about Catastrophics: [Ed note: the SIS Website address has changed to: http://www.knowledge.co.uk/sis/ ] Subscriptions to AEON, a journal of myth and science, may be ordered at the I-net address below: http://www.ames.net/aeon/ http://www.knowledge.co.uk/sis/ http://www.flash.net/~cjransom/ http://www.knowledge.co.uk/velikovskian/ http://www.bearfabrique.org http://www.grazian-archive.com/ Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered, 10 Pensée Journals may be ordered at the I-net address below: http://www.e-z.net/~mikamar/default.html ----------------------------------------------- The THOTH electronic newsletter is an outgrowth of scientific and scholarly discussions in the emerging field of astral catastrophics. Our focus is on a reconstruction of ancient astral myths and symbols in relation to a new theory of planetary history. Serious readers must allow some time for these radically different ideas to be fleshed out and for the 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. We welcome your comments and responses. thoth at Whidbey.com New readers are referred to earlier issues of THOTH posted on the Kronia website listed above. Go to the free newsletter page and double click on the image of Thoth, the Egyptian God of Knowledge, to access the back issues. ---