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 Meaning of Ancient Myths Do they count as evidence?
How could ancient myths and symbols count as real evidence for cosmic events in the past?
No one should be asked to believe a mythic story
but common patterns around the world must have an explanation.
Of course, every myth involves human imagination and interpretation,
which is why over time the word myth
came to mean, "make believe, not true".
Our role is to identify the provocation in natural experience,
which is an entirely different matter,
that does not require us to believe any story in the form it's come down to us.
To find the underlying events, we work with the cross cultural,
often global, convergence of human memories.
In particular, the convergence is on unique details that
would not be possible in the absence of a shared experience.
The dragons of human imagination did not exist as such,
but why would we choose to ignore the extraordinary events
that are required to explain the global similarities?
So, we sift through the stories and we find innumerable descriptions of a frightful
chaos monster, most often described in serpentine or dragon like-form.
We follow the theme back to it's first recorded expressions and,
to our surprise, we discover that these mythic creatures were originally cosmic.
Only in later times were they localized geographically through regional storytelling.
That gives us the beginnings of an explanation of a global theme, an archetype.
As we expand our field of view, it becomes increasingly clear
that extraordinary natural events acting on human imagination,
perhaps 5,000 years ago, produced an explosion of storytelling.
Of course, world mythology cannot be true in the interpretive terms
that the myths are anciently transmitted to us - no fiery serpents in the sky,
no terrestrial mountain reaching to the center of heaven,
no living being in the sky appearing as a motionless sun.
But such myths are global; the mother goddess Venus, the ancestral warrior Mars.
Yes, these are myths but, Venus as goddess and Mars as warrior are global archetypes.
That's where the challenge lies. Don't believe in accidents.
Mars does not look masculine, Venus does not look feminine, but these
planetary associations are worldwide and there has to be an explanation.
The mythic themes did not arise from any natural experience today,
but what about a provocation in an earlier time?
No natural phenomenon we experience today could possibly
have inspired the detailed tapestry of world mythology.
That's why deliberate attention to recurrent themes is so essential and that
means penetrating to the experiential substructure of global storytelling.
We must always ask what concrete experience
is required to produce the worldwide themes?
Themes recorded with different words, and different symbols,
and different sacred practices all pointing back to one phenomenal experience.
You cannot get the coherence of archetypal mythology by making things up.
Make believe will not create a global story of a former central sun
prior to the present sun, but the idea is worldwide.
You have to follow this investigation to grasp the power of converging testimony,
just as any good detective would do.
All of the mythic archetypes are inseparably connected to each other
- there is not a single global theme that stands in isolation from the other themes.
Hundreds of cross cultural themes are all part of the tapestry of world mythology.
Of course, the surface of storytelling is cluttered with localized contradictions,
but there is a discernible substructure that is entirely unified.
It's this substructure of human memory that assures us of a globally shared experience.
The single requirement is that we hear the ancient witnesses,
hear them sufficiently to recognize the common patterns
- the unified substructure of human memory.
And that's what our study of the ancient cultures is about:
one story told around the world, fully coherent, directing our attention to a profound
human experience that continues to echo around us in a thousand different ways.
Humanity can only be helped by bringing the human experience
and the celestial provocation into the light of day.