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 Archetypes Reconsidering the origins of world mythology
It was perhaps 15 years ago that we first used the phrase of "meeting of myth
and science" to describe The Thunderbolts Project.
But now, as we're continuing to
attract a crowd of newcomers, it seems that a little background could be useful.
My original inspiration for this work came from the controversial theorist
Immanuel Velikovsky and his 1950 bestseller 'Worlds In Collision.'
It was that inspiration that provoked my own lifelong investigation, which is focused
on the origins of ancient myths and symbols bringing to light hundreds of
mythic archetypes and connecting these patterns to
extraordinary planetary events in ancient times.
In 1972, my brother Stephen and I had published a
special issue of the student journal Pensee titled Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered.
To our surprise, the issue became a best-seller
at local campus bookstores encouraging us to advertise
the publication internationally and commit to a full series on Velikovsky.
In the course of this series, in 1974, the American Association for the Advancement
of Science, the AAAS, held a symposium on
Velikovsky at its annual meeting in San Francisco.
Shortly thereafter, I submitted a proposal to
Doubleday, the world's largest publisher at the time, for
a book growing out of my own research, the book to be called The Saturn Myth.
My proposal included an article I'd written, titled
'Saturn the Polar Night Sun' and I included an outline of a comprehensive
interpretation of ancient myths and symbols.
Starting with the Velikovskian perspective, the article claimed that in
ancient times Earth and Saturn were joined in a unique planetary system
unlike anything known today; and it suggested that the vast world of ancient
myths and symbols had its direct inspiration in this human experience.
To prepare for the task, I had learned French and German enabling me to
translate key sources not available in English.
I also acquired a ground-floor
knowledge of the Egyptian hieroglyphic system without which no satisfactory
interpretation of Egyptian mythic and symbolic content would be possible, since
my work would challenge virtually all common understanding on this subject.
Happily, the communication with Doubleday led the company to offer me the largest
advance they had ever given to a previously unknown author.
As for the rest of the story, completing the book proved to be an endurance test
beyond anything originally anticipated, and yet, when Doubleday
published The Saturn Myth in late spring of 1980, I'd
really only opened the door to the four decades of study that followed.
The Saturn Myth set forth a radical idea.
It claimed that every ancient culture
memorialized an extraordinary phase of human history called 'the age of the gods.'
Though the words could have a familiar ring today, the historic meaning was lost
many centuries ago and that meaning is precisely what we've claimed to recover.
For many years now, I've used the image seen here as a ground floor referent in an
uncompromising analysis of global patterns, and I've claimed that every
mythic theme since the emergence of the great civilizations can be explained by
what happened to these bodies.
To which I've added, just
as surely, the observation that no archetype ever named
has the slightest connection to any natural experience today.
The archetypes closest to the heart of the reconstruction would include: memories of
a primeval Sun before the present Sun, remembered also as
the father of creation, the ancient celebration of this
power as the celestial prototype of kings, the enigmatic location of the
primeval Sun at the celestial pole, the center of the sky around which the
heavens visually turned, the unexplained identity of this
primeval Sun as the planet Saturn in the early astronomies,
identity of this supreme god as a fallen or displaced power.
In fact, no description of that earlier condition
is more to the point than that given by the
Babylonian astronomer priest Berosus, in the 3rd century BC.
Berosus observed
that in an earlier time the planets were, quoting here, "so arranged in one row
that a straight line may pass through their spheres."
What a remarkable and preposterous idea, a perfect and
sustained planetary conjunction, something never seen in our time.
And yet a stunningly accurate description of the ancient polar configuration, to which we've
devoted priority attention for more than 40 years.
In the months ahead, we intend
to show that there was indeed a myth-making phase of human history
from which the full spectrum of ancient ideas including hundreds
of mythic and symbolic archetypes arose, no coincidence involved.
Our goal will be to expose the
unified substructure to show that one ancient experience recorded through a
diversity of mythic interpretations reached across every domain of commemorative activity.
There's a reason why we state our conclusions with such confidence.
Simply grant the reconstructed events, and all well
documented archetypes become predictable.
As strange as this may seem, after the
myth-making epoch no new archetypes arose, not a single one.
Now, that is a critical fact.
One that can force an investigator to ask what set the
myth-making epoch apart from the era that followed?
But now of course the
implications should be clear, the archetypes arose in response
to extraordinary celestial provocations, and nothing in today's natural world
would lead one to expect a single archetype that has been named.
For us, no prior cause other than the dynamic and
evolving polar configuration will ever meet that test.
In retrospect, it's not surprising that, month by month, new
information has continually expanded the picture.
I say not surprising because every ancient culture
on Earth memorialized a prior rule of towering gods.
So as the underlying cross-cultural
agreement stands out, the radical contrast to today's natural experience
becomes progressively more obvious and persuasive, including:
the ancient identification of the Mother Goddess as the planet Venus, the
corresponding identity of the Venus goddess as the luminous eye, heart and soul
of the sovereign power, the hub of the Cosmic Wheel and the animating outflow or radiance itself.
Worldwide myths of a legendary Warrior and Hero born from the
Mother Goddess to vanquish chaos monsters, global myths and symbols of the
ancient conjunction or marriage of the Mother Goddess and Warrior Hero, meaning
of course Mars and Venus, and finally the ancient memory that
unifies the planetary traditions, the memory so powerfully expressed by
Berosus, of planets previously gathered along a single axis.
For several decades, I've described a system episodically punctuated by planetary
instability and world altering disruptions, all occurring
in an environment unlike anything we experience today.
It's that contrast that led me to encourage
investigation by others, under the obvious acid tests.
For an independent researcher, the tangible and concrete
nature of the reconstruction will leave no ambiguity as to implications.
If the claimed events occurred, what would you expect to find?
And most critically, does the reconstruction leave any recognized
archetypes of world myth and symbol unexplained?
No other test than this should be needed.