THOTH -A Catastrophics Newsletter- VOL II, No. 3 February 15, 1998 EDITOR: Michael Armstrong PUBLISHER: Brian Stewart CONTENTS: VELIKOVSKY'S COMET VENUS (14)..........David Talbott INTERSTELLAR "COMETS"....................Amy Acheson Comments...........................Wal Thornhill WOODHENGE FIND RIVALS STONE CIRCLES BY Nigel Hawkes, SCIENCE Editor AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL GALLERY CATALOGS Comments.............Allan Beggs & Wal Thornhill ASTRONOMY PICTURE OF THE DAY Comments...........................Wal Thornhill URL's OF INTEREST ----------------------------------------------- Quote of the day: Our duty is to believe that for which we have sufficient evidence and to suspend judgement when we have not. John Lubbock ----------------------------------------------- VELIKOVSKY'S COMET VENUS (14) By David Talbott (dtalbott at teleport.com) [EDITOR'S NOTE: This concludes Talbott's series of articles on the myth of the comet Venus in Mesoamerican thought.] THE MYTH OF THE GREAT COMET In these brief articles we have asked whether Immanuel Velikovsky's comet Venus finds support among Mesoamerican cultures. Our conclusion is that, to a stunning degree, the symbols or hieroglyphs of comets stand in an unexplained conjunction with the planet Venus in Mesoamerica. Not only the five most frequently-occurring hieroglyphs for the comet around the world, but virtually all of the variations on these symbols are attached to each other and to the planet Venus. On their own, the symbols do not provide any basis for the observed merging. But grant the proposed history of a COMET Venus, and all of the enigmas are removed in a single stroke. In support of this conjunction, we have also cross-referenced the Mesoamerican traditions with more general traditions about comets in other cultures, and found an underlying consistency far too broad to be explained by chance. Additionally, we have seen that the deepest fears of Mesoamerican culture turn out to be the specific fears which ancient astronomies associated SIMULTANEOUSLY with the arrival of a comet and the risings of Venus, as we should expect: the end of the world, death of kings, overwhelming wars, plague, pestilence, drought. Those who are familiar with our larger thesis will recognize that these fears are not random, but inseparably tied to a more fundamental story: that of the ancient god-king--the celestial "father" of kings--whose death or ordeal brought a former world age to a catastrophic end, and whose "heart-soul" took flight as a comet-like star. This prototypical, cometary heart-soul is nothing other than the planet Venus. One discovers this equivalence of Venus- and comet-fears in all of the symbolic and ritual contexts by which Mesoamerican cultures expressed their deepest anxieties: we see it in calendars of world ages, in superstitions associated with unexpected disruptions of natural cycles (eclipses, etc.), in massive ritual sacrifice, in relentless war, and in a never-ending stream of commemorative festivals and rites. Repeatedly, the stargazers looked to VENUS as the cause or sign of the very disorder that world myth ascribes to the feared GREAT COMET. It has long been assumed that the great civilizations of the past oriented themselves to a sky appearing almost exactly like our sky today. I have suggested, however, that an entirely new approach to ancient myth and religion is warranted. Early races were obsessed with a prior "age of the gods," a time unlike any period of human history to follow. It is the living memories of this epoch that reveal the true source of collective fear, as generation after generation anxiously followed the movements of PLANETS. Driven by fear and guilt, the starworshippers incessantly re-enacted the critical junctures in that prior age, when planets moved out of control. There is a reason why the myth of the comet Venus is so deeply entwined with a more general memory of planetary upheaval. In truth, the evidence for an UNFAMILIAR sky is massive. But to appreciate even the first levels of that evidence one must break the trance of prior teaching and beliefs Evidence must be seen AS evidence, rather than as witness to the absurdity and contradictions of the star worshippers. When clearly-defined patterns of memory are impossible to explain under prevailing assumptions, those assumptions must be re-evaluated. To comprehend the equation of comet symbols and Venus symbols, one need only ask what we should expect to find if Velikovsky's thesis was fundamentally correct. (I do not accept Velikovsky's Venus chronology or his detailed scenario.) If Venus formerly appeared as a world- threatening comet, but subsequently lost its cometary aspect, should we not find that later fears of comets attached themselves BOTH to the now-peaceful planet Venus and to the wisps of gas periodically coming into view? Wherever systematic, empirical astronomy kept alive the Great Comet's connection with Venus, we should EXPECT that the symbols of comets would pervade the culture's images of that planet. If the thesis is correct, it could not have been otherwise. So we can hardly be surprised to find that, in Mexico, the five universal glyphs of the comet are attached to the planet Venus! That a comet is the ONLY known astronomical reference for these symbols makes the point all the more emphatic. In terms of our larger thesis, it should not surprise us either that the planet Venus was, in a hundred different ways, the regulator of the fate of kings and kingdoms in Mexico. (The Great Comet DID "determine" the fate of the king's celestial prototype; see earlier discussion of the Saturn theory.) A compelling logic will thus be seen in Venus' definitive mythical role--in regulating the cosmic cycles, ordaining festivals pointing backward to the age of the gods, sending the kingdom's strongest men to war, and sending the victims of war to the sacrificial stone. Given the full story of the Great Comet, we should expect nothing else. And even in the more tempered rituals of daily life, the keeping of the sacred fire, the morning sweeping of the shrine, and other rites too numerous to mention here, one discerns the ever-present memory of a world falling into confusion, but subsequently renewed to the drumbeat of the Dawn Bringer. When Bob Forrest said that he could find "no direct historical reference" to the Venus-comet, I believe he spoke from conviction. But the language of the first civilizations was not "historical;" it was mythical, having its reference in events no longer occurring. Thus, no civilization could meet Forrest's test. There are no "direct historical references" to the age of the gods, because that age precedes earthbound, historical chronicles. Did the underlying events implied by the myths and by the ritual acts of remembering actually occur? Given the nature of the language involved, the sheer scale of evidence is stunning; and one might wonder how the Mexican star worshippers were supposed to have told us something more about the remembered catastrophes, without a crash course in the language of modern science. In taking up such issues, cross referencing is imperative. No approach that isolates each evidential fragment, "explaining" that fragment without explaining parallel evidence pointing to the same unusual conclusion, can diminish the case for a remembered Venus-comet. No self-respecting scholar will lack the imagination to conjure an "explanation" of a particular comet symbol attached to Venus: it is simply too easy to claim that an ancient tribe or race may have accidentally confused a comet tradition with a Venus tradition. But it is the CONSISTENCY of the comet images of Venus that makes the case, and in this sense Forrest's analysis breaks down completely with the very first instance cited. The comet Venus is a global myth, and the one credible explanation of the myth is that Venus DID look like a comet--that it did participate in literally earthshaking events, not that long ago. One only has to follow the evidence to know that this is so. ----------------------------------- INTERSTELLAR "COMETS" [Amy Acheson wrote]: > >Seems like every time I surf the astronomy pages on the WEB >they have something that screams "electrical phenomena." So >here's another example: > >http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/9711/orionprop_hst_big.jpg > >The picture is from Hubble of the Orion Nebula, in particular >the Trapezium cluster. And the text mentions that many of the >smaller stars have dust clouds that point away from the larger >stars. (It's from the previous page, but they change that >every day) For the text, try: > >http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ > >and turn to Nov 18 in the archives. So I'd like to know, can >these be "coma" in the same sense but much larger scale as >cometary tails? > >They don't mention it, but it looks to me like some of the >stars have tails that don't seem aligned with bigger stars. [Wal Thornhill responds]: Thanks for the information. You're right about the rate of confirmatory reports supporting the "Electric Universe". Like all paradigm shifts, once you have made it the whole thing seems so simple and blindingly obvious. We will have no difficulty teaching this stuff to primary school kids in the future. The astounding blindspot of the current astronomical paradigm is that we know that the universe is built of charged particles (even the neutron exhibits an internal charged structure) yet we do not allow charge accumulation and exchange or electrostatic effects except in a very minor way near the surface of the Earth. As to the "Proplyds" as they call those stars surrounded by "structures that seem to point away from the brighter stars", they are large scale cometary comas. The astronomers weren't so coy about the much larger cometary structures in the Cartwheel galaxy. There they actually pinned the cometary tail on the galactic donkey. The problem for astronomers is that their dogma requires that clouds of material surrounding a star must be associated with the formation of a planetary system, so it is a purely gravitational and mechanical phenomena. That requires some kind of "stellar wind" from a nearby bright star to blow the dust into a tail shape. But you and I know that a stellar wind ain't a wind at all, it's an electrical flow. I believe the star in each Propolyd is generating the surrounding cloud by spewing material into space in the same way that a comet does under the influence of electrical discharges at the nucleus. Your comment about the lack of alignment of some tails with the brighter stars seems to be so. This would be expected if the tail direction merely shows the local alignment of the Birkeland current thread in which the Propolyd is embedded. A Propolyd type of phenomena is precisely the way I envisage the Saturnian system behaving upon entering our Sun's electrical influence. Saturn is reported to have spewed material into space, which would have formed an obscuring coma, noted by Dave and Dwardu Cardona, just as we see with the Propolyds. So, it could be said that ancient testimony tends to confirm my statement that the Propolyd comas are formed by electrical discharge of stellar material and therefore shaped by ambient electrical stresses. ----------------------------------------------- WOODHENGE FIND RIVALS STONE CIRCLES. BY NIGEL HAWKES, SCIENCE EDITOR Builders of the oak tree marvel; Bride eager to dance had devil to pay ARCHAEOLOGISTS have discovered traces of a huge and elaborate wooden temple dating back 5,000 years. Evidence shows that it was once one of the most important ceremonial sites in England, comparable in significance to Stonehenge. Nine concentric rings of oak pillars once stood on the site at Stanton Drew in Somerset, surrounded by an enormous ditch. Each upright would have been up to a metre across and probably stood eight metres above the ground. All that can be seen today is a later stone circle. Such wooden henges are unique to Britain, and this one is twice as large as any of the other seven known. The traces were found by archaeologists from English Heritage while they were carrying out a routine survey, using instruments that can detect small magnetic anomalies in the soil without disturbing the surface. "To our surprise and delight what emerged was a timber temple of about 3000 BC," said Geoffrey Wainwright, chief archaeologist at English Heritage. "There is now no timber left? It would have decayed long ago. But the disturbance of the soil when the pits were dug to take the uprights shows clearly." Andrew David, head of archaeometry at English Heritage, estimates that there would have been between 400 and 500 oak uprights making up the nine rings. Each would have weighed five tons or so, nearly as much as the stones at Stonehenge. Some wooden henges had a roof, but Dr Wainwright said Stanton Drew was far too large to roof over. He sees it as a local centre where people would go ask the supernatural powers to provide them with plentiful crops, or healthy herds of animals. "By this period, a social structure was developing, with distinct tribal areas. The temples were focal points for these tribes, where they gathered and held feasts. Other wooden henges contain masses of pig bones, along with decorated fragments of pottery. It looks as if the people deliberately broke the pots and scattered them around." At the time, the population of Britain may have been as great as one million, according to Dr Wainwright. "It's a great mistake to think the people who built this place were rude, untutored, starving individuals. They were very sophisticated with successful agriculture and made beautiful items such as carved stone axes used for barter." The technique used to find the hidden rings makes use of the fact that any disturbance of soil tends to affect its magnetism. Until a few years ago, magnetometers sensitive enough to detect the anomalies at Stanton Drew did not exist. The existence of the post holes could have been found by conventional digging, but the site has not been dug in recent times. The ring shows no evidence of having been orientated with any astronomical purpose in mind. Nor is it known whether the uprights were carved or decorated, although Dr. Wainwright believes that they were. "It is very hard to think of a structure like this with nine concentric circles not being carved in some way," he said. He suspects that the carving might have been like that on contemporary pottery, which carries geometrical patterns and spiral motifs. "The patterns are quite stylised and relate to tribal territories, we believe. It would be very surprising if these motifs were not replicated on the timber uprights." A complete excavation of the site is not planned, as it would be unlikely to provide much more information than the magnetic survey. A small dig may be conducted to confirm that the rings are indeed the remains of post holes, although there is little doubt that they are. Sir Jocelyn Stevens, chairman of English Heritage, said that Britain was apparently the only place in the ancient world where these extraordinary temples were built. "They were expressing their power by building these great rings, just as we are celebrating the Millennium by building a huge dome. This is clearly a very British habit, and it is 5,000 years old." Builders of the oak tree marvel beat Great Pyramid by four centuries The Great Pyramid at Giza was not even on the drawing board when the wooden henge at Stanton Drew was built. The building of the henge dates from about 3000 BC, while Cheops did not build the pyramid until 2590 BC. The builders of the henge were near-contemporaries of those who invented the wheel in Mesopotamia, and the sail in Egypt, both in about 3500 BC. Bronze casting and the plough were known in the Middle East, but not in Britain. Writing had just been invented in Sumer. Stonehenge itself existed, but like the temple at Stanton Drew it was made of wood, not stone. The Stonehenge we know today did not assume its final form until 2000 BC. The henge was built in much the same way as Stonehenge. Pits up to four metres deep were dug, and ramps arranged alongside them. The oak pillars were dragged and pushed until they overbalanced into the pits, and were then pulled upright. The wooden henges would have lasted for up 400 years before needing replacement. Bride eager to dance had Devil to pay THE ancient mysteries of Stanton Drew are no secret to the landlord of the Druid's Arms. John Newcombe has three of the standing stones in his beer garden, the largest 12ft high. "The local legend is that they were the guests at a wedding party who were turned to stone," he said. "The ones in my back garden are the bride, bridegroom and best man." Every midsummer's eve, he says, a small group of strangely dressed people arrive to dance around the stones. "I don't know who they are but they aren't druids," he said. "They wear little capes and hats and carry things like Devil's forks. "As long as they don't scare away my regulars I don't care what they get up to. They have these little candles like night-lights and I go out in the morning to clear them away but they never make any other mess." According to Robin Bush, the Somerset historian and member of Channel 4's Time Team, Stanton Drew means "Drew's town near the stones" and is mentioned in the Domesday Book. One of the stones has a hole in it and was once much larger. Mr Bush said: "It was called Hautville's Quoit, after a medieval lord, Sir John Hautville, whose tomb is in a church near by. "The local legend was that he had thrown it there. It once stood in the middle of the road but over the years has been chipped away at, partly to get stone to put on the road itself." The stones at Stanton Drew were considered to be the third most important prehistoric monument in Wessex after Stonehenge and Avebury. The 17th-century antiquary John Aubrey recorded the legend of the wedding party in 1664. According to Aubrey, the fiddler went home before midnight to avoid playing on the Sabbath and the bride announced that she would "go to hell for another fiddler". Another fiddler appeared and played until dawn, when he revealed himself as the Devil and turned the assembled throng to stone. No one believes that story any longer. Except, of course, on midsummer's eve. [Story submitted by Walter Radtke] ---------------------------------------------- News of interest to catastrophists: Albert Namatjira, an aboriginal watercolourist of the 40's and 50's. . .was an Arunda man from Hermannsberg in Central Australia. He trained under an European artist, Rex Batterbee, and created some beautiful watercolour landscape images of his country. His art form and style was purely European watercolour technique and expression. That's how he was trained, that's how he painted. And Australia acclaimed him. What we didn't know at the time, but we do now know, is that he painted, in European style, his sacred places. One of these paintings, in the Art Gallery of NSW, shows a magnificent TWO-peak mountain framed in the recumbent crescent formed by the end of a valley, with a pool in the foreground. Namatjira died in 1960 I believe. The Art Movement which gave rise to the paintings on the AAIA site did not begin until around 1971 in Papunya, Central Australia, not very far from Hermansberg, in fact. Some of the early Papunya Tula painters had worked with Namatjira and with the Hermansberg school of watercolour painters--which still exists and is still producing excellent paintings. However, the Papunya Tula artists did not copy or imitate European styles or forms as the Hermansberg school had done. This new Art Movement used the traditional imagery that they had always used in their ground paintings, in body decoration, and in tool and weapon decoration. What is new was that they are painting in Acrylic paints on canvas supplied by the community Art Advisors. So only the *medium* is new. The images were, and still are, their traditional imagery. Hence their work output--their Art--became very easily transportable across vast distances of desert and, in time, around the world. Before 1971, however, no-one outside of the Anthropology and Ethnology Departments of European institutions had ever seen *any* of this imagery. Before 1980 it was not considered even as art, much less as Art. It was seen as craft. In 1971-1979, David Talbott would never have found this Desert imagery unless he had access to some very specialist libraries. Sure, Arnhem Land imagery was known of and sold, but no-one had ever recognized the Desert imagery as Art before 1970. It was then for the first time (and only by a few) recognized as a New Art Form in World Art terms, which eventually and "suddenly" burst upon the world Art Market scene in 1987/1988. When I began my research in 1989 very little of it had yet been published. The international fame of Aboriginal Art began at around about the same time as David Talbott began publishing AEON, i.e. around 1988/1989. These days you can see some of the best contemporary work on the AAIA site: http://www.ozemail.com.au/~hallpa/indexb.html Allan Beggs ---------------------------------------------- Astronomy Picture of the day I wish to alert Kronians to the Astronomy Picture of the Day for Feb 5 at: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html It is captioned "A Martian River Bed?" and shows a part of Nanedi Vallis, imaged by the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS). The high resolution image shows detail down to 40 feet. The text says that the canyon appears to have been carved by flowing water because of the terraces and channels visible, but the lack of smaller surface tributary channels and other features argue that the valley was formed by a surface collapse. Those are the main conundrums attending the conventional view for most of the channels on Mars. My view is that, once again, neither idea is correct because Nanedi Vallis shows most of the features of a sinuous rille. That is, it even clearly shows a portion of the canyon with the characteristic narrower channel in the floor. Other features are: the V-shape of the canyon, the transverse striations along the floor of the canyon, the parallelism of the walls along the tortuous channel, the terracing, the tendency to scalloping along the edges of the canyon and at the ends of short tributary canyons, and the presence of a "hanging valley" at the bottom of the picture with no sign of fluid flow into the main canyon. These are a scaled down version of many of the features seen in the giant Vallis Marineris. As the MGS descends to its mapping orbit we are going to witness a flood of similar images. I hope that before long the message will be clear to all, except geologists, that water did not create these features. I exclude geologists because they have been given a Lyellian, Earth-centred way of interpreting everything they see and it may not be possible for them to unlearn and see these pictures differently. Unfortunately, universities don't offer courses in how to unlearn what you've been taught. Paradoxically, therein lies the key to rapid scientific advancement. Wal Thornhill ---------------------------------------------- PLEASE VISIT THE KRONIA COMMUNICATIONS WEBSITE-- http://www.kronia.com/~kronia/ Other suggested Web site URL's for more information about Catastrophics: Subscriptions to AEON, a journal of myth and science, may be ordered at the I-net address below: 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://www.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 mikamar at e-z.net