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Recovering the Lost World,
A Saturnian Cosmology -- Jno Cook
Chapter 1: Introduction.


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Contents of this chapter: [What this Site Is About] [Disbelieving History] [The History of Objections] [The AAAS and the Heretic] [Validation] [Mesoamerica] [Who I am] [This Text on the Internet] [What Others Say] [Endnotes]

Introduction

"... a large planet stood above the
North Pole for a very long time."

That is what all the mythology throughout the world uniformly states -- mythology from every nation, region, tribe, and period, in thousands of languages, in hundreds of forms, from every continent -- they all resound, "a large planet stood above the North Pole for a very long time." Every country, that is, except those more than 10 degrees below the equator.

The mythology of regions as far removed from each other as Siberia, North Africa, and Guatemala all agree. If the mythology is true (and what other conclusion could be drawn), then the fact that a large planet stood at the northern horizon is true. How this could be, is a matter which this text will attempt to address.

As others have also done, I will suggest that this planet was Saturn. From other sources we can estimate that the planet Saturn moved on a wildly elliptical path around the Sun in the remote past, entering the Solar System at very long intervals. Some time in the last 3 million years, perhaps after passing Jupiter, Saturn was drawn into a much closer orbit around the Sun, very near Earth. And from 10,900 BC, Saturn captured and held the Earth in a sub-polar position lasting until 3147 BC, when Earth broke away.

"You cannot reason a person out of a position
he did not reason himself into in the first place."

-- Jonathan Swift

This is, however, exactly what I will attempt to do with this text: I will try to tell the actual history of the world and humanity -- in spite of the knee-jerk reactions and spitting noises you may see and hear from those who feel they know better. This is not my story, but the efforts of a great many people, and based on evidence in plain view.

My starting point is the postulate that myths throughout the world should be taken at face value. For the recurring worldwide mythology this is almost completely obvious. No other form of meaning can be assigned.

An attempt to apply local culture and limitations to mythology almost always meets with failure because of a lack of appreciation of the constant refrain of identical themes by peoples who have remained completely foreign to each other -- who have never had cultural contact. Any theory of mythology based on limited and local origins will fail to translate to the hundreds of additional instances across the world. This holds true also for all the variations of analogies that are presented to us as explanations of mythology: notions of ritual, model behavior, allegories of nature, personifications of the weather.

This leaves only the historicity of mythology. It has an evidential character which is absolute. If myth tells us that a large planet stood above the northern horizon, then we are stuck with this as fact. It cannot be negated, waived aside, or turned into an allegory. It only remains to investigate how this could have been so. Mythology is history.

Of course it is not always astoundingly clear. Frequently we are met with wording which is no longer understood, and frequently it will be easier for us to elicit metaphors from our own culture and language in an attempt to explain the inexplicable. This is probably the most frequently made mistake in investigating mythology.

Mythology represents a history stretching into the depths of time. On the other hand, the accepted mainstream history is a 2000-year record of rewriting and softening of facts, created for the sake of sanity and the comfort of your soul. It is a history of the survivors, written to cover their suspicions and allay any fears. It was initiated with the scrutiny of myths by Plato, and has grown since the Renaissance, culminating in the scientificism of the last hundred years. If the narrative based on conventional wisdom suits you, you should stop reading here, for the story presented here will get progressively stranger. Be comforted, though, that this will not be about crashing meteors, undetected planets, or visits by aliens.

The story of what has happened to Earth has no plot and no direction, and makes no sense. This is, in fact, one of the basic parameters of myth: there is no encompassing teleological design, it does not teach, it does not glorify, it does not propose any new arcane knowledge. It only recounts the past.

Returning now to that large object in the sky:

"The evidence of myth which points to Saturn having once occupied a position above Earth's north polar regions is voluminous. There is not a race on Earth that has not preserved at least one account which states as much. According to this evidence, Saturn occupied a central position in the north celestial regions. It rotated, and rotated widely; but other than that, it was immovable.

-- Dwardu Cardona (1978) [note 1]

It rotated, in fact, in a circle around the polar axis. From a vantage point 15 to 20 degrees of latitude further south than Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Guatemalan Popol Vuh recounts that it rose out of an ocean and sank back into it every day for what appears to have been some 2500 years starting 10,900 BC.

What This Site Is Really About

This is a cosmology. It is not the traditional handed-down narrative passed off as the history of everything. It is an alternative -- one which is very extensive -- quite complete and accurate. My starting premise was to hold worldwide mythology as absolute and believable, although at times very obscure. My method subsequent to this starting position was the collection of myths and iconography, and then to develop, in turn, a chronology of events (Appendix A) and a likely process of celestial mechanics (Appendix B). At that point I started a narrative.

As an alternative cosmology the narrative has remained within the accepted boundaries of physics and dating. This has continued to surprise me as the details developed. I have had no problem with the integration of the iconography, the odd events, and the obscure mythological phrasings. Other alternative cosmologies have had to resort to analogical and metaphorical readings of the past, or suggest improbable exploding bolides.

In the realm of orthodox cosmology, since 2007 we are seeing astrophysicists, atomic physicists, and archaeologists doing exactly that -- that is, suggesting improbable exploding bolides in attempts to explain an event in 10,900 BC which caused the complete destruction of all the megafauna of the North American continent, plus an absolutely stupendous conflagration which vaporized everything organic and melted rocks. To explain these data, published papers have alternately posited an influx of meteors, aerially exploding iceballs from space, the propagation of flaming shockwaves from kinetic energy conversion in the air (even though there is no such thing), and the influx of atomic particles from a supernova. The establishment scientists are lost, and by their own admission they are grasping at straws.

But there is a straightforward answer. It lies in the predictable effects of repulsive electric force between planets when their plasmaspheres touch, that is, line up with each other. And this is what I will propose, even though you are very unlikely to be in the least familiar with this.

This is so because for some almost inexplicable reason, such forces and such interactions cannot be conceived of or even discussed within the realm of consensus science, especially in astrophysics, despite the fact that electric fields have been the stock of electrical engineering since the early 19th century. Ralph Juergens wrote in 1972:

"When the moment arrived for the inevitable encounter [between plasmaspheres], [the] sheaths would make contact. Unleashed electric fields would clash. Almost instantly, forces immeasurably greater than gravitation would be brought to bear on the charged bodies. Cosmic thunderbolts would flash between the bodies in an effort to equalize their electric potentials."

-- "Reconciling Celestial Mechanics and Velikovskian Catastrophism" (Pensee 1972)

The forces "immeasurably greater than gravitation" are real. They are electrically repulsive, billions on billions of times stronger than gravity, and they operate instantaneously (not "almost instantly"). The effects do not last long, for a charge of the opposite polarity would quickly be induced. After a delay (perhaps of minutes) the "cosmic thunderbolts" would follow -- a charge equalization. Since this is the movement of electrons and protons across space it will involve a travel time delay.

Juergens continues with:

"The list of unthinkably disastrous effects that would result could go on and on. The point to be made, however, is that Worlds in Collision [Immanuel Velikovsky's book] -- at least in my opinion -- documents historical evidence to indicate that phenomena associated with space-charge sheath destruction were actually suffered and survived by peoples of antiquity."

The repulsive force between planets with like charges (or attractive force for unlike charges) is about 39 orders of magnitude greater than the attractive force due to gravity -- thus it is greater than gravity by a factor (a multiplier) of 10 to the 39th power -- 10 followed by 39 zeros. Gravity drops off with the square of the separation distance. That is also true for point electric charges, but for charged surfaces the force drops off as the inverse of the separation distance.

It is here taken for granted that all Solar System planets carry an extremely high negative charge -- at their surface (or in the near-space region). This has been known for Earth for a long time, but this awareness is only slowly creeping into the field of celestial mechanics. The planets keep electrically isolated from each other by means of their enclosing plasmasphere (what Juergens called a space-charge sheath above) which for Earth is approximately equal to the Earth's magnetosphere (thus with a radius generally 20 times the diameter of the Earth). For comets this is called the coma.

In popular mainstream astrophysics the "plasmasphere" is frequently represented as consisting only of the Van Allen belts, an equatorial toroidal region of charged particles surrounding the Earth. The visible comas and tails of comets contradicts this, as does the analysis of the electrical properties of the space surrounding the Earth which is based on satellite measurements. See for example J. H. Piddington Cosmic Electrodynamics (1969) and others.

It is absolutely astounding that, in the 40 years since 1972, not one author among the writers in catastrophism has taken proper account of the repulsive forces Juergens first introduced into the literature.

I should point out also, that when Juergens writes "almost instantly forces immeasurable larger" and "cosmic thunderbolts would flash between the bodies," most readers fail to realize that there is a delay between these two separate actions. It seems to have been universally assumed that the thunderbolts result instantaneously from sensing a difference in potential, perhaps because one sentence follows directly on the other.

The difference in potential which causes the "cosmic thunderbolt" does not exist until an opposite charge is induced at one of the planets (which takes time) and the thunderbolt is further delayed by the time it takes for electrons and ions to travel from one planet to the other. And I should also point out that interplanetary lightning strikes are almost benign compared to the destructive interaction due to the likeness in potential -- the electric repulsive forces.

What is perhaps more astounding is the sheer lunacy of Velikovskian researchers, almost none of whom had the slightest background in physics or engineering, in insisting, for a span of thirty or forty years (as did Velikovsky), that somehow an interaction of magnetic fields between planets would account for changes in the Earth's orbit and Earth's axial inclination -- despite the fact that the two planets accused of interfering with Earth, Venus and Mars, have no magnetic field.

Much of this was due to Velikovsky's insistence on the primacy of magnetic fields while ignoring electric fields. Magnetic fields remained in the conceptual foreground as long as it was thought that the planetary interaction genuinely involved "collisions" or "near collisions." Everyone has played with magnets and understands their effectiveness at close distances. Almost no one has any feel for the enormous wallop packed by electric charges at great distances.

As I have discovered over and over again, the theorists (mostly "story tellers") of the catastrophic events first proposed by Velikovsky have seldom given much thought to the obvious: Venus could not have made a close approach to Earth without overall destruction of both planets.

The retellers of Velikovsky's narratives have held his book as Bible truth, for a number of reasons: in order to remain in his good graces, from a deficiency of imagination, and from the complete lack of knowledge of physics and electricity. There has been a whole generation of "researchers" who have never given a single thought to alternate scenarios which would generate the same descriptions from antiquity.

This is so like the established mainstream notions of today's science orthodoxy, which holds that things always were as they are today. No other condition can enter the imagination and certainly cannot present itself as fact. Yet all indications from the recent past are that things were different. Even very recently the arrangement of the Solar System differed markedly from today.

What is most important about the changes in the arrangement of the Solar System, many of which were catastrophic, is the cultural and psychological reaction of the people of Earth to these events. The last 1000 years of the period when Saturn visually stood above the north horizon (4077 BC to 3147 BC) were beneficial and was remembered as the "Era of the Gods." Subsequent human history has been a singular effort to regain that Paradise. This period was followed by a series of adjustments in planetary orbits, some of which also had significant destructive effects on Earth and traumatic psychological effects on humans.

Humans changed after Paradise closed in 3147 BC. It was not just the rapid changes which we identify as civilization since 3147 BC, but also the acquisition, over the next three millennia, of subjective consciousness. The response to catastrophic events determined how we became fully human. To say it would have happened anyway does not hold up. There could have been any number of other outcomes. We could still be chipping flints. After all, we did that for more than a million years.

Disbelieving History

Of course, many will disbelieve and deride the concept of an alternative history, for it was not learned at their mother's knee. Most people have never actually tested the logic of the mainstream scenarios. The orthodoxy just "feels so right," because it is promulgated by a consensus of the established community of scientists, and especially by astronomers and historians. These two disciplines, it should be pointed out, operate without a physical object they can lay their hands on and are thus relegated to considering their subject of study mostly within the vacuum of the mind.

The physicality and history presented by the establishment is so here and now: it is everywhere and as accepted as religion (and with as little basis in fact). Any alternative to the conventional cosmology is thought to be impossible.

So, if you need to ask me: none of the information presented here has been published as scientific opinions in peer-reviewed professional journals. There are no clinical trials underway. My readers either understand and agree or they maintain an absolute silence. Over the last fifteen years I have only been faulted once -- for my claim that mountains existed before the Biblical flood of Noah.

Ralph Juergens, in 1972, in a brief evaluation of reasons for the "emotional outburst from the community of astronomers" (in particular) to the writings of Immanuel Velikovsky, wrote in summary about the scientific community:

"... I believe it is only fair to acknowledge an underlying and totally sincere scientific disbelief in the historical record."

Juergens here plainly translates mythology to history, as I do. Let's face the facts: the major portion of the historical record of mankind is our mythology. But this is not how most people understand mythology, including, or perhaps especially so, the scientific community.

To most people mythology is an exercise in didactic preachings on ethics and morals, akin to religious education. This represents an attitude initiated with the skepticism of Plato, and most recently reinforced by Joseph Campbell with his 1949 book The Hero of a Thousand Faces.

To Campbell myths are universal truths presented in symbolic language. But to everyone else myths are insubstantial and unreal. They have no relationship to anything in the physical world, and quoting the fanciful language of ancient sages doesn't prove anything about the real world of astronomers and physicists.

But it may be more than that. It is, in fact, difficult to understand the violent reaction to Velikovsky and his book as being solely based on a disbelief in history or in misconceptions about mythology. The reaction that was evoked primarily seemed to consist of predictable psychological defenses to perceived attacks. The astronomers had been bested by an outsider. [note 2]

The History of Objections

Efforts to debunk the cosmologies proposed by Immanuel Velikovsky (Worlds in Collision published in 1950), as well as David Talbott (The Saturn Myth of 1980), and work by Wallace Thornhill, Don Scott, and others have continued unabated for 60 years by those who need to convince themselves that they live in a stable Universe where things have always been as they are today.

Even recently, in 2012, more books are being published which are intended to show the terrifying influence of Velikovsky, such as Michael Gordin's The Pseudoscience Wars and the Birth of the Modern Fringe. Gordin equates Velikovsky's writing (as the publication blurb announces) with "other fringe doctrines, including creationism, parapsychology, and more."

Another book, Laird Scranton's The Velikovsky Heresies: Worlds in Collision and Ancient Catastrophes Revisited, supports Velikovsky, but with little effort at an in-depth analysis. Most of the writing simply rehashes the favorable reviews of the 1960's.

Whereas Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision is listed under "Astronomy and Astrophysics" at Amazon.com, the above books are listed under "Religion and Spirituality" and "Christian Books and Bibles." As ever, the ability to influence religion is the greatest fear.

Today it is absolutely taboo to cite the work of Velikovsky in any scientific papers. This is observed with a religious zeal. Alfred de Grazia suggests it is a symptom of "collective neurosis" among astronomers and especially among archaeologists. Archaeology deals with actual objects but derived time periods. Velikovsky's later theory of displaced archaeological dates was very threatening. The violent rejection and debunking by professionals, whether they be astronomers, historians, or linguists, is perhaps the best certification of the very likely veracity of new ideas.

The AAAS and the Heretic

I should add an additional note on Velikovsky, since people tend to hold pre-formed opinions of him which are derived from rather scurrilous condemnations by the scientific community, in fact, almost entirely due to a symposium held by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1974 -- twenty four years after publication of Velikovsky's book Worlds in Collision.

The symposium was presented as the ultimate excommunication of Velikovsky in a trial of scientificisms performed by the AAAS. Velikovsky was on a panel with five scientists who were to consider his ideas. He was allowed to speak for 30 minutes, but was then followed by four anti-Velikovsky panelists who spoke against his ideas for two hours. The press loved it, extravagantly quoted Carl Sagan, and held Sagan as the winner.

At the time of the symposium, 24 years after his first publication, all too many predictions and corollaries formed by Velikovsky had been verified, based mainly on data gathered from the space program. Meanwhile Velikovsky had been giving standing-room-only lectures at universities and had become an embarrassment to astronomy.

James Hogan, in Kicking the Sacred Cow (2004), writes:

"Organized science had tried every tactic of distortion, evasion, misrepresentation, intimidation, vilification, and suppression of evidence to slay the monster that threatened the entire foundation of the collective uniformitarian world-view and mind-set.

Hogan is not exaggerating. As he mentions:

... after twenty years, interest in Velikovsky's theories was not only getting stronger with the apparent vindication from all quarters that was getting past the censorship and receiving coverage, but Velikovsky was no longer virtually alone. Scientists from many disciplines were beginning to organize in his defense, bringing the message to a new generation of readers and students."

But the AAAS symposium would bring all of that to an end. I won't go into details. You may readily find them. The end result was a disaster for Velikovsky's reputation.

The AAAS printed up the proceedings, but without allowing responses from Velikovsky. The papers of the 1974 AAAS conference appeared in Donald W. Goldsmith, Scientists Confront Velikovsky (1977).

The introduction by Isaac Asimov begins with, "What does one do with a heretic?" Indeed! Asimov's essay goes on to suggest that miracles by God are a more likely solution to the catastrophes recorded in the Bible: "the hypothesis that divine intervention caused the miracles."

In later recollections by Sagan in Broca's Brain (1979), however unbelievably, the television-personality astronomer accused Velikovsky of religious delusions: "Velikovsky attempts to rescue not only religion but also astrology."

Although presented as ridicule, that statement incorporates the hidden fear of the astronomers and scientists: that Velikovsky's book was an effort to tie science and astronomy to Bible fundamentalism -- just when the scientists had thought they had rescued humanity from such blundering behavior and superstitions. As Robert McAulay wrote in "Extra-Scientific Dimensions of Science" (Society for Interdisciplinary Studies (SIS) Review, 1979):

"Velikovsky can be further comprehended. Of special significance is the fact that Velikovsky's catastrophism is seen by a number of eminent scientists as raising once more the spectre of the arch-nemesis of modern science: Christian fundamentalism."

Of any number of analyses I have read of the controversy surrounding Velikovsky, only those that give voice to the idea that, inadvertently or not, Velikovsky was supplying evidence in support of Bible fundamentalism, made sense -- and this despite the fact that Velikovsky was an atheist and basically anti-religious. But nevertheless fundamentalist ideas were being read into his work.

"Perhaps the key factor is that Velikovsky's theories are regularly linked with literal interpretations of the Bible, and are thus viewed as being of one piece with 'fundamentalism,' rather than as an historical use of the Bible and other sources."

McAulay continues:

"Along these lines, the number of times that scientists refer to the religious implications of Velikovsky's work is striking."

What is happening here? I think we are seeing such violent reactions to Velikovsky because the real reason for being so upset with him was to be kept secret and hidden. It was a reaction to the invalidation of the life's work of the scientists. Let me quote Edward T. Hall who, in Beyond Culture (1976), sums up the reaction to telling people that their world is misconceived:

"When other people call attention to ... perceptual differences, suggesting that the world is not as one perceives it, these observations can be unsettling. To do so is to suggest that a person is incompetent, not properly motivated, ignorant, or even infantile."

This is exactly what Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision did to the astronomers of the USA. The unspoken implications were that they were incompetent and ignorant, and they were being told so by an outsider.

Many wrote also about the AAAS exercise in exorcism. Lynn Rose, who was present at the symposium, but not allowed to comment, produced articles in Kronos, "Just Plainly Wrong," in 1977 and 1978.

Charles Ginenthal spent nearly a decade researching Carl Sagan and Immanuel Velikovsky (1995), which took up Sagan's points of disagreement with Velikovsky.

Alfred de Grazia authored, with Ralph Juergens and Livio Stecchini, The Velikovsky Affair (1966, 1978), including an update for the AAAS Symposium experiences. [note 3]

But all to no avail. There is no right and wrong in any of this, there is nothing to prove. My feeling is that the participation by Velikovsky in the symposium was a mistake which backfired by producing astoundingly bad press. It was the single largest mistake that Velikovsky and his supporters ever made, and perhaps the only one. Nothing will ever be proven through debate of theories.

There is no decisive proof to be had. The establishment owns a complete culture of empty fictions -- the Big Bang, Black Holes, Dark Matter, the Dark Ages of Greece, Sothic dating, and the pretentious paradigm of Absolute Gradualism. None of it is real, yet all of it is accepted as Gospel Truth. What the Velikovskians needed was marketing by professionals -- not some self-generated precepts of decisive proof of their theories. As de Grazia noted, in Cosmic Heretics (1984):

"The practice of advancing priorities is childish and the idea of proving a general cosmogony by a race of claims is ludicrous. There can be no crucial test or event."

Almost the complete series of objections presented by Wikipedia today is in error or is of no current import. While many of the initial celestial suppositions of Velikovsky have proven to be wrong, his corollaries have been correct, despite the fact that in the 1950s the astronomical establishment absolutely railed against them.

One outstanding and contrary element, from Wikipedia, however, is the following:

"He proposed that electromagnetic forces could be the cause of the movement of the planets, although such forces between astronomical bodies are essentially zero."

These forces are, in fact, zero, and will remain hidden and inactive within the shielding plasmaspheres of the planets. However, if the plasmaspheres of planets of nearly equal surface potentials intersect, then the forces are absolutely stupendous, so much so that even today many catastrophists shun all mention of repulsive forces between planets, for, without a grounding in electric field theory, it simply cannot be imagined how these forces act or how large they could be. They are, in fact, billions on billions of times greater than gravitational forces. This was how Venus "collided" with Earth at a distance of 20,000,000 miles (32,200,000 km).

I would never have made any sense of any of this were it not for the elucidation provided by the writings of Ralph Juergens, Wal Thornhill, and Don Scott, which readily explain virtually all the planetary interactions in electrical terms. Additionally, the mythological aspects of my model developed out of writings and theories developed by David Talbott and Julian Jaynes, to whom I am also greatly indebted. [note 4]

Validation

I have done little more than connect the details of research by others, which I reference in these first chapters. As a result, very little of the following essay is speculative. Almost all of it can be backed up with currently available data and the theories of "Cosmic Electrodynamics." This last is otherwise known as plasma theory, which is based on long-standing concepts in electricity and field theory, and data gathered with space probes. But don't worry, I'll keep it simple.

Any speculation will be identified as such. More will be based on common sense and intuition. I'll detail my methods in a later chapter.

There have been numerous changes to this text, for many facets of the past have only slowly revealed themselves over the span of the last 10 years. But the changes are almost all in details. The overall narrative has remained the same since 2003.

Last, the reader will be looking for proof of my claims. Proof of specific ideas is at times overwhelming and at other times very sparse. But the strongest indication for the validity of the overall claims made here lies in the fact that the complete set of ideas explains almost all mythology with great ease, including many concepts which have remained entirely obscured under uniformitarian consensus and even ideas which have remained inexplicable to alternative cosmologists despite years of investigations.

The Velikovskian studies have generated a number of magazines over the years, from 1972 through to today. Much of this is available as a CDROM at [www.catastrophism.com] of texts from past issues of Pensee, Kronos, SIS Review, SIS Workshop, Horus, Aeon, Velikovskian, and Thoth (with the last also at [othergroup.net/thoth/]. There are over 4000 published articles directly concerned with these topics (and another 10,000 as news reports and uninformed drivel).

Most of these magazines have gone under. Only the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies (SIS) publications have been added to the CDROM as updates. The CDROM is perpetually out of date, and much of the graphics are missing. Why all of this information is being hoarded is curious. It should be freely made available on the internet as the most important and intellectually liberating concepts to have been developed in the last 1000 years.

In this essay I am providing no more than cursory information on what has already been written about extensively by others. I have limited references to their work because there is no reason to weigh down a narrative with thousands of "op cit" and "ibid" footnotes -- which are too unrevealing and foster the decontexualization of primary sources.

Therefore, I did not include sources for most of the information in this text since all I am doing is remapping areas already explored by others and all of it is readily available, although scattered over many sites and books.

On the other hand, what is missing from the wide-ranging efforts of other researchers is a coherent analysis of Mesoamerican sources. I have added this. But it could not have been done without the prior exposition, by others, of the sequence of events as described in Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Indian, and Chinese sources. I am also indebted to earlier commentators and chronographers from Augustine to Ussher.

This site is thus in a large part a collation and synthesis of the efforts of many other people to recoup the past and a restatement of their work. Most of the information has been published previously, although I could not accept all of the writings. A portion of these prior resources is conjectural when based on unsound chronology, impractical when based on poorly understood physics, and pure fantasy when based on analogies.

And thus, in an attempt to put it all together, I am providing a narrative text of findings which I feel are acceptable and adding what I feel is missing: a sound chronology, realistic mechanics, and an extrapolation to events not recognized by many researchers.

I collected available material and put it in order, and, when it no longer made sense, started writing. Overall, the construction of a cohesive narrative resolved every significant outstanding "problem" which other researchers had run into, although at times it took months to find a solution -- however obvious it eventually turned out to be.

I should warn that the subject matter here is not any sort of accepted science narrative. It is a cosmology based on a set of reasonable starting postulates. The postulates, like those of any cosmology, are untestable. However, established theories of physics can be applied to these and this results in an amazing concordance of information in agreement with the initial postulates, historical recollections, and observable facts. It is this which confers validity on the explication pursued here. It suggests sensible answers to questions about the history of mankind, the Earth, the Solar System, and the Universe which have remained completely unanswered by the traditional "handed-down wisdom." The sum total of the conclusions derived here goes much further to constitute a cohesive "world-view" than traditional opinions and narratives have done.

This website takes Velikovsky's groundbreaking work, his book Worlds in Collision (1950), as a starting point for the development of a history of antiquity which answers more questions than any other alternative cosmology, and certainly more than the commonly accepted uniformitarian cosmology.

Many catastrophists still accept Velikovsky's ideas. Others, such as David Talbott, Wall Thornhill, and Dwardu Cardona of the Thunderbolts group, hold that nothing ever happened after the so-called Polar Configuration came apart in 3147 BC: not with Venus in 1500 BC or with Mars after 800 BC. Considering (as I do) the huge assembly of mythology which recounts these events, spread over three continents, with Mesoamerica detailing this with identifiable dates, I am astounded at the oversight. What else could be expected as the winding down of the cataclysm of 3147 BC with the removal of Saturn except further adjustments and interactions of the loosened planets?

I also came to the conclusion that some very large aspects of the past -- including some immense events -- had been overlooked by some of the most able researchers. I discovered and detailed the fall of the Absu in 2349 BC and the resurrection of Jupiter, and discovered the blazing of Venus and Mercury in 685 BC and the plasmoid delivered from Jupiter to the Sun (to the exact date and hour). Both the Velikovskians and the Thunderbolts people have remained completely unaware of these particular events -- and not that both could not have been discovered among available texts. You will not have to be able to read dead languages to find the information.

This cosmology can explain everything from the geology of the Earth to the astrophysics of the Solar System. Other people have expanded on separate facets extensively. My first concern was to provide a chronology and a mechanics (see the Appendixes A and B). The connecting narrative came later. In this narrative my main interest has been to trace the origins of contemporary cultural practices. Of greatest importance, from my point of view, is that a Saturnian cosmology provides an explanation of the actions and thoughts of our ancestors and insight into our contemporary behavior and thinking.

Let me state at the outset that I have no particular axe to grind, no politics to promote, this is not a "creationist's young earth" thesis, I do not hold to extraterrestrial interventions, I have no religious or theistic proposals to make, nor do I put stock in the "Elohim" of the Old Testament. I'll remain within accepted physics -- I will not propose new solutions to gravity or offer new "forces" for you to consider, or have planets arbitrarily leave their orbits. And I'll use accepted dates and dating.

I started this essay in late 2001. I never meant to write as much as I did, but people asked, "So what came before 4077 BC?" That alone resulted in nine additional chapters. And then there were minor questions on items I had never paid much attention to, like, "Why was Sirius red in antiquity?" and "What about the two latitudes of Babylon?" This last has been under discussion by astronomers since AD 100. But the solution is simple.

Mesoamerica

And then, as noted directly below, I started to look at Mesoamerica, which resulted in seven more chapters. So, after completing most of the narrative described in these pages in March of 2006, I came across the Books of the Chilam Balam Of Chumayel of the Yucatan Maya which were written shortly after the invasion by the Spanish. These were an attempt to secretly keep ancient myths and tales alive.

I was astounded to find among the texts a step-by-step rendition of the course of the "creation of the world" dating back to long before 3147 BC, followed by an accounting of other catastrophic events. The events are described in the same detail as the parallel Egyptian and Mesopotamian "legends." The Chilam Balam also provided dates which turned out to be congruent with what had already been extracted from sources in the Eastern Mediterranean by others. I started to include references to the Chilam Balam within the main text.

I followed up on ideas by Vincent H. Malmstrom, writing in Cycles of the Sun, Mysteries of the Moon (1997), and Anthony Aveni in Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico (1980), who both claim that the Mesoamerican ceremonial sites are aligned to the setting of the solstitual summer Sun. They are not.

I have much better data for longitude and latitude available today than Malmstrom and Aveni had, and found their conclusions to be completely wrong. What I found instead, unnoticed by Malmstrom and Aveni, were alignments to the setting of the zenithal Sun -- the day the sun exactly overpasses a particular site, 90 degrees up in the sky. It became clear that the location of every site in Mesoamerica was selected not only so that the Sun would pass directly overhead (which happens two days each year anyway), but sites were specifically selected to have the Sun set at a mountain or in a volcano on the western or northwestern horizon. The mountains were selected to correspond to an alignment within 1/3 degree of this.

I thus looked closely at 13 early and well-established ceremonial sites in the Olmec region and the Valley of Mexico (plus two sites elsewhere), and found that they shared some 70 alignments to mountains or volcanoes -- each for sunsets primarily on six calendar dates only. These are, in fact, the calendar dates associated with the four major catastrophes identified for the Eastern Mediterranean.

After considering sources from the Eastern Mediterranean, I was able to tie the calendar dates to the catastrophic events of 2349 BC (September 8), 1492 BC (April 19), 747 BC (February 28), and 685 BC (three dates in June and July).

The dates turn out to represent the "flood of Noah" in 2349 BC (as the culmination of the Pleiades), the Earth shock of 1492 BC (recorded in Exodus), the shock of 747 BC (the start of the Babylonian "Era of Nabonassar" and the Roman calendar), plus a distribution of three dates which can be assigned to forty days of a solar nova event in June and July of 685 BC, corresponding to the Phaethon legend. [note 5]

What is interesting here is that the equivalent (seasonal) calendar dates which were found are likely to be very correct, even if the year these events are assigned to is not. To have all the multiple alignments of 13 sites consistently show up on 6 days only is well beyond random. Alignments for matching calendar dates vary only by a fraction of a degree between calculated and observed values from site to site. Among the 13 sites I looked at, there were 25 alignments assigned to the date of September 8th, 16 to April 19th, 10 to February 28th, and 22 to three dates in July. In all there were some 70 identical alignments used by 13 sites, plus 10 alignments for the setting Sun after an overhead (zenithal) passage.

Later chapters will deal with these Mesoamerican sources -- the Maya calendar, the ending of the "First Creation" in 8347 BC, the history of the world since the ending of the "Second Creation" of 3147 BC, the event known as the end of the "Third Creation" of 2349 BC, the cosmological crisis of 685 BC, the search for the "day of Kan," and an exposition of the Popol Vuh.

Within the text of the Chilam Balam I have identified the trees of the four directions, the place of reeds, the crossroads or rivers in the sky, the turtle first seen long ago, the three hearthstones in the sky, and a number of additional phenomena. Based on Olmec and later Maya iconography, I have managed to identify the plumed God with the crocodile body as well as the double-headed dragon with the Sun and Venus coming out of its two mouths, and the sloped-walled canyon for ballgames. This seems like the material of fantasies, but it is exactly what constitutes the religious symbols of Mesoamerica.

Who I Am

I should mention who I am, and what drove me to write this text.

First, I am a visual artist (sculpture, installations), living in Chicago where I have taught photography for years. But I also have a background in electrical engineering, cinematography, public administration, and programming, and a curiosity dating back a lifetime. More information is available at my website, [jnocook.net].

Second, I researched and wrote this text mainly because a comprehensive narrative of events and a plausible physical explanation were lacking in the literature of catastrophism and alternative cosmologies. This is a void I have been attempting to fill over the last decade, initially for my own benefit. The text of the narrative is based on a carefully derived chronology and a celestial mechanics which has remained within accepted boundaries of physics.

Why This Text Is Presented on the Internet

This text is presented on the internet as webpages. The advantage of a web site is that it can be easily changed, added to, corrected, and expanded, while simultaneously having all of the ideas publicly available. The alternative of publishing this in printed book form would delay the availability, limit distribution to a select few, and allow no updates. And by going public I have been forced to complete the investigation and have been under pressure to make all of it coherent. Amazingly, additional details keep coming forward as the edits continue.

What Others Say

A few comments from readers, via infrequent emails.

Colophon

All the webpages are free of any requirement for specific fonts and font sizes (with one exception). So as a reader you ought to set your browser to some font type and font size that suits you for easy reading.

The exceptions are the tables, where a CSS script forces the use of Courier, so that the data of the tables will fall in-line correctly. No size is specified -- so set your monospaced font (Courier) to a size commensurate with the normal reading font you have selected.

I don't know what happens to typefaces and fonts when the HTML (PHP) files get converted to pdf. I'll sort that out later.

Image Credits

The sources for images are listed in the captions. Otherwise they are generated by the author. Icons are from public domain sources.

-- Portland, Oregon,
January 21, 2012

____
Special thanks to G Van Aacken for pointing out the electric force dropoff.
Special thanks for editorial assistance and word editing to Claudia George, Danford Vander Ploeg, Natan Rothstein, Kevin Widen, Kim Gibson, Jean Hafner, Maggi Thickstun, Roger Poisson, and Hathor. Very special thanks to Kees Cook for book production.

Recent access [saturniancosmology.org/access] by domain name.

Endnotes

Note 1 --

The opening quotation ("A large planet ...") is lifted from a later chapter in this text.

The quotation by Cardona is from Alfred de Grazia's Cosmic Heretics (1983) as the content of a letter by Cardona to Earl Milton, who worked with de Grazia. I originally used a date for the Cardona quotation of 1982, since de Grazia's text covers up to 1983. De Grazia has no endnotes to clear up his sources. In 2010 I changed the date of the Cardona quote to 1978, which is what de Grazia seems to suggest in his text. The concept of Saturn at the North Pole had been under public discussion for about five years at that time.
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Note 2 --
"The emotional outburst from the community of astronomers that so blackened the name Velikovsky and so successfully, if only temporarily, discredited Worlds in Collision, has been laid to many causes, from the psychological and the political to simple resentment against invasion of the field by an outsider."

From Ralph E. Juergens "Reconciling Celestial Mechanics and Velikovskian Catastrophism" (Pensee, 1972). Two years later the American Association for the Advancement of Science (the AAAS) organized their famed symposium on Velikovsky.
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Note 3 --

Alfred de Grazia, in Cosmic Heretics (1983), sources Shane Mage's book Velikovsky and His Critics (1978), with the following note: [abbreviations expanded]

"Shane Mage, in appraising the speeches against Velikovsky, uncovered in them several important concessions that had been apparently achieved over the years. First, the book Scientists Confront Velikovsky, 'disavows and repudiated the entire Scientific polemic of the 1950's and 60's both implicitly and explicitly.'"

"Next, both the sponsor, Goldsmith, and Mulholland assert that Velikovsky's ideas and arguments are not un- nor anti-scientific, whatever the press and then the scientific community presumed to draw from the event. Furthermore, the legitimacy of cosmic catastrophic hypotheses in science was acknowledged both by Sagan and Mulholland, but the specific hypotheses of Velikovsky were attacked (and obviously the scientists are in confusion as to how they can work historically and empirically with the hypotheses that they admit.)"
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Note 4 --

Find Ralph Juergens's essay "Reconciling Celestial Mechanics and Velikovskian Catastrophism" at [saturniancosmology.org/juergens.htm]. This does one of the best jobs of introducing interplanetary plasma.

Much more important are two other essays by Juergens which apply plasma theories to conditions within the Solar System: "Of The Moon and Mars Part I - The Origins Of The Lunar Sinuous Rilles" at [saturniancosmology.org/juergensa.htm] and "Of The Moon and Mars part II - Searching For The Scars Of Battle" at [saturniancosmology.org/juergensb.htm], both published in Pensee in 1974.

All discussions of planetary interactions presented at this website, "Recovering the Lost World," are extensions of the basic electrical concepts originated with these two papers. Once you figure out what they say, you will know everything there is to know about planet to planet interactions.

Other relevant articles deal mainly with the Sun, and are found at [kronos-press.com/juergens/index.htm].

A recent discussion on plasma by James Hogan can be found at [saturniancosmology.org/jameshogan.htm].

See also the following collection of websites:

Specific to plasma theory are the following:

There are more links relevant to prior research in the next chapter, and in the Appendix "List of Links." See also the Appendix "List of Books." Plasma is a controversial subject with Wikipedia, since it may be enlisted to present evidence against the Big Bang theory. Wikipedia articles dealing with plasma and related topics are therefore often edited in favor of handed-down science. The reader should be aware of this bias. As an antidote I recommend two books: Eric Lerner, The Big Bang Never Happened (1991), and Hilton Ratcliffe, The Virtue of Heresy: Confessions of a Dissident Astronomer (2007).
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Note 5 --

The culmination of a star (the Pleiades mentioned in the text) is the date when it reaches the highest point in the sky. This would always be directly south, and at midnight. The Pleiades culminated on the third night after the fall equinox in 2349 BC, which occurred 15 days earlier before 685 BC. Precession of the equinox does not apply to the era before 747 BC. The concept of the "third night" (actually two days and a night) is of importance in later religions. All the calendar dates are "Gregorian equivalent" dates, apportioned over the real-time calendar days for shorter years. These conditions will be detailed in later chapters.
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