Recovering the Lost World,
A Saturnian Cosmology -- Jno Cook
Chapter 14: The Start of Time.

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Contents of this chapter: [Horus the Hawk] [The Celestial Display] [The Start of Time] [The First Land] [The God Visits Earth] [Depicting the Past] [The Gifts of the Gods] [Living in Paradise] [Endnotes]

Horus the Hawk

The first God of the Egyptians, as with others people, was a giant bird which traveled on a daily basis from east to west through the skies, seen either during the day or the night, depending on the season.

[Image: detail of the four standard carriers. After Francesco Raffaele.]

The hawk moved from the equatorial region of Earth to the north during the period before 10,900 BC, when Earth first dropped below the level of Saturn, and eventually circled above the north horizon. He was identified as a hawk (and had a ceremonial center at Nekhen, the "City of the Hawk," in upper Egypt) and his name was Horus, which admittedly is almost a generic name for "God" among the Egyptians, quite equivalent to "Lord." His movements from east to west for possibly 6000 years show up in the descriptive appellation "Horus of the Twin Horizons."

Two of the four standards carried before the pharaoh on the "Palette of Narmer" depict the hawk of the east and the hawk of the west. Both of these also have banners hanging down from the tops of the poles. I will identify such bannered devices as these in the next chapters as images of the "plumes" of the east and the west, two of the four corner posts of the sky. This form (for the east and west cardinal directions) was also in use in Mesopotamia, where archaeologists have called them "circle" standards, but also identify them as "gate posts," where the upper circle is thought to be the hinge that a gate swings on. In Mesoamerica these are identified as trees, with birds at their tops.

The other two standards are easier to decode. One shows what looks like a stomach with an attached esophagus. In Mesopotamia this was originally the sign for "lugal" -- meaning "king." It depicts the southern ball plasmoids as a single entity. This becomes obvious with a look at the fourth standard, which is a plow with a jackal on top. This is the constellation of the Little Dipper, which at that time rotated around the North Polar axis which at that time was located in the pan of the Big Dipper, plowing, like Saturn also did, the fields of the northern stars. This depiction remains in use until Roman times (as, for example, the sky map carved in the ceiling of the temple of Hathor at Denderah).

The appearance from 10,900 BC to 8347 BC of the three southern ball plasmoids seems not to have detracted from the status of Horus in the north. On the "Palette of Narmer" a hawk is shown as owner of the people of a papyrus swamp. Archaeologists have assumed this to signify the conquest of the swamp region of the delta, even though the delta was flooded following the flood of 3147 BC at the time of the "Palette of Narmer" (so says Herodotus). The papyrus blooms shown on the Palette of Narmer probably signify the Duat in the south skies, rather than the delta (also held to be a swamp full of reeds). The papyrus buds might signify the Maruts, the "Followers of Horus," which numbered six from Vedic sources (Cardona).

The four beams of excited electrons seen in the skies during the earlier period are probably the basis for the Sed Festival of the pharaohs, a ceremony of laying out the land (as a survey) for agricultural use, already depicted by 3050 BC (as on the "Mace-head of Narmer"). It obviously relates to some sort of agricultural ceremony, as shown on a number of early grave-goods tags also.

The eight lowerings of Mars during the "Era of the Gods" kept the God Horus alive in religious symbolism and iconography. The Palette of Narmer is a clear indication of this. In much later genealogies of the Gods, Horus is known as "Horus of the Gods" during the period before 3147 BC.

In 3147 BC, the home of the Gods was attacked by Jupiter, the Bull of Heaven, who had been seen in the skies as a crescent for thousands of years and is depicted on the Palette of Narmer also. I'll detail this in the next chapter.

The Changing Celestial Display

Over the course of the thousand years of Saturn's rule, 4077 BC to 3147 BC, the images in the sky differentiated into a family of Gods. New details developed from the appearances of intervening planets, changes in the plasma column, and displays of plasma discharges into the space surrounding the upper sphere. The rings seen above Saturn become the Goddess Nut upholding the sky above Geb, the God of the first land (the lower rings), where the Gods live. (Alternatively Nut and Geb could be placed in the far south, and in the period of 10,900 BC to circa 9000 BC.)

During all this time the companions of Saturn were visible -- not only the planets Venus, Mercury, and Mars, but especially the busy moving satellites of Saturn. With these satellites milling about the original creator God, this scene becomes the model for Upper Earth as the "home" of the Gods. The seven satellites become the Gods who lived in the upper land. [note 1]

In both Mesopotamia and Egypt, records of the genealogies of the Gods were kept. Male and female deities were identified. However, the gender of the Gods varied over time and by location. Names and roles were frequently interchanged, as political contingencies required. The Gods were not initially identified with specific planets. There was, at that time, no concept of a planet at all. There were only the Gods. [note 2]

The images in the sky became symbolic objects in later developing civilizations, only to become unreferenced emblems at the remove of several thousand years. The scepter, crown, and throne of kings, the altar, the cross, and church steeple, the halos of saints, the sword in the stone, the swastika, and hundreds of architectural details, still in use today, all derive from the initial forms in the sky. The symbols were kept, even when the original associations were completely lost.

Not to be neglected either, are the auroras surrounding the incoming plasma stream. Where the stream of plasma connected with Earth, the outstreaming of electrons would have produced auroras adjacent to the lower part of the stream, probably of a circular pattern (responding to a circular magnetic field surrounding the plasma stream) and thus seen from afar as matching left and right. These are perhaps the lions or goats standing up against both sides of the tree of heaven as depicted in Sumerian art. At a later time these are griffins. The Egyptians use the same or similar images. Paired animals appear in the Palette of Narmer in circa 3050 BC, and other earlier palettes.

The Start of Time

When Saturn went nova in 4077 BC, the surrounding glow mode coma disappeared and the skies of Earth cleared to also show the Sun. The creation of light was attributed to the God Saturn, and it was Saturn that was called "the Sun," not only in Egypt, but almost everywhere else on Earth.

With the (real) Sun lighting the side of Saturn, and as viewed from Earth below Saturn, a bright crescent started to rotate around the central globe of Saturn on a daily basis, looking much like the crescent of the Moon today. This would persist even after Saturn had ceased its arc mode display.

But considering that initially Saturn was lit up like a blazing sun, I doubt that the crescent due to the (real) Sun would be seen at first. Thus we can actually claim that Saturn invented time -- when it no longer blazed, but had reduced its output or dropped to dark mode. That is when a crescent would be seen at the edge of the globe, rotating counterclockwise on a daily basis.

The crescent was part of the Sun-lit half of the Saturnian globe. From the perspective of Earth, only a small section of this was seen. As the Earth rotated (below Saturn), the crescent appeared to move counterclockwise around the outer rim of the globe on a daily basis. The crescent dimmed as it moved up toward the "top" of Saturn during the Earth's daylight hours, and brightened again as it dipped down to the bottom at night. (Brightened, that is, in comparison to the darkness of night.) The first experience of clock-time had started for humanity.

I have taken this description from Talbott's The Saturn Myth (1980), while attempting to keep in mind the relocation of the globes in a stack, as later proposed by Thornhill. It becomes obvious from this that the size of the crescent might vary with the seasons, for at various times the crescent would extend over more of the sphere of Saturn.

The crescent was not only experienced as a marker of the passage of day and night hours, but it was also seen as a boat -- the Barge of Heaven. It is the "ship of the Sun," depicted with a raised prow and stern, and resembling the ships which did commerce up and down the Nile. However, the "celestial ship" also clearly showed the use of oars in its movement around the edge of the overhead globe, despite the fact that Egyptian commercial vessels seldom used oars for rowing. The "oars" are streamers of plasma rising from the surface of Saturn. Seen from below, the ship would seem to rotate on a daily basis. [note 3]

Nearly identical images appear as rock carvings in Bronze Age Northern Europe, complete with the oars (and never with sails, although sails were in common use in the North Sea) and, like many late Egyptian images, often carrying the "Sun" as a giant globe at the center of the ship. [note 4]

The Saturnian globe had developed encircling rings of light, the brightest at the edge of the globe, and four "rivers" (or more) meeting at the center and quartering the globe. The area enclosed by the circle of the planet initially shimmered like a field of grain in sunlight.

The First Land

It was understood to be the first land to have risen out of the waters, the home of the Gods -- Olympus, Upper Earth, Paradise, but often just called "Earth" or "The Land." [note 5]

[Image: Plasma streamers in high-density glow mode (or arc mode), impinging on Mercury. This is seen from the side (the Sun is behind Saturn, Earth is further below). In the inset box, is the view as seen from Earth. Mars is in front of Mercury. Modified from David Talbott, "Symbols of an Alien Sky," (slide presentation, 1997).]

The streams quartering the "fields" of the upper land were actually plasma flows at glow mode or arc mode encroaching on Mercury, located below Saturn. The plasma streams originating from Saturn divided into three, four, five, or eight streams at various times. Venus, claimed by others to be the planet directly below Saturn, could not have supported a separation of the plasma flow into distinct bundles, because it lacks a magnetic field. This planet was Mercury, not Venus.

Four streams would be the most likely form. When there were four of these, they were identified as the four rivers of Paradise of the Bible. When seen behind Mars these formed what looked like a star (the streams going to arc mode at Mercury which generally stood directly behind Mars). This bright star form was understood at times as constituting a separate god or goddess. A star within a crescent (the Sun-lit edge of Saturn) is still used as a symbol in Islam. The crescent also remained in use as an emblem used in Roman (and other Mediterranean) coins through the third century of the current era, but associated with different meaning. [note 6]

Together, the image of an eye -- the broad crescent below it (at midnight), the outstretched wings of Saturn's rings, and the column to Earth -- looked like a giant one-eyed person astride the Earth on the north horizon with arms outstretched. The apparition moved. It changed shape and color. Venus may have moved like a snake around the central eye. And then Mars started to approach the Earth and retreat again, growing larger and smaller. [note 7]

[Image: Neolithic pots with wave designs. Unknown source.]

Having no concept of the size of the Earth, no concept of space, having not seen the stars for the last 6000 years, and having no reference other than plants and animals and the elements of their own stone-age culture and limited localities, the Neolithic humans anthropomorphize the vision in the sky and take the apparition to be a giant person. Taken all together it was not seen as a celestial phenomenon, but as a God, or more properly as an overlord, which was a political concept just entering the agricultural lands of Mesopotamia and Egypt. [note 8]

Most of the southern sky of Earth was shrouded by bands of particulate matter and ionized gases which had formed in the plane of the Earth's equator perhaps from earlier plasma strikes by Saturn, dating back millions of years. This series of bands or rings extended out perhaps 8500 miles (13,700 km) from Earth, and was called the "Absu," the "sweetwater ocean," by the Sumerians (because rain came from the sky). The Earth's rings were individually disturbed by wave patterns, making the south sky look as if it were filled with a gigantic ocean. Like the rings of Jupiter or Saturn the nearest (lowest) bands moved faster than the Earth's rotation. The furthest bands moved slower than the rotation of the Earth. (Both moved to the east.) Visually the effect of these bands moving at differential speeds was quite like looking out on a sea. [note 9]

When Saturn went nova and started to blaze like a sun, humans almost universally called this event "creation," despite the fact that mankind had existed from much earlier times. Why is it that this event was called "creation" by the first humans to write records, when obviously they themselves must have been created much earlier?

Probably because "creation" dealt with the creation of "Heaven" or "the Land," not with the mundane world of Middle Earth which had always existed. "Creation" dealt with the self-creation of the Gods, not mankind. The creation activities of the Gods, starting with the ball plasmoid Gods of the far south had taken thousands of years. The result was spectacular: where once there were shadows and only a dull light, there now stood before humanity a blazing Sun. It happened with the suddenness of a few hours or days. And then things were never the same again. The Gods were seen: they milled around the edges of "the land," and some (like Venus, Mercury, and Mars) were huge in size by comparison.

Mankind never reflected on its own genesis, and held itself as insignificant in the face of the stupendous prodigies seen in the skies -- the lowering of the God Mars to Earth, the auroral displays, unexpected strikes of lightning from an electrically overcharged upper atmosphere, and the play of Saint Elmo's fire among tree tops. With the blazing of Saturn suddenly everything took on a saturated color. The signs and objects in the sky had been there for over 4000 years before creation ensued. There certainly was no thought of a creation of everything out of nothing -- the only concern was to mark the creation of heaven and the Gods.

Humans conceived of their limited Universe as consisting of a bowl-shaped depression (where they lived), with the south sky filled with a sea, and the north sky now occupied by a new land which had risen out of the swirling waters of the north (another sea), and connected to Earth -- Middle Earth -- with a river of plasma. Away from the globe of Saturn and its rings, the northern stars could be seen. They would end up being called the "imperishable stars" by the Egyptians.

The God Visits Earth

Mars descended the polar column a number of times during the "Era of the Gods." Located between Saturn and Earth, Mars started to move down from Saturn, coming closer to Earth, while remaining enclosed in the stream of plasma connecting Saturn to Earth, looking larger and larger in the process, until Mars hovered above the North Pole of Earth as a giant red sphere. In effect, it was seen as the God visiting Earth. The humans were delighted and built temples to receive and house the God. The visits to Earth happened repeatedly, at intervals of about 120 years or more.

Mars, located below the south pole of Saturn, acted as a short circuit across part of the electric discharge between Saturn and Earth. Mars's northern hemisphere is marked with gigantic electrical blisters, but is otherwise devoid of the thousands of scars and craters which pockmark the southern hemisphere. The blisters on the top half are clear signs of repeated massive lightning strikes, and the surrounding swollen ground takes on the same form as more modestly sized lightning strike blisters to non-conductive surfaces on Earth. [note 10]

About the movements of Mars, the Chilam Balam reads:

"Then the heart of the flower came forth to set itself in motion"

The heart of the flower is Mars. When Mars was closer to Saturn than to Earth, it would look like a tiny dot at the center of the flower form. The flower itself is Mercury, which could be a quarter million miles below Saturn. It would look like a petaled flower because of numerous streams of plasma impinging individually on the planet in a circular pattern. Talbott has noted the form from Egyptian and Mesopotamian sources, and has described changes in the flower form. One effect is that the flower shape distorts as Mercury moves away from being centered on Saturn: some petals visually grow shorter, while others grow longer. The shape starts to look more like an opened seashell. This would also happen if either lowered from Saturn -- that is, if one or both of the planets got closer to Earth. Of course there are other possibilities: the Earth also might have moved (relocated) to an off-center position. (By the way, the allegorical "Birth of Venus" by Botticelli, has substituted the Latin Venus for Mercury. There is more confusion in that the event was meant to describe the birth of the Moon. She stands, however, on a half seashell.)

When located in the chain of the conducting stream, Mercury and Mars would increase in charge and be repelled from Saturn toward Earth. After losing its surplus charge to Earth, Mars would move back up again along the plasma stream toward Saturn. Mars's mass is only one-tenth of one percent of the mass of Saturn. In the vocabulary of electric measurements, Mars is the gold leaf in an electroscope.

This movement easily explains the apparent increases and decreases in the size of Mars. In mythology Mars (under various names) frequently transforms into a dwarf or a giant. Ev Cochrane, in Martian Metamorphoses (1997), presents any number of examples from around the world of Mars, or his namesake, changing from a giant to a dwarf, and the reverse. As Mars moved down the plasma stream, it would not only increase tremendously in size, but it would have moved away from its location centered on Saturn. Mars would at first be seen to move to the edge of the disk of Saturn in the direction of the earth's polar axis. Mars would then be seen to increase in size, moving past the edge of Saturn in the direction of the Earth's axis of rotation. This would suggest that, as Mars neared to perhaps within 30 diameters of Earth, it would have been seen at the location of the axis of the sky. (The pole star location varied in time).

But simply the nearness of Mars, centered on the Earth's rotational axis as Mars approached Earth gravitationally, would have led to bending the plasma stream connection from Mars to the Earth's magnetic pole. This could have caused the changes in the rosette pattern at Mercury -- an offset of the circle of streams seeming to encircle Mars, making it look as if Mars was placed in a spray of petals radiating from an edge or looking (as I have noted) like a seashell. Mars would have increased in size, but remained in line with the rotational axis of Earth, because it would be gravitationally attracted to Earth.

The continuation of the plasma stream below Mars would normally be of a limited width below Mars, and would extend to the north magnetic pole in the North Atlantic (probably boring a hole in the water vapor dome which would have welled up at that location).

The whole of the bottom section of the plasma stream from Mars would likely be seen as a leg extending down from Mars. The Maya Chilam Balam calls this the tongue of Bolon Dzacab (Mars). A stream of plasma extended from below Mars is confirmed from the fact that Mars (under various names) was depicted during the Maya Classical Era with a single leg consisting of the body of a snake (but this may be related only to the 8th and 7th century BC).

This leg is generally held to be a thunderbolt by archaeologists. In the Quiche Popol Vuh Mars provides fire for the tribes at a very early time in the narrative. The lower hemisphere of Mars would indeed "be on fire" with the continuous explosions of electric arcs. The "tongue" of Mars (also seen in the central figure of the Aztec Calendar Stone) would be a glow mode plasma which, because it is dispersing and lessening in density as it distances from Mars, would change to an invisible dark mode. [note 11]

Depicting the Past

In Mesopotamia and Egypt, references to these images in the sky abound, but especially verbally in mythology. Egyptian priests felt it their duty not to discard any information, for all of it was considered part of the genealogy of the Gods and, by extension, the genealogy of the kings and pharaohs. The details of the mythological actions and symbols constitute a welter of confusion for us today. Around the world creation would be recalled as "mythical" histories. That these are actual histories, however, and not imaginative narratives, stands out from the fact that, not only are the same tales told around the world, but all the varied "myths" generate neither the suggestions for exemplary behavior or morals, despite Joseph Campbell's contrary claims -- they are simply descriptive. [note 12]

Both the Mesopotamian and Egyptian textual records of these phenomena (spells and later histories) are sparse and late. Two factors might account for this. First, writing, although initially invented before 3000 BC, only slowly developed from initial commercial uses -- invoices and bills of lading -- to the proclamations of kings and dedications of temples. Narrative use took an even longer time to develop. The tales and histories that we so urgently want to hear were not considered fit material for letters and scripts.

Second is the fact that common experiences are seldom recorded at the time they occur. Histories are written after the fact -- when things have changed or when the need exists to justify the present in terms of the past. This often has to wait 300 to 1000 years. [note 13]

In both Egypt and Mesopotamia, images of the polar configuration of the "Era of the Gods" (4077 to 3147 BC) do not show up until the cosmic display has disappeared from view. In Egypt the images show up almost immediately, with a lag of perhaps only a few decades. In Mesopotamia it would take longer. In both locations, the imagery remained stable after it first appeared and changes very little over thousands of years. The stability of the iconography is an important indication of the factual basis underlying the depictions. The images were guarded and authenticated, but created from divergent recollections, descriptive in noting that it was a giant "person" but with only some of the recalled attributes actually translated to a depiction of the God.

In Mesoamerica, there existed a tradition of recording actual history pictorially in bark books. We do not know how much of these histories were recorded contemporaneously with the events, and how much was based on later recollections. Some of the recorded events, from the few curious references we have, may have dated back to 40,000 BC, and certainly to 10,900 BC. Events are described which match what we know from other sources -- primarily archaeological and primarily from the Eastern Mediterranean. The books existed, and were quoted and referenced as late as the 16th century AD. (For which see the chapters "The books of the Chilam Balam," "The Olmec Record," and "The Popol Vuh.")

The attitude which required the recording of events in Mesoamerica, when nothing of the sort was ever accomplished (as far as we know) in the Eastern Mediterranean, might be due to a grammar heavily dependent on action verbs, where whatever was accomplished required a protagonist, an actor who completed the action. As I will show in later chapters, the result is a set of data much more extensive than anywhere else in the world, which can be collated to what we know of events worldwide archaeologically, or which can be inferred from other sources.

[Image: Jupiter on his throne; Hammurabi speaks to God. Image after circa 1700 BC. After printablecolouringpages.co.uk.]

In the era after 3147 BC we are dealing with attempts to graphically depict many differing recollections, all of which were true at one time or another and had become fixed in the imagination, even though the original forms may have changed in appearance over time. I find it reasonable to assume that once an abstract image is given a familiar identification, in terms of "it looks like ...," it would remain the same, even when the original changed considerably.

Unlike the European representations, which continued to hold the image in the sky as a female figure or a house, in Egypt and Mesopotamia the interpretation of Saturn and the plasma stream was of a person, a supreme being -- which in Egypt was assumed to be the pharaoh. It is a head seen in profile, to which the puffy beard is added (as in Mesopotamia also). Intermittent aspects of the plasma stream, some of the discontinuities noted by Peratt, become the magical or fetish symbols of the pharaoh -- the Ankh, the Djed Pillar, and the Was Scepter. In Egypt everything was retained and assigned a purpose in a plan where the pharaoh now is the God that was.

In Mesopotamian depictions the tree to heaven, complete with a globe at the top, is placed on seals next to the very human-looking image of the God, who is seated on a throne. On the other side, facing both the tree and the God is the king, the caretaker of the God's fields. The tree and globe, which originally was the God, is now a separate form shown next to the throne of God.

In Mesopotamia the God is seated. To have the God seated on a throne, rather than standing, probably is a reference to the fact that the celestial image was fixed in space. God did not walk around the heavens. In many seals God holds in his hand a device, the shen, which also shows up in Egypt both as a magical object and in outline as the form used to write the names of pharaohs or deities -- the cartouche.

In Mesopotamia, the seated person is actually the next God to take over rulership of the world, after 3147 BC -- Jupiter. He is clearly identified by his twisted turban headdress and his full-length robe. In one seal there is an adjacent star, surrounded with 9 smaller globes, the readily visible satellites of Jupiter. In some representations Jupiter is seated on a symbol for "temple" which in turn is set on a layer of bricks. The God is thus now assigned to a specific location on Earth, his home and temple.

He is wearing a long garment representing the massive mountain/skirt outpouring of plasma at the south pole. The rays shown at his shoulder are the much smaller plasma plumes extending from the north pole. (The magnetic poles of Jupiter are reversed from what is encountered for other planets. More on this in a following chapter.) The device held by the God, called a "shen" in Egypt, represents a horizontal plasma outpouring from the south pole of Jupiter during the time spent in the asteroid belt.

[Image: Palette of Narmer, circa 3050 BC. This is a dedicatory cosmetic palette found buried beneath the floor of the temple of the Falcon at Heirakonpolis (Nekhen) in Upper Egypt. This was at one time thought to represent the unification of predynastic Egypt, since the pharaoh wears the Red Crown of Lower Egypt on the obverse (left) and the White Crown of Upper Egypt on the reverse. After Francesco Raffaele.]

In Egypt, where the pharaoh is held to be the God, he stands and is seen in profile. The pharaoh also wears a fluffy beard, and later sports the cobra form of Venus (originally part of Saturn) on the headband to his striped "nemes head covering." The nemes may be equivalent to the projecting rays at the shoulder of God in Mesopotamia, or it may represent the mountain of Jupiter which disappeared at the beginning of the second dynasty. The nemes head cover first shows up in the first dynasty.

On the Egyptian dedicatory "Cosmetic Palette of Narmer" (dated to 3050 BC), the king (who is the God) wields a club to smite his enemies, even though short swords had long been in use in Egypt. The club is Venus and its plasma tail. The unfortunate enemy is the already disappeared Uranus, grabbed by his long hair.

King Narmer of the "Narmer Palette" (with the proper name of "Catfish Drill") also wears a long fluffy tail (held to be a bull's tail by Egyptologists) from his belt, reaching to his ankles, which is a depiction of the plasma outflow from Saturn in glow mode, but could also signify that Jupiter shows up in 3147 BC as a bull which wrecks the home of the Gods (which is shown on the Palette, by the way). The "Palette of Narmer" which shows the pharaoh with captured enemies, is already almost unreadable in the density of its symbols. Only the fact that the symbols will stay the same for the next 3000 years has allowed us to read some of them.

The Gifts of the Gods

During the "Era of the Gods" mankind was given many gifts. Writing was universally held to have been taught by the Gods, not only in the Near East but also in China. As I have mentioned, for the Egyptians, the changing shape of the column above the North Polar region became the model for many hieroglyphic signs, with some signs used on pottery predating 3000 BC.

Humans similarly insisted that agricultural practices were shown to them by the Gods. The "canals" seen crossing Paradise became the model for the irrigation canals constructed in Mesopotamia. Even though irrigation canals probably predated the design of the Gods, the concept was attributed to them. The column which rose from the North Atlantic was seen as a river flowing from Paradise, and the Nile, Euphrates, Tigris, Indus, and Sarasvati were understood to be extensions of this river. The bright anode tufts on the Saturnian surface are seen as golden grain waving in the wind. Four thousand years later, the Incas mold gold into stalks of maize to stand before the temples of their Emperor God.

In Mesopotamia, and elsewhere, humans tended the fields and flocks of the Gods believing that they were the slaves of the Gods, as even the late (1700 BC) Babylonian creation myth of the Enuma Elish recounts. Kingships of the next age were understood as stewardships in the service of the Gods.

Worship was performed as directed by the Gods. It included music, dance, and gifts of food to the Gods, and a decor derived from the colorful displays in the sky. Modeled on the battles in the sky seen in 3147 BC, worship also involved human sacrifice almost everywhere. [note 14]

The architecture of mastabas and the temple-enclosure walls of Egypt and Mesopotamia were modeled after the buttressed wall seen erected by the Gods (the cloudbank seen at the northwest horizon). Later pyramids and temples faced north to receive the God (the visits of Mars), but all the early mastaba graves faced the strike point of the plasma arc in the northwest. [note 15]

The early civilizations took the events in the sky not only as mandates for their activities, but also as the analog for all heroic and religious narratives, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Egyptian, Near Eastern, Celtic, and Christian resurrection theologies of later antiquity. The "history" of the lives of the Gods became the model for storytelling which runs from Sumerian epics through Greek mythology, on through the medieval Arthurian cycles and later fairy tales, and into the present. [note 16]

Living in Paradise

In summary, for a thousand years during the "Era of the Gods," from 4077 BC to 3147 BC, it was Paradise on Earth. The climate in the Middle East was mild and wet. With Earth in an orbit below Saturn, the Sun would not have been at the center of the orbit. The northern hemisphere would have faced the Sun year-round, and there would not have been the drastic changes in seasons we experience today. Mankind lived in harmony with the Gods, who supplied the techniques of agricultural cultivation, the plans for cities and temples, and the knowledge of the wheel, writing, and music. And for a thousand years the images in the sky provided a spectacular show.

The interplanetary plasma flow must also have built up an enormous amount of static electric charge in the upper atmosphere, to the point where mountain peaks would have been under continuous lightning strikes. And in addition to the electrostatic charge of the atmosphere, mankind was subjected for a thousand years to a varying magnetic field, a by-product of the rotating Birkeland current. If this arcing was even occasionally of the right amplitude and frequency, this could have had a long-term beneficial effect on the psyches of the humans. I have long suspected some such secondary results from an arc discharge. Research at Harvard's McLean Psychiatric Research Hospital has demonstrated the effects of an oscillating low-level magnetic field. To quote from a patent application, the use of a localized magnetic field is indicated for subjects with symptoms of "anxiety, moodiness, depression, lethargy, sleepiness, learning difficulties, and memory impairments." [note 17]

Imagine then, humans -- content, cheerful, outgoing, energetic, alert, intelligent, and enjoying a mild climate, living with the Gods, quick to learn, inventing everything from the wheel to writing, forming egalitarian groups to build massive irrigation projects in a desert wasteland, engaging in the manufacture of ceramics and metals, and trading these far and wide. It must have been a millennium of optimism which supported each and every effort. This certainly was the "Era of the Gods."

But then, after a thousand years, the same Gods decided that the humans were too loud, and that they would shut off the electricity and drown them all. That happens in 3147 BC.

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Endnotes

Note 1 --

Ancient sources list seven "companions" of Saturn. Nine satellites could be counted if the very small satellites and those on very close orbits are neglected. The nine were all discovered before the twentieth century by telescope. However, two of the nine satellites, Iapetus and Phoebe, are on extremely distant and irregular orbits (3,561,300 km and 12,952,000 km). That leaves some seven satellites which are easily seen, and could be understood as "companions." The God of the Bible is also accompanied by seven archangels.

Moon # Radius (km) Mass (kg) Distance (km) Discoverer Date Titan VI 2,575 1.35e+23 1,221,850 C. Huygens 1655 Rhea V 765 2.49e+21 527,040 G. Cassini 1672 Tethys III 530 7.55e+20 294,660 G. Cassini 1684 Dione IV 560 1.05e+21 377,400 G. Cassini 1684 Enceladus II 250 8.40e+19 238,020 W. Herschel 1789 Mimas I 196 3.80e+19 185,520 W. Herschel 1789 Hyperion 205x130x110 1.77e+19 1,481,000 W. Bond 1848 ....... Iapetus VIII 730 1.88e+21 3,561,300 G. Cassini 1671 Phoebe IX 110 4.00e+18 12,952,000 W. Pickering 1898 "e+n" denotes 10 exp n

As recounted in de Santillana and von Dechend's Hamlet's Mill, according to Norse mythology, as well as Indian and many other sources, seven women operated the mill (Hamlet's Mill) of remote antiquity. Venus, connected yet with a plasma stream to Saturn, might have represented the handle of the mill, with the plasma column as the shaft. The mill stones would be located in the sea where large clouds of grist bellowed up.

The "Prose Edda" (of ca Ad 1200) lists nine women. This could be the count of the seven satellites plus Mercury and Mars. The planets above Saturn were not visible in the last few thousand years before 3147 BC.

The current seven large satellites of Saturn, plus the additional two, and their radiuses and orbits, are as follows:

The seven satellites known as the "Companions of Osiris" guarded Osiris's coffin. Four of them, perhaps the four large satellites (Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Iapetus, but not the giant Titan), remain as the "Sons of Osiris" (originally the "Helpers of the King") in funeral practices. They are shown as seated mummy forms, often seated on a lotus blossom (the rings of Saturn), and they guard the four canopic jars containing the viscera of the body.
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Note 2 --

Many of the Gods, especially the initial Gods, are born as twins, identified as brother and sister, who then marry to generate children, frequently in groups of seven or nine. Some Gods also come into being as deifications of the elements of the celestial display. The Gods Nut and Geb are today identified by catastrophists as the upper and lower rings of Saturn, although they more likely belong in the far south as part of the southern ball plasmoids of 10,900 BC through 8347 BC.

William Mullen, in 1994, suggested that Isis and Nephtys (her helpful sister) were originally assigned to the two outer satellites of Saturn, Iapetus and Phoebe. But in terms of size, Venus and Titan are more likely candidates.

Neith was also identified with Venus by Plato. But Neith is most likely a manifestation of the southern polar plasmoid. She is known in the West Saharan nome as a snake, a weaver, and an archer. The crossed arrows which are one of her symbols probably represent the electron beams. The goddess was known throughout the Sahara in remote antiquity.

Thirty-three telescopic observations were made of what looked like a moon of Venus by fifteen reputable astronomers between AD 1672 and AD 1761. The object looked like a moon because it showed the same phases as Venus, and therefore must have been close to Venus. Movement was noticed and some calculations were made of its period (11 or 12 days), size (one quarter the diameter of Venus), distance from Venus, and orbital inclination and eccentricity (0.195). It has not been seen since, except for once more in 1892, by Edward Barnard of Lick Observatory, who had set out to prove that there was no companion satellite to Venus. Space age exploration has found nothing. From Patrick Moore, Venus (2002).
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Note 3 --

Egyptian river commerce depended on the current to move north, and on prevailing winds to move south. The large oars depicted in images of Egyptian ships are for steering.

David Talbott, in "The Ship of Heaven" Aeon (1988), describes aspects of the ship from Egyptian sources, both from early iconography and from later depictions and descriptions where the original elements are kept alive, but are confused. He also points to other descriptions of the ships of the gods worldwide, excepting only Mesoamerica. I think some of the descriptions would better fit a later model -- where the Gods move along the edge of the Absu of the southern sky rather than being towed around the edge of Saturn.

David Talbott writes:

"According to the model, the apparition began to grow bright as the crescent descended to the left of Saturn; reached its point of greatest splendor when the crescent was directly below Saturn; began to diminish as the crescent rose to the right; and was its weakest when the crescent was directly over Saturn. This daily cycle, I have claimed, is reflected in all ancient symbolism of the Saturnian 'day' and 'night.'"

The direction is correct for Earth revolving to the east and below Saturn. The stars at the pole move in the same direction: down on the left, to the right at the bottom, and up at the right of the pole. Saturn's daily rotation involves the same path.

Egypt, as well as other nations, counted the start of the day from nightfall.
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Note 4 --

These Bronze Age images probably represent Jupiter as the Midnight Sun at a much later date. The image created in this instance would be almost identical to the earlier Egyptian images of a globe resting on a crescent. The location in the skies would be different. See later texts.
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Note 5 --

The home of the Gods moves from an "upper land" to a mountain after 3147 BC. This mountain, seen by the ancients, at first was the plasma outpouring from below Jupiter, which probably only lasted 287 years. It was replaced early by a plasma mountain formed by Mars on close passes above Earth at thirty year intervals which lasted for maybe 300 years after 3070 BC. The mountain of Mars was seen in the north. Jupiter appeared on the ecliptic instead. Much later, from about 2527 to 2438 BC and again from 2349 to 2150 BC, the mountain of Jupiter returned as the plasma expulsion from its north magnetic pole, located at the south geographical pole. More on this in later chapters.
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Note 6 --

The form of a star within a crescent also appears whenever bright planets (Jupiter or Venus) dip behind the obscuring Absu in their travels along the ecliptic. See the chapter "Hezekiah and Babylon" where Babylonian records after 685 BC are discussed.
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Note 7 --

Venus is the uraeus (the rearing cobra form) used with the crown or headdress of the pharaoh. From this image (which is already in use in 3000 BC), and some other considerations, I would suggest that the revolution of Venus might have been synchronous with the rotation of Earth (and Saturn), so that, as seen from Earth, Venus was always seen as placed to the left and "above" Saturn (in his right hand). Even the earliest images of the pharaoh "smiting his enemies" have the figure facing (or moving) to his left.

Talbott has identified the uraeus and the sidelock of hair (seen worldwide on young boys) as a feature of plasma streams impinging on Mars and extending toward Earth from below Mars. These forms were likely composed of ionized Martian dust. At a much later date (the 8th and 7th century BC), the same extension of ionized Martian dust into nearby space probably resulted in descriptions in Mesoamerica of Mars as a bat.
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Note 8 --

The idea of a person (man or god) standing at the north horizon is very strong and occurs in many mythologies. "With the face of a mirror" reads one Mesoamerican description. With distance from the initial event, and for people less inclined to make a big fuss over the images in the sky, this giant man becomes the first man to have been created, as Adam ("man") of the Hebrews, and Manu ("man") of the Hindus. Titus Flavius Josephus, the first century AD Roman Jewish historian, in The Antiquity of the Jews (AD 93), notes, "This [first] man was called Adam, which in the Hebrew tongue signifies one that is red, because he was formed out of red earth, compounded together." That might point to Mars rather than Saturn. However, the life span and death of this celestial Adam point to a birth in 4077 BC (3147 BC - 930 BC), close to my earlier estimate of 4100 BC, as the start of the initial blazing of Saturn.
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Note 9 --

The Absu extended as a set of inclined bands in the southern sky below the equatorial. The equatorial is an imaginary extension of the Earth's equator into the sky, from directly east to directly west, but set at an angle above the south horizon equal to the complement of the latitude on Earth from which it is seen (the latitude subtracted from 90 degrees). Thus at 30 degrees latitude (Mesopotamia and Egypt) the equatorial is placed 60 degrees up from the southern horizon. The celestial ocean, the Absu, stood up somewhat short of 50 degrees (which was estimated in an earlier chapter).
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Note 10 --

It could be suggested that the northern hemisphere was entirely removed due to an even larger plasma contact -- simply machined away. But this is unlikely. The lower altitude of the northern hemisphere is of greater density than the lower hemisphere (thus maintaining a planetary balance). It also suggests the past existence of an ocean which might have been entirely removed with electric arcing. There are clear strand lines of two northern oceans, one contained within the confines of the other.

It might then be suggested that the arcing of the northern ocean was the display in the skies seen by humans in the Upper Paleolithic, say 30,000 years ago, and recorded as the "cup and tail" petroglyphs (as mentioned in a previous chapter). It would mean that Mars would have been close to Saturn. And it also suggests that Mars has been a "dead" planet for a very long time.

[Olympus Mons and seven other blisters. After NASA.]

"The most curious aspect of the map [of Mars] is the striking difference between the planet's low, smooth northern hemisphere and the heavily cratered southern hemisphere, which sits, on average, about three miles (five kilometers) higher than the north." -- GSFC/NASA

Shown below is Olympus Mons. The caldera of Olympus Mons is 40 miles (65 km) in diameter, an area of 1200 square miles -- large enough to contain the cities of Chicago, NY city, and LA -- but shows no lava flow. Olympus Mons has the shape of a pancake, and is three times the height of Mount Everest. This would have been a strike of an absolutely astounding magnitude. As noted by Thornhill, the poles also look like massive plasma strike areas.

[Olympus Mons. After NASA.]

Ralph Juergens in "Of the Moon and Mars, part II (Pensee Journal II, 1974) wrote:

"A study of Mariner 9's overhead shot of Nix Olympica suggests that the summit crater on this vast pile is indeed the result of one pit having been superimposed on another, the process repeated at least five times. But the sequence seems to run from larger to successively smaller pits in at least the first three stages, and in every case the later pits appear to be centered on rims of earlier pits. Such a seeming preference of later craters for high points on the rims of earlier ones is strongly suggestive of electrical activity."

What is of interest here is the fact that there were apparently five reignitions of an arc at this location. Other Mons also show repeated ignitions.

Richard M. Smith, in "The Mars Ocean Project," at http://pages.suddenlink.net/rickmsmith/Mars%20Links/Marsindex.html, writes:

"In 1989, Timothy Parker and colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory began analyzing the topography of Mars's northern lowlands for evidence of shorelines that would indicate the existence of ancient oceans."

"In 2001 Parker and [Stephen] Clifford published a paper that delineated their findings in a map showing the locations of several proposed shorelines. ["The Evolution of the Martian Hydrosphere" Icarus (2001)]"

"Later, in 2003, [Michael] Carr and [James] Head reported their opinion that more compelling evidence for ancient large bodies of water were to be found in the deposits on the northern plains." ["Oceans on Mars" Journal of Geophysical Research (2003)]

[Mars, northern basins. After Carr and Head; Courtesy of Richard Smith.]

Smith set out to investigate the graphical equivalent of two oceans contained within the proposed shorelines on Mars called Arabia and Deuteronilus. The larger Arabia basin includes the smaller (and lower) Deuteronilus. These are shown above for one instance of some variable parameters, such as the oblateness of Mars due to the additional amount of water.
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Note 11 --

That the lower plasma stream would follow the Earth's magnetic field lines is certain. But as Mars approached closer Mars would have centered on the (location of) the pole star, maintaining a path directly aimed at Earth, attracted, as I have pointed out, simply by gravity.

The suggestion from Book 10 of the Chilam Balam is that Mars disappeared behind the plasma (or vapor) dome in the north. It reads that Mars "pierced the back" of the mountain or the "foundation stone." This would be correct from the longitude of Central America if the plasma contact with Earth (at that time or at one time) was in Hudson Bay. But the reading could also suggest that visually Mars was seen adjacent to the cloud bank in the North Atlantic.

The Chilam Balam also notes that (presumably) Mars "warmed well" the base or pedestal -- again, apparently this is the vapor dome in the North Atlantic. This also suggests arcing from the lower hemisphere of Mars.
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Note 12 --

"That conservatism so noticeable in Egyptian art is even more emphasized in matters of religion; elements which had once been admitted into the canon continued side by side with later innovations, even though they were logically superfluous and sometimes irreconcilable."

-- I.E.S. Edwards The Pyramids of Egypt (1972).

The conservatism arises from the conviction of the experience of a thousand years of the "Era of the Gods," and some of the strange and diverse elements in Egyptian religion probably have their genesis in the need to account for the objects in the sky in the previous era from 10,900 BC through 8347 BC. These earlier impressions cannot be neglected, despite the extensive intervening time period. The well-established iconography of 3050 BC is retained for the next 3000 years.
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Note 13 --

Egypt did not produce narratives until very late, apparently during the Middle Kingdom (2050 -- 1492 BC). The first we hear of the Egyptian story of Isis and Osiris is when it is told by a Greek in the first century AD.

Sumer and Akkad produced a literature, with the earliest copies dating from 2300 and 2400 BC, although frequently attributed to much earlier dates. Most date from after 2000 BC. The narratives have little sense of the linear historical perspective that we would require. As in Egypt, only the past mattered, and of the past, only the beginning. However, Sumer kept extensive records of commercial transactions and contracts, from much earlier times.

In China the earliest documents are very late recollections. The Annals of Shu is a collection of disconnected records from 2300 BC to 600 BC, collated after 500 BC, destroyed in 213 BC, and recovered some 50 years later. This was during the Chou dynasty, 1027 to 221 BC, which had in effect removed all iconography of the religions associated with the agricultural tribes they conquered, and the Chin dynasty, which purged China of nearly all books in 213 BC.

Some of the religious notions curbed by the Chou were reintroduced by the humanist and realist philosophers of the Confucianists (Confucius, 551-479 BC) and contemporaneous Taoists (Lao-tse, 604-531 BC), but the texts were edited to serve the imperial aristocracy. This was an era of classical philosophical development, and we see efforts to tame and explain the world in terms of basic forces in nature (such as the Yin / Yang) and material elements, not unlike the efforts of the contemporaneous Greeks to displace the Olympian Gods with rational thought. This had an impact on the Chinese records that were forwarded to us, for they have been cleaned up and emptied of mythical and legendary elements. Only "heaven" is retained, and heaven is not the home of a god or spirit so much as it is a source of authority.
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Note 14 --

Marinus van der Sluijs at [www.mythopedia.info] reports the following:

"For practically every known rite -- and there are thousands of them -- you can find a natural match in mythology, and in every instance the person who performs the ritual corresponds to one of the actors in the myth, be it the main divinity himself or another one. It is, therefore, justifiable to say that the persons who enact the rituals temporarily become the gods -- in their own imagination -- for the duration of the ritual. The myth and the ritual together form a sort of microcosm that exists outside the ordinary world, but takes place in "illo tempore" exclusively."

"An interesting sidenote is that this insight vindicates the age-old traditional explanation of the origin of the rituals. ... The most sacred rites were worldwide believed to have been instituted by the gods themselves. Here the tradition explicitly connects the myth and the ritual. According to the myth the god performed the sacred act for the first time, so that the myth actually describes the ritual. Conversely, by performing the same sacred act the celebrant repeats what the god allegedly did first, so that the deity automatically becomes the legendary founder of the ritual."

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Note 15 --

The earliest Egyptian mastabas and the first pyramids are oriented towards the northwest. Only the first "true" pyramids are aligned north-south. As time goes on temples also are aligned more frequently to the north, but often determined more by the old sacred traditions.

The earlier megalithic constructions in Ireland, England, and France generally have their major axis pointing west by northwest. Only in the Bronze Age do graves and constructions in Europe start to point to the North Pole.
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Note 16 --

You will recognize obvious elements in "Jack and the Bean Stalk" and also in many other fairy tales. It might also be suggested that hopscotch diagrams represent the "stairway to heaven" plasma discontinuity. The game is supposedly British and of Roman times, but this only attests to its antiquity. It is in use worldwide. In the USA the numbered squares are surmounted with a circle marked "heaven."

The Roman poet Ovid turned many of the senseless "myths," which often have no resolution in terms of a moral or a lesson, into a narrative form but, despite his best efforts, a sense of closure often escaped him, and the only lesson learned, for example, is that the caprice of youth will lead to being turned into a Laurel tree by an angry Goddess.
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Note 17 --

Rohan and Renshaw, American Journal of Psychiatry January, 2004. The patent 6,572,528 (applied for April 20, 2001, awarded June 3, 2003), is held by McLean Hospital Corporation, Belmont, MA. The patent speaks of a 1000 Hz (pulse) rate at 5-10 Gauss. Compare this to the Earth's current magnetic field (which does not oscillate) of 0.3-0.6 Gauss.

It would be difficult, however, to imagine a Birkeland current capable of generating a 1000 Hz pulsing field from rotation. The physical dimensions of the arc are too large. The magnetic pulsing would have to be generated by sputtering, or some other by-product of the current.
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