mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== THOTH A Catastrophics Newsletter VOL IV, No. 2 Jan 31, 2000 EDITOR: Amy Acheson PUBLISHER: Michael Armstrong LIST MANAGER: Brian Stewart CONTENTS TRUTH OR FASHION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . by Mel Acheson THE DEMANDS OF THE SATURNIAN CONFIGURATION THEORY: Part IV . . . . . . . .excerpts from Dwardu Cardona's SIS Silver Jubilee Paper KRONIATALK QUESTIONS . . . Ted Bond, Karen Josephson, Julie Dyer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . responses by Wal Thornhill SHOCKS FROM ETA CARINA. . . . . . . . . . . . . by Wal Thornhill ---------------------------------------------- TRUTH OR FASHION By Mel Acheson If currently fashionable theories are Ultimate Truth (or at least smart ideas) and myth was stupid superstition, where is the dividing line? Was Ptolemy stupid and Newton smart? But General Relativity is not just an improved version of Newton's theory, it's different: Einstein's stretchable space-time is not compatible with Newton's rock-solid frame of reference. Newton was wrong. Either he was stupid or his theory, after all, was adequate for his time and for the data set he was aware of. If the latter is true, then Ptolemy wasn't stupid, either, and epicycles were appropriate for Ptolemy's time and data set. Therefore, on the principle that intelligence and theory-making are cognitive structures inherent in the human species, the myth-makers weren't stupid. They were trying to make sense of their data just as we are trying to make sense of ours. Astronomy is an old endeavor. Despite changing theories and the expansion of awareness of the universe, the tradition of trying to explain that universe is continuous from present-day astronomers to early-historical astrologers to prehistorical myth-makers. Here's the catch: The data has changed. The data set of the myth-makers was not just smaller than the data set of fashionable theory, it is unrecognizable in comparison. Nothing in today's domain of planetary motions resembles the images recorded by the myth-makers. Their planets were up close, personal, and axially aligned. Their planets turned, like wheels, in the air. Their planets swelled and shrank. Their planets raged in the sky, hurled thunderbolts, and destroyed cities. Our planets are tiny and sedate specks of light that we have to be trained to recognize. Were our ancestors hallucinating? Were they insane? Or are we? "Nothing in today's domain" is not quite true. The newly- discovered planets circling other stars are mostly close- orbiting. If we had to live in those systems, where a "year" passes in just a few days, we might better appreciate our ancestors' descriptions. And certain stellar and galactic jets are ejecting blobs of material along their axes, apparently highly charged, judging by the synchrotron radiation. There might be lightning bolts arcing among them. The domain of the myth-makers' data has reappeared at larger scales, and the explanatory power of fashionable theories is inadequate to deal with it. As long as we continue gathering data, the theories that are fashionable today will become tomorrow's superstitions. Our descendants will wonder how we could be so stupid as to believe our few observations over a couple of centuries could provide a picture of the universe for all time. And our perverse refusal to pay attention to contrary data and to the testimony of our own ancestors must surely be a sign of insanity. Stupid. Insane. It could be us. Mel Acheson thoth at whidbey.com ---------------------------------------------- THE DEMANDS OF THE SATURNIAN CONFIGURATION THEORY: Part II Excerpts from Dwardu Cardona's SIS Silver Jubilee Paper Summaries by Amy Acheson [ed. note: the text of the introduction to this paper is available at http://www.knowledge.co.uk/sis/silver/cardona.htm and the full text of the paper is scheduled for publishing in an up-coming issue of Chronology and Catastrophism Review - see http://www.knowledge.co.uk/sis/index.htm for more information.] AMY ACHESON: Part I of this paper recounted many of the unusual global attributes of the planet/god Saturn as portrayed in mytho- historical records from all over the world. Among these were Saturn's connection with an age of darkness, Saturn as supreme ruler of The Golden Age, Saturn's association with the beginning of time, Saturn as motionless, Saturn as the sun and Saturn as the sun of night. Part II concerned the postulate that the mytho-historical record places Saturn at the Earth's north pole. Cardona stresses that this information is not taken from a single story, but is expressed in hundreds of different ways in hundreds of different stories told over the world. Part III discussed the lithic bulge as a physical remnant of a recent, short-term force acting in the direction of Earth's north pole. Cardona presented mytho-historical evidence for a polar column at Earth's north pole and discussed the theoretical interpretations of several catastrophists. He expressed his personal preference of interpreting the polar column as a Rankine vortex. Part IV concludes this paper. CARDONA: THE ARCTIC CARNAGE Meanwhile, does not this scenario, involving a tornado of planetary proportions, raise even more demands? . . . we are all acquainted with the destructive force that tornadoes exhibit. Should not Saturn's Rankine vortex, therefore, have left signs of an even greater destruction? This would have been especially so since this titanic maelstrom would have wrought its devastation while laterally standing still. A full exposition concerning the history of the axis mundi requires a volume [by itself]. . . . I point to . . . the Arctic muck, or frozen soil, which 'covers no less than one seventh of the land surface of earth,' all of which encircles the Arctic Ocean and lies within the Arctic Circle. Composed mainly of silt, sand, pebbles, and boulders, it is often accompanied by 'preserved, semi-decayed, or fully decayed vegetable and animal matter.' Its depth, in some places, 'has always caused even the most open-minded geologists to boggle.' The Russians, who have conducted prolonged studies on this muck, have in some places drilled down to more than 4000 feet without reaching rock bottom. Entire forests have been found buried in this area, including plum trees complete with their leaves and fruits, to say nothing of palm trees and huge exotic ferns. . . . animals [have been] found buried in this muck, the most noteworthy and famous of which, needless to say, is the mammoth. Let's face it, as George Gaylord Simpson was astute enough to realize, catastrophic events at the end of the Pleistocene were not only much more severe in North than in South America, they also affected a much larger proportion of animals. AMY: Cardona quotes various researchers defining the puzzle of how so much surface material could have been transported so far and piled so deep, with no apparent highland source or sufficient drainage. CARDONA: . . . But consider now the model being discussed and tested. Would not such a colossal vortex as posited above have scoured the land, year-in year-out, uprooting . . . trees . . . sizable chunks of rock, [and] boulders, which would have swirled around, grinding relentlessly against each other; breaking apart into ever smaller pieces, and smaller still until ground into sand and silt? And what is the area that is now filled with the Arctic Ocean if not an immense basin scoured out of the living rock? AMY: Cardona describes the Arctic muck of Siberia, Alaska and the Arctic islands, emphasizing the "vast remains of torn and broken mammoths" as "evidence of an atmospheric tempest of unprecedented dimensions." CARDONA: . . . Entire forests in an uprooted condition, bituminous trunks and fossilized charcoal, are everywhere intermingled with petrified ash, and veins of ice, and sand that has turned into sandstone. Among this colossal devastation are found the skeletons of mammoths, rhinoceroses, bison, and horses. AMY: Cardona compares his own thesis to other catastrophic theories, and especially to the non-polar theories, concluding that: CARDONA: . . . on this topic, I have the additional evidence of the mytho-historical record on my side-as the theory, in fact, continues to demand. What is this evidence? Does it, for instance, have anything to say re the catastrophic demise of the mammoths in the north? . . . Are elephants [mammoths] . . . mentioned in the record in connection with the polar vortex? In the Mahabharata we read that Mandara, that churning mountain, was 'crowded with tusked animals.' Moreover, when the churning began, . . . great trees spun off, were crushed against one another, lightning flashed forth, a fire blazed burning the elephants and other beasts, 'and all the various creatures there lost their life's breath.' The water pouring from above eventually dowsed the fire and flowed into the ocean. Thus we can see that we have here the entire spectrum of the devastation -- the whirlwind, the uprooted forest, the carnage, the fire, and the ensuing flood. Does this not tally with is found in Earth's northern regions? AMY: Cardona quotes mytho-historical records which caution that man cannot approach the vortex, this golden mountain, and he suspects that, at first, the animals didn't approach it, either. CARDONA: . . . But in the end, when the planets were displaced from their polar alignment, the funnel of the polar column was dislodged from its axial locus. Swirling now in corkscrew fashion, writhing like a serpent in travail, it went berserk and overstepped the bounds within which it had been contained for ages. Taken unawares, beasts fell prone to it. Man, apparently, was just that much smarter. THE ONSLAUGHT OF ICE The penultimate question I wish to raise concerns the freezing of the . . . Arctic muck or permafrost. How did it all freeze? Where did the ice come from? . . . Is it traceable to the planet Saturn or Earth's primeval position in relation to Saturn? Can this demand also be met? This is an easy question to answer. The Greeks, for instance, had long associated . . . Saturn, with snow and hail. In fact, Saturn was renowned for being 'cold' and 'moist.' This seemingly-odd belief is not met only among the Greeks. Abu Ma'sar also had it stated that Saturn's nature is cold. . . . Alcabitius likewise recorded that 'he [Saturn] is bad, masculine, in daytime cold...' Epigenes of Byzantium classified Saturn as 'cold and windy.' Dorotheus also talks of 'cold Saturn.' Pliny wrote that 'Saturn is of a cold and frozen nature,' while Virgil spoke of 'Saturn's cold star.' We can thus be close to certain that when the Zunis of New Mexico refer to Awonawilona as having also been associated with cold, they were reiterating an archaic testimonial concerning the planet Saturn's affiliation with snow and ice. This is all the more made clear since Awonawilona means All- Father Father, an epithet which elsewhere was reserved for the Saturnian deity. Thus Kronos/Saturn was referred to as First Father, while Odin was known as All-father, the very same name of the Zuni Awonawilona. Mythologists have never been able to supply a convincing theory to explain why the planet Saturn and its deity should be associated with cold, snow, and ice. A telling clue comes from William of Conches who tells us that 'Saturn is called cold not because he is inherently cold himself but because he causes cold.' AMY: Cardona discusses this connection between Saturn and cold with respect to the Greek and Persian mytho-historical record, and then adds this story told by the Modoc Indians of southern Oregon and northern California: CARDONA: . . . the Chief of the Sky Spirits drilled a hole in the sky with a rotating stone through which he pushed snow and ice to form a mound which almost touched the sky. . . . the drilling of the sky with a rotating stone is too similar to the churning of the ocean by Mount Madara to escape our notice. Destruction of the world by cold is also met with among the marginal, forest, and southern Andean peoples. As Dolph Hooker informs us: ". . . we cannot find evidence that Earth's climate grew cold before the advent of an ice age; . . . on the contrary, climate grew colder only after the ice arrived and only to the extent that the ice itself refrigerated the Earth..." . . . As Hooker also tells us: "Obviously the perma-frost accumulated from the bottom upward--not by freezing from the top downward.' What this means is that the detritus which forms the permafrost was frozen as it was being laid down. Am I here advocating that the ice which caused the so-called Ice Age came from the planet Saturn? Not really. What I am claiming is that the snow, ice, and sleet came from the axial vortex when it was severed for the last time because that is where a vast quantity of terrestrial moisture had been stored. But why, and how, then did it freeze to fall as snow, and ice, and sleet? As mentioned earlier, this all transpired during the break-up of the Saturnian configuration. Saturn, Venus, and Mars were thrown out of axial alignment. And so was Earth. Its axis shifted to take up the alignment it now possesses. Do we find this also contained in the mytho-historical record? Is this demand also met? EARTH'S SHIFTING AXIS . . . The Muria, a tribe of the Bastar State in the Central Provinces of India . . . tell without ambiguity how Mahapurub turned the world topsy-turvy. . . . [the record] of the Hopi . . . is one of the best to illustrate the subject under discussion. As these Indians narrate: '. . . .the world, with no one to control it, teetered off balance, spun around crazily, then rolled over twice. Mountains plunged into seas with a great splash, seas and lakes sloshed over the land; and as the world spun through cold and lifeless space it froze into solid ice..' How would these Indians have known that the teetering of the world would cause seas and lakes to slosh over the land? How would they have known that a shifting of earth's axis could freeze it into solid ice? Actually, had I any faith in the accuracy of counting the annual layers of ice retrieved in cores drilled out of Greenland's ice fields, I would even be able to date the event for you. SATURN'S DEPARTURE . . . I do not need to tell that Saturn is no longer in Earth's proximity. The theory then demands that somewhere in the record Saturn's removal from Earth's proximity should be encountered. And so we find as, for example, with the tale of Quetzelcoatl, whose 'paladins' died from the cold through the snow that fell upon them just before the god took off on his serpent raft to be seen no more. I mention this one myth because, as one can see, it ties in nicely with Saturn's removal at the very time when Earth, teetering off balance, was deluged with the onslaught of ice that ushered in the so-called Ice Age. . . . having said so much about the Egyptian Ra toward the beginning of this treatise, it should perhaps be fitting for me to end with him. Thus, in an Egyptian myth, Ra is made to say: 'Weary indeed are my limbs and they fail me. I shall go forth... Henceforth my dwelling place must be in the heavens. No longer will I reign upon the earth.' And: 'I have determined to cause myself to be uplifted into the sky, to join the blessed gods and to renounce rule of the world' . . . Then Ra raised himself from the back of the goddess Nut into the sky. So here I must ask: if Ra was truly the Sun, where had it been prior to its ascent into the sky? And if, as mythologists tell us, Nut was the goddess of the sky, what would it mean that the Sun rose from the back of the sky (i.e. Nut) into the sky? What does it mean that, before ascending into the sky, the Sun had reigned upon Earth? What does it mean that the Sun once ruled the world? Do we not, in fact, find it stated in an Orphic fragment that 'Saturn dwelt openly on earth among men'? So, also, Dionysus of Halicarnassus who declared that 'Kronos ruled on this very earth.' Besides, as it was written, when Ra removed himself into the sky, 'darkness came on' and 'Ra was borne through darkness.' Does this make sense if Ra was the Sun? Do we see darkness coming on when the Sun rises into the sky? The answer to this mystery is that the sun of night, which had ruled Earth due to its proximity, had now removed itself into the blackness of space. True night, as we now know it, finally descended upon the world. And the stars, which could not have been seen as long as the Saturnian sun of night was shining down on Earth, appeared in all their brilliance for the first time. Do we find this stated in the mytho-historical record? Can this last demand be met? As it is written: '[When Ra left Earth he] went on his way through the realms which are above, and these he divided and set in order. He spake creating words, and called into existence the field of Aalu, and there he caused to assemble a multitude of beings which are beheld in heaven, even the stars...' Dwardu Cardona ---------------------------------------------- KRONIATALK QUESTIONS Ted Bond, Karen Josephson, Julie Dyer Responses by Wal Thornhill Ted Bond asks: I have never seen an explanation of ball lightning that makes any sense. Orthodoxy denies its possibility, obeying the rule "Reject anomalous data", but my ex-wife and I once watched it skittering around our house so I know it exists. Wal Thornhill responds: there is a photograph on the wall of the high voltage lab in Melbourne where some of the experiments appearing on my CD were videotaped. It is a photograph of ball lightning. Dr C E R Bruce of the Electrical research Association was of the opinion that ball lightning was formed at severe kinks in a lightning channel. Plasma physicists are aware that plasma does the counter-intuitive thing at sharp bends in a magnetic field and will actually leave the usual path along the field lines and veer off in the opposite direction. It is at those points that a knot of hot ionized gas (or plasmoid) seems to be formed. Ball lightning seems to be a self-contained electrically resonant form of plasma which may hold the key to many astrophysical problems. For example, Bruce expected on the basis of his theory that balls of hot gas would be found at the ends of the bars in some barred spiral galaxies. That was confirmed. (Actually, Arp has shown that they are a site of companion galaxy formation). Subsequent experiments using a Boys camera in the lab confirmed that ball lightning is formed at sharp bends in the discharge channel. Karen Josephson asks: In the latest Thoth you describe the Earth as having probably been within the "anode glow" of an L-type Brown Dwarf star. This sounds like a good theory to me. I was wondering, though, how such a location would affect the planet if it went nova, as was mentioned as a possibility recently. Would a planet so positioned be protected from the worst effects by either the Earth's atmosphere, its location within Saturn's "atmosphere", both, or??? Wal replies: it depends on whether the nova was due to the birth of a planetesimal from proto-Saturn. If so, the answer has to be conjectural based on analogies with novae of brighter stars. L-type brown dwarfs detected so far are nearby yet they are near the limit of visibility of our best telescopes. So a nova outburst of such a star would increase the radiant output but not, I think, to lethal levels. My view, stated before, is that the light increase is like a star-wide lightning flash with a suitably scaled up duration. When I say star-wide, I mean the corona and photosphere is involved. So, if we were orbiting within the photosphere, we would have been protected to a large degree by our and Saturn's atmosphere. It would depend, of course, on the trajectory of the ejected material from proto-Saturn. There is another possibility that I think played a part. That is the kind of electrical outbursts we see from comets and which enable those tiny objects to be seen with the naked eye. The effects would be similar in the Saturnian configuration, with jets from the more electrically active bodies, like Venus, within a brightening coma or photosphere. Certainly, as Velikovsky mentioned, the light outburst was memorable. Julie M. Dyer says: A little follow-up on the Spanish ice chunk fall. from: Oceanspace Issue 206 Thursday 27 January 2000 SPANISH ICE BLAMED ON WEIRD WEATHER Remember the story of huge chunks of ice dropping on Spain? Preliminary results of studies by scientists led by Jesus Martinez Frias reveal that most were practical jokes but some were the result of a freak weather phenomenon miles above the Earth. At a packed press conference, he said at least some of the ice pieces had probably been formed through sudden temperature drops in the stratosphere, which begins about seven miles above Earth and extends to about 30 miles. He explained that similar cases had been reported in China and Brazil in 1995. The researchers say that while this was the most likely explanation, they were still unsure and would continue their study. An Associated Press report explains that "questions remained. Fernando Lopez, a professor at Madrid's Autonomous University questioned how ice could form in the stratosphere because that layer has very little moisture. And, he added, once a piece starts forming, how does it remain suspended long enough to grow to weigh nearly 9 pounds, as some of the Spanish chunks did?" Wal responds: Eric Crew proposed a model for such falls of large chunks of ice. They are the result of warm moist air being jetted upwards into the stratosphere by exceptionally powerful lightning. As the front material turns to ice, the following moisture freezes to it until you have a layered ice ball weighing maybe a few kilos. It then plummets to Earth, often some distance from the storm. So the question is whether there were any electrical storms reported in the area at that time. It also occurs to me that under freak conditions of a "bolt from the blue" where the usual path to ground through a cloud is not available, the ice could fall from a clear blue (or at least not stormy) sky. In that case we should look for reports of a thunderclap without any storm. ---------------------------------------------- SHOCKS FROM ETA CARINA By Wal Thornhill Excerpt from Space Science News (12 October 1999): "Just three years ago the Hubble Space Telescope provided a dazzling image of a star that was blowing off massive quantities of material in a blast that looked like a supernova yet, mysteriously, wasn't one. Now the Chandra X-ray Observatory has looked at Eta Carina and showed details that are, well, shocking." See photos on Thornhill's website at: http://www.holoscience.com/news/eta_carina.htm A Hubble Space Telescope image of Eta Carina is shown scaled to fit within the much larger X-ray nebula discovered by Chandra. The lobes are as wide as our solar system and expanding in opposite directions away from a central bright disk at speeds in excess of 1 million km/h (600,000 mph). The odd shape is believed to be partly due to the star's intense magnetic field channeling plasma. "It is not what I expected," said Dr. Fred Seward of the Harvard- Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The new X-ray observation shows three distinct structures: an outer, horseshoe-shaped ring about 2 light years in diameter, a hot inner core about 3 light- months in diameter, and a hot central source less than 1 light- month in diameter which may contain the superstar that drives the whole show. The outer ring provides evidence of another large explosion that occurred over 1,000 years ago. All three structures are thought to represent shock waves produced by matter rushing away from the superstar at supersonic speeds. The temperature of the shock-heated gas ranges from 60 million deg. Kelvin in the central regions to 3 million K (108 million deg. F to 5.4 million deg. F) on the outer structure. Since it looked like a supernova, one naturally would assume that was the end of the star. All that should be left are beautiful nebula and, perhaps, a neutron star or black hole where the original star once stood. Instead, Eta Carinae is still there (in a subtle bit of grammar, astronomers refer to the star as Eta Carinae and the nebula as Eta Carina). FOR THE ELECTRIC UNIVERSE THERE ARE NO SURPRISES As long ago as 1968 Dr Charles Bruce of the UK Electrical Research Association identified planetary nebulae as bipolar electrical discharges from a central star. Eta Carina obviously belongs in that category. Unfortunately, astronomers have very limited options in their toolkit to explain 3 million degree temperatures and x-rays from gas more than a light-year from the central star. However, it is simple to explain if it is a plasma heated by electric current being fed into Eta Carinae. Just as with our own sun, the highest "temperatures" are then encountered outside the star. That would explain why there is relatively little radiation from the star at the centre. Most of the power focussed on the hapless star is being intercepted by distant gas and dust and radiated energetically into space. Dr. Fred Seward said: "I expected to see a strong point source with a little diffuse emission cloud around it. Instead we see just the opposite- a bright cloud of diffuse emission, and much less radiation from the centre." A star is merely a focus of a galactic electric discharge and does not have to provide internal energy to power objects like the Eta Carina nebula. A good sense of the desperate ideas required to save the old model can be gauged from the following post-script to the NASA report: "As if its huffing and puffing behavior weren't weird enough, Eta Carina also appears to be a Death Star powerful enough to make Darth Vader turn in his light saber. Sveneric Johansson, a specialist in atomic spectroscopy at the University of Lund in Sweden, has proposed that Eta Carinae also is acting as a massive ultraviolet laser. Johansson, using Hubble observations made with the Goddard High-Resolution Spectrograph, reported in 1996 that his interpretation is not yet proven, but that it appears to be the most plausible explanation of the data." Wal Thornhill See the home of The Electric Universe at http://www.holoscience.com ---------------------------------------------- PLEASE VISIT THE KRONIA COMMUNICATIONS WEBSITE: http://www.kronia.com Subscriptions to AEON, a journal of myth and science, now with regular features on the Saturn theory and electric universe, may be ordered from this page: http://www.kronia.com/html/sales.html Other suggested Web site URL's for more information about Catastrophics: http://www.knowledge.co.uk/sis/ http://www.flash.net/~cjransom/ http://www.knowledge.co.uk/velikovskian/ http://www.bearfabrique.org http://www.grazian-archive.com/ http://www.holoscience.com http://www.users.uswest.net/~dascott/Cosmology.htm http://www.catastrophism.com/cdrom/index.htm Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered, 10 Pensée Journals may be ordered at the I-net address below: http://www.e-z.net/~mikamar/default.html ----------------------------------------------- The THOTH electronic newsletter is an outgrowth of scientific and scholarly discussions in the emerging field of astral catastrophics. Our focus is on a reconstruction of ancient astral myths and symbols in relation to a new theory of planetary history. Serious readers must allow some time for these radically different ideas to be fleshed out and for the relevant background to be developed. The general tenor of the ideas and information presented in THOTH is supported by the editor and publisher, but there will always be plenty of room for differences of interpretation. We welcome your comments and responses. thoth at Whidbey.com New readers are referred to earlier issues of THOTH posted on the Kronia website listed above. Go to the free newsletter page and double click on the image of Thoth, the Egyptian God of Knowledge, to access the back issues. editor of THOTH --- You are currently subscribed to kroniatalk as: mikamar at e-z.net To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-kroniatalk-36515E at telelists.com