March 23, 1997 EDITOR: Michael Armstrong PUBLISHER: Walter Radtke CONTENTS: EDITORIAL SECTION.............................. ..Michael Armstrong THE MYTH OF THE UNIVERSAL MONARCH.....................David Talbott RECONCILING CELESTIAL MECHANICS AND VELIKOVSKIANISM (Part 1).............................Ralph Juergens ----------------------------------------------- Quote of the day: Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. Huxley ----------------------------------------------- EDITORIAL SECTION By Michael Armstrong (mikamar at e-z.net) In keeping with our present dual focus on mythology and the physics of the electrical universe, the following paragraphs should be of interest to our readers. They are taken from an article by Dr. William William . "The Center Holds", PENSEE I, May 1972: It is not surprising that in 1950 physicists felt absolved from considering Velikovsky's historical evidence because it contradicted their "known laws." He foresaw conflict from the beginning, and in the original preface defended his procedure explicitly: "If, occasionally, historical evidence does not square with formulated laws, it should be remembered that a law is but a deduction from experience and experiment, and therefore laws must conform with historical facts, not facts with laws."* Methodologically this is unassailable. Still, tactically speaking, sooner or later it is necessary to meet the physicists on their own ground. From the historical facts established in Worlds in Collision more adequate physical laws still wait to be formulated in detail. The specific laws the book was thought to contradict are those of the celestial mechanics which assumes the solar system to be electrically sterile and on that assumption successfully calculates planetary positions. It should be well known that since the early Fifties radiology and space probes have rendered such an assumption false many times over. However, the accusation is still heard that if Velikovsky dethrones Laplacian celestial mechanics, he must offer something better in its place; until then he has not approached the problem "quantitatively" and therefore physicists are still absolved from considering it. The less generous among them even assume that he was not aware of the problems involved. It is not so well known that in his correspondence and discussions with Einstein, which grew in complexity till the latter's death in 1955, the relationship between electromagnetic and gravitational forces was the principal subject. That was only as it should have been, since Einstein's own work in his last years was towards a unified field theory explaining the two orders of phenomena in common terms.... *I. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision (Doubleday, 1950), vii. ------------------------------------------- THE MYTH OF THE UNIVERSAL MONARCH (1) By David Talbott (dtalbott at teleport.com) It's amazing how frequently the earliest-remembered events occur on a mythscape of uncertain location! Where *was* the ancient paradise? Where did the gods and goddesses and heroes of the mythical epoch actually live? Beyond the north wind? Atop the world's highest mountain? In the land of the rising sun? On a lost island in the middle of the sea? If anything has been proven by the flood of ancient texts that have come to light in the past hundred and fifty years, it is that the central personalities of myth did not, in the original concepts, dwell on earth. The theater in which the great mythical events were first played out was the sky. Here is an indisputable fact: If you will trace the claimed history of any ancient nation backwards, you will, in every instance, reach a point at which man lives in the shadow of the gods. This distant epoch--what the Egyptians called the "time of the primeval gods"--cries out for clarification. Originally, the gods rule the world. First in an age of gold, but this age is followed by catastrophe and cosmic disharmony. That is the archetypal memory repeated around the world. In their earliest historical expressions, the gods are celestial through and through. As the stories are told and re-told across the centuries, however, these celestial powers are progressively localized, re-entering the chronicles in increasingly human guise. All of the profound cosmic events expressed in the earliest ritual, symbol, and myth are eventually brought down to earth. In the typical instance, through a relentless process of identification, the gods eventually emerge as legendary *ancestors* of the nation telling the story.. Each of the nations recalling the Golden Age, for example, insisted that their own forefathers had descended from the gods. At first glance, this pervasive claim will appear as sheer arrogance, a nationalistic pride carried to absurd extremes. But the origins of the idea have never been adequately appreciated. In truth, this worldwide racial claim, that "we are descended from the gods," or that "our race was originally divine," or "we were the favored children of the gods," offers a key to the primitive experience: it confirms early man's unqualified sense of connection to the enigmatic celestial powers so vividly portrayed in the myths. And one cannot afford to ignore the equally significant principle: that these celestial powers are *no longer present*, no longer visible and active in the world. Our subject, in other words, is far more than an enchanting idea. To explore the mythical age of the gods is to confront the driving force of the first civilizations--the most powerful memory in human history Some of the particulars of this myth are remarkable. All of the well-preserved myths of the Golden Age, for example, say that this magical epoch was distinguished by the rule of a Universal Monarch, a celestial king of the world. On every continent, it was declared that before a king ever ruled on earth, a prototype of kings arose in heaven, and it was this "best of kings" who had founded the original paradise. For the Egyptians it was the creator-king Ra, for the Sumerians it was the high god An, from whom kingship descended. Similarly, the Hindu Brahma, the Chinese Huang-ti, Mexican Quetzalcoatl, Mayan Itzam Na and numerous counterparts among other nations, all preside over the Golden Age, while establishing the ideals and principles of kingship. In Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, China, Greece, Italy, northern Europe, pre-Columbian Mexico and Central America--in fact, wherever the institution of kingship arose--the royal genealogies lead backwards to this exemplary ruler, celebrated as the first in a sacred line of kings. The different myths recount in rich detail how the god built a great temple or city in primeval times, invented the alphabet, or taught a new language to a pre-literate race. They say it was he who invented the wheel, introduced the science of agriculture, instituted laws, and taught the true religion--in short, brought to a barbarous race all of the arts of civilization. There is also a crucial connection here. This "ancestor-king" is so completely identified with the Golden Age that it is impossible to separate the one myth from the other. There is no Golden Age without a founding king, no founding king without a Golden Age! The fabulous chronology of Egyptian kings or pharaohs offers a telling example. In his sweeping history of ancient Egypt, the Greek historian Herodotus enumerates the early lineage of kings. He tells us that there was a first king of Egypt, and his name was Helios. This first king of Egypt was not a mere mortal! He was a celestial power. Of course Herodotus was simply translating an Egyptian name into Greek. For the Egyptians, the institution of kingship began with the rule of the primeval sun god Atum or Ra, who, prior to his retirement from the world, founded the Tep Zepi, the First Time, or Golden Age. In Egypt all of the kingship rites point backwards to the age of Ra, a supreme god celebrated from one end of Egypt to the other as the prototype of kings. Indeed, every historical king's or pharaoh's authority derived from a connection to the ancestral king, for as the best Egyptologists have pointed out, the pharaoh was *accredited as such* by the claim that the blood of Atum-Ra coursed through his veins. In rites deeply rooted in Egyptian cosmology, each new king symbolically ascended the throne of Ra, took as spouse Ra's own mistress, the mother goddess, wielded Ra's scepter, built temples and cities modeled after Ra's temple or city in the sky, adorned himself with the beard of the god, wore the crown of Ra as his own, and defeated neighboring enemies in just the way that Ra had defeated the hordes of darkness or chaos in the Tep Zepi. Identification of local king and celestial prototype was absolute. Such is the universal tradition: every king was, in a magical way, the Universal Monarch reborn. And this is why, among all ancient nations, the chroniclers of kingship took such pains to establish the unbroken line of kings: Only by proclaiming that the local king carried the blood of his predecessor, the Universal Monarch, could they certify his suitability for the prescribed function of kings. Dave ---------------------------------------- THE ELECTRICAL SUN By Ralph Juergens ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- [EDITOR'S NOTE] With the following piece, we begin a series of articles by the late Ralph Juergens, one of the pioneers of a new perspective on the role of electricity in the Cosmos. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ABSTRACT: The interplanetary medium is capable of confining the electric fields of charged celestial bodies within space-charge sheaths of limited dimensions. This phenomenon explains the success of gravitational theory in describing and predicting orbital motions in the present, relatively stable Solar System. Disruption of space-charge sheaths during close encounters between electrified planetary bodies may account for the catastrophic electromagnetic effects observed and reported by the survivors of near-collisions in ancient times. The known characteristics of the interplanetary medium suggest not only that the sun and the planets are electrically charged, but that the sun itself is the focus of a cosmic electric discharge--the probable source of all its radiant energy. RECONCILING CELESTIAL MECHANICS AND VELIKOVSKIANISM (1) Physical scientists were outraged in 1950 when Immanuel Velikovsky (1) published historical evidence from around the world suggesting that the order and even the number of planets in the solar system had changed within the memory of man. Ideas in nearly every field of scholarship were challenged, but most seriously challenged of all were certain dogmas in the field of astronomy which had only in recent centuries succeeded in convincing mankind that Spaceship Earth was a haven of safety. 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. Whatever the nature of such intensifying factors, however, I believe it is only fair to acknowledge an underlying and totally sincere scientific disbelief in the historical record. Perfectly valid dynamical theories valid in the sense of having met and passed every conceivable kind of test--simply could not be reconciled with the story told by Velikovsky. In short, conventional celestial mechanics, which had proved time and again its ability to describe and predict planetary motions in today's solar system, could in no way accommodate a disordering and rearrangement of the planets as recently as 3,000 or 4,000 years ago. In terms of celestial mechanics, a system of bodies whose motions are governed entirely by gravitational forces and the inertia of masses could not conceivably restabilize itself within mere millennia--let alone within the few decades or centuries allowed by the historical record--following disruptions of the kind described in Worlds in Collision. Even were each near-collision in such a series so providentially contrived as to leave one or the other participant moving along a near-circular orbit close to the ecliptic plane, the final encounter must necessarily leave at least one participant traveling on a highly eccentric orbit--one that must return the body again and again to at least one point of possible collision with its late antagonist. Yet today's solar system--with one possible exception involving Neptune and Pluto--seems ordered in such a way that further planetary collisions are out of the question. Velikovsky was quite aware of the discord between his findings and current ideas as to what constitutes propriety in celestial mechanics. He insisted, however, that the fault must lie in dynamical theory, not in the evidence of history. He suggested that the sun and the planets must be electrically charged, and that electromagnetic and electrostatic forces--which could quite easily be capable of cushioning collisions, altering rotational motions, tilting axes, and perhaps even damping orbital eccentricities over relatively short spans of time--must play unrecognized roles in celestial affairs. As we shall note presently, there is compelling evidence to indicate that the sun, the earth, and the moon, to name only a few major bodies in the solar system, are electrically charged. Yet the very precision with which gravitational theory accounts for the planetary motions seems to belie this evidence. Perturbations due to repulsive electrical forces, for example, are nowhere in evidence today --not even, I hasten to suggest, in the strange behavior of comet tails, about which I shall have more to say later. This impasse between celestial mechanics and the notion of cosmic electrical interactions was recognized long ago. A reconciliation seemed so unlikely that physical scientists of half a dozen successive generations felt compelled to devise all sorts of exotic theories to explain away the most obvious evidence for electric charge on the earth. An important clue to the vanity of all such ad hoc theorizing was radioed back to earth in 1962 by Mariner 2. Man's first successful Venus probe established once and for all that the interplanetary medium is not a near-vacuum, as most astronomers had always supposed, but is actually a plasma--a gas of dissociated positive ions and electrons. This disclosure instantly invalidated the argument that the planets, if electrically charged, would perturb one another in most obvious ways. According to the physics of electricity, a charged body isolated in a vacuum, which is a dielectric medium, surrounds itself with an electric field that reaches to infinity, with strength diminishing as the square of the distance. Thus, in a vacuous interplanetary medium, or even in a medium of neutral atomic or molecular gases, planetary charges must give rise to electric fields detectable by their influences upon planetary motions. In an interplanetary medium consisting of ionized gas, however, things are radically different. One of the primary characteristics of a plasma has up to now received little or no attention from astronomers. This is its ability to shield itself from the electric field of any body in contact with it, or contained within it, and charged to an electric potential different from that of the plasma itself. The mechanism by which such shielding is accomplished was named the space-charge sheath by those who first studied the phenomenon. In a space-charge sheath, positive and negative charges collect and arrange themselves in such a way that the electric field of a body with alien potential is contained within a limited region surrounding the body. This does not mean that the total electric charge of the isolated body must be compensated by equal and opposite charge in the sheath; rather, it means only that enough charge must be assembled in the sheath to increase or decrease the potential of the outer sheath boundary to match the potential of the surrounding plasma. As a laboratory phenomenon, the space-charge sheath was described, studied, and given a measure of quantitative theoretical explanation half a century ago. The most lucid accounts of this work are probably those to be found in the papers of Irving Langmuir (2), the physicist who coined the term "plasma" in reference to fully ionized gases. Up to this point I have neglected to mention two most important facts about space-charge sheaths and plasmas: 1. An isolated body whose alien potential is not continually renewed by means of electric currents will quickly acquire the potential of the surrounding plasma, and its sheath will disappear; and 2. A plasma does not necessarily possess an intrinsic electric potential. Where plasmas form in electrical discharges, however--and this is the connection in which Langmuir studied them--they do acquire non-zero potentials. These are clearly matters of immense importance. I will return to them later. For now, we can say that in a solar system pervaded by plasma, each charged planet with a potential unlike that of the local plasma must have its electric field bound up in a space-charge sheath of limited volume. When no orbital conflict exists, the system operates serenely under the direction of forces accounted for in conventional celestial mechanics. But let us imagine what might occur should two electrically charged major bodies in this system find themselves on intersecting orbits. Inevitably, as the two bodies pursued their separate paths on separate time tables, the stage would be set eventually for a rendezvous at one or another point of orbital contact. Since the spacecharge sheaths of the bodies would occupy greater volumes than the bodies themselves, a collision between sheaths would actually be more likely to take place than a direct, bodily collision, and in any case it would occur first. When the moment arrived for the inevitable encounter, 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. 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--at least in my opinion--documents historical evidence to indicate that phenomena associated with spacecharge-sheath destruction were actually suffered and survived by peoples of antiquity. 1. I. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision (Doubleday, New York, 1950). 2. I. Langmuir, Collected Works (Pergammon Press, 1961), Vols. 3 & 4. The late Ralph Juergens was a civil engineer living in Flagstaff, Arizona, and was formerly associate editor of a McGraw-Hill technical publication. --------------------------------------------- PLEASE VISIT THE KRONIA COMMUNICATIONS WEBSITE-- http://www.kronia.com/~kronia/ Other suggested Web site URL's for more information about Catastrophics: http://www.ames.net/aeon/ http://www.knowledge.co.uk/xxx/cat/sis/ http://www.flash.net/~cjransom/ http://www.knowledge.co.uk/xxx/cat/velikovskian/ http://www.access.digex.net/~medved/Catastrophism.html http://www.grazian-archive.com/ http://www.tcel.com/~mike/paper.html http://nt.e-z.net/mikamar/default.html ----------------------------------------------- The THOTH electronic newsletter is an outgrowth of an intense discussion that has been going on for several years within a community of scholars interested in astral catastrophics. We have initially narrowed our focus to supporting a reconstruction of recent planetary dislocations that ended a universally remembered "Golden Age." Serious readers must allow some time for these radically different ideas to be fleshed out and for a relevant background to be developed. The general tenor of the ideas and information presented in THOTH is supported by the editor and publisher, but there will always be plenty of room for differences of interpretation that may be included in the articles. Again, we welcome your comments and responses, and any supporting information or relevant submissions. Michael Armstrong Mikamar Publishing mikamar at e-z.net