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 I, No. 3 February 18, 1997 EDITOR: Michael Armstrong PUBLISHER: Walter Radtke CONTENTS: EDITORIAL SECTION...........................Michael Armstrong SATURN THEORY, OVERVIEW (3).....................David Talbott AGE LIMITS OF THE EARTH'S BIOSPHERE........Dr. Robert W. Bass ------------------------------------------------------------------ EDITORIAL SECTION By Michael Armstrong (mikamar at e-z.net) Quote of the day: Then Solomon built a high place for Chemosh,... and for Molech (Saturn). 1 Kings 11:7 Chronos, marker of time. But how much time? In this issue Dr. Robert Bass introduces two of the more straightforward indicators for the outside limit of the age of the bioshpere, as it is now generally constituted, being in the range of tens of thousands of years. One other powerful, very simple and significant indicator is the decline or decay of the earth's magnetic field. This is seldom talked about, but the earth's magnetic field has been carefully measured and recorded for some centuries now. The curve of the decay when projected back just 2000 years gives a value that is 3 times as great. In "geologic" time scales this is an incredibly huge rate of decay, and if projected back some 30,000 years gives values that are unacceptably high. Other crude yet simple indicators that there was a major upheaval within the last 10,000 years are the salinity increase rate for the Dead Sea (about 5000-6000 years), the rate of erosion for the Niagara Falls escarpment (5000-6000 years), the rate of erosion of the sandstone bluff along the shipping channel crack at South Whidbey island, etc., etc. The point is that essentially all cosmologists have proposed some kind of astral catastrophism, but generally insist that these catastrophes happened eons ago, buttressing their position with questionable dating methods, and counting on inertia to hold their world view together. But if major upheavals happened within human memory, it is now time to listen with an open mind to what ancient peoples have to say on the subject. SATURN THEORY, OVERVIEW (3) By David Talbott (dtalbott at teleport.com) In the course of these submissions, I'll attempt to engage various comments by others, trying to maintain a sense of direction at the same time. In response to my previous notes, Vine Deloria wrote-- > OK - then all we need is to establish the various sequences of > interaction with earth and try to get some dates down - even > approximations - and some idea of the disruption of our strata >here plus whatever was "dumped" from the other planets and we >have something to work with. > >We can now ...ask the question - how did human society and/or > civilizations get off the ground..., etc Chronology. Physical Evidence. Dynamics. All of these issues intertwine. Moreover, various individuals exploring catastrophist ideas will work from different perspectives, and will hold different ideas as to what constitutes the most solid ground for a starting point. The solid ground in my own orientation to these things is the substratum of human memory. It is this substratum that raises the deepest historical questions and sends us scurrying about to find answers, even if the answers upset various specialists, asking them to reconsider the most fundamental assumptions of their discipline. My own conclusion came as a great surprise: the substratum of human memory is incredibly dependable. But others would consider that to be a losing proposition out of the gate. So there's an immediate problem of communication here. (A definition just to avoid misunderstanding: By the "substratum of human memory" I don't mean Jungian collective memory, though Jungian archetypes may indeed come into the equation in the bigger picture. For now, I mean the common mythical, symbolic and ritual themes of widely separate cultures. Another way of putting it might be, "Points of agreement concerning remembered events.") In this inquiry, I think there are certain things we can all agree on. Truth is unifying, because it eliminates contradictions. When you are looking for the truth of a matter, any significant and incontrovertible fact is good news, because it can save you from heading in the wrong direction. It's particularly good news if it compels you to change your mind, because in doing so it has liberated you from a burden that could only grow. When it comes to the more fundamental errors, a whole life time could be spent on a dead-end course. Physical data and physical theory will be involved--and implicated-- at every step. Whatever happened is not impossible. What is impossible didn't happen. There will be no unified theory in the sense we are all looking for, until what was remembered can be comprehended. Not just comprehended as a set of anciently- supported images, but comprehended in terms of what is possible, and in terms of the physical signature of the events involved. But before I wander off, let's return to THE ONE STORY TOLD AROUND THE WORLD. Since we are claiming this to be one memory reflected in the myth-making adventure as a whole, I had better republish the story. (Already my second printing. It's not long, you will recall): Once the world was quite a different place. In the beginning, we were ruled by the central luminary of the sky, the motionless sun, presiding over an age of natural abundance and cosmic harmony. *Creator*-king, father of kings, founder of the kingship rites. And this earliest remembered time was the *exemplary* epoch, the Golden Age, the standard for all later generations. But the ancient order was disrupted and the entire cosmos fell into confusion, when the Universal Monarch tumbled from his appointed station. Then the hordes of chaos were set loose and all of creation slipped into a cosmic night, the gods themselves battling furiously in the heavens. And yet, from this descent into chaos, a new world emerged, now re-configured, but with the Universal Monarch himself, rejuvenated and transformed, assuming his rightful place in the heavens. THE END What an outrageous claim to make--to suggest that there are no domains of ancient myth that can be isolated from this singular story! But I am not just arguing by proclamation here. I am contending that the truth can be demonstrated by following certain rules. Call these the RULES FOR RE-ENVISIONING HUMAN HISTORY. Our first rule is: we will always work from the general motif to the specific. A second is: only broadly recurring themes count as evidence, particularly in the early stages of the reconstruction. And there is a third rule: Earlier-recorded versions of the recurring themes must be permitted to explain later variants. Okay, just one more rule: we must allow ancient drawings to illuminate the myths and rites, while permitting the myths and rites to illuminate the drawings. This last rule is crucial because, around the world, ancient skygazers drew remarkably similar pictures of things that do not exist in our sky. And the things depicted are the *subjects* of the myths and rites, though this vital truth has not been generally recognized, either by catastrophists or by mainstream scholars. Now let's take the ONE STORY a step further, in response to Vine's question: how many archetypal figures of myth are there? There are SEVEN, I say with smug assurance. Well there *are* just seven! But it all depends how you count these guys (and gals). For openers, we know there is at least one archetypal figure, because he is the god whose ancient name was "ONE", the primeval, all-encompassing "Unity". This figure is, of course, the Universal Monarch, the subject of our ONE STORY (So our ONE STORY might be subtitled the "The Story of ONE'"). Examples would include: Egyptian Atum and Ra, Sumerian An and Utu, Akkadian Anu and Shamash, Hindu Varuna and Brahma, Greek Ouranos and Kronos, Aztec Ometeotl and Quetzalcoatl, to name a few. Our claim is that all others stories, all other archetypal figures, when investigated at the core, lead back to the ONE STORY, intersecting with this story in the most remarkable and explicit ways. Here are the other figures: QUEEN OF HEAVEN Wherever you find the Universal Monarch you will find close at hand the ancient mother goddessÐthe goddess whom the Sumerians called Inanna, the Queen of Heaven, and the Babylonians Ishtar, and the Egyptians Isis, Hathor, and Sekhmet, each with numerous counterparts in their own and in other lands, and virtually all of them viewed symbolically as daughter or spouse of the creator- king, and the mother of another, equally prominent figure. WARRIOR-HERO This is the great national hero, originally the Demiurge, the servant of the creator-king, but passing into later myth as the laboring warrior, messenger or servant of a great chief or regional ruler. He is the Hercules archetype, a figure combining knowledge and brutish strength, quick wit and episodic foolishness. He defeats the chaos monsters in primordial times, and he reconfigures the world. With a personality clearly dominating the later mythical chronicles, the warrior-hero is the prototype of the famous tricksters and buffoons of later myth and folklore, flowering into thousands of tribal variations. Egyptian Shu, Horus and Sept, Akkadian Nergal, Hindu Indra, Norse Thor, Greek Ares and Hercules, Aztec Huitzilopochtli. Also, in North America: Coyote and Raven. But countless others as well, because the warrior-hero is far and away the most active figure in the myths. PRIMEVAL SEVEN These satellite figures are presented in a variety of contexts, as wise men, patriarchs, seers, children, dwarves, stones of fate, stars, orbs, heads of the chaos monster. They are the first reason for the sanctity of the number seven in ancient symbolism. CHAOS MONSTER Here we meet the darker, more menacing powers, possessing an often-hidden link to aspects of the mother goddess or warrior-hero type. Of these darker creatures none is more prominent than the cosmic serpent or dragon, a monster that descends on the world to preside over the twilight of the gods, and whose ultimate defeat signals the birth of a new age or, symbolically, a new year. Babylonian Tiamat. Egyptian dragon of Apep. Greek Typhon. But within every culture, endless variations will be found: hundreds of monsters repeating the primeval catastrophe, each providing a different nuance, a different accent, a different way of remembering the cosmic agent of Doomsday. CHAOS HORDES These are the companions of the monster figures. They are the swarming powers of disorder and calamity, the fiends of darkness--flaming, devouring demons which so many magical rites were contrived to ward off. From the Norse Valkyries to the Greek Erinyes, from the Babylonian Pazuzu-demons to the Egyptian "Fiends of Set." Every culture remembered the onslaught of these chaos demons, moving across the heavens as a sky-darkening cloud and ushering in the cosmic night. In their earliest expressions, they do not just announce the primeval catastrophe, they *are* the catastrophe. REJUVENATED CREATOR-KING And lastly, there is the compelling personality of the dying god- king, often a resurrected or transformed figure, whose springing back to life is reflected in the dramas of the New Year, symbolically the passing from one age to another. Though his identity is inseparably tied to the Universal Monarch, he nevertheless emerges in distinction from that god as his *son*Ðthe younger version, or *rejuvenated* form of his own father. Examples would include: Egyptian Osiris, Akkadian Marduk; Persian Ahura Mazda; Norse Balder; Hebrew Yahweh; Phoenician Bel, Greek Zeus. So there are just seven archetypal personalities of myth, if you count them in this way. We are not separating the chaos monster into it's male and female aspects, so we count only one monster. We *are* separating the Universal Monarch into his elder and younger versions, however. We arrive, therefore, at our first critical juncture. An acid test. Can a mere seven categories actually encompass all of world mythology? While there are numerous complexities and ambiguities to slow us down periodically, the vast majority of well-documented regional figures of myth can be readily identified in terms of these archetypes. And the implications are quite astounding if you set this principle beside the different theories offered to explain myth in the past. NOT A SINGLE THEORY PROPOSED BEFORE VELIKOVSKY OPENED THE DOOR WILL ACCOUNT FOR THE ARCHETYPES, THE BEDROCK OF MYTH. But the implications become all the more astounding when you begin to see that each of the archetypal figures is linked in no uncertain terms to the ONE STORY. (I'll give some key examples in the next few submissions.) A *universal structure* to ancient memory is present. The six additional biographies re-tell the "story of ONE", but each with a slight turn of the prism, putting the focus on a particular aspect of the story and providing more colorful action and detail. What an amazing principle, if true. Of all the skills that the independent researcher might bring to this inquiry, none will prove more crucial than that of pattern recognition. There is structure to myth. Structure that has never been sufficiently acknowledged. Structure implies coherence, an integrity between the parts. Clearly human imagination must have gone wild to have produced the incredible vistas of the ancient mythscape. But structure is there too, and structure means that human imagination was not operating in a vacuum. What could have unleashed human imagination in this way, while yet inspiring a universal myth? Nothing less than the most awesome and traumatic experiences in human history, I would say. Dave AGE LIMITS OF THE EARTH'S BIOSPHERE By Dr. Robert W. Bass (rbrtbass at ix.netcom.com) Recently I spoke on the phone with my old friend, Nitro-Nobel Medalist & physical chemist, Dr. Melvin Cook, who is now 85 and "totally blind" (except that he can read a computer when it is set to 150X Magnification and thereby he is still reading & writing research papers). Cook received a special Gold Medal in Stockholm in 1968 for doing the best work on the physical chemistry of High Explosives since Alfred Nobel discovered dynamite in 1867. (This medal was awarded by Nobel's company, not the Nobel Foundation, and it was for, among other things, inventing non-dangerous "slurry explosives" which are blasting agents as powerful as nitroglycerine but not anywhere so dangerous to handle.) One of Cook's most extraordinary breakthroughs came when he discovered, by accident, and then _explained_ theoretically the remarkable phenomenon of a fully ionized plasma in the state of a liquid metal (rather than a gas, which is what all conventional plasma theorists believe is the ONLY possibility). Though he is not infallible, he is certainly a genius who has made very important discoveries. And his works on prehistory merit serious study. Cook is the author of the highly-scientific, very quantitative, and very difficult to read book "Prehistory & Earth Models" (PEM) published in London by Max Parrish & Co in 1966, but now out of print. The book is highly condensed, and reading is complicated by use of 3-letter acronyms for almost every technical term the second time -- and all later times -- but the book is in my opinion extremely valuable. In 1993 Dr. Cook (a retired Prof. of Metallurgy at the U of Utah) updated PEM by a new book "Scientific Prehistory", 336 pages, many photos, tables, drawings, and graphs, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 93-74404. This is a leather-covered hardbound book. Cook had 150 copies printed and placed in 150 libraries so it CAN be borrowed, but I don't believe that any copies are available for sale. Cook's address is: Dr. Melvin A. Cook, 1586 East Tomahawk Drive, Salt Lake City, UT 84103. In December, 1993, Cook put out a 15-page privately-printed paper which summarizes the main findings (especially the main NOVEL findings in comparison to PEM) of his new book. I have the impression that Cook would send a free copy of the paper to anyone who writes & requests it. I believe that his material on solar nuclides would interest plasma cosmologists such as Wal Thornhill. Like the late Ralph Juergens, who had an isothermal model of the Sun, Cook does not believe in the conventional fusion-energy explanation of the Sun's energy, and he provides evidence that all of the Sun's energy can be explained" by the observed rate of matter falling into the Sun (i.e. rate of accretion). Cook has chapters on ALL of the radiometric dating methods, and in my opinion, demolishes them all. He also computes that IF the cosmic rays are in "nuclear thermodynamic equilibrium" (NTE) then the Solar System and Earth are about 4.5 billion years old. However, the surface features of the Earth cannot possibly be more than 100,000 years old for many reasons. For example (& the Editor of "Nature" admitted that this is the biggest anomaly which ever crossed his desk) the radiogenic helium escaping from the Earth's crust at a known rate and escaping into outer space at a known rate "prove" that the present atmosphere cannot be more than 100,000 years old. See "Where is the earth's radiogenic helium?," _Nature_, vol. 177 (1957), p. 215. Also, radiocarbon is being produced in the stratosphere at a rate TWENTY FIVE PERCENT discrepant with its well-measured absorption into the hydrosphere, lithosphere & biosphere; Cook once showed me correspondence that he had with Willard Libby over 25 years wherein Libby finally admitted he was wrong, the discrepancy is REAL and cannot be ignored. The deduction is that the Earth's atmosphere cannot be more than 30,000 years old, else it would have attained equilibrium already, which it has NOT! In Cook's view, the radiocarbon balance in the earth's atmosphere has attained 73 percent of its equilibrium value in the approximately 5,000 years "since the Flood." In his latest unpublished paper Cook is providing evidence for a theory that the Flood resulted from a combination of his ice-cap model tipping the Earth or its crust as a result of certain Asteroid impacts which he thinks he has pinpointed. [this statement is made on Cook's verbal summary to me, and may be inaccurate] Physicist Dr. Larry Vardiman has jumped onto the helium-escape problem, and written a 32-page mathematical paper: THE AGE OF THE EARTH'S ATMOSPHERE: a Study of the Helium Flux through the Atmosphere, 1990 in which he reviews in detail dozens of mainstream attempts to explain away the anomaly, and satisfied me (as a professional mathematician who checked his differential equations) that they have failed, and that the present atmosphere could have been produced in at most 2 million years. (This of course is 2,500 TIMES shorter than the uniformitarian age of the earth.) He quotes mainstream experts as admitting that "this helium escape problem will not go away, and it is unsolved." Vardiman has also written an impressive-looking paper on the Ice Core dating method (which I have not studied myself). At the recent Portland conference, on "Planetary Violence in Human History Dr. Paul LaViolette disputed the Hapgood "Earth Crust Slippage" theory as argued by Rand & Rose Flem-Ath to place Plato's lost continent of Atlantis under Lesser Antarctica (which was supposedly in the Temperate Zone up until 10,500 years ago), by means of Ice Core dating. Hence, Vardiman's study of the flaws & fallacies in that method should be of interest to Dr. Laviolette. Personally, I find the Earth-crust slippage model much more likely than the entire earth tipping over. Nevertheless, in my 1987 paper at Glasgow (of which I no longer have a copy) I mentioned that the Australian government Astronomer for West Australia had sent me an unpublished book showing his historical researches on the Obliquity of the Ecliptic (in which he compared the tilt from "gnomon measurements" and as they got more ancient the departure from the famous formula of Simon Newcomb became more & more pronounced. This Cambridge-trained astronomer then fit the observations with a dynamical model of the earth as a spinning top, and showed that the observations indicated that the axis of the earth was stabilizing in a new position after the entire earth had turned over about 2,500 BC (or whatever his particular dating of the Flood was). I also have to admit that I have not yet checked out the mathematical accuracy of a paper sent me by a "Saturnist" mathematician in Italy named Dr. Spedicato by his friend, a Prof. Barbiero, in which Barbiero posits that an asteroid hitting the spinning earth under certain conditions could cause the Earth itself (rather than merely its crust) to tilt by a large amount. Reading the Flem-Ath book has motivated me to want to check the Barbiero calculation, but there are not enough hours in the day! Bob ----------------------------- Suggested Web site URL's for more information about Catastrophics: http://www.ames.net/aeon/ http://www.knowledge.co.uk/xxx/cat/sis/ http://www.flash.net/~cjransom/ http://www.knowledge.co.uk/xxx/cat/velikovskian/ http://www.kronia.com/~kronia/ http://www.access.digex.net/~medved/Catastrophism.html Mikamar Publishing mikamar at e-z.net