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 IV, No 13 Aug 31, 2000 EDITOR: Amy Acheson PUBLISHER: Michael Armstrong LIST MANAGER: Brian Stewart CONTENTS HOW YOU KNOW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . by Mel Acheson A UNIFIED THEORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .by Dave Talbott CARNIVAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Kroniatalk Discussion A LITTLE HISTORY OF THE ELECTRIC UNIVERSE . . . .by Wal Thornhill >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>-----<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< HOW YOU KNOW By Mel Acheson Probable, Possible, my black hen, She lays eggs in the Relative When. She doesn't lay eggs in the Positive Now Because she's unable to postulate how. >From _The Space Child's Mother Goose_ By Frederick Winsor People don't pay much attention to "how" they know; they just start arguing about "what" they know. From that beginning, grades and egos and jobs are on the line. If you know the answer, you get a better grade, you feel superior, you're promoted. There's security in thinking you're building your life on a solid foundation of knowledge. The idea of "how" is disconcerting. Thinking about thinking undermines what you think. If you were looking for a cognitive rock to stand on, "how" leaves you floating. Fortunately, knowledge is buoyant. The cognitive boat can take you to new and exciting places. With a few ideas and a handful of equations, it can fill the universe with meaning. Unfortunately, the boat doesn't come with a warranty. The history of ideas is a record of sinkings. You can be sure (almost) of one thing: What you believe today to be certain will someday go down. For practical purposes (for building a life or a career), the "how" doesn't matter. The carpenter doesn't have to know how hammers are made in order to drive nails. Nor do scientists need to know how knowledge is made in order to build theories. But then carpenters don't claim to be building Ultimate Truth. The "how" has two parts, roughly corresponding to "production" and "marketing". Individuals are constantly thinking up new ideas, exploring new things and looking at old things in new ways, testing the ideas and the observations against each other, judging how much sense it all makes. Then populations of individuals "buy" some of these ideas and pass up others. The ideas that most individuals "buy" become "accepted theories" and constitute knowledge. Hence, scientific knowledge is not an ever-closer approximation of some unknown Truth. Rather, theories are selected (in the sense used in theories of biological evolution) by the environment in which they're proposed: by the level of awareness and understanding of the people using them, by the characteristics of that part of reality people currently live in, by the dynamics of social and cultural power. Instead of being built on a foundation, knowledge is composed of relationships. The metaphor of construction is misleading. There is no "foundation" which justifies all subsequent knowledge built on it. Modern physics, for example, is anchored to a philosophy that sank over a century ago, as Karl Popper (among others) has pointed out. The rocks that sank it were the discoveries in the late 1800s about how the brain works. Neurons firing in your brain are distinguished only by their relationship with other neurons. Information about the world is not transmitted by nerves but is created metaphorically in the classification of impulses. Facts are not given. Evidence is not evident. And the entire apparatus (your brain) comes preassembled and running. The construction metaphor can only go this far: The progress of knowledge is a remodeling of existing neural structures. Sequences of neural firings can be rearranged, new sequences can be added or removed. But any sequence you might think is fundamental turns out to be just another association of associations of associations. This has a couple of interesting consequences: The hegemony of physics over the other sciences is attributed to its being more "fundamental". Presumably, the other sciences ultimately can be "reduced" to the collisions of "elementary particles" with which physics deals. Any theory in any other science, no matter how reasonable it may be in light of its own domain of evidence, must receive the imprimatur of physics to be taken seriously. The idea that psychology, say, could provide a critique of physical theories is considered absurd. But this is what the nature of the human cognitive apparatus allows. Its mechanism of classifying neural impulses treats the evidence and theories of physics exactly the same as it does those of every other science. "Gestalts" can be the "fundamental" objects of perception as readily as can the parts that compose them. If there is a foundation to science, it's this business of reclassification of neural relationships, not the content of any particular discipline. Disciplines can _relate_ to each other, but one can't _dictate_ to another. "Reasonableness" is the relationship of a theory to the evidence it seeks to explain, not its subservience to physics. Thus the idea that the conclusions of comparative mythology aren't to be taken seriously until they conform to the currently accepted theory of celestial mechanics is without foundation. The second interesting consequence concerns the many efforts to justify knowledge by starting with some simple element and building up all the rest. The brain works in just the opposite way: It starts with everything and narrows its focus to some simple thing. This has its usefulness, but along the way a lot gets discarded. When the process is reversed, what was discarded is likely to be ignored. The result is a picture of the universe that's simplistic, reductive, incognizant. This is what Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine discovered in his examination of dynamics. It bothered him that the "fundamental" laws of dynamics treated time as reversible when all experience indicated it wasn't. With the advent of the awareness of complex systems, he worked out generalized equations of state for populations of particles. He found that irreversibility of time and multiple solutions based on probability were inherent, essential characteristics of those systems. Reversibility only appeared in isolated systems at equilibrium. It's especially interesting that the complexity of his generalized equations persists down to as few as three particles: Thus the three-body problem in gravitational analysis is already beyond the scope of traditional dynamics. In other words, what has been proclaimed the "fundamentals" of physics upon which more complex systems are built is actually a degenerate case derived from those more general complex systems. In working up from the degenerate case to the complex, the multiple solutions are missed. To get the larger picture, you have to start with complexity and work down. The craving to justify the content of scientific knowledge, to establish it on some absolute truth, can never be satisfied. The mechanism of knowledge doesn't work that way. This doesn't mean our knowledge is "not true". But its truth is a truth within limits. It's a truth of special cases. It's a truth of human scale. The "how" of knowing may leave us floating, but we can learn to swim. Mel Acheson thoth at whidbey.com *********************************************************** A UNIFIED THEORY By Dave Talbott Perhaps few claims I've made for the Saturn model will seem more outrageous than the assertion of a unified theory. But all I am really saying is that there was a mythmaking epoch of human history. It had a beginning and an end. Its focus was an unstable congregation of planets close to the earth, moving through phases of beauty, awe, and terror. The "myth-making" epoch was unlike anything which followed. With the drifting away of the planetary gods, attention shifted radically to the tools for remembering. Through mythical representations and reenactments, our ancestors sought to keep alive and to give meaning to experiences more intense than anything experienced in later times. Myth requires an active imagination, but something more as well. Always the myths point to EXTRAORDINARY EVENTS re-defining the course of human history. A study of the archetypes--the first forms and enduring themes of myth--will show that they are already present with the flowering of civilization. AND NONE ARE ADDED OVER THE SUBSEQUENT MILLENNIA. Though quite remarkable from the usual vantage point (which assumes an expanding corpus of myth through history), the fact is expected under the Saturn model. I've stated often that there are hundreds of archetypal themes of myth. But there is, at root, a unifying thread, which I called the "One Story Told Around the World." The statement is indeed preposterous, but of this truth I no longer have any doubt. All of humanity experienced the same events. I believe that a series of snapshots of the polar configuration, together with animations illustrating the seamless connections between the different phases, will do the most to make the outrageous claims believable. It will also lend enough clarity and specificity for readers to see how easily the model will be disproved if our claims are fundamentally false. For a few weeks now I've been musing over the ways to establish the core principles and work outward from there, so that something more than random details will be evident. Though entirely understandable, the popular sense of randomness is the most pervasive misperception of myth. There is no such thing as a random original theme of myth. Randomness enters the picture only as the archetypes are subjected to localization, a process which can only introduce contradictions. As a testament to the unity of world mythology, I list below the archetypal personalities of myth. It's a small list. There are no others. UNIVERSAL MONARCH Though multiple bodies are involved in the planetary configuration, one planet in particular came to be identified as unified power, presiding over cosmic beginnings. That planet was Saturn. In this sense it is not inappropriate to call the archaic god, the subject of the One Story, the god Saturn, so long as it is clearly understood that other planetary powers in the configuration provided distinctive aspects of that god. Our first "snapshot" depicts the universal sovereign just prior to the visual displacement of the planetary bodies in conjunction. It is with their visual displacement that aspects of the unified god begin to emerge as separate powers, becoming the active forces in the "creation" and setting in motion a series of more complex events. With the emergence of distinct and independent forms, arising from aspects of a primeval Unity, other archetypal personalities take the stage, all standing in a fundamental relationship to the sovereign god we have called the Universal Monarch, and all playing distinctive roles in the One Story QUEEN OF HEAVEN Wherever you find the Universal Monarch you will find close at hand the ancient mother goddess--the feminine power whom the Sumerians called Inanna, the Queen of Heaven, and the Babylonians called Ishtar. For the Egyptians the prominent goddess figures include Isis, Hathor, and Sekhmet, each with numerous counterparts in their own and in other lands. Familiar names of the great goddess would include the Greek Aphrodite, Athena, and Artemis, or the Latin Venus, Minerva, and Diana, but many hundreds of counterparts could be named, all expressing a similar complex of ideas. While the goddess will at times appear as the mother of the universal sovereign, the more common role is as the god's daughter or spouse. When the goddess idea is traced to its earliest roots, one notes two crucial themes reflected in the symbolism: 1) The goddess is the central, animating source of the sovereign god's power. She is his "radiance," his "glory," even his "life,"--a role she fills concretely in her capacity as the god's central, luminous eye, heart, or soul. All of the leading Egyptian and Mesopotamian goddesses, for example, reveal this underlying character. 2) The departure of the goddess begins a series of events leading to a descent into chaos, the onset of world-destroying catastrophe and the perceived "death" of the sovereign himself, whose flaming "soul" rages in the sky in the form of the angry, lamenting, or warring goddess. The most common form of the raging goddess is the female serpent or dragon attacking the world. It will be our contention that the full complex of goddess images answers to the role of Venus in the planetary configuration. With a visual model as a reference we will see that the original "beauty" or "radiance" of the great goddess, her "life-giving" attributes; her role as "star" par excellence; her centrality in relation to the universal sovereign; her birth as an independent power; and her terrible aspect, are all rooted in the highly concrete visual appearances of Venus through two prominent phases, one quasi-stable, the other highly unstable, unpredictable, and violent. But a third, most fundamental attribute of the goddess must be mentioned as well: that is her role as the mother of another archetypal figure. WARRIOR-HERO This is the great national hero, originally the Demiurge, the servant of the Universal Monarch, but passing into later myth as the laboring warrior, messenger or servant of a great chief or renowned ruler. He is the Hercules archetype, a figure combining knowledge and brutish strength, quick wit, and episodic foolishness. He defeats the chaos monsters in primordial times, and he reconfigures the world. This is the most active personality in world mythology, clearly dominating the more developed chronicles and epic literature, while the more passive Universal Monarch fades into the background. The warrior-hero is the prototype of the famous tricksters and buffoons of later myth and folklore, flowering into innumerable tribal variations. Noteworthy instances of this warrior archetype would include the Egyptian Shu, Horus and Sept, Sumerian Enki, Damuzi and Ningirsu, Akkadian Ea, Ninurta and Nergal, Hindu Indra, Norse Thor, Greek Ares and Hercules, Latin Mars, Aztec Huitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca, North American Coyote and Raven, to name the barest few among thousands. The comparative approach will identify this warrior figure as the planet Mars. In the Saturn model, that means the innermost circle or sphere in the pictographic representations under discussion. In the myths, Mars' displacement from that visual position is most commonly recorded as the "birth of the hero" and the "descent of the hero," two themes of immense impact on the ancient world. But numerous other themes must be confronted as well. Reducing this complexity to its most crucial details, four principles must be noted here. 1) In the earliest versions of the story, the warrior-hero is born from the womb of the mother goddess, who is Venus. The "birth of the hero" means the displacement of Mars from the position depicted in our initial snapshot of the planetary configuration. 2) Periodic movement of the warrior-hero along the world axis occurs, a motion associated with the visual descent and ascent of the god. This movement along the axis also bears a distinctive relationship to episodes of catastrophe. 3) The reunion, or consorting, of the warrior-hero with the mother goddess was celebrated by every ancient cultures. This pervasive story was rooted in the visual conjunction of Mars and Venus as they drew nearer to each other in the configuration. From this conjunction arose the repeated myth of the hero's liaison with the daughter or spouse of a renowned "king," or the hero consorting with his own mother. 4) In connection with the descent of the god, a cosmic column appeared, a luminous stream stretching along the world axis. This cosmic column will be the world mountain, or the mountain upon which the hero was "exposed" at birth, or the mythic river into which the hero was cast at birth. By this association the hero himself was inseparably linked to the world pillar. Originally, it was his essence as the Atlas figure, supporting the turning sphere of "heaven" (Saturn) upon his shoulders. PRIMEVAL SEVEN These satellite figures are presented in a variety of contexts, as seers or wise men, archangels, patriarchs, children, dwarves, stones, eyes, stars, orbs, heads of the chaos monster. They are the first (but not the only) reason for the sanctity of the number seven in ancient symbolism. We meet these gods as seven stones of fate, or seven demons in Sumerian and Akkadian symbolism; seven eyes of God in the book of Zechariah; seven Watchers of Enoch; seven stars and seven spirits of God in the book of Revelation; Seven Sages of Arabian epic literature, Seven Immortal Fates of the Persians; seven Rishi of the Hindu Vedas. Seven daughters of Aphrodite, or Seven Sisters in Greek myth. Seven heads of the primeval serpent or dragon in Egyptian, Babylonian, Hebrew, Christian, Hindu, and Mesoamerican traditions. In more than one land, constellational astrology eventually localized the Primeval Seven as stars of Ursa Major or the Pleiades. In the Saturn model these will be the seven moons or "satellites" originally seen in the presence of Saturn. (This point cannot really be clarified until we take up the polar enclosure, the visual dwelling of the primeval seven.) CHAOS MONSTER Here we meet the darker, more menacing powers, possessing an often-veiled link to aspects of the mother goddess or warrior- hero. Of these darker creatures none is more prominent than the cosmic serpent or dragon, a monster whose attack upon the world is synchronous with the twilight of the gods, and whose ultimate defeat signals the birth of a new age or, symbolically, a new year. Babylonian Tiamat. Egyptian dragon of Apep. Greek Typhon. But within every culture, endless variations will be found: hundreds of monsters held responsible for the primeval catastrophe, each providing a different nuance, a different accent, a different way of remembering the cosmic agent of Doomsday. Though we must oversimplify things in stating the planetary identifications, the general rule is that the female chaos monster is the terrible aspect of the mother goddess, who is Venus, while the male chaos monster is the terrible aspect of the warrior-hero Mars. Both planets participate directly in the unstable and catastrophic phases, yet paradoxically both are linked to the vanquishing of chaos and renewal of the world. Moreover, the close conjunction or interaction of the two bodies does not allow for an unequivocal distinction between the two, as I will seek to make clear. CHAOS HORDES These are the companions of the monster figures. They are the swarming powers of disorder and calamity, the fiends of darkness-- flaming, devouring demons which so many magical rites were contrived to ward off. From the Norse Valkyries to the Greek Erinyes, from the Babylonian Pazuzu-demons to the Egyptian "Fiends of Set," every culture remembered the onslaught of these chaos demons, moving across the heavens as a sky-darkening cloud and ushering in the cosmic night. In their earliest expressions, they do not just announce the primeval catastrophe, they ARE the catastrophe. The chaos hordes signify the cometary debris fields and gas or dust clouds particularly prominent in the unstable phases of the configuration. Mythically, they are to retinues of the goddess and hero in their terrible aspects, while also giving shape to the bodies of these monsters. And yet, in the phases of stability, they become the raw material of creation itself, giving form to a luminous habitation in the heavens. Both the polar column and the polar enclosure are constituted from this raw material, which the Egyptians called the "primeval matter," the alchemists' prima materia. REJUVENATED SOVEREIGN Lastly, there is the compelling personality of the dying and resurrected or transformed god-king, whose return to life is reflected in the dramas of the ancient New Year. As a global symbol, the "New Year" recalls the passing from one age to another, a remembrance often celebrated annually but on many other schedules as well. Though his identity is inseparably tied to the Universal Monarch, the resurrected god nevertheless emerges in distinction from that god as his son. He is simultaneously a younger version, and the rejuvenated form of his father, and his appearance or "reappearance" is synonymous with the renewal of a world which had fallen into darkness and discord. Such appears to be the underlying character of the Egyptian Osiris, Akkadian Marduk; Persian Ahura Mazda; Norse Balder; Hebrew Yahweh; Phoenician Bel, Greek Zeus, Roman Jupiter. This archetypal. renewed god will frequently appear as a more passive figure in contrast to the mother goddess and warrior-hero personalities, both of whom are highly active in the break between world ages and are typically involved directly in the episodes leading to the sovereign god's transfiguration or renewal. It is common in our time to represent the coming of the New Year as the departure of the elder "Father Time"--along with the emergence of the ever-young or new-born babe or "child" of the New Year. We are simply extending an ancient tradition whose meaning we have forgotten. The rejuvenated sovereign is the planet Jupiter, not visible in the illustrated phase (our first snapshot) because it was hidden behind Saturn, but becoming visible with the disruption of the collinear system, and emerging as the apparent re-birth of the original sovereign. Indeed, the identities of Jupiter and Saturn are so intertwined that we are really dealing with two aspects of the same mythical figure--the god-king's original form as Saturn, and his renewed and transformed state as Jupiter. Mythically, the younger Saturn is Jupiter, and the elder Jupiter is Saturn. -------------------------- Additional Notes In the above listing, while we have not separated the chaos monster into its male and female aspects, we do separate the Universal Monarch into his elder and younger versions. So while there are different ways one might distinguish or count the archetypal personalities, we arrive at an acid test. Do the listed categories actually encompass the vast layers of world mythology? While I have no intent to minimize the presence of ambiguous or unexplained details, the significance of the structure should not be minimized either, for the implications are quite astounding. Patterns do not exist without a cause. And that means that an explanation of the patterns must be possible. The implications become all the more astounding as one begins to see that each of the personalities has a defined role in the One Story. As will become clear, each archetypal figure achieves a turn of the prism, putting the focus on a particular aspect of the One Story and providing more colorful action and detail. But throughout these dramas, the core personalities of myth all know each other and interact in highly meaningful ways. The question, therefore, must be asked: what events could have unleashed human imagination in this way, inspiring a story so powerful as to have retained its underlying structure for thousands of years? Structure implies coherence, an integrity between the parts. Clearly, human imagination must have gone wild to have produced the incredible vistas, the complex personalities, and the magical events of world mythology. But structure is there too, and structure means that human imagination was not operating in a vacuum. It is the structure that directs our attention to common experiences and to the external references, without which a unified substratum would be impossible. Dave Talbott *********************************************************** CARNIVAL A Kroniatalk Discussion Ted Bond queries: Someone very recently said that Carnival was a New Year's celebration. Carnival of course is in the Spring and is a Spring equinox festival. If it is a New Year's festival it dates from the time when the year began with March (as reflected in the names of the last four months of our year). The Jewish New Year was also originally a Spring festival, according to Genesis. However the Winter solstice festival, which is our Christmas, certainly was dropped on to the pagan Saturnalia (Yule), and this is very close to our New Year. Was there an ancient New Year's festival following closely on the Saturnalia celebrating the arrival of Jupiter (the reborn Saturn) as the Universal Monarch? Can anyone sort this out? Michel Tavir responds: Carnival, which emerged from the Saturnalia, symbolized the death of the old year, and took place in the late winter. Practically it was time to pig out on the remains of the last harvest, while they were still edible. Then came the New Year, which until the late middle-ages coincided with the Spring equinox. Some (I think I remember some pope conniving with a French king, maybe François the 1st) found it more politically expedient to move it to shortly after Christmas. There is still a trace of the "original" New Year in the April's Fool day. Dave Talbott adds: Ted, you might find of interest Theodore Gaster's little volume, _The New Year_. Gaster was one of the true experts on comparative myth and ritual. Our calendar is filled with New Year's celebrations. Even Halloween has to be included. (It traces to the Celtic New Year.) Either a solstice or an equinox timing of "New Year's" celebrations was most logical, though of course the archetypal event being recalled each year had nothing to do with either a solstice or an equinox. This is the way localization of myth works. First there was extraordinary and devastating event, remembered as the End of the World To commemorate the event, together with the subsequent renewal of the world, ancient symbolists re-enacted the fall into chaos, the displacement of the elder Father Time, and the regeneration of the world (Father time reappearing as a newborn babe). In this sense the New Year's festival must be set alongside others celebrations which were not annual but set on longer timetables. The Aztec 52 year cycle is a good example--symbolic destruction of the world followed by a new lease on life for another cycle. The Egyptian Sed Festival is a "New Year's" festival every thirty years, which happens (?) to accord pretty well with a Saturn cycle. Of the New Year's concept, Gaster writes: "...No other festival has been celebrated on so many different dates or in so many seemingly different ways....The more one examines them, however, the clearer does it become that these observances which seem at first sight so different and diverse are really no more than variations upon the same theme and that though the accompanying emotions may have changed and though he may be completely unconscious of this fact, the behavior of the modern sophisticate on New year's Eve or New year's morn stems ultimately from the same roots as does that of his more primitive brethren." The ancient celebrations were characterized by mock battles in the streets, great commotion, lamentations, joviality, celebrants in disguised, monstrous forms amid the chaotic throngs--and of course (in more than one land), the fall of a flaming wheel down a hill, or the running amok of a "chariot" through the streets (Phaeton revisited). What is most interesting is that, as you follow the celebrations backwards, you see an increasing scale of drama and literalism, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. Attempts to account for a global archetype of this sort through feeble references to the annual course of the Sun only put an exclamation point to the failure of modern scholarship. The experts cannot see beyond the symbol to the thing symbolized. Dave Talbott ************************************************************ A LITTLE HISTORY OF THE ELECTRIC UNIVERSE By Wal Thornhill "The implications of electrical activity between planets will be profoundly disturbing for those who have built their cosmology around the weak force of gravity, acting in an electrically sterile universe. This strange, dogmatic oversight guarantees that nothing will remain in future of the fanciful Big Bang theory or the simplistic story of the formation of the solar system." The pieces of the Electric Universe "Big Picture" are supplied by some remarkable individuals, most of them unknown and who have lived or are living "quiet, unobtrusive lives" away from universities. For those with a sense of history this fact should serve to increase curiosity rather than dull it. Most revolutions in science have come from people who taught themselves outside the academic system and were not constrained by the fallacies and fashions of the day. It has been well documented that modern institutions of science operate in such a way as to enforce conformity and prevent research and publication of revolutionary ideas. J. R. Saul argues that medieval scholasticism was re- established during the 20th century. If so, the new "Enlightenment" will have to come, as before, from outside academia. For me, enlightenment began with the controversial polymath and author of Worlds in Collision, Immanuel Velikovsky. In 1950 he demonstrated an interdisciplinary, comparative technique for uncovering hard evidence of planetary catastrophe from the recorded memories of the earliest civilizations. His method was forensic in that he looked for reports of physical events of a highly unusual nature that were nonetheless corroborated globally by totally separate cultures. Then by applying scientific knowledge of cause and effect, it was possible to build a very detailed model of the sequence of those events. Finally, the model enabled specific predictions to be made and confirmed - a requirement of a good scientific theory. Some of the predictions he made were outrageous at the time: Venus would be near incandescently hot, Jupiter would emit radio noise, the Moon rocks would be magnetised, and so on. Velikovsky was right, astronomers of the day were wrong. However, you will not find any textbook that gives him credit because his theory was judged to be wrong. Presumably they were all lucky guesses! It became clear to Velikovsky that Newton's concept of gravity was insufficient to explain the reported behaviour of the planets. And it certainly could not answer the obvious question, "why do the skies look so peaceful now?" This allowed a dogmatic response by academia to Velikovsky's seminal breakthrough. It was said his theory didn't obey Newton's laws. But what did Newton know of electricity? And if anyone believes that Newton's laws guarantee a stable planetary system - think again! Any gravitational system with more than two orbiting bodies is unstable. Yet the question is hardly ever asked, let alone answered, "what produces the observed stability of the solar system?" Velikovsky was convinced that the clue lay in his discovery that electrical forces dominate the incredibly weak force of gravity at times of planetary close encounters. Although he was unable to explain at the time how this would create the observed stability of the solar system, with his uncanny prescience he had pointed the way to the Electric Universe. Since then sceptical scholars have shown Velikovsky's historical perspective of cataclysmic events to be wrong. However, his basic premise of planetary encounters has been confirmed and the details fleshed out to an extraordinary degree. Several pioneering researchers in this new field now agree that awe-inspiring planetary encounters did occur in pre-history. To the most ancient civilizations they were a culturally defining memory. They were the inspiration for pyramids, megaliths, statues, totems and sacred rock art. The survivors of global upheaval felt it imperative that the memory be preserved and passed down faithfully to future generations in the expectation that the "gods" would return. The memorialization took the form of architecture, ritual and story to re-enact the apocalyptic power of the planetary gods over human destiny. Such a catastrophic beginning explains why civilization appeared like a thunderclap out of nowhere. Unfortunately, with no reference points in the present behavior of the planets, the stories lost their real meaning. This short explanation may seem contrived until the wealth of supporting evidence can be presented. However, it highlights the crucial distinction between the planetary catastrophism of the Electric Universe and that of neo-catastrophists who attempt to explain the evidence for planetary encounters in terms of cometary phenomena. Modern comets simply do not fit the descriptions from the past. Nor can they account for abundant evidence of fresh looking planetary cratering and scarring. Besides, in an Electric Universe comets are not the apocalyptic threat to the Earth imaginatively portrayed by artists. Such pictures are entirely fanciful because a comet would be disrupted electrically by a cosmic thunderbolt before it hit the Earth. The only visible evidence remaining would be an electric arc crater like Meteor Crater in Arizona. The Electric Universe model grew from the realization that a new plasma cosmology and an understanding of electrical phenomena in space could illuminate the new work being done in comparative mythology. In return the images of events witnessed in the prehistoric sky and their sequence could help unravel the recent history of the Earth, Mars and Venus. By accepting data over a far wider span of knowledge and human existence than conventional cosmology allows, the Electric Universe model began to provide pragmatic and common sense answers to many questions that seem unrelated. It followed the entreaty of the Nobel Prize winning plasma physicist and cosmologist, Hannes Alfvén, to work backwards in time from observations rather than forward from some idealized theoretical beginning. "We have to learn again that science without contact with experiments is an enterprise which is likely to go completely astray into imaginary conjecture." - Evolution of the Solar System, NASA 1976, H. Alfvén & G, Arrhenius, p. 257. The result is now a "Big Picture" that emphasizes our dramatic prehistory and essential connectedness to the universe. No longer do we have to look at ourselves and the universe through the distorting sideshow mirrors of modern science. (c)Wal Thornhill 2000 See the home of The Electric Universe at http://www.holoscience.com *********************************************************** PLEASE VISIT THE KRONIA COMMUNICATIONS WEBSITE: http://www.kronia.com Subscriptions to AEON, a journal of myth and science, now with regular features on the Saturn theory and electric universe, may be ordered from this page: http://www.kronia.com/html/sales.html Other suggested Web site URL's for more information about Catastrophics: 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/ http://www.holoscience.com http://www.users.uswest.net/~dascott/Cosmology.htm http://www.catastrophism.com/cdrom/index.htm http://www.science-frontiers.com Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered, 10 Pensée Journals may be ordered at the I-net address below: http://www.e-z.net/~mikamar/default.html A collection of used and out-of-print books on the subject of catastrophics is now available from Mikamar Publishing. E-mail the website directly, or write to THOTH to request a list of available titles. 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.