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 6 March 31, 2000 EDITOR: Amy Acheson PUBLISHER: Michael Armstrong LIST MANAGER: Brian Stewart CONTENTS WANTED: COSMO-CENTRIC IDEAS . . . . . . . . . . . . by Mel Acheson THE NAME OF GOD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . by Anthony Larson SUPERLUMINOUS EJECTION QUESTIONS . . . . . A Kroniatalk discussion PARADIGM PORTRAITS III: YOUNG GALAXIES. . . . . . . by Amy Acheson FOUNTAINS OF IO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . by Wal Thornhill PATTERNS OF HUMAN MEMORY. . . . . by Michel Tavir and Dave Talbott >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>-----<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< WANTED: COSMO-CENTRIC IDEAS By Mel Acheson Currently accepted theories have evolved a long way toward catastrophics from their ancestry in uniformism. Assumptions of actualism and gradualism-that present-day processes acting over long times could explain the changing morphology of rocks and species-have been displaced. Impacts from space have broken the continuously gradual action of erosion and natural selection into discrete episodes of modification of morphogenic discontinuities. Proposals such as the Alvarez asteroid and the Clubian comet appeared at first to add a few spectacular footnotes to the geologic record. Now they threaten to become the shapers of that record. Less apparent than this evolution from ideas of continuity to ideas of discontinuity is an underlying movement in viewpoint. The development of ideas over millennia can be simplistically characterized as a movement from explaining unfamiliar phenomena in terms of familiar to explaining all phenomena-familiar as well as unfamiliar-in terms of immanent intelligibility. Examples would be the change from geocentrism to heliocentrism and from anthropocentrism to open-ended evolutionism. For the purposes of this opinion, I'll limit my simplistically characterized movement to a segment beginning with uniformism and extrapolated one step forward. Uniformism (and its fellow travelers in physics: gravitation, expanding universe, etc.) is thus (relatively) geo- and anthropo-centric. Or perhaps helio- and Homo-centric would be better: It seeks to explain all space and all time in terms of processes active locally (in the solar system) in the present (as experienced by modern humans with their technologically-enhanced senses). It projects this momentary condition (of only a few centuries) of our tiny planetary system as sensed by one species (us) onto vast expanses of time and space. It illuminates There and Then with the light of Here and Now. In contrast, my one step forward would reverse this: It explains the local present in terms of processes active throughout the cosmos and throughout the past. It sees beyond our noses and the immediate blink of our eyes to place us in a cosmic context. It illuminates Here and Now with the light of There and Then. Intellectually, the two should be equivalent: We can start with This and try to explain That, or we can start with That and try to explain This. But geo-anthropo-ego-centrism tips the balance: We "naturally" prefer to explain That with This. One of the basic principles of scientific investigation is to keep such biases from influencing results. There's an inherent tension in this: A certain passion for dispassionate research is essential. An operative criterion is to let Nature speak for herself-in this case, to let the cosmos and the past speak for themselves. But we ask the questions, and the answers are constrained by the limits inherent in the questions, i.e., by our assumptions, viewpoint, mindset. We can counteract this bias by rephrasing the questions to invert (or at least to change) the limits. And we can pay attention to hints-to the things that don't fit. My three favorite misfits are: Excess redshifts (in stars) showed up early last century. They were ignored until Halton Arp discovered physical and statistical connections between high- and low-redshift extragalactic objects. Suddenly, astronomers were able to ask the question "Is redshift caused by some intrinsic mechanism and not solely by the Doppler effect?" instead of declaring "What else could it be but Doppler!" Suddenly, the Expanding Universe with its clusters of galaxies elongated along axes pointed at the Earth collapsed into superclusters not pointing at the Earth. (Geocentrism is alive and well and hiding in the Expanding Universe.) A long list of researchers, from Birkeland before 1900 to Thornhill today, discovered many unexpected properties of electrical discharges: pinching, braiding, formation of sheaths, isomorphism over large ranges of scale. They recognized close similarities in certain characteristics of the sun and other stars, of nebulae, and of galaxies. Their proposals for an electrically active cosmos were ignored, but the opportunity now exists to ask questions without gravitational limits and to let the stars and galaxies answer: Do stars generate light the way arc lamps do rather than by astronomical accumulations of insignificantly-gravitating particles? Do galaxies generate X- rays the way a dentist does rather than squeezing them out of unimaginably pressurized holes that shouldn't let anything out? The legends of our prehistoric greatSgrandparents from around the globe tell a coherent story. Their art and architecture and rituals illustrate that story. They appear somewhat obsessed with it. This has been noticed for some time. But Velikovsky said it out loud, and the questions were lost amid the howls and denials. Talbott, Cardona, and Cochrane (to name three recent researchers) put together a model that re-opens the mouths of our greatSgrandparents and enables them to speak again of planetary gods hurling lightning bolts at each other. Are these the same cosmic lightning bolts that Thornhill suspects of electrifying the universe? Is this electrified universe pinched into a couple of "ball-lightning" superclusters that resonate at quantized values of redshift? I'm framing these questions with deliberate passionate bias. (It's an editorial, after all.) The point (for me) is to jostle loose the ossifications of thought that accumulate around widely accepted ideas. There's a whole universe out there to discover, and our ideas are still stuck plodding around in the provinces. It's time to move to the Big City of cosmo-centric ideas. Mel Acheson Thoth at whidbey.com ******************************************************** THE NAME OF GOD by Anthony E. Larson "Sound is an evocative and thus a creative experience. Many cultures credit the gods with the power to make sounds, either through natural agencies, such as wind, water, and animals, or through musical instruments. In myth, sound can be bewitching (the voices of the sirens), or destructive (the shout with which Joshua and the Israelites felled the walls of Jericho). Many creation myths talk of sound disturbing the pre-existent stillness, thereby bringing the world into being." David Fontana, _The Secret Language of Symbols_, (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 1994), p. 64. Velikovsky suggested that all humanity had once heard what they perceived to be a celestial voice, which spoke the name of God. That name, according to the good doctor, can be found in the ancient traditions of many cultures today, good evidence that the voice was heard worldwide in antiquity. Perhaps the best instance of its preservation is in the sacred Hebrew name, YAHWEH. For reasons that will become clear by the end of this monograph, the ineffable word was mere onomatopoeia. The source of this voice, according to Dr. Velikovsky, was the electromagnetic oscillations produced by the interplay between Earth and a proximate body. The Earth, acting as a great transducer or speaker, effectively converted those electromagnetic waves into audible sounds. A clue to the nature and form of this ancient voice may be found in the behavior of modern radio receivers because they convert electromagnetic signals into audio-in effect, doing the same thing that the Earth did anciently. Early radio receivers often produced an annoying 'whistling' sound that can only be called an electronic glissando. This sound began at a very high tone, slid down to a very low tone, then slid back up to the high tone. In fact, the receiver was reproducing a long wavelength carrier frequency on which the program audio was superimposed or modulated. The carrier wave is normally suppressed by circuitry within the radio so that only the desirable program material-music or voice-was reproduced. The technology to suppress the carrier signal was crude in early receivers, hence the 'whistle' was often heard when attempting to tune the set. This 'whistle' holds the key to understanding the sacred name, YAHWEH. To understand the relationship, we must alter that crude 'whistle.' Perhaps the most useful device for its reproduction is a modern analog music synthesizer, which can be manipulated-using tone or waveform generators, envelope generators and a variety of filters-to produce "electronic" sounds of epic proportions. In fact, the 'whistle' effect can be enhanced and refined to reproduce what must certainly be a close approximation of the sound the ancients heard. First, we begin with 'pink noise'-a hissing, rumbling noise that contains all audible frequencies sounding at the same time, with extra emphasis on the lower frequencies. This is the simple 'shhhh' sound we make with our mouths when we wish to quiet a noisy child. This represents the omnipresent background noise in the Universe, generated by all the electromagnetic activity around us. We push that noise through a comb filter, which is driven by an extremely low frequency sine wave-a pure fundamental tone that is the equivalent of the electronic oscillations set up by intersecting planets in antiquity. The sine wave causes the filter to emphasize only those parts of the pink noise that correspond to its amplitude-the 'peak' of the wave emphasizes only the highest frequencies, the 'valley' of the wave emphasizes only the lowest frequencies. This produces a 'swishing' sound, much like that which you can make with your mouth by rapidly opening and closing your lips while making the "shhhh" sound. It sounds like the onomatopoeic word 'swish' repeated over and over. The sound heard by the ancients was undoubtedly far more complex due to its nature as a random or chaotic electromagnetic event. By adding several other minor tones to our sound, we arrive at an even more dynamic sound that, I believe, is more representative of the sound heard in antiquity. Finally, by increasing the amplitude of our fundamental sine wave-beginning with an extremely high-pitched, noisy tone that gradually shifts to an extremely low, rumbling frequency-we approach the dynamics of the ancient sound. The 'swish' now moves at a snail's pace and it varies from extremely high to extremely low frequencies. What we hear now is probably what the ancients heard. If you do not have access to an analog synthesizer, you can use your mouth and your voice to simulate an onomatopoeic expression of it. Using only the vowel sounds, begin by making the 'eeee' sound heard in the word 'me,' with your jaw closed. At the same time use your vocal cords to intone the highest tone possible. Proceed from vowel to vowel-eeee, aaaa, oooo-letting your jaw open gradually as you purse your lips, all the while dropping the frequency of the tone you are singing until you are at the lowest tone possible and your mouth forms a perfect 'o.' Then, without stopping, reverse the sequence of sounds and events until you end where you began, with the 'eeee' sound. You have just spoken the sacred name of God, YAHWEH, as the ancients heard it and subsequently articulated it in countless sacred ceremonies and holy proceedings in antiquity. It seems likely that this sound was heard repeatedly and in various forms. At times it would have been at a very low volume-almost a whisper. It would have seemed to the listener that the pianissimo voice was whispering right in one's ear. On other occasions it would have been a mind-numbing, ear-splitting cacophony that would have been felt as much as heard, seemingly penetrating the very fiber of one's being. Such descriptions of the voice of deity are replete in ancient records. Of course, this was not the only sound heard anciently as the result of electromagnetic waves turned audible. As others have suggested, trumpet-like sounds, drum-like sounds and ringing, bell-like sounds were heard. Thus, these instruments found their way into the liturgy of all cultures in an attempt to replicate (re-member, as Talbott put it) the sacred sounds. So, too, the chants and mantras of all religions, including the chorale renditions of modern Christianity, hearken back to those audible sounds produced when the planets stood in proximity to one another. One wonders if composers, like their artistic counterparts who draw on universal symbology for their inspiration, do not subconsciously draw on those ancient sounds to reproduce them in modern musical expressions. This would explain the power of some orchestral and choral compositions to affect emotional responses. Indeed, the more true a musical expression is to the ancient originals, the more power it would seem to have for its listeners. This would explain why these sounds are so important to sacred rites and rituals. They not only replicate the sounds, they duplicate the human response to them. These sounds, then, were literally the 'music of the spheres' and the 'voice of God'. Anthony Larson ************************************************************* PARADIGM PORTRAITS III: YOUNG GALAXIES By Amy Acheson This is from an article on the CNN website for Oct 6, 1999 The article begins: WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Hubble Space Telescope is giving astronomers new clues about the birth of spiral galaxies like our own. One team of astronomers studying pictures from Hubble said Wednesday they had confirmed that the central bulges of the more tightly wound spirals were all created at more or less the same time in the early universe. The team, led by Reynier Peletier from the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, used the Hubble to look into the center of 20 spiral galaxies that have large bulges. "What they found that is quite surprising is that all of them are old," Peletier said at a news conference Wednesday. "All of them were formed within a period of only two billion years." Amy comments: What they have left out of this analysis is how they determined that these galaxies were formed at "the same time in the early universe." All they have actually measured is the redshift. All they can say without invoking theoretical assumptions about what redshift means is that these 20 galaxies had similar (high) redshifts. What does this high redshift mean? In the conventional view, redshift was explained as a Doppler effect and only a Doppler effect. From this assumption, plus the observation that fainter galaxies seem to have higher redshifts, the whole idea of an expanding universe was deduced. From the expanding universe deduction, it followed that an object of high redshift will be farther away than an object of low redshift. Because it is farther away, its light will have been traveling for billions of years, so what we see now is what was happening billions of years ago. If all the members of a certain class of objects have high redshifts, then it is assumed that they are were all formed billions of years ago and that no galaxies of that type have been formed since. If we could teleport instantly from here to there (billions of light-years away) in the universe as hypothesized by mainstream astronomy (where redshift means Doppler effect and nothing else, we would presumably discover that all of these galaxies have "aged" and no longer have this "youthful" structure and appearance. If we then looked back from there to here, we would see billion year-old light from our familiar neighborhood, showing our own Milky Way and neighboring galaxies in this "young" form -- large bulges and tightly wound arms. Halton Arp's intrinsic redshift hypothesis would also conclude that these high redshift galaxies are "young". This may appear as though Arp is in agreement with mainstream astronomy. But there is an important difference. In Arp's cosmology, the high redshift is a property of the young galaxy itself. It is a measure of velocity or distance. So instead of automatically defining these galaxies as background objects based on their high redshift, Arp would examine the sky around each of them to see how they relate to nearby galaxies. Again and again and again he finds that quasars and galaxies of different redshifts high redshift form lines or arcs that are positioned in non-random formations in the sky. They are lined up along the spin axes of active galaxies. Again and again and again he finds high-redshift galaxies physically connected to low- redshift galaxies by gas clouds, radio isophotes and x-ray fields. When presented with the evidence, again and again and again, the mainstream astronomers and editors of the peer-reviewed journals say it's "just another isolated case." So what would you see in Arp's cosmos if you could step into that fantasy teleporter that we used on the mainstream universe and come out in the same "billions of light-years away" location that we visited in the conventional universe? Maybe nothing. The "redshift = velocity = distance" equation of the conventional viewpoint adds billions of light-years to the assumed distance of high redshift objects. From Arp's intrinsic redshift viewpoint, the universe we see is distributed in a much tighter configuration. Even the Hubble telescope hasn't probed as deeply into the universe as the expanding universe theories claim. But, unlike the expanding universe, the intrinsic redshift universe doesn't postulate that we know the beginning or the end, or even the "edges" of the universe, so let's assume that beyond the limits of what we see today, we will find something similar to what we see in our neighborhood. So look around. Even though the time is now billions of years later than what we might have seen from home, we can still expect to find a nice mix of galaxies -- low redshift and high, young and old, all connected, ejected, and evolving. The article continues: Scientists said the relatively brief incubation period for these galaxies could have happened through the collapse of a single hydrogen cloud or through the merging of primeval star clusters. "These bulges (in the spiral galaxies) are as old as the oldest galaxies we know of in the universe, which are the ellipticals and clusters," Peletier said. Amy comments: Arp discusses the ellipticals and the clusters, as well. There is more than one type of elliptical, and again astronomers have confused them by their redshift. The giant ellipticals of the Virgo and Fornax clusters are the most impressive groups of stars known. All have low redshifts, some of them even negative redshifts (blueshifts). The high-redshift ellipticals tend to be small, shapeless, sometimes no more than a handful of stars and some gas. Again, the expanding universe thesis assumes that these are normal ellipticals, dwarfed by their great distance. Arp sees them as nearby infant structures. In _SEEING RED_, he even argues that the clusters we see (supposedly in the far distance/past) are also front-row baby formations formed in the break-up of an unusual type of quasar called a BL Lac object. Are there any advantages to looking at the universe this way? Well, for one, in Arp's cosmology, we no longer have to look for that elusive dark matter and dark energy. Brought into their proper perspective, up close and personal, galaxies and clusters no longer behave as if they were super-dense. Quasars no longer eject jets at many times the speed of light. And even the biggest gamma ray bursts no longer appear as energetic as the Big Bang. All of these phenomena are distortions of perspective caused by the theoretical framework of the expanding universe/big bang cosmology. In Arp's cosmology, the problems simply disappear. As a bonus, Wal Thornhill's electric universe model, conceived in the mytho-historical celestial thunderbolts of planetary catastrophics, can explain how the galaxies are ejected and why their redshift changes. The rest of the CNN article (and a couple of delightful galaxy photos) can be found here: http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9910/06/hubble.pictures/index.html Amy Acheson ************************************************************* SUPERLUMINOUS EJECTION QUESTIONS A Kroniatalk discussion >From the introduction to the book Open Questions in Relativistic Physics by Franco Selleri: "Astrophysical evidence has been reported of superluminal (faster than light) propagations in jets emerging from galactic nuclei and in active clouds emitted from quasars. These can be explained away if quasars are indeed associated with nearby galaxies and their redshifts are not due to expansion. There remains the M87 ejections (blue knots propagating at a velocity of 5-6 c!) whose distance does not depend on redshift, but was obtained from Cepheids, planetary nebulae, apparent size of galaxy, etc. This distance is somewhere near 50 million light years. The M87 evidence was reported immediately after our conference." Amy Acheson wants to know: What does this mean? At first reading, it seems to contradict relativity, the expanding universe and the intrinsic redshift models. Don Scott discusses the problems associated with determining the velocity of the blue knots: I'll take a very brief shot at this . . . The only stars whose distance can be directly measured are those that apparently move against the far distant background because of parallax. The parallax effect is what you observe by viewing a close object - say a person about 10 feet away - first with one eye and then the other. The person appears to move from side to side against the background. The same effect occurs when we make two observations (6 months apart, making the baseline distance the diameter of Earth's orbit) of a relatively close star. If the star apparently moves one second of arc (1/3600 of a degree) we say it is at a distance of one "parsec" (parallax second). It was discovered that a few dozen of these relatively close stars were variable in brightness (the most notable of these was discovered in the constellation Cepheus and so they were called Cepheids. It was subsequently discovered that the period of brightness fluctuation of Cepheids was proportional to their absolute luminosity - and "therefore" if any star was observed to be a Cepheid type variable, it is assumed that its absolute luminosity can be calculated. Knowing the absolute luminosity, the distance can then be calculated via an inverse square law. There are several assumptions in all of this that may or may not hold up. The original population of observable Cepheids was very small; there are at least two "populations" of Cepheids in our galaxy (and the Magellanic clouds) each having its own period- luminosity characteristic; and it is assumed that Cepheid type stars in other galaxies have the same period-luminosity characteristic as the ones near us do. The important statement in the paragraph is: "There remains the M87 ejections (blue knots propagating at a velocity of 5-6 c!) whose distance does not depend on redshift, but was obtained from Cepheids, planetary nebulae, apparent size of galaxy, etc." Does he mean that Cepheid stars have been observed in the "blue knots"? I am willing to bet not. I am willing to bet that although the distance to M87 can possibly be measured without reference to redshift (Maybe. I'd like see specifics.), the ejecta have intrinsic redshifts, different from M87, that indicate their age and not their velocity. Wal Thornhill adds: Don gives a very good summary of some of the problems associated with determining the velocity of the blue knots being ejected from the core of the giant active elliptical galaxy M87. The distance to the jets is obviously the same as that of M87. The blue knots however have no spectral lines with which to measure a redshift. In fact they are so close to the nucleus of M87 that on Arp's model (or more correctly, Ambartsumian's model) they are newly born. The knots are strong sources of UV and hard x-rays. I would like to know more about the reported superluminal speeds of the knots. My information from the book 'Galaxies' by Timothy Ferris says that the jets are 15,000 years old and have achieved a length of 5,000 light years which is clearly not superluminal. I presume that such figures are derived from radio-telescope observations. I think that faster than light speeds may not be a problem in a non-Einsteinian electric universe. Once we acknowledge that he (and everyone else) didn't have a clue what is meant by mass then the interpretation of the increasing difficulty of accelerating particles in an electromagnetic field as due to increasing mass of those particles is a cranky supposition. And if Sansbury is right and the electrostatic force is instantaneous then it seems to me that the possibility of faster than light movement lies open. As well, there is then such a thing as universal time, time travel is impossible (sorry Dr Who but your police box is permanently out of order), clocks don't have to run slower than each other as Einstein's Special Theory requires, space is not warped in another dimension and has no connection with time, measuring rods do not change length as they approach the speed of light, and Schrodinger's moggy can get on with its nine lives without worrying about some demented physicist observer. What a wonderful universe! Halton Arp was of the opinion that the blobs formed near the centre of an active galaxy are created with practically zero mass and acquired mass over time, slowing down in the process. Because the blobs are near massless they can, like photons, travel initially at near light speeds. He may be right. I can see the outlines of an answer to this puzzle based upon the electrostatic dipole theory of inertial mass. In a private communication, Halton Arp says that the superluminal velocity was computed by parallax: Some small knots in M87 were observed with HST to be moving in position from year to year. That computed out to be 5-6 c apparent velocity at the distance of M87. But after the usual assumptions about projection angle and relativistic corrections they got the physical velocity down to ~.9999c. But at almost c they have to pump almost infinite energy into the motion so they really have not solved anything as they would have you believe. ************************************************************** FOUNTAINS OF IO By Wal Thornhill The following quote is from a recent NASA report. It relates to an image taken from NASA's infrared telescope at Mauna Kea, Hawaii, at about the same time that Galileo did its close fly-by of Io. See http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/PIAGenCatalogPage.pl?PIA02522 It shows a bright spot which is taken to be the same bright lava fountain that was supposedly recorded by Galileo's camera. The report continues: "When this image was taken, the fiery lava fountain was almost on the edge of Io's disk and about to disappear from view due to Io's rotation. The lava fountain was seen from an angle just 5.5 degrees above horizontal. Its prominence when seen so obliquely confirms that this eruption is indeed composed of fiery fountains rising up above the surface; horizontal lava flows would be much harder to see from so close to the horizontal." It is even easier to see cathode jets lit from below by hot spots at 5 or 6,000K on the surface of Io. One good distinguishing test might be to look for multiply ionized atoms in the spectrum of the so-called lava fountains. High ionization states would be expected from the electric arc model but not from lava. Wal Thornhill See the home of The Electric Universe at http://www.holoscience.com ************************************************************** PATTERNS OF HUMAN MEMORY By Michel Tavir, Dave Talbott Michel Tavir wrote: Human remembrance, forgetfulness and the good old days: every single person living in coastal Western Europe "knows" that the weather has changed in the past few decades. Every single person "knows" that when they were children, there was always snow at Christmas. Well, sort of. Meteorological records tell us another story: two white Xmas's in the past 50 years or so. Memory and the use humans make of it are very fascinating things indeed. Dave Talbott Replied: Gotta disagree with you here concerning the meaning of the "exemplary" epoch, since I believe you are referring to my comments on the Golden Age. Comparative analysis will show that the memory of the Golden Age is much more than a recollection of "the good old days". It is a global idea with very specific content: passage from timelessness to time; rule of the universal sovereign as first king "on earth", a superior, motionless sun in the sky; identification of this "sun" with the first king; paradisal garden divided by four rivers of life; identity of the garden with the turning "wheel" of the sun; identification of the "hub" or "nave" of the wheel with the mother goddess; identification of the "axle" of the wheel with the unborn warrior- hero; placement of a crescent on this same wheel; location of paradise on the summit of a mountain reaching to the center of the sky; identity of the original sovereign with Saturn; identification of the goddess with Venus; identification of the warrior-hero with Mars; violent collapse of the paradisal condition; exile or displacement of the original sovereign; subsequent wars of the gods; subsequent regeneration of the world-- to name only the most elementary components of the idea. All of this relates to the matter of memory "and the use humans make of it", which I do see as the key, though not quite in the sense I think you are implying :-). When investigating events witnessed around the world, the patterns of human memory enable us to draw conclusions of a far more specific and dependable sort than could be obtained through physical evidence or physical theory in the absence of human testimony. Initially, almost no one will realize this. But to discover that this is indeed true, it is only necessary to follow the appropriate groundrules. The groundrules are designed to expose the substratum of memory beneath all of the regional fragments, enabling one to speak for the substratum with the highest level of confidence. Quite frankly, this has been the most difficult point for a few of our readers to grasp, and we continue to hear references to "Saturnist's subjective interpretation of myth" and the like (c.f., Lynn Rose's and Peter James' comments at the recent SIS conference). But the purpose of pattern identification is to REMOVE all subjective interpretation, to assure that the reconstruction rests on cross-cultural points of agreement, where the patterns cannot be disputed. For example, no one can dispute that ancient words translated as "the sun" were words for Saturn in ancient astronomies. That's all we need to know, and the fact that one critic or another can guess at an alternative "explanation" to the one offered by the Saturn model is utterly irrelevant to the validity or non-validity of the Saturn model. All anomalies have prompted proposed "explanations" and that includes hundreds of recurring themes. If we had to separate out every theme and base a defense of the Saturn model on our ability to prove our interpretation WITH RESPECT TO THAT THEME ALONE, we would indeed be in trouble! The only issue logically is the predictive power of the Saturn model in relation to the substructure as a whole. Taken as a whole, the global patterns do not just suggest certain external events, they REQUIRE them. To see that this is so, however, one must consider the patterns with sufficient specificity and completeness, eliminating all selective perception. Considered in isolation from the larger patterns, all we can expect is a madhouse of guesses and interpretations. But when it comes to the full substratum, no fundamentally false "explanation" could possibly work. This truth, however, will be recognized only AFTER enough of the substratum has become sufficiently clear to the researcher to eliminate any doubt concerning the underlying coherence of the patterns Once one is willing to consider ALL verifiable patterns, it will become clear that they are all connected to each other, that they are entirely consistent with each other, and that, from top to bottom, they explicitly and flagrantly contradict all patterns in our sky today. Had the planetary forms not appeared in the ancient sky, such detailed and coherent patterns simply could not be there. [The comment which follows is not directed at Michel, who has shown a sincere interest in these issues] When I think about, I'd have to say that we Saturnists have been remarkably tolerant of the more extreme abuses of logic and common sense by certain critics :-) At the SIS conference, AFTER Ev had presented numerous illustrations of global imagery showing Venus smack in the center of the ancient and universal "sun" pictograph, Peter James stood up and drew a picture of a circle with rays, telling the audience that children naturally draw the Sun that way, end of mystery. Did he not HEAR Ev's presentation? :-) Did he not SEE the pictures Ev showed? :-) Did he not wonder why Venus was drawn as a SPHERE in the center of the depicted "sun"? Or why the streamers of Venus were shown reaching across the entire face of the larger body? Did he not wonder why the images are identical to ancient pictures of "Saturn's wheel"? Or wonder if there is any connection between such images and the ancient language of Saturn as "sun"? Peter James is a scholar commanding great respect. But after viewing his SIS comments, I am prompted to ask: If a critic will not even engage the first scratches on the surface in our presentation of acknowledged patterns, are we not permitted to doubt the sincerity of his interest? Michel wrote: Sacrifice is a fairly vast notion. I wonder whether sacrifice of animals (found in its "purest" form in clan initiation rituals) and human sacrifice (found in its uttermost form in holy wars - but aren't all wars "holy"?) can be equated. Some hints as to the mythical significance of the former (initiation consisting in the intake of the clan's animal's spirit by sacrificing it) might be found, if I remember well, in Carlos Castaneda's later books. Dave replied: Sacrifice does indeed take many different ritual forms, and these collective practices certainly do reflect memories of planetary upheaval. But they also draw our attention to a deeper human tendency, and this tendency, I believe, must be confronted as a pre-condition to any healing deserving of the name. If we peel away the respective ritual forms of sacrifice, we will eventually confront a root idea more fundamental than any collective practice. By the "sacrifice principle" I mean the idea that something (be it yours or mine, a thing, a possession, or life itself) must be given up in order for ME to gain an advantage. How did this idea arise? There is nothing inherent in planetary catastrophe to make ritual sacrifice "logical", unless an underlying premise had already been accepted. (I do realize that more needs to be said to make the point clear.) Michel: "The principle of sacrifice involves an obstruction of human awareness, a barrier to the innate sense of the unity of life". this does not seem - repeat seem - to apply to the cannibalistic sacrifice of war prisoners among pre-Portuguese Brazilian Indians - where prisoners received the best and most honourable treatment before they were sacrificed and eaten (hearts first). I would associate this kind of sacrifice with the type of animal sacrifice mentioned above, whereas animal sacrifice in the ancient religions of the Mediterranean (including Judaism) resembles Amerindian human sacrifices, for instance. But keep in mind that the "honorable treatment" you refer to above cannot be separated from the honor being paid to the sacrifice principle itself. The distinctions you make between ritual practices are surely valid, but all forms of sacrifice do express an underlying, uniquely human conflict, or a contradiction in human motivation and perception, if you will. Rather than address the point here, which would unfairly imply that I'm directing the comments toward something you have said, Michel I will post some further notes on the sacrifice principle separately. Michel: Not sure I can formulate where the line should be drawn, if a line has to be drawn, that is. Cruelty, maybe? The birth and the success of Christianity reflecting times when people felt pretty sure that the planetary gods had stopped "acting" (or had forgotten that they had been acting) and that they no longer had to be appeased with sacrifices? Nonetheless, the abolition of ritualistic sacrifice didn't keep cruelty away from Christianity, until very recently at least. Incidentally, it seems that ancient Greece, as opposed to most of the cultures and time periods we can turn our eyes to, shunned the practice of cruelty towards fellow humans (not that it was unheard of: the gods of the Pantheon made a generous use of it). Dave: I would suggest that when thinking philosophically, no "lines" be drawn in response to the sacrifice principle, since the distinctions between different expressions of the principle are only matters of degree and of variations in the form of projection involved. But an acknowledgment of the sacrifice principle and its effects is, I believe, essential both to constructive self-inquiry and to cultural healing. The value of penetrating to the taproot principle is that, once we discover that the idea is contradicted by another principle we know to be true and do not wish to violate, then only one correction is necessary. On the other hand, if we do not confront the taproot, we will tend to treat some forms of the error as advantageous, some as harmless, and some as unforgivable. And that pretty well encompasses the human condition in all its variations. Michel: "Guilt" is a concept extremely peculiar to Judaism and Christianity. As such, I believe, its "bandwidth" is too narrow to be useful when considering events on a planetary scale over such a time range as implied since the Saturn configuration. Dave: I do not believe that it is correct to limit the influence of "guilt"-concepts to Judaic-Christian influences. If there is no sense of SOMEBODY'S guilt, there can be no sense of "deserved punishment", and wherever actions or events are seen as deserved punishment, some idea of guilt (either "mine" or "yours") must be present. In fact many instances could be given from around the world in which the "guilty" party is a god. Much of Egyptian and Mesopotamian magic can be seen as early variations on the theme of "casting out the devil". Accordingly, various rites were designed to continue indefinitely the "punishment" of a guilty god or goddess, the male or female form of the chaos monster (witch- burning being the most familiar instance). This is only one variation on the scapegoat principle and that, too, is a form of sacrifice and certainly does involve the projection of guilt. All of this requires something more than a natural event. It requires that human imagination see events in a particular way. I simply do not believe that any experience of "guilt" is possible apart from a prior attraction to the sacrifice principle. (But again, I realize that what I mean by the "sacrifice principle" needs further explanation, and I'll try to get to that.) 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