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Road to Saturn
By: Admin Date: September 15, 2024, 1:57 pm
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.3/16/16) 9:33AM)
____Road to Saturn
____The Road To Saturn [Aeon]
HTML https://www.aeonjournal.com/articles/road_to_saturn/road_to_saturn.html
[by Cardona]
_I have read less than a handful of books that can be said to
have influenced my way of thinking. Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds
in Collision has not only been one of them, in the end it
totally changed my life.
_In this work Velikovsky proposed that, in the distant past, but
still within man's memory, the planet Jupiter ejected from
itself a smaller but sizeable body that careened across the
solar system in the form of a giant comet. Coming into close
contact with Earth, but avoiding an actual collision, this
cometary body caused a series of catastrophic events which
mankind remembered and passed on to his descendants in an oral
and written tradition that eventually evolved into the
well-known mythologies of the various nations. Thus the gods and
goddesses of antiquity seem to have really been the deified
planets of the solar system. Their divine actions were merely
reflections of errant orbits in a cosmic drama which man
witnessed and immortalized in his religious rites, his liturgies
and, finally, his sacred texts.
_Worlds in Collision was first published in 1950. At that time,
having been raised in one of Roman Catholicism's most
impregnable strongholds, I was still being taught that the world
had been created in six consecutive days. During our science
courses at Stella Maris College, Gzira, on the island of Malta,
we were informed that the Earth came into existence long after
the Sun. But in the course of our religious upbringing during
the same semester at the same college, we were also expected to
believe that the Earth was created shortly before the Sun. Upon
questioning this inconsistency, we were told that in matters of
science we were to follow the teaching of the scientists, but
that in religion, honoring the words of Genesis, we were to
accept the precepts of God.
__II
_It was on an evening in 1955, while I was browsing through a
store in Valletta, that a book title caught my eye. It was
Velikovsky's Ages in Chaos. I picked it up, leafed through it,
and read a few pages. I did not buy the book. I merely placed it
back on the shelf. I never even noticed the author's name.
_Here, I thought to myself, was another foolish attempt by some
pseudo-scholar who was out to prove, in some pseudo-scientific
way, that the miracles of the Old Testament, especially those of
Exodus, were really misunderstood natural phenomena.
_By this time the radio noises from Jupiter, as predicted by
Velikovsky, had already been detected. Textbooks on astronomy,
however, were still preaching a universe void of any forces
other than gravitation. Entire galaxies, it had already been
discovered, were even then colliding with one another. But mere
planets, it was still being argued, could not so collide.
_I was at that time working on high tension voltage during my
stint at the Mains Section while in training at her Majesty's
Dockyard. My instructor was George Wickman. He was partly deaf
but his wit and wisdom had turned him into something of a legend
throughout the entire section of the E.E.M. His appetite for
knowledge was voracious; his reading voluminous. He not only
possessed a unique philosophical mind, he had an encyclopedic
memory to boot. I took so much to him that, more than being his
apprentice, I considered myself his protege. I told him about
Ages in Chaos -- or what I had thought Ages in Chaos was all
about. As best I can remember, this is what he said to me:
_"No amount of human reasoning can ever hope to make sense of
God's madness. Murder in God's name, as described in the Bible,
is a contradiction in moral precepts; hail stones that burst
into flames, as described in Exodus, is a contradiction in
scientific terms. The man who will make logical sense of God's
miracles will never be born."
__III
_My next meeting with Velikovsky occurred in 1960 in another
book store, this time in Montreal, Canada. The title of another
book had attracted my attention. It was Worlds in Collision. I
leafed through it and the passages I read instantly made me
connect it with what I remembered of Ages in Chaos. I did not
yet know that both books were written by the same man. I did not
remember having heard of Immanuel Velikovsky. But I did remember
George Wickman's words and, maybe because it was a second-hand
copy, I purchased the book. I still have that same worn-out
edition on one of my shelves. I devoured it in one sitting --
although heaven only knows how often I have had occasion to
return to it. There are times when I actually curse the day I
came across that work. Like many others whom I was to come in
contact with later, I was utterly enchanted by Velikovsky's
seductive reasoning. The next day I was out hunting for Ages in
Chaos.
_The man George Wickman had said will never be born had already
lived half his life. True -- Velikovsky might not have been
entirely correct about the specific set of "miracles" he sought
to explain; but, in a more general way, he had shed a bright and
scholarly light on the meaning behind religious beliefs to say
nothing of many of the world's ancient marvels.
_In the meantime, scientific discoveries had already vindicated
several of the crucial points he had raised. More than that, as
in the case of the radio dispatches from Jupiter, some of them
had actually been predicted by him. Evidence was discovered
pointing to past shifts in the direction of the Earth's
astronomical axis and the position of its geographical poles.
The Earth's magnetosphere had been discovered. Spectral analysis
had revealed the presence of hydrocarbons in cometary tails. The
net negative charge of the Sun had been detected.
Electro-magnetic interactions had been found to be sufficiently
strong to affect the Earth's rotation, even if only minutely.
Yet, despite these correct prognoses, the world of science
continued to ignore him. Today's belief is that his advance
claims, as he preferred to call them, were mostly derived
through erroneous deductions and that, in any case, they are
inadequate in proving his theory of nearly-colliding worlds. To
this day, in the halls of science, Velikovsky's name remains
strictly anathema.
_My studies of Velikovskian catastrophism can be said to have
commenced as soon as I turned the last page of Worlds in
Collision. Burying myself in Montreal's libraries, scrounging
around second-hand book stores, I brought myself up to date on
the sordid controversy that has become known as the Velikovsky
Affair. I set out on an extensive inquiry which has led me
through the libraries of three Canadian universities and those
of their cities. Nor has this research yet come to an end. What
commenced as mild curiosity metamorphosed into an ogreish
obsession. I examined every facet of Worlds in Collision,
checked its every detail, and weighed all its possibilities,
plausibilities and probabilities. I investigated every
alternative to Velikovsky's contentions.
_My initial reaction, of course, was to disbelieve the whole
thing. After all, Worlds in Collision is not a faultless work.
Far from it. Even as I read it that first time, I could already
detect certain weaknesses in Velikovsky's knowledge of mythology
on which the major portion of the book is based. One did not
have to be an expert on the subject to spot these flaws. In
fact, right from the start I have been utterly amazed at
Velikovsky's detractors, none of whom, until recently, seem to
have been intelligent enough to finger the sore spots contained
in his work. As I have twice stated before elsewhere in my
accumulating works, the battle against Velikovsky might have
been over in a year had the assault come form knowledgeable
mythologists rather than the pompous astronomers who took part
in the debate during the 1950s. Had I not had an open mind, I
would have laughed Worlds in Collision right out of my life. In
some ways, I might have been better for it. But because there
were aspects of the work with which I was not overly familiar, I
decided to give Velikovsky the benefit of the doubt. To that
end, my research continued and flourished.
__IV
_One of the first things I unearthed was that the idea of cosmic
catastrophism did not originate with Velikovsky. Granted that he
might not have been aware of his precursors when he first
embarked on his work, Velikovsky himself soon realized it and,
despite the accusations of his detractors, did not hide the
fact. Without taking into account what the ancients and present
primitive peoples have had to say about the subject, free
thinkers have been writing on cosmic catastrophism since the
17th century. Among the best known have been William Whiston,
theologian, mathematician, and deputy at Cambridge to Sir Isaac
Newton; Ignatius Donnelly, member of congress, reformer, and
politician extaordinaire: Hans Hoerbiger and Philipp Fauth, the
one a self-styled cosmologist, the other a renowned
selenologist, who collaborated amid an "ill-tempered battle of
books" during the rise of the Nazi regime; and Hans Schindler
Bellamy, a British student of mythology who became Hoerbiger's
disciple in the English-speaking world. There were a few others
and while their hypotheses, long since relegated to the dust
bins of history, varied from one another, they had one thing in
common: They all emphasized a dissatisfaction with the then-
prevailing views concerning the nature of the solar system and
its formation, to say nothing about its later history.
_On the mythological front, it was not long before I had to
accept that the deities of the ancient nations originated as
personifications of cosmic bodies, prime among which were the
very planets of the solar system. It did not take Velikovsky, or
any of his precursors, to convince me of this. The ancients, who
were in the best position to know what they themselves believed
in, so stated in many of their texts. It therefore struck me as
strange that most modern mythologists would go to such great
pains in attempting to explain mythological characters and
themes in anything but cosmic terms. In this respect, whatever
else may be said of him, Velikovsky proved superior. Not that he
was always correct when identifying specific deities with
specific planets but, had he dug deeper in a field which I now
know to have been novel to him, he would have discovered that,
in many instances, the ancients themselves had already supplied
the identities of their gods. Where they did not, the rules of
comparative mythology unerringly lead the way. But that is
something that only crept slowly on me as my research continued
to unfold. After reading Velikovsky I should not have been
surprised at the sheer amount of mythological tales which hinted
at, referred to, and sometimes explicitly described catastrophic
events. These appeared of such magnitude that, were they to be
believed, they could only be explained by the shaking of the
Earth's framework. Predominant among these disasters was the
universal deluge, which the Biblical account associates with
Noah. Moreover, the cosmic thread that ran through the ages was
intertwined with these disasters so that it did not take long to
realize that Velikovsky had been right when he insisted that
catastrophism was literally heaven-caused. What became more and
more obvious was that the celestial order with which ancient man
was so obsessed was entirely different from the one we are
presently acquainted with. Ancient man described the Sun as
rising in the west, setting in the east, stopping in mid-course,
and turning right around. According to ancient texts, the
planets seem to have occupied different positions in the sky
[than now]; they moved in different orbits and, in all cases,
looked entirely different from the way they do now. Prime among
these examples was the planet Venus which, very much as
Velikovsky had claimed, was described as having had the form of
a comet which followed a changing orbit entirely different from
the one it follows at present. As everyone knows, the planets,
like the stars, appear to the naked eye as nothing more than
pin-points of light in the night sky. Yet ancient traditions
seem to leave no doubt that these same planets, often described
and even depicted as spheres and/or discs, were viewed at close
quarters and often in terrifying circumstances. Thus most of
mythology turns out to be a reflection of cosmic disorders which
ancient man seems to have witnessed and survived. In this
generality, if in nothing else, Velikovsky was entirely correct.
__V. Between 1961 and '62, while still in Montreal, I [wrote] a
work of fiction, ... woven around the impending disaster of the
universal deluge and its final culmination. ... [I]n the end it
was never published ... [and] I was eventually glad ... [as] I
had committed two major blunders: I presented Noah as a human
protagonist...; and I described the cosmic events in terms which
... did not reflect the traditional sources correctly. ... It
was while waiting for the outcome of my book that ... back to
the libraries I went in order to ascertain what else our
forebears could divulge about the deluge and, if possible, about
earlier times. What I continued to discover amazed me, for, even
before the deluge, it seems that cosmic catastrophism had been
rampant, and today it is my belief that mankind owes its
emergence as the unique race it has become to such disasters in
the celestial sphere.
- VI. Catastrophism betokens destruction, but our ancient
forebears seem to have been just as obsessed with creation.
Tales of creation are among the most abundant in the world's
repository of mythology. Our ancestors not only described the
creation of the world, they did so as if they had actually
witnessed the occurence. There is no point in countering that
such cosmogonical tales are the result of philosophical
reasoning. It does not seem possible that primitive peoples,
with whom it all started, and who were separated by vast
mountain, desert and ocean stretches, would arrive at similar,
and sometimes identical ideas in their philosophical quest for
primal beginnings. Predominant among such identical ideas, the
recognition of which was to carry me far, was the shedding of a
bright light, exactly as described in Genesis, at the very
commencement of creation. Proponents of the diffusion theory
might accuse me of gullibility, but my contention is that such
ideas would be too unnatural to survive diffusion and the test
of time had there not been some universal cause in the real
world upon which they might have been based. Had primitive
reason required the abolishing of an imagined primal darkness by
the shedding of light, logic would have chosen the Sun as the
source of that sudden illumination. What would have been more
logical than to have the creation of the Sun dissolve this
fictional gloom? And yet in all cases where the light of
creation is spoken of, the Sun was said to have been created
later. This posed an enigma that took me long to resolve. When I
finally did, it was again through Velikovsky.
- VII. It was during my investigation of the myths of creation
that I finally came face to face with Saturn. Actually, I had
been bumping into him from the beginning, but it was not until
now that I saw this planetary deity as something more than a
murky figure lurking behind some of the most engaging
mythological motifs I had yet encountered. From then on every
avenue that I followed brought me back into his shadow. As
intrigued as I had been with the idea of cosmic catastrophism,
this new turn of events piqued my interest even more and, in the
end, there was no escaping the clutches of this most ancient
mythological character. ... In Worlds in Collision, Velikovsky
had offered next to nothing about Saturn. He only hinted,
somewhat teasingly, that, prior to the catastrophe of the
Exodus, the Earth had suffered a more severe series of
disasters, one of them being the deluge, at the hands of the
giant gas planets.
... What I ... was uncovering about Saturn was beginning to
puzzle me to no end. ... I kept coming across these strange
allusions to Saturn as having once been an immobile planet. How
could a planet, at close quarters or otherwise, have not
appeared to move across the sky? Other textual bits and pieces
kept hinting at Saturn having once occupied a position in
Earth's north celestial pole. As a pole star, Saturn's apparent
immobility would be explained but there was nothing in celestial
mechanics that would accommodate any planet in that role. To be
quite frank, I had no idea what to do with this information
other than to disbelieve it. I therefore decided to ignore all
such allusions and put them down to misinterpretation by those
early writers who had striven to record the beliefs of their
more ancient forebears. I should have asked myself: Would all
these misinterpreters have misinterpreted in the same way?
- VIII. I do not remember who it was that first brought Hamlet's
Mill to my attention or exactly when. In this work, published in
1969, Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend analyzed some
of the most obscure motifs in all of mythology and came up with
a cosmic interpretation. This was refreshing, to say the least.
Even so, they hamstrung themselves by disallowing any
conclusions that threatened to trespass [on] uniformitarian
precepts. What these authors proposed was that ancient man
derived his beliefs concerning the end of all things from the
slow displacement of the pole star through the precession of the
equinoxes over the millennia. Cosmic catastrophism was explained
as the dissolution of an order brought about by this slow change
in the celestial sphere. Creation consisted in the establishment
of a new celestial order. In other words, an era ended every
time the reigning pole star was displaced; the "selection" of a
new pole star through precession was the beginning of a new
world age. The universal deluge was perceived by these writers
as having been a purely celestial occurrence which early man
transcribed in earthly terms. So also with other deluges, with
fire from heaven, world-encompassing hurricanes, and days of
darkness. These early disasters, they claimed, were merely
analogies of what actually transpired in the night sky with each
passing pole star. The documentation of this thesis was
presented in a heavy tome of 505 pages, including 39 lengthy
appendices, and generously annotated with rare-source material.
The book is a heady excursion into the intricate labyrinth of
mythology and, if nothing else, serves as a veritable mine of
mythic information. It has, however, long been understood that
most of mythology derives from primitive times, from those eras
preceding the birth of writing. While major mythological themes
have changed their dress more than once, the messages contained
within their core have remained unchanged. It is therefore
difficult to accept that the primitive mind of ages past had
already noted the extremely slow change of the pole, let alone
that the change was understood. De Santillana and von Dechend
were, of course, quite aware of this objection, so it is not
surprising that they attempted to overrule it. The discovery of
the precession of the equinoxes has long been attributed to
Hipparchus, one of the greatest astronomers and mathematicians
of antiquity, who flourished sometime between 146 and 127 B.C.
Yet, as the authors of Hamlet's Mill argued, this does not prove
that the phenomenon had not been observed prior to his time.
But, even given that it was, it remains difficult to accept that
this extremely slow change, the perception of which requires
thousands of years, could have given rise to a world-wide belief
in the cataclysmic end of all things --with flood and fire and
the shaking of the terrestrial globe itself. After all, when one
pole star is displaced by another, no disaster ensues, either on
Earth or in heaven. More important is the fact --and the authors
in question were well aware of this --that certain items of myth
and ancient astronomical lore not only refuse to fit the
precessional scheme of the equinoxes but are notorious in not
fitting anything else that is presently known about our
universe. Prime among such misfits is the ancient notion that
Saturn had once played the role of pole star which they could
not help but run into. Like myself, de Santillana and von
Dechend did not know what to do with this odd piece of
information; and, like myself, they relegated it to the limbo of
unacceptable data. Their verdict on this particular oddity was
that it arose through "figures of speech" that "were an
essential part of the technical idiom of archaic
astrology"--which, let's face it, does nothing to explain the
oddity itself. This non-acceptance made me view mine in a
different light. To begin with, if others had detected this
northernism with which Saturn is associated, the knowledge could
not be as obscure as I had first imagined it to be. Also, it was
easier to imagine Saturn as pole star than it was to accept that
primitive man would have noticed the slow precession of the
equinoxes. It was then that I realized that if we were to
reconstruct a cosmic history based on ancient records, we would
have no option but to accept what the ancients recorded. I also
decided that, for the time being, it did not much matter whether
what the ancients recorded was deemed possible or not. The
testing of such possibilities could come later. Temporarily it
was enough to attempt a reconstruction as dictated by the
message of myth. Moreover, in those cases where the message was
unambiguous, it would have to be accepted at face value. And
such was the message which stated that Saturn had once played
the part of pole star. Much as I wanted to disbelieve it, I had
to accept it. It was either that or disbelieve everything else I
had thus far uncovered.
- IX. In February of 1970 I heard Velikovsky lecture at the
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in which city I had
finally dug my roots. Until then Velikovsky had been very
reticent about the part Saturn had played in the early
catastrophes. Even so, that same year, an article written by
Joseph Goodavage, appearing in the September issue of SAGA,
contained a new clue which, so to say, made me prick up my ears.
Goodavage, who had interviewed Velikovsky, stated that the good
doctor was somewhat guarded when it came to novae or "exploding"
stars. "I prefer not to discuss {the subject}," Velikovsky is
there reported as saying. "It would disclose too much about my
future plans and work." Could Velikovsky have been hinting that
the light of creation, with which I was still grappling, had
been shed by a nova?- I found myself wondering. This could only
have been so if the "exploding" star happened to be one of those
relatively close to Earth. Even so, its blinding radiation would
have been drastically diminished at that distance. The flare,
even if prominent, would have been a far cry from what the later
Hindus were to describe as a light that shone as bright as a
"thousand suns."
- X. ... On February 22 [1972], the CBC aired an hour-long
documentary by Henry Zemel that was devoted to Velikovsky and
his work. In it, Velikovsky touched upon some of the basic ideas
he had aired at Valais, [Switzerland] and his views on Saturn
became then a matter of public knowledge. ... [T]hrough this
documentary ... I first learned about Velikovsky's ideas
concerning the universal deluge. ... Thus Velikovsky spoke of
two filaments of water--"because I cannot [rightly call them
comets," he said --through which the Earth had passed. ... It
was the manner in which these watery filaments were born that I,
like others, found most illuminating. Velikovsky's scenario of
the flood was this: Saturn and Jupiter had once been much closer
to Earth. Saturn was a water planet. More than that like
Jupiter, it had once been a "dark" star. Through a near
collision of the two, which took place somewhere between five
and ten thousand years ago, Saturn erupted in nova-like
brilliance. The water it ejected from its body took the form of
two watery filaments which, seven days after the flare-up, hit
the Earth and caused the deluge. The water, which fell on Earth
in torrential rains, was warm and salty and resulted in more
than doubling the Earth's hydrosphere. Jupiter reacted
differently. It fissioned and expelled from itself the comet
that was later to cause the catastrophe of the Exodus before
turning into the planet we now call Venus. [The theory that
Venus was ejected from Jupiter is no longer part of the Saturn
Theory.] Bizarre as this scenario appeared at the time --and how
tame it now looks when compared to what else was yet to come
--it answered one major riddle which had been plaguing me ever
since I had entered the Saturnian maze. Although Velikovsky
himself does not seem to have been much concerned with the myths
of primal beginnings, I finally had the answer to the blinding
light of creation. I realized then what Saturn had to do with
this most mystifying of events and why it had been misunderstood
down through the ages. With the disclosure of Saturn's flare-up,
which Velikovsky himself, while proposing it, had badly
misapprehended, the myths connected with the creation of the
cosmos began to fit neatly into a larger picture. It was at this
point that I decided to give up fiction and publicly enter the
Velikovsky debate.
- XI. I met Velikovsky in person at the three-day symposium held
at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon, in August of 1972.
... [Afterward,] I immediately embarked on a three-front
attack. The first of these was ... a lengthy work, ... "An
Objective Criticism of Worlds in Collision" ... [which] never
progressed beyond a few introductory chapters. My second attack
consisted of a lengthier work devoted entirely to the part
Saturn had played in cosmic catastrophism. This one held the
promise of evolving into a series of books for, already, my
material on Saturn was reaching "mountainous" proportions. The
title of this work was many times changed but, eventually, I
settled on The God Star. ... My third front was the most
successful. I began a series of articles ... laying the ground
for my Saturnian disclosures. The first of these went to Pensée
... as "Letters to the Editor." A few others were rejected. One
... was ... titled "Cows, Caste, and Chaos." [It was d]ealing
primarily with Hindu myths.... Stephen Talbott, the editor of
Pensée, ... replied with ... criticisms.... I received the
impression that Talbott had Velikovsky's unpublished manuscript
on the Deluge open before him as he penned his various
criticisms to my work. ...
- XII. ... What was disconcerting about all this was that,
obviously, I was not the only Velikovskian scholar working on
the Saturn problem. Worse than that, one reference Talbott had
made concerning the pole as the abode of the mother goddess made
me suspect that he, also, had come across the ancient belief in
Saturn's former placement in the north. Seeing that he was on
Saturn's track, how could he not have? All of this transpired in
1973. With renewed vigor I spent most of the next two years
honing my work on Saturn.... Unfortunately, the more it
progressed, the more it inspired disbelief so that, more than
ever, I decided to keep it under wraps until I could formulate a
working hypothesis to account for the celestial mechanics
involved. ... The need to return to the basic originals [of
myth] necessitated the utilization of Egyptian, Hebrew and other
dictionaries. ... [M]any ancient tracts had been mistranslated
simply because the metaphrastic meaning of certain passages made
absolutely no sense when compared to what was known about the
present cosmos. Moreover, the confusion that ensued from this
was not always due to word-juggling by modern mythologists. As
Wallis Budge stressed in more than one of his voluminous works,
the ancients themselves were often guilty of not having
understood what their ancestors had been alluding to. ...
- XIII. On March 6, 1975, Professor Lewis Greenberg, whom I had
met at Lewis and Clark, phoned me from Pennsylvania and asked me
to join the editorial staff of KRONOS. ...
- XIV. On April 24 of that year, Professor Robert Hewsen invited
me to submit an article for an anthology that was to be
presented to Velikovsky at a dinner held in his honor. This
supplied me with an opportunity to [write] ... "Cows, Caste and
Comets" ... [which] included all of Talbott's objections, as
also all my former rebuttals. ...
- XV. ... From Genesis to Hiroshima joined my ever growing list
of uncompleted works. The only saving grace was that these
unfinished manuscripts served as a repository of material from
which I lifted a series of independent articles. To this day, I
am still mining them. ...
- XVI. In the fall 1975 issue of KRONOS, Greenberg and Sizemore
published a half-page article titled "Saturn and Genesis." In it
they briefly analyzed Maurice Jastrow's 1910 paper, "Sun and
Saturn," in which the Assyro-Babylonian belief in Saturn as a
sun that shone at night is discussed at some length. This was an
idea I had already encountered but, because of Velikovsky's
belief that Saturn had been a "dark" star, I had been assuming
that the luminary had shone, much as it does now, through the
Sun's reflected light. When I unearthed and read Jastrow's
original paper, I became convinced that Saturn, despite the
author's expected disclaimer, must have been a true sun of
night, radiating its own light. With this new datum, my
reconstruction of Saturnian events took on a more coherent
chronological sequence. The scenario, bizarre in many ways, and
faulty in others, evolved into the following: In prehistoric
times, Saturn was the most conspicuous object in the sky. This
body was observed by ancient man as a rotating sphere, which
means that markings of some sort were clearly visible on its
surface. Since tradition insists there was no way of telling
time in those "days," these markings must have been of a
fluctuating nature with no specific form retaining a
recognizable shape that could have been timed with each
rotation. Fluctuating surface markings bespeak an active
atmosphere, perhaps in turmoil, and the impression one receives,
especially in view of what transpired later, is that Saturn was
an unstable gaseous body. Unlike the Sun, the luminary did not
rise or set. It simply hung suspended in the north celestial
pole, which could only mean that it shared the same axis of
rotation with Earth. More than that --and this was a puzzle I
had not yet solved --the texts speak of this planetary deity as
having ruled alone and in darkness. The Sun, it is stated, was
completely absent from the sky. Man remembers this age as a time
of perpetual night. But for Saturn to have been visible, it must
have shed some light. Since the light did not dissolve the gloom
the illumination must have been feeble. For fauna and flora to
have thrived, Saturn must also have shed warmth. Man himself
went completely naked. He knew nothing of chilling winds, cold
rain, of snow, or ice. During this period, the Saturnian orb
does not seem to have been paid much heed. It was simply there,
invoking neither fear nor reverence. But then an event
transpired of such stupendousness that it went down in the
annals of mankind as Day One. Saturn suddenly flared up in
nova-like brilliance, flooding the Earth and its inhabitants
with a blinding light. The act of creation had commenced. When
the light of the flare-up finally ebbed, man was presented with
a ghastly sight. Spewing out from the central orb was a
multi-spiralled black mass that revolved and wound itself around
its parent. Viewed as a monster which the transformed god had to
subdue, this was also the chaos out of which creation
progressed. It seems to have been precisely at this point that
the Sun made its appearance. Day now succeeded night. Time had
come into the world. Saturn itself continued to shine as a sun
in its own right. It was bright enough to keep the stars, except
those of first magnitude, from being seen. It was not however as
bright as the Sun and, during the day, it paled into a
cloud-like ghost. Two filaments detached themselves from
Saturn's spiralling matter and were temporarily "lost" in the
reaches of space. The rest of this watery debris congealed into
a ring around the orb [Saturn]. The god had organized his
cosmos. It was this "world" that man had witnessed the god
create, for in truth the creation did not originally refer to a
terrestrial realm. In time this ring resolved itself into a
series of concentric bands --first into three and later, for the
longest time, into seven. These were the original seven
"heavens" or seven "earths." They were also the seven stages of
creation, long after misunderstood as seven "days." The light
from the unveiled Sun illuminated Saturn's encircling ring as a
gigantic crescent, and later as seven nested ones. The other
half of the band was only dimly lit, forming a crescent in
shadow that was nonetheless visible. Both crescents revolved in
unison, perpetually chasing each other, around the stationary
orb. This, together with the now rising and setting Sun, enabled
man to calculate the passage of time. The visual revolution of
these crescents was naturally due to the rotation of the Earth.
This means that the Saturn-Earth System must have been at right
angles to the Sun-Earth vector (although, as Chris Sherrerd was
to point out to me years later, not necessarily perpendicular to
the plane of the ecliptic). Nine smaller satellites, which were
not formerly apparent, now appeared to revolve around Saturn. In
mythology they became the nine followers, or company, of the
god. A cruciform star-shape also appeared as four bright rays
radiating from the central orb. Rightly or wrongly, I initially
interpreted these as an atmospheric illusion. A singular beam of
light also appeared to taper upward from Earth's northern
horizon, connecting our humble abode to Saturn's glorious realm
in the sky. All mythologies speak of this singular beam, this
polar column or cosmic tree, this bond which tied heaven to
Earth. Despite the apparent impossibility of the system I had
managed to reconstruct, nothing perplexed me more at the time
than this effulgent axis mundi. Together with the puzzle of the
primeval darkness, this so-called world-axis stymied me. What
could it really have been? It is obvious now in retrospect that
I still retained a mental block. Had I taken the ancients at
their word, as I had resolved I would, this problem would have
been solved with the rest. When the answer was finally in my
hands, as in the case of Saturn's flare-up, it was only because
it was given to me by another. Mythology also speaks of a
universal world mountain located at the north. This was a
phenomenon I had understood as a lithic bulge that was raised in
gravitational response to Saturn's close proximity. The axis
mundi would have rested on top of this bulge which would have
accounted for the world-wide belief in the archaic deity resting
on his mountain of glory. Various atmospheric phenomena also
appeared in conjunction with this polar sun in the form of
parhelia [sun dogs] and Parry halo arcs, although these, because
of their very nature, were understandably impermanent. The most
amazing aspect of the Saturnian structure, however, was the
uncanny resemblance it bore to the human form, especially around
the hour of midnight, when the sunlit crescent of its encircling
ring(s) appeared as two uplifted arms. The entire apparition was
like a resplendent giant towering above the world for all
mankind to see. As I have stated elsewhere, no earthly
description can ever hope to do this phenomenon justice. We will
never be able to fully appreciate the impact it must have had on
the primitive psyche. The Sun itself might have been brighter,
but Saturn was much more glorious. For untold generations
Saturn's strange apparition became the very focus of man's
existence. It was the fountainhead of all religious beliefs and,
more than that, the impetus behind the rise of civilization.
Unstable as this system might have been, it managed to sustain
itself for an unspecified but long period of time. Its formation
ushered in an era that mythology remembers as the Golden Age.
This was the Edenic childhood of mankind, a time of prosperity
and peace, during which the earth was said to have given freely
of its bounty. It was an age that man was forever after to
recall with nostalgic longing. But in time it, also, came to an
end. The two filaments that had detached themselves from
Saturn's former spiral had gone into orbit around the Sun. Each
successive passage had brought them back into close proximity of
the Saturnian system. These were seen as monsters which
periodically threatened the god. Eventually at least one of them
collided with the Earth. Composed mainly of water, this filament
dispersed itself across the Earth in a deluge that lasted for
days. Thus the universal flood was a direct result of Saturn's
initial flare-up. Saturn, with its cosmos, became unhinged. It
was now seen to circle around the sky as the Earth, knocked off
its balance by the impact of the collision, began to wobble and
topple. Slowly but surely the Saturnian apparition slid down the
sides of heaven and sank beyond Earth's trembling horizon. Earth
had actually turned head over heels. The god of mankind, dying
his death, had drowned in the deluge. With the overturning of
the Earth, the Sun reversed its path across the sky, rising
where it had formerly set and setting where it had formerly
risen. The quarters of the world had been displaced. But all was
not lost. After a while the Earth righted itself and Saturn was
seen to return to his post in his former glory. The god had
risen from the dead. To others he had been saved by building an
ark. Noah was actually Saturn- and where was my work of fiction
now?- while his ark was the sunlit crescent. Textual evidence of
Noah having sailed through the sky actually exists. Moreover,
the word "ark" derives from a root that, in more than one
language, translates into an ancient name for Saturn. The panic
with which mankind had witnessed the death and disappearance of
its divinity was temporarily allayed. But, ere long it became
apparent that something was amiss with the deity. The central
orb lost its brightness; wrinkles and blotches began to appear
over its surface. The luminary's gaseous envelope was
re-asserting itself. To those who looked on in horror, the risen
deity had been struck with leprosy; to others, he was beginning
to show signs of his advancing age. In the end, whatever force
had held the planets rotating on the same axis dissipated. The
polar column severed itself from the main body, while the ringed
structure was seen to break up. Saturn's cosmos had become
unglued and literally fell apart. The god, to some still dead,
had been dismembered. Earth and Saturn parted company. The giant
planet, growing ever dimmer, was seen to move slowly away. No
longer a sun, it grew smaller as it rose above the Earth until,
eventually, it became the pin-point of light we now see in the
night where it was free to reconstruct a new system of rings. In
the surrounding sea of stars that now became the order of the
night, mankind saw the dissected members of its god. Thus Saturn
was the only deity who was born his own son; who lived on Earth;
who died and descended to the underworld; who rose again from
the dead and finally ascended into heaven. If the tale sounds
familiar, you now know its origin. ...
- XVII. ... I held back my major criticisms of Worlds in
Collision until the San Jose seminar of 1980. ...
- XVIII. The long-awaited copy of Talbott's paper on Saturn
arrived. Titled "The Universal Monarch: An Essay on the Lost
Symbolism of Saturn," it outlined the mythological motifs
associated with Saturn's northern cosmos. The first thing that
struck me on reading it was the close similarity --nay, near
identity --that Talbott's Saturnian configuration had to my own
model. It was immediately obvious that Talbott and I had been
digging in the same well. There were differences, especially in
interpretation, but, in the totality of the scheme, these were
minor. On the other hand, it did not take much to realize that
in no way could Talbott have borrowed any of his ideas from my
correspondence with his brother. Having been as secretive about
my rediscoveries as he himself had been with me, I had never
said anything to Stephen about Saturn's northern placement or
the bizarre structure Saturn had organized around itself. While
Talbott's paper included many items which were not contained in
my work, nothing I had divulged to Stephen was to be found in
David's outline. The paper contained nothing about the events
prior to Saturn's flare-up, nor did it so much as hint at
Saturn's dissolution. The method through which he proferred his
revelations was entirely different from mine, stressing symbol
rather than myth. A chronological sequence was not even
attempted. ... I was elated because if two researchers, working
independently of each other, could come to the same
unconventional conclusions about a most unconventional celestial
arrangement, the derived model could hardly have been the result
of an overworked imagination. In what did Talbott and I differ?
Where my research had unearthed nine satellites revolving around
the Saturnian orb, Talbott vouched for only seven. Among the
varied symbolism associated with the revolving crescents of
light and shadow, Talbott included that of the ever battling
cosmic twins, a mythological motif I had not yet accounted for.
But our main difference concerned the polar column or axis
mundi. While I had visualized the world mountain as an actual
uplift of land, Talbott saw the mountain as an analogy of the
polar column. In other words, to Talbott, mount and axis were
one and the same. Actually, certain texts do speak of mount and
axis as if they were one and the same portent; others, however,
seem to intimate that the two were separate, even if closely
connected, phenomena. Certain mythological themes had also made
me believe that, at some point, the planet Mars had passed
through the fabric of the polar column, temporarily trapping
itself there before passing on. A repeat performance was what
later severed the polar column. In Talbott's scheme, the polar
column is shown to have stretched earthward from Mars, which
planet would have been permanently suspended between Saturn and
the Earth, rotating on the same common axis with them. Visually,
Mars was thus part and parcel of the same configuration. The
polar column would then have been seen as belonging to the
Saturnian complexity without losing its identity with Mars.
While this was not entirely spelled out in Talbott's paper, it
was clarified by him in later works. Of the planets Jupiter and
Venus nothing was mentioned. This was somewhat strange because
my earlier debate with Talbott's brother had eventually led to
the role Venus had played in the Saturnian age, and why it was
that the Venerian deities of later times were often imbued with
Saturnian motifs. I was to live and learn.
- XIX One of my most stimulating correspondents during this
time, and for many years afterwards, was Frederic Jueneman. As I
later found out, he had known about Talbott's work on Saturn
since 1972. In discussing the subject with me, Jueneman told me
that anyone who wanted his ideas could have them for the asking.
Emboldened by this offer, I did not hesitate to pick his mind.
Although I did not always accept whatever he threw at me, he
managed to solve many a problem for me. In March of 1976 I asked
him if he had any ideas on what could have constituted the
fabric of the polar column, or, as I phrased it, the trunk of
the cosmic tree. His reply reached me that same month and, when
I read it, I felt like kicking my own behind. Jueneman supplied
me with more than I had asked for. To him the axis mundi and
world mountain were separate phenomena. Very much much as I had,
he interpreted the latter as a tidal uplift of land. But the
most important thing he disclosed was the mechanics he had
worked out to account for the polar column. Its major
constituents he had ascertained to have been air and water
vapor. According to him, these were "carried upward towards the
nul[l]-gravity at the apex between the two planets" in "a
columnar Rankine vortex." To put it in a nut-shell, the axis
mundi would thus have been a cosmic tornado seen from a
distance. The fact is that various texts which had already
passed through my hands had actually described the axis as a
cyclone, a whirlwind, or churning hurricane. Had I listened to
the collective voice of the ancients, I would have had this
solution much earlier. I vowed never to make that mistake again.
The Rankine vortex, if that is what it really was, answered
another mystery. On the basis of an Assyro-Babylonian text, de
Santillana and von Dechend had inferred the occurrence of a
second deluge caused by Mars. If, now, the polar column
consisted of water vapor, the immense volume of moisture it
would have contained would have been released when Mars swooped
by and severed it. As the column twisted and sank in its death
throes, it would have poured its water on Earth's northern
hemisphere. This would account for those traditions which insist
on a calamitous flood that roared down from the north. Going
further, Jueneman also described the effect of a bolus flow
complete with Coriolis tendency which, at times, would have
split the central pillar into two serpentine spouts. Entwining
about each other, these were later to give rise to the god's
twisted legs and the mythic caduceus popularly associated with
Mercury. ...
- XX. In my endeavor to discover the possible physics behind
Saturn's polar configuration, I approached various members of
the KRONOS staff with a related set of problems. Professor Lynn
Rose, among others, was very receptive. ... While Rose's model
may appear to be more mechanically viable than Jueneman's,
Talbott's, and/or mine, it violates the universal message of
myth which insists in placing the Saturnian sun unequivocally in
the north celestial sphere. ...
- XXI. My investigation of the possible mechanics responsible
for the Saturnian configuration resulted in an ever increasing
circle of correspondents. ... These convinced me that, while my
re-discoveries were arrived at independently, David Talbott had
managed to reconstruct the polar configuration before my own
model had approached completeness. This claim to priority was a
fact I had to acknowledge. It also taught me something about
presumption. I published "The Sun of Night," my first article on
Saturn, in the fall 1977 issue of KRONOS. This paper merely
discussed the ancient belief in Saturn's former sun-like
appearance.
... As it turned out, ... Talbott published his views on the
polar configuration at about the same time I published "The Sun
of Night." ... In his opinion, Jupiter would have been invisible
from Earth since it was hidden directly behind Saturn. My own
research, on the other hand, had disclosed what seemed to be
exactly the opposite. Ancient texts from various quarters
describe Jupiter as the god and/or star of the south. This led
me to believe that Jupiter must have been located in Earth's
south polar sky. This configuration would coincidentally have
lessened the Roche limit problem since the Earth would have been
gravitationally attracted to both giants without succumbing to
either.
- XXII. Hard on the heels of "Saturn's Age," Talbott released a
slightly longer paper titled "Saturn: Universal Monarch and
Dying God." Offered as a special publication through the
Research Communications Network, it consisted of a numbered
thesis that included the outline of events connected with the
polar configuration's dissolution that he had earlier mentioned.
To begin with, Talbott proposed a tentative date for the cosmic
catastrophism associated with Saturn. Whereas Velikovsky had
opted for a period between 5 and 10,000 years ago as the time
slot within which the universal deluge had occurred, Talbott
reduced the time span to "within the past 6- 8,000 years." ...
Talbott described the bending of the axis mundi as the beginning
of the Saturnian destruction. The bent pillar would have lent
the configuration a hunch-backed appearance that was interpreted
by the onlookers as a sign of the god's decrepitude. He said
nothing about the mottled appearance of the central orb in this
respect. According to him it was at this point that the cosmic
pillar commenced on a churning motion while the ringed structure
began to move "in ever widening circles." He gave no indication,
however, as to what might have caused this apparent motion.
Still according to Talbott, the deity was seen to devour the
seven satellites orbiting around it and that these actually
began to disintegrate. Saturn's disappearance was then explained
as the clouding of the central orb by the ensuing debris. The
seven disintegrating satellites, in Talbott's view, continued to
revolve around the clouded center while spewing their own
detritus in a multi-spiralled manner. This spiral eventually
segregated itself into the seven concentric bands of myth. At
some point during this destruction, according to Talbott's
scheme, Jupiter finally appeared from behind Saturn, "stole"
Saturn's encircling band, and then wandered away from the
celestial center. Thus Talbott made it clear that the original
ringed structure had actually surrounded the hidden Jupiter and
that it was only Earth-bound perspective that had made it appear
to encircle Saturn. This tenet was not very well explained. In
more than one place, Talbott had made it appear that the
enclosing band was formed from material ejected by the Saturnian
orb. It is hard to conceive that material ejected by one
celestial body would encircle another x-miles away. Or was this,
according to Talbott, but another celestial illusion in which
the primeval matter had actually been ejected by Jupiter? Was it
Jupiter then that flared up? In contradistinction, my scenario
had Jupiter appearing from beyond Earth's horizon when the
latter flipped over. Saturn and Jupiter were seen to change
places. It was said that Saturn made his acquaintance with the
southern constellations while the star of the south rose to
occupy Saturn's vacated post. In my scheme the seven bands had
actually surrounded the Saturnian orb, rather than merely
appearing to do so, from long before the dissolution. These
disappeared with Saturn when the luminary dropped out of sight.
Jupiter was encircled by its own ringed system, which accounts
for the apparent "theft." This mythological evidence could
actually have been used to predict the later discovery of the
Jovian rings. That no one did made us all miss the chance of a
lifetime. According to Talbott, it was this partial destruction
of the Saturnian configuration that was later remembered as the
universal deluge. Thus, along with de Santillana and von
Dechend, but for different reasons, Talbott saw the deluge as a
strictly, but perhaps not entirely, celestial event. In
Talbott's scheme, the resurrection of the deity is explained as
the clearing of the obscuring debris which again brought the
Saturnian orb into full view. Whether the Jovian planet ever
returned to its position behind Saturn was not made clear. The
second and final destruction, blamed on Mars, was described in
terms closer to my scenario, as was the deity's final withdrawal
to the "great beyond." Of the planet Venus there was not a
single mention in either of Talbott's two papers. The above
mentioned points were not my only disagreements with Talbott's
model, but they were the major ones. I mention all this here not
because I was obviously right and Talbott wrong for that might
not be the case at all, but merely to record our differences as
they existed at the time. In the end it may turn out that he was
closer to being correct than I was. But one thing was obvious:
One of us, or perhaps even both, had confused some of the
earlier events associated with the creation of Saturn's cosmos
with those connected with its destruction. This brought home one
particular lament of the ancients themselves who, among other
things, had often stated that the sequence of events had long
been forgotten. In any case, I have had many an occasion to
change some of my views since then as, naturally enough, so has
Talbott. And this is as it should be for we can best progress by
constantly discarding, changing, and refining unsatisfactory
portions of the theory in an endeavor to get ever closer to the
historical truth. Talbott and I did not correspond any further
--at least not for many years --and we both went our separate
ways. To be continued
---
10:16 AM 4/15/2022
4:21 PM 4/15/2022
The Road to Saturn (Excerpts from an Autobiographical Essay)
[Journals] [Aeon]
_From: Aeon I:3 (1988) - Dwardu Cardona PART II
__I. 1977 saw the publication of George Michanowsky's The Once
and Future Star. In this work Michanowsky maintained that the
rise of civilization and the origin of religious beliefs owe
their impetus to the ____sudden appearance of a bright light in
the sky. But the similarity to the theory of Saturn's flare-up
ends there. Michanowsky's theory was based on the remains of a
supernova, in the form of a pulsar, discovered in 1968 by the
Molonglo Radio Observatory in Australia. The pulsar was detected
in the southern constellation Vela and thus received the popular
designation Vela X. The stellar explosion that gave birth to
this pulsar occurred somewhere between 1300 and 1500 light years
away and must therefore have appeared in Earth's sky for many
months as a prominent light that might even have shone as a
smaller second sun by day. Searching in Sumerian documents for a
possible reference to this ancient stellar outburst, Michanowsky
believed he found it in a cuneiform list of star names. The item
that matches the event reads: "The gigantic star of the god Ea
in the constellation Vela of the god Ea." As seen by the ancient
peoples of Mesopotamia, Vela X would have appeared low on the
horizon with its luminosity reflected "like a shiny ribbon" on
the waters of the Persian Gulf. This sudden celestial
apparition, according to Michanowsky, so awed ancient man that
its psychological impact was responsible for a "quantum jump in
human achievement." The supernova, however, cannot be dated more
precisely than "sometime between 9000 and 4000 B.C." Michanowsky
opted for the lower date on no particular astronomical evidence.
He merely wished to bring it as close to the beginning of
Sumerian civilization as possible. But if by "human achievement"
is meant such things as herding, farming, smelting, and
building, it will have to be admitted that civilization is older
than 4000 B.C. If Michanowsky, on the other hand, was to raise
his date, it would remove the occurrence beyond the reaches of
the Sumerian data. What is curious about Vela X is its Sumerian
connection with the god Ea since Ea was one of the
personifications of the planet Saturn. In fact, as I have
already noted elsewhere, Michanowsky's entire work is littered
with purely Saturnian motifs, though he did not seem to
recognize this. Only once did he acknowledge a connection
between Saturn and Vela X - when he noted that, in one
Greek-written version of the Mesopotamian Deluge myth, the god
Ea is rendered Kronos, which is Greek for Saturn. He then
lamented that "Most of what is known of Cronus is quite
uncharacteristic of Ea [which is not strictly true], with a
single very striking exception. In classical literature and in
subsequent esoteric writings, the name Cronus is identified with
a former Golden Age and its eagerly awaited return." [Emphasis
added.] It was, however, not merely the return of the Golden Age
that was eagerly awaited by the ancients, but also the return of
the god-king that had ruled over it. The Jews are not the only
ones who await the coming of their Messiah. Christians also
await the second coming of Jesus who was said to have been born
under a star. Both these beliefs, as well as others, trace to an
ancient hope. The Saturnian deity, who had once disappeared only
to return and disappear again, had long been expected to affect
another appearance. This hope, maintained through various
religious rituals that were perpetuated down through the ages,
was to culminate in the belief of cyclic repetition that Mircea
Eliade termed the "myth of the eternal return." Michanowsky was
not oblivious to all this. Referring to this mythic theme as the
"Prophecy of the Return," he erroneously believed it owed its
origin to Vela X's awaited reappearance. Had he been aware of
the Saturnian scenario that others had been slowly unfolding, he
might have realized that this ancient hope culminated, albeit
falsely, rather than originated with Vela X. Judging by the
Sumerian record discovered by Michanowsky, the supernova of Vela
X would have to have occurred sometime around 4000 B.C. In that
much I agree. It would, however, have occurred too late to
inaugurate the rise of civilization and its attendant religious
beliefs. What it might have done is help to perpetuate both. As
the appearance of a sudden bright light in the sky, it would
have been enough to remind our ancestors of that more ancient
burst of illumination that had heralded the appearance of their
god and the beginning of the Golden Age. To the inhabitants of
Mesopotamia, its "shiny ribbon" of a reflection on the waters of
the Persian Gulf would even have lent it a slight resemblance to
the original Saturnian configuration, with its column of radiant
light, as it had been described by their more ancient forebears.
Add to that the fact that the new starburst appeared in a
constellation that was already sacred to Ea / Saturn and the
implication of its appearance becomes quite clear. Those who
witnessed it merely mistook it for the long awaited Saturnian
return. Thus it was called "the gigantic star of the god Ea,"
that is "the star of Saturn." A few months later, however, it
faded without ever having ushered in a new Golden Age. In time,
its memory degenerated into a mere designation in an ancient
star list. Not so with the original Saturn whose various names
and motifs continued to permeate all of mythology and religious
beliefs down to the present. Vela X turned out to be one of many
false messiahs with which the world has often been plagued.
__II. Michanowsky's opus prompted me to make haste with an
article on Saturn's flare-up that I had written in April of that
year. I had already revised it once in September but, in order
to accommodate some objective criticisms raised by members of
the KRONOS staff, I revised it once more in December and sent it
to my Editor-in-Chief. While waiting for it to be published, two
British writers beat me to the punch. Writing under the name of
Brendan O'Gheoghan, Bernard Newgrosh had teamed up with Harold
Tresman to produce an exploratory paper on the subject that was
published in the December 1977 issue of the S.I.S. Review. While
I could not concur with each and every item that the paper
touched upon, it was becoming obvious that interest in matters
Saturnian was growing. Coincidentally or not, that same issue of
the S.I.S. Review contained a reply by Ralph E. Juergens to his
critics in which he proposed a conjectural scenario through
which he attempted to account for Saturn's flare-up. According
to Juergens, this primordial nova-like eruption could have
occurred if the Saturnian system had been invaded, dismembered,
and its parts captured by the interloping Solar one. What
Juergens envisioned was this: Not massive enough to have been a
thermonuclear star, Saturn could very well have been an electric
one, induced to shine through galactic electrification. With a
retinue of smaller planets that included the Earth, Saturn could
thus have constituted a system independent from the Solar one.
The Solar System, to which we did not yet belong, would have
consisted of the Sun, Jupiter, and some minor planetary objects.
At some point in time, the Solar System would have invaded the
Saturnian one (or vice versa) resulting in a near-collision of
Jupiter with Saturn. The planets would then have been scattered
to be recaptured in newly acquired orbits around the Sun. In the
process, Saturn would also have become harnessed to the Sun but,
more than that, it would have found itself too highly charged
for its new environment. As Juergens himself phrased it "How
otherwise end such embarrassment than by shedding [its] excess
charge in a mighty explosion?" As conjectural as this scenario
was, it answered more, on a theoretical basis, than Juergens
himself at first assumed. Besides accounting for Saturn's flare
up, it could also be made to account for the primeval darkness
preceding that event if it could be assumed that Saturn had been
a dark electric star prior to its invasion of, or by, the Solar
System. Thus the Earth, already suspended beneath Saturn's south
pole, would have been enveloped by the darkness of outer space
even while its life forms, including man, would have been kept
from freezing to death by the warmth dispensed by Saturn's close
proximity. As the mythological record implies, Saturn would only
have shone as a sun following its flare-up through the period of
the Golden Age. What enticed me about this theory was that I had
already encountered one ancient legend that spoke of a time when
the Sun was still far away, appearing to man no bigger than a
star. Unfortunately, while one or two other myths can be
interpreted in the same light, they are not that specific. What
is worse, I have not been able to trace the one that is specific
to its original source. ____How would the Earth's southern
hemisphere have been warmed enough to sustain life? This
question could be answered by again positing a southern
placement for Jupiter where the Earth would have been suspended
between the two giants as some myths seem to imply. If we are to
believe the ancients, Jupiter also once shone as a sun. Its
position beneath Earth's southern pole would have warmed that
hemisphere facing away from Saturn. Thus Jupiter would have
belonged to the Saturnian, rather than the Solar, system. Out in
the far reaches of space, the skies of Earth should have been
peppered with stars. Why is it then that the mythic report
insists on a starless night prior to Saturn's flare-up? While
the stars would have been rendered invisible by Saturn's
luminosity during the Golden Age, they should have shone through
in their multitude in the preceding era had Saturn truly then
been a dark star. This problem could be circumvented by
appealing to the immense attractive forces that must have
existed between Saturn and the Earth. If, as I still believed at
the time, the giant's attraction could exert the Earth's
lithosophere into the gravitational bulge that had been the
World Mountain, Earth's hydrosphere and atmosphere would also
have responded to Saturn's close proximity. This heaping of the
Earth's atmosphere, not to mention the fine mist that might have
been generated by Saturn's stationary heat source, would have
rendered the air murky enough to effectually shield the
glittering stars from mortal view. But could such a heat haze,
opaque to the point of hiding the stars, have been transparent
enough to reveal Saturn's axial spin? And would warmth, with
only a feeble heavenly light, have really been sufficient to
sustain life?
__III. The adaptation of Juergens' conjectural theory to the
Saturnian scenario obviously merited a deeper study. Even so, I
decided to bounce the idea off my growing circle of colleagues.
In May of 1978 I wrote a lengthy paper under a title borrowed
from Vardis Fisher - "Darkness and the Deep" - and sent it to a
selected few for comment. Needless to say, Juergens was
delighted to discover that his conjecture had not fallen on deaf
ears. More than that, he dove headlong into the problem
concerning the manner in which the Earth's hydrosphere could
have maintained itself in a raised heap around the north polar
region. Could this not have been the watery deep out of which
creation was said to have progressed? Frederic Jueneman did not
agree. In a report he wrote on my paper, dated May 21, 1978, he
dwelt at length upon the subject. He argued strongly in favor of
a cosmic, as opposed to a terrestrial, deep. To him the deep
signified the concentric rings around the boreal body in the
sky. Although, at the time, I was somewhat opposed to this
concept, I might as well confess that, in the end, I was forced
to accept it. Saturn's rings lend themselves most beautifully to
the mythic concept of the cosmic ocean. But, on the other hand,
I did not altogether give up on the notion of a terrestrially
heaped ocean. On the one hand, Jueneman chided me for not
availing myself of the opportunity to disclose the boreal
placement of Saturn; on the other, he cautioned me to make haste
slowly. He also indicated dissatisfaction with Juergens'
interloping Saturnian system. Thus in a letter to me dated May
24, he wrote: "There seems to be any number of interpretations
as to the cause of such diminution of light. You appear to opt
for the miasmal darkness of interstellar space as a dimly
glowing Saturnian system wended its way with its terrestrial
satellite toward a rendezvous with the Sun, a curious tableau
which is not without its charm... However, I believe that there
are at least a couple of causes of darkness, not the least of
which is an immense cloud cover that once enshrouded the Earth,
where the Sun's light was diffused throughout the atmosphere
making day a deep, dull grey and night a somewhat darker
manifestation." Jueneman's proposed dark cloud had its problems.
For one thing, such a cloud would have hidden the Saturnian orb
from view (whereas my postulated heat haze might not have); for
another, the change in brightness between day and night would
have enabled man to calculate the passage of time, concerning
the inability of which the mythic record is quite adamant. The
Sun, therefore, had to have been elsewhere - or so, at least, I
then believed.
__IV. The late Professor David Griffard did not deride the idea
of an interloping Saturnian system as long as it was presented
as a purely speculative theory in need of more corroborative
evidence than Juergens and I had thus far managed to provide. As
for the invisibility of stars, Griffard was of the opinion that
the Earth "could have been enshrouded in some obscuration
emanating from the parent body itself." [Emphasis added.] This
notion, which was entirely different from Jueneman's, and which
did not reach me until November of 1979, was not without merit -
but not as a cloud that enshrouded the Earth within it. What
triggered a favorable reaction in my mind was Griffard's
suggestion that this ____obscuring medium might have emanated
from Saturn. Griffard's suggestion directed me to the accretion
disc, or placental cloud, theory. A dramatic painting of such a
cloud by the noted space artist Chesley Bonestell appeared in
one of the volumes in my library. It depicted the Earth and the
Moon, "reddened by the heat of their own internal fires,"
surrounded by the enormous and dark placental cloud of matter
out of which they had supposedly accreted. Turning the picture
upside down, and disregarding the Moon, gave me an inkling of
what Saturn might have looked like prior to its flare-up had it
been the one surrounded by a placental cloud. The sky would have
been completely obscured by the colossal accretion disc, thus
effectively hiding not only the stars but also the Sun; Saturn's
southern hemisphere would have protruded bodily through its
equatorial cloud, thus rendering itself quite clearly as a fast
rotating globe to Earthly eyes; and its red glow would have been
sufficient to heat the Earth at close proximity without actually
dissolving the gloom. The same placental cloud, rotating as a
giant whirlpool in the sky, would also have been the dark
abysmal deep out of which creation was said to have progressed,
the very chaos out of which Saturn was to organize his heavenly
realm. The flare-up, when it finally occurred, would then have
blown this placental cloud into the far reaches of space to be
replaced, but only temporarily, by the new spiralling matter
that Saturn was seen to spew from its still rotating orb. The
next step was to hunt throughout ancient literature all over
again - and oh, how many more times did I make this trip! -
looking for records that might hint at the one-time existence of
this placental whirlpool. Unfortunately, what I discovered was
not explicit enough and the placental cloud theory was put
temporarily on hold.
__V. In the meantime my article on Saturn's flare up, titled
"Let There Be Light," was published in the Spring 1978 issue of
KRONOS. While I did not expect a pat on the back from Velikovsky
for having furthered his theory, I did not expect resentment
either. As I later learned through the grapevine, his
pronouncement on reading it was: "Cardona has made the flare-up
his own." This disconcerted me because I had given him full
credit for having originated the idea. But, as Stephen Talbott
had written in the closing issue of Pensée, "The continuing
non-publication of major portions of Velikovsky's research ...
has become, after two decades, a serious damper to all
discussion." Those of us who wished to plunge forward on our own
were forever risking a head-on collision with Velikovksy's fear
of being pre-empted, a fear that was by then becoming legendary.
What upset me further was that my next paper, "The Mystery of
the Pleiades," was to deal with another Velikovskian item that
had long been promised. This concerned the identification of the
Biblical Khima and Khesil as the planets Saturn and Mars, an
identification that had been proposed, but left undocumented, in
a footnote in Worlds in Collision. One British writer had
already written about the subject, disagreeing with Velikovsky's
proposed equation. I wanted to straighten the record, showing
that, in this instance, Velikovsky was correct. But, more than
that, remembering Jueneman's gentle increpation, I saw the
subject as an excellent opportunity to finally introduce my
readers to Saturn's polar configuration. The question became one
of how to do so without appearing to be stepping on Velikovsky's
toes. At some point during this dilemma, I hit upon the idea of
provoking Velikovsky into publishing his own material on Khima
and Khesil alongside mine. This would achieve a double result:
It would allay Velikovsky's fear of pre-emption while, at the
same time, his disclosure would indirectly act as an endorsement
of mine. In a way, my ruse worked. Velikovsky did publish his
paper with mine in the Summer 1978 issue of KRONOS. But the plan
also had its dire effects. Velikovsky remained displeased
especially about that portion of my paper which delineated, in
outline, the thirteen points I chose to disclose concerning
Saturn's former northern placement. Through Jan Sammer, then
acting as his secretary, Velikovsky let me know that he was
emphatically against the concept of Saturn's polar configuration
that Talbott and I were independently working on. The grapevine
had it that, either in humor or disdain, Velikovsky started to
refer to Talbott and me as "Portland and Vancouver."
__VI. Having now spelled out the Saturnian scenario to the
KRONOS readers, I waited for the storm of criticism that I was
sure was bound to follow. I was surprised when none came. This
did not elate me since I knew, or thought I knew, exactly what
it meant. The Saturnian scenario was obviously seen as so
far-fetched that serious scholars thought it best to ignore it.
The stratagem then became one of finding some means to convince
my readers of its viability. I therefore returned my attention
to the solution of the celestial mechanics that could account
for the bizarre configuration of planets that constituted the
Saturnian system prior to, and through the period of, the Golden
Age. At the same time I knew from my past toying with this
Augean task that this was a problem I could not hope to solve on
my own. Even before "The Mystery of the Pleiades" had appeared
in print, I had already accosted some authorities outside the
Velikovskian field with the mechanical problems inherent in
Saturn's configuration. Because I suspected that I would be met
with a certain amount of derision, I initially approached these
conventional mechanists by telling them I was embarked on a work
of science fiction. When the truth was out, most of them
informed me that I had been right the first time and the
majority of them would have nothing more to do with me. Five of
them however promised to look into the matter despite their
obvious disbelief, although they all bound me to keep their
names out of the literature, at least until such time as their
endeavors showed any results. Their fear of being ridiculed by
their peers for even considering such an outrageous astronomical
arrangement was spelled out in no uncertain terms. And before
Velikovskians deride such attitudes, allow me to inform them
that I was later to meet with identical restraints even among
some members of their own fold. Since I have never been released
from this pledge, I remain unconditionally bound to safeguard
their identity and reputation to this day. Over the years some
calculations petered in but, without exception, they all
involved some amendment of the model they were meant to
quantify. This was not much help since no problem can be solved
through its own modification. The answer to a question is
unacceptable if the question itself is altered. When I pointed
this out, I was lectured on the scientific method and told I was
being stubborn. In the end, the verdict was that my model was
physically impossible. The argument that Wegener's model of
shifting continents was also once thought to be impossible went
unheeded. My five staunch mechanists deserted me, leaving me
with a pile of impressive calculations that explained everything
except what I had wanted them to explain.
__VII. The result was somewhat different when I approached
Professor Earl Milton with the same request. Being also a
Velikovskian scholar who had already questioned the tenets of
astrophysics, he did not see the problem as insoluble but simply
as one concerning a scheme with which he did not entirely agree.
This was not to be wondered at because, as I was soon to find
out, he, also, had been working on a model of his own. This was
based on a scenario which his colleague, Professor Alfred de
Grazia, was, somewhat like myself, trying to wed to the
Velikovskian one. Later correspondence with de Grazia himself
was to indicate - (and this became more obvious when his
quantavolution series was finally published) - that he had not
investigated Velikovsky's work in any depth and he ended up by
repeating many of the erroneous assertions and mythological
interpretations contained in Worlds in Collision. Worse than
that, de Grazia, as I myself had once done, continued to build
on these errors, extending their natural fall-out to include the
cosmic catastrophes of those eras preceding that of the Exodus.
On top of all that, while de Grazia acknowledged the
universality of the mythological record, he showed a distinct
penchant for using Greek sources as the yard-stick against which
to measure his cosmic scheme. This tendency, which had exhibited
itself on an earlier occasion, had already been criticized by
Peter James but de Grazia, perhaps because he was already too
deeply committed to his views, chose to ignore it. Thus de
Grazia saw it as imperative to accommodate the Greek generation
of gods in which each deity was considered to have been the
offspring of the preceding one. In Worlds in Collision
Velikovsky had made the unfortunate statement that "The
mythologies of all peoples concern themselves with the birth
only of Venus, not with that of Jupiter, Mars, or Saturn" -
which, of course, is simply not so. In fact, with perhaps one
exception, every planetary deity was described as having been
born of another. But because Velikovsky had interpreted the
birth of Athene from the head of Zeus as the expulsion of the
cometary Venus from the planet Jupiter, de Grazia deceived
himself into believing that the actual ejection of one planet
from another has to be implied by all such divine births. And
Milton, unfortunately, followed suit.
__VIII. The generation of planets from one another was not
unheard of in the astronomical world. Back in 1960, well after
Velikovsky, R.A. Lyttleton had also theorized that the
terrestrial planets had been born by disruption from the larger
ones. In following de Grazia's scheme, however, Milton's
conclusion had to be somewhat the reverse of this. If the Greek
generation of deities was to be kept intact, it was the giant
planets that would have to have been born from one another.
Milton introduced me to his model in June of 1978. The same was
outlined in de Grazia's Chaos and Creation in 1981. But it was
not until the 1984 appearance of their combined effort, Solaria
Binaria, that the theory was presented in full. In the barest of
outlines, the theory was this: Solaria binaria refers to the
solar binary system that preceded the current uni-solar one. It
consisted of the Sun, acting as the primary, with super-Uranus,
a smaller glowing sun, as the secondary partner in the system.
An excessive potential on the Sun discharged an electrical
current that sent "its powerful pulses across the axis of the
binary." An induced magnetic field rotated around this enormous
axial current. This field consisted of ionized gases containing
a number of chemical elements. Stacked above each other, a
number of smaller planets, including Earth, rotated inside this
magnetic tube in the atmosphere of which they had originally
evolved. The Earth rotated nearest the Sun but its inhabitants
could not well distinguish super-Uranus or the Sun because of
the "vast cloudy environment and the intervening atmosphere of
the tube." As in other binaries detected throughout our galaxy,
the two giants revolved around a common centre while spinning on
their own axes. The connecting axial tube, carrying the planets
with it, would have rotated with them as a rigid rod around what
was to become the plane of the ecliptic. About 14,000 years ago,
this system began to disintegrate. As the discharge from the Sun
lessened, so did the density of the magnetic gases within the
axial tube. Planetary atmospheres within the tube began to clear
and super-Uranus began to be seen, as the secondary sun it was,
in Earth's north celestial sphere while the Sun became visible
in the south. As super-Uranus slowed down in its rotation, it
began to break apart. A large fragment, which the authors refer
to as Uranus Minor, exploded from it and "arched through" the
binary system. As Uranus Minor passed close to Earth, fragments
were torn from its body and hit the Earth. A goodly portion of
the Earth's crust was sucked high into space and pursued "the
rapidly retreating intruder." The "greater part of it," however,
was "unable to continue the pursuit." It therefore "relapsed
into an orbit" around the Earth. In a matter of "a few years,"
this orbiting material "assumed the globular form of the Moon."
This event was dated to have taken place approximately 11,500
years ago. What was left of super-Uranus then became
super-Saturn. Mankind's Golden Age commenced. The Sun continued
to shine "feebly" in the south while super-Saturn dominated the
northern sky. De Grazia described the Earth's climate during
that period as "even and damp" - "a tropical greenhouse." It was
during this time that language, music, and agriculture developed
under a benign government ruled over by god-kings. As
super-Saturn continued to slow down it, also, underwent
fragmentation. The luminary's downfall was hastened by absorbing
the debris generated by its predecessor. This item was included
to account for the Greek myth in which Kronos was said to have
swallowed his children. As de Grazia phrased it, super-Saturn
"progressively engorged material from space it could ill
digest." About 6,000 years ago, super-Saturn, as per Velikovsky,
fissioned. It flared up in nova-like brilliance and deluged the
Earth with its erupted water. Contrary to Velikovsky, who had
seen Saturn's flare-up as the result of its near-collision with
Jupiter, it was super-Saturn's fissioning that gave birth to the
Jovian planet. (Which is where it became obvious that the
yard-stick of Greek mythology was favored above that of
Velikovsky). "An electric storm of cosmic dimensions ensued as
Jupiter and Saturn separated." The stacked planets, including
Earth, "reacted to the drop in electrical power" and "their
axial rotational speed changed into self-rotational motion." In
the interim, they also changed the tilt of their axes. On Earth,
with its axis now angled almost perpendicular to the plane of
the ecliptic, the seasons came into being. Earth's major cloud
cover was blown away. Snow and ice collected in its polar
regions while the Sun, no longer appearing in the south,
commenced on its daily course across the sky. Jupiter now became
the dominant ruler in the system. Its celestial career, however,
was not a peaceful one. Time and again it was destined to
encounter the various streams of debris left running loose by
its disrupted predecessors. These tribulations were perceived by
ancient man as the wars of Zeus against his various enemies. It
was during this age of "Jovea" that the Egyptian civilization
flowered. Jupiter's retinue included two larger satellites -
planets actually - one of which, Apollo, was annihilated under
somewhat mysterious circumstances. The other was Mercury which,
after it "fled the neighborhood of Jupiter," followed an erratic
career of its own. Occasionally coming close to colliding with
Earth, it was eventually flung closer to the Sun where it
continues to orbit to this day. The rest of de Grazia's scenario
followed Velikovsky's. Cometary Venus erupted from Jupiter,
causing the catastrophes associated with the Exodus; Venus
disrupted Mars, which caused the calamities of the 8th and 7th
centuries before the present era; while, during one of these
last periods, Mars involved itself in a "disastrous love affair"
with the Moon. There is no doubt that, as scenarios go, this was
quite a neat package. Not only was it all-encompassing, it
cleverly conformed to Hesiod's divine succession while keeping
within the bounds of Biblical lore. More than that, de Grazia
had managed to accommodate both of Velikovsky's schemes, that of
Worlds in Collision and its as yet unpublished prequel. There
was also a smattering of ideas from competing models with which
de Grazia was familiar. Portions of Talbott's work found their
allotted place in Chaos and Creation, as so did something of my
own. Best of all, the scenario was upheld by the mechanics that
Professor Milton had tailored for it. A physicist had finally
lent his support.
__IX. This is not the place to criticize de Grazia's scenario in
any detail but a few examples, in order to stress the
unacceptability of his scheme, would be in order. I therefore
turn the reader's attention to the Greek goddess Aphrodite. As
Peter James had earlier pointed out to de Grazia, Velikovsky had
been in error when he identified Aphrodite as the Moon. In the
Greek system that de Grazia so staunchly upheld, Aphrodite is
unquestionably identified as Venus. Unfortunately, de Grazia
would not divorce himself from Velikovsky on this issue.
Followed by Milton, he sought to accommodate Aphrodite's birth
from the severed genitals of Uranus as described in Greek myth.
These genitals, it was said, had fallen into the ocean where
they generated a miraculous foam from which Aphrodite was born.
In the scheme of solaria binaria, this was explained as the
falling of "fire fragments" from Uranus Minor into the West
Central Pacific from which the Earth's oceanic crust exploded
into the sky to form the Moon. In orthodox circles, the
formation of the Moon from the Earth's crust has long competed
with the theory of lunar capture and, recently, the former has
again received a measure of respectability among some
physicists. Those conventional astronomers who hold to this
view, however, place the event in the remote past by millions of
years. Not that I wish to subscribe to such antiquity but, if
the Moon was formed from the Earth during mankind's sojourn, it
is difficult to believe that witnesses of the event could have
survived a calamity which, according to de Grazia, tore away "as
much as half of the Earth's continental material." In March of
1979, Milton countered this objection in one of his informative
missives to me. "Clearly if [the] Moon came from [the] Earth,"
he wrote, "only those inhabitants away from the encounter [could
have] survived, [and obviously] they couldn't see it happen."
(Emphasis added). But if no one saw it happen how, then,
according to de Grazia, did the event find its way into the myth
of Aphrodite's birth? In Milton's model, the stacked planets are
made to orbit around the electrical discharge axis. As seen from
Earth, this motion would have made the northern sun appear to
circle around an invisible centre. Yet one of the
characteristics of the north celestial sun about which ancient
records are adamant is that it stood perfectly immobile in its
boreal placement. Like many of Velikovsky's adherents, de Grazia
accepted too much of him on faith. Thus Velikovsky explained
Saturn's flare-up as the demise of that planetary deity with the
deluge following seven days after the occurrence. ____The texts,
however, leave no doubt that the flare-up constituted the birth,
and not the death, of the Saturnian deity. It does not take much
browsing through ancient literature to realize that the shedding
of the light heralded the creation and that the long and
prosperous era of the Golden Age intervened between it and the
deluge. Velikovsky had unfortunately confused the flare-up with
the much later dismemberment of the god and de Grazia, together
with Milton, fell into the same trap. De Grazia's blind reliance
on Velikovsky particulalry showed through in his treatment of
the planet Mercury. In Ramses II and his Time, Velikovsky
promised that, in a future work, he would show "that what is
known as the catastrophe of the Tower of Babel ... was caused by
a close passage of Mercury." Corroboration of this event would
have been understandable had some independent research been
conducted by way of verifying the existence of evidence in its
favor. De Grazia's glaring lack of data connecting Mercury to
the Tower of Babel indicates that he was content to accept
Velikovsky's statement without an iota of evidence to support
it. The pity is that the evidence exists. ____Ancient texts,
however, more than intimate that the Tower was not a man-made
edifice but, rather, a celestial apparition that was nonetheless
physical. As Frederic Jueneman had much earlier surmised, the
celestial object that was originally called Mercury was itself
the Tower. In fact it was nothing more than the Tower of
Kronos/Saturn or, to be more specific, Saturn's churning axis
mundi. The stacked planetary system of solaria binaria was not
entirely dissimilar to Talbott's which had the planets Jupiter,
Saturn, Mars, and the Earth all rotating on the same axis. But
Milton's electrical discharge axis could not be made to account
for Talbott's model primarily because Talbott's model, as also
mine, would seem to require planets stacked at right angels to
the plane of the ecliptic. This is necessitated by ancient
documents which unequivocally demand the solar illumination of
Saturn's ring(s) as a rotating crescent of light around the
central orb. Even so, following Milton, I did toy with the idea
of electrical charges. Could these be made to reduce the
attractive tensions that would ensue between the stacked planets
of the polar configuration had this been purely a gravitational
system? In June of 1978, Milton assured me that if the Sun and
the planets possessed "electrical charge excesses of the same
sign," they would rotate in their locked positions without
swallowing each other because of the currents flowing between
them. "These currents would eventually equalize the potential on
all of the bodies but need not discharge them." This was all
fine and dandy but, despite the noble efforts of Ralph Juergens,
Eric Crew, C.E.R. Bruce, and others, the electrical nature of
the universe remains itself an unorthodox theory that has
generated as much quibbling among its proponents as the
Saturnian scenario was now raising among its competing
adherents. I do not wish to be as uncharitable as de Grazia
himself was in his Cosmic Heretics but, personally, I would have
been more inclined to lean toward Milton's theory had it not
been tailored to fit the former's particular scenario.
__X. I met Roger Ashton in October of 1979. He had approached
KRONOS with a proposal that Professor Warner Sizemore dumped in
my lap. Ashton wanted to organize a series of debates on the
Velikovsky phenomenon to be broadcast from Vancouver Co-op
Radio, a community station with which he was loosely associated.
His intended project asked for various scholars to tape on their
own a variety of pre-planned talks and debates, which tapes were
then to be sent to him for editing into a short but
comprehensive series of programs. I liked the idea especially
since the final result would later have been made available to
other interested radio stations. Such coverage would have aided
in promoting the aims of the Velikovsky movement to a general
public that was mainly unaware of the controversial impact
Velikovsky had had on the scientific establishment. I therefore
agreed to give Ashton all the help I could. Invitations to
participate, together with rules and instructions, were sent to
promising members of the KRONOS staff as also to the Society for
Interdisciplinary Studies in England. Professor Robert Hewsen
was the first to reply, telling us he would be more than happy
to take part. He did, however, add: "I should warn you that I am
more a partisan of fairness and open mindedness than I am of
Velikovsky. I think that he has been disgracefully treated and I
would like to see his ideas seriously discussed. I am not at all
convinced that they are correct as he sets them forth. I remain
associated with the Center [for Velikovskian and
Interdisciplinary Studies] for the express purpose of keeping it
balanced and preventing it from becoming a cult sanctuary. This
understood, count me in." Hewsen's attitude was heartening
rather than disconcerting for neither Ashton nor myself had any
intention of presenting Velikovsky as an unfailing patriarch.
Unfortunately, many Velikovskian scholars were still bent on
defending Velikovsky's every tenet come hell or high water. With
Hewsen on it, Ashton's proposed programme would therefore have
been assured of at least one voice that would not be rooting for
the blind acceptance of Velikovsky's work as ipse dixit. But
whatever hopes Hewsen's positive response raised were soon
dashed to the ground. Apart from one or two other persons, no
one else ever even bothered to reply. Ashton's project had to be
disappointingly scuttled. By this time Ashton and I had spent
many hours of pleasant conversation, both on the phone and at my
home where, for a while, he became a frequent visitor. I found
my new colleague to be a man of many talents, with interests
ranging from classical Asian music to the study of butterflies.
He was also quite conversant with Hindu mythology but it was his
knowledge of Sanskrit that I found most illuminating. Our
interminable discussions of Velikovskian matters did not take
long to focus on Saturn. I do not know how much he believed of
the Saturnian phenomenon when I first broached the subject to
him. But, without my asking, and mostly to satisfy his own
curiosity, he embarked upon a cursory exploration of Indic lore
in search of Saturn's polar configuration. What he discovered
was enough to hook him. In January of 1980, at his own request,
I prepared for him a 58-point thesis delineating the formation
of Saturn's bizarre cosmos, its history through the period of
the Golden Age, and its final dissolution. Ashton's studies of
matters Saturnian commenced in earnest after that. Ashton's
incursion into Hindu mythology pumped new blood into the
Saturnian phenomenon. His ever broadening analysis combined
Talbott's method with mine in that he embraced both mythic lore
and its attendant symbolism. His knowledge of Sanskrit enabled
him to analyze the shared meaning of words in this amazingly
complex language, through which he was permitted to extract some
of the original and arcane information often embedded in the
language of myth. His in-depth study further clarified the
mythological identities of Hindu planetary deities; uncovered
tentative new events in the configuration's history; and added
tremendously to the evidence in favor of its one-time existence
in man's ancient sky. Unlike many other scholars in the
Velikovskian field, Ashton was not content with the insights of
his own rediscoveries. In an attempt to verify the message of
myth as a factual and historic occurrence, he began to focus on
the detectable effects that the Saturnian sequence of events
should have left indelibly imprinted on the present nature of
things. Not feeling quite comfortable with the accepted scheme,
he urged a re-examination of the palaeontological succession
that is based on ecological communities, traceable evolutionary
change, stratigraphic accumulation, assumed rates of
sedimentation, and the supposedly correct decay rates of
radioactive materials. Granted that many of these conventional
tenets had already been questioned, and in some cases
re-examined, by Velikovskian scholars, Ashton went one better.
He devised a series of experiments, to be conducted in the
laboratory, in the field, and through additional research, by
which the effects of the Saturnian events could be tested. These
tests touched upon a wide range of subjects from such
diversified fields as astrophysics, chemistry (both organic and
otherwise), geology, paleontology, botany, palaeobotany,
entomology, dendrochronology, ecology, and others. In the years
that followed, Ashton bombarded me with a series of "research
memoranda" that started coming in faster than I could digest
their contents. The amount of information, suggestions, and
overall insights that these memoranda contained was, and
remains, invaluable. Hoping for re-direction of energy among
Velikovskian scholars, I relayed many of these compilations to
various members of the KRONOS staff. But when I realized they
were falling on deaf ears, as had Ashton's radio programme
proposal, I decided not to waste my time any further. In later
years, a similar appeal I made to the members of the Canadian
Society for Interdisciplinary Studies in a paper I read at one
of their seminars met with an identical lack of interest.
Unperturbed by this non-reaction, Ashton continued to feed me
the fruits of his endeavors. More than that, he kindly allowed
me the freedom of utilizing his ideas and their results as I saw
fit as long as proper credit was duly given. Not having the
physical, not to mention the financial, means to carry out the
various experiments that Ashton devised, his tests remain, to
date, unconducted but definitely not forgotten.
__XI. One problem that especially intrigued Ashton was that
concerning the primeval darkness prior to Saturn's flare-up.
Although he did not have a ready answer for it, it was not long
before he formulated one. At first sight, his solution had an
intrinsic simplicity but, as both he and I realized, it was not
one that did not raise its own dilemmas. His reasoning was this:
"[In order] for the vast assemblages of diurnal creatures to
have survived [such gloom], some measure of visible light would
have been required ... Above all, ultraviolet and infrared would
have been required for all links in the terrestrial food chain.
This suggests a form of light that was low in the visible
wavelengths, but ascending from red into strong infrared, and
from violet into strong ultraviolet. Since there would have been
no sunlight to scatter pale blue in the sky, the sky would have
appeared a ____deep purple or magenta." None of this, of course,
did much to solve the problem of stellar invisibility. Ashton
did not seem to think much of my accretion disc, so he played
around with a few ideas of his own. In the end he settled on a
shell of gas, or gas bubble, within the hollow of which the
Saturn-Earth system would have abided. This would have served a
double purpose: It would effectively have shielded the stars
from mortal eyes while leaving Saturn clearly visible in the
sky; and it would have reflected back the infrared and
ultraviolet radiation emanating from Saturn. While Ashton would
not commit himself in any detail on ____the origin of this
bubble, I could visualize such a shell as having been formed
from the gases expelled by an even more ancient Saturnian flare,
which gases would then partly have been held back and sustained
by the double attraction of Saturn and Jupiter between which the
Earth would have been suspended. Ashton was not unaware of
Talbott's alternative scheme in which Jupiter was hidden
directly behind Saturn but, at the time, he had to admit that
his own sub-system worked much better with a southern
positioning of Jupiter. The result of all this was that Ashton
sent me back to the sources in search of mythic hints of a
purple sky. As it turned out, I already knew of one, concerning
which I had not previously known what to do with. Before long, I
unearthed another. These two data came from opposite sides of
the world, from two different civilizations that were as unlike
each other as the proverbial day and night. Yet both spoke
fondly of a purple dawn, specifically described in one as the
dark purple dawn of creation. There were other hints, and more
have come to light since then, but none, so far, that are as
explicit as the two mentioned above. Nevertheless, as Ashton
himself admitted, these were enough to warrant further research.
He therefore sent me hunting for other clues. Was there any hint
in the mythic record that humans had once possessed larger eyes
or that they once had a greater ability to see in darkness? Was
there, during these primeval times, any hint of blindness, or
other harm to human eyes, induced through mysterious causes? Do
the myths contain description of colors that differ from those
seen at present? To be sure, some of the information that Ashton
was after was already contained in my shelved paper, "Darkness
and the Deep." Other bits and pieces - for they were never more
than that - were hastily exhumed in a scrambling effort to
produce further evidence. What I managed to dredge up on short
notice was not enough to clinch the case but, together with what
I have since collected, it was, to say the least, quite
interesting. Of larger eyes I could find absolutely no
reference, but of mysterious optical ailments I found this: That
the gods, having decided man to have been too perfect, had
shortened his sight. One text even had it stated that blindness
was the first plague with which god had cursed mankind. If we
are to take such mythological hints seriously, it seems that man
was not only able to see better in darkness during what Ashton
now began to term the age of purple darkness but, contrary to
what one would expect in such a gloomy environment, he could see
farther before the gods altered his vision. This was one of the
points I had previously argued at some length with Professor
Griffard who could only understand the change in this ability as
a change in the human eye. As he correctly reasoned, such a
change could not have been accomplished in such a relatively
short time. Further study of the problem since then has however
convinced me that the change in this ability could have been
occasioned by the changed nature of the light itself. An
increased density of the air would have altered the passage of
light through it, causing its wave front to be refracted, thus
displacing images beyond the horizon to appear above it. This,
of course, is the principle behind that atmospheric optical
illusion known as a mirage. As previously noted, the Earth's
atmosphere might have been gravitationally heaped at the
northern latitudes due to Saturn's close proximity. It could
therefore be argued that such an attraction would have tended to
diffuse the air column, thus lessening rather than increasing
its density. On the other hand, the bottom layers might have
been denser than at present due to their own weight and a cooler
ground temperature - precisely the conditions necessary for the
formation of such a mirage. Following Saturn's flare-up and the
formation of the axis mundi, the atmospheric environment would
have changed. If, as per Jueneman, the axis was a cosmic
cyclone, it would have drawn much of the Earth's atmosphere into
its hungry vortex. This would have lessened the density of the
air while the increased heat from the unveiled Sun, augmented by
the increased heat from Saturn itself, would have evened out the
atmospheric temperature. The mirage-like effect would have come
to a sudden end. Of miraculous colored stones of light, which
could be understood as the fluorescence activated by ultraviolet
light on certain minerals, there were also some hints in the
myths. The most rewarding evidence, however, came from a
particular source which claimed that, during the age of
darkness, the human skin was of different hue. Under ultraviolet
light, it definitely would have been. Moreover, this source
describes the awe with which men looked upon the changed color
of their skin in the light of the unveiled Sun. In fact it is
stated that humans did not easily get accustomed to this change
and that it was for this very ____reason that clothing was
invented. This brings to mind the indigo dye extracted from the
plant Isatis tinctoria, popularly known as woad, with which the
ancient Britons were said to have dyed themselves. Was this
custom originated in an effort to retain the "original" hue of
the human epidermis prior to the Golden Age? And what of the
dyes extracted from the sea snails, murex trunculus and murex
brandaris, of the eastern Mediterranean, a dye that was reserved
for the violet robes of monarches, the well known royal purple?
Were the kings of ancient times not perhaps imitating the hue of
their Saturnian forebear, from whom it was said that royalty
itself descended, the very first king of the world? Was Saturn
himself not described as having once been blue-black in color? -
But perhaps not. Perhaps there are other and better
interpretations behind these usages. One matter concerning which
Ashton was certain was that "if an age of darkness had existed
at all, it could not have [lasted] long in palaeontological
terms." In other words, the age of darkness would have to have
been preceded by an age of visible light. Palaeotological
remains demand it. To my way of thinking, eras prior to the age
of darkness could still have existed in a Saturnian sub-system.
Since, judging by ancient records, Saturn was known to have gone
through three disruptions within man's memory, there is nothing
to discount even earlier outbursts. Saturn seems to have
commenced his sojourn among men as a dimly illuminated sphere.
This seems to indicate a cloudy atmosphere obscuring its surface
that would have partly shielded its infrared and ultraviolet
radiation, perhaps rendering them a little less harmful to those
who lived at the time. Saturn's cloudy atmosphere, akin to that
which enwraps the planet today, would have been blown away,
together with Ashton's shell or my accretion disc, when the
luminary flared up. Saturn also seems to have ended his days
among men as a wrinkled, or leprous, old man, which again
indicates the formation of a new mottled atmosphere around its
once glorious self. The age of darkness could then be seen as
the interim between one subsidence and the next flare. Could not
such recurring outbursts have been responsible for the closing
of the great geological ages with their attendant extinctions
and the mutational changes of life? But let us not get carried
away. Nothing of the above should be allowed to seduce my
readers into believing that the age of purple darkness had once
been a factual reality. Neither Ashton nor I ever mistook our
furtive gropings as the last word on the subject. With Ashton,
it had never been more than a possibility in need of
verification; an interesting exercise in conjectural theory. If
anything, Ashton was neither gullible nor glib. He himself was
the first to raise objections against his own scheme. But, on
the positive side, as was usual with him, he also devised a set
of tests to be carried out in an effort to verify the
possibility. When, in 1980, he finally disclosed his ultraviolet
theory to the public at the San Jose seminar sponsored by
KRONOS, it was these tests that he stressed. Moreover, at the
end of his paper, he strictly admonished that "the only fitting
attitude for dealing with Saturnian problems [should be]
agnostic in every possible sense." When Ashton sent his paper to
KRONOS for publication, I inveigled upon him to hold off for a
while until I could lay the ground for him by publishing my own
"Darkness and the Deep" which I had intended to exhume and
revise. I should never have done so for, due to other pressures,
"Darkness and the Deep" remained on the shelf. When I finally
told Ashton to go ahead on his own, he informed me that he had
abrogated the whole idea. He had by then fallen victim to his
own objections. He was now of the steadfast opinion that the age
of primeval darkness was but a fiction and that all ancient
records that described such a state of affairs must have
originally alluded to a cosmic analogy. For reasons of my own, I
was not convinced.
__XII. Having satisfied himself that a polar configuration was
indeed described in myth, Ashton concentrated on amending and
refining its interpretation. The age of purple darkness was not
the only theory with which he began to show dissatisfaction.
Having been strict in dismissing his own ideas, he was just as
stringent in repealing those of others. Thus, while he had at
first accepted Juergens' interloping Saturnian system, and had
even theorized further about it, he could not, in the end, abide
by it. Not only was the mytho-historical data weak, but so was
the astronomical evidence. For a while he held on to the idea of
a southern placement for Jupiter but, as time went by, he began
to think better of Talbott's model in which Jupiter is placed
directly behind Saturn, even though he had not yet seen the
latter's evidence. At one point he even suggested that both
theories might be correct if combined in a scheme in which a
southern Jupiter was later displaced to move and occupy
Talbott's favored positioning. This idea was not, of itself,
without merit especially since some myths can be made to
accommodate it. Temporarily at least, I decided to hold on to
it. Ashton's belief also changed in relation to the World
Mountain. Having at first accepted this phenomenon as a lithic
bulge, later calculations convinced him that, even had it
existed, it would not have been prominent enough to be visible
as a towering massif from anywhere within the northern
hemisphere. His proposed planetary distances would not permit
it. He therefore "sided" with Talbott in interpreting the World
Mountain of myth simply as an analogy of the more verifiable
polar column. Of this I was still not entirely convinced
especially in view of Desmond King-Hele's 1967 geodesic study.
This seemed to reveal a "fossilized" retention of just such a
bulge, together with its southern isostatic ____rebound-dimple,
in the present shape of the Earth. While King-Hele might be the
last person to subscribe to a former World Mountain, his
findings could not help but intrigue me. One particular idea I
had bounced off Ashton was initially derived from William Warren
who was one of the first moderns to notice and document the
northernism with which mythology abounds. Back in 1885, Warren
interpreted this northernism in an anthropological light. He
theorized that the cradle of civilization was to be found in the
north polar regions. It was here, according to him, that mankind
had discovered its identity; and it was from here that
____mankind had migrated southward in separate bands. As he
pointed out, most prehistoric migrations have been traced in a
southward moving pattern. Few nations were there whose primitive
ancestors were not known to have come from the north. A few
snippets of myth had meanwhile convinced me that a vast
population movement did take place in primeval times. This was,
however, a northward journey embarked upon by those who desired
to move closer to their northern god. Thus, while it is unlikely
that mankind originated in the north, it could have congregated
there during the Golden Age. The southward migrations that
Warren spoke of might therefore still have taken place. If early
races moved northward at Saturn's appearance, they might also
have returned southward when their planetary god shifted his
position. One can almost visualize them picking up en masse and
trekking southward in search of their lost god. Saturn, however,
does not seem to have lasted long in the south if, indeed, the
luminary was ever displaced to that locality, and the nations
might have stopped dead in their tracks when the world next
tipped over. They could there have dug their roots while
awaiting the god's next return. Ashton never accepted any of
this and he looked upon my theorizing with wry humor. I was
therefore flabbergasted when he showed up one day with a 1960
article on this very subject written by no less an authority
than Dr. V. S. Apte. Titled "Support for the Arctic Home
Theory," it proved that Warren's conjecture had at least
survived seventy five years. It did not prove much else - hardly
that mankind originated in the Arctic or that ancient races had
once congregated there. But it did present some evidence of an
ancient civilization that thrived 11,000 years ago on the shores
of the then ice-free Arctic Ocean. Might not archaeological
excavations of similar areas reveal more of the same?
__XIII. Ashton's short foray into Mesoamerican culture brought
him face to face with an old quandary - namely, that
Mesoamerican astronomy is silent when it comes to the planet
Saturn. Comparative mythology can point to various American
deities that can be identified as Saturnian gods but in no
instance did the indigenes themselves ever equate any of them
with the actual planet. This led Ashton to a rather rash
conclusion. If the Americans did not remember the northern body
of myth to have been Saturn, he argued, it could not have been
Saturn. This was a monster that, years later, was to rear its
ugly head again among the members of the Canadian Society for
Interdisciplinary Studies. And the snag is this: In the absence
of a time machine that could transport us to the past,
incontrovertible proof of Saturn's former boreal placement
cannot be had. What must not be overlooked, however, is that
this places a burden on the shoulders of those who oppose the
belief rather than on those who accept it since the opposition
is left with a crucial question: If the northern body of myth
was not Saturn, then why, despite the meso-Americans, did so
many ancient peoples insist that it was? While he continued to
pursue the subject, Ashton grew increasingly cautious of
identifying gods directly with planets, and he began to allude
to the former merely as divine representatives of the latter. In
view of his penchant for succumbing to his own impediments, his
next step was actually predictable. Since the ancient records
were too persuasive even for him to ignore, he never stopped
believing in the former existence of the polar configuration but
he finally convinced himself that an astronomical interpretation
had to be ruled out. The last I heard he was preparing a paper
to illustrate the utter impossibility of such a planetary
arrangement. (1) One may well ask Ashton: If not cosmological in
nature, then what could this abominable apparition have been?
That, however, is for him to answer. 1. *See Ashton's paper in
this issue.
__XIV. Ralph Juergens died suddenly on November 2, 1979.
Immanuel Velikovsky followed him fifteen days later, passing
peacefully away in his favorite chair while talking to his wife.
Both men had striven for a clearer understanding of the cosmos.
Juergens' contributory knowledge has yet to be assessed; that of
Velikovsky yet to be appreciated. My only misgiving at that
point was that I had postponed my major criticisms of
Velikovsky's work for far too long since I would rather have
broken my lance with him while he was still alive. I had
listened to those who had sought to draw in my horns against my
better judgement and I was now in danger of falling prey to the
fear of being labelled a traitor. But in my mind I knew I could
not hold back any longer. "Other Worlds, Other Collisions," the
paper I prepared for the San Jose seminar sponsored by KRONOS,
was meant to raise more than just a few eyebrows. In fact I had
expected to be crucified. I not only took Velikovsky to task for
his erroneous planetary identifications and the chronological
misplacement of mytho-historical events, but also those
supporters of his who had relied blindly on his statements
without having checked the original sources on which Velikovsky
had based them. I advised Velikovskian scholars to clean their
own backyard before pointing the accusing finger at the
opposition and I pleaded for a cognizance of the rising tide of
Biblical fundamentalism which I saw, and still see, as a
colossal detriment to our cause. Due to time constraint, I knew
I would not be able to read the entire paper so I decided on the
middle section of its three parts since this contained what I
believed to be one of my major criticisms: The lack of
mytho-historical evidence concerning the supposed birth of Venus
from Jupiter. On its own, this criticism does not invalidate the
thesis of Worlds in Collision. But behind it lay a force I
myself had long resisted in my effort to incorporate the cosmic
events described by Velikovsky into my own scenario. But, unlike
de Grazia, I finally had to concede that the two schemes could
not easily be wed. Early in my Saturnian studies I had lifted
the veil of that elusive entity known throughout mythology as
the Mother Goddess. It did not take me long to realize that this
mater dei was actually the feminine aspect of the Saturnian
deity. More than anything else, the polar configuration had
resembled a gargantuan figure towering above Earth's northern
horizon with uplifted arms. Our ancient forebears had looked
upon this effulgent phantasm as having been both male and
female. The Saturnian deity had truly appeared androgynous. In
mythology, however, this Mother Goddess displayed an uncanny and
persistent habit of merging with the Venerian deities of all
races. As my early correspondence with Stephen Talbott shows, I
had originally attempted to keep the two goddesses apart mainly
in order to keep Velikovsky's scheme intact. In the end I had to
throw in the sponge. The two goddesses were obviously one. This
raised a dilemma - and how many had I already encountered? If
the goddess was in fact an aspect of the Saturnian deity, how
did she come to be identified in the ancients' minds with the
planet Venus? The logical answer was to assume that only later
was the the goddess imbued with Venerian traits. Talbott had
already detected as much - as he indicated when he had written
these words to me: "The whole issue of the mother goddess seems
to warrant deeper thought than heretofore given it in discussion
of Velikovsky's work. It is well established that numerous
mother goddesses are identified with Venus (as well as the Moon)
in the late period. In origin they certainly were not Venus.
With surprising unanimity their abode is placed at the pole or
the so-called World-navel' ... "What needs to be established is
when the character of this goddess was acquired by Venus and
what characteristics distinguish the Venus goddess from the
earlier mother of the gods and spouse of Heaven." (Emphasis as
given.) In Worlds in Collision Velikovsky had utilized the
events connected with this goddess indiscriminately. Thus, much
of what he stated about Venus rightly involves the feminine
aspect of the Saturnian deity. Moreover, with one exception,
there seems to be no mythic record of the Venerian deity having
been given birth by the Jovian one. That one exception, the
birth of Athene from the head of Zeus, is contested by other
Greek myths - and definitely by a multitude of sources from the
rest of the ancient world. With close to unanimity, the Venerian
goddess is universally spoken of as the daughter (but also the
wife and/or mother) of the Saturnian god. I had been burdened
with Velikovsky long enough. It was time I divorced myself
entirely from his scheme. Whatever my colleagues may think,
there was no point in pleading for a backyard cleaning unless I
was willing to abide by my words.
__XV. In January of 1980, Chris Sherrerd sent a most surprising
paper to KRONOS. The title itself - "The Plausibility of the
Polar Saturn" - was such a positive statement that it made me
devour its contents with childlike eagerness. Here, out of the
blue, was the very first serious attempt at resolving the
physics of the polar configuration without tampering with the
model behind it. It had been dumped, without my asking, right
into my lap for comment or criticism. Sherrerd had no compulsion
about stating that such a planetary system was "not only
plausible but likely." He considered that "a 4-body linear
configuration," consisting of Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, and the
Earth, "twirling in orbit about the Sun, is a feasible and
stable arrangement according to well-known principles of modern
physics." (Emphasis as given.) His two assumptions, that
____both of the larger bodies in the configuration would have to
have had high spin rates and strong magnetic fields, were borne
out by both the mytho-historical record and recent planetary
discoveries. Moreover, since both electrostatic repulsion and
gravitational attraction obey the inverse square law, Sherrerd
argued that accepted physics suffices in determining their
relative motions at close proximity to each other. The strong
magnetic fields of two such bodies in close proximity would,
according to Sherrerd, "interact in such a way as to induce
torques on each other." These torques would tend to align the
magnetic, and hence the spin, axis of each with the other's
magnetic field. As each body revolved about the other, their
spin and magnetic axes would have shifted, causing each to track
the other's magnetic field. This precession, strongest when the
misalignment was at its greatest, would in turn have shifted
"the local magnetic fields each body [was] affected by" in a
tendency to co-align with the magnetic and spin axis of the
other. The addition of Mars and Earth to this 2-body
configuration could result in one of various models. Much
smaller in size and mass, the motions of these bodies would be
entirely dominated by the gravitational and electromagnetic
fields of the two giants. Depending on the genesis behind the
system, they could end up revolving either around Jupiter or
Saturn or, perhaps, around the Jupiter-Saturn system as a whole.
The insertion of these two terrestrial planets between Saturn
and Jupiter would, howeverr, also make for a stable system. In
the latter case, the two smaller bodies would have reacted
similarly to the larger, more massive ones as long as they,
also, possessed high spin rates and strong magnetic fields. They
would have gyroscopically precessed until their spin and
magnetic axes co-aligned with those of the two larger bodies.
Sherrerd's insertion of the two terrestrial planets between
Saturn and Jupiter surprised me because, as yet, nothing had
been published about Jupiter's ancient fame as the Star of the
South. In April of that year I asked him what had prompted him
to consider such a southern placement for Jupiter. His reply of
May 15 outlined the logic behind his consideration. His twirling
configuration first required "that the two main bodies be of
commensurate size and electromagnetic properties." In view of
the mythic record, Jupiter was chosen as Saturn's most likely
companion. But since, according to the same record, Jupiter was
not visible in Earth's sky during the Golden Age, the planet
would have had to have been hidden somewhere. Talbott's
postulate of a Jupiter hidden behind Saturn was given
consideration - and never quite ruled out - but Sherrerd felt
that "with Mars and Earth between the two big boys',"the
configuration would have been lent greater stability. Despite
the fact that Sherrerd's theory conformed precisely to what I
had discovered in the mythic record, I was not so naive as to
hook on to it. It was the most promising explanation to date, to
say the least. But I was not in a position to pass judgement on
it primarily because the intricacies of the theory were somewhat
beyond my competence. Also, as Thomas McCreery was later to
lament, Sherrerd's paper suffered from a simplified compactness.
Thus, a fuller explanation of the gyroscopic precessions at
work, as also some sample calculations of the torques involved,
would have greatly clarified the processes that Sherrerd
understood much better than most of his readers would. McCreery
also questioned some of the planetary electromagnetic properties
that Sherrerd accepted but which had not yet been quantitatively
demonstrated. To be fair to both men, however, McCreery did
confess that some of his criticisms might have been due to his
misunderstanding of some of Sherrerd's postulates. My immediate
plan was to try and get Sherrerd together with McCreery, and
also with Ashton, Jueneman, and Milton, so that they could work
together as a team and iron out all visible creases in the
model. I should have known better by then. Most of these
would-be participants still had their own models to push and
they invariably started amending Sherrerd's theory to fit their
own. As for Sherrerd himself, he was not at that time
predisposed to enter a lengthy debate via long distance phone
and mail. As he wrote to me in his reply of May 15: "I think you
would like to understand my motive [which is] not to prove' the
Polar Saturnian scenario ... but rather to establish credibility
before things get out of hand." (Emphasis as given.) He had also
said as much to Jueneman who had shown some indication of
rewriting Sherrerd's paper but, in the end, this loose
collaboration fizzled to a halt. In retrospect I realize I
should have pushed for publication of Sherrerd's paper in
KRONOS. If nothing else, it might have given someone, who had no
model of his own to boost, a chance to properly evaluate it. Who
knows how further advanced in this particular study we might
have been by now?
__XVI. 1980 finally saw the publication of David Talbott's book.
To those who were already familiar with his earlier works, The
Saturn Myth contained no surprises. It nevertheless was, and
remains, a work of high standards. Talbott had not only done his
home-work, he set an excellent example among Velikovskian
scholars concerning the thoroughness with which research should
be conducted. His opus consisted of an in-depth analysis of the
Saturnian configuration. In that much he offered nothing new to
what he had already stated in his previous short papers. In fact
he said less. The formation of Saturn's cosmos was only
superficially delineated. There was no mention of Jupiter's role
in the Saturnian events and even Mars was excised from the
general scheme in an effort to simplify this first major
sampling of his theory. It was understood by those who knew
that these topics would be introduced in his promised sequel.
The thesis, however, was now lent the support of weighty
evidence and this, to say the least, was impressive. Talbott's
arguments were now solidified, his case wrought taut around a
near-water-tight array of well-chosen mythological sources.
Despite some unfortunate mislocation among his references, the
work remains close to being scholarly faultless - and that is
saying a lot. Despite all this, and for various reasons, the
book failed to gain popularity. Talbott's publishers did not
promote it as well as they should have. Book reviewers virtually
ignored it and it received very little notice in the "outside"
world. This was probably due to the work's lack of
sensationalism. Worlds in Collision it was not. While, other
than in a pioneering way, it was, in my opinion, superior to
Velikovsky's opus, it lacked the latter's epic sweep. For that
reason it was not about to grab the public's imagination. This
short-coming should have been compensated for on the scholarly
front but there, also, the response was meagre. Velikovskian
scholars, if no one else, should have embraced it but, sad to
say, few of them were prepared to acknowledge, let alone laud,
it. Most of those with whom I discussed it were not impressed.
This chagrined me for two reasons: In the first place I could
not understand how such an important work could fail to interest
those who had the most to gain by it; in the second, it boded
ill for my own slowly progressing study of the same subject.
Velikovskians might have looked upon The Saturn Myth as an
anti-Velikovskian blow which, in a way, it is. But, at the same
time, those who viewed it in this light missed the fact that
Talbott's work was the logical fall-out of Velikovsky's own
endeavors. It was of course already widely known by then that
Velikovsky himself had refused to stand behind Talbott's scheme
and my near-identical one. And this might have had a lot to do
with the unfortunate repudiation of Talbott's work. It therefore
became imperative to make Velikovskian scholars aware that their
mentor's outpouring was not as solid as some die-hards were
still maintaining.
__XVII. The KRONOS-sponsored San Jose seminar scheduled for
August was drawing near. I therefore decided to include a few
references to Talbott's work in the paper I meant to read there
in the hope that others would pick up the thread and follow
suit. My only fear was that this might make me appear to have
abandoned Velikovsky's camp in favor of Talbott's. The truth was
that I did not want to belong to either. After all I, also, had
my own horn to blow. I was not crucified at San Jose. "Other
Worlds, Other Collisions" was received quite well and the
questions that followed its reading indicated that my listeners
were willing to consider my alternatives. The criticisms, for
there were bound to be some, came later - mostly from those who
had not been present at the seminar. But even these were mainly
concerned with my lack of evidential material. Not that I had
failed to annotate my paper with the proper references but, as I
was later to argue privately with my critics, it would have been
impossible to present all the evidence in one short article on
the subject. I had told Professor Lewis Greenberg that he would
not like what I had to say at the seminar. As he was to say
later to another: "Cardona was right, I did not." And yet it was
he who encouraged me to present my case in more depth and with
all the evidential material at my disposal. "Child of Saturn,"
my lengthy serialization, owes its evolution to Greenberg's
encouragement as so do many of its spin-offs. They were all
published by Greenberg in KRONOS without the least obstacle
being placed in my path. These criticisms of Worlds in Collision
have been received by other Velikovskian scholars with mixed
feelings but my intentions, at least, have been accepted in good
faith. Not so with my continuing defence of those Velikovskian
particulars which I still deem to be valid. Downright detractors
remained vehement. My backyard cleaning seems to have had
absolutely no effect on them.
__XVIII. Bob Forrest had been virtually unheard of among
Velikovskian scholars. He was not so to remain. Premonishment of
what he was up to cast him as the proverbial stormy petrel but
my own warnings to undermine his coming razzia through a
concentrated admission of Velikovsky's shortcomings went
completely unheeded. Part One of Forrest's privately published
series, titled Velikovsky's Sources, was out in July of 1981 but
it did not come to my attention until a little while later. By
then there was not much of Velikovsky's scheme, as outlined in
Worlds in Collision, that I still adhered to. In fact when, in
September that year, Mrs. Velikovsky asked me at the Princeton
seminar how much of her husband's work I aimed to leave
untouched, my reply was: "Very little." I could still
acknowledge Velikovsky's pioneering thrust in matters of cosmic
catastrophism and, of course, I continue to applaud his
scholarly insights on the subject to this day. But the scenario
of Worlds in Collision was no longer, in my opinion, as solidly
founded as it had originally appeared. Apart from the
unverifiable birth of Venus from the planet Jupiter, I had also
failed to discover any concrete connection between cometary
Venus and the Exodus. Granted that the tale of Exodus hinted at
a natural catastrophe of sorts, it had by now become obvious
that Velikovsky had mistaken many earlier occurrences as
parallels of this event. Granted also that a celestial body had
been associated by the ancients with the Exodus - and Velikovsky
had amazingly missed the most telling of this evidence - I could
find nothing by which to identify this body as Venus. Moreover,
whatever the disaster of the Exodus, it was much smaller in
scale than Velikovsky had assumed. So, also, with the proposed
Martian catastrophes of the 8th and 7th centuries B.C. ____I
accept that some cosmic disturbances occurred during those times
but nothing in ancient literature connects those commotions -
again much milder than Velikovsky had envisioned them - with the
planet Mars. In this, the works of Donald Patten et al. are just
as much in error as Velikovsky's. Bob Forrest could have been
one of my greatest allies. Instead we ended up crossing swords.
Virtually of a mind concerning Velikovksy's misuse of the
sources, we differed on the overall validity of his work. In his
monumental series, which stretched into seven mini-volumes over
a period of three years, Forrest did Velikovskian scholars a
service by exhuming their mentor's original sources and
presenting them in their proper context. Unfortunately, since he
chose to dissect Worlds in Collision source by source rather
than subject by subject, he managed to scatter Velikovsky's
evidence on any one topic across some five hundred odd pages,
thus robbing the work of its concentrated strength. His
unfamiliarity with mythology showed transparently through as so
did his misunderstanding of Velikovsky's method. Worst of all,
casting Velikovsky in the mold of Erich von Däniken, he treated
him rather unkindly while peppering his remarks with sarcastic
barbs. This shabby treatment was not only uncalled for, it
proved detrimental to the serious consideration his work might
have received by Velikovskian scholars. Granted that Forrest
proved shrewd enough to finger many of the sore spots contained
in Worlds in Collision, he also managed to commit a few blunders
of his own. In his relentless discarding of the evidence, he
ended up throwing the baby out with the bathwater. As I have
stated elsewhere, Velikovsky's Sources could have been a great
work had it not suffered too much from lack of objectivity. No
matter what good may be said of it, it is not the work to refer
to if a truly unbiased evaluation of Velikovsky's work is what
is being sought.
__XIX. I finally met David Talbott in September of 1983 at the
Haliburton seminar sponsored by the Canadian Society for
Interdisciplinary Studies. He came to the seminar with Ev
Cochrane who, in 1979, had been bold enough to include the
Saturnian phenomenon, as gleaned from the pages of KRONOS, in
his Master's thesis on evolution and racial memory. When,
sometime later, The Saturn Myth was published and brought to his
attention, he contacted Talbott and the two of them ended up
collaborating on a new series of Saturnian events. The two of
them had thus attended the Haliburton seminar with the intention
of introducing their first paper on the subject. Cochrane and I
were not exactly strangers. We had met and discussed Saturnian
matters at previous seminars. But this was my first eye-to-eye
with Talbott. I had not known what to prepare for but I was in
for a pleasant surprise. Talbott and I got on well together. He
turned out to be quite a fun guy with a somewhat mischievous
sense of humor. Together with Cochrane, we were almost
immediately, and somewhat derisively, christened "the
Saturnists." The subject of their paper took me unawares. It
concerned the role played by the planet Venus during Saturnian
times. On this particular topic, their thesis had carried them
well beyond mine. Even so, this further unfolding of the
Saturnian scenario did coincide in one very important aspect
with what I, only recently, had resolved. In some of the
earliest literature from Sumer, the ____planet Venus is referred
to as the "edge star" or "star of the periphery." Together with
other mythological motifs, this had led me to conclude that
Venus had once orbited Saturn on the periphery, or edge, of its
encircling band(s). Its cometary tail - which, unlike my
colleagues, I did not conceive of having been curled - would
have thus appeared as a short protrusion, lending the
human-shaped likeness of the Saturnian configuration a tufted
countenance. This, in my opinion, could account for the
descriptions of a bearded Mother Goddess as encountered in the
mythology of the races. Having reserved this revelation for the
coming conclusion of my "Child of Saturn" serialization, I did
not expand this motif any further. Using an entirely different,
and more comprehensive, set of mythological data, Talbott and
Cochrane, I now discovered, had inadvertently anticipated me -
or had I anticipated them? (I did not reach this conclusion
until about 1980.). More than that, they went one better. It
was, according to them, from the cometary tail of Venus, as it
orbited Saturn, that the initial Saturnian ring had been
primordially fashioned. Having learned from my experience with
Ashton's paper on purple darkness, I was not about to ask
Talbott and Cochrane to wait for the conclusion of my
serialization before publishing their paper. Heaven only knew
how many years down the line this was to be. It would not, in
any case, have been fair. Besides, my dealings with Velikovsky
had convinced me of the childishness behind the fear of
pre-emption. I therefore asked Talbott if he, or Cochrane, would
have any objections to publishing their paper in KRONOS. Talbott
assured me he had none but he correctly pointed out that, having
been presented at a CSIS seminar, the paper rightly belonged to
that Society. This was no obstacle because Professor Irving
Wolfe, the Society's Chairman, had already given me a carte
blanche option to relay any of their papers to KRONOS as long as
I obtained the individual author's permission. Thus, having
cleared the matter with my Editor-in-Chief, Talbott and Cochrane
joined the ever growing list of KRONOS contributors. Talbott's
and Cochrane's first paper on the subject appeared in the Fall
1984 issue of KRONOS. In deference to Velikovsky, they titled
their article "The Origin of Velikovsky's Comet." This was
followed by two more essays on the subject, published in the
Fall 1985 and Winter 1987 issues respectively. In these
informative articles, the authors strove to show that, not only
did Saturn's initial band owe its origin to the circling
detritus emitted by the cometary tail of Venus, but that, in the
minds of the ancients, the band was synonymous with the comet.
(Talbott, of course, had long been of the opinion that the
Mother Goddess of myth was represented by the band around Saturn
rather than the Saturnian configuration as a whole.) While the
evidence they presented for all this seemed rather persuasive,
certain mythological subtleties kept me from accepting it in
toto. The fine mythological line which often separates the
goddess from her renowned beard seemed to me to warrant further
study. This was one aspect of the problem which I had meant, and
still mean, to resolve in the concluding installment of "Child
of Saturn." This slight disagreement, concerning whether
cometary Venus originally represented the goddess or merely her
beard, might seem like a splitting of academic hairs. The issue,
however, becomes of crucial importance in view of the "later"
acquisition of Saturnian traits and names by the planet Venus.
Be that as it may, it cannot be overemphasized that Talbott's
and Cochrane's in-depth study of this particular subject is most
illuminating, touching on mythological motifs that I myself had
never considered, and definitely merits the most serious
deliberation. But then Talbott surprised me by throwing what
seemed to be a spoke in his own wheel. Hard on the heels of his
first co-authored essay with Cochrane, he individually published
his "Guidelines to the Saturn Myth" in the Summer 1985 issue of
KRONOS. Toward the end of this challenging article, Talbott
included a view, with explanatory notes, of Saturn's
configuration as seen from the outer reaches of space. In this
"celestial bird's eye view," Jupiter is still shown "hidden"
behind Saturn, with Saturn, Mars, and Earth sharing their
rotational axis while orbiting around Jupiter in unison as a
rigid rod. The Saturnian band, however, is shown to have circled
neither Saturn nor Jupiter. It was now indicated to have been
suspended in isolation between the two giants. In part, this was
a reversion to Jueneman's model which also includes an isolated
ringed structure suspended between Mars and the Earth. Moreover,
Talbott's band was shown for the first time as a doughnut shaped
"torus-cloud." This might have been his answer to Milton Zyman's
oft repeated objection concerning the "impossibility" of
illuminating a flat ring of fine debris so as to appear in the
form of a crescent when viewed from Earth. Saturn's cruciform,
which I had once envisioned as an atmospheric illusion, was
depicted in Talbott's scheme as a physical outburst radiating
from Saturn's north polar region. This immediately reminded me
of the multiple jets, or fountains, which are sometimes seen
"adorning" the heads of comets and it dawned upon me that
Talbott might be trying to explain the Saturnian cruciform
through a similar process. The biggest surprise, however,
concerned the placement of cometary Venus which was here shown
to have orbited around the planets' common rotational axis but
well below Saturn and high above Mars. Its positioning was such
that only from Earth would it have appeared to circle the edge
of the enclosing band. But how, then, could the "torus-cloud"
have been formed from the detritus emitted by the cometary tail
of Venus when the latter was so widely separated from the
former? And through what mechanism, as opposed to Jueneman's
model, could the Saturnian band have sustained itself in
isolation out of the gravitational attraction of both Jupiter
and Saturn? In private discourse on the phone and through the
mail, Talbott has furnished me with a few explanations and I can
promise the readers of this journal some very exciting
revelations. Talbott has tantalized his readers, as I have done
myself at times, and we both owe them a fair amount of
dissertation.
__XX. The same issue of KRONOS that carried Talbott's
"Guidelines to the Saturn Myth" also contained a paper by Ragnar
Forshufvud titled "Protosaturn and Velikovsky's Cosmogonical
Reconstruction." In part an answer to some of Leroy
Ellenberger's previous criticisms of Velikovsky's cosmogony, the
paper touched upon such issues as interplanetary discharges,
shock waves through interplanetary gas, rapid change of solar
radiation, change of planetary orbits, and decreasing
interplanetary dust clouds. Obviously unhappy with Talbott's
model as, quite naturally, also with mine, Forshufvud then
attempted to account for the Saturnian events through what he
considered a simpler scheme. Forshufvud accepted that the Sun
and Protosaturn, as he correctly referred to it, had constituted
a primordial binary. The latter, according to him, could have
flared up when its expansion drove its gaseous envelope "beyond
the boundaries of the Roche lobe." The expelled gas, as
hypothesized for other binaries found in the galaxy, was
attracted to the Sun where it formed "a large rotating
disc-shaped cloud around it." If Protosaturn, as had already
been surmised, had once been more massive, it would have been
critically reduced to the limit permissible for thermonuclear
reaction by previous outbursts. Continuing dissipation of its
gases would have further lowered Protosaturn's mass which, due
to its decreased gravitational force, would have led to a final
disintegration. At first sight, Forshufvud's accretion disc
around the Sun, as my postulated one around Saturn, might be
seen as the answer to the primeval darkness insisted on by myth.
But while a disc around the Sun would have been effective in
hiding the major portion of the stars, it would not have
shielded the solar orb itself from view. The southern hemisphere
of the Sun, or most of it, would still have been visible below
the equatorial plane of the disc. Forshufvud, however, went
further. Accepting also that Earth had then been a satellite of
Protosaturn, Furshufvud correctly recognized that it could not
have orbited the Saturnian orb outside the Roche lobe. But since
the giant's gaseous envelope had expanded beyond this limit, the
Earth would have found itself in the distinctive position of
orbiting inside Protosaturn. This had been one of Jueneman's
prime objections to a Saturnian system consisting solely of
Earth and Saturn with the two revolving around a common
barycenter. Jueneman's original calculations had placed the
barycenter within the Saturnian sphere and hence disqualified
the concept. But, as Forshufvud indicated, Protosaturn's
atmosphere might have mainly consisted of "very thin gas," thus
enabling the Earth to survive within it. And, in truth, such a
state of affairs is not exactly deemed impossible by
conventional astronomy. As Thomas Van Flandern pointed out,
there is reason to believe that the famous Jovian Red Spot could
be due to an Earth-sized object "floating" within Jupiter's
atmosphere. Forshufvud's idea is therefore not as outlandish as
it might appear. In this model, Protosaturn's "core" would have
appeared as the bright shining Saturnian sun of myth at the
centre of the gaseous shell within the inner periphery of which
the Earth itself was embedded. The cruciform rays radiating from
this sun would have consisted of the circulation pattern of
gases flowing back and forth between the core and the outer
shell. The axial column would have been formed from the steady
flow of one of these streams when gravitationally attracted
toward the Earth. Later, when the Earth would have left
Protosaturn, the thin and semi-transparent shell would have
appeared as the ring described by myth to have circled the
Saturnian orb. In comparing his Saturnian model to those
proposed by others, Forshufvud professed a preference for those
closest to conventional views. This is all fine but, to repeat
the admonition I have already pitched, there is no point in
formulating a workable model if this fails to satisfy the
message of myth. One may argue that there is also no point in
formulating a mythological model if this fails to satisfy
accepted physics. But the one thing to remember is that what we
have all been attempting to reconstruct are the events which our
ancient forefathers reported. If, then, we disregard the very
record we have been trying to substantiate, we end up defeating
the very purpose of our studies. In order to reconstruct ancient
events, we must first accept their reality. Our purpose is not
to find a workable model but one that fits the events. Never
mind that what we postulate is believed to have been physically
impossible. If the events described in myth truly occurred, they
would have had to have been possible. If, on the other hand, it
could incontrovertibly be demonstrated that the mythological
model is physically impossible, we would have to admit that the
events described by the ancients never transpired. My heartfelt
conviction, however, is that the mythological model Talbott and
I have been developing has not yet received the proper
scientific attention it deserves. Most of those who have thus
far tried to account for it have felt commpelled to alter it. I
cannot believe that this model is incapable of being accounted
for without tampering with its construction. Some may argue that
myth is open to interpretation. My only retort to that is to
repeat what I have often stated: That while the above may be
true for certain mythic themes, there are definite aspects of
myth that can only by interpreted one way. In the past, even
those conventional mythologists who could not bring themselves
to believe the message of myth were left with no recourse but to
accept the meaning of that message. Despite its ingenuity, it is
some of these incontrovertible aspects of myth that Forshufvud's
model violates. I do not wish to appear as if I'm castigating
Forshufvud. He and I have corresponded amicably for many years.
But what he has worked out is a scheme tailored to account for
what he believes could have happened. That this is not what the
ancient record insists to have happened is what he, like others,
has yet to come to grips with. Thus, like others before him,
Forshufvud sees the Earth as having orbited Protosaturn when the
mythic record leaves no doubt that Earth and Saturn must have
shared the same axis of rotation. The sheer quantity of
available evidence that points conclusively to this dictum
cannot be ignored. The band which the mythic record describes to
have circled the Saturnian sun could not have been Protosaturn's
shell as seen from Earth after the latter had left the former
because this Saturnian band had been prominent during the Golden
Age when the Earth was still very much a satellite of Saturn.
If, during the Golden Age, the Earth was still within
Protosaturn's shell, what would have appeared as a ring around
the Saturnian orb? And then, what would one do with the seven
concentric rings that eventually wrapped themselves around
Saturn? Are we to have Protosaturn's atmosphere stratifying
itself into seven semi-transparent shells? The placement of
Earth within the Protosaturnian atmosphere is not that different
from Ashton's previous postulate of a similar shell surrounding
Saturn and the Earth. Of itself, this is not inconceivable even
with an axial sharing of the two bodies. Forshufvud's opinion
that "an ever bright" sky would have "surrounded the Earth on
all sides" is, however, incompatible with the ____cycle of night
and day experienced during the Golden Age as also insisted on by
myth. If, on the other hand, Forshufvud's model is made to apply
to those times previous to the Golden Age, especially if the
core's radiation was to be theoretically lowered in the
visible-light spectrum, it might be helpful in accounting for
the age of primeval darkness. As Forshufvud himself commented,
the stars would not have been seen through the atmospheric
medium while the Sun's visibility would have depended "on the
optical density of the shell." Even so, is such a shell
necessary? Ashton had used his bubble in order to facilitate the
reflection of ultraviolet and infrared radiation from Saturn to
all parts of the Earth, including its southern hemisphere. But
if Jupiter had been shining in the south during the northern age
of darkness, the bubble theory becomes redundant. Ashton's UVIR
bombardment would have been limited to the northern hemisphere.
Are there any intimations that Earth's southern hemisphere never
experienced the primeval darkness? As it turns out there is one
Amazonian myth which states that, at the beginning of time,
there was no such thing as night. It was always day. This would
contest Lynn Rose's hypothesis that Earth's southern hemisphere
had been a place of perpetual shadow as he saw it echoed in the
counter-Earth of Philolaos. But I shall not be adamant about
this because, after all, one myth does not a case make. On the
other hand, I have not yet had the opportunity to look for
others.
__XXI. In 1986, Bob Forrest attempted to amend some of his
previous remissness. An abridgement of his Velikovsky's Sources
appeared in Stonehenge Viewpoint as a new serialization titled
"A Guide to Velikovsky's Sources." (Emphasis mine.) After having
been castigated for his ploy in dispersing Velikovsky's
evidence, Forrest reorganized his material in a more equitable
thematic analysis. This did not make Worlds in Collision appear
any more valid - how could it? But it should have isolated its
convincing features. That it did not was mainly due to Forrest's
steadfast prejudice and intractability. Despite additional
reading on the subject, comparative mythology remained his terra
incognita. Some corrections were made but many of his old
misconceptions resurfaced. Further corrections were then
attempted in 1987 when Forrest collected his Stonehenge
Viewpoint essays in a book bearing the same title - A Guide to
Velikovksy's Sources. But, as I asked Forrest before I had even
read it, where does he next intend to correct the misconceptions
that continue to appear in this new venture? The worst part of
all this is that Forrest has committed his harm, much more so
than any other critic of Velikovsky. He has not only taken
Velikovsky to task in his own backyard, he has done it quite
comprehensively. That much, and more, I grant him.
Unfortunately, Forrest has not only cast Velikovsky in the mold
of a shoddy scholar, which he definitely was not, but also all
those who take his work seriously. Nor are objective critics of
Velikovsky, like myself, immune to his harm. As he himself
recently informed me, it matters little that some of us have
left Velikovsky to branch out on our own version of cosmic
catastrophism. To him we are all "much of a muchness." And he is
right. We can ill afford Forrest's searing judgement, even if it
is biased and in error. His form of criticism, while faulty, has
always appeared persuasive to the uninitiated. It now becomes
all the more dangerous because not only are our scenarios more
bizarre than Velikovsky's but, speaking for Talbott and myself,
they keep getting increasingly so. We are thus opening our doors
ever wider to derision by critics of Forrest's ilk. Who, in his
right scientific mind, is going to believe what we are
proposing? I was therefore elated when, in mid-1987, David
Talbott invited me to participate in the monthly symposium on
myth and science, an ongoing debate to be carried out in the
pages of his newly inaugurated periodical, AEON. Talbott means
to allow everyone his say regardless of the wildness of the
theories proposed. The emphasis, however, is meant to rest on
the eventual distillation of models into a possible single
comprehensive one and its physical testing. This should be an
exciting endeavor especially since I already know there are many
novel surprises in store. My hope is to be able to live up to
the challenge by supplying new material as well as pro and con
arguments in an increasing effort to resolve the many and varied
competing theories that are currently vying for recognition and
acceptance. I intend to be harsh in my criticisms, as I have
always been, but I do hope that those who will come within range
of my disapproval will understand the intent behind my ruades.
Others are welcome to treat my own work in like manner as long
as the confrontation is conducted in a sober and scholarly
manner. Personally, I have never been afraid of criticism and,
in most cases, I have even welcomed it despite the vehemence of
my past retorts to it. As those who are familiar with my past
works should know, I have more than once had a change of mind on
certain issues but I have never been afraid to publicly retract
whatever statements of mine I retrospectively discovered to be
amiss. In the interest of fairness I shall even play devil's
advocate to particular aspects of Talbott's model which, in
effect, is also mine. De Grazia once called me "a harsh critic,
but a sweet man." Let me try, then , to live up to that name
while inviting others to join me in an equitable but stimulating
debate which should be devoted to nothing less than the
scholarly quest for truth. Only in this way can we ever hope to
iron out the differences between us in a continuing effort to
exhume the ultimate reality, or as much of it as we possibly
can, concerning the astronomical and historical past so that
this can then be applied to correct present ailments in the hope
of salvaging what often appears to be a very dim future. To that
end, I intend to start ab initio - Where else?
#Post#: 741--------------------------------------------------
Re: Road to Saturn
By: Admin Date: September 15, 2024, 3:22 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
Here's my abbreviation of your previous Saturn Theory answers.
YOUNGER DRYAS NO COMMENT
CARDONA MISATTRIBUTED SOME VENUS/MARS EVENTS TO SATURN
NO JUPITER INVOLVEMENT IN THE POLAR CONFIGURATION
NO EVIDENCE OF A 2,300 BC EVENT
ANCIENT BANDED SPHERE IMAGES ARE JUST INTRIGUING SO FAR
SATURN WASN'T APPARENTLY REPLACED IN THE POLAR CONFIGURATION
THE INNER PLANETS APPARENTLY DIDN'T MIGRATE IN FROM ELSEWHERE
1. I was surprised that you said you don't think the inner
planets migrated to the inner solar system from the outer solar
system. Yet you support the Saturn Configuration in which
Saturn, Venus and Mars were close to Earth in very ancient
times. So you apparently accept that Saturn was previously in
the inner solar system. And, since it long ago moved beyond the
orbit of Jupiter, what do you suppose caused it to move so far
outward?
2. I know that Dave for a while considered the idea that Venus,
Mars and Earth were originally phase-locked with Saturn and
orbited Saturn while Saturn orbited the Sun. But I thought Dave
later accepted Dwardu's idea that the Saturn configuration came
from outside the solar system, in a linear formation, similar to
the way the SL9 comet fragments moved linearly from 1992 to 1994
on their way to impacting Jupiter. ... because I thought it was
decided that Venus, Mars and Earth would not likely have been
able to line up well with Saturn for the polar configuration if
they were all orbiting Saturn, since outer satellites always
normally orbit much slower than inner satellites. Or do you
figure that Venus, Mars and Earth followed Saturn in a line like
the SL9 comet fragments, instead of orbiting Saturn?
3. Can you describe briefly what major events likely occurred in
prehistory and when, according to your mythology research?
4. Was there an Age of Darkness and was the polar column visible
then?
5. Was there a huge Saturn flareup that ended the Age of
Darkness and was described as Creation?
6. Did the polar column retract just before the flareup and lead
to belief in Saturn's self-castration and rites of circumcision
etc?
7. Did Venus appear like a comet circling Saturn after the
flareup and did the Venus comet tail appear to form a ring
around Saturn, called Aten and Ouroboros?
8. Did Saturn's rings form at that time?
9. Did Saturn have a separate circumstellar disk that resembled
an ocean?
10. Can you estimate the minimum and maximum duration of the
Golden Age?
11. Was there one or more Great Floods?
12. Was there one or more Ice Ages?
13. Was there one or more Great Conflagrations?
14. When did those events occur relative to the Saturn flareup
Creation event?
15. By the way, are you a teacher? Something gave me that
impression some time ago.
#Post#: 746--------------------------------------------------
Re: Road to Saturn
By: Admin Date: September 18, 2024, 10:34 am
---------------------------------------------------------
EC/ SATURN CONFIGURATION BREAKUP, NO INFO
NO EVIDENCE INNER PLANETS CAME FROM OUTER SOLAR SYSTEM
MAJOR PREHISTORY EVENTS ... occurred ... by the time of Unis's
pyramid in 2450 BCE:
... i.e. Creation, Venus/Mars catastrophes, the polar
configuration, the Flood, the ladder to heaven and/or World
Pillar, etc.
VENUS COMET DARK PERIOD BEFORE CREATION
VENUS/MARS MARRIAGE WAS CREATION
POLAR COLUMN DID NOT RETRACT BEFORE CREATION
VENUS CROWNED MARS KING DURING CREATION
SATURN'S RINGS, NO INFO
SATURN'S CIRCUMSTELLAR DISK, NO INFO
GOLDEN AGE DURATION, NO INFO
CELESTIAL FLOOD
ICE AGE, SEE CARDONA
CELESTIAL CONFLAGRATION JUST BEFORE CREATION
CHINESE DRAGON. In Newborn Star, Dwardu said this on pages
158-159.
"Sutherland was entirely mistaken when, in attempting to
corroborate one of Velikovsky's main theses, he misidentified
the dragon and its pearl as the planet Venus in its previous
near-cometary aspect.11 In all honesty, I have to confess that,
in my pioneering days, and in support of Sutherland's thesis, I
was just as guilty of so misidentifying the Chinese dragon and
its fiery pearl.12 It is now quite apparent that, in comparison
with the myths of other ancient nations, the encircling Chinese
dragon is to be understood as the outflow of debris from
proto-Saturn's axial pole, which debris continued to spiral out
so far that, in time, witnesses of the event could actually see
it circumventing proto-Saturn's flaming globe. And it is the
very watery illusion of proto-Saturn's circumstellar disk across
which this debris spiraled that eventually associated the Dragon
in Asian minds with water, rivers, lakes, and oceans."
Since you said Dwardu often erred in attributing to Saturn
events that actually involved Venus and/or Mars, do you disagree
with Dwardu on the above?
RETRACTION. On page 279 of Flare Star he said this.
"There was a general belief among the ancient Egyptians that, at
one time, Ra cut off his own phallus.2 Since, as we have already
seen, the phallus of Ra was actually the plasma column or axis
mundi we have been analyzing, what this self-castration seems to
indicate is a detachment of that axis. This castration motif is
one that recurs often enough in myth, although, to be sure, some
of it refers to a much later, but similar, event."
Dwardu concluded that a retraction of the polar column caused
the Saturn flareup of Creation. But you say there was no
retraction before Creation and Creation was a flareup of Venus
instead of Saturn. Is that right? And was there a retraction or
severing of the polar column later, after Creation, which was
interpreted as Saturn's or Mars' self-castration, which led to
the tradition of circumcision?
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