THOTH -A Catastrophics Newsletter- VOL I, No. 5 March 14, 1997 EDITOR: Michael Armstrong PUBLISHER: Walter Radtke CONTENTS: EDITORIAL SECTION............................ Michael Armstrong THE MYTH OF THE GOLDEN AGE....................David Talbott Movie Review: REMEMBERING THE END OF THE WORLD..............Steven Parsons THE VENUS COMET (2)........................... Wal Thornhill ----------------------------------------------- EDITORIAL SECTION By Michael Armstrong (mikamar at e-z.net) Quote of the day: "Tiger got to hunt Bird got to fly Man got to sit and wonder why, why, WHY? Tiger got to sleep Bird got to land Man got to tell himself he understand." Kurt Vonnugut's little jingle The word paradigm comes from the Greek word, "paradeigma," which means "model or pattern." A paradigm is the undergirding conceptual framework within which we seek to understand the world. It describes boundaries, shapes our perceptions, and in many ways determines our conclusions. One cannot meaningfully "know" or believe anything without a paradigm to "hold" that knowledge and belief. Most people do not consciously question the paradigms effecting their interpretation of natural events or human history. The difficulty comes when a new paradigm gives rise to possibilities never considered from within the previous boundaries. It seems there are two contrasting ways to introduce a radically new paradigm. One way is with parables or analogies (literally "outside of logic;" if the idea or truth is the milk, the paradigm is the container.) Analogies are designed to engender an intuitive insight into the new idea or truth being communicated. Since one partial definition/description of a language is a set of words, each of which is definable by other members of the set, the "harder and slower" way is by exchange of information, logic and reason--a brick-by-brick building approach--which requires a shared genuine interest in the question raised, and an unqualified commitment to the reasoning process. THOTH is dedicated to exploring a new paradigm for understanding our cosmic history. And we will honor both of the paths to new insight. Responses from readers--including challenges from fact, reason or intuition, will be welcome. ----------------------------------------------- THE MYTH OF THE GOLDEN AGE By David Talbott (dtalbott at teleport.com) In this and several submissions to follow, I will offer some background notes on a few mythological themes that are integral to the historical argument of the Saturn theory-- Golden Age/Ancestral Paradise Universal Monarch/King of the World Saturn as Ancient Sun God Myth of the Polar Sun Saturn at the Pole GOLDEN AGE When the world began, according to the biblical account and other Hebrew myths, Adam, the first man and prototype of man, occupied a garden of abundance, in communion with God Himself--a deathless realm, free of sickness and any need for human labor. Loss of that original paradise was nothing less than a cosmic rupture, and never, since that rupture, has man experienced a comparable terrestrial condition. The Eden story is filled with interesting and familiar images. Four rivers of paradise, tree of Life and tree of the Knowledge, devious serpent, Adam's rib, temptress Eve, flaming sword at the gate, and more. But what immediately concerns us is a single underlying theme, a theme clearly linked to a myth preserved on every habitable continent. A global myth declares that the world has not always been as it is experienced now. In a former time, man lived in a kind of paradise, close to the gods. It was the Golden Age. Throughout an eternal spring, the earth produced abundantly, free from the seasonal cycles of decay and rebirth. And under this remarkable cosmic order, man experienced neither war nor sickness, neither hunger nor any requirement of human labor. This recurring and unexplained myth was carried into modern times by primitive races the world over. In Mexico native legends spoke of an ancestral generation whose every need was met, without cost. There was no sickness or hunger no poverty or sadness, and the gods dwelt among men. But this harmonious age didn't last, eventually succumbing to an overwhelming catastrophe. According to the Cheyenne of North America the original race roamed naked, innocent and free, enjoying the natural abundance of an eternal spring. What followed, however, was an age of flood, war, and famine. The Caribs of Surinam have a poignant memory of this fortunate epoch. "In a time long past, so long past that even the grandmothers of our grandmothers were not yet born," they say, "the world was quite other than what it is today: the trees were forever in fruit; the animals lived in perfect harmony, and the little agouti played fearlessly with the beard of the jaguar " The South American Indians of Gran Chaco and Amazonia recall this as the Happy Place, where work was unknown because the fields produced abundance of their own accord. The Hopi Indians proclaim that in the earliest time they were a marvelously contented race, at peace with their brothers. They knew nothing of sickness or conflict, and all things were provided by Mother Earth without any requirement of labor. But these are just the American Indian versions of the story. The aborigines of Australia insist that their first ancestors enjoyed a Golden Age, a Paradise of abundant game and without conflict of any kind. Northern Europeans once celebrated this earliest age as the "Peace of Frodi," a mythical Danish king. Throughout this peaceful epoch no man injured another and a magical mill ground out peace and plenty for the entire land. Memories of a Golden Age pervade the myths of Africa. The distinguished folklorist Herman Baumann reported that "Everything that happened in the primal age was different from today. People understood the language of animals and lived at peace with them; they knew no labor and had food in plenitude." Sacred texts of ancient India recall this as the Krita Yuga or "Perfect Age," without disease, labor, suffering or war. The Iranians called it the age of the brilliant Yima, an age with "neither cold nor heat," an eternal spring. According to ancient Chinese lore, the purest pleasure and tranquillity once reigned throughout the world. Mythical histories called it "the Age of Perfect Virtue" and declared that "the whole creation enjoyed a state of happiness. . . all things grew without labor; and a universal fertility prevailed." How old, then, is this ancient memory of a lost paradise? It is this question we will take up in our next installment. ---------------------------------------- "REMEMBERING THE END OF THE WORLD" -A Feature-Length Documentary- Review by Steven Parsons (openflow at vr-net.com) This documentary takes the viewer on an extraordinary journey into the collective memory of our species. The compelling audio/visual effects and thoughtful narration weave a story so deep that I felt excited for days. I found that I was unable to explain to my friends, in just a few sentences, what I had learned during my 90 minute viewing of "Remembering the End of the World." I felt compelled to watch the video a second time, then a third. With each viewing, I gained a greater appreciation for the utter enormity of the topic and the deceptively large amount of information presented. If David Talbott is correct, the common themes of myth that have been told and re-told by all cultures of the world point to actual physical events, global events. Deep in our collective memory, beneath conscious awareness for most of us living today, we remember the golden time with nostalgia and longing. We remember doomsday with dread. In a consistent way, these deep memories have erupted into form through the arts, through stories and through cultural ritual. According to this theory, our ancestors actually did live in a paradise, an Eden, a Golden Age that ended in chaos. This golden time occurred recently enough that our distant ancestors remembered. During the Golden Age and its confusing aftermath, the sky looked very different than it does today. During this period, neighboring planets loomed very large in the sky. The people of this earlier time did not invent stories of gods in the heavens just to entertain themselves. Rather, the towering presence of planetary spheres in the sky could only be understood in super-human or god-like terms. These gigantic planetary spheres enacted the original dramas that have been depicted in myth and art ever since. Those dramas in the sky deeply impacted the inhabitants of that era, even creating world-wide terror and destruction. David Talbott presents a convincing argument. The preponderance of mythical evidence points to dramatic global events, and already several experts in the physical sciences have stepped forward to present theoretical ways of understanding these events. Perhaps our ancient astronomers deserve more credit. Perhaps Venus and Mars really did display character attributes such as flowing beauty or war-like intensity, and displayed these vividly. Perhaps the historians of Greece and Rome deserve more credit, too. What if we take their descriptions of earth-shaking events in their own history to be fact? What if we were to listen to the ancient voices and to look for truth there? We would find that their collective story paints a picture of a past that is radically different than modern science has assumed. If we temporarily regard myth and art as bearing the same level of usefulness as bones and rock, the expressions of those story tellers and artists carries more information than once thought. This documentary summarizes a very large and very important story. If the story proves to be true, its acceptance today will deeply impact astronomy, depth psychology, cultural anthropology and many other sciences. A consideration of the hypothesis will not only boost our planetary understanding but may also open a door for healing and integration within deep layers of the collective psyche. The pacing of the narrative is gradual and the visual effects serene at times. Very skillfully, the periods of quiet, the scenes of winter rains and forest streams invite the viewer into a contemplative mood. Such a mood seems necessary so that the probing questions posed by the narrator may ripen in one's mind, unanswered. The magnitude of this topic requires inner calm for its realization. Let no one be fooled by the conservative pacing of delivery here, influenced by Canadian-style film making. This production contains an enormous amount of visual and verbal information. I believe the director did an excellent job in weaving an immense story together with supportive evidence, while maintaining a high level of audio/visual interest. I regard this as a high quality production in every respect. ----------------------------------------------- THE VENUS COMET (2) By Wallace Thornhill (walt at netinfo.com.au) For those who prefer to believe that the early description of Venus as a comet can be explained away as a case of mistaken identity, I present some of the physical evidence which must also be explained away. Much of the following material comes from my paper to the 1993 SIS Cambridge conference. ELECTRICAL PHENOMENA 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. In D. Grinspoon's recent book, 'Venus Revealed', he writes on p.245, "One of the most puzzling [patterns] was this: the highest mountains of Venus are all surprisingly shiny. At altitudes above about thirteen thousand feet, the reflectivity jumps up and the ground abruptly gets very bright. Surface roughness cannot explain this, so something in, or on, the ground at these high elevations is different, making it highly reflective". Grinspoon puts forward the idea that some chemical reaction takes place at the lower temperature, 820 degrees F, to form a radar reflective mineral. This requires the unlikely situation that all peaks on Venus have the same chemistry. A much simpler answer is that the diffuse electric discharges of St. Elmo's fire, occurring preferentially at the highest altitudes of mountain peaks, forms a highly conductive plasma which is a superb reflector of radar signals. Lightning is poorly understood. The mechanism of charging of storm clouds remains a mystery. Because lightning is conventionally associated with violent cloud movement on Earth, it was a surprise when investigators found strong evidence of lightning in the quiescent atmosphere of Venus. 'On Venus the clouds tend to resemble fogbanks,.... You don't see much lightning in fog'. The Venusian ionosphere is directly coupled to the solar wind. Intense airglow emission in long wavelength UV was observed to occupy a large volume of the ionosphere on both the day and night sides of the planet. The intensity seems to be linked to solar activity. I would therefore expect lightning activity on Venus to be generated, not from cloud motions, but from electrical input originating in the Solar plasma. If ions are scarce in the lower atmosphere (and there are no counterparts to earthly clouds on Venus), fewer but more equally energetic lightning discharges would be expected than on Earth. There is evidence that this is so; the rate detected by the Galileo spacecraft as it swung around Venus would require 2,000 years for a strike to occur in a given square kilometre. On Earth, 7 strikes would be expected each year in a square kilometre. Six out of nine events detected by the Galileo spacecraft were strongly clustered in frequency spectrum and power, a situation not found on Earth. If the extremely rapid lightning detected by the Venera spacecraft is verified, there may be two modes of discharge on Venus: firstly, a continuous glow of St. Elmo's fire at high points on the surface with rapid, low energy lightning, rather like that on Earth, and secondly, high energy superbolts which fire from the upper atmosphere - as detected by the Galileo spacecraft. Another argument for expecting lightning on Venus comes from the idea proposed by Juergens. He identified cometary tails with objects which are under enhanced electrical stress from the solar plasma due to the radial component of their movement toward or away from the Sun. THE COMET-LIKE PLASMA TAIL OF VENUS WOULD SUGGEST THAT THE PLANET HAS NOT YET ACHIEVED ELECTRICAL EQUILIBRIUM AFTER A RECENT COMETARY HISTORY. That being so, lightning of considerable violence and/or frequency would be expected on Venus. It would also fit the observation that the solar wind is tightly coupled to the planet. The magnetic flux 'ropes' of the solar wind, entwined about the planet, are indicative of electric (Birkeland) currents flowing from the solar wind directly into the planet's ionosphere. This is most simply explained by a high potential difference between the planet and its surroundings. The solar wind shock front observed by Pioneer Venus at solar maximum was 35% larger than the shock front observed the Soviet Venera 9 and l0 spacecraft at solar minimum. It was expected that the size of the bow shock would be determined by the size of the planet and the solar wind speed (which remains remarkably constant throughout the solar cycle) and remain unchanging. However, plasma sheaths change in thickness in response to changes in electric stress. Cometary comas show similar variability during solar storms. This implies that the solar cycle either causes, or is caused by, a change in the electrical environment of the Sun. Another manifestation of electrical effects in the ionosphere of Venus is the well-known 'Ashen light' which is often seen as a faint illumination of the dark part of the crescent disk. "There can be no doubt that the true origin of the Ashen Light is electric. It is a night-sky glow, similar to that in our own sky but estimated to be 50-80 times stronger. It has a line emission spectrum sufficiently strong to be photographed...." [V A Firsoff] The associated puzzle as to why Venus maintains a nightside ionosphere, given that night on Venus lasts about 58 Earth days, has not been answered. It is known that the nightside atmosphere is bombarded by fast electrons and that there is an unexplained large, fast drift of plasma (up to 10km/sec or 23,000mph) from day to night hemispheres. ATMOSPHERIC ROTATION The energy required to move the upper atmosphere of Venus violently about the slowly rotating planet may also be attributable to electromagnetic effects coupling through the ionosphere. In other words, the Venus equivalent of the Van Allen radiation belts would be forced into an equatorial belt of ionised gas in the upper atmosphere. Firsoff has noted that if Venus does have an intrinsic magnetic field it may both contribute to driving the ferocious high level winds and at the same time mask the planet's magnetic field. If planetary magnetic fields are caused by the rotation of charge intrinsic to the planet, the slow rotation of Venus would result in a small planetary field. The general 4 Earth-day retrograde global rotation is only disturbed by the notable 'eye' pattern in the high level haze caused by solar heating at the sub-solar point. The near equal temperatures, day and night, and from equator to the poles is totally inadequate to drive the energetic atmospheric movements observed. ATMOSPHERIC BREATHING In 1972, a 'breathing' phenomenon was discovered in the Venusian atmosphere. It is as if the cloud cover is acting like the lid on a kettle of boiling water; the infrared CO2 lines swing through a four day cycle akin to a relaxation oscillation which builds up slowly during each cycle and then collapses. This indicates that the cloud deck moves up and down through 1 km over the entire planet. Such a phenomenon requires considerable energy input which is difficult to account for on a very slowly rotating planet if solar energy is the only source. The 'breathing' has been confirmed by the Magellan orbiter which underwent variable atmospheric braking at the lowest point of its orbit, with a 4 day cycle. This strange phenomenon is analogous to the lid on a kettle of boiling water and indicates planet-wide heat input. It is one of the strongest arguments for Venus' heat being sourced internally and is consistent with the the four Pioneer probes discovery of twice the radiation coming from the surface as was incident from sunlight. The surface radiation also varied by a factor of two which is difficult to explain by any greenhouse theory. IN SUMMARY: The comet-like magnetosphere, extreme heat, strong electrical interactions with the solar wind and intense lightning, ionospheric and atmospheric activity suggest that Venus has not yet achieved electrical or thermal equilibrium with its environment in the solar plasma. This, in turn, lends physical support to the interpretation of early reports of the planet as COMET VENUS and of its interaction with other planetary bodies. Then there is the evidence of the surface scars...... Wal Thornhill ----------------------------- 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 framework of 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, and these differences may be seen in the various articles. Again, we welcome your comments and responses, and any supporting information or relevant submissions. Michael Armstrong Mikamar Publishing mikamar at e-z.net