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 is nothing to fear.
The Great Comet Venus
The planet Venus.
A closest planetary neighbor and the brightest star in the sky.
Poets the world over have long considered Venus
as a celestial symbol of charm and enchantment.
The morning star transitioning to evening star, then back to morningstar.
But more ancient traditions about the planet
run much deeper with enigmas at every turn.
Tales of wonder and terror attached to Venus
seem entirely out of place in our tranquil heavens.
Within the common theoretical frameworks today, there's just no room
for the extraordinary sky-altering events once remembered around the world.
That today's quiet planet could have formally appeared as a great monster,
a serpent or dragon attacking the Earth, may indeed seem too much to believe.
And yet anomalies abound at every turn,
inexplicably Venus is the only planet revered globally
as a celestial symbol of the mother goddess, both the love goddess,
a goddess of unrivaled radiance and an angry goddess
linked to earth-shaking and even world-ending catastrophe.
This global contradiction must have an explanation
even if that explanation has been entirely missed in contemporary studies.
Today Venus moves on an orbit 67 million miles from the Sun,
compared to Earth's distance from the Sun, of 96 million miles.
But many clues suggest a historic connection of Venus to the Earth
and these clues include the geometries of their motions today,
both the rotation of Venus and its revolution around the Sun
exhibit a synchronous connection to Earth's motions.
5 Venus' years equal 8 Earth years.
While the usual planetary rotation is from west to east, Venus rotates in reverse,
though remarkably slowly in contrast to the solar system norm.
A Venus day of full rotation is longer than its year,
the time it takes to complete a revolution around the Sun.
But a Venus' year almost exactly matches the timing of its closest approach to the Earth
and at its closest approach Venus always shows virtually the same hemisphere to Earth.
Synchronous or locked-in relationships of this sort,
when they occur elsewhere in the solar system,
are seen as evidence of a dynamic connection, either currently or in the past.
Of course, astronomers have long believed that Venus evolved peacefully
within its own enclave in the solar system, for countless millions of years.
Given its proximity to Earth, astronomers assumed
the planet to be rather similar to our own,
calling it Earth's sister planet
and speculating freely on the possibilities of life on Venus.
But such speculations ended in the 1960s
when probes of the planet stunned astronomers.
The first continuous close-up look at Venus' surface came with the Magellan probe.
But Magellan moved into orbit around the planet on August tenth, 1990.
Its radar images revealed features as small as 100 meters across.
Almost nothing in the earlier picture of Venus
could withstand the impact of the discoveries that followed.
The surface of Venus has been radically and catastrophically transformed
by events yet to be comprehended.
The probes revealed the superheated cauldron
with surface temperatures averaging more than 460ºC or 900ºF.
And describing a new profile of Venus,
astronomers summoned images of a doomsday world.
Massive clouds of sulfuric acid and carbon dioxide 20,000 meters high,
create an atmospheric pressure at the surface some 90 times that of the Earth.
What has occurred in the evolutionary history of Venus
to create a world never imagined prior to the Space Age?
In this Discourse and others to follow we'll explore the astonishing accord
between space-age surprises and the ancient descriptions of Venus.
The greatest surprise for science will lie in the global evidence
that Venus formerly roamed the sky as a comet.
In the language of ancient myths and symbols, the mother of all comets.
And this is where we find one of the greatest challenges
to today's theoretical assumptions about planetary history.
Though Immanuel Velikovsky was not the first to notice
the cometary images attached to Venus,
it was his book "Worlds in Collision" published in 1950,
that brought the issue to public attention with much greater force
than any evidential fragments that preceded his best-selling book.
Velikovsky noted many tales of disaster and upheaval
in which the agent of destruction not only possessed comet-like attributes
but was named as the planet Venus.
And so the anomalous comet-like features of Venus in world mythology
became key pieces of a historical argument.
He noted for example, that in Mexican records Venus was the smoking star,
the very phrase natives employed for a comet.
He found in both the Americas and the Near East a recurring association
of Venus with celestial hair
and with a celestial beard.
Two of the most common hieroglyphs for the comet in the ancient world.
Another popular glyph for the comet was the serpent or dragon.
A form taken by the planet Venus in virtually every land.
And the same planet among the Egyptians, the Babylonians and other races
was called the Flame or Torch of heaven,
a widespread symbol of a comet amongst ancient peoples.
According to Velikovsky, the history of the comet Venus
inspired one of the most powerful themes of ancient myth and ritual,
a collective memory of catastrophe, global upheaval, earth-shaking battles in the sky,
decimation of nations on earth, an extended period of darkness
and the end of one world age and the birth of another.
Having devoted decades to following the global evidence,
I can confirm beyond any reasonable doubt
that chroniclers the world over did indeed describe Venus as a comet.
Not the planet that we observe on a predictable path today.
From Egypt and Mesopotamia to northern Europe and Africa,
from the Mediterranean to the South Pacific, from China to the Americas,
the sky worshippers remembered the comet Venus with awe and terror.
For those who've been following these Discourses we'll connect the global story
of the comet Venus to our reconstruction of the polar configuration.
The universal fears of comets trace to the symbolic mother of all comets
without which the global accord could never have arisen in the first place.
Why did the appearance of a comet signify the death of a great king?
Why, more specifically, was it claimed to be the soul of a deceased King rising in the sky?
Our goal will be to show that the myth of the Great Comet
is the story of the radiant star that animated the polar configuration.
As the central eye, heart and soul of the primeval Sun.
The subsequent fate of that star is indeed the story of the Great Comet.
Always look for the underlying form!