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Of all our planetary neighbors, perhaps none have proved more
surprising to space scientists than Venus.
As late as the mid-20th century, some renowned
astronomers including Fred Whipple, the father of the dirty snowball model of
comets, continued to argue that Venus, the so-called twin of planet Earth, might
have water clouds.
Instead, when the first space probes touched down on Venus,
they found it to be the hottest planet in the
solar system and drier than any desert on Earth.
For many decades, Venus has only grown more puzzling.
From its absence of so-called impact craters, to its
retrograde rotation, to the super- rotation of its atmosphere, to the
planet's vast comet-like tail which has been found
to interact with the solar wind "like a comet."
In fact, only one scholar successfully predicted Venus's
superhot temperature and comet-like characteristics.
In his best-selling book Worlds in Collision,
Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky presented his thesis that Venus was globally
remembered as an Earth-threatening comet and will thus be extraordinarily hot due
to its recent birth.
In subsequent decades, a number of scholars, originally
inspired by Velikovsky, began the process of reconstructing the catastrophic
events Velikovsky suggested, applying a rigorous cross-cultural comparison of world mythology.
The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that Venus's
extraordinary role in ancient astronomy, myth and religion, cannot be explained in
terms of anything observed today.
One of the leading comparative mythologist to explore this question is Ev Cochrane, a
colleague for several decades of David Talbott and the late Dwardu Cardona.
As Cochrane exhaustively outlined in his books Martian Metamorphoses and The Many
Faces Of Venus, the relationship between Mars and
Venus is just one extraordinary clue to the celestial catastrophes recorded in ancient testimony.
In part 1 of this two-part presentation, Cochrane begins by
explaining the genesis of his own research including his and his
colleagues' conclusion that certain aspects of Velikovsky's thesis were incorrect.
My initial interest in Velikovsky's work centered around his
claim that certain archetypal mythological themes, such as the dragon
combat, trace the celestial determinants in astronomical events.
So for example, the universal motif of the dragon, he
identified as a memory of the Venus Comet.
And so, my earliest articles in this area sought to investigate this
particular claim, and so I focused on dragon imagery and the mythology
attached to Inanna and Ishtar in ancient Mesopotamia.
I was at Iowa State pursuing my master's program and then
I learned of Dave's research in 1981 and so I reached out to him and visited
him in Portland and slowly but surely we agreed to collaborate on a series of
articles for Kronos on the Venus comet.
Dave and I knew from almost day one that the Venus and Mars cataclysms
were prehistoric in nature and thus predate by thousands of years the
historical reconstruction advanced in Worlds In Collision.
So that was a major flaw, to put it mildly, and so a
fundamental flaw at Velikovsky's entire methodology was the fact that he tended
to focus on Hebrew and Greek lore, and as a result he often overlooked the precise
parallels to be found in the much more ancient Egyptian and Sumerian traditions.
Yet, it stands to reason that the oldest traditions, the ones, you know, closest in
time to the actual catastrophic events in question, should preserve the most
complete record of the events, and so by generally overlooking these ancient
traditions, Velikovsky's entire enterprise was compromised.
At the same time, Velikovsky was an amateur mythologist at best and
just did not give serious enough consideration to methodology or to
comparative mythology and comparative linguistics.
He identified Aphrodite with the Moon, for example.
Had he given the matter much consideration at all from a
comparative standpoint, he would have understood that
Aphrodite had to be identified with Inanna and Ishtar, and thus had to be the
planet Venus, not the Moon.
Likewise, his attempt to identify certain mythological
characters such as Oedipus and Noah with historical figures, is just simply
misguided.
As late as 1951, most astronomers believed that Venus was Earth-like in
nature and likely home to lush vegetation and various forms of life.
But, as I pointed out in the Many Faces Of Venus, it's a historical fact that
conventional astronomers have gotten virtually everything wrong about Venus,
so why should we believe them now when they tell us Venus has been moving on
the same orbit for billions and billions of years?
At the same time, it's important to distinguish between ancient
terminology and modern scientific definitions.
So, in describing the planet Venus as a prototypical comet, the
ancient sky watchers were not employing scientific language and somehow implying
that Venus moved on a wildly erratic or
elongated orbit -- characteristic of modern comets.
Rather, in describing Venus as a dragon star or long-haired star or comet-
like, the ancients simply meant that Venus took on the appearance of a
dragon-like object or presented wildly disheveled hair.
In each case, it's possible to reconstruct the history of
the symbol in great question during its historical evolution.
The serpent, for example, after a period of disorganized
activity, ultimately came to encircle the planet Mars.
Similarly, in the phase marked by cosmic disorder, Venus's comet-
like hair was wildly disheveled and spread out, but during the later phase
marked by the encircling of Mars and the crowning of the warrior hero,
Venus's hair is tied up or bound or otherwise brought under control.
And during this latter phase Venus's hair is typically described as green or
turquoise blue in color, a clear pointer to the remarkable nature of the events in question.
As noted, Venus's extraordinary role in ancient myth,
religion, and the earliest astronomies, has never been satisfactorily explained by astronomers.
We asked Ev for his thoughts on occasional attempts by
mainstream scientists and academics to explain the anomaly.
In numerous recent books on Venus and/or ancient mythology, astronomers or
scholars are always trying to dream up some explanation for why Venus is
associated with this or that characteristic.
So for example, Patrick Moore, the astronomer, was trying to
explain why Venus was always regarded as a female.
So he said, "A female association is in fact general; this is natural
enough, since to the unaided eye Venus is the loveliest of planets."
I mean, talk about a ludicrous idea, I mean, why would
being just lovely have anything to do with being female, why would it be found
in cultures all around the world, they'd all arrive at the same exact idea.
Similarly, the astronomer David Grinspoon and Ed Krupp, they both pointed to
Venus's phase of a morning star being roughly two hundred sixty three days, and
they claimed that because that is a close approximation to the gestation
period for a human female, that that explained why the planet was associated
with fertility or love.
As if these indigenous tribes in South America were
carefully marking out the two hundred sixty three days of Venus's orbits, you know.
So again, it's just laughable that these guys come up with these ideas.
One of my favorites is from the top scholar in Inanna religion from ancient
Mesopotamia, and this gal's conclusion was that "Inanna's function as a bestower of
kingship and the protectress of the city-state of Uruk may have given rise
to her warlike character, since kingship followed the fortune of arms."
And yet, one page later she gives a different explanation.
She says, "Goddesses of war and victory predominate like Inanna and Ishtar."
And she says, "This may stem from a battle metaphor in which women in
childbirth, men in battle were seen as struggling with elemental forces of life and death."
Again, a very distinguished scholar, it
never occurs to her to check and see how Venus was represented in ancient Mexico
or ancient China, or these other cultures in which case she'd find that they've
represented her as a warrior there as well.
And as a raging goddess, that type of stuff that was comet-like in nature,
her idea just falls to the ground almost immediately, as just laughably inaccurate
to the puzzle in question. As I tried to demonstrate in various books,
Venus's traditional femininity and catastrophic histories are recorded around
the globe, so just a list of the goddesses; you have Inanna and Ishtar in
Mesopotamia, you have the Persian Anahita,
the Greek Aphrodite, Arabic Al-Uzza...
I chronicled dozens and dozens of goddesses in South America that are
typically lumped together under Star Woman category
that share the exact same characteristics.
So for example, Star Woman is virtually indistinguishable
from Greek Aphrodite.
In other cases however, the original identification with
Venus was not preserved, so for example, one of the most prominent symbols in
Egyptian literature is the Eye of Horus, and it's clearly a celestial agent, it's
clearly a catastrophic agent, but it is nowhere explicitly identified with
the planet Venus and yet, the mythology of the Egyptian Eye of Horus is
identical to that of Inanna and Ishtar.
Dave and I have written numerous articles on that subject, documenting
that beyond any shadow of a doubt.
So too, the Indian goddess Kali and the Canaanite goddess Anat are both
indistinguishable from Inanna and Ishtar as warring goddesses, and yet they were
never identified with the planet Venus to the best of my knowledge.
The history of scholarship, with respect to the analysis of Venus imagery, presupposes
that the ancient sky watchers were describing the familiar Venus, peacefully
moving on an orbit millions of years from the Earth
and that nothing could have changed in the planet's appearance and behavior in the meantime.
Yet, such an assumption is entirely unfounded.
Indeed, the mere fact that the planet Venus was described in
an Inanna-like terms around the globe, should be enough to refute this conventional position.
How else but upon the basis of common experience of the Venus comet are
we to account for the fact that ancient descriptions of the Venus around the
globe are so similar?
As noted previously, it's a mystery unresolved by mainstream
science and academia, why the planet Venus would be historically identified as
"feminine" and why the planet Mars would be identified as a "masculine" warrior.
In fact, as Ev explains, a remarkable number of cultures described
a mythical union between Mars and Venus, which became
the basis for many sacred marriage traditions.
The old saying "men are from Mars and women are from Venus" is not of a recent origin.
I mean, this idea has been around since the dawn of time
literally, and the identification will hold around the globe, even though
there's nothing in the visual appearance or behavior of the planets currently
that could ever inspire such traditions.
So, just to take a familiar example: in ancient Greece the planet Venus is
inseparably associated with sacred marriages -- the union of the sexes.
So, Aphrodite is specifically identified as the bride in human marriages, while the
bridegroom is, specifically in early Greek documents, identified with Ares.
This is exactly the situation in ancient Mesopotamia, where Inanna is the subject
of the sacred marriage and identified as the bride or the female participant in
the sacred marriage and Dumuzi is the prototypical bridegroom.
Now, we know this mythology traces to celestial determinants, because the very same
situation is found in the New World, where the Skidi Pawnee
of North America, have a sacred marriage involving Venus as the female bride
in a sacred marriage, and the planet Mars as her husband.
According to the Skidi account of creation, the union of Mars
and Venus sparks creation, and in each of these three cases: Mesopotamia, Greece,
and North America, the marriage takes place in a verdant garden and promotes
fertility throughout the world.
So these coincidences are just too specific and remarkable to be coincidences alone.
We believe they trace to common observations.
Stay tuned for part 2