VOL I, No. 14 May 21, 1997 EDITOR: Michael Armstrong PUBLISHER: Walter Radtke CONTENTS: EDITORIAL SECTION...........................Michael Armstrong THE MYTH OF THE CENTRAL SUN (4).............David Talbott HYAKUTAKE X-RAYS....................................News Item Submitted by Ian Tresman MORE VENUS DIALOGUE.............................Wal Thornhill New URL Section ----------------------------------------------- Quote of the day: Up from Earth's Centre through the Seventh Gate I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate; And many a Knot unravel'd by the Road; But not the Master-knot of Human Fate. Omar Khayam, Rubaiyat quatrain XXXI Submitted by Pam Hanna ----------------------------------------------- EDITORIAL SECTION Michael Armstrong (mikamar at e-z.net) In the second issue of THOTH we published a brief quote showing that Johnathan Swift had a knowledge of the ancient Saturn myth. Swift shows in various other passages that he was aware of remembered catastrophes involving Mars and Venus as well. The quote from Omar Khayam above suggests that this author, too, had a knowledge of Saturn's place in the ancient celestial scheme. (Ancient Arabic tradition connected Saturn with the "seventh heaven" at the celestial pole.) It seems that memories abound of an ancient sky so different from our own that only a fundamental reappraisal of cosmic history will get to the bottom of things. One culture after another claimed that the planets themselves were once active in the heavens, directly affecting the fate of the world. That these memories have persisted into modern times, shaping our language and literature, is a remarkable testimony to the impact of ancient events on human imagination. Perhaps you, our readers, have questions with respect to unusual ancient motifs or passages you have encountered. If so, we invite you to send us any quotes or questions, which we will then submit to David Talbott and his colleagues for a response. ----------------------------------------------- THE MYTH OF THE CENTRAL SUN (4) 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. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- In this investigation we will see that many threads of evidence lead to the same unified conclusions. In preceding segments we have reviewed these unexplained associations-- € Helios as Saturn; Helios as central sun, and Helios as axis of the celestial revolutions. € Assyrian Shamash as Saturn, Shamash as central sun, Shamash at the polar "midst" and "zenith." € Egyptian Atum-Ra as central sun, Atum-Ra as Saturn, Atum-Ra atop the world pole. There is a way to test the integrity of the ancient ideas we have reviewed. Are there any independent astronomical traditions enigmatically connecting the outermost visible planet to the celestial pole? This would be particularly significant because nothing in the appearance of Saturn today could conceivably suggest such a connection? And it would show a coherence of the collective memory beyond anything historians would have thought possible. The answer is clear, and it is stunning. Wherever ancient astronomies preserved detailed images of the planet Saturn, it seems that Saturn was declared to have formerly occupied the celestial pole! The priestly astronomy of Zoroastrianism knew the planet Saturn as Kevan, called "the Great One in the middle of the sky," and they located the primeval seat of Kevan at the celestial Pole. In neo-Platonist symbolism of the planets, Kronos-Saturn is claimed to rule the celestial Pole, or is placed "over the Pole." It is also known that Latin poets remembered Saturn as god of "the steadfast star," the very phrase used for the pole star in virtually every ancient astronomy. Thus Manilius recounts that Saturn, in his fall, toppled to the "opposite end of the world axis." Hence his original throne could only have been atop the world axis. A stunning example of the polar Saturn is provided in Chinese astronomy, where the distant planet was called "the genie of the pivot." Saturn was believed to have his station at the pole, according to the eminent authority on Chinese astronomy, Gustav Schlegel. In the words of Leopold deSaussure, Saturn was "the planet of the center, corresponding to the emperor on earth, thus to the polar star of heaven." Interestingly, the theme also appears to have passed into the mystic traditions of numerous secret societies (Rosicrucian, Masonic, Cabalistic, Hermetic, and others rooted in an unknown past). The greatest authority on such societies was Manly P. Hall, who published numerous volumes on the related belief systems. In the general traditions reviewed by Hall, the god Saturn is "the old man who lives at the north pole." Even today, it seems that in our celebration of Christmas we live under the influence of the polar Saturn, for as Hall observes, "Saturn, the old man who lives at the north pole, and brings with him to the children of men a sprig of evergreen (the Christmas tree), is familiar to the little folks under the name of Santa Claus." Santa Claus, descending yearly from his polar home to distribute gifts around the world, is a muffled echo of the Universal Monarch spreading miraculous good fortune. But while the earlier traditions place his prototype, the Universal Monarch, at the celestial pole, popular tradition now locates Santa Claus at the geographical pole--a telling example of originally celestial gods being brought down to earth A planet at the celestial pole? The consistency of the message cannot be denied, and it is anything but the message anticipated by conventional models of the ancient sky. As odd as this tradition of Saturn at the pole may appear, it has been acknowledged by more than one authority, including Leopold de Saussure. The principle also figured prominently in the recent work of the historian of science, Giorgio de Santillana and the ethnologist Hertha von Dechend, authors of _Hamlet's Mill_. According to an ancient astronomical tradition, the authors suggest, Saturn originally ruled from the celestial pole! As for the rationale of Saturn's polar station, the authors could only suggest that the concept arose as a "figure of speech" or astral allegory whose meaning remains to be penetrated. "What has Saturn, the far-out planet to do with the Pole?" they asked. "It is not in the line of modern astronomy to establish any link connecting the planets with Polaris, or with any star, indeed, out of reach of the members of the zodiacal system. Yet such figures of speech were an essential part of the technical idiom of archaic astrology." It seems that the primordial age, as chronicled in accounts around the world, stands in radical contrast to our own era. One can no more explain Saturn's ancient connection with the pole by reference to the present arrangements of the planets than one can explain, within conventional frameworks, Saturn's image as the Universal Monarch, as founder of the Golden Age, or as primeval sun god. Yet the fact remains that throughout the ancient world these images of Saturn constituted a pervasive memory which many centuries of cultural evolution could not obliterate. Separate threads of evidence, each posing its own mystery for the specialists, thus suggest a remarkably unified memory: myth of the Golden Age, myth of the creator-king or celestial prototype of kings, reverence for a former sun god, the archaic day beginning at sunset, placement of the sun god at the cosmic center and summit, identification of the cosmic center with the axis of the turning sky, Saturn as founder of the Golden Age, Saturn as creator-king, Saturn as primeval sun or best sun, Saturn as god of the day (the day beginning at sunset), Saturn as resting god or god ruling the "day of rest," Saturn at the cosmic center and summit, Saturn ruling from the celestial pole. In attempting to comprehend such enigmatic threads, we can no longer afford to ignore the most fundamental of questions: Is the sky we observe today the same sky experienced by the first stargazers? ------------------------------------- From: Ron Baalke : Douglas Isbell Headquarters, Washington, DC May 9, 1997 (Phone: 202/358-1753) Lynn Chandler Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD (Phone: 301/286-9016) Sally Pobojewski University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI (Phone: 313/647-1844) RELEASE: 97-92 HYAKUTAKE X-RAYS SHOW ABILITY TO MONITOR COMETS AND SOLAR WIND A supercomputer simulation of Comet Hyakutake's interaction with the solar wind demonstrates that resulting X-ray emissions can be used to monitor comets and solar wind phenomena, NASA- funded researchers write in today's issue of "Science." The simulation was conducted using an Earth sciences supercomputer at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD. The results match and explain March 27, 1996, observations of Comet Hyakutake by Germany's ROSAT satellite, the first detection of X-ray emissions from any comet. The model also supports a leading theory for how the X-rays are generated. "Cometary X-rays present a potentially powerful new tool to monitor comet activity far from Earth, as well as the composition and flux of the solar wind," said co-author Dr. Tamas Gombosi of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "By capturing these X-rays' detailed energy spectrum, it might be possible to monitor the propagation and evolution of spectacular solar wind phenomena, such as the coronal mass ejections seen this January and April." About one percent of the solar wind, which flows from the Sun out past Pluto, is composed of minor ions: atoms (such as oxygen, carbon and neon) that have been nearly stripped of their electrons and thus have a high positive charge. Dr. Thomas Cravens of the University of Kansas theorizes that these minor ions steal electrons from neutral atoms and molecules of cometary origin. The electrons are first seized in excited states, traveling in the ions' outer orbitals. As the electrons fall to lower orbitals, Cravens' theory asserts that X-rays are emitted, in addition to other forms of radiation. "Considering the magnitude and shape of the emission, we believe the most satisfactory theory to be this mechanism of charge exchange excitation," Gombosi said. "Other explanations produce neither the crescent pattern nor the intensity observed by ROSAT and duplicated by our simulation." Within this pattern, some electron orbital transitions emit distinct wavelengths of X-rays that can be measured. The computer simulation shows that the overall X-ray spectrum for Comet Hyakutake depends mainly on the solar wind composition, and not on the comet. Because of this independence, researchers can determine the relative size of the comet's atmosphere from the proximity of the brightest X-rays to the icy nucleus. "In Hyakutake, the brightest X-ray region was 18,700 miles (30,000 kilometers) ahead of the comet, on the Sun side," said University of Michigan co-author Dr. Michael Combi. "If the comet has enough of an atmosphere, the solar wind minor ions recombine with electrons far from the nucleus. If the comet were producing less atmospheric gas, the place of maximum emission would be closer to the nucleus," Combi said. This theory will be tested on Comet Hale-Bopp, which is scheduled to be observed by Japan's ASCA X-ray satellite this September. "Comet Hale-Bopp should have the emission shifted further sunward; it is bigger than Hyakutake," Combi said. Active comets are typically first observed in visible light at large distances from the Sun. After discovery, the orbits of comets can be established with very high accuracy as they pass through the inner solar system. "If X-rays are observed from the known location of a comet, one can conclude with great confidence that the X-rays originated from the comet," Gombosi said. The University of Michigan team used March 27, 1996, solar wind density measurements from NASA's WIND spacecraft. Their model first considers the global interaction of the solar wind with the comet. It projects the comet into a three-dimensional grid that automatically applies finer resolution where more activity occurs. This physics component predicts the deflective paths and speed of the solar wind traveling through the comet. Other co-authors of the "Science" paper are Roman Haberli, Darren De Zeeuw and Kenneth Powell. The University of Michigan team is one of nine Grand Challenge Investigations funded by the NASA High Performance Computing and Communication Program's Earth and Space Sciences Project. Additional funding comes from NASA's Office of Space Science, the National Science Foundation and the Swiss National Science Foundation. Simulation images are available on the World Wide Web at URL: http://hpcc.engin.umich.edu/HPCC/recent3/index.html Submitted by Ian Tresman ----------------------------------------------- MORE VENUS DIALOGUE [EDITOR'S NOTE: IN PREVIOUS POSTS WALLACE THORNHILL HAS CONTENDED THAT THE PLANET VENUS SHOWS SUBSTANTIAL EVIDENCE OF ELECTRICAL INTERACTION WITH ITS ENVIRONMENT, A CONDITION SUGGESTING BOTH AN ELECTRICAL IMBALANCE AND AN UNUSUAL, "COMET"-LIKE HISTORY.] [Wal Thornhill, continuing his dialogue with Tim Thompson]: >> The Venera spacecraft found continuous lightning activity from 32km down >> to about 2km altitude, with discharges as frequent as an amazing 25 per >> second. The highest recorded rate on Earth is 1.4/sec during a severe >> blizzard. The Pioneer lander recorded 1000 radio impulses. Thirty-two >> minutes after landing, Venera 11 detected a very loud (82 decibel) noise >> which was believed to be thunder. Garry Hunt suggested at the time that: >> '... the Venusians may well be glowing from the nearly continuous >> discharges of those frequent lightning strokes'. A 'mysterious glow' was >> detected coming from the surface at a height of 16km by 2 Pioneer probes >> as they descended on the night hemisphere. The glow increased on descent >> and may have been caused by a form of St. Elmo's fire and/or chemical >> reactions in the atmosphere, close to the surface. [Tim Thompson:] >I cannot trace or verify Thornhill's remarks with regards >the Venera >spacecraft. (PIB -- I assume Mr. Thornhill's original paper for the SIS >included such references. Perhaps Mr. Thornhill or someone from the >SIS can get a copy to Mr. Thompson for his perusal.) While the initial >reports of lightning from Pioneer are easily available [1,2,3], those >from Venera appear not to be [4,5], as they were published in obscure, >or difficult to obtain sources. The Pioneer lightning detections were >based on the observation of whistler mode waves (about 100 Hertz) when >the orbiter neared periapse. The interpretation of those waves as >lightning, supported by Scarf et al. [3], continues to be a matter of >considerable controversy. There are a number of ionospheric processes >that will produce such waves, and the Pioneer data lack sufficient >spectral resolution to unambiguously tell the difference between lightning >and these other possible sources. [WT] My first obscure reference was NASA News 79-12 (4.19.79) p 1., as follows: "The Russian Venera spacecraft found continuous lightning activity from 32km down to about 2km altitude, with discharges as frequent as an amazing 25 per second. The Pioneer Orbiter also observed this lightning, measuring such discharges during every pass across the planet's night hemisphere. The eye would not be able to separate such frequent flashes and an observer on Venus might see the landscape and dense atmosphere bathed in a continuous eerie electrical glow, accompanied by continuous peals of thunder. Pioneer experimenters, Dr. Boris Ragent, Ames Research Center, and Dr. Jacques Blamont, University of Paris, now believe that the 'mysterious glow' measured by their instruments is real light on Venus, and not something happening on the spacecraft. The glow started at about ten miles altitude, and increased as the two night-side probes approached the surface. 'Chemical fires' due to reactions of various compounds in the super-heated atmosphere close to, or on, Venus' surface have been cited as a possible source for the glow. Pioneer measurements suggest a 'chemical stew' near the surface whose reactions could fuel such fires. Lightning discharges also are a possible source of this glows except that the increasing intensity observed going down would be unlikely for lightning, as would be the very steady character of the glow." More detail was given on pp.5-6, under the heading "Continuous Lightning Confirmed": "The Soviet Union's Venera spacecraft, which entered Venus' atmosphere in late December, detected 13 minutes of electromagnetic signals similar to terrestrial lightning storms. The signals began at above 32 km and ended at about 2 km. At times, the Soviet spacecraft detected as many as 25 strokes of lightning per second--an essentially constant bombardment of Venus' atmosphere. Thirty-two minutes after landing, Venera 11 acoustic equipment detected a very loud (82 db) noise which is believed to have been thunder. The first U.S. detection of lightning came on December 30, 1978, when the Pioneer Venus inditer instruments picked up intense and highly impulsive electric field signals characteristic of terrestrial lightning detected during the first day that the Orbiter's point of closest approach occurred on the night side of Venus, the signals were picked up near that closest point. Scientists said the lightning signals, which are well below the ionopause, are detectable either because they are coming through "holes" in the ionosphere, or because they are "whistler" signals which are able to pass through the ionosphere. Whistler radio waves on Earth are generated by lightning or by high energy electrons." The second reference was, G. E. Hunt: A Pioneer's view of Venus, Nature 278 (1979), p.778: "One of the most startling observations was made as the spacecraft descended toward the surface, where in the altitude range of 6-14 km, Iightning storms were encountered. At least 1.000 impulses of radio noise mere measured. Lightning on Venus is not unreasonable, since the atmosphere is electrically active. By way of comparison, there are typically 100 lightning strokes every second scattered all over the Earth. But on Venus there may be several times that number in a localized area. Instead of being illuminated for a brief instant by a dazzling flash of lightning, as on Earth, the Venusians may well be glowing from the nearly continuous discharges of those frequent lightning strokes." The third reference was by R. A. Kerr: "Lightning found on Venus at last?", Science 253 (1991), p. 1492, under the sub-heading: "Galileo's fortuitous pass by Venus has yielded the best evidence yet that somehow Earth's neighbor generates lightning". This reference brings us forward by more than a decade and shows the change in tone and some of the controversy that had arisen since the first confident announcements. This is one good reason for looking at the earliest discovery announcements, while free-wheeling ideas are often expressed and before 'scientific correctness' steps in. You will note the use of the word "somehow" above as a description of the mechanism for lightning generation on Venus. This is central to the debate and is symptomatic, as I said in my original post, of the ignorance of what causes lightning (despite TT's confident assertion to the contrary). But I will come back to that later. I have included most of the reference because it sets the scene in a highly readable fashion: "Earth's atmosphere crackles with lightning. Jupiter has it too, sporting bolts 100 times more powerful than terrestrial ones. There are signs of strong electric discharges in the atmospheres of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. But making a case that lightning flickers through the dense atmosphere of Venus has been difficult. Now new electric field observations from the Galileo spacecraft's swift flyby of Venus have provided strong evidence that--however it does it--Earth's sister planet can also electrify itself. The news from Galileo challenges some conventional wisdom. Theorists have long doubted that Venus' quiescent atmosphere could generate the strong electric fields needed for lightning, and past evidence for lightning on Venus has drawn strong challenges. In the absence of new missions dedicated to the study of Venus, the prospects for resolving the debate did not seem bright. That all changed when NASA replotted the trajectory of the Jupiter probe Galileo after the Challenger disaster. A Venus encounter hadn't been in the cards, but new safety considerations forced a cutback in the power of the rocket booster that would propel Galileo away from Earth after its release from the space shuttle's cargo bay. Unable to head directly for Jupiter, the craft was sent on a complex course that included one swing by Venus and two Earth flybys to give it a trio of gravity-assisted boosts. The serendipitous encounter with Venus gave space physicist Donald Gurnett of the University of Iowa and his team the opportunity to use the craft's plasma wave instrument - designed to study the electric field signals generated by plasmas moving in Jupiter's intense magnetic field - to listen for radio discharges from Venusian lightning. Listening for enlightenment wasn't a brand new idea. The Soviet Venera landers of the 1970s and the Pioneer Venus Orbiter, which reached Venus in 1979, may have detected flashes, though the meaning of the data has been in dispute for a decade. But Gurnett and his colleagues expected that Galileo's instrument would be able to detect lightning signals with much more confidence than the earlier probes. And their expectations were rewarded on 9-10 February of last year, when Galileo swept by the night side of Venus and recorded six abrupt noise bursts that looked just like lightning signals. How convincing is the claim? Compared to Pioneer Venus, Galileo could record signals at much higher frequencies, up to 5.6 megahertz, which makes them easier to distinguish from plasma-generated signals and the usual types of spacecraft interference. "I would say our confidence is reasonably high," says Gurnett of his findings, which appear in Science this week (p. 1522). And there are indications that the results are already impressing some of the doubters, if not immediately winning them over. Paul Cloutier of Rice University, a leading critic of the Pioneer Venus data, agrees that the Galileo results have strengthened the lightning advocates' case. "Gurnett's is perhaps the only credible result in the last few years that might be a detection of Venus lightning," he says. Lightning proponents such as space physicist Christopher Russell of the University of California, Los Angeles, go further. "I was confident before" that Pioneer Venus had detected lightning, says Russell, "but I'm pleased by the independent confirmation." Still, the data leave wide open the question of how Venus manages to produce its electricity. The atmosphere itself seems an unlikely candidate. "It's hard for people to imagine how the atmosphere of Venus would create lightning," says planetary scientist Larry W. Esposito of the University of Colorado. Venus, he points out, seems to lack the lightning-generation system so familiar in terrestrial thunderheads: strong updrafts of condensing vapor, which provide the particles that can carry opposite electrical charges and the vertical motions needed to separate them. (The sudden combination of the separated charges is a stroke of lightning. ) On Venus, the clouds tend to resemble fog banks, says Esposito. "You don't see much lightning in fog," he notes. Maybe the Venusian fog generates electric fields by some still-unimagined mechanism. Or maybe, researchers speculate, the lightning is born not from atmospheric processes but from geologic ones. On Earth, particles rubbing against each other inside turbulent plumes of volcanic ash sometimes generate lightning, and the same thing might happen on Venus." Wal Thornhill (walt at netinfo.com.au) ----------------------------------------------- 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 emerging 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 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