Recovering the Lost World - Part 6: The Polar Sun and Creation

Recovering the Lost World,
A Saturnian Cosmology -- Jno Cook
Part 6: Creation and the Polar Sun.

[Table of Contents]
A short [introduction] here.
A short [chronology] here.
$Revision: 23.5 $
Contents of this chapter: [Starting from Chaos] [An Unexpected Flood] [The Egg] [The Creation] [The Eye of Ra] [Petroglyphs] [The City on the Horizon] [The Celestial Display] [The God Visits Earth] [The Start of Time] [The First Land] [Depicting the Past] [Horus the Hawk] [The Gifts of the Gods] [Living in Paradise] [Endnotes]
This chapter will deal with the swirling cloud seen above the north horizon since about 5000 or 6000 BC, the appearance of an egg in the sky after 4900 BC, the 'creation' event of 4200 BC, and the following "Age of the Gods" which lasted to 3147 BC. Some of the material from the previous chapters (which you may have skipped) is repeated here. The dates used in this chapter were developed in the previous chapter and in more detail in Appendix A, "Notes on chronology."
Starting from Chaos

By 6000 BC farming was already widespread in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and certainly in the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, in some cases dating from 9000 BC. That is when an amorphous white shape stood above Earth in the north, described as "mists" and "swirling clouds." Little was remembered of this period, and thousands of years later the claim is made that, at the beginning, there were no stars and no Sun, that the stars did not come into being until after the Gods had left, 3000 years later. It was universally held that the past before 'creation' was a long period during which the skies were in chaos and featureless turmoil.
In support of a long time during which the Earth was enveloped in clouds and mists, I suggest a perusal of any of the 'creation myths' from around the world. These all describe a swirling sky and specify that this condition lasted a very long time. The creation myths hold that there was, in effect, no history before the 'time of creation.'
See especially the work of Dwardu Cardona, in "God Star" (2006), which traces these ideas from diverse mythological sources. Cardona presents descriptions which suggest that the 'chaos' consisted of a cloud-like mass floating either in the sky or on an ocean. Associated with this hovering cloud shape was a twisted column of clouds or vapor reaching down to Earth to the north horizon. Cardona notes that this 'creation god' column was named Hurakan in parts of Central America. Cardona also notes that the episode of darkness and the obscuring cloud are found in a different order among the legends of different people. This is to be expected, since these are memories dating back to 10,500 BC. [note 1]
The placement in time of the obscuring cloud would reflect the location of Earth with respect to the lower plasma expulsion of Saturn. The previous chapter suggested that Earth would have entered the outer edge of the plume some time after 8,500 BC, traveling from an equatorial location of Saturn to a sub-polar location. As Earth entered the dense portion of the lower plasma plume of Saturn, the view of Saturn would have been obscured. Before that time, and afterward, the Earth would have been located away from the denser portion of the plasma, and Saturn would have been seen, or, at least, the coma surrounding Saturn would have been seen.
Even after the relocation of Earth to below Saturn, it was not ever exactly below the south pole of Saturn, that is, there was not a single line extending through the axes of rotation of Saturn and Earth. It would probably have take hundreds or thousands of years before the spin axis of Earth and Saturn would line up. Additionally, considering the variations in the plasma stream ('instabilities') which will show up over the next few thousand years, the Earth might have been rocked about like a little boat in a storm in response to a changing electrical field. [note 2]
By about 6000 BC, there was apparently a continuous plasma discharge in glow mode from Saturn to Earth, for the descriptions of a "swirling cloud" in the sky is frequently accompanied by the description of a stream reaching Earth, although this may also reflect the impression of the electron streamers from the southern ball plasmoids to the sphere in the north. If, instead, there was an actual plasma contact from Saturn, this would have been seen as a contact with the North Atlantic or Greenland.
After 5800 BC the orbit of Earth had became established well below the equator of Saturn, and progressively moved toward Saturn's south pole. Earth remained in this sub-equatorial and sub-polar orbit for over 2700 years. One indication that Earth was located below Saturn after 5800 BC, and in contact with a stream of plasma, is that a warm and moist period started in 5800 BC and extended through to the end of the "The Age of The Gods," 3100 BC. [note 3]
I would suggest that it was the plasma contact from Saturn to Earth which changed the climate favorably. I suggest that a warm and wet climate would result. This long period of warmth has never been equaled. The plasma arc in contact with the northern ocean would produce stupendous amounts of water vapor, resulting in the upstreaming of water vapor and the downpour of rain and snow from far above the stratosphere -- adding to the glaciation of Greenland as a secondary result. It would produce worldwide atmospheric weather conditions unlike anything experienced today. The plasma contact would change the wind direction, increase the moisture, and moderate the climate of Earth everywhere away from the plasma contact. It would only be later, after the arc has ceased, that the climate would become colder again. This is, of course, conjecture, and contrary to contemporary weather theories. [note 4]
An Unexpected Flood -- 5600 BC

As I have previously pointed out, when the Earth dropped below the equatorial level of Saturn after about 9000 BC the climatic zones of the northern hemisphere and the tropics changed location, moving north by 10 to 20 degrees latitude. The tropic zone of Africa moved to the southern and central Sahara, and the dry zone moved further north. The climate in southern Europe, north Africa, and the Middle East worsened between 9600 and 9400 BC (the end of the Younger Dryas), and again from 6200 to 5800 BC, becoming cold and dry. The cold temperatures are open to question, but the lack of rain is certain.
Much of the drop in temperature is today blamed on the release of fresh water into the North Atlantic from the melting North American glacier. This worsened climate affected farmers in the Middle East especially, for there the rains disappeared completely. Nearly all of the Levant was abandoned for periods for up to 400 years. The same drought depopulated large areas of southern Europe. [note 5]
Along the margins of the Black Sea and its river valleys, however, farming had continued during the drought experienced in Europe and the Levant after 6200 BC, and had concentrated there. The Black Sea region was climatically isolated from the surrounding land areas because it formed a depression 500 feet below the Mediterranean sea level and the adjacent land areas, and even more so because it was ringed on three sides by mountains. The region was thus unaffected by the dry winds from the west and south. The Black Sea was also, at that time, a fresh water lake, unconnected to the Mediterranean, fed by glacial runoff from northern Europe. The region provided fertile lands in the river valleys and deltas of the Danube, Dneister, Dnieper, and Don rivers on the north margins, and in additional river valleys on the south margins flanking the Anatolian highlands where, incidentally, grains were first domesticated. [note 6]
In ca 5600 BC, the Bosporus cracked open and the Black Sea was flooded with a fury of Mediterranean salt water dropping 500 feet into the depression, a process mostly completed in a few months. It is likely that externally-induced seismic activity caused the Bosporus to open up. Most likely the gravitational forces exerted by the arrival of Earth underneath Saturn were responsible. Once started, the flooding was unexpectedly rapid, moving miles per day in the low-lying river valleys. Details of this event will be incorporated much later into the story of a world-wide flood by the farmers and fisherman of the Black Sea.
William Ryan and Walter Pitman, in "Noah's Flood" (1998), describes the evidence for the sudden flooding of the Black Sea through the Bosporus in 5600 BC, and the diaspora of the mixed-farming (farming, hunting, fishing) peoples and languages, including (probably) the Indo-European languages, to Europe and Central Asia, and (possibly) Semitic languages to Asia Minor and Mesopotamia. Europe was repopulated by the farmers fleeing a catastrophic flooding of the Black Sea. By 5400 BC they had reached as far as Paris.
Parts of the initial waves of people spread to Anatolia, the Levant, and Mesopotamia. The warmer and moister climate throughout the world after 5800 BC allowed farming to return to the Middle East.
Those who dispersed to Central Asia return on horseback a thousand years later, as the armed Kurgan nomads and herders, and establish themselves throughout Europe. After 2000 BC there are additional movements (of Indo-European speakers) from the Indus valley into the Middle East (Iran and Anatolia).
The flooding of the Black Sea is well established and well dated. The secondary effect of the flood was the migration of people away from the Black Sea region, and thus the spread of agriculture into Europe and central Asia. Indo-european languages show up as far east as the western borders of China. An overflow of Indo-european speakers from central Asia entered India and Persia.
Despite the title of the book by Ryan and Pitman, "Noah's Flood," this was not Noah's flood. Noah's world-wide flood will happen in 3147 BC, although the Bible will place it in 2349 BC.
The Egg of Creation -- 4900 BC

By 5800 BC brighter skies had returned, although possibly the Sun was not yet seen regularly. The swirling 'cloud' remained, but after 900 years, in about 4900 BC, and at a location surrounding the north pole of Earth, a circular shape became visible through the swirling clouds, a globe ten or twenty times the diameter of the Moon. [note 7]
The notions of misted skies and of endlessly churning water overhead, which we have from almost all sources, might reflect experiences covering thousands of years. The globe stood, inactive except for a daily rotation about the north pole, for another 700 years. The globe looked white. This was the planet Saturn enclosed in a plasma in glow mode. All the tales recall that when the first God emerged, it was as a smaller object -- an egg.
Although in some legends of creation only a globe is remembered, other sources recall the figure as a duck or a goose, having noticed the planet Uranus, which was displaced from the central axis of rotation of the Saturnian planets (as noted in the previous chapter). Uranus still looked like the head of a bird -- with a beak and with a neck seemingly connected to the globe of Saturn. Thus any number of creation legends hold that the creator god was a (white) duck or goose. The Egyptian heiroglyph for Ra, the creator God, is a goose. The sacred animal of Brahma, the Vedic creator God, is a goose. From about 5000 BC egg-shape designs are added to pottery decorations in eastern Europe. [note 8]
In Greek mythology, as in Egyptian mythology, the globe is the original creator God -- Ouranus ("Father Sky") in Greece, Amun ("Hidden") in Egypt. Even before the Goose of Creation laid its egg, or before the Egg of Creation hatched, the imagery must have been understood as being alive -- even though nothing much happened for 700 years -- for it moved in a circle around the pole star on a daily basis and additionally the plasma connections would have grown and moved throughout the year as Saturn moved alternately closer and more distant from the Sun on its orbit. [note 9]
The egg, the real egg, not the body of the duck or goose, is Mercury, enclosed in a glow mode plasma, but distinct enough from Saturn to be noticed as a smaller object seen below the duck or next to the duck.

Image: A polar alignment of Saturn, Mercury, Mars, and Earth. The relative sizes of the planets are correct, but the distances between the planets may not be. Neptune, Uranus, the plasma surrounding these, and the plasma connection to Earth are not shown.

Creation -- 4200 BC

After the initial period of chaos, and after looking like a duck with an adjacent egg, Saturn went nova and started to blaze like a sun in about 4200 BC. Saturn flared up, threw out an enormous amount of matter, and developed a corona, that is, it lit up like a sun. Initially the globe (egg) seemed to split and light up, and bright circles appeared at the periphery. The glow-mode coma collapsed and disappeared. The mass ejection became the rings with which Saturn remained marked. Venus was expelled from Saturn and started to rotate far beyond Saturn's rings. Lightning flashed continuously from the planet to the rings, as it still does today.
So then the sun rose. In the 16th century Maya "Popol Vuh" the sun rises directly after the darkness of the Younger Dryas ended in 9000 BC. But to have a newly rising sun dispel the darkness makes narrative sense.
"The sun was like a person when he revealed himself. His face was hot, so he dried out the face of the earth."

The "sun" of course rose no more than about 20 degrees or so above the north horizon. The "Popol Vuh" continues..
"..when the sun had risen just a short distance he was like a person, and his heat was unbearable."

This text here suggests that perhaps Earth was relatively close to Saturn initially, and distanced over the next thousand years. The 'Sun,' as noted, rose only part way.
"..it is only his reflection that now remains."

The Aztecs also had a notion that the present Sun seen in the sky was only a mirrored reflection of the actual Sun. The source for this came from the same set of ancient documents. As the "Popol Vuh" claims...
"As they put in the ancient text, 'The visible Sun is not the real one.'"

It was suddenly light during the day and during the night. This constituted the start of a period of continuous light, which some creation myths claim as following the period of darkness. Actually, of course, the considerable darkness of the Younger Dryas was separated from the period of the nova event of Saturn by over 4000 years.
"The name of the water of chaos was Nun. It was from Nun that Ra created himself, rising up on the first piece of land -- the primeval mound (Benben) out of the water lily (lotus) blossom, born from the world egg, or as a /bnw/ bird who then found and landed on the mound."
-- Gary Fletcher, "Zep Tepi" [http://www.users.bigpond.com/MSN/gary_fletcher/zeptepi.html]

Saturn was now seen clearly in the skies over the northern horizon, as were Uranus, Venus, Mercury, and Mars, plus their satellites. This event was recalled throughout the world as the start of "The Age of the Gods." It was universally held that humanity was witness to this creation event. The date when Saturn lit up can be derived from the Sumerian "King List," which I will detail in the next chapter. [note 10]
The glow mode plasma which had encompassed Earth, now reduced to a single column in arc mode, with a bang. The change to arc mode must have caused a tremendous noise to be heard throughout the world. A late Egyptian source of the Third Kingdom relates .. [note 11]
"Amun initiated creation, in association with his sacred animal, the goose. He is called the Great Honker, who gave a great screech which stirred the inert cosmos into action. He is also called the Great Cackler -- the creative energy in the form of a goose which carried the cosmic egg from which all life emerged."
-- Ogdoad of Hermopolis, paraphrased

This is the sound of an electrical arc striking, followed by the sounds of a sustained electric discharge. In one of the Egyptian creation epics (as well as a large number of other tales), God creates himself by his own spoken word. Spoken words were capable of great power for the Egyptians. John 1:1 is one of the last evocations of this notion from antiquity. [note 12]
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God."

Another source depicts the creator God in coitus with Mother Earth, penetrating her "fifty times" and eventually moving away, never to lie with her again. Read that as individual arcs, which are as likely as a sustained arc discharge. (This may sum up a thousand years of celestial events.) We see this today (on a larger scale) in pulsar stars -- acting as relaxation oscillators.
David Talbott has traced the sequence of events from Egyptian iconographic and literary sources. At first only a globe shows. At some point the globe splits -- that is, a line forms horizontally across the globe. "The egg cracked," say the records, and they go on to describe the further sequence of events, involving a change in color and a differentiation of the top and bottom half. It is the primordial Yin and Yang of Chinese creation myth. Vedic sources relate the same splitting of the egg. [note 13]
The line which showed when 'the egg split' is the first of an equatorial mass expulsion which will create the rings of Saturn. As Saturn now goes nova, the glow mode coma collapses, and a smaller sphere, the actual planet in arc mode plasma discharge, appears. Many myths clearly differentiate between the egg form and the blazing planet as if these were two Gods with differing names.
It would be suspected that the line representing the rings of Saturn, located at its equator, was initially seen at an angle other than from directly below. Over time the view changes and the rings are seen from below their plane so that they now look like wings or like rivers of fire surrounding the globe. This implies that the alignment of Saturn and Earth changed over time. [note 14]
Image: Saturn with Mars and Earth

In its position below Saturn, the Earth now rotated around the Sun below the Sun's equator, so that the Sun continually remained in the northern hemisphere of Earth. Seasonal variation would have been slight, the days long, and, as was recalled at a later time, "fruit ripened all year long." This period, lasting to 3147 BC, constituted what is known as "the Age of the Gods."
The Eye of Ra

Mankind is now met with a gigantic circular shape in the heavens above the north pole, encircled in oval rings, with a stream connecting it to Earth. And the image reveals Mercury as a white iris with the darker shape of Mars as the pupil of what now looks like an eye staring down from above.
Image: "Wedjat" -- the Eye of Ra

An image from Egypt, called the "Eye of Ra," captures what was seen in the sky -- Saturn as an eyeball with a iris (Mercury) and pupil (Mars) and with the eyelids and eyebrow defined in almond shaped lines above and below (the rings as seen from below at a slight angle) with plasma in glow mode shaped to a point away from the Sun by the Solar Wind (this is uncertain). It is a well known image, with what looks like an triangular leaf-like form hanging from below the eye, and a feather-like swirl drawn sideways from the lower lid away from the nose, ending in a ball. The plasma discharge from the equatorial region of Saturn (in effect from the region of the rings), stretching away from the Sun, may have becomes the line of makeup drawn from the outside corner of the eye across the cheekbones in the later depictions of pharaohs and gods. (Although this last effect might be recalled from a much later time.) [note 15]
Talbott and Thornhill suggested that the leaf-form of the Eye of Ra is Mars with a plasma discharge shaped as a sword or knife. I don't agree with this. I think the pupil of the eye is Mars or Mercury. At any likely separation between Saturn and Earth, however, Mars would visually have been reduced to a speck. But with Saturn in arc mode discharge, the much larger Mercury would have been dark, for from Earth only the shadow side of Mercury would have been seen. [note 16]
I think the leaf-form is the planet Uranus. In the Upper Paleolithic (27,000 BC to 10,000 BC) this was the head of the Venus figurines, initially close to Saturn, but seemingly distancing from Saturn after 17,000 years ago through 9,500 BC with a change in perspective. This resulted in the long-necked figurines of that era with the beaked "bird mask."
Uranus has its spin axis nearly in the plane of the ecliptic -- that is, the planet is on its side, with its north pole dipped 8 degrees below the ecliptic. The axis of the magnetic pole of Uranus would probably have been in nearly the same position, although today is is about 60 degrees away from the spin axis. Since the north magnetic pole of Neptune, located below Uranus, lined up with the south magnetic pole of Uranus, the head of the figurines always tilted forward. The plasma discharge from Saturn would have landed at the south pole, with the north pole receiving only a secondary stream of plasma, accounting for the 'beaklike' bird mask of the later figurines. If seen from a distance, Uranus would have seemed to rotate only very slowly, once with each circuit around the Sun.
As the orbit of Earth changed to fall entirely below Saturn, the planet Uranus would be seen from a changed perspective, looking as if placed next to Saturn, still with its plasma stream from its south pole pointed down toward Saturn. Seen from Earth, the plasma streaming from Uranus was understood as hair. In classic predynastic images, about 3100 BC, it is the hair of the captive held by the pharaoh who is about to club him (using Venus and its tail as a mace). The Maya "Chilam Balam" calls Uranus the older sister of Oxlahun-ti-ku, Saturn.
The pointed plasma outflow extending from Uranus to Saturn may have become the model for the celt -- the polished stone axe -- of western Europe during the European Neolithic (after 4200 BC) and into the Bronze Age (to 1500 BC). These axes are next to useless for cutting down trees although they would hold their own as maces or curmudgeons. Archaeologists call their owners the "battle-axe people," even though we have no evidence of battles. The tomahawk (sagaris) does not appear until late in the Bronze Age in the steppen region of central Asia. It looks like the stone celts became 'must-have' luxury articles and an index of wealth. A thriving business in the manufacture of very pretty celts developed in late Neolithic England and the polished stone axes are often included in senseless abundance as gifts to the Gods among grave goods.
Image: The Narmer Palette of 3050 BC, Egypt. This is a dedicatory cosmetic palette found buried beneath the floor of the temple of the Falcon at Heirakonpolis (Nekhen) in Upper Egypt. The back side is shown. This was at one time thought to represent the unification of predynastic Egypt.

The swirl and ball of the "Eye of Ra" represents Venus, expelled from Saturn at the moment of creation, and still connected with a plume-like swirling plasma stream. This feather-like symbol of Venus is used for the head-dress insignia of some of the Gods of Egypt -- as a feather ending in a circular shape at the top. (These might also represent the Earth's polar plumes -- the axis mundi -- discussed in the following chapter.)
Alternately, it will become the cobra form (the 'uraeus'), always part of the crown of the pharaoh. It is also, of course, represented as the mace with which the pharaoh 'smites his enemies,' as in the Palette of Narmer dating from 3100 BC, and other tags to grave goods. The 'enemy' obviously is Uranus. [note 17]
The image of Venus with a curved plume of plasma extending toward Saturn, also becomes depicted as an ibex with wildly spiraling horns enclosing an egg -- the globe of Saturn -- seen as pottery decoration in eastern Europe and the Levant, and much later in Scythian ornaments.
The swirling Venus and its tail may also be the model for that strange Bronze Age personal ornament, the torque. Torques are composed of twisted strands with balls at the ends. They are worn around the neck, just as Venus and its swirl of plasma encircled the head or neck of the God in the skies above. We know these primarily from the European Bronze Age of ca 1500 to 800 BC (made of twisted gold wires). They may have had an earlier counterpart of organic material. [note 18]

Image: The plow and ibex, carved in a section of the 90 feet tall Grand Menhir at Carnac, 4000 to 5000 BC. The dotted portions continue on other segments of the broken menhir.

The two symbols external to the eye -- Venus with its swirl and the hanging sword of Uranus -- also show up early in European iconography as the ibex and the plow (or celt) inscribed on pottery, but also carved on the face of the Grand Menhir at Carnac (dated to 5000 to 4000 BC). [note 19]
To the Egyptians the "Eye of Ra" represents the completeness at the beginning of time -- the "one-ness" at creation. The symbol first appears in the fifth Dynasty (ca 2300 BC, among the "pyramid texts") of the Old Kingdom. By 1100 BC the constituent parts of the symbol (the corner of the eye, the pupil, the swirl of Venus, etc) will come to represent a fractional notation (1/2, 1/4, 1/8, etc) as the 'parts' of the 'one-ness.' Egyptian mathematics of multiplication and division will remain imbedded in a cumbersome fractional notation for the next two thousand years.
The Polar Configuration

What did the Polar Configuration look like to the humans below? Let me first point out that conditions changed continuously, probably even on a seasonal basis. At first Saturn stood blazing like a sun in the sky above the north horizon. But this did not last. It probably diminished to a red glow, or even the aspect of a quiet and cold planet. And if at one time an arc connected Saturn with Earth via Mercury and Mars, this was substituted for with plasma in glow mode, and at various levels and with various effects.
From the vantage point of Egypt or Mesopotamia, Saturn would have represented a blazing globe about 30 degrees up from the northern horizon, with a diameter of about 5 or 10 degrees -- ten to twenty times larger than the Moon. (At a later time, when the Earth had receded from Saturn, the globe in the sky would be much smaller.) A continuous series of flares could be seen rising from the edge of the globe. Surrounding the globe there were a number of rings, probably also ablaze. These rings were likely seen as ovals, crossed by lighting flashes, and interrupted by the moving shadow of Saturn. (For the first time in thousands of years the Sun was also seen.) [note 20]
Well outside the rings, to the left of Saturn and 'above' (in the standardized image), a white globe hung suspended and attached to Saturn with a swirl of plasma. This was Venus, and would (with its own coma) have had a diameter somewhat smaller than the Moon. I suspect that Venus may have rotated about Saturn in a synchronous orbit and in the same direction as the Earth, so that it too would seem to stand still in the skies.
From the vantage point of Earth the planet Uranus was seen to the right and 'below' or 'above' Saturn, because it was displaced from being directly above Saturn. Uranus looked close to Saturn, and no larger than Venus, even though in actuality the planet was located a considerable distance above and is nearly four times as large as Venus.
Centered on Saturn was a dark spot. This was Mercury and Mars looking like the iris and pupil of the eye, but in actuality located perhaps a million miles below Saturn and separated from each other. Impinging on Mars were four bundles of plasma in arc mode, seemingly from the edges of the Saturnian globe, but in actuality simply coming from the space further above. At times the four bundles would change to three or to five. At other times changes in the electrical field of Saturn (and the Sun) would cause discontinuities in the streams, causing them to look like a swastika. At times of extreme electrical conditions the streams would divide into 14, 28, or even 56 bundles.
The reason the bundles impinged at Mars in arc mode is because, unlike Mercury, which had a large coma supported by its atmosphere (and possible magnetosphere), Mars could only offer a cloud of suspended dust to isolate itself from the surrounding electrical environment. The plasma stream directed toward Earth would be in dark mode at the location of Mercury, but tightened into glow mode bundles on nearing Mars, and went to arc mode at the surface of Mars.
The plasma stream continued from below Mars to Earth. It probably left the lower half of Mars as sporadic discrete arcs, resulting in blistering the lower hemisphere of Mars with thousands on thousands of cathode craters.
On approaching Earth the stream of plasma would have been coalesced to a single column or a twisted intertwined column by the Earth's magnetic field, and struck the North Atlantic at the location of the north magnetic pole, where it would have thrown up a stupendous bank of vapor. The plasma stream thus looked like the stem of a plant, with Saturn (with the petals of Mars) looking like a sunflower on top. On nearing Earth the stream took a bend to land at the north magnetic pole. The location of the contact point with Earth would remain unmoved for any point of view on Earth, but the portion located 20 or 30 Earth diameters above the Earth (the limit of the Earth's magnetosphere), plus all of the stem up to and including Saturn (and its planets), must have looked like it was moving in the wind. [note 21]
The stream looked also like a river connecting Saturn to Earth, and would have looked almost the same width for most of its length, because it broadened near Saturn.
The whole apparition, initially separated from Earth by a half million to a million miles (two to four times as far as the Moon is from Earth today), but eventually at a distance of 3 million miles, looked much closer than it was in reality, especially because it was relatively low on the horizon. Details of Saturn and Mars could be clearly seen (and Mercury sporadically). The satellites of Saturn could be distinguished and seen traveling around the planet, and were counted by a number of peoples. The satellites of Mars also could be seen, even though they were quite small. Details of Venus (as with Mercury) were shrouded by a coma or by a dense atmosphere, as is still true today for Venus. Uranus, with a liquid exterior and largely enclosed in a coma, was featureless.
Petroglyphs

The plasma stream connection between Saturn and Earth represented the most impressive display because it showed the most variability and often reshaped itself into geometric patterns, looking like a leafed tree, a puffy beard, or a standing stick-figure man.
The plasma connection to the Earth looked like a stream of water, entwined snakes, rotating twisted ropes (Birkeland currents), or a circle of bright columns (in arc mode). In the nature of a plasma stream, it was always alive, always changing, although it could be expected that the various forms would take months to form. As the flow of current varied, it assumed many different shapes, looking at times like a stairway or even a set of stepped arrow heads. The 'stairway' form and the related 'arrow head' form have been observed in experimental discharges (lasting only milliseconds) and can reliably be scaled up in size and extended to much longer periods of time. The images show up in myths (and in petroglyphs) on all the continents. The plasma stream connected to Earth at the magnetic pole, not at the geographical north pole. Where the plasma stream touched Earth a gigantic cloudbank arose in the North Atlantic and enormous auroras played at the edges. Thus it looked like a tree rooted on a mountain at the Earth, but swayed away from this location further away from Earth. [note 22]
The differing shapes were due to instabilities lasting for months and were probably only infrequently identical. The instabilities were caused by the changing response of Saturn to the Sun's electrical field as Saturn moved closer to the Sun and further away again over the year. (Saturn and the Earth were most likely on elliptical orbits.) The plasma stream from Saturn probably represented 1,000 million amperes and may have delivered fifty trillion kilo-watts per second for a thousand years. [note 23]
A plasma instability is a deformation of the plasma stream, which otherwise has the simple form of a conduit. In arc mode the conduit might consist of a circular bundle of continuous electrical arcs. An instability looks like a shockwave traveling through the bundles, deforming the stream into a series of stacked toroids or a number of other forms.
An instability results from a change in the current level being carried by the plasma stream. This would occur as Saturn moved further away from the Sun and back, as would happen if the planets were on elliptical orbits around the Sun. In either case the instability might last for months, certainly giving the petroglyph artists who recorded the prior southern plasma column plenty of time to execute a design. For the northern plasma column a period of months would also allow the stabilization of the iconography.
The millions of petroglyphs -- of very complex shapes -- throughout the world, initially carved after 8300 BC to depict the southern Peratt Column (see the previous chapter), might have been augmented with the views of the plasma column in the north. Or not. But the new entity in the north did not require a vantage point high up on a cliff face. Unlike the southern plasmoid which was difficult to see above the equator (most of the Earth's landmass), the northern apparition was easily seen by almost everyone.
Petroglyphs have a remarkable identity over such diverse areas as the southwestern United States, Northern Europe, Saharan Africa, Asia, and Australia. Although the rock carvings had long been identified with the plasma discharge of Saturn by Talbott and others, the involvement of Anthony Peratt (of Los Alamos National Laboratory) with the Saturnians eventually allowed clear identification of the images. Peratt has, since his first contact with the Saturnians, investigated some 4,000,000 petroglyphs from worldwide sources and claims about half of the petroglyphs do not represent any known imagery except plasma instabilities.
Peratt has identified the cliff-side petroglyphs as representations of a south pole plasma stream dated to long before 5000 BC. There is every reason to believe that a plasma stream from the north would be subject to all the same forms of instabilities as the earlier Peratt Column in the south, but there would now be no reason to climb cliffs to get a view. Starting in 4200 BC, we would expect to see an entirely additional set of rock carvings to appear worldwide, mostly the same forms as before, but from a new vantage point. But we do not, and probably because the apparition in the north did not dip below the horizon, because Earth was now almost directly below the south pole of Saturn. Additionally, humanity was no longer confronted with strange objects traveling along the overhead beams of electrons to the south. There were also some obvious conceptual difference between the objects in the far south -- which never reshaped themselves -- and the planet and their satellites in the north, which were obviously individual moving objects -- alive as well.
We should distinguish between the plasma contact in arc mode and in glow mode. The contact with Earth started (probably) in glow mode, and seems to have lasted a very long time. Then came the stupendous arc, with the flare-up of Saturn. We have no idea of how long the arc lasted, although it may have been hundreds of years. But most likely the current density decreased progressively over time as the electrostatic charge of Earth built up and Earth relocated further from Saturn. As the current density decreased, at some point the plasma stream suddenly switched back from arc mode to glow mode. The Mayan "Book of Chilam Balam," written in Colonial times, notes the order of events:
"Then it was that fire descended, then the rope descended, then rocks and trees descended."

In low level arc mode and high level glow mode it took the form of a twisted rope. The "rocks and trees" were part of the displays in glow mode -- plasma stream instabilities.
High density plasma streams tend to separate out into 28 or 56 bundles (this is even seen at galactic levels). In higher amperage arc mode a section of the stream can take the shape of lighted bundles arranged in a circle, especially noted in the construction of henges of northwestern Europe, which replicate the 56 bundles. The builders were located close to the earthly contact point, and had a point of view which looked directly up along the axial alignment of the plasma stream as it bent away from the magnetic north pole. The same count of 56 separate bundles of the arc are represented in petroglyphs world wide. Once you catch sight of the core of the electron beams in arc mode, anything beyond disappears from view. It is the 56 brilliant dots which them become the apparent source of the plasma -- rather than a view of Saturn.
The arc to Earth might also have extinguished and restarted again, with a sustained connection in glow mode during the intermediate intervals. I'll suggest in a later chapter (and Appendix A) that the re-ignition of the plasma in arc mode was understood in Mesopotamia as the heavenly assignment of new rulers of Earth.
A common side view of the shape assumed by the plasma stream was a shaft with a series of seven or nine disks, initiated as toroids (doughnut shaped rings) which flattened out and turned up at their outer edges. These are the seven heavens of the Bible and Chinese mythology and the djed pillar of Egypt (with only three disks). The "tree" form shows up in the earliest Mesopotamian seals and sculptures, as the "pillar of heaven" or the leafed "tree of heaven" surmounted with a globe. The steps to heaven are frequently reflected in the design of stepped pyramids in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica, and in Chinese pagodas. However, the look of the Absu or Duat, with its seven rings (at about 30 degrees north latitude), and periodically looking like seven stair steps in the east and in the west, when the shadow of the Earth extended across all of the Absu, might represent a more solid basis for the 'stairs to heaven.' [note 24]
The interpretation of the display in the sky in antiquity depended in part on the viewing perspective of people at differing latitudes on Earth, and how close they were to the termination of the plasma stream where it made contact with Earth. But there were many common elements. It is the snake which will gnaw at the roots of the tree to bring down Valhalla, and the snake which nests in the Sumerian Goddess Inanna's Huluppu tree. It is the entwined serpent-necked animals of the Palette of Narmer (called 'serpopards'). It is the Peach tree of Chinese mythology, seen in the northwest. Here too is the image of the Caduceus: two snakes climbing to a circular Heaven -- a Heaven with outstretched plasma wings on either side. The winged disk becomes a later Egyptian image representing Horus and Mercury. One Indian source at a later date calls the plasma column a swizzle stick, "stirring up creation." Nordic tales identify it as a tree atop of which the Gods live.
To the people living much further north than the Mediterranean, the contact of the plasma stream near Earth would have looked different. Both Celtic mythology and the Eddas often describe the plasma stream as a bridge between Earth and the 'Other World.' [note 25]
Norse legends call it an "inverted tree" with the roots at the top and branching near the Earth. This is very probable because, on hitting the cloudbank above the contact point, or perhaps even on hitting the atmosphere, the plasma stream would most likely have broken up into separate strings -- not unlike lightning. [note 26]
The plasma stream from the heavens was accompanied by endless celestial noise as the Earth's atmosphere and crust produced a calliope of sounds in feedback to vibrations from the column. "The Gods taught us music," people will later declare. Chinese legends hold that music derives from thunder.
The Egyptians used the distinctly different shapes assumed by the plasma column as the shapes of a number of hieroglyphs. These are first seen on pottery fragments before 3000 BC. [note 27]
As Talbott has pointed out, the 'bowling pin' shape of the White Crown of Upper Egypt and the Red Crown of Lower Egypt were suggested also by the descent of Mars within the plasma stream in glow mode (discussed below). Both shapes represent the pharaoh's head as Mars, with the widened bulbous plasma stream crowning his head, especially prominent where it widened to surround Mars. The White Crown is the stream in daylight, with Mars hidden completely in the white glow-level plasma which is lit by the Sun. The Red Crown is Mars seen at night, with the sunlight from behind making the red globe visible. As the Sun shines from an angle, a shadow falls on the column. This is the peculiar cutout in the Red Crown.
The City on the Horizon

Where the arc met the salt water of the North Atlantic, water was turned to steam in large quantities. This mass of steam must have risen up well past the stratosphere (helped perhaps by the tidal pull of Saturn at the pole) and been forced to spread away as more steam and clouds were generated beneath it. Here it cooled and fell back as snow.
But the cloudbank composed of water vapor was of much smaller dimension than the 'cloudbank' seen as a mountain by people in Egypt, Sumer, and China. This 'cloudbank,' seen from afar, is a dome of plasma -- the bell-shaped bottom portion assumed by the plasma stream under certain instabilities.
One of the semi-stable forms of the plasma stream is a series of three toroids. The center toroid flattens out to become just a cross bar. The top and bottom toroid develop bell shapes, facing up and down. This chalice form becomes the Holy Grail of Arthurian tales. The lower portion would have looked like a steep bell-shaped mountain and would have been seen from very far away.
This plasma 'cloudbank' or 'world mountain' may be seen today in the stupas of India or the 'omphalos' of Delphi and other sacred locations in antiquity. The plasma dome at the horizon likely rose up thousands of miles. Eventually the giant aurora or vaporous plasma might have covered perhaps 30 degrees of the circumference of the Earth. It would have been visible from 10,000 miles away -- nearly half the circumference of the Earth. [note 28]
The upper portion, when seen in outline, where the edges of the plasma is most dense, might be recognized as the Ankh held by the pharaohs, as the cartouche of Egyptian hieroglyphics, and as a similar device held by the God depicted in Sumerian seals. There are other later sources for this image, however. [note 29]
Along the edges, fluted areas developed, as is typical of auroras, and would show in relief in sunlight. Such a continuously generated figure standing up to the high heavens, surrounding the strike point of the arc, must have looked like the walled cities described in Sumer, and the primordial mound of creation described by the Egyptians. Numerous records recall the "cloudbank," as it built up and broadened, as the City of the Gods. In later ages it is claimed that the Gods showed mankind how to build walled cities and temple enclosures. [note 30]
"The great gods created the structure of Unug, the handiwork of the gods, and of E-ana, the house lowered down from heaven. You watch over the great rampart, the rampart which An founded," (one manuscript has instead: "its great rampart, a cloudbank resting on the earth"), and continues, "the majestic residence which An established."
-- "Gilgamesh and Aga" Sumerian, ca 2800 BC

The quotation above is from the Gilgamesh sagas. The "majestic residence" described here is actually the E-ana, the name of the temple of An at Uruk. 'An' is the primary creation God. A connection is here made between the founding of the celestial city before the Flood (of 3147 BC) to the city walls of Uruk (Unug), built 300 years after the Flood -- as if they were interchangable. The address, "You watch," is in reference to Gilgamesh waiting, at the city walls of Uruk, for the approach of King Aga of the city of Kish.
Mastabas in Egypt and China, with their exterior buttresses or regular indentations, recall the giant mountainous shape near the pole. In Egypt this kind of wall, enclosing pyramids and temple compounds, is today called the "palace wall facade." Even common house walls in Iran during this period have regular exterior recesses which have no structural function. [note 31]
China also records a giant mountain in the northwest which supported the celestial Peach Tree. In China the 'cloudbank' is also interpreted as the shell of a tortoise which supports Earth -- that is, Heaven. Central and South America see the plasma 'cloudbank' as a mountain of caves -- from which the first humans came. [note 32]
Along the coast of western Europe, the bell shaped plasma instability might have been only a mist to the tribes looking out on the North Atlantic, and only the much smaller water vapor cloudbank, composed of steam from the sea, would have been seen. The western Europeans had a clear view of this local mass of expanding steam clouds, and above-ground megalithic 'barrow graves' are built after 3800 BC in imitation of the furrowed water vapor shape at the northwestern horizon. Beside the overall shape of a pudding, the grave barrows of Ireland and England frequently also have regular indentations at the exterior edges. Barrow graves proliferated along the Irish and English coasts, and are found from Portugal through Scandinavia. Fewer are found further east into Europe. The cloudbank of water vapor certainly was seen as an apparition of substance -- the fortress of Ys floating on the ocean, as the Celts later recalled. (Earlier huge barrow graves, dating to 4000 BC, uncrenelated and oriented north-south, probably recall the plasmoid seen in the far south toward which all the traffic on the electron beams was moving.) [note 33]
The Changing Celestial Display

Over the course of the next thousand years of Saturn's rule, 4200 BC to 3147 BC, the images in the sky differentiate into a family of Gods. New details develop from the appearances of intervening planets, changes in the plasma column, and displays of plasma discharges into the space surrounding the upper sphere. The rings seen above Saturn become the Goddess Nut upholding the sky above Geb, the God of the first land (the lower rings), where the Gods live. During all this time the companions of Saturn are also visible -- not only the planets Uranus, Venus, Mercury, and Mars, but especially the busy moving satellites of Saturn. With these satellites milling about the original creator God, this scene becomes the model for Upper Earth as the 'home' of the Gods. [note 34]
In both Mesopotamia and Egypt, records of the genealogies of the Gods were kept. Male and female deities were identified. However, the gender of the Gods varied over time and by location. Names and roles were frequently interchanged, as political contingencies required. I should also note that the Gods were not initially identified with specific planets. There was, at that time, no concept of a planet at all. There were only the Gods. [note 35]
The images in the sky became symbolic objects in later developing civilizations, only to become unreferenced emblems at the remove of several thousand years. The scepter, crown, and throne of kings, the altar, the cross, and church steeple, the haloes of saints, the sword in the stone, the swastika, and hundreds of architectural details, still in use today, all derive from the initial forms in the sky. The symbols were kept, even when the original associations were lost.
Not to be neglected either, are the auroras surrounding the incoming plasma stream. Writing about the auroral displays as experienced today, one author states,
".. waving curtains of riotous greens and reds ... shimmering crazily across the entire heavens, producing new scenes every fraction of a second ... blotches, rays, bands, arcs, or curtains.... It can appear to float motionless, or pulsate leisurely, or flicker rapidly with five entirely new scenes every second.... "
-- Bob Berman, "Cosmic Adventure" (1998)

Where the stream of plasma connected with Earth, the outstreaming of electrons would have produced auroras adjacent to the lower part of the stream, probably of a circular pattern and thus seen from afar as matching left and right. These are perhaps the lions or goats standing up against both sides of the tree of heaven as depicted in Sumerian art. At a later time these are griffins. The Egyptians use the same or similar images. Paired animals appear in the Palette of Narmer in ca 3000 BC, and other earlier palettes.
The God Visits Earth

Mars descends the polar column a number of times during the "Age of the Gods." Located between Saturn and Earth, Mars changed location, moving down from Saturn, and coming closer to Earth, while remaining enclosed in the stream of plasma connecting Saturn to Earth, looking larger and larger in the process, until Mars hovered above the north pole of Earth as a giant red sphere. In effect, it was seen as the God visiting Earth. The humans were delighted and built temples to receive and house the God. The visits to Earth happened repeatedly, at intervals of 120 years or more.
Mars, located below the south pole of Saturn, acted as a short circuit across part of the electrical discharge between Saturn and Earth. Mars' northern hemisphere is marked with gigantic electrical blisters, but is otherwise devoid of the thousands of scars and craters which pockmark the southern hemisphere (traditionally attributed to 'meteor' impacts). The blisters on the top half are clear signs of repeated massive lightning strikes, although they are traditionally held to be the largest 'volcanoes' in the Solar System. There are, however, no signs of lava flows. The central depressions and the surrounding swollen ground take the same form as more modestly sized lightning strike blisters to non-conductive surfaces on Earth. [note 36]
About the movements of Mars, the "Chilam Balam" reads..
"Then the heart of the flower came forth to set itself in motion"

The heart of the flower is Mars. The flower itself is probably Mars with the impinging plasma streams. Talbott has noted the same from Egyptian and Mesopotamian sources. As Mars moves down from Saturn and moves past the bend in the stream connecting Earth and Saturn, the flower shape distorts: some petals grow shorter.
When located in the chain of the conducting stream, Mars would increase in charge and be electrically repelled from Saturn toward Earth. After losing its surplus charge to Earth, Mars would move back up again along the plasma stream toward Saturn. Mars' mass is only one-tenth of one percent of the mass of Saturn. In the vocabulary of electrical measurements, Mars is the gold leaf in an electroscope.
This movement easily explains the apparent increases and decreases in the size of Mars. In mythology Mars (under various names) frequently transforms into a dwarf or a giant. As Mars moved down the plasma stream, it would not only increase tremendously in size, but it might have moved away from its location centered on Saturn. Assuming that Saturn in effect would seem to rotate in a a daily circle about the pole star, Mars would at first be seen to move to the edge of the disk of Saturn in the direction of the pole star. Mars would then be seen to increase in size, moving past the edge of Saturn in the direction of the Earth's axis of rotation. Ev Cochrane, in "Martian Metamorphoses" (1997), presents any number of examples from around the world of Mars, or his namesake, changing from a giant to a dwarf, and the reverse.
By the time the original plasma stream from Saturn had reduced from arc mode or glow mode to an invisible dark mode, only the section above Mars, where the streams from Jupiter reduced in size, and therefore increased in density, would be seen in glow mode. Talbott, et al, suggest various rosette patterns. This would suggest that, as Mars neared to perhaps within 30 diameters of Earth, it would have been seen in the location of the pole star.
But simply the nearness of Mars, centered on the pole star as it approached Earth, would have led to bending the plasma stream connection to Mars. This could have caused the changes in the rosette pattern -- an offset of the circle of the streams seeming to encircle Mars, making it look more like a spray of petals radiating from an edge or looking like a sea shell.
Mars would have increased in size, but since it remained in one location, it is possible that this was not seen as an approach, but only as a change in appearance. On the other hand, the increase in details visible at the surface of Mars, might have been convincing evidence that the planet was indeed getting closer to Earth.
The continuation of the plasma stream past (below) Mars would also be in dark mode except near Mars -- for the same reason, the fact that the stream from Mars would widen below Mars to extend itself to the diameter of Earth. Near Mars this would likely be seen as 'something' extending down from Mars. The Maya "Chilam Balam" calls this the tongue of Bolon Dzacab (Mars), although the description is associated with the much later appearances of Mars in the 8th and 7th century BC. That a stream of plasma extended from below Mars is confirmed (but may be related only to the 8th and 7th century BC) from the fact that Mars (under various names) was depicted with a single leg consisting of the body of a snake, which is generally held to be a thunderbolt by archaeologists. In the Quiche "Popol Vuh" Mars provides fire for the tribes at a very early time in the narrative. The lower hemisphere of Mars would indeed 'be on fire' with the continuous explosions of electrical arcs. The 'tongue' of Mars (also seen in the central figure of the Aztec Calendar Stone) would be a glow mode plasma which because it is dispersing (lessening in density) as it further away from Mars would change to an invisible dark mode. [note 37]
The Start of Time

When Saturn went nova, the surrounding coma disappeared and the skies of Earth clear to also show the Sun. But the creation of the Sun and light were attributed to the God Saturn, and Saturn was called "the Sun", not only in Egypt, but almost everywhere else on Earth. With the (real) Sun lighting the side of Saturn, a bright crescent started to rotate around the central globe of Saturn, looking much like the crescent of the Moon today. This would persist even after Saturn had ceased its arc mode display.
But considering that initially Saturn was lit up like a blazing sun, I sort of doubt that the crescent due to the (actual) Sun would be seen. Then we can actually claim that Saturn invented time -- when it no longer blazed, but had reduced its output or dropped to dark mode. That is when a crescent would be seen at the edge of the globe, rotating counterclockwise on a daily basis.
The crescent was part of the Sun-lit half of the Saturnian globe. From the perspective of Earth, only a small section of this was seen. As the Earth rotated, the crescent appeared to move counterclockwise around the outer rim of the globe on a daily basis. The crescent dimmed as it moved up toward the 'top' of Saturn during the Earth's daylight hours, and brightened as it dipped down to the bottom at night. (Brightened, that is, in comparison to the darkness of night.) The first experience of time had started for humanity.
I have taken this description from Talbott's "The Saturn Myth" (1980), while attempting to keep in mind the relocation of the spheres to a stack, as later proposed by Thornhill. It becomes obvious from this that the size of the crescent might vary with the seasons, for at various times the crescent would extend over more of the sphere of Saturn.
The crescent was not only experienced as a marker of the passage of day and night hours, but it was also seen as a boat -- the Barge of Heaven. It is the "ship of the Sun," depicted with a raised prow and stern, and resembling the ships which did commerce up and down the Nile. However, the 'celestial ship' also clearly showed the use of oars in its movement around the edge of the overhead globe, despite the fact that Egyptian commercial vessels seldom used oars for rowing. The 'oars' are streamers of plasma rising from the surface of Saturn. Seen from below, the ship would seem to rotate on a daily basis. [note 38]
Nearly identical images appear as rock carvings in Bronze Age Northern Europe, complete with the oars (and never with sails, although sails were in common use in the North Sea) and, like many late Egyptian images, often carrying the "Sun" as a globe in transport at the center of the ship. [note 39]
The First Land

The Saturnian globe had developed encircling rings of light, the brightest at the edge of the globe, and four 'rivers' meeting at the center and quartering the globe. The area enclosed by the inner circle shimmered like a field of grain in sunlight. It was understood to be the first land to have risen out of the waters, the home of the Gods -- Olympus, Upper Earth, Paradise, but often just called "Earth" or "The Land." [note 40]
The streams quartering the 'fields' of the upper land were actually plasma flows at arc level encroaching on Mars when it was centered on (and below) Saturn and Mercury. The plasma streams originating from Saturn divided into three, four, five, or eight streams at various times. Four streams would be the most likely form. When there were four of these, they were identified as the four rivers of Paradise of the Bible. When seen behind Mars these formed what looked like a star (going to arc mode at the top surface of Mars). This bright form was understood at times as constituting a separate god or goddess, especially since the convergence of the streams seemed to coincide with Mercury, which stood between Mars and Saturn. A star within a crescent (the Sun-lit edge of Saturn) is still used as a symbol in Islam. [note 41]
Together, the image of an eye -- the broad crescent below it (at midnight), the outstretched wings, and the column to Earth -- looked like a giant one-eyed person astride the Earth on the north horizon with arms outstretched. The apparition moved. It changed shape and color, and formed appendages -- arms or wings -- which moved constantly. Venus may have moved like a snake around the central eye. As Mars approached Earth and retreated again, it grew larger and smaller. [note 42]
Having no concept of the size of the Earth, no concept of space, having not seen the stars for the last 1600 years (and possibly since 9000 BC), and having no reference other than plants and animals and the elements of their own stone-age society and limited localities, the Neolithic humans anthropomorphize the vision in the sky and take the apparition to be a giant person. Taken all together it was not seen as a celestial phenomenon, but as a God, or more properly as an overlord, a political concept just entering the agricultural lands of the Mesopotamia and Egypt. [note 43]
Most of the southern sky of Earth was shrouded by bands of particulate matter and ionized gasses which had formed in the plane of the Earth's equator perhaps from earlier plasma strikes by Saturn. This series of bands or rings extended out perhaps 8000 miles from Earth, and was called the 'Absu,' the "sweetwater ocean," by the Sumerians (because rain came from the sky). The Earth's rings were individually disturbed by wave patterns, making the south sky look as if it were filled with a gigantic ocean. Like the rings of Jupiter or Saturn the nearest (lowest) bands moved faster than the Earth's rotation. The furthest bands moved slower than the rotation of the earth. (Both moved to the east.) Visually the effect of these bands moving at differential speeds was quite like looking out on a sea. [note 44]

Image: Pots with wave designs.

When Saturn went nova and started to blaze like a sun, humans universally called this event "creation," despite the fact that mankind had existed from much earlier times. Why is it that this event was called "creation" by the first humans to write records, when obviously they themselves must have been created much earlier?
Probably because 'creation' dealt with the creation of 'Heaven' or 'the Land,' not with the mundane world of Middle Earth which had always existed. 'Creation' dealt with the self-creation of the Gods, not mankind. Mankind never reflected on its own genesis, and held itself as insignificant in the face of the stupendous prodigies in the skies -- the visits of the God, the auroral displays, unexpected strikes of lightning from an electrically overcharged upper atmosphere, and the play of Saint Elmo's fire among tree tops. The signs and objects in the sky had been there for over 4000 years before creation ensued. There certainly was no thought of a creation of everything out of nothing -- the only concern was to mark the creation of heaven and the Gods.
Humans conceived of their limited Universe as consisting of a bowl-shaped depression (where they lived), with the south sky filled with a sea, and the north sky now occupied by a new land which had risen out of the swirling waters of the north (another sea), and connected to Earth -- Middle Earth -- with a river of plasma. Away from the globe of Saturn and its rings, the northern stars could be seen. They would end up being called the "imperishable stars" by the Egyptians.
Depicting the Past

In Mesopotamia and Egypt, graphical references to these images in the sky abound. Egyptian priests felt it their duty not to discard any information, for all of it was considered part of the genealogy of the Gods and, by extension, the genealogy of the pharaohs. The details of the symbols constitute a welter of confusion for us today. The world would recall the stories of creation as 'mythical' histories. That these are actual histories, however, and not imaginative narratives, stands out from the fact that, not only are the same tales told around the world, but all the varied 'myths' generate neither explanations nor morals -- they are simply descriptive. [note 45]
The Mesopotamian and Egyptian textual records of these phenomena (spells and later histories) are sparse and late. Two factors might account for this. First, writing, although initially invented before 3000 BC, only slowly developed from initial commercial uses -- invoices and bills of lading -- to the proclamations of kings and dedications of temples. Narrative use takes an even longer time to develop. The tales and histories that we so urgently want to hear were not considered fit material for letters and scripts.
Second is the fact that common experiences are never (or seldom) recorded at the time they occur. Histories are written after the fact -- when things have changed or when the need exists to justify the present in terms of the past. This often has to wait 300 to 1000 years. [note 46]
In both Egypt and Mesopotamia, images of the polar configuration of the "Age of the Gods" (4200 to 3147 BC) do not show up until the cosmic display has disappeared from view. In Egypt the images show up almost immediately, with a lag of perhaps only a few decades. In Mesopotamia it would take longer. In both locations, the imagery remained stable after it first appeared and changes very little over thousands of years. The stability of the iconography is an important indication of the factual basis underlying the depictions. The images were guarded and authenticated, but 'created' from divergent recollections, descriptive in noting that it was a giant 'person' but with only some of the recalled attributes actually translated to a depiction of the God.
In Mesoamerica, there existed a tradition of recording actual history pictorially in bark books. We do not know how much of these histories were recorded contemporaneously with the events, and how much was based on later recollections. Some of the recorded events, from the few curious references we have, may have dated back to 30,000 BC, and certainly to 10,500 BC. Events are described which match what we know from other -- primarily archaeological -- sources. The books existed, and were quoted and referenced as late as the 16th century AD. (For which see Chapter 16, "The books of the Chilam Balam," Chapter 17, "The Olmec Record," and Chapter 20, "The Popol Vuh.")
The attitude which required the recording of events in Mesoamerica, when nothing of the sort was ever accomplished (as far as we know) in the eastern Mediterranean, might be due to a grammar heavily dependent on action verbs, were whatever was accomplished required a protagonist, an actor who initiated the action. As I will show in later chapters, the results are a set of data much more extensive than anywhere else in the world, which can be collated to what we know of events worldwide archaeologically, or which can be inferred from other sources.
In the era after 3100 BC we are dealing with attempts to graphically depict many differing recollections, all of which were true at one time or another and had become fixed in the imagination, even though the original forms may have changed in appearance over time. I find it reasonable to assume that once an abstract image is given a familiar identification, in terms of "it looks like..," it would remain the same, even when the original changed considerably.
Unlike the European representations, which continued to hold the image in the sky as a female figure or a house, in Egypt and Mesopotamia the interpretation of Saturn and the plasma stream was of a person, a supreme being -- which in Egypt was assumed to be the pharaoh. It is a head seen in profile, to which the puffy beard is added (as in Mesopotamia also). Intermittent aspects of the plasma stream, the discontinuities noted by Peratt, become the magic or fetish symbols of the pharaoh -- the Ankh, Djed Pillar, and the Was Sceptre. In Egypt everything was retained and assigned a purpose in a plan where the pharaoh now is the God that was.
In Mesopotamian depictions the tree to heaven, complete with a globe at the top, is placed on seals next to the very human-looking image of the God, who is seated on a throne. On the other side, facing both the tree and the God is the king, the caretaker of the God's fields. The tree and globe, which originally was the God, is now a separate form shown next to the throne of the God.
In Mesopotamia the God is seated. To have the God seated on a throne, rather than standing, probably is a reference to the fact that the celestial image was fixed in space. God did not walk around the heavens. In many seals God holds in his hand a device, the shen, which also shows up in Egypt both as a magical object and as the form of the cartouche used to contain the names of pharaohs or deities.
In Mesopotamia, the seated person is actually the next God to take over rulership of the world, after 3147 BC -- Jupiter. He is clearly identified by his twisted turban head dress and his full length robe. In one seal there is an adjacent star, surrounded with 9 smaller globes, the readily visible satellites of Jupiter. In some representations Jupiter is seated on a symbol for 'temple' which in turn is set on a layer of bricks. The God is thus now assigned to a specific location on Earth, his home and temple.
He is wearing a long garment representing the massive mountain/skirt outpouring of plasma at the south pole. The rays shown at his shoulder are the much smaller plasma plumes extending from the north pole. (The magnetic poles of Jupiter are reversed from what is encountered for other planets. More on this in the next chapter.) The device held by the God, called a 'shen' in Egypt, represents a horizontal plasma outpouring from the south pole of Jupiter during the time spent in the asteroid belt.
In Egypt, where the pharaoh is held to be the God, he stands and is seen in profile. The pharaoh also wears a fluffy beard, and later sports the cobra form of Venus (connected to Saturn with a stream of plasma in glow mode) on the headband to his striped 'nemes' head covering. This last item may be equivalent to the projecting rays at the shoulder of God in Mesopotamia. On the Egyptian dedicatory Cosmetic Palette of Narmer (dated to 3050 BC), the king (who is the God) wields a club to smite his enemies, even though short swords had long been in use in Egypt. The club is Venus and its plasma tail. The unfortunate enemy is Uranus, grabbed by his long hair.
King Narmer ("Catfish Drill") also wears a long fluffy tail (held to be a bull's tail by Egyptologists) from his belt, reaching to his ankles, which is another depiction of the plasma outflow from Saturn in glow mode -- the rope -- or alternately the fact that Jupiter first shows up (on the Sun side of Earth) just before 3147 BC as a bull which wrecks the home of the Gods. The Palette of Narmer, which shows the pharaoh with captured enemies, is already almost unreadable in the density of its symbols. Only the fact that the symbols will stay the same for the next 3000 years has allowed us to read them.
Horus the Hawk

Image: Palette of Narmer, ca 3050 BC.
I should point out that the first God of the Egyptians, as with others people, was a giant bird which traveled on a daily basis from east to west through the skies, seen either during the day or the night, depending on the seasons. The hawk moved from the equatorial region of Earth to the north during the period of 9000 BC, when Earth first dropped below the shadow of Saturn, to about 8300 BC, when the bird had moved north from the equatorial and just circled above the north horizon.
He was identified as a hawk (and had a ceremonial center at Nekhen, the "City of the Hawk," in upper Egypt) and his name was Horus, which admittedly is almost a generic name for 'God' among the Egyptians. His movements from east to west for 700 years show up in the descriptive appelation "Horus of the Horizons." Two of the four standards carried before the pharaoh on the "Palette of Narmer" depict the hawk of the east and the hawk of the west. Both of these (and not the other two) also have banners hanging down from the tops of the poles. I will identify such bannered devices as these in the next chapter as images of the 'plumes' of the east and the west, two of the cornerposts of the sky. This form (for the east and west cardinal directions) was in use in Mesopotamia, where archaeologists have called them 'circle' banners or 'circle' standards.
The appearance after 8300 BC to about 6000 BC of the three southern ball plasmoids (see the previous chapter) seems not to have detracted from the status of Horus in the north. On the Palette of Narmer a hawk is shown as owner of the people of a papyrus swamp. For archaeologists this is assumed to signify the conquest of the swamps of the delta, even though the delta was flooded at the time of the Palette of Narmer (as per Herodotus, and following the flood of 3147 BC). The papyrus blooms shown on the Palette of Narmer probably signify the Duat in the south skies, rather than the delta.
The four beams of excited electrons seen in the skies during this period are probably the basis for the Sed Festival of the pharaohs, a ceremony of laying out the land (as a survey) for agricultural use, already depicted by 3050 BC (as on the Mace-head of Narmer). It obviously relates to some sort of argicultural ceremony, as shown on a number of early grave-goods tags also.
It is uncertain what the significance of the ball plasmoids was in Egyptian iconography. Other people (Mesoamerica excepted) relate them to grave mounds. On the Palette of Narmer the third standard is a stomach shape, a Sumerian logotype for "Lugal," that is, "king." I think the standard in this case only signified 'the south,' just as the remaining standard, a jackal on a plow signified 'the north,' showing, in effect, the constellation Ursa Minor -- a depiction which remains in use until Roman times (as at the sky map carved in the ceiling of the temple of Hathor at Denderah).
The eight lowerings of Mars during the "Age of the Gods" kept the God Horus alive in religious symbolism and iconography. The Palette of Narmer is a clear indication of this. In much later geneologies of the Gods, Horus during this period is know as "Horus of the Gods."
In 3147 BC, the home of the Gods was attacked by Jupiter, the Bull of Heaven, who had been seen in the skies as a crescent for thousands of years and is depicted on the Palette of Narmer also. I'll detail this in the next chapter.
The Gifts of the Gods

During the "Age of the Gods" mankind was given many gifts. Writing was universally held to have been taught by the Gods, not only in the Near East but also in China. As I have mentioned, for the Egyptians, the changing column above the north pole became the model for many hieroglyphics, with some signs used on pottery predating 3000 BC.
Humans similarly insisted that agricultural practices were shown to them by the Gods. The 'canals' seen crossing Paradise became the model for the irrigation canals constructed in Mesopotamia. Even though irrigation canals probably predated the design of the Gods, the concept was attributed to them. The column which rose from the north pole was seen as a river flowing from Paradise, and the Nile, Euphrates, Tigris, Indus, and Sarasvati were understood to be extensions of this river. The bright anode tufts on the Saturnian surface are seen as golden grain waving in the light. Four thousand years later, the Incas mold gold into stalks of corn to stand before the temples of their Emperor God.
In Mesopotamia, and elsewhere, humans tended the fields and flocks of the Gods believing that they were the slaves of the Gods, as, for example, even the late Babylonian creation myth of the "Enuma Elish" recounts. Kingships of the next age were understood as stewardships in the service of the Gods.
Worship was performed as directed by the Gods. It included music, dance, and gifts of food to the Gods, and a decor derived from the colorful displays in the sky. Modeled on the battles in the sky seen after 3147 BC, worship also involved human sacrifice almost everywhere. [note 47]
The architecture of mastabas and the temple-enclosure walls of Egypt and Mesopotamia were modeled after the buttressed wall seen erected by the Gods (the cloudbank seen at the northwest horizon). Later pyramids and temples faced north to receive the God (the visits of Mars), but all the early mastaba graves faced the strike point of the plasma arc in the northwest. [note 48]
The early civilizations took the events in the sky not only as mandates for their activities, but also as the analog for all heroic and religious narratives, from the "Epic of Gilgamesh" to the Egyptian, Near Eastern, Celtic, and Christian resurrection theologies of later antiquity. The 'history' of the lives of the Gods became the model for story-telling which runs from Sumerian epics through Greek mythology, on through the medieval Arthurian cycles and later fairy tales, and into the present. [note 49]
Living in Paradise

In summary, for a thousand years during the "Age of the Gods," from about 4200 BC to 3100 BC, it was Paradise on Earth. The climate in the Middle East was mild and wet. With Earth in an orbit below Saturn, the Sun would not have been at the center of the orbit. The northern hemisphere would have faced the Sun year-round, and there would not have been the drastic changes in seasons we experience today. Mankind lived in harmony with the Gods, who supplied the techniques of agricultural cultivation, the plans for cities and temples, and the knowledge of the wheel, writing, and music. And for a thousand years the images in the sky provided a spectacular show.
The interplanetary plasma flow must also have built up an enormous amount of static electric charge in the upper atmosphere, to the point where mountain peaks would have been under continuous lightning discharges. And in addition to the electrostatic charges of the atmosphere, mankind was subjected for a thousand years to a varying magnetic field, a by-product of the rotating Birkeland current. If this arcing was even occasionally of the right amplitude and frequency, this could have had a long-term beneficial effect on the psyches of the humans. I have long suspected some such secondary results from an arc discharge. Research at Harvard's McLean Psychiatric Research Hospital has demonstrated the effects of an oscillating low level magnetic field. To quote from a patent application, the use of a localized magnetic field is indicated for subjects with symptoms of "anxiety, moodiness, depression, lethargy, sleepiness, learning difficulties, and memory impairments." [note 50]
Imagine then, humans -- content, cheerful, outgoing, energetic, alert, intelligent, and enjoying a mild climate, living with the Gods, quick to learn, inventing everything from the wheel to writing, forming egalitarian groups to build massive irrigation projects in a desert wasteland, engaging in the manufacture of ceramics and metals, and trading these far and wide. It must have been a millennium of optimism which supported each and every effort. This certainly was the "Age of the Gods."
But then, after a thousand years, the same Gods decided that the humans were too loud, and that they would shut off the electricity and drown them all. That happens in 3147 BC.

Endnotes

Note 1 --
"Hurakan," is the name in Central America for the Peratt column ball plasmoid in the south. This becomes clear from the the "Popol Vuh" and other Mesoamerican sources. "God Star" was published in 2006, a year before Peratt's revelation that the plasmoid was seen in the south.
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Note 2 --
The fact that at the earliest time Saturn in effect reappeared out of the northern ocean on a daily basis is also confirmed from the name "Heart of Sea, Heart of Lake" in the "Popol Vuh." The northern ocean would be the Caribbean, as seen from northern South America, at a time before the predecessors of the Olmecs had migrated to Central America. See Chapter 20, "The Popol Vuh."
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Note 3 --
The Hypsithermal, a period of warmer climate throughout the world from about 9000 BC to 2500 BC, is subdivided into additional smaller periods. The "climatic optimum" period from 6000 BC to 3000 BC is one of these periods. Because the Earth's orbit was at that time placed entirely below the level of the Sun, the inclination of the Earth's axis to the Sun added to the improved climate in the northern hemisphere.
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Note 4 --
Traditional thinking is that cold winds sweeping off the continental glaciers condensed water vapor to rains on meeting the warmer zone south of the glaciers. This is a contemporary attempt to explain the temperate climate south of the glaciers. But cold winds do not carry moisture.
Traditional geological and climatological estimates are based on contemporary conditions, and do not consider an alternate orbit for Earth, with the Sun at a different angle, or the effects of a plasma contact. The overall operation of a global weather system under the condition of a billion ampere arc in the north Atlantic is outside of our current experience.
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Note 5 --
The two worstening of climate in the Middle East (where we have reasonable records) suggest that the plasma contact with Saturn was not continuous, but was interupted during these periods. Only after 5800 BC does the plasma contact remain, eventually going to arc mode. On the other hand, the northward relocation of the dry zone north of the tropics would be enough to account the radical change in climate in the Middle East (as well as southern Europe).
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Note 6 --
The cultivation of grain apparently spread through all of the Black Sea basin during the dry period 6200 to 5800 BC. After 5600 BC, it is the Black Sea basin which becomes the source of the spread of agriculture to eastern Europe and, within another 200 years, to western Europe.
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Note 7 --
In terms of an image, if the globe subtended 10 degrees in the sky (a measure sourced by Talbott, perhaps from an analysis of the perspective of some images), it would be located at a distance of (71600) * cos(10/deg) / sin(10/deg) = 406,064 miles

Image: distance to Saturn, based on a 10 degree angle of view.
For comparison, the distance to the Moon is (2160) * cos(.5/deg) / sin(.5/deg) = 247,511 miles
These calculations are based on Saturn being the same diameter as today, and there is little reason to suggest a change in size. Ten degrees is 20 times the diameter of the Moon today -- equivalent to two hand spans at arm's length. Thus the 'globe above,' would have been immense. As time went on, and Earth's accumulated charge increased, the Earth would have receded further from Saturn and the image would have reduced in size.
But the initial circular shape, because it was most likely the coma of Saturn, would have been much larger than the physical size of Saturn. That would increase the distance between Earth and Saturn considerably. It is, in fact, likely that the 10 degrees suggested by Talbott represents Saturn with a closely held coma -- the duck of creation -- which does not need to coincide with the edges of the plasmasphere. Other estimates of the distance between Saturn and Earth (in 'bare' form, as in arc mode discharge) are 2.83 and 2.75 million miles (both developed in Appendix B, "The Celestial Mechanics"). This would represent an angle of 1.5 degrees, three times the width of the Moon today.
At any rate, seen from any latitude up to the equator, Saturn would appear at a location in the sky normally occupied by the Pole Star. The amount it might be off from this exact location, as seen at various latitudes, would be slight if the axis of the two planets coincided. But as has been stated previously, the spin axes of Saturn and Earth would not have had any reason to be aligned initially, and would only subsequently became closer aligned. Thus the apparition was seen from below the Earth's equator because it rotated around the position of the Earth's polar axis. The 'day' would thus also have been determined by the apparent circling of the giant white orb about the north pole. This movement, especially after Saturn went nova, seems to be described in Mesoamerican Michoacan creation myths. Mexicans still play a football game with a flaming ball.
"The ancient sun was a huge celestial orb batted about by the dark, unpredictable powers of the cosmos"
-- Bernardino Verastique "Michoacan and Eden" (2000)

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Note 8 --
The egg designs could be Saturn, or could be Jupiter when Saturn's orbit fell inside Jupiter's. Jupiter, in fact, seen lighted by the Sun, but seen from below, would have looked oval shaped.
There is an obvious problem from both mythology and modeled artifacts, namely the fact that there are no references to the fact that the imagery may have turning upside down during the course of a day -- an upside down duck would show at some point. This can only suggest that the Earth and Saturn rotated at the same speed, probably the 24 hour day we experience today. That the day of Earth remained mostly the same for 8000 years can be suspected from the fact that the orbit of Earth never changed radically. To suggest that the day of Saturn changed from 24 hours to 11 hours after 3147 BC, when Saturn moved to a far greater orbit around the Sun, is also not unreasonable if this is understood as interchange of spin momentum for orbital momentum (actually, kinetic energy).
The rotation of Saturn around itself has nothing to do with how it would be viewed from Earth located below its south pole, since Saturn is a sphere, and differential rotation would not effect the view from Earth. What we are concerned with here is the fact that, to have the apparition look like a duck or a goose, Uranus would have to be seen above Saturn, not below. But Uranus would not rotate with Saturn. This would suggest that the "goose of creation" might have been seen rotating backwards, that is counterclockwise as seen from Earth in the north sky. Considering the distance between Earth and Saturn, Uranus could not have disappeared behind Saturn for any part of its daily rotation. The view also would not change with different latitudes of Earth.
There are actually some indications that Uranus might have been seen in different locations with respect to the globe of Saturn. The Egyptian Palette of Narmer (ca 3050 BC) depicts Uranus as a long-haired captive on the lower right from the pharaoh (who represents Saturn and Horus). The Egyptian icon called the "Eye of Ra" is another image which places Uranus 'below' Saturn. See the text for details.
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Note 9 --
"How things look," or what they seemed to look like, is an abstract mental process, strongly influenced by habit, and thus by cultural transmission. Once an identification is made, it will remain, despite changes. Cultural transmission of 'what things look like' can be seen in the concept of what is seen in the face of the Moon. China and Mesoamerica hold that the Moon represents an image of a rabbit; Western Europe take it to be the face of a man.
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Note 10 --
The 'mythology' of Mesopotamia is similar to that of Egypt, India, China, and Mesoamerica, plus hundreds of other nations and peoples. The hundreds of additional stories, retellings, and legends from around the world all consistently include the same elements.
From India:
"As stated in the Puranas, there was only water all over at the dawn of creation. This water gradually began to circumambulate in a circular motion, which in turn produced bubbling foams. Besides, one kind of white element emanated from the water out of which the creator created an egg. This egg bisects into two parts and the Brahmma appeared out of this egg from where the name Brahmanda or the Universe is derived. One part of this broken egg constituted the earth and the other space. According to the Purana, the tiny parts that scattered all over at the time of bursting of the egg produced rains."

Following is a paraphrase of part of the first verse of the Finnish "Kalevala," transcribed from verbal sung recollections in the 18th and 19th century AD.
"Ilmatar, the virgin of the air, leaves the loneliness of the sky and moves down to the sea, where the wind impregnates her. She drifts upon the waters for ages [700 years]"...
Overburdened now the maiden
Cannot rise above the surface;
Seven hundred years she wandered

Thus she swam as water-mother,
Toward the east, and also southward,
Toward the west, and also northward;

"...pregnant but unable to give birth. A magical bird [a duck] flies by and lays several eggs on Ilmatar's upraised knee. As the bird sits brooding in the nest, the heat makes Ilmatar jerk her knee, and the eggs begin to change. One breaks open and the lower half becomes the earth, the upper part becomes the sky, the yolk becomes the Sun, and the white becomes the Moon."

In the Kalevala Ilmatar's pregnancy results in a son who will initiate creation. It is also clear that the initial lines retell the travels of Saturn from the overhead skies 'down' to the ocean in the vicinity of the Big Bear. The description of this last -- Saturn near the north horizon -- speaks to the antiquity of the Kalevala, for it would be a view from a perspective much further south than the current location of the Fins, in effect before their separation from the Hungarians.
Notice also the rotation of Ilmatar in the ocean, and although the clockwise direction of rotation -- east, south, west, north -- is incorrect, it is the only instance where a back-and-forth wandering in the ocean or sky is described as a circle.
There are no dates associated with any of these 'mythological' tales, except for the 16th century Maya "Books of the Chilam Balam of Chumayel," which, however, records a date of 8347 BC instead of 4200 BC for the beginning of the previous era which ended in 3147 BC. But this was the sighting of the southern ball plasmoid. The intervening period between 8347 BC and ca 4200 BC is detailed as the endless negotiations between the three Gods of the south and the five Gods of the north about the task of creation, without any indication of a date when creation actually ensued.
But there are geographic limits. People below the equator would not have seen the birth of the 'Sun.' Michael Witzel, in "Vala and Iwato, The Myth of the Hidden Sun in India, Japan, and Beyond" at the "Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies" Volume 12 (2005), notes for the myths of the birth of the Sun ..
"The myth relates the disappearance of the sun (or the deity of the sun) in a cave or some other enclosure, and its re-appearance (often as Dawn) after the intervention of a group of gods (and others), creating (or restoring) light and prosperity to the world."
"It is found in various forms in Vedic Indian, Greek, Japanese, Ainu, Amerindian and South-East Asian sources, and in an aberrant version even with the Hawaians."
"..in the light of the theory of a Eurasian (Laurasian) mythology, its distribution is significant. The myth is found precisely in the areas labeled as Laurasian, irrespective of geographical distance from the pole or equator, but not in Australia and sub Saharan Africa. Also, the structure of this myth is very similar in all the versions mentioned above."
Witzel mentions that Inca, although living below the equator, participate in this Eurasian myth.
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Note 11 --
Book 11 of the Maya "Chilam Balam" seems to suggest that the arc did not start until Mars started to lower itself from Saturn. From an analysis of the record of the Sumerian "King List" this would be approximately 4200 BC.
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Note 12 --
The goose form seen in the sky, which was seen as a body with a neck and head, occurs in the fairy tale of the Golden Goose. The egg is the smaller form of Saturn as it suddenly blazes up while going nova within the much larger coma originally surrounding it, the body of the goose.
The body shape of the bird might have also resulted from the misshaping of the coma surrounding Saturn due to the solar wind. The tail feathers of the bird would face away from the direction of the Sun. The head and neck of the bird was the remaining glow mode plasma discharge to Uranus above Saturn. The bird of creation is universally understood to be a duck or a goose because the coma was white.
From Hindu myths we have the following, quoted by Kelley L. Ross, and with his added comments..
"The eternal ones, Brahmâ, Hari, and Shambhu approached him, each mounted on his own vehicle: [The sacred animals of the Gods] the bull Nandi for Shiva, the eagle Garud.a for Vis.n.u, and a goose for Brahmâ.
-- Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty "Hindu Myths" (1975)

Ross notes, "There is a more dignified vehicle for Brahmâ, however, the lotus." Kelley L. Ross, at [http://www.friesian.com]. The lotus will be recognized as the outpouring of an equatorial disk, which constitute the rings of Saturn. The same lotus is the seat of the "Companions of Osiris," the four large satellites of Saturn, in Egyptian funeral practices.
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Note 13 --
In Talbott's imagery, the rings of Saturn are missing and Venus is placed below Saturn, between Saturn and Mars. See David Talbott, "Symbols of an Alien Sky" (1997).
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Note 14 --
The tale of the egg which splits open (supposedly along a horizontal line) implies that Saturn was initially seen 'edge-on' or nearly so. With Saturn anywhere 'above' the Earth in the northern hemisphere of the sky, this could happen if Earth were not located directly below Saturn, from which vantage point the rings would have looked flatter.
The suggestion that Earth started out at about the level below the equator of Saturn, and, over an extended period of time, was forced to slip lower (that is, to assume an orbit which was wholly below the orbit of Saturn), is suggested from the description provided by a number of sources. One of these is a section of the Maya "Chilam Balam" books, which note that Uranus, initially seen above Saturn, "lowered itself into the center" of Saturn (described as a "flower") and that subsequently Saturn lit up like the Sun (see Chapter 16, "The Chilam Balam Books").
The description above was seen as the movement of Saturn and Uranus, but actually represents a changing perspective due to the movement of Earth from a location of a higher vantage point to a more central location below Saturn. This would date probably to after 4200 BC. It is astounding to think that the predecessors of the Maya could have records reaching back that far into prehistory, but the description which I ran across, after already having settled on the movement of Earth during this time, is visually accurate.
The description also suggests that Saturn and the attendant planets, specifically Uranus and Mars, were in full view, rather than shrouded in mists. We have no similar sequence of events, that I am aware of, from other sources. But it is very possible that the Maya or Olmecs had a completely different view of what was happening overhead. This suggests that the "clouded skies" was composed mainly of the plasma stream in glow mode from Saturn, and encompassed only a portion of the northern hemisphere, but were not significant below 20 degrees latitude.
That the above description is accurate can be gleaned from additional text of the "Chilam Balam," which continues with, "His heart was on fire; the Sun was within, and his name could be read." In transcribing information from ancient illustrated glyphic records, the copyist was confusing the illustration with what at a later time would become the glyph for "sun." Additionally, because the "Chilam Balam" is obviously a radical abbreviation of events, we cannot tell if a thousand years have not lapsed between the start of a sentence and its end. (All punctuation is missing anyway.)
As Saturn lit up, a blazing ball would be seen, with Mercury and Mars in the center as much smaller orbs. Much later perhaps, Mars connected with four plasma streams to 'the edges' of Saturn, as described by other mythological sources. This is probably a stream of plasma coming from far above Mars, changing from dark mode to four streams in glow mode, before turning to an arc mode concentration on reaching Mars. This configuration, looking like a four-petal daisy from below, became the glyph for sun, "kin." Thus "his name could be read within."
"The rings of Saturn were known also to the aborigines of America before Columbus discovered the land; this means also before the telescope was invented at the beginning of the seventeenth century. An ancient engraved wooden panel from Mexico shows the family of the planets: one of them is Saturn, easily recognizable by its rings."
"Nor were the Maoris of New Zealand ignorant of them: 'One of the great mysteries connected with Saturn is the still unanswered question of how the ancient Maoris of New Zealand knew about her rings -- for there is evidence that they did have a Saturnian ring legend long before the days of Galileo.'"
-- Immanuel Velikovsky, unpublished document, "ring.txt" at [http://www.varchive.com]

The Maoris, however, did not arrive in New Zealand (from the Solomon Islands just below the equator) until about AD 1200.
In the Maya "Chilam Balam" the equatorial rings of Saturn are also seen as the petals of a flower. About Saturn (Oxlahun-ti-ku), the text reads, "The flower was his mat, the flower was his chair."
Some other sources claim that Saturn's rings (as we know them today) were generated later after a cataclysmic contact between Saturn and Jupiter. In the Isis and Osiris story they are the mummy wrapping for the body parts of Osiris which Isis gathers before his body is sent to the underworld.
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Note 15 --
The image might rotate in the sky on a daily basis, making the rings look like flapping wings. The eye of Ra is the only image I am aware of that actually attempts to represent some sort of extension of the rings, or beyond the rings, into the space away from the Sun. This would not be the rings, however, since these could not be altered without rapidly being lost. The "eye" -- and later a removed and traveling eye -- is a constant in both Egyptian and Chinese sources, and elsewhere.
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Note 16 --
A circle with a dot (or small circle) in the center (representing the darker Mars in front of the globe of Saturn) was the hieroglyph for 'sun' in Egypt (the God Ra) and the glyph for 'sun' in China, and is still in use today as the symbol for the Sun in astronomy. The Maya use a four-petalled flower as the glyph for Sun -- a larger circle with a small circle at the center. The edges of the petals represent four streams of electrons in arc mode from Saturn converging on Mars.
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Note 17 --
See Wal Thornhill, "Thoth" Vol 8, No 2, (July, 2004) on the "Eye of Ra." This is the most convincing evidence that Venus was expelled by Saturn when it lit up like a Sun, ca 4200 BC. The iconography of the Eye of Ra or the Eye of Horus had previously eluded me.
There are obviously problems with the iconography, for the rotation of Venus around Saturn will change direction depending on whether a left or right eye is depicted. Shown as a left eye, Saturn would appear to be rotating retrograde, shown in counterclockwise rotation as seen from below. The right eye of Ra is thus probably the original. But in both cases Venus is seen rotating about itself in a direction opposite to the rotation of Saturn.

Image: An aurora on Jupiter, showing a connection to a satellite. Presumably the north pole.

The above image, of an aurora at the north pole of Jupiter (taken in UV light) shows a similar outside connection of a stream of plasma to a satellite. The satellites of Jupiter revolve slower than the planet.
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Note 18 --
The description of a figure called the "Ancient of Days" in the "Zohar" of the literature of the Kabbalah (13th century AD) is an obvious description of the Saturnian polar imagery. It is a head, or multiple heads (skulls), with or within a strong light source, a beard, no body, but with testicles and a penis which exudes some magical liquid equated to the dew source of manna during the time of Moses. There is also "a strong right arm," which has to represent Venus with its swirl connection to Saturn and seen on the left. The "strong right arm" also suggests that Venus was stationary as seen from Earth, that is, it revolved around Saturn in an Earth day.
The Kabbalah dates from about 200 BC and is a mystical reaction to the more staid mainstream theology of Israel since 500 BC. The "Zohar" was written in Spain in the 13th century AD, in badly done Aramaic (including Spanish words). Although possibly based on the Egyptian image of the Eye of Ra, it more likely represents a Celtic oral traditions.
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Note 19 --
If the Grand Menhir dates as far back as 5000 BC, then the Saturn would have gone nova earlier than my estimate if 4200 BC. I should also point out that its purposeful destruction might have followed the disappearance of the initial polar column. The Maya "Chilam Balam" reads, "First the fire, then the rope," but gives no indication of dates. After the "rope" (a plasma stream in glow mode) changed to dark mode (as can be suspected) nothing would be seen, and in fact the shape of Saturn, except for the crescent lit by the Sun, would disappear almost entirely when seen in the daytime against the Earth's atmosphere, as happens today with the crescent Moon. At night, seen from the night-side of Earth, it would be fully lighted by the Sun, however.
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Note 20 --
By 3147 BC Saturn subtended an arc of only about 5 degrees, if we go by the later depiction of the White Crown of Egypt, which looks like a bowling pin, with Mars (enclosed in a glow mode plasma) forming the wider part of the crown and Saturn forming the upper knob. The calculated distances between the planets in 3147 BC suggests the same (see Appendix B, "The Celestial Mechanics").
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Note 21 --
At much later dates, after the initial plasma contact in arc mode and glow mode, the stream might have disappeared altogether from view as it switched to dark mode.
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Note 22 --
The plasma connection would show as twisted ropes only in low level glow mode. As the current increases on approaching the arc level, the plasma starts to look more like a solid column. In arc mode the column would divide up into a circle of 28 or 56 separate very bright streams, at times arranged as two concentric circles of these bundles.
Anthony Peratt, in "Characteristics for the Occurrence of a High-Current, Z-Pinch Aurora as recorded in Antiquity," (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Transactions on Plasma Science, December 2003), discusses the large number of petroglyphs found worldwide. For the casual reader, this is high obfuscation typical of journal papers. Most of the tie to reality is with respect to current auroral phenomena. Peratt divides the plasma stream up into three sections, and discusses two of them. The lower section, where contact is made to Earth, is not discussed.
In a second paper, "Characteristics for the Occurrence of a High-Current Z-Pinch Aurora as Recorded in Antiquity Part II: Directionality and Source" in IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science (August 2007), Peratt makes note of the fact that half of the petroglyphs which can be identified were created in locations with an unobstructed view of the south. A suggestion is made that the aurora should have encircled the magnetic pole, but it did not. From his research he also concludes that nothing like the south polar plasma column was seen in the north -- or at least it did not require access to high cliffs to make a record. See Chapter 5, "Saturn and Archaeology."
Peratt places the appearance of the three plasmoids below the south pole of the Earth and the strands of lighted electrons in arc mode headed north past the Earth in roughly 5000 BC (likely since 8300 BC, by my estimates). I have incorporated this event, the "Peratt Column," with the earlier history of Saturn in Chapter 5, "Saturn and Archaeology," and showed that the Peratt Column shows up in Mesoamerican documents and is physically recognized with the construction of the causeways at Carnac, sculptures in eastern Europe, and myhological stories in Mesopotamia. Unlike the Nasca lines of Peru, which Peratt illustrates as being a response to the beams of electrons seen coursing past the Earth, at Carnac it appears that a northern terminal to the streams of electrons was recognized -- another circular object in the sky. After the Peratt Column disappeared in the south (we do not know as yet how long it lasted), a new arc-mode column started up, from the north, around 4200 BC. This second column would be subject to all the same changes in form that the Peratt Column experienced, but there would be no need to climb cliffs to get a view.
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Note 23 --
Current flow in electricity is measured as amperage and represents the amount of electricity which moves from one location to another (like the amount of water flowing in a pipe or out of a faucet), and actually can be counted as the movement of electrically charged particles. If no particles (like, for example, electrons) move, or if they cannot move, there is no current. Voltage is the pressure behind the flow of current (like water pressure in a pipe). It is the difference in voltage from one location to another that causes the current flow.
The total amount of electricity delivered per unit time is measured in watts or kilo-watts (1000 watts). This can be found by multiplying the voltage difference by the amperage, w = v * a. The total energy delivered is found by multiplying the wattage by time, and typically expressed as, for example watt-hours, or kilowatt-hours.
There is very little information in Peratt's article to allow a sense of the magnitude of the electrical discharge of the "stupendous" plasma stream. He mentions that amperage of an auroral display scales to brightness, and suggests a level of 5 lamberts as a minimum for the former plasma stream. The auroras currently brighten only to 0.05 lamberts, at an estimated amperage of 5 to 10 million amperes.
Since Peratt speaks of a minimum brightness of 5 lamberts for the plasma stream, we could estimate the current flow of the plasma stream by scaling up. This would result in a current flow of 500 to 1,000 million amperes. I will use the figure of 1,000 million amperes. (In a later paper Peratt mentions "giga-amp" auroras. My estimate of 1,000 million amperes is one giga-amp.)
We have no idea what voltage difference drove the flow. At an estimated voltage difference of 300,000 volts between Earth and the ionosphere, the auroral display today delivers up to about 3 billion kilo-watts ((300,000 x 10 exp 7 )/1000 kw).
The Sun today is estimated to present a potential difference of 100 billion volts to the surrounding exterior space. However, V. Bailey calculated 100 million trillion volts -- 100 x 10 exp 18 volt -- in Nature (1961). If we assume that the potential difference with respect to deep space is proportional to the volume of a planet, then Saturn might have been at 58 million volts. That would not be an unlikely figure to use, and leads to an estimate of 58 thousand trillion watts (58 x 10 exp 15 watt). The Sun puts out an estimated 4 x 10 exp 26 watts (Juergens, Pensée ca 1972). (Another source estimates the Sun at 3.8 x 10 exp 20 watt.)
The world's annual use of electricity today is 15 thousand trillion watt-hours (15 x 10 exp 15 watt-hours). (from the CIA World Factbook, estimate for 2002).
Where did all that energy go? If the Earth had no atmosphere or oceans, the energy of the plasma stream would have scoured the surface, loosening the bonds of molecules making up the rocky surface, ionizing them, and electrostatically launching them into space. But the Earth's surface is buffered with an atmosphere and oceans. The energy would have gone to altering the molecular (atomic) constituents of the atmosphere and ocean water, but probably mainly ended up electrostatically charging the Earth's atmosphere and ionosphere. Soon the surplus would have flowed out to the space surrounding the Earth, for it is doubtful if the Earth could have remained the end terminal of the plasma flow.
Saturn did not, even over a thousand years, discharge itself completely to the Earth (or the other planets). The discharge happened later, when Saturn met up with the giant planet Jupiter, 100 times the diameter of Earth, and three times the mass of Saturn. 'Discharge' is a misnomer; actually the process is one of charge equalization, a reduction in the voltage of Saturn to match conditions in the space near the Sun.
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Note 24 --
The "Tree of Heaven" on Mesopotamian seals has never been identified as a botanical species.
It should be pointed out that the Chinese pagodas, like the stupas of India, are originally Buddhist architectural forms. The pagoda form was introduced into China after 200 BC.
The geometry of plasma instabilities tends to certain numerical repetitions, as with the 9 toroidal flattenings of the column (which become seven when the top and bottom disappear from view), and the 28 and 56 exterior bundles of plasma surrounding the column.
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Note 25 --
North of the plasma contact point in the Atlantic, the stream would have looked like an arch spanning the heavens from a location in the southwest to Saturn seen almost directly overhead.
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Note 26 --
The plasma currently impinging on the poles of the outer planets (not Mars which has no atmosphere) and Venus produces a depression in the atmosphere, looking like the caldera of a volcano. It is thus likely that the arc to Earth struck directly through to the ocean surface by means of a similar hole in the Earth's cloudbank and into the ocean.
There are no volcano-like 'cones' surrounding these depressions for the planets with heavy atmospheres, for the plasma streams are in low level -- dark mode. For the Earth, in the past, with a plasma stream in arc mode, there would certainly have been a 'cone' at the location of the arc's impingement at an ocean, consisting of rising water vapor.
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Note 27 --
The trigrams of the Chinese "I Ching" (the "Book of Changes" used for telling fortunes) seem to derive from the sight of the rings of Saturn seen from below. A shadow would be cast by the Sun alternately on parts of the bottom and the top rings -- which would change throughout the day and seasonally.
The diagrams were taken from a nearby tribe by the Chou dynasty, and texts were assigned in the 8th century BC, although the practice of fortune telling clearly dates from the Shang dynasty a thousand years earlier. All the trigrams are identified as landscape elements -- sky, lake, lightning (sun), thunder, wind, rain, mountain, and earth -- as if we are watching a land above the Earth.
About its own origins, the "I Ching" reads..
"Anciently, when the rule of all under heaven was in the hands of Pâo-hsî, looking up he contemplated the brilliant forms exhibited in the sky; and looking down surveyed the patterns shown on the earth. ... On this he devised the eight lineal figures of three lines each...."
-- James Legge, translator, "The I Ching" (1882).

Pâo-hsî is the first legendary emperor.
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Note 28 --
Depictions of the 'world navel' (at various locations in antiquity) each represented the center of the Earth with a dome shaped rock, at times with an entwined snake, representing a twisted Birkeland plasma stream. Each was considered to have been attached -- at one time -- to a placenta in the sky with a twisted umbilical cord.
The inflow of plasma at a pole of Saturn and Venus (today) is seen to bore a hole in the cloud cover, however. This argues against a plasma stream 'snake' slithering down the exterior of the dome of the world navel. We would expect similar phenomena for the Earth. The point of electrical contact was the conducting salt sea. The cloud dome of stream contained no salt and represented a much higher resistivity to the plasma flow.
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Note 29 --
A cartouche is a shape made up of a rectangle with rounded corners, looking like rope which is tied or twisted at the bottom. It is a graphic form used to record the names of pharaohs. The name is written in hieroglyphics inside the cartouche shape. The cartouche first came into use with Huni, the last king of the third dynasty, before 2613 BC. It is likely to represent the 'shen' form of Jupiter, a disk on a bar, actually a plasma outpouring from the south pole of Jupiter which diverted left and right to the objects and dust of the asteroid belt. I have estimated in another chapter that this probably ended around 2690 BC, some decades before Huni.
The "Was Scepter," another device often depicted as being held by the pharaoh (representing his authority), looks like a putting iron with a two-tined fork at the other end, or, as someone stated, a "municipal water shut-off key." After seeing some of Peratt's plasma instabilities, it seems to represent the same image as the curious Kokopelli (a Hopi word) petroglyph figure otherwise known as "the flute player."
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Note 30 --
The information below is from elements developed in following chapters, and is used here to estimate the height of the cloudbank, both the water vapor clouds and the dome of plasma or aurora seen from further away.
The sight lines for the aurora or plasma dome as seen from Egypt (based on the orientation of mastabas and the first pyramids), China -- or more likely Mongolia -- (based on the recorded location of "the mountain at the center of the Earth"), and Ireland (based on the orientation of grave mounds) all intersect in the Atlantic somewhere near southern Greenland and south of Iceland. In northeastern Siberia the 'world mountain' is held to be located directly east. This also leads directly to the north Atlantic. Mesoamerican monuments only date from after 2000 BC, and have nothing to do with the polar plasma column.
...Height of the Water Vapor Cloudbank

I doubt if the actual water vapor cloudbank exceeded 15 degrees (in width) of the circumference of the Earth in diameter, which is a circle with a diameter of 1000 miles. And I doubt if the cloudbank extended more than a few degrees above the horizon. I am basing this on descriptions of the walled fortress of Ys seen by the European coastal peoples, that is, I am assuming the walled city floating on ocean water would not have subtended such a large angle as to make it appear significantly different from a city or fortress, so that, for example, it would not have been identified as a mountain or island.
It is interesting to make some estimates of how high this cloudbank might have been. Placed in the north Atlantic towards southern Greenland, at about 30 degrees longitude and 60 degrees latitude, this would be 800 miles from England and the coast of France, and about 1200 miles from Portugal. I'll use one thousand miles as an average of the distance between the edge of the cloudbank and the location of England and France. This represents about 15 degrees of the Earth's circumference.
To be just barely visible above the horizon, we can start with the sightline tangent to the Earth at the viewing location (normal to the radius of the Earth) extended to the top of the cloudbank. This is a right triangle whose two legs are an Earth radius at the viewing location and the sightline. The hypotenuse is the radius of the Earth plus the height of the cloudbank.
Image: height of cloudbank seen from 1000 miles away.

The height can be found from cos()=r/(r+h), where r is the radius of Earth. To subtend 15 degrees the apparition would have been..
4000/cos(15/deg)-4000 = 141 miles high.
To be seen above the horizon, the cloudbank would have to be higher than this. The angle above the horizon can be found from tan()=height/distance. The distance in this case is the sightline, which is the base of the right triangle we were using.. b=sqrt((r+h)^2-r^2) = 1071 miles.
An extra 20 miles in height would show the cloudbank at one degree above the horizon -- using arctan(20/1071)/rad for a distance of 1071 miles to the location of the cloudbank. Twenty additional miles added to 141 miles is very high, considering that the stratosphere is currently only 40 miles high. This height produces an image which has a 25 to 1 ratio of width to height (for an assumed width of 15 degrees of Earth circumference). This may be too low as an image of a fortified castle. One degree above the horizon would show the cloudbank at a height of twice the diameter of the Moon.
...Height of the Plasma Dome

In northern Egypt, Sumer, Siberia, Mongolia, and Olmec Veracruz, the aurora or plasma dome was seen instead. Each of these locations is about 60 degrees of Earth circumference from the contact point of the arc.
Allowing 15 degrees as the radius of the aurora, each of the far locations needs to subtend only 45 degrees of the Earth's circumference in order to see the top of the aurora. I am here only making estimates for what would be the lower portion of a complete three-toroid disturbed plasma flow.

Image: The inverted plasma dome seen from other locations on Earth.

The two legs and the hypotenuse of the right triangle are defined as above, but the sight line is only extended to the edge of the aurora. As above, the height would be found from cos()=r/(r+h). For a 15 degree radius (30 degrees diameter) the apparition would only have to be..
4000/cos(45/deg)-4000 = 1656 miles high.
Certainly exceedingly high, but not at all unlikely, especially since we are looking at the inverted cup-like lower toroid which represents the lower quarter to lower third of a 250,000 mile to 500,000 mile long plasma stream.
If the 'serpopards' shown on the Palette of Narmer (ca 3050 BC, Egypt) represent the demise of the twisted polar column in 3147 BC, as I will elsewhere suggest, it would represent an upwelling of plasma (or water vapor) surrounding the strike point of the plasma stream from Saturn (in glow mode) which at that time would have reached high enough to be seen from Egypt, and represented as the body of a long necked animal. That would suggest a cloud bank -- not just a inverted plasma discontinuity -- reaching over 3000 or 4000 miles above Earth.
Likewise, to be seen from Guatemala, at 20 degrees latitude, the dome would have to extend a minimum of 1200 miles up from the ocean. To look like a mountain or mountains, as described in Book 11 of the "Chilam Balam," we could add another 1000 miles.
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Note 31 --
Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa in the Indus valley both have elevated platforms with crenelated walls on the west side of the city. These are most likely temple platforms. The founding of both cities are dated, with some uncertainty, to after 3000 BC.

Image: Left: Temple wall from the predynasic temple at Heirakonpolis (ca 3050 BC). Right: Enclosing wall to the compound of Djoser's pyramid (ca 2655 BC).

The buttressed mound appears in China during the Chou dynasty, after 1000 BC, but is modeled after Central Asian forms of burials. That central or eastern Asia could have seen a buttressed mound seems unusual. It would suggest that the cloud dome was much higher than would be suspected.
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Note 32 --
When the Incas construct a mythology of their tribe in AD 1200, they insist that their ancestors first appeared from some local caves, as did many of the Mesoamerican tribes at earlier dates.
The 'tortoise' is also, at least in Mesoamerica, the interpretation of the southern ball plasmoid first seen in 8347 BC.
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Note 33 --
Celtic legends describe the fortress of Ys. The city was walled, with brass gates or walls, floated on oceanic waters, and sank at the end of the "Age of the Gods" when the plasma stream ceased. There are dozens of variations on this theme, with the city under various names, but all with details matching aspects of the Polar Configuration. The Celts were by all accounts the people of the west coast of Europe, bordering the Atlantic, even if they did not occupy England and Ireland until later, and would have had a direct view of the plasma contact which they preserved in their legends.
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Note 34 --
Geb is probably the ball plasmoid of the southern Peratt column. In that case Nut is the clouded shape of Saturn in the north before 4200 BC.
Ancient sources list seven 'companions' of Saturn. Nine satellites could be counted if the very small satellites and those on very close orbits are neglected. The nine were all discovered before the twentieth century by telescope. However, two of the nine satellites, Iapetus and Phoebe, are on extremely distant and irregular orbits (3,561,300 km and 12,952,000 km). That leaves some seven satellites which are easily seen, and could be understood as 'companions.' The God of the Bible is also accompanied by seven archangels.
The current seven large satellites of Saturn, and their radiuses and orbits, are as follows:

Moon # Radius (km) Mass (kg) Distance (km) Discoverer Date Titan VI 2,575 1.35e+23 1,221,850 C. Huygens 1655 Rhea V 765 2.49e+21 527,040 G. Cassini 1672 Tethys III 530 7.55e+20 294,660 G. Cassini 1684 Dione IV 560 1.05e+21 377,400 G. Cassini 1684 Enceladus II 250 8.40e+19 238,020 W. Herschel 1789 Mimas I 196 3.80e+19 185,520 W. Herschel 1789 Hyperion 205x130x110 1.77e+19 1,481,000 W. Bond 1848 Iapetus VIII 730 1.88e+21 3,561,300 G. Cassini 1671 Phoebe IX 110 4.00e+18 12,952,000 W. Pickering 1898 "e+n" denotes 10 exp n

The seven satellites known as the "Companions of Osiris" guarded Osiris' coffin. Four of them, perhaps the four large satellites (perhaps Tethis, Dione, Rhea, Iapetus, but not the giant Titan), remain as the "Sons of Osiris" (originally the "Helpers of the King") in funeral practices. They are shown as seated mummy forms, often seated on a lotus blossom (the rings of Saturn), and they guard the four canopic jars containing the viscera of the body.
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Note 35 --
Many of the Gods, especially the initial Gods, are born as twins, identified as brother and sister, who then marry to generate children, frequently in groups of seven or nine. Many Gods also come into being as deifications of the elements of the celestial display. The Gods Nut and Geb, are today identified by catastrophists as the upper and lower rings of Saturn.
William Mullen, in 1994, suggested that Isis and Nephtys (her helpful sister) were originally assigned to the two outer satellites of Saturn, Lapetus and Phoebe. But in terms of size, Venus and Titan are more likely candidates.
Neith was also identified with Venus by Plato. But Neith is most likely a manifestation of the southern polar plasmoid. She is known in the west Saharan nome as a snake, a weaver, and an archer. The crossed arrows which are her symbol probably represent the electron beams.
In later times, first Mercury (through Greek classical times), and later the Sun, are known as "Apollo" which translates as "without (or 'not') many." Mercury and the Sun at no time had any visible companions. This is of course true for the Moon also, but the Moon does not show up near Earth until after 2350 BC. It is less certain for Venus which, when identified as Isis (in Egypt) or Inanna (in Mesopotamia), often is accompanied by a sister goddess, which might have been a satellite.
Thirty-three telescopic observations were made of what looked like a moon of Venus by fifteen reputable astronomers between AD 1672 and AD 1761. The object looked like a moon because it showed the same phases as Venus, and therefore must have been close to Venus. Movement was noticed and some calculations were made of its period (11 or 12 days), size (one quarter the diameter of Venus), distance from Venus, and orbital inclination and eccentricity (0.195). It has not been seen since, except for once more in 1892, by Edward Barnard of Lick Observatory, who had set out to prove that there was no companion satellite to Venus. Space age exploration has found nothing. From Patrick Moore, "Venus" (2002).
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Note 36 --

Olymous Mons and seven other blisters
"The most curious aspect of the map [of Mars] is the striking difference between the planet's low, smooth Northern Hemisphere and the heavily cratered Southern Hemisphere, which sits, on average, about three miles (five kilometers) higher than the north."
-- GSFC/NASA

Cratering on Mars
It could be suggested that the northern hemisphere was entirely removed due to an even larger plasma contact -- simply machined away. It might be suggested that this was the display in the skies seen by humans in the Upper Paleolithic, say 30,000 years ago, and recorded as the 'cup and tail' petroglyphs (as mentioned in a previous chapter). It would mean that Mars would have been very close to Saturn. And it also suggests that Mars has been a 'dead' planet for a very long time.

Olympus Mons caldera
Shown above is Olympus Mons. The caldera of Olympus Mons is 40 miles in diameter, an area of 1200 square miles -- large enough to contain the city of Chicago, NY city, and LA -- but shows no lava flow. It has the shape of a pancake, and is three times the height of Mount Everest. As noted by Thornhill, the poles also look like massive plasma strike points. If this is so, these would have been strikes of an absolutely astounding magnitude.

Mars, larger northern ocean. Courtesy of Richard Smith.
Richard M. Smith, in "The Mars Ocean Project" (2009) at http://mysite.verizon.net/rickmsmith/MarsOceanProject.html, writes..
"In 1989, Timothy Parker and colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory began analyzing the topography of Mars' northern lowlands for evidence of shorelines that would indicate the existence of ancient oceans."
"In 2001 Parker and [Stephen] Clifford published a paper that delineated their findings in a map showing the locations of several proposed shorelines. ["The Evolution of the Martian Hydrosphere" Icarus (2001)]"
"Later, in 2003, [Michael] Carr and [James] Head reported their opinion that more compelling evidence for ancient large bodies of water were to be found in the deposits on the northern plains." ["Oceans on Mars" Journal of Geophysical Research (2003)]

Smith set out to investigated the graphical equivalent of an ocean sustained on Mars in the past -- actually two oceans, called Arabia and Deuteronilus. The larger Arabia includes the smaller (and lower) Deuteronilus. These are shown above for one instance of some variable parameters, such as the oblateness of Mars due to the additional amount of water. I'll get back to the details of a Martian ocean in Appendix B, "The Celestial Mechanics."
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Note 37 --
That the lower plasma stream would follow the Earth's magnetic field lines is certain. But as Mars approached closer it would have centered on the (location of) the pole star.
The suggestion from Book 10 of the "Chilam Balam" is that Mars disappeared behind the plasma (or vapor) dome in the north by mentioning that Mars "pierced the back" of the mountain or the "foundation stone." This would be correct from the longitude of central America if the plasma contact with Earth (at that time or at one time) was in Hudson Bay. But the reading could also suggest that visually Mars was seen adjacent to the cloud bank in the north Atlantic.
The "Chilam Balam" also notes that (presumably) Mars "warmed well" the base or pedestal -- apparently the vapor dome in the north Atlantic. This suggests arcing from the lower hemisphere of Mars.
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Note 38 --
Egyptian river commerce depended on the current to move north, and on prevailing southerly winds to move south. The large oars often depicted in images of Egyptian ships are for steering.
David Talbott, in "The Ship of Heaven" Aeon (1988), describes aspects of the ship from Egyptian sources, both from early iconography and from later depictions and descriptions where the original elements are kept alive, but are confused. He also points to other descriptions of the ships of the gods worldwide, excepting only Mesoamerica. I think some of the descriptions he brings forward would fit a later model as well -- where the Gods move along the edge of the Absu sea of the southern sky rather than being towed along the 'river' at the edge of Saturn.
Saturn itself also rotated in a circle around the polar axis (as I have already suggested). This last motion was also counterclockwise.
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Note 39 --
These Bronze Age images represent Jupiter as the Midnight Sun at a later date. The image created in this instance would be almost identical to the earlier Egyptian images of a globe resting on a crescent. The location in the skies would be different. See later texts.
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Note 40 --
The home of the Gods moves from an 'upper land' to a mountain after 3147 BC. This mountain, seen by the ancients, at first was the plasma outpouring from below Jupiter, which probably only lasted 100 to 150 years. It was replaced by a plasma mountain formed by Mars on close passes above Earth which lasted for 380 years after 3147 BC. This was also seen where it ougth to have been -- in the north. Jupiter appeared on the ecliptic instead. Much later, from about 2590 to 2500 BC and again from 2350 to 2250 BC, the mountain of Jupiter returned again as the plasma expulsion from its north magnetic pole, located at the south geographical pole. More on this in later chapters.
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Note 41 --
The form of a star within a crescent reappear whenever particularly bright planets (Jupiter and Venus) dip behind the obscuring Absu in their travels along the ecliptic. See later chapters where Babylonian records after 685 BC are discussed.
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Note 42 --
Venus is obviously the uraeus (the rearing cobra form) used with the crown or head dress of the pharaoh. From this image (which is already in use in 3000 BC), and some other considerations, I would suggest that the rotation of Venus might have been synchronous with the rotation of Earth (and Saturn), so that, as seen from Earth, Venus was always seen as placed to the left and 'above' Saturn. If the uraeus then ends up being used at the front of the pharaoh's head dress, then the Egyptians may have conceived of Saturn as a 'head in the sky' seen in profile, facing left. It is possible that this underlies the consistent depiction of Egyptian sacred figures in profile. However, the Egyptian iconography of flat images (discussed in a previous chapter) may have nothing to do with this. Even the earliest images of the pharaoh 'smiting his enemies' have the figure facing to the right.
Talbott identifies the uraeus, as well as the world-wide sidelock of hair of the celestial god, but especially Mars, as a feature of the plasma streams impinging on Mars in arc mode or glow mode. A flow of plasma to Mars would most likely divide to 4 or 8 streams and come together above Mars to impinge on the upper hemisphere. It would look like a star behind Mars.
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Note 43 --
The idea of a person (man or god) standing at the north horizon is very strong and occurs in many mythologies. "With the face of a mirror" reads one Mesoamerican description. With distance from the initial event, and for people less inclined to make a big fuss over the images in the sky, this giant man becomes the first man to have been created, as Adam ("man") of the Hebrews, and Manu ("man") of the Hindus. However, Josephus, in "The Antiquity of the Jews" (AD 93), notes, "This [first] man was called Adam, which in the Hebrew tongue signifies one that is red, because he was formed out of red earth, compounded together." That might point to Mars rather than Saturn.
The Kurgan invasions into Europe, and possibly into the Near East, were in progress during this time (4400 to 4200 BC and 3400 to 3200 BC). The Kurgans were sheep and cattle herders from the steppes of Russia and Central Asia. Later waves include horse nomads. Related tribes arrive in Iran and Anatolia within the next few thousand years. The areas they infiltrate are introduced to weapons, the feudal system, the horse, and probably the Indo-European languages (as Persian was). Where they superimpose themselves on a native population, the native people are segregated into classes within a few hundred years with the invaders as the overlords.
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Note 44 --
The Absu extended as a set of inclined bands in the southern sky below the equatorial. The equatorial is an imaginary extension of the Earth's equator into the sky, from directly east to directly west, but set at an angle above the south horizon equal to the compliment of the latitude on Earth from which it is seen (90 degrees less the latitude). Thus at 30 degrees latitude (Mesopotamia and Egypt) the equatorial was placed at 60 degrees up from the southern horizon, and the celestial ocean stood up somewhat short of 50 degrees. (Estimated in a later chapter.)
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Note 45 --
"That conservatism so noticeable in Egyptian art is even more emphasized in matters of religion; elements which had once been admitted into the canon continued side by side with later innovations, even though they were logically superfluous and sometimes irreconcilable."
-- I.E.S. Edwards "The Pyramids of Egypt" (1972).

The conservatism arises from the conviction of the experience of a thousand years of the "Age of the Gods," and some of the strange and diverse elements in Egyptian religion probably have their genesis in the need to account for the objects in the sky in the previous era from 8500 BC through 4200 BC. These earlier rationalizations cannot be neglected, despite the intervening 1000 years of the "Age of the Gods," since the iconography which was well established by 3050 BC in Egypt is retained for the next 3000 years.
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Note 46 --
Egypt did not produce narratives until very late, apparently during the Middle Kingdom (2050 -- 1492 BC). The first we hear of the Egyptian story of Isis and Osiris is when it is told by a Greek in the first century AD.
Sumer and Akkad produced a literature, with the earliest copies dating from 2300 and 2400 BC, although frequently attributed to much earlier dates. Most date from after 2000 BC. The narratives have little sense of the linear historical perspective that we would require. As in Egypt, only the past mattered, and of the past, only the beginning. However, Sumer kept extensive records of commercial transactions and contracts, from much earlier times.
In China the earliest documents are very late recollections. The Annals of Shu is a collection of disconnected records from 2300 BC to 600 BC, collated some time after 500 BC, destroyed in 213 BC, and recovered some 50 years later. This was during the Chou dynasty, 1027 to 221 BC, which had in effect removed all iconography of the religions associated with the agricultural tribes they conquered, and the Chin dynasty, which purged China of nearly all books in 213 BC.
Some of the religious notions curbed by the Chou were reintroduced by the humanist and realist philosophers of the Confucianists (Confucius, 551-479 BC) and contemporaneous Taoists (Lao-tse, 604-531 BC), but the texts were edited to serve the imperial aristocracy. This was an era of classical philosophical development, and we see efforts to tame and explain the world in terms of basic forces in nature (such as the Yin / Yang) and material elements, not unlike the efforts of the contemporaneous Greeks to displace the Olympian Gods with rational thought. This had an impact on the Chinese records that were forwarded to us, for they have been cleaned up and emptied of mythical and legendary elements. Only "heaven" is retained, and heaven is not the home of a god or spirit so much as it is a source of authority.
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Note 47 --
"For practically every known rite -- and there are thousands of them -- you can find a natural match in mythology, and in every instance the person who performs the ritual corresponds to one of the actors in the myth, be it the main divinity himself or another one. It is, therefore, justifiable to say that the persons who enact the rituals temporarily become the gods -- in their own imagination -- for the duration of the ritual. The myth and the ritual together form a sort of microcosm that exists outside the ordinary world, but takes place in "illo tempore" exclusively."
"An interesting sidenote is that this insight vindicates the age-old traditional explanation of the origin of the rituals. ... The most sacred rites were worldwide believed to have been instituted by the gods themselves. Here the tradition explicitly connects the myth and the ritual. According to the myth the god performed the sacred act for the first time, so that the myth actually describes the ritual. Conversely, by performing the same sacred act the celebrant repeats what the god allegedly did first, so that the deity automatically becomes the legendary founder of the ritual. The process of transfiguration and the exemplary nature of the myths are here seen to culminate in the significance of the ritual imitation of the myths."
-- Marinas van der Sluijs at [http://www.mythopedia.info]

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Note 48 --
The earliest Egyptian mastabas and the first pyramids are oriented towards the northwest. Only with the first 'true' pyramids is the alignment changed to north-south. As time goes on temples also are aligned more frequently to the north, but often determined more by the landscape than the old sacred traditions.
The earlier megalithic constructions in Ireland, England, and France generally have their major axis pointing west by northwest. Only in the Bronze Age do graves and constructions in Europe start to point to the north pole.
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Note 49 --
You will recognize obvious elements in "Jack and the Bean Stalk" and also in many other fairy tales. It might also be suggested that hopscotch diagrams represent the stairway to heaven. The game is supposedly British and of Roman times, but this only attests to its antiquity. It is in use worldwide. In the USA the numbered squares are surmounted with a circle marked "heaven."
The Roman poet Ovid turned many of the senseless 'myths,' which often have no resolution in terms of a moral or a lesson, into a narrative form but, despite his best efforts, a sense of closure often escaped him, and the only lesson learned, for example, is that the caprice of youth will lead to being turned into a Laurel tree by an angry Goddess.
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Note 50 --
Rohan and Renshaw, American Journal of Psychiatry January, 2004. The patent 6,572,528 (applied for April 20, 2001, awarded June 3, 2003), is held by McLean Hospital Corporation, Belmont, MA. The patent speaks of a 1000 Hz (pulse) rate at 5-10 Gauss. Compare this to the Earth's current magnetic field (which does not oscilate) of 0.3-0.6 Gauss.
It would be difficult, however, to imagine a Birkeland current capable of generating a 1000 Hz pulsing field from rotation. The physical dimensions of the arc are too large. The magnetic pulsing would have to be generated by sputtering, or some other by-product of the current, such as a splintering of the arc into discrete streams.
On the other hand, the atmospheric electrical charges -- static electricity -- during this time must have been enormous. There are therapeutic effects ascribed to static electricity also.
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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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Recovering the Lost World, A Saturnian Cosmology -- Jno Cook Part 6: Creation and the Polar Sun.

Starting from Chaos

An Unexpected Flood -- 5600 BC

The Egg of Creation -- 4900 BC

Creation -- 4200 BC

The Eye of Ra

The Polar Configuration

Petroglyphs

The City on the Horizon

The Changing Celestial Display

The God Visits Earth

The Start of Time

The First Land

Depicting the Past

Horus the Hawk

The Gifts of the Gods

Living in Paradise

Endnotes

Recovering the Lost World,
A Saturnian Cosmology -- Jno Cook
Part 6: Creation and the Polar Sun.