Recovering the Lost World,
A Saturnian Cosmology --Jno Cook
Part 7: The Age of the Gods and the Flood.


[Table of Contents]

$Revision: 23.28 $
Contents of this chapter: [The King List] [Dating the Age of the Gods] [Barrows] [Henges] [Temples and Platforms] [The Gods Destroy Earth] [The Flood] [The Battle of the Gods] [The Absu and Duat] [The Gods Leave] [Return of the Axis Mundi] [A New Era] [Endnotes]

This chapter will give further details of the "Age of the Gods." I will suggest some dates, discuss megalithic sites in Europe, and describe the flood of 3147 BC -- when the Gods leave.

I will be using 3147 BC, as the 'end' of the "Age of the Gods." This date is a correction of 3114 BC, the retrocalculated Maya "year zero," which is the start of Mesoamerican calendars-- as understood by us and, in fact, by the Maya of the Classical era (AD 400 to 900). The correction is based on the institution of the Long Count by the Olmecs, and is detailed in Chapter 15, "The Maya Calendar." The date of 3147 BC is probably more correct than 3114 BC, although both dates generally match later chronologies, archaeological findings, and climatological information. The date also matches a massive setback in Middle Eastern civilization. The setback is caused by a catastrophe which will be recounted 800 years later in the "Epic of Gilgamesh" as "The Flood" and retold much later in the Bible as the "Flood of Noah." Bible chronologists will place the flood in 2349 BC. [note 1]

The King List

The "Age of the Gods" ends in 3147 BC with the Flood of Gilgamesh. Two questions are, How long did the Gods rule, and, When did this era begin?

The beginning date of the "Age of the Gods" can be derived from the Sumerian "King List." Additionally, the span of time the "egg" stood in the sky, before creation, can be found from some variations of the "King List" and both can be partially verified against later Egyptian records. From climatological data we can even determine when the "chaos before creation" started. All of these bear up under archaeological evidence.

I will use the Sumerian "King List" because it provides actual year tallies. The Sumerians and people of northern Mesopotamia had been keeping extensive records of farm products since 8500 BC. Among the tallies and records which were kept was a summary list of the names and lengths of reigns of kings, along with the names of the cities they ruled.

The Sumerian "King List" is a text extant from remote antiquity. It was frequently recopied and seems to have had canonical status among the people of Mesopotamia. It was even used by the Bible editors after 600 BC as a record of the world since Creation. It lists 8 "kings before the flood" and then a long list of "kings after the flood," the first 23 at the city of Kish of Sumer, followed by hundreds more at other cities. The first of the 8 kings before the flood and the first king after the flood both "descend from heaven." It is the flood which separates our era from the "Age of the Gods." The "King List" simply starts off the list of kings at Kish with..

"And then the flood swept over."

The earliest extant copies of the "King List" date from 2300 or 2200 BC, apparently transcribed from records of ca 2800 BC. There are variations among the 18 extant copies, but it is possible to suggest an earlier master copy and to reconstruct it. Accurate copies were known even in Classical times, long after the lands of Sumer and Akkad and the Babylonian Empire had been completely forgotten. While the length of the reigns of some individual kings vary among copies, the total length of all the reigns at individual cities always remains the same. [note 2]

The Sumerian "King List" is often held to be nothing more than political promotion and the large number of "years" for the reigns of the earliest kings, as extravagant bragging in the service of some regime. But if we recognize that the first kings are not human kings but represent celestial beings -- Saturn at first, and later the planet Mars who approaches Earth at regular intervals -- then the beginning portion of the "King List" will start to make sense.

The early kings, and especially the "kings before the flood," rule for impossibly long times -- reigns lasting up to 43,000 years. However, the word that is translated by us as 'year' actually means 'turn' or 'shuttle,' as in weaving. It also means 'rotation' and came to mean year (as in a 'rotation' in seasons) as well as a change in government.

The number of 'turns' of the "kings before the flood" are all given as whole thousands, making it look suspiciously like they were made up. But, in fact, it seems that the 'turns' represent days, likely retrocalculated from years. If the list was transcribed from other records after 3100 BC, the chroniclers must have been aware that the length of the year had changed and attempted to preserve accuracy by using days (turns) rather than years. Dividing all the numbers by 225 (what I will assume to be the number of days in the year before 3147 BC) makes all the 'turns' into whole numbered years and reduces the total time span of the 8 kings from 241,200 "years" to 1072 years. [note 3]

The "King List" notes that Meskiaggasher, the first king (and founder) of the city of Uruk "was the first to write on clay." Meskiaggasher is dated to 2720 or 2740 BC and is the 24th king "after the flood." The "writing on clay" was actually well established much earlier in northern Mesopotamia, yet for Sumer the credit went to the founder of Uruk. The previous 23 kings had held sway over the city of Kish, north of Uruk. Kish was the center of Sumerian politics for some 300 years. In about 2700 Gilgamesh, the 5th king of Uruk and the literary figure at the center of the "Epic of Gilgamesh," defies the king of Kish, and the center of Sumerian politics shifts to Uruk. It was at this time that the "King List" was probably first transcribed from older tallies and records. We probably owe the compilation of the "King List," which was continued for hundreds of years into the future, to this gesture of independence by Gilgamesh. Independence of the individual cities became the political philosophy and practice of Sumer. [note 4]

With respect to accepting the validity of the "King List," I think we need to overcome our chauvinism and not assume factual inaccuracy simply because these people precede us by 5000 years. They were not cavemen. The Sumerians showed amazing abilities -- agricultural production, the building and maintenance of massive irrigation projects, the manufacture of goods, widespread conduct of trade, and the ability to keep track of products numbering into the tens of thousands of units. The tallies of farm products which date back to 8500 BC were initially represented with clay tokens. The use of the token system was extended to many differing trade goods -- barley, beer, cattle, sheep, wicker, cloth, and building materials -- and representations of 10 and 100, plus 60, 600, and 3600 were in use. The far-flung trade of Sumer ranged from the Indus valley to the seacoast of the Levant, and, before 3000 BC, to Egypt. There are surviving temple records of trade accounts from 4000 BC. [note 5]

Dating the Age of the Gods

Together the eight "kings before the flood" account for 1072 years. Subtracting this from an ending date of 3147 BC, the "Age of the Gods" started in 4219 BC. The 'eight kings' seem to be the appearances of Mars, mentioned previously. Their 'rulership' is established because Mars is seen descending from heaven. A version of the "King List" below...


"When kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in Eridu.
- In Eridu Alulim became king; he ruled for 28,800 turns. Alaljar ruled for 36,000 turns. Eridu was abandoned.
- Kingship was taken to Bad-tibira. Ammilu'anna the king ruled 43,200 turns. Enmegalanna ruled 28,800 turns. Dumuzi the shepard ruled 36,000 turns. Bad-tibira was abandoned.
- Kingship was taken to Larak. En-sipa-zi-anna ruled 28,800 turns. Larak was abandoned.
- Kingship was taken to Sippar. Meduranki ruled 21,000 turns. Sippar was abandoned.
- Kingship was taken to Shuruppak. Ubur-tutu ruled 18,600 turns.
- Total: 8 kings, their turns: 241,200
- Then the flood swept over."

-- MS in Sumerian on clay, 2000-1800 BC

With 'turns' representing days in the "King List," the 8 kings ruled at 128 to 192 year intervals. The reigns have a repetitive regularity. Mars probably descended slowly at 120 to 190 year intervals. Because plasma flows tend to be self-limiting, and thus represent nearly identical flows of current over long periods of time, it is likely that the descent of Mars was very regular. A long interval also fits with the long time spans between the building and use of grave barrows (and henges) in western Europe (see below). The identification of five different cities probably implies that the strike point of the arc was interrupted and restarted in a new location periodically. [note 6]

Based more on linguistic than archaeological evidence, Eridu (the first city of the King List) is thought to be Uruk or is located in the south, Sippar (the fourth city) is thought to be Nippur, and Shuruppak (the fifth city) might be located near Fara. (The Sumerian 'Noah' of the "Epic of Gilgamesh" is from Shuruppak -- "the City of the Ship".) But linguists and archaeologists work from slim evidence, and I suspect, as others do also, that Eridu is not Uruk. Uruk was not founded until 350 years after the flood of 3147 BC. The last two cities have not been identified at all. It is suspected by some that they may be under the coastal waters of the Persian Gulf. Although Eridu tends to be thought of as real, many archaeologists hold that none of the cities have been identified.

When the "King List" was being compiled (before 3100 BC), there had been walled cities in Sumer for perhaps a thousand years and the cloud or plasma formation at the north horizon was thus recognized as a walled city. This was probably the formation and disappearance of the cup-shaped 'mountain' at the base of the plasma stream near Earth, caused by plasma instabilities. To the Sumerian chroniclers, compiling the records of the past, the equivalent of what had been seen at the north horizon was the existence of cities, kings, and changes in kingship. [note 7]

When The Egg Appeared

Now we take another step back in time. At the very beginning of some versions of the "King List," and preceding the eight "kings before the flood," is Alorus, a king who does not descend to Earth but rules in heaven for an inordinately long time -- 162,000 'turns.' Assuming again that a turn is a single day and using a year of 225 days, Alorus would have ruled 720 solar years. The reign of Alorus in Heaven must represent the condition before the 'creation event,' for there is no mention of his descent to Earth, whereas the next king is preceded with the phrase "When kingship descended from heaven...." Alorus must represent the time when the egg stood in the sky, and presumably before Saturn lit up and Mars started periodic descents. For a long time nothing happened -- 720 solar years (but only 443 of our current years). Why this period of inactivity lasted so long is curious. Perhaps a certain level of charge had to accumulate before Saturn went nova and an arc would strike from Saturn to Earth. [note 8]

Subtracting 720 years from 4219 BC we arrive at 4939 BC as the first appearance of Saturn, as an egg, in the clouded sky. I had suggested in the previous chapter, based on climatic data, that Earth originally arrived at a location below Saturn at ca 5800 BC, but we now have the additional suggestion that Saturn remained indistinct until ca 4900 BC -- shrouded in turbulent clouds or what looked like a sea of swirling water. [note 9]

Thus we have the following sequence...

The details of the sequence of events when Saturn goes nova are given in the previous chapter. Note again that, as far as the humans are concerned, it is the nova event that determines 'creation.' There was no thought of the creation of humans or of anything dealing with Middle Earth. The only concern was to mark the creation of heaven and the self-creation of the Gods.

Barrows in Western Europe

The Egyptians and Mesopotamians, who were eventually to build gigantic stone and brick monuments, left nothing but a few post holes and wall foundations from the "Age of the Gods." It is in western Europe, from Portugal to Sweden, that people start a frenzy of building very large grave mounds, called Long Barrows, followed by hollow megalithic mounds, called Passage Graves, and later yet open circular megalithic structures, called henges, during and after the "Age of the Gods." [note 11]

The Long Barrows are 100 to 200 feet long and half as wide, made at times with with standing stones, often 8 to 10 feet tall and capped with stone slabs weighing up to 40 tons. These are covered with packed earth to form a large mound, often much larger than the internal space. The barrows have long passages in the interior with a single terminal chamber at the end. But not all Long Barrows do. Some, like West Kennet Long Barrow, are composed almost entirely of a mound of dirt, with very little dedicated as an enclosed burial space. The Long Barrows tend to be older, by thousands of years, than other structures, called Passage Graves.

The Long Barrows date from 4100 BC through about 3400 BC. There can be little question about the fact that these barrows are designed after the plasmoids seen in the far south. The concept that a huge mound of dirt, or a hollowed out barrow is required for depositing the bones of the dead will extend far into the future. The idea will be modified a number of times, but the 'barrow' idea will remain, even after 2400 BC.

The Passage Graves appear a thousand years later, after 3400 BC and 3100 BC, and continue to be built until ca 2400 BC. If the Long Barrows seem to be modeled after the plasmoids in the south, so the Passage Graves seem to be modeled after Saturn in the north sky.

Then, after about 2500 BC (I would suggest after 2350 BC), the large communal barrows are replaced by single graves under heaped-up soil, called Round Barrows.

Ron Wilcox, at http://www.archtext.co.uk/onlinetexts/britains_past/, writes about the confusion of barrows..

"..barrows are frustrating to archaeologists because they are so varied that they defy classification except in very broad (and probably rather meaningless) categories. The mounds might be long, trapezoidal, ovate, rectangular or oval while the chambers underneath can be made of wood or megaliths (large stones) and constructed in a variety of plans. Entrances can be at the sides or at the ends or in the case of the earthen long barrows entirely obliterated by the heaping up of the mound."

This should be extended to dates also. Although I have indicated a range of dates for three 'types' of barrows, these are not hard and fast. The confusion of dates extends to the mixing of calibrated and uncalibrated C-14 dates.

The Passage Graves are of some interest because they look as if they are modeled after Saturn in the north sky, and especially the plasma discontinuity which looked like a plant with lobe-like leaves in matched pairs left and right. (This icon is common to Sumerian cylinder seals also.)

The Passage Graves have paired chambers left and right, up to six pairs. Most of these grave structures have an additional low exterior wall surrounding the mound of dirt. All have a clearly marked entrance with a doorway and closing stone, even in later designs which no longer allow access to the chamber. Many use a porthole as the entrance, either a single large stone with a round perforation two feet wide, or two abutted stones with semicircular cuts.

There are over a thousand barrows along the east coast of Ireland, the west coast of Britain, and the coast of northern France, most often in areas with a clear view of the western sky. There are about 2400 in total in western Europe. The concentration of barrows in Ireland and England is unusual. The east coast of Ireland and west coast of England were used to allow ocean access, directly from France. This can be easily understood, since these were very large construction projects, much larger than a local population of farmers would have been able to support. Water was the highway of antiquity. It allowed large numbers of people to congregate easily, both during construction and for the intended ceremonies. The east coast of Ireland and west coast of England had easy access from the projecting tip of France while providing protection from Atlantic storms.

The ocean travel reflected the attempt of the continental people of western Europe to come closer to the strike point of the arc or plasma stream in the northern Atlantic.

There are barrows inland also, mostly in coastal France. The earliest are at Carnac, France, along the Brittany coast. It is this northern European stone-age culture which apparently starts the fashion for barrows. The barrows spread elsewhere in western Europe, but mostly to coastal regions with river access. After 3000 BC they spread to the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and eventually to India. The building of barrows lasts until 2400 BC.

[Image: Megalithic architecture]

Image: Megalithic architecture, after Tharkun Coll, Wikipedia.

Building on this gigantic scale, especially for the dead, had never been done before. There are older cemeteries belonging to settled towns, as in Egypt and Mesopotamia. But generally, where we have cities and permanent houses, the burials were below the floors of houses, after excarnation. However, the northern Europeans at this time were hunters and slash-and-burn farmers. They had no cities, and at best only scattered housing. What did all this construction mean?

First let me outline the problems in understanding these constructions. The number of people buried in barrows do not add up to the size estimated for the workforce needed to build the barrows, and thus to the number of people who may have been expected to use the facilities when they died. This is an enigma which has frequently been noted by archaeologists. Except for a few instances of ossuaries for thousands of bones (as at Malta, for example), even a hundred skeletons would be insignificant in representing the dead of a spread-out community of a couple of hundred slash-and-burn farming families, especially for a period of a thousand years. But we do not find hundreds of skeletons. The very large West Kennet Long Barrow, near Avebury henge, built around 3700 to 3600 BC, contained 46 burials (individuals of all ages) when investigated in the last century. West Kennet was in use for a thousand years, before the 'Beaker People' closed it up during the construction of Avebury henge (the ditch after ca 3300 BC; standing stones ca 2600 BC).

There are other 'earlier' European locations of barrows: Portugal 4500 BC; Barnerez, France 4700 BC; some Carnac mounds are dated at 5800 BC. Early barrows in Portugal and France face (or parallel) the Atlantic ocean. I have other estimates for the first Carnac mounds at 4500 BC, with two larger mounds dating from 4000 BC and 3500 BC.

And there are other graves. Thousands of ground burials with small mounds still covered Denmark in the 19th century. These are the interments of Neolithic farmers, some of which are contemporaneous with the larger barrows. The same grave goods appear in both. [note 12]

Most of the barrows do not show signs of frequent use. It looks like many sites were reworked, or new interments were made in total disregard of older interments. In many instances old bones were merely swept aside to reuse the tomb.

The barrows may not have been graves at all. It is quite possible that the few skeletal remains actually are sacrifices performed at infrequent intervals. In some locations there are grave goods consisting of arrowheads. In later locations there are collections of celts, certainly many more than would be required for the afterlife. The grave goods (including occasional domestic animals) may be gifts to the Gods, along with the bones of the humans. The barrows may have simply represented attempts to pacify the Gods with sacrificed humans. I have no idea if this is correct, nor does anyone else.

Wilcox is able to suggest that the burial practices involved excarnation, after which the skull and long bones are deposited in a barrow. All the small bones of the body would have been carried off by scavengers. Wilcox writes..

"Remains of what is thought to have been an excarnation platform where dead bodies were exposed .. have been discovered at Stoney Middleton in Derbyshire [and other locations]. The platform .. was surrounded by a semi-circular wall with three standing stones by the entrance. Hundreds of human teeth and bones have been found at the site together with the tiny bones of small animals such as frogs and rodents, which are thought to have been deposited at the site in the droppings of owls and other birds of prey attracted to the decaying human flesh. The excavators suggest the site was built c3000 BCE and remained in use for some 1000 years."

Wilcox suggests that ultimately the barrows are territorial markers.

"Associated with causewayed enclosures [not the giant cursuses] and perhaps constructed by groups of people (septs or small clans) who cleared and farmed in adjacent small areas are mortuary enclosures and barrows. Professor Colin Renfrew, who has studied megalithic stalled cairns (barrows) on the island of Rousay, identifies each barrow with an adjoining territory belonging to an individual sept. The cairns not only served as places where excarnated remains (skulls and long bones) could be deposited after exposure but also as markers of the sept territories on which dwelt the people whose ancestral remains were stored within them."

It seems excessive, and 'ownership' seems like a contemporaneous notion. This is of course pointed up by the fact that almost universally the barrows get very little use. Some are in use only a decade, some others last a few generations. Yet even for this last case, the number of inhumations falls far short for a clan which could have built the the barrow and farmed near by.

To undertake building a Long Barrow or Passage Grave, a crew would need to be fed. The farmed plots adjacent to barrows remind me of the circumnavigation of Africa in about 600 BC by a Phoenician crew under the pharaoh Necho..

"[Who] every autumn put in at some convenient spot on the Libyan [ie, African] coast, sowed a patch of ground, and waited for next year's harvest. Then, having got in their grain, they put to sea again.."-- Herodotus, "Histories" ca 440 BC.

It seems very likely that the islands of Malta in the Mediterranean, Bahrein (Dilmun) in the Persian Gulf, and Cozumel in the Caribbean were each used as island cemeteries equated to the original ball plasmoid of the south which had been seen in the ocean of the Absu. Britain and Ireland may similarly have functioned conceptually as an island cemetary.

Whatever their function, it seems clear that the later barrows (the Passage Graves) were built in imitation of the 'city of the Gods' seen on the northwest horizon -- the giant cloud bank, the polar plasma stream above it, and the globe of Saturn and its rings above this. The barrows are complete models of this structure.

Some of the very large Long Barrows are of early dates, 5800 BC and 4500 BC (Carnac, Barnerez, Portugal), and do not fit the concept of Saturn above the north pole, but more likely represent the ball plasmoid above the south pole during an earlier era, especially when these seem to face or parallel the Atlantic, rather than being oriented to the northwest. That means that the ball plasmoid was understood as a destination for the dead, something I have suggested in Chapter 5, "Saturn and Archaeology," with respect to the 'sweepers' of the beams of electrons.

Of the later barrows, many have buttressed or scalloped exterior walls in imitation of the fluted water vapor cloud bank. In the interior of the earlier Passage Graves there is a long passage leading up to a room, but at times to two rooms side by side. The interior looks like a plan of the polar plasma stream, as a path terminating in the disk and wings (rings) of Saturn. The exterior entrances of the barrows often repeat the same design with porthole entrances often flanked by stones shaped like spread wings.

Later versions of the Passage Graves feature additional rooms arranged left and right, but always at the end of a passage which is much too long to have any utility. The repeated branching of chambers in pairs off the main passage looks like a plan view of the "tree" form of the plasma instability which had shown up in earlier petroglyphs and as the later Mesopotamian cylinder seals depicting the lobe-leafed "tree of heaven" with a globe at the very top -- the terminal room of these graves. [note 14]

There are other hints that the barrows were built in imitation of what was seen at the far northwestern horizon. The barrows in Ireland and the west coast of England are almost always aligned to have entrances facing southeast. This is usually thought to have been done to allow the midwinter sunrise to enter the structure and a few late barrows do this, although perhaps by accident. However, most constructions clearly miss the mark. The west-northwest by east-southeast orientation actually points the barrows to Greenland. A location near Greenland was the center of the plasma strike under way some time after 4200 BC. With few exceptions, all the monuments of France, England, and Ireland point to the center of the strike point of the plasma at the shifting location of the north magnetic pole, and thus to the center of the cloud banks seen in that direction. This accounts also for the fact that the alignments tend to wander from a single compass point. [note 15]

Most (but not all) of the parallel rows of stones in Brittany, which apparently precede any of the other stone henges and their access causeways in western Europe, are aligned southwest, but almost all the passage graves, some of which are also assigned early dates, are aligned northwest, and dated from 4410 BC to 3360 BC. I think only the earliest barrows at Carnac are aligned southwest.

This change in alignment is a change in the direction in which the primary object of interest was seen. First the plasmoid in the southwest direction, then the cloud bank in the northwest.

The parallel rows of standing stones in Brittany and Carnac probably are equivalent to the Nasca lines of South America, representing the overhead passage of streams of electrons from the Peratt Column which existed below the south pole after 8300 BC. This lends credence to some of the very early dates at Carnac.

The oldest barrows in Portugal (4500 BC) face the Atlantic, and are aligned east-west. These are different in being absolutely huge. I would suggest that these also might be models of the southern ball plasmoid of the Peratt Column. This may be the first association between death and an afterlife, where an afterlife is guaranteed through proper burial. It is interesting that in early Roman times the people of western Europe (and throughout central Europe in Roman times) believed in a return to life after death, whereas the Romans and Greeks did not.

The most prominent feature of the barrows is the persistent doorway, and may yield an answer as to why these projects were undertaken. The doorway suggests an interior space, even when the interior space is no longer present, as in some later barrows. Because the western Europeans saw a dozen much smaller orbs following Mars like ducklings (identified as knots in the plasma stream, noted by Talbott) as Mars moved back toward Saturn, these people may have understood that the approaching God Mars had come to collect the dead. The cloud bank at the northwestern horizon was thus understood as a house -- perhaps a charnel house where bones awaited transport to the upper home of the Gods. Most likely the earliest barrows were simply intended to duplicate the mountain at the horizon, with the porthole as the entrance to a cave in the mountain. [note 16]

It could also be suggested that the lowering of Mars was seen as a threat. The lowering of Mars to the vicinity of Earth, so that it looked like a giant red globe suspended in the sky, would have been accompanied by earthquakes, rising tides, storms, and massive lightning discharges. It is likely that the approach of Mars could be seen in progress for decades. Mars would remain above or behind the cloud bank. The Maya "Chilam Balam" suggests 'behind.' But this is from the perspective of 15 degrees north latitude in Central America.

If Mars came close to Earth, it would approach along the axis of the Earth's north pole, not the location of the cloudbank in the Atlantic. The plasma stream from Saturn would most likely follow the path of Mars, and bend to strike Earth at the magnetic north pole. The barrows may have been a preventive measure meant to induce the God to leave again with the bodies as sacrifices meant to appease the God. [note 17]

The portholes, flanked on occasion by wings cut into the same stone slabs, also suggest the circular disk of Saturn, with its flanking rings, just as the long interior passageways and the terminal room with the dual chambers on both sides duplicate the image seen in the sky. The places of sacrificial offerings were built on the only model at hand -- Saturn in plasma discharge to Earth.

We should expect most of the barrows to have been built between 4200 BC and 3100 BC, for it is only in this period that the God Mars descends to Earth at intervals. And in fact we see very few barrows constructed before 4200 BC (some might be misdated, but others would be copies of the southern plasmoid at the end of the Peratt column) and their construction falls off rapidly after 3100 BC. (Construction picks up again after 3000 BC; I will describe this in the next chapter.)

The infrequent construction and infrequent use of the barrows might be the result of the 120 to 190 year interval between approaches of the God. The lack of bodies would make sense if the trip to Heaven were reserved only for selected people, leaders, priests, or sacrificial victims. The lack of respect for earlier remains in the barrows would be accounted for if some sort of transformation -- a stellation, for example -- were to be assumed for the dead, or if earlier sacrifices were meaningless at a later time. As time progressed (thousands of years), the use of later barrows (in the Neolithic and Bronze Age) seems to have been extended to larger groups. It became a funeral business. [note 18]

In the 1920s the idea of a "missionary" religious sect was proposed to account for the fact that the dolmen and megalithic barrow structures are almost identical throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. The suggestion was that the religious ideas were spread by proselytes from the eastern Mediterranean region moving west across France and around Spain to eventually reach England and Scandinavia. This idea has not held up under archaeological dating. I propose the opposite: the idea of a house of the dead spread from western Europe to the Mediterranean, at least as far as Malta, and may have influenced Egyptian graves and temples after 3000 BC. Based on archaeological dating, it looks like the use of barrows moved from Portugal north to Carnac, and then west to England and further west to Ireland. Each move brought the ceremonies ever closer to the home of the Gods seen in the northwest. [note 19]

I should add a note on cursuses. These are absolutely giant enclosures of land, marked off by a dike or a dike and ditch. Wilcox writes..

"Cursuses are a type of monument that is not at all well understood and have remained an enigma for many years. We know they date from the Neolithic period and that they are one of the most common of Neolithic monuments, with over 150 so far identified. Some excavation has been carried out on a few of the best-known. The Stonehenge Cursus (Stone) which, like other examples, is a lengthy enclosure, measuring some three kilometres long with enclosed ends where the banks are at their most obvious, varies in width from 100 metres to 150 metres. Its bank is about 6.5 metres across and 0.4 metres high dug out of a ditch of comparable size and is dated to between 3600 and 3300BCE. A smaller cursus lies not far off."

"The largest-known cursus is the Dorset Cursus running for 9.6 km from Bokerley Down to Thickthorn Down (Atkinson). Its banks are about 91 metres apart and, like the Stonehenge example, has enclosed ends. Investigations have shown that it was built in two sections and this seems to be a feature of cursuses that they are constructed in incremental additions, not all at the same time, rather like a medieval church. Incorporated into the Dorset Cursus are long barrows that suggest to some that the monument may have had a relationship with the ancestor cult."

"Dates for cursuses seem to range from c3600BCE to c3000BCE."

Henges

Stone henges and causeways also precede any of the gigantic building projects of Egypt or Mesopotamia. Their construction starts in western Europe after 4000 BC (only a few) and lasts to 3000 BC (and later), thus spanning the "Age of the Gods." Henges are not grave sites. (However, William Stukeley, in "Stonehenge, A Temple Restored to the British Druids" (1740), notes at least 50 barrows in sight of Stonehenge.)

They are public structures, perhaps equivalent to the temple platforms constructed later in Sumer out of dried mud bricks. There are some 120 known henges in Britain. The only signs of activity at the henges are the remnants of occasional feasting. The material used in building henges varies with what was locally available -- trees in some Central European locations, large glacial boulders in western Europe, and, in some cases, dressed stone. Compared to the barrows, they are enormous undertakings, requiring a vast labor force. [note 20]

The henges are circles of wooden posts or standing stones, at times set in concentric circles and always with an exterior ditch. Again we seem to encounter an imitation of the planet overhead in plasma discharge. Anthony Peratt claims that the post holes of the original Stonehenge site (a circle of 56 posts) is an exact copy of a sphere in a state of stupendous plasma discharge (actually a tubular 'aurora'). The posts (or stones in other henges) represent a view directly up into the plasma stream at the location of the bend in the stream, away from the magnetic north pole, which was, as Peratt has pointed out, the terminal point of the 56 bundles of concentrated plasma at the outer edges of the stream. The division of the plasma stream into 56 (or 28) bundles is an inherent feature of concentrated plasma discharges. [note 21]

Some henges have causeways which lead up to an entrance and are also edged in standing stones. These represent the column of plasma extending from Saturn to Earth -- the path leading to Heaven. Note that none of the causeways are straight, all include a curve, resembling the plasma stream between Saturn and Earth, which, on nearing Earth, curved away from the direction of the polar axis to make contact with the north magnetic pole. [note 22]

At Carnac in France there are also a series of causeways with 10 to 13 parallel lines of standing stones, dated from 4000 BC or, more likely, from about 5000 BC. The causeways are aligned toward the southwest, with a few shorter alignments running northwest instead. The parallel rows of stones narrow near the west end of the constructions. At one or both ends of many of the causeways there are remnants of large circles of standing stones. In all there are some 5000 standing stones. Many causeways have a bend at the center, that is, they change direction slightly.

There is no doubt that the causeways at Carnac represented the Peratt Column seen extending from the south pole. This was discussed in Chapter 5, "Saturn and Archaeology." The fact that some shorter causeways are aligned toward the northwest, rather than the southwest, suggests that the polar apparition above the north pole of Earth followed directly after the south polar column had disappeared, or soon after. "Soon" might be hundreds of years, however.

The Carnac 'Grand Menhir,' mentioned earlier, is a single 90 foot standing stone, also dated from 4000 BC. It is probably the largest stone ever set up. The larger circular henges in England and Ireland date as follows: New Grange 3200 BC, Avebury 3300 BC (the ditch; the stones followed 700 years later). There are many more than are listed here.

What did the construction of stone henges (and rows of standing stones) mean? First of all, as I have noted, I believe they were made in imitation of what was seen in the sky, a round orb in plasma discharge. But it also looks as though efforts were being made to harness displays of Saint Elmo's fire.

The arc touching down in the north Atlantic after 4200 BC must have built up the Earth's charge of static electricity and caused an electrically charged atmosphere. Any tall pointed object would arc with Saint Elmo's fire under the right conditions. This was seen as the doing of the Gods and, in imitation of the arcing circle in the sky, structures were built that would blaze with a similar ring of fire.

Even today any high pointed object (like a ship's mast) will discharge with a flickering blue flame during an electrical storm. This is the result of introducing a ground potential into an location of higher elevation where it would experience a voltage differential easily measured in hundreds of volts per foot. The almost ubiquitous ditches surrounding the henges add to the effect since they increase the electrical potential difference and could be filled with water to wet the surrounding ground -- making the ground plane more conductive.

Location was everything, and in western Europe the location of henges and barrows seemed to have involved three factors. First, a clear view of the western or northwestern horizon was needed with visual proximity to (and visibility of) the strike point of the plasma arc in the north Atlantic.

Second, easy access from the sea, via a river, to allow for the arrival of people for the purposes of construction and the gathering. [note 23]

The third factor was the existence of a conductive plane. This would be a matter of selecting a region which had sufficient (and proper) minerals to allow the ground to readily assume an induced positive charge with the occurrence of an overhead negative charge, as happens during thunder storms. The need for a conductive ground plane is most vividly demonstrated with Saint Elmo's fire when it occurs on ships today, for they float on a highly conductive electrolytic solution -- the salt sea. [note 24]

The third factor also explains another reason why we see megalithic constructions clustered together on the west coast of France (near the ocean), in central England, and on the east coast of Ireland. Separate stone henges and causeways are at times dated a thousand years apart yet built in very close association. The locations are on the lee side of higher ground or mountain ranges or, as in France, a low coastal area. During westerly thunderstorms these areas would experience an electrically charged atmosphere overhead more frequently than other locations. Besides the Saint Elmo's fire, there would also have been many lightning strikes out of the clear blue sky.

The henges, like the barrows, seem to show very occasional, rather than continuous, use and are often abandoned for new constructions. This suggests that festivities were very infrequent, yet the work involved in the construction is enormous. Something very important was being celebrated. [note 25]

However, after having been in disuse for a thousand years or more, the reasons for their construction were forgotten and they may have been seen only as some sort of holy place from antiquity and were used for occasional interments. After 3000 BC there are additional henges built, including many which served no purpose except to duplicate the past. The frequent reconstructions of Stonehenge extend over a period of 1500 years after 3100 BC.

The henges and causeways should be distinguished from the thousands of barrows and ossuaries, but since the graves are constructed both earlier and during the same time period in parallel with the public monuments, the combined effect can be very confusing. One author notes the variety of origins as "inspired by outside influences." I would suggest that nothing was built in prehistory which was not done in imitation and that a connecting thread can be seen in the variety of construction if we look towards the sky. The structures were built in imitation of the home of the Gods. [note 26]

After 3147 BC the static electricity in the atmosphere declined enough to make wood and stone henges ineffective in triggering a display of heavenly fire. As air moisture lessened, ground water dropped, and wooden posts dried out, other means for these spectacular displays were required. At Stonehenge in England a late desperate effort included changing the stones to a blue rock (transported from 200 miles away), on the presumption that blue rocks would cause blue flames, but they were soon discarded and much larger local gray sandstone slabs were substituted. [note 27]

The Egyptians resorted to massive stone pyramids for the lightning displays and the Mesopotamians built multi-storied ziggurats to achieve the same effect, both started after 2700 BC. The stone henges and causeways would remain sacred to future generations, but no new structures of that type were seriously attempted after 3000 BC. Their day was over. (I'll deal with later barrows and the endless reconstruction of Stonehenge in the next chapter.)

Temples and Platforms

In Egypt and Mesopotamia, as elsewhere, the descent of Mars was understood as a visit to Middle Earth by the God. Temples and platforms were constructed to receive the God, with the courtyards and entrances facing northwest. The first temple at Jerusalem faced 6 degrees west of north.

But temple orientations are not at all uniform, partially because most of the archaeological records are from dates in antiquity. The functions of temples were entirely different from the mastabas and grave sites which, even later, continued to be oriented toward the northwest. [note 28]

Mars would get larger as it dropped below Saturn, but would follow the centerline between Saturn and Earth. Although the plasma stream took a bend in its travel to make contact with Earth's magnetic north pole (starting maybe some 30 or 40 Earth diameters above Earth), Mars would not slip away from the Saturn-Earth axis. It is also doubtful if Mars approached any closer than 20 Earth diameters (160,000 miles -- somewhat closer than the Moon). At that location it would have looked more than twice the diameter of the Moon, and all of its features would have been clearly visible. From anywhere in the world Mars would also have looked to hover over the location of the earth's north pole. I should note that any object located above the north pole would visually be seen as standing at the pole star.

Mars would have approached close enough to be seen as a giant globe above the north horizon, but we have no idea how close Mars reached before reversing and moving up again toward Saturn. Mars would stop in its descent when the electrical repulsion between the planets equaled the gravitational attraction. Mars would have stood still above Earth at its lowest descent because Mars rotates at the same speed as Earth. The plasma stream, which, earlier in the "Age of the Gods," was probably in glow mode, followed and enclosed Mars, bending away toward the Earth's north magnetic pole or dispersing. [note 29]

The first temple buildings, made of wood, were constructed in Central Europe among the first Neolithic farmers, the people whom Gimbutas calls the "Old Europeans." Gimbutas also points to some 50 miniature temples which, like the figurines, were probably modeled on Saturn ablaze in the sky. The miniatures are almost always on short stilts, have open fronts, and include a wide porch like the lower rings of Saturn. Many include the furniture -- ovens, seats, fire pits, and tables -- which will later become the furnishings of full scale temples (these are the furnishings of houses also, of course). Many of the model temples are populated with tiny figurines -- probably representing the satellites of Saturn. [note 30]

There is clear evidence from Sumer and Egypt of platforms and temple enclosures (ca 4500 BC for the Ubaid city of 'Eridu' in Mesopotamia). In Sumer the temple buildings start as large rooms equipped with niches and what looks like an offering table very similar to Central European designs, and soon become large compounds with enormous buildings apparently used as work areas and for storage.

The God is understood to be a local visitor living with the humans. In Egypt and Mesopotamia, as probably elsewhere in the settled world, local images or statues were kept as the presence of the God. These statues were not 'representations' of the God -- they were universally understood to be the actual God. People everywhere identify their local temple as the home of the God, and the name of the God varies widely from city to city. [note 31]

The localization of the Gods is a direct response to what was seen in the skies. In that the image above the north pole mostly remained in one location, even with Mars periodically lowering, it was visually seen as "directly above." Thus any occupied space on Earth was understood as "directly below."

The columned porticos of the later Egyptian temples, facing north, are thought to represent the papyrus-forested Nile delta through which the God, or Gods, had entered the country and the temples. The Egyptian Gods were recognized even in antiquity as coming from the north, traveling via the Nile. We are told this at the time of the Greek occupation of Egypt after 315 BC, but the columns were as likely to have been intended to imitate the many-columned plasma path to the Upper Land. The plasma stream from the Upper Land was certainly equated with the Nile. [note 32]

The priesthood throughout Mesopotamia and Egypt establishes an economy based on maintaining the temple of the God or Gods. Food was offered and the statues were adorned. Far-ranging trade eventually results from the needs of the temples.

Among herders and dispersed farm populations, the offering altar consisted of one of the "high places" to which the Bible makes frequent reference. With the upper atmosphere supercharged with electricity, the effect could be impressive. The God would light the fires with a lightning strike and consume the smoke from the burning fat as it ionized to rise directly into the sky. The following is Elijah in action in about 900 BC...

"The opposition builds its fire, places its offering, dances about, and gets no response. Elijah builds an altar of stone, places his offering, and then pours twelve barrels of water upon the offering. He douses the offering thrice. He digs a trench around the altar and fills it with water."

"The time is approaching evening. The water soaks down and makes contact with the water table. The approaching thunderstorm is preceded by a heavy, moist, ionized, and charged lowering atmosphere. The fire of Yahweh descends upon the offering of Elijah. His triumphant followers escort the prophets of Baal to a nearby place and kill them."

-- III Kings 18, paraphrased by Alfred de Grazia "God's Fire" (1983)

The Gods Destroy Earth

The theater in the sky comes to a sudden end shortly after 3100 BC. Earth experiences a violent disturbance which reduces the civilizations of the Middle East to rubble, except on highlands (as in Persia, Anatolia, and the foothills of the Himalayas) and in protected river valleys (as in Egypt). Floods, fires, and the return of a colder climate are noted in the archaeological and climatological records.

The year 3147 BC marks 'The Flood,' to be written about 800 years later in the "Epic of Gilgamesh." It is the flood which generates stories all over the world of survivors in arks or boats or canoes. In flood tales throughout the world, nearly all the boats or canoes moor to a high mountain peak. The "mountain" is a celestial apparition dominating the skies following immediately after the flood -- Jupiter in plasma discharge to its surroundings from its south polar region.

Among farmer populations, the stories tell of arks provisioned with seeds and farm animals, an event actually experienced earlier by the people fleeing the Black Sea flood of 5600 BC. The Black Sea flood story had been carried far afield with the diaspora of the survivors, who show up in Eastern and Central Europe, Central Asia (as far east as the borders of China), Mediterranean Europe, Anatolia, and of course in Mesopotamia between 5400 and 3000 BC. The Black Sea survivors were farmers and fishermen, and thus generated a hundred stories of family, farm animals, and seeds saved aboard a multiplicity of arks. It is only from the casual references in Mesopotamian documents to a "flood before the flood" that we know that the Sumerians understood the repeating nature of world-wide floods.

Yet another world-wide 'flood event' would happen in 2349 BC. This also was understood as a major flood. The Chinese Annals of Shu report that it took the Emperor Yu nine years to empty the mountain valleys of water from the "inundation which overtopped the hills." Yu is dated to around 2200 BC. The "legendary" Yu is traditionally placed as reaching the throne in 2205 BC as first king of the Xia dynasty. The Xia lasted to about 1500 BC. The Chinese 'flood event' is dated to approximately the same time as the Noachian flood of the Bible, but neither of these were floods. It was a period of extreme rains and hurricanes. More on this in a following chapter.

The whole issue of 'flood' is complicated by the fact that similar events are likely to be collapsed in memory, especially when these happen at the infrequent interval of a thousand years or more. People will always think of the last flood as "The Flood," and the image will merge with previous memories into a composite.

This was true for the Hebrews, for whom the 'flood' of 2349 BC, the flood of Noah, was the only flood in their recorded experience. However, the Noachian flood story incorporates elements of the earlier flood of 3147 BC, and perhaps also the archetypal Black Sea flood, as does the story of the Flood of Gilgamesh.

This last is hinted at in the "Epic of Gilgamesh." Although nominally describing the flood of 3147 BC, the "Epic of Gilgamesh" clearly refers back to the spectacular flooding of the Black Sea basin in 5600 BC, with its descriptive references to the Black Sea (the "Sea of Death") and the Bosporus Strait (which Gilgamesh's ferryman navigates by hanging a basket of rocks over the edge of his boat). Gilgamash, in an impulsive gesture reminiscent of Hercules, cuts the ropes to the basket. On the north shore Gilgamesh visits with the Sumerian Noah, Utnapishtim. [note 33]

Flood stories are ubiquitous, and, interestingly, none of them recall local events where only thousands died. The flood stories all claim to be about a universal deluge, a world-wide catastrophic event which killed nearly everyone and also decimated the plants and animals. [note 34]

"But Deucalion in the ark, floating over the sea for nine days and as many nights, grounded on Parnassus, and there, when the rains ceased, he disembarked, and sacrificed to Zeus.."

-- Apollodorus, 2nd century

"Tahiti was destroyed by a flood. A husband and a wife were saved. They had a chicken, dog, kitten, and a pig with them. They took refuge on Mount O Pitohito."

-- Tahiti, contemporary

"When the Moon did not yet exist, a bearded old man named Botschika taught the arts of agriculture, clothing, worship and politics to the people. His beautiful but malevolent wife was Huythaca. She caused a flood in which most people perished. Botschika then turned her into the Moon."

-- Columbia, contemporary [note 35]

At this point we have flood dates for ca 5600 BC, 3147 BC, and 2349 BC. But apparently the disturbance of 3147 was absolutely overwhelming. The "Epic of Gilgamesh" expresses the regrets even the Gods had for the utter destruction this flood caused.

"How could I do this!
Am I so stupid,
That I give life
Only to take it away,
So that people fill the sea like fishes?"

-- Inanna, in the Epic of Gilgamesh

The Flood of 3147 BC

The Flood of Gilgamesh was an extraordinary flood, consisting of a series of world-wide tsunamis. The apparent cause was the removal of Saturn from above the north pole. The sea waters, which had been drawn north due to the gravitational attraction of Saturn, and held there for 2700 years, were suddenly released. Those waters must have stood miles high in the polar sea, and to a lesser height, but in much greater volume, in the north Atlantic and the north Pacific. At the same time, the ocean level in the far south might have dropped hundreds of feet. No other flood in later times would approach the devastation of the flood of Gilgamesh, and the retellings of all later floods refer back to the events of 3147 BC.

Many of the flood stories deal with rain. Certainly the Black Sea Flood of 5600 BC, which burst forth at a rate of over 50 billion gallons per hour, would have stirred up a lot of mist and, on hitting the warmer atmosphere of the lake region, would have resulted in continuous rains. To the victims it looked like rain caused the rising waters. It is more likely that the rains are associated with the later catastrophe of 2349 BC. The early Sumerian flood myths do not include rain.

A consideration of deposited layers of 'soil' worldwide would make it look like the flood of 3147 BC might have had the following sequence: [note 36]

Where was it safe for humans? Although the initial tsunamis overran coastal mountains and even land glaciers (Antarctica also shows evidence of flooding), inland away from the coasts and high ground would have provided safe places -- the east side of the Andies, and the central regions of Asia, Europe, and Africa. Coastal areas which run in a north-south direction were also safe, for the waves would not be forced inland. But any coastal areas which stood in the path of the waves would be overrun by water. In some regions, we can surmise, a wall of water ran for hundreds of miles across relatively flat land, building giant dunes, as in areas of Australia and the western United States. Remains of whales have been found in the Andies, in the Saharah, as in the state of Michigan.

The Mediterranean regions, surrounding an inland sea, were little affected, as also the upper reaches of Mesopotamia and Anatolia. The waters headed north from the south Indian Ocean for the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf would have battered Somalia and Oman respectively. But the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf are additionally protected by their pinched southern necks. The Sumerians certainly had flood myths, but the Egyptians do not.

Additionally the Earth may have been jolted, possibly sending the axis of rotation into a spin. A swinging axis would also cause sweeping tides and hurricanes in the east-west direction. The Celts remember that the sinking of the fortress Ys (the water-vapor cloudbank on the horizon) was accompanied by high seas and hurricanes.

Recent tsunamis due to submarine earthquakes have been one hundred feet high on reaching a coastline. (And travel in excess of 400 miles per hour.) The damage (in that case) is mostly limited to coastal areas and the waters flow back to the oceans immediately. They certainly would not "cover the Earth." But simultaneous gigantic world-wide tsunamis miles high would be an extraordinary disaster.

In a number of deluge tales the Gods felt remorse for the flood they had brought and set a sign in the sky as a promise not to do so again. In the "Epic of Gilgamesh" the Goddess Inanna (Venus) raises her necklace of lapis-lazuli so as to never forget the flood. Noah receives the sign of the rainbow. I have never thought that God would set a rainbow as a sign in the sky. With the later flood of 2349 BC (Noah's actual flood), the sign in the sky might have been the Moon, but more likely it was the appearance of the south (and north) polar plasma plumes, which I will discuss below. In the Babylonian "Enuma Elish" (of about 1700 BC), Marduk (Jupiter) plants his bow in the sky to commemorate the flood (the later flood). This bow is today confused with a 'rainbow.' [note 40]

It was Jupiter's approach which caused the flood -- by displacing Saturn away from the location of Earth. On the first instance after the flood, and as the flood was subsiding, the Earth was located at a considerable distance below Saturn as well as below the nearing Jupiter. The "mountain" of the flood stories, where Noah moored his ark after the waters subsided, is a stream (plume) of plasma from Jupiter, directed out from the region of Jupiter's south pole (which is the 'north' magnetic pole), and nearly opaque in the daylight sky. The mountain was colored green (as we know from Egyptian depictions of Osiris, as well as the Quiche Maya "Popol Vuh"). On top of the mountain of plasma was Jupiter in a coma, but lighted on its opposite side by the Sun. With the Earth located below the orbit of Jupiter, only the bottom crescent of this was seen. This was the mountain and the ship of Noah, recorded in hundreds of flood myths. [note 41]

After his ship landed on a mountain, Noah released a raven to test the waters but the raven just flys back and forth and does not return. Noah next released a dove. The dove returns the first two times, but not the third. The details occur in the Bible, attributed to the flood of 2349 BC. Nearly the same events were recorded in the Sumerian flood epic, written a few hundred years earlier. The raven is the release of the darker Uranus into a larger orbit. At this time the Earth was on an inner orbit, while Jupiter and Saturn, now completely outside the orbit of Earth, were receding from the Sun. Over the next few revolutions of the Earth around the Sun, Uranus would have been seen alternately on the east and the west of Jupiter, looking like a raven flying back and forth aimlessly, first approaching Jupiter (which still looked like a mountain) toward the east, and then moving away, but on the other side of Jupiter.

The light-colored Venus, the dove, was initially seen moving on an outer orbit, moving past (understood as returning to) Jupiter (where Noah's ark had landed) a number of times, carrying a green olive branch to Noah the last time -- the plumage of Quetzalcoatl. The green olive branch, or quetzal plumage, is a plasma tail of ionized Hydrogen. On an inner orbit Venus soon disappeared from view. [note 42]

In the Sumerian "Epic of Gilgamesh," on the seventh day after the flood, Utnapishtim sent out successively a dove, a swallow, and a raven; only the raven found a resting place and did not come back. The dove (Venus) and the swallow (Mercury) do return, for they start to orbit the Sun. The raven (Uranus) eventually disappears into deep space. (Possibly the swallow was not Mercury.)

The Bible and the "Epic of Gilgamesh" record that Noah and Utnapishtim, respectively, offered a sacrifice to God (or the Gods) after leaving the ark. This fire, located on the mountain, is probably the sight of the sun-lit side of Jupiter, but now seen from a greater distance as the Earth continues to orbit the Sun, in red, with the smoke from the fire as the much lesser wisps of plasma extending from the upper region of Jupiter. The Gods, records the "Epic of Gilgamesh," crowded like flies around the smoke of the fire. These are the satellites of Jupiter buzzing around the planet. Saturn at this time might have been located behind Jupiter, or obscured by plasma outpourings.

In Egypt, almost unaffected by the flood, and parts of Mesopotamia, the initial sight of the approaching Jupiter, seen as a crescent on a dark opaque mountain in the north skies, and subsequently in the south skies, is understood as the "Bull of Heaven," a huge shape with horns on top, who wrecks the city of the Gods. He is shown as bulldozing city walls (and people) on Egyptian cosmetic palettes between 3100 BC and 3050 BC.

The event of 3147 BC appears to have been an all-encompassing disturbance. The stories only attest to the flood, but there is also a sudden change in the climate and the start of a cooler and dryer period. The mild and wet days of the "Age of the Gods" never return and glaciation probably stopped suddenly. There is evidence of world-wide fires. There is also evidence that the length of the year changed. Civilization -- cultivation of grains, trade among regions, and even the development of writing -- comes to a sudden halt, and regresses. In Mesopotamia the sudden halt of civilization is know as the Jemdet Nasr period.

What caused the catastrophe of 3147 BC?

The Battle of the Gods

The catastrophe of 3147 BC involved more than the disappearance of Saturn from the north sky. It involved the near 'collision' of 8 planets. What most likely happened in 3147 BC is that Saturn, together with Earth, Mars, Mercury, Venus, Uranus, and Neptune, ran into Jupiter, which was then located probably at 0.7 AU from the Sun. (See Appendix B, "Mechanics," where this information is derived.) Possibly some 3 million years earlier, Saturn had assumed a closer orbit around the Sun as a result of an earlier near-collision (a remote repulsive electrical shock) with Jupiter. The resulting new orbit of Saturn was an ellipse, with aphelion (the furthest distance from the Sun) beyond the orbit of Jupiter. Saturn would annually return to cross Jupiter's old orbit. In 3147 BC Saturn reached this location just as Jupiter also arrived.

What I have characterized as a 'collision' above, should be understood as an intersection of the plasmasphere of these planets. It could readily be suggested that when the plasmaspheres of Jupiter and the Saturnian planets connected (at an estimated distance of 1.5 or 2 million miles), it instantly reformed to a different shape to include the giant planets, but in the process locked out the small planets Earth and Venus. Located far below the south pole of Saturn, Earth was not likely to have been within a million miles of Saturn when Jupiter closed in, and escaped easily. (In Appendix B, "The Celestial Mechanics," I estimate that Earth at that time was located about 3 million miles below Saturn, and an equal distance away from Jupiter.) [note 43]

Earth and Venus easily escaped from the encounter. They were each cast off by the near collision into separate but slightly different elliptical orbits. Earth and Venus would continue to return to the orbital location of the 'collision' in the future.

It is uncertain how Venus managed to escape, but it is likely that Venus at the time of the collision was orbiting around the mass centroid of Uranus, Neptune, and Saturn, and was thus located far above Saturn, and most likely at the level of Neptune. If, at the time of the collision, Venus was located on the side away from the downstream plasmasphere of the Saturn and Jupiter, it may have been locked out of the reformed plasmasphere.

Mars and Mercury remained in the reformed plasmasphere sphere of Saturn (after 3147 BC), since they were close to Saturn and likely at a matching potential. Both remained with Saturn and were apparently released perhaps 80 years later, probably at the time Saturn entered the asteroid belt and its coma and plasmasphere shrunk considerably. (See Appendix A, "Notes on Chronology.") If we can trust the "King List" for the 'kings before the flood,' it looks like Mars had completed a descent to Earth 80 years earlier, and would have been close to Saturn, or on its way down again.

Titan, larger than our Moon or Mercury, remained in orbit around Saturn, as did the other satellites of Saturn and Jupiter, and probably the satellites of Uranus and Neptune. The counts of satellites of Saturn and Jupiter noted in antiquity (as, for example, from Mesoamerican sources) match the counts of satellites today -- barring tiny rocks and extremely distant satellites discovered only in the 20th century. In the last century it has come forward that many primitive people knew the number of satellites of Jupiter and of Saturn. They are also depicted on Mesopotamian seals. Egyptian funeral practices identify seven large (visible) satellites of Saturn as the "Helpers of the King" or the "Sons of Osiris" known since before 3147 BC. Today Saturn still has seven large satellites which can be readily identified. [note 44]

Neptune and Uranus, the closest to Saturn, were cast into much larger orbits. Uranus is reflected on briefly in the Sumerian flood epic and then never taken note of again. Uranus is one of the Titans 'banished' by Zeus (Jupiter) in Greek mythology.

The report we have after 3147 BC is of extended combat between two Gods. As Jupiter chased Saturn, the planets could be seen to battle over supremacy, resulting in a massive fireworks display as streams of plasma played across the sky. Jupiter had developed a plasma tail outpouring at the first close approach to Saturn, which continued at Jupiter's removal away from the Sun. The image of Jupiter in the south skies would have been absolutely stupendous in size. A glowing round globe -- the coma surrounding Jupiter -- stood about halfway up into the sky from the south horizon, traveling on the ecliptic. Below the globe was a green mantle which extended all the way to the horizon below, and above were what looked like feathers. But more noticable was the equatorial toroid of glowing plasma within the coma of Jupiter. Of this the left and right crossection -- where the toriod was most dense -- stood out as two eyes staring back at the humans. More on this further below.

We do not know how large the coma of Saturn was originally, but later estimates suggest a diameter of three million miles, more than three times the diameter of the Sun, but of course located much, much closer to Earth. The coma could initially have occupied 45 or 30 degrees of the sky (at distances of 4,000,000 or 6,000,000 miles). From later snippets of the Egyptian "Book of the Dead" we often get the feeling that the Gods of Egypt were absolutely huge in size, although far removed. But the image in the south skies receded rapidly, deminishing in size steadily, and especially since Earth continued away from the 'impact' location much faster than the travels of the other planets.

The large outpouring representing a mantle was the plasma plume at Jupiter's north magnetic pole, which is located at its south (lower) geographic pole. From a number of source it is clear that it was colored green -- which is how the mummified Osiris is nearly always depicted. (At a much later date, when reduced to a coma surrounding the planet, it was red instead.)

A much smaller plasma shaped funnel appeared above the globe, suggesting horns where the edges were most dense. In this form, this was the "Bull of Heaven" who had destroyed the home of the Gods. Colored green and mostly immobile (as an outer planet, Jupiter would have moved through the skies slower than Earth) Jupiter was identified as the mummified body of Osiris. His worship, however, does not start up until the end of the fifth dynasty (ca 2350 BC), following, in effect, on a time span when 'Re' was worshipped (who is also Jupiter). This sequencing of what and who were seen in the skies after 3147 BC will be addressed again in the next chapter.

Like the ithyphallic God Min, a statue of which, dating to 3100 BC, was found in the delta, Osiris is always depicted with an erect penis. It seems strange to have a plasma extrusion sticking out at right angles from the mantle (or what would later be known as a mummified form). Of course this would be along the direction of the plane of the ecliptic, so we can suggest the plasma tail of a comet or minor planet. I would elect 'planet' if for no other reason that that in order to be seen at right angles to Min, it may have extended along the ecliptic, although some distance below. In 550 BC Herodotus, on the basis of what he learned from the priests at Sais, calls Menes, the founder of Memphis and the first king of the first dynasty, Min -- the name of the ithyphallic God current in the delta in ca 3100 BC. Menes is listed both as a God and as a human in the Turin Papyrus.

Whatever it was that formed the erect penis of Min and Osiris, it could not have existed within the lower plasma plume of Jupiter and simultaneously penetrated it, since a plasma tail directed away from the Sun represents a shadowing of the Sun's electrical field. Within the plasmasphere of Jupiter, this could not have been sensed by another planet. What are we looking at?

I would suggest that this is the first indication of the presence of Mercury, a small planet with a magnetic field (even if minor), an atmosphere (even if much reduced today), and covered only by fresh electrical scars. We are probably looking at a visual superposition of forms -- Jupiter's mantle with Mercury behind or in front. The location is possible, since apparently Mercury was an outer planet until 686 BC. Thus Mercury could have been seen against the background of Jupiter's mantle. They may have been seen 3 degrees above and below each other. The orbit of Jupiter is inclined 1.3 to the ecliptic; the early orbit of Mercury (before 686 BC) was likely inclined 2 to 2.5 degrees to the ecliptic (this is an estimate).

We do not know how long this lasted, but when Mercury disconnects from the image of Jupiter, the planet obviously comes to represent the lost genitals of Osiris. The details of all this are very obscure. I will expand on the topic of Mercury in the next chapter.

... the Bull of Heaven

It is Jupiter who is the "Bull of Heaven" in the Mesopotamian "Epic of Gilgamesh," written 800 years later, and is similarly remembered elsewhere. On the front of the Egyptian "Palette of Narmer" (3050 BC), and other palettes from that era, Jupiter is shown as a bull attacking a walled city (or persons), which represent the home of the Gods. Jupiter had been known about because for a thousand years Jupiter had been seen in the skies at a distance.

Because Earth was located far below Saturn, and thus below the ecliptic, Jupiter was represented as a pair of up-pointing horns, a crescent, traveling inside the orbit of earth on the sun-side (and as an oval 'egg' shape when located outside the orbit of Earth). This was (or might have been) the heavenly cow, recalled at later time, but understood as a bull after the incident of 3147 BC -- from his temperment.

The battle is likely to have occurred some safe distance from Earth, but close enough to have been clearly seen. Plato's Atlantis, the land held up by the giant Atlas, sank into the sea in one day and a night. That is an accurate description of the event as the toppling of the land in the north, which was seen sinking into the Absu the following night. [note 45]

There are detailed and accurate Mesopotamian depictions of the globes of Jupiter and Saturn -- Jupiter shown with its bands (and satellites) and Saturn with its rings. The number of visible satellites of Saturn and Jupiter are accurately counted as families of Gods. [note 46]

... the battle of the Gods

From Hesiod we have the account of Zeus (Jupiter) in a battle over supremacy with a generation of older gods, Kronos (Saturn) and the Titans, the giant trans-Saturnian planets Uranus and Neptune. When, in the 19th century AD, these two very large planets were discovered beyond Saturn, they were named according to Greek mythology. In Greek mythology Saturn and the Titans were banished to the outer reaches of the Underworld -- the zodiac in the south sky -- by the new Chief of the Gods. The losers in the battle could be seen diminishing in size, to eventually become mere pinpoints of light, and lost track of. Saturn, however, was tracked and accounted for during all of antiquity, on every continent, despite the fact that it is indistinguishable from a star and takes 30 years to circle around the zodiac. [note 47]

We should not underestimate the extent of the battle, much of it 'fought' with flung thunderbolts. Hesiod's description of Zeus is probably an understatement.

"Hurling his lightning:
The bolts flew thick and fast
From his strong hand
Together with thunder and lightning,
Whirling an awesome flame."

-- Hesiod, 800 BC

Hesiod's writings are a recollection made 2400 years later. But even later than this there are Greek and Roman writers inquiring into the mechanics involved in these interplanetary lightning strikes. The last lightning strikes between planets (between Mars and Earth and between Venus and Mars and the Moon), were witnessed in the 8th century BC (followed by one more massive bolt from Jupiter to the Sun in 685 BC), and were still being discussed by philosophers in 300 BC.

Hesiod describes two distinct battles, the first with the Titans, the second with assorted monsters. The first battle is frequently recast in mythology as a conflict between the chief God and a dragon or snake. Jupiter (Zeus, Marduk, or other primary God) hurtles a spear (or trident) down the throat of the snake to kill it. The attacking snake might have been Saturn with an enormous tail of plasma streaking away from the direction of the Sun, and thus seen horizontally at certain seasons, that is, in the plane of the ecliptic.

But I think this event, involving a snake or dragon, is probably misplaced, but mythology tends to fuse separate celestial experiences into singular events. I think the battle with a snake or dragon should be placed in 2349 BC when Venus makes electrical contact with Earth. At that time Earth and Venus were well beyond the reach of Jupiter. The thrown trident, however, could be assigned to the era following directly on the end of the "Age of the Gods" when Jupiter hurdles plasmoid thunderbolts (described below) at the retreating Titans and obliterates objects in the asteroid belt. The Egyptians name one of their predynastic kings after the thunderbolt, Narmer, "Catfish-chisel," which precisely describes both the plasmoid bolt and the effect as it strikes an object. The 'serekh' (name label) for Narmer at times is drawn with the twisted rope-like body, ball ends, and tridents of a plasmoid thunderbolt. [note 48]

... monsters of the asteroid belt

The snake or dragon would have had an enormous head. David Talbott summarized the curious worldwide fusion of a wildly maned lion and snake imagery as..

"Why did ancient symbolists so frequently combine serpent and leonine features in a single monster? We see this juxtaposition in the Greek Chimera, with the head of a lion and a tail in the form of a serpent. The Chinese "lion" has the countenance of a dragon, while the Chinese "dragon" possesses a distinctively leonine mane. The Egyptian goddess Tefnut appears as the Uraeus serpent, but in her terrible aspect becomes a giant lion head, with "smoking mane." The Mesopotamian dragon Labbu was a snake, but its name means "lion". The Sumerian goddess Inanna was the "lioness" of heaven, but in her rage became a fire-spitting serpent or dragon devastating the land. In Orphic theology, the god Phanes was born from an egg as a winged snake, though he grew the head of lion. "Snake of the Lion" was the name of a Mixtec creator god."

-- Thoth Newsletter, Kronia.com (2002)

I think the description here applies to events of 2349 BC, which will be described in the following two chapters. But just as the lion-serpent image is described as consisting simultaneously of water and fire, so any plasma discharge in arc and glow mode will take on solid-looking shapes and must have struck terror into the hearts of the humans watching the battle from the vantage point of Earth. The plasma exchanges, however, were diffuse enough to leave the rings and satellites of the planets intact through the confrontations.

These descriptions, such as the monsters listed above, may have their genesis in the movement of the two planets through the asteroid belt, and the further electrical discharges from Jupiter to the asteroids, and thus represents the second battle with the misshapen monsters described by Hesiod. Evidence of the conflict is shown in the scars, burns, and 'impact craters' covering every side of the thousands of remaining asteroids. Every asteroid (and comet) that has been inspected by a space satellite has been found to be pockmarked with these craters, sometimes nearly equal to the diameter of the target bodies. The same circular 'impact craters' exist by the millions on the Moon, Mars, Mercury (but due to later plasma contacts), and virtually every satellite of every planet. The electrical arcs must have launched millions of tons of dust into the surrounding space, making all of the ecliptic glow with light reflected off dust (universally described as a yellow river or highway of the Gods), and causing many of the thousands of asteroids to start exhibiting cometary comas and tails in the suddenly altered electrical conditions of the asteroid belt. [note 49]

It has been proposed by some that the asteroid belt is the remnant of the battle between Jupiter and Saturn. However, the breakup age of the asteroid belt dates from 3.2 million years ago with a spread of values dating to 40 million years ago. Some date to 300 million years ago, or more. Thus the belt existed long before 3147 BC when Jupiter and Saturn started to move through the asteroid belt enroute to their present locations at 5.2 AU and 9.5 AU. [note 50]

The 'impact craters' are anode burn marks caused by plasma discharges and by interplanetary lightning bolts -- electrical discharges in arc mode. With an increased level of dust in the ecliptic, due to the initial violent interaction between Saturn and Jupiter, plasmoid lightning bolts were hurtled and traveled very long distances. The plasmoid bolts (which disconnect from the originating body, and then contract to look like a contained object hurtling through space) cause circular depressions of molten rock. The shapes of these plasmoid bolts are depicted in statuary and as objects worldwide as late as the beginning of the current era. They are shown as twisted shafts with a ball and trident at both ends. [note 51]

Continuous plasma arcs, composed of rotating rope-like electrical currents (Birkeland currents), on the other hand, leave flat bottomed round 'craters' generally with raised centers and perforated edges. Nearly all the 'impact craters' were created five thousand years ago by the "thunderbolts of the Gods" and by plasma discharges in arc mode. [note 52]

... Mercury

In later Egyptian mythology the planetary interactions after 3147 BC are understood as the battle between Seth (Jupiter) and Osiris (Saturn), although the assigned names vary with the temples of different nomes. One late Egyptian source off-handedly lists the battle (and periods of 'negotiations' among the Gods) as lasting for 80 years. By one account the 'pupil of the eye' is lost; by another Osiris loses his genitals at the end in the turmoil, reminiscent of a passage in Hesiod's "Theogony." The 'negotiations' are the sight, from Earth, of the known planets bunching together in the same location of the ecliptic, which would happen periodically, and more frequently than today. [note 53]

Mercury (Thoth of the Egyptians) also was a survivor of the encounter between Saturn and Jupiter, and was (apparently) first noticed at this time. Mercury is somewhat larger than our Moon, represented in later Greek iconography as Hermes with winged sandals and a winged hat, carrying the Caduceus -- two snakes entwined on a staff below a winged disk. Mercury, because of its smaller size and weak magnetic field, would have had only a limited plasma tail -- certainly not the curved 30 million mile plasma tail identified as the hair of Isis (Venus). Mercury certainly was part of the stack of Saturnian planets, at least since late in the European Gravettian culture of the Upper Paleolithic (24,000 years ago), or perhaps the Magdalenian (17,000 to 14,000 years ago), and occupied a position between Saturn and Mars.

Mercury obviously also was on a very elliptical orbit, as it still is today, and in remote antiquity was very busy -- a much different orbit than today, one which overrode the orbit of Earth. [note 54]

... Jupiter

The coma outlining the equatorial plasma belt of Jupiter, seen at a distance, would have looked like an owl, with its immobile staring eyes and a plasma tail body extending below the planet. This is a motif which becomes the owl totem of Athena and shows up as a talisman in the design of horse bridles and pectorals (at a later date), as well as petroglyphs throughout the world.

[Image: Inscribed Amulet, Anatolia, ca 3100 BC] [Image: Owl petroglyph, ca 3000 BC] [Image: Athenian coin, ca 500 BC]
Image: Left, carved ivory Amulet, Anatolia, ca 3100 BC. Center, carved petroglyph, China, ca 3000 BC. Right, silver coin of the city of Athens, inscribed A-Th-E, Athena.

"Eye mask" or "Eye Icon" amulets show up stored by the thousands in northern Mesopotamian caches shortly after 3100 or 3000 BC, and appear also as engravings on tomb wall of barrows and as thousands of petroglyphs world-wide. Of the ivory amulet, three hundred complete and thousands of broken pieces were found. The eyes likely represent the side view of a toroidal plasma surrounding Jupiter and a giant plasma tail extending from the south pole. The ibex and plow are symbols from the previous era.

"[Talbott] drew attention to what he called the 'eye mask'.... He had collected a series of 'eye mask' images, ranging from Easter Island in the southern hemisphere to North America, Europe, ancient Mesopotamia, and elsewhere. From the global distribution he had deduced that the formation was seen from both hemispheres. [Anthony] Peratt immediately identified the eye mask as a 'low opacity torus' or thick ring, seen from a vantage point substantially off-axis, not too far from the plane of the torus. The most intense currents in a plasma torus are concentrated at the center and surrounded by a number of concentric 'shells.' Because the outer shells have a low opacity, an observer can see deeply inside the torus. The center of the toroid cross section becomes more visible at optical wavelengths as the outer plasma shells become less opaque. In addition, the toroid tends to flatten with increasing current, a characteristic revealed by innumerable instances of the eye mask globally and as seen in the ancient Sumerian symbols of the goddess Inanna...."

-- David Talbott and Wallace Thornhill, "Thunderbolts of the Gods" (2004)

The fact that "the formation was seen from both hemispheres" speaks to the fact that we are not seeing something in the north skies above the pole. Jupiter with his owl-eyes was seen anywhere where the ecliptic could be seen -- at least during those months when Earth on its own orbit passed Jupiter in its slower travel on its orbit.

The eye masks might be "the ancient Sumerian symbol of the goddess Inanna" but it is an association with Venus, it is not Venus unless it be suggested that Venus had a magnetic field. If Venus had a magnetic field, it would have developed a toroidial form at its equator, but also flower forms at both poles. But the owl eyes also show up on the coins of Athens 3000 years later, as the symbol for Athena (as shown above).

The eye mask is Jupiter, in limited plasma discharge because it was still close to the Sun. As Jupiter distanced into and (later) beyond the asteroid belt its coma became much larger, and the view of the toroid vanished from view, occluded by the larged and denser coma.

There is a Maya glyph, meaning "Venus rising," which looks identical to the face of the eye-icon in having two eyes under a single wavy shaped eyebrow. It is often used as a frieze in buildings. In some of the codexes it is used as a label to designate a celestial form.

To most of the world Saturn is the loser and Jupiter is clearly the victor. He is a younger God, never seriously noticed before, and held by many peoples to be a resurrection of the older God Kronos. Widely named "the younger," he replaces the older God of Time and Beginnings, Kronos or Saturn. He is Zeus, "youth" of the Greeks, or Jupiter, "father youth" (Jove Pater) of the Romans.

The Absu and Duat

This was the first time humans had seen anything of interest in the south sky. The battle had started in the northern skies, but as the Earth spun away from Saturn and Jupiter, the battle scene would have shifted to the ecliptic in the southern skies.

At first it might have been the sight of two globes of equal size and a separation of a few diameters, surrounded with sheets of plasma and the massive outpouring of plasma below Jupiter. Egyptian 'myths' suggest that the two planets at some point drifted away from each other. In effect the coffin of Osiris floated down the 'river' of the ecliptic -- north toward Biblos (which is the correct direction).

From representations in Mesopotamia is appears as if the plasma in glow mode at the bottom of Jupiter was absolutely huge, and deserves to be called a 'mountain.' The coma of Jupiter may thus have completely obscured whatever changes Saturn was undergoing, and in fact we hear very little of Saturn after this period.

The rotation of the night sky would move the battle from east to west, the change of seasons would move it further up and down in the sky, and the rotation of the year would bring it closer in and move it further away. Most likely the spectacle could also be seen when it occurred on the other side of the Sun and may have been seen in the day sky. But as the receding planets diminished in size, the battle had moved into the night sky to the region of the Absu or the Duat -- the ocean in the southern sky. Sumerian Absu translates as "abyss" or "the deep." In Egypt this region is known as the Duat. [note 55]

The destruction wrought by Jupiter with plasma bolts in the asteroid belt (Hesiod's second battle) would have left dust and debris strewn along the ecliptic, causing the "path of the Gods" to be marked like a highway, defining the road of the Sun and the planets -- the zodiac. The lighted zodiac (the ecliptic) was last seen from Earth in AD 1840. [note 56]

Because of the disappearance of the planets into the far reaches of the Zodiac, the southern skies become known as "Lower Earth" (as apposed to "Middle Earth") and are eventually designated as the "Underworld" -- the graveyard for dead Gods and soon, by extension, as the place to which humans go at their death. By the time of the "Iliad," the Underworld has moved below ground.

Some of the debris created by Jupiter might have reached the vicinity of Earth, and started to fall toward the planet. This would have been gasses, ionized dust particles and particulate matter. There might have been a continuous infall from dust near Earth or it could have been periodic as the earth swept through the clouds of this matter which may have orbited the Sun. The falls of material into the upper atmosphere caused patterns of concentric circles and spirals to appear during the nighttime, which were recorded in profusion on the boulders of megalithic barrows after 3100 BC. Similar spirals and concentric circles have been recorded in modern times in the night skies from disturbances of the upper atmosphere by high altitude rockets -- perhaps from the exhaust gasses. [note 57]

Some of the debris would remain as part of a series of rings around all the larger planets. Earth also would have ended up with its share of dust and suspended rocks. The bands (rings) above the equator of the Earth might have reached 8000 miles high -- the Absu. But the Absu probably existed already long before 3147 BC. The Egyptian word for the rings ("Duat") is very old and was never defined in antiquity (Budge). Seen from the ground at a location in the northern hemisphere, the rings would have filled the southern night sky from east to west in a semicircle standing at an angle less than the compliment of the latitude -- about 50 degrees up from the south horizon in Mesopotamia and 60 degrees in the Yucatan. The Egyptians and Sumerians recorded that seven rings could be seen. The Olmecs in Central America, located closer to the equator, noted nine rings. India, at 10 or 20 degrees north latitude, also counted nine rings. [note 58]

The rings of material would have obscured the southern stars, and probably became organized into distinct bands and broken up into a pattern resembling waves (as was seen for the rings of the planet Saturn in the 1980s). The nearest bands moved to the west, faster than the rotation of the Earth (which seems to move the night sky to the west). Bands further up from the horizon moved slower. The wave pattern filling the southern sky is the 'sweetwater ocean' of the Sumerians and, for the Egyptians, the entry to the "Underworld." [note 59]

Each night the shadow of the Earth would sweep across the rings from east to west. In effect a portion of the rings would not be seen, leaving only the left and right (and top) edges. The effect looked like a portal or gate. This became the gateway to the "other world" of the Egyptians, located in the western sky -- the direction in which the doorway rotated each night. [note 60]

Near the equinoxes the Earth's shadow on the Absu would extend all the way across the Absu. Because at this time the penumbra, the widening soft shadow of Earth, also fell on the Absu, the shadowed area would be shaped like an inverted parallelogram. In Mesoamerica the ballcourt, constructed between two sloping walls, is a physical representation of the south sky at night seen at this time. In Egypt the God Re (as Jupiter) is almost always depicted as a giant red globe located in a mountain saddle -- a valley between two mountains composed of ridges. This also graphically describes the Egyptian "field of rushes." The massive pylons used as the gates to Egyptian temples are also clearly meant to represent the left and right edges of the Duat defined by where the shadow of the Earth did not fall.

In Akkadian times (after 2335 BC), in Mesopotamia, the name for the village of Babylon is misunderstood by the invading Akkadians as "The Gate of the Gods" -- that is, the doorway through the Absu. Subsequently, Babylon becomes the most important ceremonial center in all of the lands of Akkad and Sumer, a position held for 2000 years.

I have presented this information on the Absu (more will follow) because it is an important concept. Once the reader knows of the Absu, many statements and descriptions from remote antiquity, which have reference to an ocean, a sea, a number of rivers, or a seven-headed snake, all of a sudden take on meaning and start to make sense. The concept of an ocean in the south skies remained even after the Absu disappeared.

The rings disappeared, rained down upon Earth or more likely drifted out to space, after 2349 BC, in what will later be known as the 'Flood of Noah', with the last and most distant ring remaining, I suspect, to perhaps AD 600. More on this in the next chapter.

The Gods Leave

The battling Gods in the sky started an immediate retreat after 3147 BC, and Saturn and Jupiter eventually moved to their current orbits, although it would take 860 years for Jupiter and may have taken over a thousand years for Saturn and the Titans. As the Gods retreated into the far sky, Jupiter at first continued to bolt objects in the asteroid belt, through which it was moving, as it was receding from the Sun. The displays enter the mythology of the Gods as the magical weapons of the chief God -- the bolt of Zeus that never misses, the hammer of Thor.

On reaching the asteroid belt Jupiter would not likely to have retained its extensive lower tail or even its coma. A large coma would only develop again as Jupiter exited the asteroid belt and was no longer in proximity to the conductive material of asteroids and dust. Jupiter exited the asteroid belt in about 2550 BC at a distance from the Sun of 3.1 AU.

While Jupiter was in the asteroid belt, its massive mountain-shaped coma was replaced by horizontal streams of plasma from its south pole, directed left and right into the dust and objects of the asteroid belt. In about 400 years, after clearing the asteroid belt, Jupiter would again develop a mountainous lower plasma outpouring in an attempt to reach equilibrium with the electrical field of the Sun in far outer space (between 3.5 and 5.2 AU from the Sun).

I will get back to this in a following chapter, but it might be of interest to quote Plutarch's brief description, from Zoroastrianism (Mazdaism) sources, of the God Ahura-mazda (who is Jupiter). In "Isis and Osiris," (AD 200) he writes..

"Then Oromazes [Ahura-mazda, Jupiter] enlarged himself to thrice his former size, and removed himself as far distant from the Sun as the Sun is distant from the Earth, and adorned the heavens with stars."

"One star he set there before all others as a guardian and watchman, the Dog-star [Venus]."

The comment about 'distance' suggests that eventually Jupiter's coma was the visual size of the Sun or Moon, subtending 1/2 degree in diameter. At the distance of 5.2 AU, the final location of Jupiter, the coma can be estimated at 3.5 million miles in diameter. [note 61]

The "Dog-star" mentioned in the quoted text above is translated from Greek use of the Egyptian word "Sothis," which was used both for the star Sirius (the Dog Star) and the planet Venus, and meant something like "bright" or "shining." In Egyptian it takes the masculine form for Sirius and feminine for Venus, the difference being an ending d or t. The Greeks didn't differentiate, or didn't care. There is the additional confusion in the practice in antiquity of appointing stars as the 'spirits' of the planets, like every person (in Egypt) would be stellated after death. Sirius was the brightest star and Venus was the brightest planet. Sirius was 'the star of Venus.'

The word "Dog-star" is used in the English translation of Plutarch, who used "Sothis" as a translation of "Tishtrya" from his source, the Zoroastrian Zend-Avesta scriptures. "Tishtrya" could also be translated as "shining." "Tishtrya" is Venus.

As noted above by Plutarch, the planet Venus remained after the battle to course across the sky. In antiquity Venus is variously called Neith, Isis, Hathor, Athena, Inanna, and other names, and is often identified as a warrior goddess. [note 62]

After 3147 BC, Venus circled the Sun as a planet, and for the next 2500 years displayed a gigantic plasma tail, stretching some 30 or 50 million miles away from the Sun (although perhaps only periodically). Because Venus is an inner planet, the full extent of its plasma tail would be seen from the vantage point of Earth most of the time. Today the tail has dropped to dark mode. Today Venus also still shows its youth by its excessive heat radiating away, continuous lightning strikes, and curious sparsity of craters. [note 63]

Venus was alternately represented as a charmer and a terror. That she remained venerated, despite occasional destructive electrical contacts with Earth, is probably due to the fact that Venus was the most spectacular object in the sky between 3100 BC and 685 BC, an image intermittently reinforced by being seen at various distances and various parts of the sky and drawing closer every two years or so. She must have been seen as everyone's friend and companion throughout life. In Babylonian (Chaldean) records Venus is not recognized as a 'planet' until after 600 BC, as also in Hindu records.

And a minor planet, Mercury, with wings and a tail (or a beak, in some Egyptian iconography) continues to scurry back and forth as a messenger of the removed Gods. The orbit of Mercury is the most displaced in angle from the ecliptic, and would have been understood as flying off the ecliptic (the path of the Gods) at times, often disappearing in the portion of the sky where the Sun rose. Mercury became the God of the air in Mesopotamia.

Mercury and Mars, will start to appear close to Earth about 80 years after 3147 BC. Mars will become the most important God, Horus, of the Egyptians over the next 300 years, a position already held since 9,000 BC, but under a different form. More on that in the next chapter.

The Titans (the two giant planets Uranus and Neptune) were banished to the Underworld -- the far reaches of the Solar System -- to be rediscovered by telescope nearly 5000 years later, and named in accord with Greek mythology. Saturn takes up his station as Lord of the Underworld. He eventually becomes just a faint speck among the stars of the sky, taking 30 years to orbit the Sun, however, he will be recognized and tracked worldwide throughout antiquity.

If, as a reader, you wonder at the movement of these planets seemingly out of concert with the celestial harmony of today, I should first remind you that any of the suggested orbits are (with some exceptions) only slightly different from today. But also, the Solar System is hardly as stable as is generally accepted. The orbits of some of the outer planets are today observed to be changing inclination to the ecliptic, although minutely, which is as likely to be the result of electrical interactions with the Sun as being caused solely by gravitational interactions. All the repeating comets have likewise been observed to change orbits for reason which cannot be attributed to gravitational forces alone. [note 64]

The Return of the Axis Mundi

As the Earth assumed a new orbit around the Sun after 3147 BC, it would have had to equalize its charge to match the new location in the decreasing electrical field of the Sun. This was a change from the electrical field experienced when Earth was as yet within the plasmasphere of Saturn. The equalization of charge was accomplished through an influx of electrons, concentrated at the magnetic poles.

Plumes of plasma in glow mode would have extended soon after 3147 BC from both poles, rising straight up from the north and the south, and then bending toward the tail end of the magnetosphere, away from the Sun, looking like bent twigs at the top. These would be seen at night throughout the world, perhaps broadening at the top like trees. Most likely the stems of the plumes remained cohesive, that is, it looked to be the same size or only diminished somewhat in diameter with distance. At the far end the plume was terminated in a plasmoid sphere (similar to the Peratt Column seen in the south after 8300 BC), with the typical tentacle-like structure extending away from the plasmoid. We know this from Mesoamerican descriptions (as the birds on top of each 'directional tree') and later Akkadian and Egyptian illustrations. It is also likely that the axis mundi widened at the base to a bulbous form from the formation of a dome of water vapor where the plasma column contacted the ocean, or, as likely, formed a gigantic aurora.

To be seen to a latitude of 20 degrees, as in Mesoamerica, the plumes would have had to extend 4 or 5 Earth diameters up (40,000 to 50,000 miles) along the magnetic field lines, and another 4 or 5 diameter into the tail of the Earth's plasmasphere where they terminated in a ball-shaped plasmoid. If understood as trees, the plumes would seem to wave in the wind, although in actuality this is the nightly change in perspective resulting from the rotation of the Earth, for the tops would continue to follow the direction of the magnetic field lines of the plasmasphere extending away from the direction of the Sun. The north and south trees would bend toward the west at the start of the night, and rotate to end up bending toward the east by dawn. [note 65]

It might be suggested that after the passage of time the ball plasmoid at the end of the tree would no longer show. It could also be suggested that the plasma plume showed only periodically, perhaps annually as the Earth, still on an elliptical orbit, moved alternately into a region of higher or lower value of the Sun's electrical field. That would mean, since we are dealing with plasma, that the plume would show suddenly and would disappear again as suddenly at the end of some months as the Earth returned on its orbit to the higher value of the electrical field and the plasma would switch to dark mode.

The repeated appearance of the plasmoid, might explain why it is represented by the repeating 'shepherd's crooks' carved on megalithic surfaces by the people at Carnak (France). The region was cleared of people with the flood of 3147 BC and may not have been repopulated for a hundred years or more. A count of the crooks in some locations could furnish some estimates of for how many years the Axis Mundi kept returning, although a baseline measure is missing if we assume a depopulation.

Similarly it could be suggested that the 'year glyph' used in the oldest records of Egypt, the Palermo Stone, represents the annual appearance of the plasma plume. The Palermo Stone is a carved basalt block from the Fifth Dynasty (ca 2550 BC) of the Old Kingdom, of which only seven fragments exist. The Palermo Stone records pharaohs of the first five dynasties. For each of the pharaohs there is a catalog of years, with each year named after an important event. Each year is distinguished from the next with a 'year glyph,' which arches over the space used to record events. The glyph is thought to be based on a bent leafless palm font, as if one portion of the leaf was removed every day from the font. [note 66]

Mesoamerica recognized a total of four trees which held up the sky, perhaps also the daytime sky, but certainly the nighttime sky. Mesoamerica places a bird on top of each of the trees. This is obviously an understanding of the terminating plasmoid of each plume, with the tentacles constituting the tail of a bird. The four trees or pillars also occur in the 'mythology' of the Egyptians and the Chinese. From Egypt we have the following...

"This heaven was situated in the sky, which the Egyptians believed to be like an iron ceiling, either flat or vaulted, and to correspond in extent and shape with the earth beneath it. This ceiling was rectangular, and was supported at each corner by a pillar; in this idea, we have, as M. Maspero has observed, a survival of the roof-tree of very primitive nations. At a very early date the four pillars were identified with 'the four ancient khu's who dwell in the hair of Horus,' who are also said to be 'the four gods who stand by the pillar-sceptres of heaven.' These four gods are 'children of Horus,' and their names are Amset, Hapi, Tuamautef, and Qebhsennuf. They were supposed to preside over the four quarters of the world, and subsequently were acknowledged to be the gods of the cardinal points."

-- E. A. Wallis Budge in "The Book of the Dead" (1895)

Budge further explicates that the four pillars holding up the sky, are also called the "four blazing flames made for the Khu."

[Image: Plasma plumes at the poles]
Image: Plasma plumes at the poles extending into the magnetosphere in the direction away from the Sun.

Book 13 of the "Chilam Balam," titled "The Creation of the Uinal" by the translator Roys, reports on how the Uinal, the 20 day month, "came to be created before the creation of the world." The remainder of Book 13 is composed as a song, attributing some quality to each of the 20 day names of the 13 numbered days of the month. At one point we have, "Then the following were set up in the middle of the land: the Burners, four of them." The "Burners" are named after the 5th, 10th, 15th, and 20th day of the month, then noted that "these are the four rulers." There is little question that these four Burners are the four Bacabs, the gods of the cardinal points, here represented, like in Egypt as braziers.

Four trees of the cardinal directions appear throughout Book 10 of the "Chilam Balam." Two of the trees of Mesoamerica are associated with the east and the west, which I cannot place with certainty. At first I thought they might be the leading edges of the Absu, lit by the Sun, and seen rising up and widening directly from the east cardinal point and from the west. But after the Absu has disappeared, the four trees are sighted again two additional times, according to the "Chilam Balam."

The plumes show up repeatedly in diverse cultures. I will suggest that the east and west plumes might be an image of the denser portion of a toroid of plasma encircling the Earth (one of the Van Allen belts). It would thus appear at the location of the equatorial, overlapping it and rising at an angle. The edges of this tube would stand out for the plasma would be denser along the left and right edge. But in Mesopotamian illustrations a circular form is shown above the stalk. This might be a portion of the circular toroid which composes the Van Allen belts. In this case there would not be the triple leaves which could be associated with the ball plasmoids of the north and south polar plumes. This might be a graphical shorthand, however, for in some seals the tops of the plumes are shown as small lions.

Both China and Mesoamerica assign colors to the four trees, and as a result to the four cardinal points. The colors assigned in Mesoamerica (Maya) can be traced to the celestial phenomena involved. The tree at the north is white, as would be appropriate to a northern glow-mode plasma plume seen from the northern hemisphere. The tree of the south is yellow, which is likely the coloration due to looking south through the coloration of the Absu, before it disappeared. The tree in the east is noted as being red only in 2349 BC and 1492 BC when only a single red ring of the Absu remained (which I will claim as being red). After 3147 BC, the east tree is listed as being yellow, although the translator of the "Chilam Balam" thinks this is an error. But the Absu most likely was colored yellow. The tree in the west is always black. So reads the Maya "Book of the Chilam Balam."

The colors of the east and west trees were most likely determined as the night passed and dawn came (Mesoamerica defined events at their completion). At dawn the east tree would reflect the light of the rising Sun. The west tree is in the shadow of the earth at dawn, so it is always black.

The north tree would be the largest since the north magnetic pole would be most effective in gathering electrons. The formation of this tree was a monumental event, recorded in specifics not only in the "Chilam Balam" but also in casual reference in the "Popol Vuh" narrative. Additionally, the establishment of the tree in the north was monumentalized in AD 700 in the sculptured texts of the Temple Inscriptions at Palenque in the Yucatan. The central temple relates in part..

"On August 13, 3114 BC, 13 Baktuns were completed.
1 year, 9 months, and 2 days after the new epoch began,
G1-prime [Saturn] entered the sky.
On February 5, 3112 BC, G1-prime dedicated it.
Wacan chan xaman waxac na G1
(raised-up-sky north-eight-house G1 [Venus]) was its name.
It was his house of the north."

The use of "G1," Venus, rather than "G1-prime," Saturn, may be an error in Schele and Freidel's book, "A Forest of Kings," from which I quot this inscription. However, this matches the tale from Egypt about the travel of Isis to the tree of the north, at Biblos, which included the coffin of Osiris.

For the present purpose it should be noted that the raised-up-sky north-eight-house ("edifice") was dedicated a year and a half after the start of the current era, as retrocalculated by the Maya. It is within expectations that it would take perhaps a year to develop a plasma stream in glow mode in response to a change in the electrical field surround the Earth's plasmasphere, although it seems late. (The plasma starts in dark mode and then suddenly switches to glow mode.) The plume is noted here (and in other records) because the raised-up-sky north-eight-house was much larger than anything else ever seen in the skies up to this point in time. It rose far above the previous polar location of Saturn. Seen from Mesoamerica, the Saturnian planets had hovered only some 20 degrees above the north horizon. "Saturn entered the sky," is noted because the planet had now moved (within a year and 6 months) across the sky and to the south. This had to be established first (in this text) because otherwise Saturn (G1-prime) would not have been able to construct his edifice. Mesoamerican languages are action based.

I think, from the use of names-with-numbers in the "Chilam Balam," that north-eight-house signifies an eventual total of eight appearances of the plasma plume. There is one Maya record (a ballcourt marker at Copan) which claims nine appearances in the north. The Axis Mundi would certainly be well remembered if, as I would suggest, it was last seen again in 686 or 685 BC. [note 68]

If, as I have claimed, the plasma plume would impinge on the Earth at the magnetic poles, then certainly there should be some record of this for the north magnetic pole -- if the magnetic pole were located in the north Atlantic. As a matter of fact, there are historical claims as late as AD 800, although somewhat fancifull, in claiming a descent into the whirlpool created by the concentrated plasma stream. There are stories told as late as the 19th century.

There are additional Celtic, Icelandic, and Norse 'myths' which claim the whirlpool to emit a thunderous noice and flames. Some of the recollections might incorporate details from much longer ago than the 7th century BC. As with plasma streams today impinging on the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, the incoming plasma bored a hole into the ocean. The rotational magnetic field surrounding the incoming electrical current would set the water and the generated steam in rotation. The boiling of the ocean water would produce the grinding noice, the concentration of plasma at the point of contact would change the plasma stream to arc mode. Among northwestern European nations (Friesland, Denmark, England, and Norway) the whirlpool is known as the Maelstrom (or Maal Stroom), which translates as 'grinding stream.' Maps of the north Atlantic place the Maelstrom off the coast of Norway. [note 69]

The trees would fade with time, then suddenly disappear. As a result the trees will reappear again, as the "Chilam Balam" makes clear, with each major change in the Earth's orbit -- as, for example, in 2349 BC and 1492 BC. I will address these changes in following chapters.

... the celestial cow

I should also note that if the left and right extremes of the surrounding Van Allen belt toroid could be seen as trees, or some such structure standing at the east and west cardinal point, then the remainder of the Van Allen belt -- the portion overhead and bridging the equatorial -- would also have been seen when it achieved glow-mode.

[Image: Van Allen belts]
Image: Inner and outer Van Allen belts. The toroids are generally larger on the shadow side of Earth. The outer belt touches down at the magnetic poles.

The inner Van Allen toroidial belt, located above the Earth's equator, varies in size, extending from as little as 0.1 Earth radius (400 miles) to 3 Earth radiuses (12,000 miles). The outer belt reaches from 3 to 10 Earth radiuses. My estimate is that the Absu reached two Earth radiuses (8000 miles) above the equator.

The glowing Van Allen belt likely constitutes the 'body' for the cow of Hathor, with the east and west plumes adding the legs. The view of the Van Allen toroid would have been smaller (further away) in the east and west, and obscured by the atmosphere, so that only the dense edges showed -- two in the east and two in the west. This could have been the outer Van Allen belt, which is a collection of electrons in cyclotron motion -- and thus giving off light if energized.

If not the edges of the inner or outer Van Allen belts, the north and south polar plumes may have constituted two of the legs. Also, perhaps the shadow of the Earth would have cut a dark oval into the bottom of the body, the underbelly of the cow, although the Van Allen belts are not, like the Absu, a narrow phenomena which appears only in the plane of the equatorial. The Van Allen belts are much wider, and would have been seen thousands of miles away from (north and south of) the location of the equatorial. But if the inner belt lowered to 400 miles (as it apparently does under conditions of high Solar Wind activity), a portion would certainly have been removed by the Earth's shadow.

[Image: Van Allen belts, magnetosphere]
Image: Inner and outer Van Allen belts located within the magnetosphere (plasmasphere) of Earth.

What is missing from this image is the head and udders of the cow. The cow was a familiar farm animal to the Egyptians, and clearly distinct from a bull. It was the 'bull of heaven' which had, only days earlier in 3147 BC, come through and destroyed the home of the Gods.

For the Van Allen Belts to show in glow mode there would have to be an influx of plasma from another source. Thus I would expect the 'cow' to only show up (for example) at those times when Venus aligned between the Sun and Earth, and the electrical condition of the Earth and its surroundings changed.

The cow would have been a form seen more or less in the center of the sky, on both sides of the equatorial, and stretching from the east horizon to the west. The Van Allen belts increase in size (mostly their thickness) with increased activity by the Sun. Today, after becoming very active, the Van Allen belts discharge to the space away from the Sun in a matter of days. This would suggest that the 'cow' of antiquity did not last all that long after appearing.

I'm suggesting Venus as a cause here because in Egyptian sources the cow shows up seven times. In Egypt it is the cow-eared goddess Hathor who is identified with Venus at the times of an electrical contact with Earth. She is frequently depicted as a cow and is also known as the "Seven Hathors" (see, for example, sculptures of the Seven Hathors at the Temple of Hathor at Denderah). In the Maya "Chilam Balam" Venus is called "Ah Uuc Cheknal," which translates "who fertilizes the maize seven times." The seven dates would have been 3147 BC, plus four times between 2349 BC (the 'flood of Noah') and 2193 BC (the fall of Akkad), 1492 BC (Exodus), and 1442 BC (the day of Joshua). The date of 3147 BC is not associated with an electrical contact by Venus. I'll detail each of these in later chapters [note 70]

... the green tree

There was also a "green tree of the center" defined in the "Chilam Balam" at this time (directly after 3147 BC) but not at later times, but the location is probably the whole range of the southern sky. This is Jupiter on his green mountain receding into the distance. Jupiter would appear first in the northeast and look small. The green shape would increase in size as the Earth overtook Jupiter, and diminish again in size as Earth passed Jupiter. The green mountain would thus seem to move across the whole of the sky of a period of months (and also on a daily basis). This movement through the south skies would allow the judgement that the green tree was located somewhere in front of the trees of the east, the west, and in front of the yellow tree of the south. In about 2900 BC Jupiter entered the asteroid belt, and the green mountain disappeared as the plasma outpouring changed shape. [note 71]

A New Era

Humans who had observed the celestial drama narratized the events with some difficulty and with considerable confusion, which shows in the later accounts which have come down to us. Both in Egypt and Mesopotamia, the stories of the first period after the breakup of the Saturnian system involve repeated councils by the Gods where agreements are reached and then broken and tradeoffs are made. It seems to have taken many years before matters in the sky were settled.

As mentioned earlier, late Egyptian legends speak of battles and periods of negotiations (lasting over 80 years) among the Gods as they determine who, between Seth and Osiris, is to rule which territory -- Upper Earth (Heaven) or Lower Earth (the Underworld of the south skies). But the story is cast in terms of a division between Upper and Lower Egypt, rather than Upper and Lower Earth. As the planets Jupiter (Osiris, Seth, and later Re) and Saturn (Ra or Osiris) move further away from Earth, and Horus (Mars) starts to show up near Earth, the claims on territories change. Horus ends up as ruler over all of Egypt, both Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt, Osiris receives the Underworld of the dead in deep space, and Seth gets nothing.

The actual power of various cult centers over national politics varied over time. The worship of Horus is from Heirakonpolis (Nekhen), 400 miles up the Nile river. Heirakonpolis probably initially gained control over all of Egypt with the establishment of the city of Memphis at the apex of the delta, thereby controlling trade up river, but did not retain power, which later passed to cult centers in the delta. Herodotus was told that the Delta was flooded at this time. Horus was also worshipped in the delta. Seth was worshiped in the region just south of the delta. In the delta Ra or Re was also worshipped, but his worship did not take hold with the pharaohs until the 4th dynasty. Ra, at that point in time, is Jupiter.

The tale about the negotiations, "the Contending of Horus and Seth," is considered to be a 12th dynasty (ca 1500 BC) version of a much older myth. The actual descriptions of the contests and labors with which Horus and Seth are beset are ridiculous in the extreme. Isis is involved also. The following is a short narrative version adopted from http://www.philae.nu/philae/Horus&Seth.html ..

"After another appearance before the court of the Gods follows a series of bizarre events. First, Horus and Seth change into hippopotami and stay under water for three months. Isis becomes concerned for her son and throws a copper harpoon, but it misses Seth and hits Horus instead. She retrieves it by magic on his complaint. On her next throw she hits Seth but he appeals to the brother-sister relationship between them, and she withdraws the weapon. Horus emerges out of the water, enraged that his mother spared the life of Seth. He cuts off her head and she turns to flint."

"Under water" is under the edge of the Duat. The ecliptic, low in the south sky in summer nights, would dip below the Duat perhaps a month after the vernal equinox and rise out again a month or so before the autumnal equinox. That accounts for three months under water

We can also suggest that the "copper harpoons" represented plasmoids launched at Mars (Horus) and the other planet, Seth (whoever that is), in sequence. They would be copper colored, rather than the bright white of an electrical arc, because they are seen through the screen of the Duat, which was most likely yellow, buff, or copper colored.

That Isis (Venus) would lose her head likely represents the sudden switch of the coma of Venus to dark mode after releasing two massive lightning bolts, or the loss of its tail. The Egyptians would have seen the bolts travel along the ecliptic, like thrown harpoons, and explosively 'detonate' at the two planets. We would expect plasmoids to be brilliantly white, for they are electrons in arc mode, but seen behind the Absu or Duat, which was colored buff or yellow, these would have changed to a coppery color.

If the "Contending of Horus and Seth" was created out of nothing as a narrative in the 12th dynasty (ca 1500 BC), then we have to ask how these people knew about the change in color -- something that would not have been seen for a thousand years, since 2349 BC.

That brings up the question of what planet here represents Seth. For the period directly after 3147 BC, when Jupiter is seen receding into the southern night sky after attacking Saturn, I would suggest that Jupiter is Seth and Saturn is Osiris. But somewhat later (differing by the 'theology' of differing Egyptian nomes), it is Jupiter who is Osiris -- a mummified form depicted in green, and matching the description of the Quiche "Popol Vuh" as a traveling green mountain. At that point, or at some point, it is also likely that Mercury was identified as Seth, still on a very elongated orbit and always seeming to travel nearly the same orbit as Mars (as I will point out later). Mercury also sported a large coma, a bow shock, and a tail. In fact, a globe will grow out of Seth's head in a later episode of this narrative, which in effect is Mercury developing a coma as it gets closer in to the Sun.

These details place the origin of the story in the era shortly after 3147 BC, but mixed in are much later elements. For one, Seth in the end is assigned to travel in the bow of the boat of Ra (Jupiter) to watch for the celestial snake Apep (details of Apep are in a later chapter). The 'boat' form of Ra is the 'shen' form associated with Jupiter after about 2940 BC and the snake Apep does not show up until after 2349 BC.

A few more discordant story elements are added, like the gouged eyes of Horus, and a whole 'semen' episode.

"Later Seth finds Horus asleep under a tree and gouges out his eyes which he buries in the sand where they turn into lotus flowers. Hathor finds Horus and pours gazelle milk into his eye sockets, causing them to heal."

"Seth next invites Horus to his home, and makes a homosexual attack on Horus. Horus however catches the semen of Seth in his hand which he shows his mother Isis. She in outrage cuts off his hand, throws it into the marshes. Then she makes Horus's phallus rise and catches his semen in a jar, spreading it on lettuces which Seth will eat. Before the council Seth claims the homosexual domination of Horus, but Horus instead wants their respective semen to speak from where it is located. Thoth calls the semen, and the semen of Seth comes out, not from Horus, but from the marshes where his hand had been thrown by Isis. Horus's semen appears as a gold disc on the head of Seth who now is humiliated."

The 'eyes of Horus' will be recognized as polar plasma plumes, which must have been bright enough to light up the night. The Egyptians will eventually identify there as braziers.

The totality of semen exchanges should be recognized as plasma in glow mode between planets and, in the case of the swamp, with objects in the asteroid belt. The lettuce is an Egyptian variety which exudes a white liquid when broken. The court procedings are eventually resolved as follows..

"The council now sends a letter to Osiris in the underworld, asking for advice. Osiris threatens them all if his son is not chosen. He will remove the stars in the heavens together with man and god alike and make them all descend below the Western Horizon. This causes the council to finally instate Horus on the throne of Egypt. Re states that Seth will accompany Re in the heavens and that his voice will be heard in the thunder itself."

Osiris (here possibly Jupiter again) is obviously far removed, placing this ending perhaps 200 years after 3147 BC, when Jupiter has entered the asteroid belt. The worship of Osiris dates from the end of the First Kingdom, 2349 BC, when the first references to Osiris show up, and, as will be detailed in later chapters, Jupiter suddenly reappeared in his full mountain form.

When early pharaohs make statements about the conflicts or peace between the "two lands," they are speaking about Heaven as the Upper Land and Middle Earth as the Lower Land. Over time these terms Upper and Lower Land come to mean Upper and Lower Egypt -- the river valley region of the south as Upper Egypt and the delta region of the north as Lower Egypt. There are some parallels between the two Egyptian territories and the two celestial domains, because Seth was worshipped in parts of the delta and Horus in Upper Egypt before Upper Egypt extended its cultural and religious influences to the delta.

In the end, in the "Contending of Horus and Seth it is agreed that Osiris (now as Saturn) gets the Underworld and remains there, swaddled in strips of cloth like a mummy. He never again disturbs other planets. Jupiter remains active only a short time, then, after less than 200 years (which may have been the 80 years of negotiations), enters the asteroid belt, reduces the size of its coma, and starts zapping asteroids which come near.

Egypt is awarded to Horus, who is held to be the resurrected Osiris, but in actuality is Mars now on an orbit which periodically overrides the orbit of Earth. This condition apparently started 80 years after 3147 BC and lasted some 300 years. Mars appears as an active and impressive ruler of Earth. By comparison, Jupiter does nothing except recede further from Earth. [note 72]

Within a hundred years of the initial disturbance, both Mesopotamia and Egypt rebound to achieve the most stupendous growth in civilization ever seen. (Both also initiate the first dynasties.) This rebound stands as one of the most amazing facts of prehistory, a blooming of civilization often noted as "unsurpassed" by historians and archaeologists. This is duplicated in other places, as if the world suddenly woke up. Large scale cultivation starts up right after 3000 BC in West Africa, the Indus valley (Pakistan), China, southeast Asia, Mesoamerica, and South America. Agricultural production in Mesopotamia increases as never before, monumental stone architecture soon takes a leap forward in Egypt, trade is expanded, and writing suddenly proliferates. [note 73]

In spite of this progress, however, both Mesopotamia and Egypt remain conservative and rooted in the past. The temple religions and economies are now more tightly integrated into society than ever and become the justification for the kings and pharaohs who rise to fill the void left by the departed Gods.

The universal lack of an elite before 3100 BC is an outstanding and inexplicable difference between the culture before and after the flood of 3147 BC. Today we simply cannot imagine the existence of large egalitarian societies which somehow accomplished the extensive irrigation projects, food production, and trade which existed before 3100 BC. We are much more comfortable with conditions after 3100 BC, when kings, pharaohs, and emperors show up to lead the people. [note 74]

We are a gregarious species and we look for leadership. Anyone who reached out to lead the people, after the removal of the leadership of the powerful Gods, would have been willingly accepted. The first kings in Sumer are known as the "shepherds of the people." The new leaders take on the role of the Gods.

Again, I have to point to the sky for the example of the behavior of those who assume the leadership as kings and pharaohs. The new leaders all derive from the established priesthood, and are often the primary servants of the local God. The new leadership understands dynastic succession as legitimate. It had been seen among the Gods. The new leadership sees battle and the death of others as a means of achieving power. This too could be inferred from the activities depicted in the skies. In Mesopotamia the new leaders remain as the kings of distinct theocracies. In Egypt the new leadership unifies the individual districts, with their individual Gods, and assumes for itself the identity of the one ruling God, Horus.

Endnotes

Note 1 --

See Chapter 15, "The Maya Calendar," for how reasonable the date of 3147 BC is if solar years are used rather than years of 365.24 days. In 747 BC, the Olmecs added 6 Baktuns of 400 Tuns to have a Long Count starting date of 6.0.0.0.0 on February 27th -- where a 'Tun' was a solar year, at that time understood as representing 360 days. (See Chapter 15, "The Maya Calendar," also for the concept of the Long Count, Baktuns, and Tuns.) If we understand that the Olmecs assumed that the year had always been 360 days, then we can extend this concept to say that the Olmecs counted in Tun years, where a Tun was a solar year -- without regard to the actual number of days in the year. Thus, subtracting 2400 solar years (6 Baktuns) from 747 BC, the date of the end of the "Age of the Gods" would be 3147 BC.

Hindu sources identify a number of calendars. A Kali era started on February 18, 3102 BC. In Kashmir, the Laukika era, starts in 3076 BC. A third, the Brhaspaticakra era starts in 3116 BC (15th EB). In China the date which comes closest to the beginning of the third millennium BC is the starting date of the first of the "Legendary Emperors" Fu Shi dated at 2953 BC.
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Note 2 --

The "King List" was brought to Greece by Berossus, a priest of former Babylon, in ca 280 BC and published. Until the 19th century AD, when cuniform copies were found during archaeological excavations in Mesopotamia, this was the only extant record.
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Note 3 --

In fact, the documents from Sumer list the numbers in "sars" which is 3600, that is, 60 times 60, and in "ners" which represents 600, 10 times 60. The Sumerians used the decimal numbering system, but large numbers were expressed in sexagesimal. In the 7th century BC, the Assyrians still used "sarus" specifically to mean 3600 days, that is, a decade of years of 360 days.

See Appendix A, "Chronology," for the basis of a year of 225 days, and an analysis of the "King List." I will use Solar years (a rotation around the Sun) rather than our 365.24 day years. It would make little sense to do otherwise, since even 'calibrated' Carbon-14 dates have been unwittingly adjusted to Solar years.
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Note 4 --

It is also from this time that the lengths of rulership become reasonable. The previous kingship at Kish and Uruk had included some 20 long-lived kings. Gilgamesh himself -- fiction or not -- is attributed a reign (or life span) of 126 years. It has frequently been suspected that some of the figures for the "kings after the flood" represent how long a king lived, rather than the length of his reign. At 126 years of 240 days, Gilgamesh would have lived to the age of 82.

The very early poem "Gilgamesh and Aga" recounts the defiance of Gilgamesh as he stands up against Aga the King of Kish over a matter of digging wells. The poem has no literary conclusion as we would like, although there is what looks like a later ending added which tells of Gilgamesh's capture and release of Aga.

A schema of notation is used for the long-lived "kings after the flood," which is different from the 'turns' obviously used for the "kings before the flood" and not at all clear. The literary style of the initial portion of the "King List," the "kings before the flood," also differs from the remainder of the list in using archaic language. Near the end of the list, for the last of the records at the time of the fall of the Akkadian Empire, this style is used again.
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Note 5 --

"Remarkable organizing ability was required to administer huge estates, in which, under the 3rd dynasty of Ur, for example, it was not unusual to prepare accounts for thousands of cattle or tens of thousands of bundles of reeds. Similar figures are attested at Ebla, three centuries earlier."

-- Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition

"There are samples of the clay counters used in the Near East from about 9,000 BC to 1500 BC. There were about 500 distinct types, although not in all times and places. Tokens start to be found at widely separated sites as of 8,000 BC (Carbon-14 dated), such as Level III of Tell Mureybet in Syria and Level E of Ganj Dareh in western Iran. Tokens were used at sites throughout the Near East, from Israel to Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, with the exception of Central Anatolia. The farthest extent of their use was from Khartoum in the Sudan to the pre-Harappan [in Pakistan]."

-- John Alan Halloran, [http://www.sumerian.org/]


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Note 6 --

If the arc from Saturn to Mars and Earth started up and extinguished eight times over the thousand years of the "Age of the Gods" and perhaps lasted over a hundred years each time then we should expect the upper hemisphere of Mars to have been severely burned. The top hemisphere is actually some three miles lower, but for no clear reason, unless it was originally an ocean. What is more interesting is the lack of craters in the north and the existence instead of five very large fulgamite lightning blisters (Olympus Mons, Arsia Mons, Pavonis Mons, Ascraeus Mons, and Elysium Mons) and three smaller ones (Hecatus Tholus, Albor Tholus, and Tharsis Tholus), clearly the mark of eight stupendous electrical lightning strikes. These are hundreds of times larger than any volcanoes on Earth. The caldera of Olympus Mons is 40 miles in diameter. These are not volcanoes.

The "Chilam Balam" book of the Maya calls this first Mars (actually calling it "first" as the Egyptians do) "Bolon Dzacab" which translates as "Nine-Lives" or "Nine Generations." The Olmecs thus counted occurrences of Mars when it was centered on Saturn, rather than counting the number of times it lowered to Earth. Mesoamerican languages count the existence of an event on completion, not at the start, as we do. The title "Nine-Lives" is typical of suggesting that the God appeared nine times But this is not clear. It is perhaps more likely that the name "Bolon Dzacab" was given to Mars in the 8th and 7th century BC, when it approached earth nine times. See Chapter 15, "The Maya Calendar," for details.
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Note 7 --

There are early Ubaid (5600 -- 4000 BC) walled cities in the same region. Walls were originally built as dikes and used to prevent flooding. The Ubaid culture represents the first settlers of lower Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates and precedes the Sumerians. But the model of a 'city' comes from much older established cities of Anatolia (some listed below), which were frequently at war with each other, as shown by the collections of baked clay throwing balls at some locations.

The text of the "King List," where each city is attacked or sacked in turn, reflects the political conditions in Sumer at a later time, when the cities of Sumer constantly attacked each other to remove kings and city gods.

The first written record of the construction of city walls in Sumer is the description of the walls of Uruk. The building of Uruk's city walls is attributed to Gilgamesh (ca 2700 BC), although archaeological indications are that he repaired the walls rather than built them. The first Sumerian kingship, however, was at the city of Kish, 300 years earlier. This dates the earliest composition of the oldest portion of the "King List," including the "kings before the flood," to a 300 year period after 3100 BC at the city of Kish. The next portion, representing the addition of the kings of Kish and Uruk, probably dates to shortly after 2700 BC -- the time of Gilgamesh.

The Vedas list the number of times Mars approaches Earth as "a hundred," but the number is clearly meant as "a lot of times." The content of the Vedas reflects a history of the world since the "Age of the Gods" (or earlier). The Vedas were only rendered in script after 500 BC. A number of people have based complete cosmologies on the Vedic information, for example, Donald W. Patten and Samuel R. Windsor "The Mars-Earth Wars" (1996), and John Ackerman "Firmament: Recent Catastrophic History of the Earth" (1996).

If, however, we assume that Mars may have been seen as 'close' every 30 years since 3067 BC, then (without accounting for the changes in the length of the year) it would have been seen (3067 - 686) / 30 = 79.3 times.
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Note 8 --

At this time, the Sun was probably visible, and if not, then at least it got light and dark in rotation, and days could be counted in this manner. As I have noted elsewhere, the rotation of the egg, "without cease," in a circle around the north pole would also have indicated the rotation of the Earth.
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Note 9 --

The date of ca 4900 BC is close to the only estimated date for the Peratt Column, of 5000 BC. I mentioned earlier, in Chapter 5, "Saturn and Archaeology," based on the design of the causeways at Carnac, that the existence of circular structures at both ends of the causeways would suggest that an additional circular object existed above the Earth's north pole, which has not been identified by Peratt. Although Alorus is likely to be an object seen in the skies, which did not connect to Earth ("descended from heaven"), he may be the Opossum above the south pole rather than the egg seen in the north.
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Note 10 --

The listed dates also show up in readings of North American archaeology as dates marking long-term changes in climate, moisture, and vegetation, except for the appearance of the egg in 4939 BC. Thus the dates 5800 BC, 4219 BC, and 3147 BC, which are detailed in this narrative, may be compared with the archaeological dates of 6000 or 5800 BC, 4300 BC, and 3100 or 3000 BC when changes in climatic conditions are noted.
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Note 11 --

In addition to the barrows of western Europe, there are some impressive earlier sites in the Levant, Anatolia, and Pakistan: Eynan in Palestine, the earliest farming town (with houses), dated about 9000 BC; Jericho in Palestine, a farming and herding town, with its tower and enclosing wall, dated from 8000 BC (abandoned by 6800 BC); Catal Huyuk, a village in central Anatolia, dated from 7400 BC (abandoned 6200 BC); Hamoukar in eastern Anatolia (near present Mosul), founded 5000 or 4500 BC and destroyed in 3500 BC; Mehrgarh, in the south of Pakistan (Baluchistan), started as a village around 6000 BC, lasting to 2500 BC.
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Note 12 --

The "Neolithic" (farming) had reached central and southern France by 5400 BC, but did not reach northern and western France until 5000 BC, the British Isles in 4300 to 4200 BC, and Scandinavia in 4100 BC.

A summary of Neolithic funeral practices and graves follows:


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Note 14 --

Single chamber barrows disappear after about 3500 BC. This may be an indication of the time at which multi-lobed plasma discontinuities become prevalent in the stream of plasma from Saturn.
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Note 15 --

See Maximillian Ottmar Baldia "A Spacial Analysis of Megalithic Tombs" (Doctoral Dissertation, Southern Methodist University, 1995), which reports on the average orientation of all 2385 tombs in Western Europe. Most chamber alignments are on compass directions of roughly west-northwest and east-southeast, with entrances on the east-southeast side. These are median figures, that is, there are also some north-south and east-west orientations.
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Note 16 --

The concept of a cave or caves where humanity was originally generated is repeatedly expressed in Mesoamerican mythology, and even enters the very late creation myths of the Incas.

The smaller orbs following Mars were identified as thirteen in number by Talbott. Anthony Peratt notes that the number of nodules developed in Birkeland currents is almost always seven or nine in number. On reaching Saturn they are seen as surrounding Mars (but may have been the satellites of Saturn). This is reminiscent of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, or any number of similar narratives, involving the theme of death, a red orb, and a far-away residence.
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Note 17 --

You wonder why the population did not simply move away from the coasts of the north Atlantic. On the other hand, maybe they did. From artifacts and occasional pottery, it looks like the people building the barrows were not indigenous to this region.
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Note 18 --

Some barrows in Europe date well into the Middle Ages, but many of these are fake and were constructed to claim land ownership. Barrows were still under construction in India in the 19th century AD.
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Note 19 --

The oldest above ground temple at Malta is Gigantija, on the island of Gozo, dated to 3600 BC, and has its major axis aligned northwest and southeast, with the entrance in the southeast. The temple is the prototype for all the later Malta temples -- 30 to 40 of them -- and used the largest megaliths.
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Note 20 --

We may be overestimating the size of the workforce needed to move stones, but a great deal of labor was required to build the ditches around the henges.

The stones are much easier to move if balanced at the center on two pieces of wood, cut across the grain. Wood has high compressive strength in the direction of the grain. Rollers, often suggested, just will not do. The logs would be bruised and crushed and rollers allow almost no control over the direction the stones will move unless the ground is dead flat and the logs very even.

There have been many efforts to duplicate the dragging of large boulders in France, Holland, Germany, and England. They all demonstrate that a very large workforce is required, and that the boulders never move as expected when placed on rollers. Descriptions of some of these efforts may be found in Jean-Pierre Mohen, "The World of Megaliths" (tr 1990). Included as an anecdote, is the following statement..

"The old Breton quarrymen knew how to manoeuvre [sic] moderately sized blocks [of stone] by using wedges, rollers, levers, and ropes to move them sideways on their points of balance and imbalance close to the center of gravity. Thus even small groups of men could roll and shift blocks sideways by working first one side and then the other"

The stones can be walked and raised by two people in a few hours by rocking and inserting wood left and right near the center. Rocking involves people walking from one end to the other on the top of the stone. We tend to think in terms of dragging giant boulders, which has to be the most inefficient way of working; we don't think in terms of vast quantities of available lumber. Large stones can also be moved relatively easily by using a track of wooden rails as supports and shuffling the stones along with pinch bars. This apparently was the method used in Malta.

There is, in fact, a suggestion by Herodotus that the blocks of the pyramids at Giza were moved with some unidentified devices, requiring thousands of components. The best interpretation has been to suggest that these devices were short stubs of wood. A walked megalith can be moved with minimal effort, requiring only a few workers, since the momentum of the block of stone will aid in movement. See for example the website of W.T. Wallington, at [http://www.theforgottentechnology.com] or Gordon Pipes' article at [http://www.world-mysteries.com/gw_gpipes.htm].

On the other hand, Craig Smith, in "How the Great Pyramid Was Built" (2004), makes a good case for ramps in the construction of Khufu's pyramid at Giza.
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Note 21 --

Some of the earliest henges are the Central European wood henges, called 'roundels,' supposedly dating from 5000 BC. Roundels are closely spaced two-foot diameter tree trunks set up in a large circle with four open entrances. No signs of interior structures or burials are associated with these. The only activity seems to have been feasting. That is generally true for stone henges also.

Peratt in his 2003 article in "IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science" separates the plasma stream display from the source (the anode) -- which (for us) would be the planet Saturn. He notes that the stream most often tends to divide itself into 56 or 28 discrete streams at the anode, and compares this to the henges and the circular designs pecked into vertical rock walls, worldwide. He notes that he has found "hundreds" of these coincidences, on separate continents: the Americas, Europe, Australia. All use 56 posts or megaliths (or pecked depressions) in the outermost circle. The coincidence of design includes an secondary interior ring of plasma streams, and a flow from the outer to the interior rings (representing a substantial increase in current). When these designs are presented high up on cliffs facing south, they obviously represent the plasma stream from the south, the 'Peratt Column.'

Peratt claims Stonehenge is an exact model of "a plasma discharge, a lightning stroke that must have been unprecedented in intensity and duration." He certainly is not talking about an aurora. Presented in a paper at The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology "Celestial Catastrophes in Human Prehistory?" on 17 October, 2001. Peratt has avoided stating the obvious -- that the "lightning stroke of unprecedented intensity and duration" is a planet in arc mode plasma discharge with Earth.
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Note 22 --

A Roman author of the first century BC, Diodorus, makes note of "a temple to Apollo" in use with the "Hyperboreans" (presumably England), where "the God appears every 19 years." This is obviously in reference to Stonehenge, which was reconstructed in 2400 BC and 2100 BC, with an entrance aligned to the midsummer sunrise, and may have been presumed (by Diodorus) to mark lunar eclipses, which since late antiquity were known to occur on the 19 year Metonic cycle (the approximate repeating cycle of lunar eclipses). The number 56, the number of post-holes at Stonehenge, is actually three Metonic cycles, which occur at 19, 19, and 18 year intervals. The circle of blue stones at Stonehenge also numbers 19. An interesting coincidence.

The "Iliad" takes place over 56 time periods, 55 days and one night. The night event is the logical center of the book, and all the other events rigorously match each other about this center. You will wonder why an author of 700 BC feels the need for this numerical organization. See Guy Davenport, "Geography of the Imagination" (1981).
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Note 23 --

Location of Avebury, Stonehenge, and other megalithic sites in southern England. All have access via rivers.

[Image: Henge areas in southern England]
Image: Henge areas in southern England.

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Note 24 --

See for example Pierre Mereaux, in "Carnac: Des Pierres Pour Les Vivants" (1992), who rejects the suggestion of an astronomical alignment proposed earlier by Alexander Thom for the Carnac causeways. As paraphrased in a review by Roslyn Strong in the NEARA Journal (2001), "there seemed to be no reason to erect thousands of stones to verify certain risings and settings of the sun or moon." Nor does Mereaux accept the 'cult of the dead' proposed by Roger Joussaume in "Dolmens pour les Morts" (1985?).

Mereaux investigated the electrical properties of the granite menhirs at Carnac, as well as the properties of the geological subsurface of the region. One conclusion is that the standing stones would readily attract lightning (and of course Saint Elmo's Fire). There are no stones erected where the subsurface is not composed of quartz-bearing rock. Where the menhirs stand, the soil is very shallow, and thus the menhirs are in contact with the subsurface rock. I do not accept Mereaux thesis that the alignments represent a megalithic seismic detector. Who ever needed that?
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Note 25 --

In Mesoamerica (Mexico) there is no record of monuments before about 1500 BC, although there are in Guatemala. In South America there are many constructions dating to the "Age of the Gods" or shortly after.

[Image: Ouachita mounds, ca 3400 BC. Artist's rendition.]
Image: Ouachita mounds, ca 3400 BC. Artist's rendition. Ouachita river bank, Louisiana.

In North America an oval of mounds (11 of them) at Ouachita in Louisiana, dated to 3400 BC, stands out. This also was not a burial or occupation site. Similar sites, nearby, date to 1500 BC.

The next serious mound building phase in North America is the Adena culture, located throughout the Ohio valley, and dating from ca 700 BC. This is followed by the much wider distributed Hopewell mound culture. The mounds of both of these cultures were graves.
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Note 26 --

The iconography of the structures includes the circle, the wings at the edges (seen in some 300 Irish barrows), the hill or mound (often crenelated, common in barrows from Ireland to China), and the connecting stream (as causeways). The interior structure of barrows is remarkably similar over a large geographic area and a time span of a thousand years or more.

A double armed cruciform shows up as the plan for the interior space in barrows from Ireland, England, France, Portugal, and the temples of Malta. Changes in construction, such as the use of slabs instead of megaliths, are due to availability of local materials or improvement in construction techniques. Some of the changes in the form and interior plan of the barrows, as in going from a cruciform to a galley arrangement, might be due to actual changes in the signs in the sky or due to local interpretations. But I would suggest that once a rational association is made to an arbitrary symbol in the sky, it remains in use -- despite changing evidence -- for a long period of time.

Some of the symbols in the sky changed after 3100 BC. Circular monuments are no longer constructed after another 300 years (with some exceptions), but, in imitation of the mountain-like glow level plasma discharge from Earth to Mars, pyramidical structures come into use (but only after 2600 BC, about a hundred years after the last of the 10 'visits' by Mars). The causeway remains in use in Egypt as the access to the desert grave sites, mastabas and later pyramids, always placed on the east or southeast side of the pyramid or mastaba -- reflecting the original northwest location of the plasma stream -- and always including a bend in the road. In Egypt boats are buried beside the pyramids. The symbolism of access to heaven via a heavenly river also dates, of course, from the "Age of the Gods," as does the use of a valley building where the body is prepared before travel up the causeway to the grave site, reflecting the mound or mountain seen at the northwest horizon.

[Image: Avebury, sketch by William Stukeley]
Image: Avebury, sketch by William Stukeley, AD 1720.

A wood-post building located within the smaller henge, known as "The Sanctuary," located at the far southeast end of the causeway to Avebury henge, is completely equivalent to the valley buildings of the Egyptian pyramids. Within a circle of standing stones was a wood structure which was replaced up to five times with a building of the same dimensions. Described in "British Archeology" (Feb 2000).

A second causeway leads out of Avebury toward the southwest (more or less, the end is not well defined) ending in two large long-barrows, which were apparently closed up by the builders of Avebury. Together these may have represented the earlier Peratt column and two of the southern ball plasmoids. There is a third and fourth long-barrow directly south of the Avebury henge (West Kennet and East Kennet), and further south than the other two. The southwest causeway is today only half the lenght of the southeast causeway. We would actually expect the southwest causeway to be much longer. William Stukeley visited the site in the 1720s and recorded (or at least suggested) a much longer southwest causeway.

The remnants of a secondary circle of stones has been found at the east terminal of the causeway leading out from Stonehenge at the river Avon, today called Bluehenge. The impressions of 27 (not 28!) of the 'blue' stones, later moved to Stonehenge, have been unearthed.
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Note 27 --

Considering how slowly an electric charge 'leaks away' to space, it might not be correct to say that the atmospheric electrical charge dropped considerably after 3147 BC. It is more likely that the Earth experienced a large drop only in 2349 BC, when Venus made electrical contact. More on that in the following two chapters.

The blue stones of Stonehenge were re-installed at a structure at the end of the causeway (called Bluehenge) leading out from Stonehenge toward the northeast, which bends to continue to the southeast, meeting the river Avon. This has only recently been detected through stone chips left behind. The blue stones were later returned to Stonehenge.
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Note 28 --

The first temple at Jerusalem, built in about 900 BC, was oriented 6 degrees west of north, pointing roughly to the north Atlantic. Temple orientations, although admittedly late in antiquity compared to the date of 3147 BC, were tabulated by Rafael Kazmann, in "On the Orientation of Ancient Temples and Other Anomalies," in Aeon (1990), sorted by angle as follows.. 


   location    temple        deg:min  direction   date 

   Olympia     Jupiter       7:22     N of E      790 BC
   Jerusalem   Jehovah       6:0      N of E      925
   Girgentl    Juno Lacinia  6:0      N of E      690
   Megalopolis Castor        4:0      N of E      400
   Olympia     Juno          3:16     N of E     1445

   Megalopolis Hercules      0:0      N           470

   Tegea       Minerva       1:23     S of E     1650 
   Rhamnus     Nemesis       1:24     S of E      787
   Rhamnus     Themis        1:29     S of E     1092
   Lycosura    Despoina      2:11     S of E      650
   Corfu       Kadarki       4:39     S of E      875
   Selinus     Unknown       4:52     S of E      795?
   Ephesus     Diana         5:21     S of E      715
   Athens      Nike Aptersos 5:43     S of E     1130
   Thebes      Cabeiron      6:27     S of E     1160
   Athens      Minerva       9:05     S of E     2020 
   Megalopolis Jupiter Sot.  9:42     S of E      605

North of east, is the same as 'west of north.' South of east (east of north) makes no sense.
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Note 29 --

Book 11 of the "Chilam Balam" suggests that Mars, in its descent, disappeared behind the vapor dome seen in the far north (to "drill holes in the mountain"). This is of course a view from a very low angle -- from a latitude of 10 or 20 degrees north. -- totally unlike the view from Egypt at 30 degrees or England at 50 degrees latitude. As Mars approached Earth in line with the polar axis, it could easily have disappeared from view behind the dome of plasma rising above the north Atlantic.

I suspect Mars would not follow the path of the plasma stream to the Earth's magnetic north pole. Plasma streams do not move objects. Talbott has recorded how Mars would have looked when it went off axis (moved away from the disk of Saturn). Although the reason for the changes in the shape of the rosette of plasma streamers impinging on Mars (held to be impinging on Venus), is given as due to a change in perspective, the distances involved are just too great to suggest a change in perspective. But since Mars in its descent moved away from the disk of Saturn, a portion of the rosette pattern would not have been seen, since it would have flowed from Saturn to Mars from behind Mars.

Mars would look to be 'behind' the plasma mountain (or adjacent), as seen from a latitude of 10 or 20 degrees north and 90 degrees west, only if the vapor dome in the north rose to enormous heights, not just to the stratosphere, but thousands of miles up. This last I have already surmised.

Mars would have lowered and come to a stop, remaining perhaps a considerable distance from Earth. Mars is half the diameter of Earth, and even if seen at a distance of 20 Earth diameters (160,000 miles) it would have looked twice the diameter of the Moon today. Certainly all of its major features would have been clearly visible, and its satellites. (By comparison, the Moon is 250,000 miles away, and half the diameter of Mars.)

As I have pointed out, it took a minimum of 120 years to complete a lowering to Earth and a return to Saturn. Humans had plenty of warning that Mars was about to visit again. As Mars stopped in its travel toward Earth and reversed direction after some months, the efforts on the part of humanity was rewarded with this apparent warding off of the planet.
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Note 30 --

A collapsed (burned down) second story temple room has been found and identified among Vinca archaeology in Serbia (dated to about 3800 BC).
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Note 31 --

Marinas van der Sluijs notes the following with respect to the localization of mythology:

"The fact that people made so much effort to locate the gods of a mythical past in their own lands points to the suggestion that the gods were no longer present at the moment the transfer was made. And this is a conclusion rarely made, if not never before, but nevertheless quite much in line with the whole idea of localisation 'überhaupt.' In identifying the nearest mountain as the cosmic mountain of the gods, the nearest river as the river of the gods, and any tree similar to the cosmic tree as the tree of life, the ancients literally 'brought the gods down to earth' and would have succeeded, to their own satisfaction, in recovering the age of the gods."

-- [http://www.mythopedia.info]


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Note 32 --

Egyptian temple plans are a reflection (a mirror image) of the signs in the sky, rather than a 'projection.' A plan based on a projected image is used in the construction of henges in Europe. This disconnects Egyptian culture from western European Neolithic culture, except for the causeway design of European henges and Egyptian mastabas and pyramids, which are in all cases on the east or southeast side.
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Note 33 --

The reputation as the "Sea of Death" apparently dates from antiquity. The mass of decaying plant material at the bottom of the Black Sea still releases bursts of methane gas today, which dissolves into the water on rising. This reduces the density of the sea water at the surface -- enough to suddenly sink ships.

The surface current of the Bosporus flows toward the Mediterranean. A much lower current carries salt water into the Black Sea. A weighted basket hung off the boat into the lower current will drag the boat toward the Black Sea. This also seems to have been known since remote antiquity.
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Note 34 --

Gunnar Heinsohn writes...

"The first truly comprehensive compilation of flood sagas was written a hundred years ago. From Babylonia to Haiti, it listed eighty-eight texts. Forty appeared to be genuine pieces created independent of each other. Only twenty myths of this collection seemed to have traveled, i.e. were borrowed via diffusion. The rest were duplicates only exhibiting minor variations from other stories found in the same area. A decade later, seventy three genuine stories could be reported. Soon, the number of flood stories swelled to two hundred and sixty eight. Ten years later, five hundred deluge myths coming from two hundred and fifty nine peoples or tribes were estimated. Special studies were devoted to parts of the world of which the flood myth was claimed to be absent by the pioneering researchers: northern Asia, eventually, yielded twenty one texts. In Africa, two dozen myths could be located."

-- Gunnar Heinsohn, in the Conference CATASTROPHISM 2000, University of Toronto, Ontario, 1990.

Egyptian references to a massive flood are found in the Pyramid Texts as threats made by the dead pharaoh after he reaches the northern stars. Actually, as Leonard King wrote in ca 1917..

"The nearest Egyptian parallel to the Deluge story is the "Legend of the Destruction of Mankind", which is engraved on the walls of a chamber in the tomb of Seti I. The late Sir Gaston Maspero indeed called it "a dry deluge myth."

"The narrative ... betrays undoubted parallelism to the Babylonian and Hebrew stories, so far as concerns the attempted annihilation of mankind by the offended god, but there the resemblance ends. For water has no part in man's destruction, and the essential element of a Deluge story is thus absent."

-- Leonard King "Legends of Babylon and Egypt" (1918)

The Egyptians recorded a flood-like event, but it involved the slaughter of men by the goddess Hathor. She is calmed down by the Gods with the application of 7000 jars of red dyed beer, simulating human blood. The records are found in New Kingdom tombs, after 1500 BC.
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Note 35 --

The rains mentioned by Apollodorus equate his flood recollection to 2349 BC, not 3147 BC.

The "bearded man" is Saturn with a plasma instability of a series of toroids, looking like a puffy beard. This is the same fake beard also worn by the pharaohs of Egypt, and found on images in Mesopotamia (although the beard is added to a God who is obviously Jupiter). This Columbian snippet, which ties the Moon to a flood, also describes the flood-like event of 2349 BC. The Moon showed up near Earth soon after.
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Note 36 --

Details of information on a world-wide flood is taken partially from an article by Charles Ginenthal, "The Flood" in "The Velikovskian" (1994), and partially from other sources. The action of the oceans and translational waves rushing onto continents has been adjusted for the simple mechanism of the sudden release of an extremely high standing tide at the north pole, the north Atlantic, and the north Pacific. There is no need, as others, including Ginenthal, have suggested, of a polar relocation of the Earth and the translation of continents to different latitudes.

Saturn, with a mass 3000 times that of the Moon, would, even at a distance twice that of the Moon, exert a tidal pull 350 times stronger than the Moon does today. However, it would still be insignificant compared to Earth's gravity and the pull of Saturn would not suck water away from Earth, as was thought at one time. The formula below is Newton's F=(K m' m")/(r^2) using as the mass of Saturn 100 times the mass of Earth, and for the Moon 1/10th the mass of Earth.

0.1/(243000^2) == 0.0169 -- Moon
100/(409000^2) == 5.9 -- Saturn
1/(4000^2) == 625 -- Earth

The units have no sensible measure (and 10 exp -10 is not shown), and are only shown for comparison. Normalized to the tidal pull of the Moon, the numbers would be:

0.0169 == 1 -- Moon
5.9 == 349 -- Saturn
625 == 36982 -- Earth

If the Moon today can raise tides 10 to 20 feet high, then if we multiply by 350 we get a height of 0.5 to 1.5 miles for the Arctic 'tide.'

Variations in abandoned strand heights throughout the world have been measured from 100 to 300 feet, and vary largely. High abandoned beeches of course prove nothing except to suggest that the land has raised as a rebound from a glacier depression, which in northern Europe is as likely as a lowering of the level of the north Atlantic. The lost beaches we are looking for would all be under water instead. Archaeologically these can be found off the coasts of India and Japan (both with submerged man-made structures), but also very interesting are the dolmens and henges at the Atlantic coast near Carnac, which are now under water. These last were certainly not built before end of the last ice age.

Technically, and based on wholly current theories of tides, there would have been a counter-tide in the far southern hemisphere, due to a depression of the Earth's mantle. But only Antarctica and Chile in South America would have been effected.
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Note 37 --

There is no evidence of a hunter/gatherer population in most of India. These people may have been swept off the face of the Earth. Along coastal India there are many architectural archaeological sites deep below oceanic waters. See, for example, Graham Hancock, in "Underworld" (2002), who lists many underwater sites in India and Japan. Hancock places the blame for the submerged sites to glacial melting before ca 10,000 BC.
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Note 38 --

Although suspected of being wind blown and the result of glaciers grinding rocks to a fine dust, the actual source of loess remains uncertain. Glaciers do not grind rocks to silt, as terminal morains testify. Windblown dust does not remain unoxidized. Loess contains no organic material. The following is the 'accepted' understanding.

"Loess is mixture of silica and clay, with particle size ranging from 0.1 mm down to 0.005mm . Where loess is unoxidized, it has a greyish color, but may also be yellow, orange, or brown because of presence of ferric oxides. Deposits of loess occur in North America, Europe, Russia, Siberia, China, and also in Argentina and New Zealand...." -- D. A. Cyr, Annular Space Dust (1968), paraphrased by A. de Grazia.

"Loess is a homogeneous, typically nonstratified, porous, friable, slightly coherent, often calcareous, fine-grained, silty, pale yellow or buff, windblown (aeolian) sediment. It generally occurs as a widespread blanket deposit that covers an area of hundreds of square kilometers and tens of meters thick. Loess often stands in either steep or vertical faces."

"Loess is an aeolian sediment which forms by the accumulation of wind-blown silt and lesser and variable amounts of either sand or clay. Glacial loess is derived from either glacial or glacial outwash deposits, where glacial activity has ground rocks very fine. After drying, these deposits are highly susceptible to wind erosion, winnowing of their silts and clays, transportation of these sediments, and deposition some distance downwind from glacial deposits. The loess deposits found along both sides of the Mississippi River Alluvial Valley are a classic example of glacial loess."

"Nonglacial loess consists of silt-size sediments eroded by wind from either deserts, dune fields, or playa lakes. The prolonged accumulation of wind-blown volcanic ash can form loess. Some types of nonglacial loess are (1) volcanic loess in Ecuador and Argentina; (2) tropical loess in northeastern Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay; (3) gypsum loess in northern Spain; (4) trade-wind loess in Venezuela and Brazil; and (5) anticyclonic gray loess in Argentina. The thick Chinese loess deposits are classic nonglacial (desert) loess with their sediments having been blown in from deserts in northern China. The loess covering the Great Plains of Nebraska, Kansas, and Colorado is nonglacial desert loess. Nonglacial desert loess is also found in Australia and Africa."-- Wikipedia

The reader may recall the wide spray of sand resulting from the lightning bolts which pulverized the depths of the great Lakes in 10,500 BC. This looks to be a more likely source for the loess.
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Note 39 --

This text was written before the Indonesian tsunami event of 2004.
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Note 40 --

I suspect that the Moon was seen in an orbit about 4 million miles further from the Sun than Earth. At that distance, however, it would have looked like a bright star. Hesiod writes that the Moon showed up after the defeat of Kronos, but only after a very long time.

I suspect that after the fall of the Absu in 2349 BC (covered in the following chapter), an amount of dust, or perhaps larger rocks remained in orbit at considerable distances from the Earth, somewhere below the equatorial of Earth. This might represents the necklace set as a sign in the skies by the Sumerian Goddess Inanna. The remnant of the Absu is red, however, and Inanna's necklace is blue.
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Note 41 --

Some time in the past a Velikovskian researcher noted the existence of a textual record which claimed that Jupiter at one time was seen passing Earth on the wrong side, that is to say, on an inner orbit. I found this so preposterous at the time I read this, that I neglected to keep track of it. Here, however, is the instance of the Jupiter passing Earth on the wrong side. From the events of the 'battle of the Gods,' it becomes clear that Jupiter would have to be placed inside the orbit of Saturn at the time the two planets made electrical contact. Earth traveled with Saturn, but as both Saturn and Jupiter slowed in their orbital travel (which would cause them to be relocated to much larger orbits), the Earth, locked out of the newly reformed plasmaspheres now enclosing the remaining five planets constituting the Saturnian stack, continued forward and away from the two planets (as Venus did also).
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Note 42 --

Earth, on an inner orbit, would see Jupiter and Saturn initially disappear to the celestial west (that is, be passed up). If Venus was seen returning with an olive branch only after its second return near Jupiter (seen passing in front), it would suggests that Venus did not develop a plasma tail in glow mode until after it had rounded the Sun once. Venus apparently passed from behind the upper portion of Jupiter and its plasma before starting to orbit the Sun. That would coincide with the notion held by some Greek authors that Venus was "born of the skull of Zeus" (Jupiter). Venus appeared from behind the globe of Jupiter, rather than from behind the mountain shaped lower coma, because Venus had originally been rotating around the mass centroid of Uranus, Neptune, and Saturn, and thus much higher up with respect to Earth's initial orbital path. Today the orbit of Venus is only displaced from the Sun's equator by 3.6 degrees, which, except for Mercury, is the least tilt of any planet. In Appendix B, "Celestial Mechanics," I'll derive the vertical separation of the planets in 3147 BC from the current orbital inclinations, except for Mercury and Mars.
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Note 43 --

Earth would have immediately changed its orbit as soon as it was released from the grip of Saturn, again placing the Sun at one of the two nodes of its orbit. This accounts for the change in perspective on Jupiter (and on Saturn, as recorded in Egypt and Mesoamerica). It also accounts for the fact that the plane of Earth's orbit today still has the largest divergence from the Sun's equator. Earth was furthest below any from the orbits of the other planets.
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Note 44 --

See an endnote of Chapter 6, "Creation," for details of the satellites of Saturn. A count of seven neglects Phoebe and Iapetus, which are on extremely large and irregular orbits.
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Note 45 --

Plato's Atlantis is the only instance of the "Atlantis legend" in antiquity. If the Atlantis legend was current in Greece or Egypt, we would have heard about it from other sources. Although, "Hamlet's Mill" (1969) by Giorgio de Santillana and H. von Dechend recounts hundreds of versions of this legend worldwide -- of a land held up by a giant, a tree, or a river rising in the sky. The tree, river, snake, bridge, or giant at some time in the past was cut down, and the land sank into the sea. That can be placed at 3147 BC. Plato's date of 9600 BC is the weakest link in his story. An old man has to go home to think over what it was that he might have heard his grandfather tell others when he was a little boy. Plato actually places Atlantis in the Gulf of Guinea, west of equatorial Africa.
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Note 46 --

As related by Robert W. Bass, in "The Titus-Bode Law from 1766 to 1996" Pensee (1996), "Zecharia Sitchin, in "Divine Encounters" (1996), ... displays the drawings on an Assyrian cylinder seal which shows an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and shows Saturn with rings!" I have not seen this and wonder from what vantage point this was drawn.

[Image: Jupiter on a throne with a planet and 11 satellites]
Image: Jupiter on a throne with a planet and 11 satellites.

There is a seal image (above) which shows Jupiter enthroned, with an adjacent pointed star form, which most likely is Jupiter, ringed by 11 smaller round balls of different sizes. These are most likely meant to be the satellites of Jupiter, although there are two additional satellites in addition to the 9 which are normally easily seen. The graphic traditions for two dimensional surfaces in antiquity revolved on the depiction of recognizable detail without concern for actual dimensional relationships.

The depiction of an anthropormorphized Saturn (or Kronos) encircled by rings extends to Roman times. No other God is ever depicted as bound by rings. Somewhere I have seen a similar depiction of the atmospheric bands of Jupiter. But the banded head-dress of Marduk on Sumerian cylinder seals should be convincingly obvious.

[Image: Satellites of Jupiter]
Image: Jupiter with 11 satellites.

The adjacent graphic is a reproduction of the star and its 11 satellites (by others). The table below relates all the satellites of Jupiter to the depicted diameters of the spheres, except the dozens of tiny satellites discovered by space craft in recent years. Additional established larger satelites are shown separately below. 


           Distance  Radius    Mass
Satellite     (km)   (km)     (kg)   Discoverer   Date    comment
---------  --------  ------  -------  ----------  -----    -------
Ganymede   1,070,000    2631  1.48e23  Galileo      1610   9
Callisto   1,883,000    2400  1.08e23  Galileo      1610   8
Io           422,000    1815  8.94e22  Galileo      1610   7
Europa       671,000    1569  4.80e22  Galileo      1610   12
Amalthea     181,000      98  7.17e18  Barnard      1892   11
Himalia   11,480,000      93  9.56e18  Perrine      1904   4
Thebe        222,000      50  7.77e17  Synnott      1979   3
Elara     11,737,000      38  7.77e17  Perrine      1905   6
Metis        128,000      20  9.56e16  Synnott      1979   2
Lysithea  11,720,000      18  7.77e16  Nicholson    1938   10
Adrastea     129,000      10  1.91e16  Jewitt       1979   5

	Remaining satellites (mostly very far large orbits)

Leda      11,094,000       8  5.68e15  Kowal        1974   smallest
Pasiphae  23,500,000      25  1.91e17  Melotte      1908   too far
Sinope    23,700,000      18  7.77e16  Nicholson    1914   too far
Carme     22,600,000      20  9.56e16  Nicholson    1938   too far
Ananke    21,200,000      15  3.82e16  Nicholson    1951   too far

Comments: the last column lists the numerical representation in the diagram above. There are some discrepancies, such as, for example, the fact that Io (number 7) should be much closer to Jupiter than Ganymede and Callisto. On the other hand, Amalthea (number 11) and Thebe (number 3) are appropriately shown as much closer to Jupiter. But, again, Metis (number 2) and Adrastea (number 5) are sized right, but located too far from the star. But the graphical presentation is reproduced from records (which may have been verbal) dating from shortly after 3147 BC to perhaps 2950 BC, when these satellites would have been seen close up. As the Sumerian Flood Story (as retold in the epic Gilgamesh) has it, "the gods gathered like flies over the sacrificer."

In ca 2950 BC Jupiter would have entered the asteroid belt, obscuring the satellites for the next few hundred yaers. This distance is somewhat less (closer) than one third the distance Jupiter would eventually travel and so equivalent to being seen at three power magnification with a telescope, as Galileo used in his discovery of the four larger satellites.
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Note 47 --

Hesiod, in the "Theogony" (ca 800 BC). See the translation by Norman O. Brown, and especially the introduction by the translator, as published by The Library of Liberal Arts, Bobbs-Merill Co (1953). The "Theogony" recapitulates the period with which these pages deal, from the creation through the end of the "Age of the Gods."

The planet Uranus ("Father Sky") is misnamed by Hesiod, for he is the cloud-shrouded sky or, more likely, the duck seen therein with the egg next to the duck. He is thus the father of Kronos.
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Note 48 --

During the early years after 3147 BC, the Egyptians are uncertain to whom among the celestial apparitions they owe allegiance. The names of a number of "kings" come forward, of which King Narmer seems to have had some extended claims. His name-serekh is found throughout Egypt and the Levant as labels on wine jars and other products, destined for delivery to the temple at Nekhen. The name-serekh, Nar-mer, consists of the glyphs for "catfish" and "drill" (or "chisel").

The glyph for "catfish" has the shape of a toroidal thunderbolt, in all the instances I have seen. See for instance the illustrations of serekhs, accompanying the text "Dynasty 0" by Francesco Raffaele (2002) at [http://xoomer.virgilio.it/francescoraf/hesyra/dynasty0.htm]. In one instance this is depicted with a rope-like twisted body. The Nile catfish (there are a number of species) has only a two-pronged tail, but has the typical large feelers protruding from its head, making it look like a trident.

The "catfish" is the toroidal thunderbolt which Jupiter explosively launches toward the Titans and various objects in the asteroid belt. The "chisel" describes what the catfish shaped bolt does: it produces a spray of material like a chisel striking stone, something with which the Egyptians were familiar from their industry of stone jars and platters.
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Note 49 --

The orbits of the asteroids today are still very chaotic and many asteroids are on elliptical orbits. Frequently some of them will develop a cometary coma in moving from aphelion to perihelion. These objects are subsequently classified both as a comet and as an asteroid.
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Note 50 --

The main asteroid belt is located beyond the orbit of Mars and halfway to the orbit of Jupiter -- from about 2 AU to about 3.5 AU. Jupiter is at 5.2 AU. There are additional asteroids traveling within the space of the inner planets, as well as beyond Jupiter.

The belt is generally thought to be the remnants of a planet, sometimes called Krypton. A planet can blow up during a time of severe electrical stress when electrons rushing outward from the interior disrupt the lattice of the structure. Similarly, bolides nearing Earth often explode and fragment on reaching the Earth's ionosphere -- not the atmosphere. They are seen to fracture but are not heard.
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Note 51 --

The tridents shown in late antiquity are actually a depiction of what was seen in the skies in 685 BC. It is not likely that the plasmoids of the period directly after 3147 BC would be acurately recalled and depicted.
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Note 52 --

The largest piece of missing evidence in the "impact theory," which suggests that all the various craters on asteroids, satellites, and planets are due to impacts from other bodies, is the existence of the impactors. Not a single asteroid is moving at anything except a crawl with respect to any of the other asteroids. There is little difference in the speed of travel of objects traveling at the same distance from the Sun.

Gravitational forces between the Earth and an approaching asteroid will accelerate the asteroid to a speed on the order of 25,000 miles per hour. The Moon will accelerate an asteriod to about 5000 miles per hour. Two asteroids meeting under conditions of gravitational attraction, however, will just ding each other.
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Note 53 --

Although Osiris is probably Jupiter, looking like a draped figure, Osiris may also be understood as Saturn. The "eye," which is lost, might be the whole Saturnian Polar structure with the rings outlining the eye, in effect the "Eye of Ra." The eye might also be the pupil of the eye -- that is, Mars.

The lost genitals of Osiris are the only body parts not retrieved by Isis for burial. Most likely the image of the severed genitals is Mercury with its erect plasma tail. This suggest that Mercury should probably be closely associated with Jupiter in the era immediately after 3147 BC. A twist on this tale will turn up much later, after 600 BC, and derived by a completely different people (the Hittites of Anatolia), as the progress of the gestation and birth of the Greek God Dionysus, who is rescued by Zeus from the death of his mother, and who implants the fetus in his thigh.

The removed genitals are attributed by Hesiod to the castration of Uranus (the primordial "Father Sky") by Kronos (Saturn). They "floated for a long time," says Hesiod, spilling blood on the sea, from which eventually arose the Moon. The "sea" is the "waters above" -- the Absu, not the Earth's ocean. In this case a rather confused, but correct, connection is made between Jupiter and the Moon, which will be detailed in a later chapter.
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Note 54 --

The Turin Papyrus of ca 1200 BC gives Mercury (Thoth) a 'lifetime' of 3126 years. The extremely long life assigned to Mercury may be due to his changing responsibilities over time and certainly due to his constant visibility. The statement also needs to be understood as the lifetime up to that time, that is, up to ca 1200 BC.

In the second millennium BC, when in effect Mercury was the only remaining active planet, his duties (as Thoth) were extended to include creation, and thus his lifetime needed to be counted from the very beginnings. If the Turin Papyrus indeed dates from ca 1200 BC, then Mercury was certainly prominent in the night skies. Subtracting 3126 from 1200 BC places the birth of Mercury in ca 4300 BC. This is roughly equal to my estimate (4200 BC) of when Saturn went nova and the coma dropped to reveal its satellites and companion planets.

The dual small circles of stone within the large Avebury henge and a number of other henges, might suggest two planets below the south pole of Saturn. We have no idea of why these would have been offset from each other to give this particular depiction, or even if the depiction of two objects seen below was intended in the construction of the henge, especially because the whole of the circular sets of standing stones apparently date to after 3100 or 3000 BC.

As a sub-polar Saturnian planet, Mercury would have remained with Saturn (like Mars), not to be released until Saturn reached the asteroid belt, and Saturn's plasmasphere shrank to exclude both Mars and Mercury. Both of these planets would have immediately started to 'fall' toward the Sun, and thus established orbit with the Sun as one center, and the asteroid belt as the aphelion of the orbit.

The word "released," as used above, is probably incorrect, but sort of sums up what might have happened. A change in the shape of the plasmasphere of Saturn (as it entered the asteroid belt) is certain -- the change in form will be seen and recorded for the planet Jupiter.

Ev Cochrane, in "Martian Metamorphoses: The Planet Mars in Ancient Myth and Religion" (1997), identifies Apollo (as the planet Mercury in antiquity) with the planet Mars (under various names like Aries or Nergal) in that they both have reputations for destructiveness and are seen as the cause of plagues. The cross-identification of attributes and miss-identification in antiquity is likely in that apparently both planets regularly moved together from deep space into the region closer to the Sun, overriding the orbit of Earth in the process (as I will establish in later chapters). Homer still deals with Apollo as Mercury in the 7th century BC.

Velikovsky, in an unpublished document, "Mercury" (at varchive.org), notes in a footnote that Mercury was active in the second millenium BC, and quotes from the Bhagavatamrita that "Budha [Mercury] became visible the 1002nd year of the Cali yug." The Kali era (Cali yug) started in 3102 BC. The 1002nd year is 2100 BC, and thus after the contacts by Venus in 2349 BC and 2193 BC. According to Velikovsky (but unconnected by him to this date), Abraham Rockenbach, in "De Cometis Tractatus Novus Methodicus" (1602), places the Tower of Babel incident in 2060 BC.

In addition to a number of distinctive physical (or symbolic) differences between the Mars and Mercury, Cochrane also identifies Mercury with the mythical Hyperborean people who lived in the far north. This is believable, since Mercury wound a much tighter path around the Sun, such that on summer nights, on approach of morning, it could be seen to disappear at a low angle in the northeast (over a period of days), the same location from where the Sun would then rise. This may have something to do with the shift of the name 'Apollo' from Mercury to the Sun, in addition to the fact that today, and probably since the seventh century BC, the path of Mercury remains within a few degrees of the Sun.
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Note 55 --

About the Duat, E. Budge wrote..

"In the XIXth Dynasty we know that the Tuat [Duat, the Underworld] was believed to be situated not below our earth, but away beyond the earth, probably in the sky."

-- E. Budge, quoted by Cardona, 1994.

In fact we can be certain that in antiquity the Underworld was held to be located in the south night sky below the equatorial, consisting initially of the circles of the equatorial rings around the Earth. The bright path of the ecliptic was considered a celestial river, congruent with the "waters above" of the earlier polar apparition. The ecliptic was located above and below the equatorial, as a tilted hoop in the sky, so that part of the ecliptic dipped into the Absu or Duat (which stood to an altitude of less than 50 degrees in Mesopotamia or Egypt). The ecliptic is the later river Styx of the Greeks, "encircling the lower world." That the lower (southern) heavens would continue under the Earth probably must have seemed obvious.

At the latitude of Mexico city and the Yucatan (about 20 degrees north), the planets on the ecliptic rise and plunge into the ocean at a steep angle. Mesoamerica, as a result, always places the "Underworld" below ground.

In the tropics, closer to the Earth's equator, the Duat would have stood almost straight up in the sky. With the rings and spokes it would have looked like a spiderweb suspended above and stretching from horizon to horizon. It is little wonder, then, to hear that the creation God of central African tribes is a spider.
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Note 56 --

The concept of a glowing zodiac occurs in Chinese and Mesoamerican sources. It is also identified as the river Styx of Greek mythology, which has to be navigated or crossed before entering the Underworld, and, in Egypt, as a similar river to be crossed by the dead Pharaoh.

In encyclopedias dating from the 19th century AD, the glowing ecliptic is still identified as the "zodiacal light," and note was made that this was last seen extending across the sky in about AD 1840. Entries in encyclopedias with later publication dates identify the "zodiacal light" as the Sun's "afterglow" ("gegenschein"), a glow due to sunlight on dust particles in outer space, but seen only shortly before sunrise or after sunset.

In the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition (ca AD 1911), it is noted of the "Zodiacal Light" that "until recent time was never observed except in or near the zodiac; hence its designation." The article notes that the zodiacal light was 2 to 3 degrees wide, and was not the 'gegenschein' of the Sun at dawn or sunset. It further notes the investigation of "... George Jones, who spent eight months at Quito, Peru, at an elevation of 9000 feet ... [who] saw the zodiacal band at midnight as a complete arch spanning the sky ... sometimes so bright as to resemble the Milky Way." (Since I first wrote this, the content of the 11th EB became public domain.)

It would make sense to have the zodiac glowing, even if just from reflected sunlight, if millions of asteroids had been ground to dust -- as had happened when plasma arcs struck these rocks floating in space. The silicates split asunder as the electrons broke their bonds to rush through the material to the location of a plasma contact point. Neptune and Uranus had passed through the asteroid belt to start the process of electrical arcing to these objects. Saturn would have followed to do the same. And last the gigantic planet Jupiter passed through. This last was especially noted by Hesiod.

The dust was ionized and repelled into space electrostatically. We saw this also when the space probe "Deep Impact" fired a projectile at Comet Temple-1 in 2005.

Thornhill has identified this process as identical to electric arc machining. In vacuum tubes this process (minute particles breaking away from the cathode) is known as sputtering. Under plasma conditions these minute particles, when they find themselves in a plasma environment, will become encased in electrons at glow mode. This has been observed in plasma tubes and described since early in the 20th century. Basically, this is what made the ecliptic glow.
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Note 57 --

"Curious Manifestations of Ascending Rockets" from William R. Corliss' "Handbook of Unusual Natural Phenomena" (1977), quoted from "Marine Observer" (1964), AC Browne, et al. All three ships were located off the coast of Africa, north of the equator, after sunset. The rocket mentioned below was fired during the daylight hours, 1400 hours EST, from Cape Kennedy, Florida. Rockets bound for outer space move in an easterly direction.

[Image: Rocket exhaust at night]
Image: Rocket exhaust seen at night.

First report from "British Oak," Teneriffe to Monrovia. Captain A. C. Browne. Observers, the Master and Mr. P. M. Edge, Chief Officer.

"27th November 1963. A point of light of about 2nd magnitude with an elliptical glow of approx. 3 degrees diameter and concentric circles of light was observed through binoculars at 1925 GMT. It was first seen bearing 230 degrees at 18 degrees altitude and disappeared 4 min. later bearing 190 degrees, altitude 8 degrees. The sky was cloudless and the atmosphere clear."

"Position of ship: 24 degrees 27' N, 17 degrees 14' W."

A second report from "Ripon." Captain Smith. On passage to Freetown. Observers, the Master and Mr. G. W. Brown, Chief Officer.

"27th November 1963. At 1926 GMT an illuminated body was observed bearing 270 degrees, altitude 30 degrees. It appeared at first to have a suffused glow around it, but as the object moved parallel with the ship's course, the glow assumed the definite form of a tight spiral of blue-white light. The spiral expanded to a maximum radius of about 5 degrees with about 12 turns visible at one time when bearing 200 degrees, altitude 20 degrees. The size afterwards diminished until the body faded from sight bearing 155 degrees, altitude 12 degrees, at 1931. As the object moved in azimuth, it also appeared to be gyrating about a centre in an anticlockwise direction and to vary in brilliance. At its brightest the object had a brilliance less than Venus and greater than Altair; its track passed between these two bodies."

"The whole phenomenon gave the impression of looking into a conically formed spring and was indeed a most sensational sight. We can only conjecture that it was an artificial satellite 'gone wrong' or passing through a cloud of meteoric dust."

"The accompanying sketches show how the phenomenon appeared to the observers. There was a cloudless sky and bright moonlight at the time."

"Position of vessel: 10 degrees 5' N, 15 degrees 59' W."

A third report from "Pennyworth." Captain I. Gault. Middlesbrough to Monrovia. Observers, Mr. J. H. Edwards, 2nd Radio Officer, the Master, Mr. J. Nielsen, Chief Officer, Mr. J. MacKenzie, 3rd Officer, Mr. T. Walker, 1st Radio Officer, and the Chief Engineer.

"27th November 1963. At 1900 GMT for approx. 5 min. a bright object having a magnitude greater than any other star or planet was seen in the sky. It appeared to be stationary in the west at an elevation of 40 degrees, for about 2 min. It then moved off rapidly in a SE'ly direction, disappearing about 2 min. later. The bright light from the object radiated outwards, like the ripples from a pebble thrown into a pond; at first in concentric circles, then in a spiral and finally in concentric half-circles. The general impressions of the phenomena seen are shown in the accompanying sketches. The object was definitely not a meteorite, and the course was too erratic for an earth satellite."

"Position of ship: 7 degrees 39' N, 14 degrees 13' W."

The "Marine Observer" comments on these reports as follows..

"What was seen by the ships was undoubtedly an American rocket, 'Centaur 2,' launched from Cape Kennedy at 1900 GMT on 27th November 1963. The times and positions indicated by the three ships agree very closely with calculated values. The odd appearance cannot be explained precisely but it is no doubt associated with the fact that the rocket when seen was still under power or had very recently been so."

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Note 58 --

To what angle above the southern horizon the rings would have been seen can be estimated if some assumptions are made about how far the rings might have extended into space.

[Diagram of the angle of view of the Absu]
Image: The angle of view of the Absu.

What is of interest is the extent of the rings closest to the earth which cannot be seen at some latitude, and the angle of view of the end of the rings. The diagram above is composed of two triangle, marked "A" and "B". The length of the sides of triangle "A" can be found from..

(side a)/sin(angle a) = (side b)/sin(angle b)

The distance from the center of the Earth to the intersection of the horizon line, marked "D" (where "L" is the latitude), is..

D = 4000 / sin((90-L)/deg)

Some estimates can be made from what we know of how many rings could be seen at various latitudes. There are three data points:

The region of the rings not seen (because it falls below the horizon) is as follows. It should be understood that there would have been no rings within the atmosphere, the stratosphere, and the ionosphere. Thus the first band would have been located at least 200 or 300 miles above the surface of the Earth.

4000 / sin((90-L)/deg) - 4000

Note that this offhand suggests that the 9 rings seen in the Yucatan probably represent the maximum visible at latitudes close to the equator. The third side of triangle "A" marked as "N" can be found from..

N = 4000 * sin(L/deg) / sin((90-L)/deg))

At this point the angle of view can be found if some estimates are made of the extent of the ring structure (marked "V"), for triangle "B" would be defined by two sides and an included angle. The angle of view is found from the tangent of the angle..

(V * sin((90+L)/deg)) / (N-V * cos((90+L)/deg))

Thus the angle is equal to the arctangent of this. The results can be found for two latitudes used above (skipping Poverty Point), and for various values of the extent of the rings, as follows (neglecting the region not seen).. 


     Comparing Memphis (30 degrees) with the Yucatan (20 degrees)

	        height of Absu in the sky 
  extent of     --------------------------
  the Absu	30 degrees 	20 degrees	add'l view *
  --------      ----------      ----------	----------
  20,000 mi     54.6 deg	66.2 deg	21.2 % 
  10,000 mi     49.8 deg        62.6 deg	25.7 %
  8000 mi       47.7 deg	61.0 deg	27.9 %  <---
  6000 mi       44.4 deg	58.1 deg	30.9 %
  4000 mi       38.8 deg	53.1 deg	36.9 %
  2000 mi       27.6 deg	41.3 deg	49.6 %

  using for 30 degree latitude (for 10,000 mi): 
  arctangent(10000*sin((90+30)/deg) / (2309 -10000*cos((90+30)/deg)))/rad
  using for 20 degree latitude (for 10,000 mi): 
  arctangent(10000*sin((90+20)/deg) / (1456 -10000*cos((90+20)/deg)))/rad

The two additional rings seen in the Yucatan represent a 28.6 % increase (2/7th) in the number of the rings which were seen. A difference of 28 percent between the view at Memphis and in the Yucatan would occur if the rings extended 8000 miles above the equator. There probably were no visible rings close to the atmosphere, as is true also for Saturn today.

I have included 10,000 miles and 20,000 miles to demonstrate that even extensive rings will not visually approach the equatorial. (The equatorial rises to 60 degrees from the south horizon at 30 degrees latitude, and rises to 70 degrees at 20 degrees latitude.)

Thus the Absu in Mesopotamia (and the Duat in Egypt) rose about 48 degrees above the southern horizon, somewhat more than half way up into the sky. In the Yucatan the "House of Nine Bushes" would have risen 60 degrees into the sky (later to be recalled as the location of Tula or Tollan, the "City of Reeds"). In both these cases the rings would have partially obscured the ecliptic.

There are also Mesopotamian references to 7 streams of the Absu, the same number as in Egypt. India, extending from 30 degrees latitude down to 7 degrees, recorded 9 rings (or streams or rivers).

I have neglected Poverty Point (describes below) in this comparison, because I am not sure if the concentric berms at Poverty Point would represent the Absu, tempting as this conclusion might be. The six ring structure at Poverty Point may have been constructed a thousand years after the fall of the Absu, and is likely to be a schematic representation of the heavens, since it faces east, the first location of Jupiter when the Earth on its orbit passes Jupiter on its orbit. The reduction of one ring at Poverty Point from the seven rings of the Duat is, however, consistent with the decrease of two rings between the Yucatan and Memphis.

The count of rings in the "Chilam Balam" is not consistent. It is possible that seven rings should be counted, based on some references to "the seven seas" and certainly the fact that nearly all of the ballcourts constructed, although nearly 3000 years after 2349 BC (when the Absu disappeared), are referred to, and constructed as, consisting of six steps or six stairs (thus seven levels).

It looks as if the number of rings which could be distinguished increases with latitude, as the viewing angle became more obtuse, despite the fact that the rings would be lower in the sky. Thus in Nordic countries and in Tibet, China, and Siberia nine rings are counted. It may also be that the Absu was conformed to a number which had nothing to do with reality.

[Image: Naqada and Cook Islands redition of the Absu]
Images: Left: Naqada II period Egyptian pot showing 6 or 7 ring areas. Right: A 19th century conceptual diagram of the nine heavens above Earth, plus six Underworld regions, Cook Islands. From www.thunderbolts.info

Rens Van der Sluijs offered two additional examples (although unidentified), one being an Egyptian Naqada era pot (3500 -- 3200 BC), and another as a native cosmological diagram recorded by a missionary to the Pacific Cook Islands in the 19th century. The Cook islands are at 20 degrees south latitude, and would afford a view of the Absu as consisting of nine rings, similar to what was seen in central Mexico at 20 degrees north latitude. However, the Cook Islands were not settled until about AD 300. At the time the Absu last existed, the inhabitants lived in the Bismarck Archipelago or New Guinea at about 5 to 10 degrees south latitude. (MOTD at www.thunderbolts.info, April 17, 2008)

The fact that the rings do not come together in the east and west in the Cook Island diagram, could be attributed to the fact that this reconstruction was made 4000 years after the Absu fell. But for the Naqada period vase, where the rings are also shown equally spaced from left to right, this is not explained. The number of rings of the Naqada pot count to 11 or 12 if the lines demarcate separate rings, but to six or seven if each ring is understood as depicted with two edges. The failure of the rings to come together may be because in the Nile valley the horizon directly east and west are obscured by a rise of the landscape.

[Image: Artist rendition of Poverty Point, Louisiana, concentric berms.]
Image: Artist rendition of Poverty Point, Louisiana, with six concentric berms in ca 1350 BC. The rings face east, at the edge of the Mississippi River, before its course relocated. The very large mound to the west represents a bird with spread wings.

In North America, in the state of Louisiana, at Poverty Point (33 degrees north latitude), starting ca 1350 BC, a group of villages builds an amphitheater as a model of the Absu, consisting of six concentric rings of ridges, broken by five aisles radiating from the center. Poverty Point in northern Louisiana is three degrees further north than Memphis in Egypt, from which we have the measure of the "seven rings" of the Duat. Thus in Louisiana one fewer of the rings would be seen. The opening of the semicircles faces east, with the center (where a bird mound is located) aligned about 15 degrees south of west (thus pointing northeast), probably in expectation of the easterly rising of Jupiter.

I should also note that the existence of the Duat also explains the Egyptian phrase of "the Nine Bows." The "Nine Bows" have been used in Egyptian inscriptions as a shorthand for all the enemies of Egypt, that is, the people of foreign lands, but in particular with reference to Nubia. Egypt extended geographically from 30 degrees north latitude to 24 degrees at the first cataract at Elephantine (Aswan). The territory further south was Nubia, extending another 4 degrees to Kerma (19.6 degrees latitude). Kerma was a major site since about 3000 BC and the ancient capital of the Kingdom of Kerma (or Kush) since 2400 BC.

At Elephantine the Duat would have stood in the skies at about 56 degrees up from the south horizon, and at Kerma some 61 degrees. This last is the same latitude as Mesoamerica, where, by the table above, nine rings were seen. Thus the appelation of the "Nine Bows" or "the land (or people) of the Nine Bows" probably entered the Egyptian vocabulary by 3000 BC. After 2349 all the rings disappeared except one and the phrase "Nine Bows" simply meant the foreigners of the "land of the Nine Bows." A reason for the continued assignment of "Nine Bows" to Nubia is apparently also because the Nubians were skilled bowmen who were hired into Egyptian armies at later dates. In the Middle Kingdom of Egypt (ca 2050 to 1492 BC) the phrase had come to mean "enemies."
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Note 59 --

Dwardu Cardona, in "The Original Star Of Dawn," a talk presented in 1994(?), spoke about the Duat and identified their number from Egyptian sources..

"...a clue as to its real nature [of the Duat] comes to us from its description as having been divided into regions each of which, among other things, was called 'qerert' -- an Egyptian word that means 'circle.'"

He continues with an identification of these circles as the rings of Saturn before 3147 BC, a concept with which I disagree, and which is inadvertently made clear in the following quoted text.

"...besides being called 'qerert,' each division of the Duat was also referred to as 'arret,' that is 'a hall.' What is of interest here is that, according to the 'Papyrus of Nu,' these halls of the Duat were seven in number, which, among other things, explains the plurality of circles associated with Ra's habitation."

Ra or Re, which means "sun," was at first the name of the creator God Saturn at the north horizon. But after 3147 BC the name was transfered to Jupiter seen in the ecliptic, first on a mountain, and later riding his ship across the circles of the Absu (for which see a following chapter).
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Note 60 --

In the Andes of South America the doorway of the Absu in reflected in the ubiquitous U-shaped ceremonial centers. For all practical purposes, the Absu framed most of the planetary displays seen in the southern hemisphere, except the battle of the Gods after 3147 BC. Later events mostly happened over the northern hemisphere, and were thus seen in the southern hemisphere only within the doorway of the Absu or in the space above.

There are additional references to the Absu among Mesopotamian seals, for example, showing the Sumerian Enki, God of water, shedding water and fishes from his shoulders, in effect framing a doorway.

Additionally, there are many mentions of "the gates of heaven," or similar phrasings, in the Bible and classical texts. In Job, Chapter 9, the Lord is He who "... alone spreads the heaven ... and [makes] the chambers of the south...." In the King James Version the "chambers of the south" is usually translated as "constellations of the south." But "chambers of the south" is the Egyptian term for the Duat.
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Note 61 --

To have the same apparent diameter (a half degree) as the Moon at the eventual location of 5.2 AU from the Sun, 480 million miles from Earth, (using the tangent of 1/2 degree, with the Earth located at this time at 0.79 AU), the coma would have been..

(sin(0.5/deg) / cos(0.5/deg)) * (5.2 - 0.79) * 93,000,000 = 3,500,000 miles in diameter.

Plutarch's information can be verified, at least to within an order of magnitude. Near the end of the asteroid belt, 215 million miles from Earth (at 3.1 AU, with the Earth located at 0.79 AU at that time), the same-size coma of Jupiter would there have looked about two times as big, thus twice the size of the Moon. Plutarch had suggested "trice."

Considering that the coma of comets a few miles wide at times exceed the diameter of the Sun, 864,000 miles, these estimates do not seem unrealistic for Jupiter, which has a diameter of 88,700 miles.
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Note 62 --

In Egypt, as Isis, she is understood to have traveled up and down the celestial Nile (the ecliptic) in search for Osiris' body parts after 3147 BC. The Egyptians initially identified Venus as Neith, a warrior goddess, and later applied the names Hathor and Isis. The plurality of names probably stems from the religious democracy of Egypt, and would thus be names specifically in use at the temples of differing nomes.

The Sumerian and Akkadian Goddess Inanna is Venus, and narratives from 2300 to 2000 BC have her on repeated adventures, including visits to Lower Earth, that is, the Underworld ("Inanna's Descent to the Netherworld"). At each of seven gates (the rings of the Absu) she is stripped of some item of clothing, and eventually she is hung from a hook in the underworld. This implies that the orbit of Venus extended beyond the orbit of Earth, and at least periodically Venus was seen as an outer planet and visually slowed to a stop, what is known as 'retrograde motion.' If at that moment Venus still had a visible tail, it would stretch away from the Sun as well as Earth, and thus would not be seen. I will suggest in later chapters that the orbit of Venus did indeed overrun the orbit of Earth in antiquity, at least until 1492 BC.
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Note 63 --

Robert Fritszius points out the lack of small craters, and the relatively few large craters in an essay, "Is Venus a New PLanet?" presented at the American Astronomy Society in 2007. See [http://www.datasync.com/~rsf1/vel/New/Venus.htm].

Because craters are the cathode burn marks of plasma in arc mode, small craters would not be expected on any planet with an extensive atmosphere, since the plasma strikes would be dissipated by the atmosphere. The same is true for Earth and Saturn's satellite Titan.
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Note 64 --

Robert W. Bass in 1974 pointed out that the original estimates of planetary orbital stability were made by Laplace in 1773, and have been quoted without question for 200 years. Bass writes..

"Laplace's theorem allegedly proving stability of the solar system (1773) was shown to be fallacious in 1899 by Poincare; in 1953 dynamical astronomer W. M. Smart proved that the maximum interval of reliability of the perturbation equations of Laplace and Lagrange was not 10 exp 11 years, as stated in 1895 by S. Newcomb, but actually at most a small multiple of 10 exp 2 years."

-- Robert W. Bass "Can Worlds Collide?" Pensee (1974)

A few hundred years ("a small multiple of 10 exp 2") is vastly different from 100 billion years ("10 exp 11"). As suggested from the little data available from antiquity, it might be much less than that. The Earth / Moon system apparently became stable within a period of about 30 years. (See the next chapter.)
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Note 65 --

Milton Zysman first proposed something like this, in 1994 at a Velikovsky Symposium, for the era after 1500 BC when the Israelites followed a pillar night and day after the Exodus from Egypt. Zysman assumed this would be an extensive aurora. But auroras depend on gases in the Earth's atmosphere to achieve thier colorful effects. The effect comes about through high energy electrons in cyclotron motion colliding with low pressure Oxygen, Hydrogen, and Nitrogen atoms. The aurora only extends about 60 miles up from the surface of the Earth. An intense aurora will extend up to 600 miles in altitude in a red glow from sparse Oxygen ions above the atmosphere. But even 600 miles is not enough to be seen worldwide, although intense auroras tend to be placed at lower latitudes. Above the 600 mile altitude the effect of the incoming electrons would be invisible, unless, as a plasma, it switches to glow-mode.
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Note 66 --

The year glyph occurs already in predynastic times ca 3100 BC to 3050 BC, but, as far as I know, not before 3147 BC.
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Note 68 --

Ballcourt A-IIb at Copan in Honduras was built during the sixth or seventh century AD, and soon remodeled. The remodeling preserved three central alley markers, representing the mythological burial places of the father and uncle of Hunahpu and Xbalanque, the heroes of the "Popol Vuh." Similar markers are found at Yaxchilan, Cerros, and other locations. But at Copan the carvings are well preserved, and can be read. Two mythological characters are shown flanking a ball in each marker. Only the ball of the central marker in in play (between Hunahpuh and One-Death); the balls of the north and south markers are suspended by a twisted cord from overhead beams.

[Image: The ballcourt markers from Copan]

Image: The ballcourt markers from Copan, ca AD 700. After Friedel and Schele.

A tree is shown on the outside area of the north and south markers. The tree of the north is labeled "Nine Successions;" the tree of the south is labeled "Seven Successions." If, as I suspect, the trees represent the plasma plumes of the north and south, then we have here an inventory of how many times the Axis Mundi reappeared. It would be appropriate to reappear more frequently in the north, since the north magnetic pole would facilitate a larger influx of electrons.

I can only list seven events where this might have happened -- 3147 BC, 2349 BC, 2193 BC, 1492 BC, 1440 BC, 747 BC, 686 BC -- each corresponding to a known change in the Earth's orbit. The dates of 1440 BC and 686 BC are less certain. The date of 685 BC could be added. I also have the suspicion that there might have been two additional changes in the orbit of Earth between 2349 BC and 2193 BC, which have remained unrecorded. All of this information will be developed in following chapters.

The name "Nine Successions" is one more 'succession' than noted in the records at Palenque, where the first northern plasma plume is called "north-eight-house."
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Note 69 --

With reference to the Maelstrom, Giorgio de Santillana and H. von Dechend, in "Hamlet's Mill" (1969), reproduce, without much comment, two early maps, the 16th century "Carta Marina" (Olaus Magnus) and an illustration from Athanasius Kircher's "Mundus Subterraneus" (AD 1665). The first map places the Maelstrom off the southwest coast of Norway; the second map places it further north. Both locations are relatively close to land. In the 16th century the north magnetic pole was located south of Spitsbergen and west of Norway.

[Carta Marina map and Mundus Subterraneus map]
Image: Carta Marina map and the Mundus Subterraneus map. After Giorgio de Santillana and H. von Dechend, "Hamlet's Mill" (1969).

Santillana and von Dechend offer other world-wide mythological references, but most are descriptions seen from afar, and likely to represent events before or directly after 3147 BC. They vaguely note that the whirlpool is mostly located in a northwest direction from Greece (or north by northwest from western Europe). In the end, with no physical model available to them, Santillana and von Dechend suggest that the wirlpool is a representation of the precession of the ecliptic, although they admit that this model "does not, of course, help to understand any single detail."
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Note 70 --

The series of 7 dates which I have suggested may need to be altered, so that 747 BC and 685 BC are added. However, the strong association with Venus (Hathor) in Egypt is probably because of five repeated electrical contacts with Venus starting in 2349 BC. The sequence of events for 2349 BC is detailed in the New Kingdom "Tale of the Celestial Cow," (recorded in some five tombs) which recapitulates the contact of 2349 BC and was the start of four additional contacts which ended the Middle Kingdom of Egypt in 2193 BC. More on this in Chapter 9, "The Career of Jupiter."
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Note 71 --

When Marinus van der Sluijs put out the book "The Mythology of the World Axis" (2007), I started to investigate if plasma plumes might have been sighted repeatedly in antiquity. Even Nonos in ca AD 450, in his poem "Dionysiaca," recounting the events of 685 BC, makes casual reference to a world axis, the axis mundi, writing, "Even the axis, which turns in the centre, began to totter through the whirling ether."

It was the information from Mesoamerica (noted in the text) which convinced me that this was so. Thinking about this, one soon realizes what the plasma phenomena could also be described by the directional trees mentioned repeatedly in the Maya "Chilam Balam." In March of 2008 I added sections titled "return of the axis mundi" to various chapters. Then a year later vd Sluijs wrote a piece for the Thunderbolts.info website (March 29, 2009), presenting information from a press release from UC Berkely, which stated that NASA had discovered the (northern) plasma plumes, on the night side of Earth, bending up into the magnetosphere, and extending 40,000 miles up -- as I had predicted about a year earlier. I did not initially propose two plasma plumes.

[Image: University of California at Berkeley, space tornadoes]
Image: THEMIS mission tracks electrical tornadoes in space;
Andreas Keiling/UC Berkeley.
"The idea of a giant radiant pillar rising up from the earth to the sky would have sounded too fantastic to be true - until recently."

"In April of 2009, NASA's fleet of THEMIS satellites detected vast electrical tornadoes about 40,000 miles above the night side of the earth, on the boundary between the solar wind and the earth's magnetosphere."

"Since the 1990s, a handful of 'plasma mythologists' had assumed the former existence of a stupendous, luminous sky column that was visible from almost every part of the earth. The evidence for this was the prominent place allotted to this axis mundi or 'world axis' in detailed cosmological traditions from hundreds of cultures dotted around the globe."

"The column was widely portrayed as a prodigious mountain, tree, rope, bridge, ladder or pathway and was universally characterised by notions of centrality, vitality, vorticity, and luminosity: the conspicuous position it occupied in the firmament earned it an association with the 'navel', 'heart' or 'centre' of the world; its agility made it seem as if it was imbued with life, like a giant divine creature breathing life into the surrounding cosmos; its filamentary extremities were subject to warping and twisting, while the column itself was seen to be entwined by spiralling filaments frequently compared to snakes; and the splendour of the light it emitted repeatedly invited comparison to the sun and to lightning."

"The difference between the mythical column and the tornadoes observed today appears to be one of scale only: an unusually strong bombardment of charged particles onto the ionosphere could have triggered the formation of a single collimated Birkeland current, of a semi-permanent nature, that was susceptible to a type of plasma instabilities known as 'Peratt Instabilities'."

-- Rens van der Sluijs

I agree with vd Sluijs that in a higher dark mode or in the initial level of glow mode the two separate 'tornado' columns would merge, and form a single pillar. I doubt if the column ever completely switched to arc mode except at its contact point with the ocean and above, although perhaps higher up in the Earth's atmosphere, for the concept of 'braziers' are expressed in Egypt, and 'flames' or 'lights' in the "Chilam Balam."

I do not agree with some of the forms that the polar plume is being equated to here -- the mountain, ladder, and "the 'navel', 'heart' or 'centre' of the world." These forms, and others, are to be associated with the plasma connection from Saturn under conditions of plasma instability of extreme conditions (as noted in the text) -- and under parameters of a very large plasma connection extending over millions of miles, not thousands, and sustaining shockwaves which took months to form and propagate. A plume 70,000 or 100,000 miles long would not respond in that manner.

Vd Sluijs fails to mention that the plasma plume would have been seen rotating from the east to the west every night -- "waving in the wind."
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Note 72 --

We may think of Mars as a small planet, but when it appeared above Earth in this era it would have been gigantic, exceeding the previous apparition of Saturn in size. This happened not just in Egypt, but throughout the world, as signified by the fact that within a hundered years of when Mars was last seen 'on his mountain,' pyramids construction starts everywhere. That suggests (as, for example, Patten and Windsor have done) that Mars continued to be seen periodically nearing Earth, but not getting close.
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Note 73 --

There is a boom in population after 3000 BC in Mesopotamia, which cannot be attributed exclusively to agriculture (which had been long established), or the fact that farmers tend to have more children. Population growth seems to have been very limited during the "Age of the Gods" and earlier -- almost a zero growth rate. One wonders if radiation from the plasma stream (which included UV, radio, X-rays, very high energy atomic particles) did not inhibit births. In Sumer, in the second millennium BC, there are extensive laws (and records) governing adoption -- perhaps a holdover from previous times.

Exponential growth, however, often masks slow beginnings. We might at least acknowledge a new beginning for humans after 3147 BC.
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Note 74 --

It is currently presumed that there were kings in Egypt before the first dynasty, often presented as 'Dynasty 0' and including kings named after a number of animals -- Scorpion, Catfish, and others. But these names are only known from label inscriptions, and although they might point to some local chiefs or chief priests of temples, it is very doubtful if these were kings of a dynasty. It is difficult to determine anything for sure since all the graves were robbed in antiquity. None of these predynastic kings of Egypt are acknowledged in the official chronicles. Additional notes on the predynastic kings may be found in the Appendix A, "Chronology."
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Calculations are in Unix bc notation, where ^ denotes exponentiation; the functions (a)rctangent, (s)ine, and (c)osine use radians; angle conversions to radians or degrees by the divisors rad=.017+ and deg=57.2+; other functions are shown as f( );
units: million == 1,000,000; billion == 1,000,000,000;
one AU == 93,000,000 miles.

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