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.
Sekhmet: The Ranging Eye of Ra
Throughout this video series we've claimed that the origins of world mythology,
ancient symbolism and magical rites
lie in human memories of extraordinary natural events.
It was from the emerging commemorative practices
that the ancient civilizations themselves arose.
And so we've repeatedly emphasized that the reconstruction offered here
is far too specific to allow us to make up stories or to make up explanations.
The evidence will either be there in unique detail
that the reconstruction demands or it will not be there.
Our explanation lies in a congregation of planets gathered close to the earth
long before the rise of observational astronomy.
And that means before any of these bodies were even named as planets.
We've called this celestial formation The Polar Configuration
and we've identified many of its varying forms as electric discharge activity
between these bodies.
Extraordinary events in the sky provoked an explosion of human imagination,
now discoverable as story content within every ancient culture.
In the course of these presentations it should also become clear that no archetype,
no global theme could ever be explained by natural events in our own time.
Things occurring today provide no referent whatsoever.
The impact of this human experience requires that we follow the instincts of a detective,
noting things too consistently out of place.
And we must never forget that the more unusual the detail,
the more compelling is the improbable convergence of testimony.
Our claim is that the link of the mythic archetypes
to the evolution of the polar configuration
requires that we uncover the concrete reference beneath the imaginative symbols.
Amongst the cross-cultural points of agreement
is the repeated identity of the mother goddess as the planet Venus.
This identity is not just worth following,
it is a window to a mind-altering human experience,
a story that reverberated through history for thousands of years.
The paradoxical identity of the mother goddess with life itself,
her role as the great protectress, but also as a world destroyer,
can only be explained at the level of concrete origins beneath that symbolism.
The discharge streamers of Venus and effusion of mythic power and glory
were the animating life of heaven
seen in mythic terms as the luminous heart and soul of the universal power
we've identified as Saturn.
But the connection runs in two directions since the discharging sphere of Venus
was also interpreted as the protective shield of the warrior God, named as Mars,
who occupied the impenetrable spot as if protected from the sky darkening clouds
or celestial armies of chaos.
When the heavens fell into disorder, the sky itself became a mythic battlefield.
Swarms of debris, seen as rebelling hordes, appeared to overtake the world.
It was in this context that the most active and spectacular form of the goddess emerged,
affecting every ancient culture's ideas about the meaning of war, conquest and magical defense.
Star of chaos: California rock art
But was the goddess a divine weapon launched against rebelling powers
or was she herself the provocation, the feared destroyer of cosmic order?
Human imagination would stand in competition for millennia
but more fundamental than the interpretation was the underlying event
and our purpose here is to see the events through the lens of global patterns.
Ironically, it is the competing interpretations
that confirm both the patterns and the events that provoked them.
Confirmation comes wherever, without the underlying event,
the global patterns would not be conceivable, not even be possible.
Egypt: "The Destruction of Mankind"
In the presence of the goddess' visible power, enemies were scattered.
Dark clouds of chaos gave way to a blast of fire and light.
The rebelling hordes of heaven fled from its onslaught.
One of the most dramatic illustrations of this archetypal theme
is the Egyptian legend called The Destruction of Mankind.
The myth says that the primeval sun god Ra
had grown aged and perhaps a bit weary of humanity.
It recounts how, in that remote time, the children of Ra
had rebelled against the god.
In response to the rebellion, Ra sent out his powerful eye
to take vengeance on a disrespectful world.
The agent of the conflagration that followed was the goddess Sekhmet.
Not just a goddess, Sekhmet was the far-famed eye of Ra,
the Utchat, the giver of life and the great protectress,
the very heart and soul of the primeval sun himself.
Egypt: The Eye of Ra (Utchat) as the goddess Sekhmet
Enigmatically, Sekhmet also possessed both a leonine and a serpentine form,
a remarkable parallel to the Sumerian Venus goddess Inanna,
who displayed the same forms in her role as the terrifying radiance
in the center of the god An, the overarching ruler of the sky.
This is no coincidence,
these mythic forms reveal no relationship whatsoever to today's sky
but they are not accidental, not random
and they direct our attention to the archetype of the great comet,
the human experience from which the female comet archetype descended.
The comet as the eye, heart and soul of a great king.
Comet as a star with disordered hair or leonine mane.
Comet as a cosmic serpent
and the comet as a sign or an agent of world destruction.
And so we find a remarkable juxtaposition of comet attributes
in the titles of the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet,
called the Beautiful Eye of the primeval sun.
She was the Great Flame or Flaming One, the Destroyer by Fire,
the Destroyer of Rebellions,
the Rulerof Serpents
and the Ruler of Lions.
Strangely, all of the well documented goddesses in Egypt were like Sekhmet,
called the eye of Ra,
suggesting an underlying identity entirely outside natural experience today.
And no goddess figure in ancient Egypt
tells this story of the sun god's eye more vividly than Sekhmet
whose very name derives from the root Khem
signifying a blast of glory or majesty, the essential character of the eye-goddess.
Sekhmet entered the conflagration displaying a trail of fire.
The texts say, "Behold me, men and gods!
I have come into being as the Lady of Glorious Appearings....
my flame is behind me.
It is a flame which drives away on its account.
The tip of its flame crosses the land from the sky...:
No one at all can approach her, the streams behind her are flames of fire."
In fact, the Egyptian traditions constitute a remarkable parallel
to Sumerian descriptions of a world in fear and trembling
at the tempestuous radiance of Inanna, identified as Venus.
Sumerian Inanna (Venus) with her foot on her alter ego, the lion
Precisely the same way, Sekhmet appeared as a flame of fire in her tempest,
instilling terror on Earth and threatening to destroy the world.
"I am mistress of the flame", the goddess announces,...
"The fear of me is in their hearts and the awe of me is in their hearts.
The flame makes his enemies fall.
It is a flame moving before the wind of the sky to the end of the earth."
Surely it is no coincidence that the great flame in heaven,
taking the form of a fiery serpent,
found its symbolic place on the crown of kings in Egypt,
exactly as we've seen in ancient Mesopotamia.
It was the headgear of the king that reflected the protective role
of the explosive majesty most dramatically.
In later times, when Egyptian armies confronted foreign nations,
these peoples were seen as barbarians outside the gate,
they were the terrestrial counterparts of the primeval chaos themes
and so the king invariably called upon the shining majesty of Ra,
remembering how the eye- goddess, in her rage,
had destroyed rebelling powers in the sky in former times.
In considering this theme, the critical steps will require comparative analysis
of an incontrovertible historical pattern.
The ancient story of the goddess says the explosive glory of heaven
was the story of the great comet.
In this experience we find the origins of the astronomical language
and symbolism of comets around the world, there is no other explanation.
And so too, the attributes of the celestial glory
are the defining attributes of the planet Venus as mother goddess.
And as we continue our series, this truth can be verified
in the astronomical lexicon of every well-documented culture in ancient times.
In their essential details, the global story of the great comet
is the story of the planet Venus.
Always look for the underlying form!