THOTH -A Catastrophics Newsletter- VOL I, No. 25 November 3, 1997 EDITOR: Michael Armstrong PUBLISHER: Brian Stewart CONTENTS: VELIKOVSKY'S COMET VENUS (9)...................David Talbott HERE WE GO AGAIN ...............................Wal Thornhill E-mail Conversations about Uranus and Neptune ......... by Amy Acheson and Wal Thornhill ----------------------------------------------- Quote of the day: Any pursuit of understanding and meaning requires faith, the acceptance of certain underlying assumptions that are necessary if one is to use a given mode of inquiry ...Proponents of religion emphasize the crucial role of faith, though it is unfortunately often presented in the form of uncritical belief. ...Faith is also a prerequisite for philosophical inquiry; the philosopher needs the confidence that such inquiry actually pertains to truth, that reality can be thought about. In addition to faith, philosophizing also requires reason. If a theory is internally inconsistent, illogical, or inconsistent with experience, it is unlikely to be accepted as sound philosophy. Science also requires a type of faith, although it rarely goes under that label. Whereas religions normally make a clear statement of their articles of faith, science introduces its assumptions more surreptitiously. B. Alan Wallace, "Choosing Reality" ----------------------------------------------- VELIKOVSKY'S COMET VENUS (9) By David Talbott (dtalbott at teleport.com) [EDITOR'S NOTE: This continues Talbott's series of articles on the myth of the comet Venus.] 52-YEAR CALENDAR ROUND Across Mesoamerica, the combination of two calendars, the solar or seasonal calendar and the 260-day ritual calendar, produced an extended sequence of sacred time, in which the two calendars concluded on the same day only once every 52 solar years--a cosmic cycle of extreme import. This 52-year cycle the Maya called the Calendar Round and the Aztecs a "bundle of years" or "Perfect Circle" of years. Interestingly, to Sylvanus Morley observes that the Maya "never indicated dates in hieroglyphic texts or historical documents by the solar year designation alone. Most often the date was specified by its designation in the Calendar Round." Among the Aztecs this extended cycle was intimately tied to the myth of Quetzalcoatl, who was born on the day ce acatl ("One Reed") and departed on the day ce acatl 52 years later. He will return, the Aztecs claimed, on a future day ce acatl. It is only reasonable to assume, therefore, a close relationship between the symbolism of the Calendar Round and the symbolism of the founding god-king. Mesoamerican timekeepers show an extreme ambivalence about this extended calendar period. Its conclusion was both a renewal- the end of the old cycle and the beginning of a new cycle--and a potential moment of disaster, since the Aztecs believed that the entire world order was then in jeopardy. At that critical moment the astronomer priests anticipated world destruction by fire, wind, or water, repeating the great cataclysm that ended the golden age of Quetzalcoatl. The synchronous Earth-Venus movements appear to have figured prominently in the calendar, enabling priest astronomers to draw on the mathematics of Venus cycles to anticipate the recurrence of doomsday. For example, 65 Venus cycles were equivalent to 104 solar years, or two 52-year cycles, which the Aztecs called _huehueliztli_, an old age or "long-period." To Velikovsky, this role of Venus in calculations of world ages was, at the very least, evidence to be considered in assessing Venus' catastrophic role in the past. The works of Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, the early Mexican scholar (circa 1568-1648) who was able to read old Mexican texts, preserve the ancient tradition according to which the multiple of fifty-two-year periods played an important role in the recurrence of world catastrophes. He asserts also that only fifty-two years elapsed between two great catastrophes, each of which terminated a world age. Now there exists a remarkable fact: the natives of pre- Columbian Mexico expected a new catastrophe at the end of every period of fifty-two years and congregated to await the event. "When the night of this ceremony arrived, all the people were seized with fear and waited in anxiety for what might take place." They were afraid that "it would be the end of the human race and that the darkness of the night may become permanent: the sun may not rise anymore." It happened that the end of a cycle occurred in mid-November, 1507, and available records give us a good sense of the collective fears embedded in the symbolic rites of renewal. It is said that five priests moved in procession with a captive warrior out of the city of Tenochtitlan to the great ceremonial center on the Hill of the Star. The occasion was proceeded by ritual extinction of fires across Mexico, the casting of statues and hearthstones into the water, and rites of sweeping- -all of these gestures bearing a significant symbolic tie to an ancient cultural memory of catastrophic transition. We are also told that on this frightening occasion women were locked in granaries to avoid being turned into man-eating monsters, pregnant women donned masks of maguey leaves, and children were kept awake to keep them from turning into mice while asleep. (That these fears trace to the cosmic night and the associated chaos hordes should become clear in the course of this series.) David Carrasco writes, For on this one night in the calendar round of 18,980 nights the Aztec fire priests celebrated "when the night was divided in half": the New Fire Ceremony that ensured the rebirth of the sun and the movement of the cosmos for another fifty-two years. This rebirth was achieved symbolically through the heart sacrifice of a brave, captured warrior specifically chosen by the king. We are told that when the procession arrived "in the deep night" at the Hill of the Star the populace climbed onto their roofs. With unwavering attention and necks craned toward the hill they became filled with dread that the sun would be destroyed forever. When the priest astronomers did confirm that the heavens were still in order, the country broke into celebration, the Sacred Fire was rekindled, houses, roads and walkways were swept clean and normal life resumed, the gods having granted man another 52-year cycle. As in the case of disaster portents, the fears implicit in the calendar symbolism flowed from a core idea of recurrence. In the same way that the appearance of a comet OR the rising of Venus recalled the world-ending catastrophe, the calendar system (which undeniably related to observed Venus cycles) rested on a memory of former upheaval, when heaven fell into confusion. Could the terrestrial king, whose life always mirrored that of the founding god-king, escape the fate of the great predecessor, whose death ENDED a cosmic cycle? Would the world itself survive a full turn of time's wheel? It's too easy for archaeoastronomers, when chronicling the calendar symbolism, to slip into a state of enchantment over the system's mathematical symmetry, forgetting that there is a far more vital question: what were the experiential origins of the collective fear--the fear of a world falling out of control? And why did the planet Venus figure so prominently in the calculations of world ages? Perhaps the answer lies with the famous Calendar Stone, on which the time-keeping hieroglyphs are recorded. Enclosing the stone, and thus encompassing the entire cycle or world age is the two-fold form of the great serpent Xiuhcoatl, the mythical parent of comets, the great celestial torch launched against the rebel powers when the world was overrun by demons of chaos. That the archetypal comet should define the great cycle of time does not surprise us. For it seems that bringing one world age to an end and inaugurating another is, in the universal tradition, the comet's most distinctive role. ONE FEAR, MANY EXPRESSIONS Due to the progressive fragmentation of evidence over time, the experts have missed the most significant fact of all. Mesoamerican cultures as a whole expressed the doomsday anxiety in pervasive ritual practices which themselves offer vital keys to the nature of the original events: the rites of sweeping practiced in every sacred precinct; the great festivals reckoning with critical moments in the calendar and repeating memorable episodes in the age of the gods; the virtually endless rites of sacrifice, by which tens of thousands died in a culture-wide bargaining with celestial powers; and the ritually-ordained wars by which the city's bravest and strongest repeated the catastrophic interlude between two world ages. Together with the available information on disaster portents, these mythically-rooted themes provide a great reservoir of evidence as to the character of the remembered catastrophe. (See sections to follow.) The repeated ritual patterns re-enacted on every scale (from household sweeping rites to nation-wide celebrations of the 52- year cycle) a world falling into darkness; the death of the creator-king, whose heart-soul was torn from him to soar aloft as a comet-like "spark"; the end of the kingdom (symbol of the "world"); a sky filled with celestial dust and cometary debris- -the feared chaos-hordes; the gathering of great armies in the heavens to wage celestial combat; and overwhelming commotion: reverberating shouts and cries, the earthshaking moans of the great goddess, the shrieks of whistles, trumpets blaring, the beating of drums, and--in the very midst of this world-ending havoc--a smoking star (the prototypical comet of the Aztecs and Maya, the planet Venus) announcing the disaster in the most literal, causative sense, and presiding over the recovery of order, as if sweeping clear the darkened and cloud-filled sky. To see how these vivid memories of cometary disaster found expression in the local rites, we shall next turn to the role of the feared chaos hordes in the remembered events. Dave Talbott -------------------------------------------- HERE WE GO AGAIN Wal Thornhill (walt at netinfo.com.au) I quote from the latest report from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), concerning a massive crater discovered on the surface of the asteroid Vesta: "The giant crater is 285 miles across, which is nearly equal to Vesta's 330 mile diameter. If Earth had a crater of proportional size, it would fill the Pacific Ocean basin." "Another surprising finding is that such a large crater, relative to Vesta's size, might have been expected to cause more damage to the rest of the minor planet." This is becoming a familiar refrain. As well as Vesta, we now have Phobos, the tiny moon of Mars with a 7 mile circular crater on one end of its 17 mile long body (it's peanut shaped) and Mimas, the moon of Saturn, with its 80 mile diameter circular crater on a 240 mile diameter body. I predict that the crater on Vesta, when photographed more closely, will be circular also. All 3 craters have central peaks. In the recent west coast workshops I showed a dramatic slide of Phobos' crater, named Stickney. Prominent along the surface of Phobos were near parallel grooves apparently streaming away from Stickney and in the floors of the grooves were small circular craters. As Juergens noted a quarter of a century ago, and I have elaborated on since, the cratered grooves are a result of electrical discharges streaming across the surface toward the main crater, which is the focus of a plasma discharge from a planetary body. The circular crater with a central peak is characteristic of an impinging, rotating electric arc. It is emphatically not a result of an impact and so does not threaten to disrupt the rest of the moon or asteroid. In the case of Vesta, at the low relative speeds of objects in the asteroid belt we should not expect to find neatly circular craters resulting from impacts. (High resolution images of asteroids Gaspra and Ida show that practically all craters on them are circular too). The report goes on: "Because of the asteroid's small diameter and low gravity, the crater resembles smaller craters on the Moon that have a distinctive central peak. Towering eight miles, this cone-shaped feature formed when molten rock "sloshed" back to the bull's-eye center after the impact." This notion that central peaks in craters are caused by "sloshing" rock is total nonsense. There is a profound incompatibility between the two major requirements of the impact theory. First it requires a hypervelocity impactor in order to create a circular blast crater for almost any angle of approach. Secondly, it needs to melt rock to allow subsequent "sloshing" to form a central peak. But a blast causes rock to move by plastic flow under the influence of the shock front. When the shock front passes it freezes right where it is. There is very little melting. Evidence that rebound peaks were never melted is provided by the strata still evident in the rocks forming the peaks of so- called impact craters on the Earth. Sure, the minerals show shock effects but we all know the kind of concussion that even puny earthly lightning can cause. The central peaks of lunar craters are quite distinct from the melted floors and appear to be physically similar to the undisturbed terrain surrounding the crater. In a few notable instances on the Moon, the peak is connected to the rim by a mountain ridge! This is possible if the arc is extinguished (pinched off) before completing a full circle, but is inexplicable from any impact theory. You will also notice that the central peak on Vesta is as high as the crater is deep. This seems also to be a general pattern and is expected from arc machining but is not necessary for sloshing rock. Next, we get the obligatory reference to "the early days of the solar system" which is one of the key justifications for NASA's existence: "This suggests that more asteroids from the early days of the solar system may still be intact." Since the impact theory is wrong and the nebular hypothesis of the formation of the solar system is patently absurd, NASA has not even begun to ask the right questions - let alone find answers about our beginnings. In the Electric Universe, such cratering is likely at the time of the birth of an object as it departs its parent. It is, if you like, a birth-mark. Wal Thornhill ----------------------------------------------------- Re: Saturn's Revolving Crescent At 2:44 PM 9/2/97, Amy Acheson wrote: > >I want to bring in a related question here. We remember when the >planets Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were "first" discovered--since >the invention of the telescope) and named after the gods of the >ancients. Yet Uranus and Neptune show scars of catastrophe, too. >Uranus with its entire moon system is lying on its back, nearly >90 degrees to the plane in which it circles the sun. Neptune's >largest moon revolves backwards in an orbit that could remain >stable only a short (astronomically speaking) time. Both of them >have highly skewed magnetic fields. All of their moons are >riddled with the same kinds of scars found on the hypothesized >participants of the Saturnian scenario. And, as I understand it, >Wal Thornhill has been toying with the possibility that spread- >out solar systems are "captured" while electrically fissioned >ones are closely-packed. Uranus and Neptune are definitely "spread out." > >So the questions are these: > 1) did the outer planets (as well as the gods they were named >after) also participate in this Saturn scenario? > 2) Are catastrophic scenarios common enough to hypothesize more > than one in the history of our solar system? or > 3) Could the catastrophe we're talking about have been of a >greater scale than solar-system-wide? [I can't help thinking >about the scale of disruption of galactic arms in Arp's peculiar >galaxies. Whether the cause is electromagnetic discharge, quasar >ejection or something gravitational, the effect is large enough >to make the "Saturn Myth" a localized version of the story.] > >Amy [Wal Thornhill replies] Amy, 1) I can't answer your first question, except to note that it seems likely to me that the names Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were merely names transferred from mythology by astronomers to those practically invisible planets and have nothing to do with the planets themselves. 2) I definitely think that there have been repeated catastrophes. The layering of the surfaces of the Earth, Moon and Mars is not, in my opinion, to be explained purely by internal mechanisms and the present view of impacts is far too simplistic. 3) There doesn't seem to be anything untoward going on in our arm of the galaxy, nor in the galaxy itself, so I don't think the catastrophes were more than a local event. (I must read Arp's books). In fact, I think earlier catastrophes more likely occurred in the close-packed environment of the Saturnian system than in our current relatively empty solar system. ----------------- The subject of the origin of Uranus and Neptune is intriguing and difficult to be definite about. You are correct that I've been toying with the idea that spread-out solar systems are generally "captured" while electrically fissioned ones are closely-packed. I haven't spent much time recently thinking about such issues because there has been plenty happening in the inner solar system to keep me busy. But I will toss in a few facts and ideas for you to think about. Uranus and Neptune seem to form a pair, in size and appearance of their blue atmospheres - believed to be due to red light absorption in methane. They both have oddly offset magnetic fields which may have something to tell us about their different electrical nature. Neptune is the only planet to show changes in brightness of up to 4 percent. Neptune (17.2 Earth masses) is both more massive and dense than Uranus (14.5 Earth masses). The outermost planet in the solar system, Neptune's orbit is more circular than most machine shops could reproduce. Neptune's major moon, Triton, has the same kinds of electrical furrows and lack of craters as Jupiter's moon, Europa. These two moons also have a bright, pinkish surface. Maybe they are twins? Triton has a little atmosphere, chiefly nitrogen. (Saturn's moon Titan has a largely nitrogen atmosphere as well). Triton orbits Neptune retrogradely, which argues for its capture by Neptune. Triton also has terrain reminiscent of Uranus' moon Ariel, Saturn's moon Enceladus, and Jupiter's moons Io and Ganymede. It also has many of the same characteristics and size as Pluto (now demoted from the status of a planet). Three of Neptune's inner moons are within the Roche limit for the planet and should not have been able to form there, according to standard accretion theory. Triton has small replicas of the geysers on Io, reaching a height of 8 km. (This is probably a very low estimate based on just a few images from Voyager 2. Further investigation of the plumes on Io found those reached much higher than first thought). Triton also has dark plumes of material, thought to be from the geysers. Given their great differences in environment and surface conditions, this is further evidence in favour of such geysers being electrical discharges to the surfaces of these moons. Neptune has a net heat flow from the planet, Uranus has none that has been detected. Once again, this may denote a difference in electrical characteristics, maybe due to recent disturbance. Neptune has a wide equatorial zone that rotates more slowly (18 hours) than the magnetic field (16 hours), while polar regions rotate more rapidly than the magnetic field. The differential rotation is more pronounced than any other body in the solar system. Near the GDS, the winds are blowing retrogradely at 1500 miles per hour, the strongest measured anywhere in the solar system. It is noteworthy that all planets from Venus to Neptune have roughly similar cloud-top wind speeds despite a solar energy input variation by a factor of 1000! This is the strongest argument in favour of electrical energy being the main motive power behind upper atmospheric circulation. The wind speeds, relative to Neptune's surface, may not be as great as they appear if the planet's magnetic field and periodic radio signal are being driven by an external plasma toroid, rather than being intrinsic to the planet. The "clumpy" nature of the planet's rings may be another manifestation of radial plasma discharges between the planet and the encircling plasma toroid, as seen in the "spokes" of Saturn's rings. Neptune has a Great Dark Spot (GDS) of the same relative dimensions and latitude as Jupiter's Great Red Spot. Neptune's atmospheric banding has more in common with Jupiter's than with Saturn or Uranus which implies that Neptune is more electrically active than Uranus. Further evidence that this may be so is in the excess heat radiated by Neptune, the changes in brightness, the precise circularity of its orbit and the geysers on Triton. For the planet Neptune, being the planet most weakly bound to the Sun, to have an almost perfectly circular orbit argues, according to Newtonian mechanics, 1) that no body greater than 1/10 solar mass has passed through the solar system; 2) no object greater than 3 Jupiter masses has passed within the orbit of the Earth; and 3) there are no large planets beyond Neptune (sorry Don Patten). In fact astronomers are wont to say that its orbit is primordial. Notice that none of these constraints placed by a purely gravitational model prohibits the entry of a Saturnian system into the Solar family. But it does look as though Neptune was already a part of the solar system at the time since I don't think it would have had time for many revolutions about the Sun (1 Neptune year = 165 Earth years) to achieve such a highly circular orbit if it was stripped from the Saturnian system. Uranus is so similar to Neptune that I expect they were born at the same time under almost identical conditions. The extreme tilt of Uranus' axis (98 degrees) may have been due to an encounter with the Saturnian system, on its way in toward the Sun. Uranus has a very large number of small moons (15) which could be a result of that encounter. Neptune could have been somewhere on the far side of the solar system at the time of Saturn's incursion and been relatively unscathed. (Remember that in an electrical solar system, energy can be lost by an intruding body or system of bodies such that they are readily captured without returning to the outer reaches of the solar system from whence they came). Similarities between the major moons of all four gas giants suggests that they were originally a part of the Saturnian entourage, with Uranus and Neptune picking up some of the stragglers. Pluto and its moon, Charon I believe were some of the first bodies to be lost to the Saturnian system as the Sun's influence grew and, I would predict, they have similar characteristics to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. In other words, they will exhibit the same kind of electrical scarring, composition and hemispherical differences as the Galilean satellites of Jupiter and the large moons of Saturn. Pluto occasionally behaves like a comet, which adds some weight to my suggestion. I look forward to your comments. Wal Thornhill ---------------------------------------------- At 10:24 PM 9/7/97, Amy Acheson wrote: .... something about the way Uranus and Triton >seem so carelessly tossed about draws my attention. > Dear Amy, Thanks again for your comments. I sent the last post off late at night because I wanted to let you know I hadn't ignored or forgotten your earlier questions. It was based largely on my file on Neptune. Straight after I sent it I came across a joint paper by our friend, Tom Van Flandern (with R S Harrington), on the subject of "The Satellites of Neptune and the Origin of Pluto" Icarus 39, 131-136 (1979). It made me realize that I had been bending over backwards to accommodate the standard gravitational arguments wherever possible, to the detriment of my own argument. So when your reply arrived this morning, asking "Can you get away with that? Arguing that Neptune is "primordial" because of its nearly perfect circular orbit....", the answer is no, I can't. That argument would have Venus being primordial too. In any case, I didn't mean that I agreed with astronomers that Uranus and Neptune were primordially associated with the Sun. But that's another topic. Tom's paper concludes from a series of numerical experiments that "Pluto and the chaotic satellite system of Neptune may have originated from a single encounter of Neptune with a massive solar system body". I was prompted by this to look at the plane of the orbit of Triton and compare it with Pluto's orbital tilt, which is 17.2 degrees to the ecliptic. Triton orbits in a plane tilted 160 degrees to Neptune's equator (in other words, retrograde) and Neptune's equator is tilted 1 degree 47 minutes to the ecliptic. Therefore, Triton and Pluto orbit at almost the same angle to the ecliptic. I think Tom's idea that a planet (his model argues for a 2 to 5 Earth mass trans-Neptunian planet in a slow pass by Neptune) disrupted a system of normally rotating satellites of Neptune is a good starting point. As he says, "the 3- to 2-resonance between Neptune and Pluto is easy to get into in this way, and, once established, very difficult to get out of." However, as others have pointed out, now that we know that Pluto has a large satellite, Tom's model doesn't work quite as well to create or maintain a pair of close objects in Pluto's orbit from a pair of Neptunian satellites. It seems clear from all this that the entry of the Saturnian system into the solar system, comprising at that time Uranus, Neptune and Mercury (I include Mercury for the moment because it and the Sun share an inexplicable tilt to the plane of the ecliptic of 7 degrees) did have an effect upon Neptune. But rather than a single intruder disrupting a system of Neptunian satellites, I believe the answer to the dilemma of Pluto being a double system is that it and its satellite were torn from the weakening grip of Saturn as it passed Neptune, at the same time that Triton was captured in its retrograde orbit. In fact, the most likely situation was that Pluto, its moon Charon, and Triton were all closely associated before the encounter with Neptune. For what it's worth, Pluto and Triton are about the same density and close to that of Ganymede, Callisto and Titan. "With its tectonic features, its criss-cross of channels, its mushrooms, its wind streaks, its haze, its evidence of condensing volatiles, Triton was beginning to look like Europa, Enceladus, Mars and Io rolled into one" Cooper, New Yorker, June 18, 1990, p.84. Triton was one of the Saturnian family! Neptune's small moon, Nereid, appears to be an object that almost escaped capture during the flyby. As for the other inner satellites, Dr. S R Taylor has written: "The strange Neptunian satellite system seems to be principally the result of the capture of Triton, whose arrival on the scene must have resembled that of a bull entering a china shop." It is interesting that Tom Van Flandern's model required a slow flyby. It adds weight to my suggestion that the Polar configuration was transient but lasted for a time measured in decades or more likely, centuries as the Saturnian system lazily spiraled in toward the Sun, encountering first Neptune, then Uranus on its way. I will look at Uranus shortly. Wal Thornhill ------------------------------------ [Dave Talbott wrote, concerning the obscuration of the sun:] > As a complement to this concept Wal Thornhill has shown how a > group of planets moving into a new electrical environment will > generate a "plasma sheath" that could do exactly the same thing >as the gaseous envelope I earlier proposed. [A reply] >He has theorized, and that is interesting. Where is the proof of >the theory? [Wal answers:] If, by proof you mean "show me a planet with a glowing cometary coma", then there can be no proof until we can sample other stellar planetary systems or our own solar system goes haywire again (heaven forbid). However, I do consider it to be theoretically consistent and the most likely explanation for some of the reported characteristics of ancient daylight. We do know that planets and minor bodies have invisible comas around them today. We have proof that Venus has a cometary magnetosphere. The only difference between the invisible planetary magnetospheres and a visible comet's tail is the energy of the ions and electrons in the coma and tail. As for the size of a coma, cometary comas have been discovered by the Hubble Telescope in the Cartwheel galaxy with heads a few hundred light years across and tails more than 1000 light years long. I am not suggesting a Saturnian coma that size, but it would have been huge as it entered the solar environment - easily sufficient to envelop its entourage of planets. Looking at the Shoemaker-Levy comet breakup near Jupiter, upon its dismemberment each of the components assumed their own cometary comas and tails. By analogy, the Earth may have later had its own glowing, cometary sheath, after the shift to the polar configuration, to add to the diffusion of light. Lightning activity on the Earth at that time would have been spectacular and dangerous. As I have argued earlier in this forum, St. Elmo's fire would have been a common occurrence, as seems to be the case on Venus even today. I am reminded of the beautiful representation of that phenomenon on the high ridges of buildings, represented in the traditional architecture of Thailand. 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 Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered, 10 Pensee Journals may be ordered at the I-net address below: 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. New readers are referred to earlier installments in issues of THOTH posted on the Kronia website listed above. Go to the THOTH page and click on the image titled "Thoth: the Egyptian God of Knowledge" to access the back issues. Michael Armstrong Mikamar Publishing