You've just entered the theater of an alien sky.
If the words and images seem strange to you there's a reason for this.
Our world was once a vastly different place.
To experience this won't hurt you and there's nothing to fear.
In our previous episode, we observed the critical role of a great crescent in
the ancient sky. The placement of this crescent on the sphere of an
enigmatic body called the primeval Sun is one of the unresolved mysteries of the ancient world.
The first step in a resolution must be to honor the early historic descriptions
of things not seen in our sky today.
The crescent had nothing to do with our moon, and the great sphere on which the
crescent appeared certainly was not our Sun. It was the sphere at the gas giant Saturn,
appearing as a massive body visually dominating the sky.
Yes, today's Sun was present.
It was the Sun that cast the illuminated crescent on the towering form of Saturn.
But, why the incessant contradiction of our familiar sky?
Ancient astronomies place Saturn at a preposterous location, far from the
orbit that we know today. Saturn occupied the celestial pole, the axial center of the turning heavens.
This unthinkable idea, when taken with the seriousness it deserves,
places stringent demands on our reconstruction -
and an inescapable requirement that the crescent revolve around the polar center
in a cycle of day and night. Descending to the left at sunset,
below at midnight, rising to the right at sunrise, and standing inverted above at noon.
Of course, in this description we're using the modern language of day and night.
But the language is reversed in more ancient times.
It's well established that the ancient counting of days was from sunset to sunset.
We explain this language by an ancient reverence for that moment in the
daily cycle when the planetary configuration exploded into life
at the beginning of the archaic day.
But there's much more to this story.
The symbolism of the crescent takes on far-reaching implications with the
emergence of the cosmic pillar, a form we noted only briefly in the previous segment.
The pillar, linked to the movement of the planet Mars,
arose with the descent of material from the red planet toward the Earth,
creating a form universally interpreted, not just as a pillar,
but as the axial World Mountain, the cosmic support and resting place
of the creator himself, the primeval Sun.
A mountain of fire and light, the mountain of creation, the mountain of assembly,
an axial pillar around which the heavens visually turned,
all meaningless in the absence of the original referent in the sky.
A single cosmic column inspired the diverse images of the crescent at the summit.
Suddenly things were seen imaginatively that were not imagined previously:
the mythic mountain of the moon;
the outstretched arms or wings of a divine celestial figure;
shining horns, a horned pillar called the Bull of Heaven;
a cleft peak, or twin peaks; twin supports of the sky, as extensions of the central column;
a revolving crescent ship on its mooring post;
and we can add countless ancient images and pictographs of the daily cycle.
We explain the full range of mythic images by the placement and movement of the crescent.
Each and every mythic form inspired by the crescent must have revolved in the sky
- against all seeming logic, against all familiar human experience.
And not just a revolving crescent form, but revolution in a precise relationship
to an archaic daily cycle. A contradiction of anything and
everything that could be said of a daily cycle today.
Every mythic interpretation of the crescent thus becomes an acid test.
That means, a test the reconstruction must meet and alternative explanations could not meet.
A crescent form seen as the arms of a celestial figure.
Upright and inverted arms in a predictable relationship
to opposite phases of growing bright and growing dim.
One phase seen as the twin or double of the other.
The phase of brilliance, arms upright, produced the images of life and power,
the phase of dimming, with arms inverted came to mean negation, or absence of life.
This unique mythic role of a revolving crescent as outstretched arms in a daily cycle,
can only open our minds to a much broader range of myths and symbols.
What about the other mythic forms of the crescent,
since they must also have rotated absurdly around a central star?
We'll show that every predicted correspondence occurs in explicit detail, the more archaic the tradition,
the more precise the correspondence, as we would expect,
all with no explanations available under common suppositions about the ancient sky.