April 29, 1997 EDITOR: Michael Armstrong PUBLISHER: Walter Radtke CONTENTS: THE MYTH OF THE CENTRAL SUN (2).....................David Talbott ELECTRICAL SCARRING ON EUROPA.......................Wal Thornhill PUTTING A NEW FACE ON PREHISTORY........................News Item ----------------------------------------------- Quote of the day: I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. Thomas Jefferson ----------------------------------------------- THE MYTH OF THE CENTRAL SUN (2) David Talbott (dtalbott at teleport.com) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- EDITOR'S NOTE: The following continues David Talbott's introductory comments on the "Saturn theory." New readers are referred to earlier installments in issues of THOTH posted on the Kronia website (address listed at the end of this newsletter). Go to the Thoth page and click on the image titled "Thoth: the Egyptian God of Knowledge" to access the back issues. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- LANGUAGE OF THE POLE In the sixth century B.C. Xenophanes of Colophon offered this definition of the true god: "There is one God, greatest among gods and men, neither in shape nor in thought like unto mortals. He abides ever in the same place motionless, and it befits him not to wander hither and thither." I think it will become clear to anyone who takes up this subject with any seriousness that Xenophanes was expressing, not a new abstract philosophy, but a very ancient tradition elevated to a philosophical principle. A remarkable parallel occurs in the Hindu Upanishads: "There is only one Being who exists Unmoved yet moving swifter than the mind Who far outstrips the senses, though as gods They strive to reach him, who, himself at rest ...Supports all vital action He moves, yet moves not." As more than once scholar has pointed out, such images arose from the idea that the ruler of the sky stood motionless at the polar center, while yet turning the heavens. Which is to say that the philosopher's Unmoved Mover had an ancient mythical prototype in the central sun, the founder of the Golden Age. So one step in the reasoning here is simply to note the language applied by the first astronomers to the celestial pole and to compare that terminology to the earlier language applied to the great rulers of the sky. Consider the image of the pole in Shakespeare-- "...I am constant as the northern star, Of whose true-fix'd and resting quality There is no fellow in the firmament" The speaker here is Shakespeare's Caesar--whom tradition regarded as the supreme ruler on earth, a replica of the celestial power. Is it significant that he locates this supreme power at the celestial pole? Many centuries before Shakespeare, Hipparchus spoke of "a certain star remaining ever at the same place. And this star is the pivot of the Cosmos." That language turns out to be the very language used by the ancient Chinese in describing the pole star as the "star of the pivot." And this was anything but an abstraction, for Chinese astronomy insisted with one voice that the pivot was the ancient location of the celestial emperor Shang-ti, the ruler of beginnings. To the Polynesians the pole is the station of the "Immovable One." The Pawnee call it "the star that stands still" and regard it as the governor of the sky. This star, they say, "is different from other stars, because it never moves." To the Hindus, the star is Dhruva, meaning "firm," while the region of the pole is esteemed as the "motionless site," the celestial "resting place" of gods and heroes. POLAR SUN The worldwide astronomical designations of the celestial pole become crucial pieces in a puzzle, for this reason: the language establishes beyond any reasonable doubt that the pole is the remembered location of the archaic sun god Saturn. In modern astronomical terms, a planet at the celestial pole is a preposterous idea. All of the planets in our sky, together with the Earth, move on a common plane around the Sun, so that from Earth we see the planets moving on roughly the same arc across the sky as the Sun. The paradox is glaring. No planet today approaches Earth's celestial pole! And yet the ancient tradition of the polar sun confronts us everywhere. In ancient Egyptian cosmology, possibly the oldest known thought-system, one finds a mystifying connection of the sun god Atum with the pole. The French scholar Jacques Enel, in his study of Egyptian imagery, for example, assures us that the Egyptians remembered Atum's station as "the single, immovable point around which the movement of the stars occurred." To the Egyptians, states Enel, "Atum was the chief or center of the movement of the universe at the pole." Much the same language is used by the eminent Egyptologist, T. Rundle Clark, who tells us the pole was the place par excellence. Atum, according to Clark, is "the arbiter of destiny perched on the top of the world pole." So when the text declare that "the great god lives, fixed in the middle of the sky," the reference is to the polar station, according to Clark. Clark writes that "the celestial pole is 'that place,' or 'the great city.' The various designation show how deeply it impressed the Egyptian imagination. If god is the governor of the universe and it revolves around an axis, then god must preside over the axis." That the Egyptians would remember a former sun god at the celestial pole may seem hard to digest. And yet the preeminence of the celestial pole as the resting place of Atum is both emphatic and unequivocal. Clark writes: "No other people was so deeply affected by the eternal circuit of the stars around a point in the northern sky. Here must be the node of the universe, the center of regulation." (Our only disagreement here is with Clark's assumption that ancient nations outside his own area of expertise--Egypt--were less preoccupied with the celestial pole.) Atum, the first form of the sun god Ra, was thus the 'Unmoved Mover" described in Egyptian texts many centuries before Aristotle offered the phrase as a definition of the supreme power. The Egyptian hieroglyph for Atum is a primitive sledge, signifying "to move." To the god of the cosmic revolutions, the Book of the Dead proclaims "Hail to thee, Tmu [Atum] Lord of Heaven, who givest motion to all things." But while moving the heavens Atum remained _em hetep_, "at rest" or "in one spot." Throughout all of Egypt this "resting place" of Atum was remembered as the site of the First Occasion, the drama of cosmic beginnings. Remember that the sun god Atum and the sun god Ra were one and the same, though the Egyptians insisted that the god himself evolved with the unfolding events. The god who was Atum became Ra in the course of his own unfolding, as the originally formless god began to acquire certain distinct attributes. Thus Atum's counterpart Ra, according to the sources themselves, "rests on his high place." He does not roam about the sky. Like Atum, Ra is the pivot, with the lesser lights revolving around him. These are, as the texts say, the "stars who surround Ra." "These gods shall revolve round about him." "The satellites of Ra make their round." Again, the picture is of a stationary god serving as the pivot of celestial motions. As I have already noted the ancient Sumerian counterpart of Atum was the creator-king An, the Akkadian Anu, whose "terrifying glory" was a repeated subject of the hymns and rites. This was "the terror of the splendour of Anu in the midst of heaven," and the starworshippers did not mean by the "midst" of heaven some vague and unfamiliar metaphor. The "midst" (kirib sami, Kabal sami, meant, very concretely, the cosmic center), making the polar god, according to Robert Brown, Jr., a nocturnal sun. The words translated as the "midst" mean, according to Brown, "that central point where Polaris sat enthroned." Both Sumerian and Akkadian texts are replete with references to the "firm" and "steadfast" or "motionless" character of the dominant gods. The great god Enki of Eridu is "the motionless lord," and god of "stability." A broken Sumerian hymn, in reference to Ninurash, a form of Ninurta, reads: "Whom the 'god of the steady star' upon a foundation/ To...cause to repose in years of plenty." [AUTHOR'S NOTE: AS WE WILL SEE THE "POLAR" GODS INCLUDE NOT JUST THE SUN GOD SATURN, BUT OTHER FIGURES AS WELL. NO CONCLUSIONS SHOULD BE DRAWN HERE WITH RESPECT TO PLANETARY IDENTIFICATIONS, EXCEPT WHERE SUCH IDENTIFICATIONS HAVE BEEN STATED IN PRIOR NOTES.] Failing to perceive the concrete meaning of such terms, solar mythologists like to think of the place of "repose" as a hidden "underworld" beneath the earth, a dark region visited by the sun after it has set. But the place of repose is no underworld. It is: "The lofty residence... The lofty place... The place of lofty repose..." What, then, of the famous Assyrian and Babylonian god Shamash, the sun god whom we now recognize as Saturn? A remarkable fact is that Shamash "comes forth" ·(shines) and "goes in" (declines, diminishes) at one spot, the "firm," "stable" or motionless station of supreme "rest". This place par excellence was symbolized by the top of the ziggurats the famous Babylonian axis-towers constructed as symbolic models of the Cosmos. Hence, the uppermost level was deemed the "light of Shamash," and the "heart of Shamash," denoting (in the words of E.G. King) the pivot "around which the highest heaven or sphere of the fixed stars revolved.:" The Babylonian tradition of the polar sun has been preserved up to the twentieth century in the tradition of the Mandaeans of Iraq. In their midnight ceremonies these people invoked the celestial pole as Olma l'nhoara, "the world of light." It is therefore not surprising to find that chroniclers of the Mandaean rituals call the polar power the "primitive sun of the star-worshippers." The recurring concepts are these: a stationary location, the celestial place of rest, the place round which the heavens turn, and the cosmic center, the place where the myths begin. Firmness, stability, pivot, axis, center, and summit or zenith. The imagery is both archetypal and universal. To the Hindus the sacred celestial spot, the province of the creator-king, was the place of "supreme rest," called also "the motionless site." The Hindu Dhruva, whose name means "firm," stands on this very spot--"a Spot blazing with splendor...and which subsists motionless." In the Sanskrit texts, Dhruva means the celestial pole. What remains to be explained by mythologists is that the sun god Surya "stands firmly on this safe resting place." Surya, states the Sanskrit authority V.S. Agrawala, "is himself at rest, being the immovable center of his system." Just as the Egyptian and Mesopotamian sun gods "rise and set" in one place, Surya occupies samanam dhama--"the same place of rising and setting." The words translated as "rising" and "setting" can only mean the phase of brightness followed by the phase of receding light. Another name for the stationary sun, according to Agrawala, is Prajapati. "The sun in the center is Prajapati: he is the horse that imparts movement to everything," The motionless Dhruva, Surya, and Prajapati compare with the light of Brahma, called the "true sun." This is the ancient sun, the texts say, which "after having risen thence upwards ... rises and sets no more. It remains alone in the center." Here, too, center and summit are synonymous. Brahma, observes Rene Guenon, is "the pivot around which the world accomplishes it revolution, the immutable center which directs and regulates cosmic movement." Moreover, this stationary and axial character of the greatest gods seems to be common to all of the primary celestial figures in Hindu myth, with its diverse pantheon gathered from so many cultural traditions. The god Varuna, "seated in the midst of heaven," is the "Recumbent," and called the "axis of the universe." "Firm is the seat of Varuna," declares one of the Vedic hymns. In him "all wisdom centres, as the nave is set within the wheel." One of Varuna's forms is Savitar, the "impeller." While the rest of the universe revolves, the impeller stands firm. "Firm shalt thou stand, like Savitar desirable." Also occupying the stationary center is the popular god Vishnu--who takes a firm stand in that resting place in the sky." The location is the celestial pole, called "the exalted seat of Vishnu, round which the starry spheres forever wander." Vishnu is the polar sun or central fire: "Fiery indeed is the name of this steadfast god," states one Vedic text. To the Buddhists this is the center of the cosmic wheel, the throne of the Buddha himself. It is acalatthana, the "unmoving site," or the "unconquerable seat of _firm_ séance." Thus, as noted by Coomaraswamy, the Buddha throne crowned the world axis. Given the great variety of mythical figures pointing to the same underlying concepts, it is crucial that we recognize where Hindu and Buddhist myth located this cosmic center, the celestial resting place. It was, according to the most widely respected Sanskrit authorities such as Ananda Coomaraswamy, the celestial pole, the axis of the turning heavens, a verdict repeated again and again by Rene Guenon, Mircea Eliade, and others. According to ancient Chinese astronomy the revered Emperor on High, prototype of kings, stood at the celestial pole. Chinese astrologers, according to Gustav Schlegel, regarded the polar god as "the Arch-Premier ... the most venerated of all the celestial divinities. In fact the Pole star, around which the entire firmament appears to turn, should be considered as the Sovereign of the Sky." It was thus proclaimed that the celestial pole was the seat of the supreme ruler Shang-ti, mythically, the first king of a great dynasty in the remote past. His seat was "the Pivot," and all the heavens turned upon his exclusive power. Raised to a first principle, the polar power became the mystic Tao, the motor of the Cosmos. The essential idea is contained in the Chinese word for Tao, which combines the sign for "to stand still" with the sign for "to go" and "head" The Tao is the Unmoved Mover, the supreme ruler, who "goes," or "moves" while yet remaining in one place--revealing a striking correspondence with the images of the polar power in other lands. Chinese sources proclaim the Tao to be the "light of heaven" and "the heart of heaven." "Action is reversed into non-action," states Jung. "Everything peripheral is subordinated to the command of the centre." Thus the Tao, in the words of Erwin Pousselle, rules the "golden center, which is the Axis of the World." Significantly, these same overlapping images of a polar sun or sovereign luminary at the pole occur in the Americas. In southern Peru the Inca Yupanqui raised a temple at Cuzco to the creator god who was superior to the sun we know. Unlike the solar orb, he was able to "rest" and "to light the world from one spot." As the pioneering Mesoamerican scholar, Zelia Nuttal, noted many years ago, the only reasonable position in the sky for fulfilling this requirement is the celestial Pole. "It is an extremely important and significant fact," writes Nuttall, "that the principal doorway of this temple opened to the north." (Since the north celestial pole is not visible from Cuzco, 14° below the equator, Nuttall assumed that this tradition of a polar sun was carried southward.) It seems that the memory of the central sun established itself around the world. Other reflections of the polar power in the Americas are noteworthy. Cottie Burland tells us that, among the Mexicans, "the nearest approach to the idea of a true universal god was Xiuhtecuhtli, recalled as the Old, Old One who enabled the first ancestors to rise from barbarism. Xiuhtecuhtli appears as the Central Fire and "the heart of the Universe." "Xiuhtecuhtli was a very special deity. He was not only the Lord of Fire which burnt in front of every temple and in the middle of every hut in Mexico, but also Lord of the Pole Star. He was the pivot of the universe and one of the forms of the Supreme Deity." An apparent counterpart of this central fire is the Maya creator god Huracan, the "Heart of Heaven" at the celestial pole. The Pawnee locate the "star chief of the skies" at the pole. He is the "star that stands still." Of this supreme power they say, "Its light is the radiance of the _Sun god_ shining through." ---------------------------------------- ELECTRICAL SCARRING ON EUROPA [Wal Thornhill original post] Europa seems to have suffered many episodes of electrical scarring judging by the multiple layers of crisscrossing linear features. This would be expected if its orbit brought it repeatedly into the danger zone between Saturn and Venus. Electrical scarring seems to follow the law of fractals. So I would expect the new closer up shots of Europa to show similar scars down to the limit of resolution. That is, trenches consisting of circular craters, possibly being so close together as to appear continuous; levees on each side of the trenches; the parallel "racetracks" to be composed of many trenches, side by side. [Respondent poster] > Did you see the images released on April 9? The ones with the > "ice floes" that have broken into pieces, but where you can still see the > pattern continued on the broken pieces? > > My question to you is--given the fact that the surface is clearly > active, does that in any way change your interpretation of ANY of the > features? I.e., can you grant that maybe more than one type of > process is at work on Europa? [Dave Talbott responds] Can't speak for Wal, but I spent about 45 minutes studying the incredible recent close-up pictures of Europa. Clearly there has been more recent activity on Europa than any astronomer had imagined prior to the Voyager probes. There are significant sections of the surface which have been re-arranged by the movement of ice. These in particular put a huge exclamation point the long, narrow channels, whose formation COULDN'T be due to ice movement or any geological process "deep within the planet," as the planetary geologists had claimed. Where melting has occurred and sheets of ice have been randomly shifted about, you can a get a very dramatic picture as to how irregular the spacing is between the broken fragments under such conditions--literally nothing like the thousands of narrow channels running side by side, some up to hundreds of kilometers--which geologists had tried to explain by fracturing and subtle movements of the ice. And notice that in the fields of formerly melted ice, after the various fragments had been frozen into place again, additional channels were carved out, up, down, and over the previous fragments. The consistent pattern of these channels suggests an instrument being dragged along the surface to plow out the long, parallel furrows. Try as I may, I could not see anything in the character of the channels to suggest internal geology. That recent chaotic motions of planets and their moons might account for the catastrophic melting and re-freezing would seem self-evident. [Wal Thornhill response] Dave has effectively answered the question for me while I was in Melbourne. The surface *was* recently active with both electrical sculpting and melting. The evidence for an episode of melting and re-freezing of the ice is graphically depicted in photo P-48526. It must be water ice for the creation of ice floes. Satellite photographs of Antarctic sea ice breaking up do not show parallelism, constancy of width, levee banks, the dark-light-dark appearance, or anything to match the scale of the "cracks" on Europa. Certainly nothing to match the appearance of "freeways". The larger "cracks" range up to 70km in width and stretch as far as 3,000 km in straight or curved paths across Europa's surface. When seen in close-up, the "cracks" look like furrows. The best conventional explanation for this appearance is some form of gas venting through the cracks from below. But the material vented had to be "dirty" to provide the colouration of the levees. It had to be remarkably consistent over great distances. Then clean ice had to fill the bottom of the "crack" to give the bright centre line. (I would not expect to see any dark central lines of dirty ice beneath the furrows when seen in cross section where the ice floes have broken away. The photos are not yet sufficiently detailed to test this suggestion). The lightning discharge hypothesis is the only one to explain all of the observed linear features from the smallest to the largest scale. The central line is bright because that is where the lightning vapourized the ice to blast it outwards and form the levees. We are looking at a clean bed of ice at the bottom of the channel. The colouration of the levees may come from shock heating and rapid cooling of the ice and any resulting chemical changes in dissolved or suspended material. (The same mechanism that formed the green glass beads found near rilles on the Moon). The larger furrows stand out as much more deeply coloured than their surroundings. So it may be that the electric discharges that created them were sufficiently intense to cause nucleosynthesis in the form of the conversion of oxygen atoms (from the water) to sulphur. Elemental sulphur takes many colours ranging from yellow through red to black (look at Io's surface) and could account for the reddish colouration of the ejected material. Alternatively, and I think less likely, the coloured material may be exogenous and implanted by the discharge itself (as described by Ralph Juergens). Of course, when we finish discussing Europa, we have the linear features on Ganymede and Callisto to explain--not to mention the moons of Saturn, Neptune and Uranus. ----------------------------------------------- PUTTING A NEW FACE ON PREHISTORY Skeletons Suggest Caucasoid Early Americans By Boyce Rensberger Washington Post Staff Writer Skeletons unearthed in several western states and as far east as Minnesota are challenging the traditional view that the earliest Americans all resembled today's Asians. The skeletons' skulls hear features similar to thoae of Europeans, suggesting that caucasian people were among the earliest humans to migrate into the New World more than 9,000 years ago. Anthropologists have known of such bones for years, but did not fully appreciate their significance until reappraising them over the last few months. The new analyses were prompted by the discovery last summer of the newest addition to the body of evidence-the unusually complete skeleton of an "apparently Caucasoid" man who died about 9,300 years ago near what is now Kennewick, Wash. D. Gentry Steele, an anthropologist at Texas A&M University, speculates that people of both races migrated into North America in separate waves, possibly thousands of years apart. Where they met, he suspects, they "made love, not war," and thus both populations may be ancestral to some or all of today's Native Americans. Until now, most anthropologists thought that the earliest humans to in- habit the Americas all resembled today's Asiatic peoples, popularly called Mongoloids. Prehistoric Americans are thought to have migrated from Siberia into Alaska and then spread southward, probably during an ice age when sea levels were hundreds of feet lower than now, exposing a "land bridge. Now, however, many anthropologists believe that early colonization of the Americas was a more complex process, involving not only Mongoloids but Caucasoids as well, probably in separate migrations. Some Native American peoples today resemble the people of Asia and some are more European. Much of this mixture is the product of intermarriage in recent centuries, but some may date back thousands of^[years. ----------------------------------------------- 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 scientific and scholarly discussions in the new field of astral catastrophics. Our initial focus will be on a reconstruction of ancient astral myths and symbols in relation to a new theory of human and planetary history. Serious readers must allow some time for these radically different ideas to be fleshed out and for the relevant background to be developed. The general tenor of the ideas and information presented in THOTH is supported by the editor and publisher, but there will always be plenty of room for differences of interpretation. We welcome your comments and responses. Michael Armstrong Mikamar Publishing mikamar at e-z.net