The film clips that follow are from the documentary
"Remembering the End of the World," available at:
According to ancient Greek poets, philosophers and historians,
the present age is just a shadow of the former epoch
called the Golden Age of Kronos.
But who was this ancient god Kronos?
All Greek astronomical traditions agreed that Kronos was the planet Saturn.
Our own name for the planets came from the Romans.
In unison Roman poets and historians insisted
that in a former time Saturn had ruled as a god-king.
Producing a paradise on Earth.
It would be almost impossible to overstate
the power of this memory among the different cultures.
For the Babylonians, the Hebrews and the Greeks,
the most sacred day of the week was the Sabbath,
a ritual remembrance of the lost epoch.
And in each of these cultures this holiest day was the day of Saturn.
The Latin is Saturni Dies or Saturn's day.
The Celtic day of Cetur,
our Saturday.
A worldwide tradition says that before a king ever ruled on Earth
a prototype of Kings arose in heaven.
Father of Kings,
model of the good king.
The universal monarch
The Aztec Quetzalcoatl
The Egyptian Ra
The Hindu Brahma
Every culture had its own Universal monarch.
It is said that the local king is responsible for the prosperity of the nation.
In the reign of a good king, the Earth flowers abundantly.
Why is this?
It is because the universal monarch, who set the standards of kingship,
brought forth a remarkable condition in primeval times,
an epoch called the Golden Age.
Sunrise,
to the star worshipers, a symbol of the cosmic dawn
when the universal monarch, the first sun-god, shone above the world.
The ancient Greeks called their sun-god, Helios.
We assumed they were referring to the Sun we know.
The Sun that rises in the east and sets in the west.
But in the earliest Greek manuscripts,
Helios was the name of the planet Saturn.
And the Greeks were not alone.
The Babylonian Shamash, always translated as Sun,
was identified as Saturn.
So also the Egyptian Ra,
the Hindu Surya,
the Latin Sol.
But Saturn is a mere dot in a starry expanse.
What could have caused the first star worshippers to celebrate that minute speck
as the Sun?
Every day our Sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
But the archaic sun-god Saturn did not rise or set.
It did not move.
Egyptian texts say of the sun-god Atum or Ra:
"The great God lives, fixed in the middle of the sky."
Surprisingly, the Babylonians used almost exactly the same language
to describe the sun-god Shamash in the stationary center of heaven.
For an Earth-bound observer, there's only one motionless spot in the sky,
the celestial pole.
The stars we see are actually cutting a circle around the polar axis
close to the star Polaris.
Of course nothing would seem more irrational
than an ancient sun-god at this location.
And yet, throughout the Near East,
the universal monarch appears as a central Sun called
the "Axis" and the "Pole of the World."
To the Hindus, the sun-god Surya occupied the place of supreme rest,
the motionless site.
So do the Greek Helios
and the Aztec Quetzalcoatl.
In their earliest expressions, these figures occupy the stationary cosmic center.
There is an astonishing unity to this global tradition.
Ancient iranian astronomers identified the pole as Saturn's home.
And so did the Neoplatonist of Greece.
Roman poets remembered Saturn as the steadfast star.
And chinese astronomers recalled that in the beginning,
Saturn was the arch-premier at the celestial pole.
On every continent
archaeologists have uncovered curious drawings of an archaic sun.
They do not look like our sun
yet they are strangely similar.
and most mysterious of all is the great crescent
encircling the sphere of this enigmatic sun.
Early Egyptian drawings place crescent horns on the sun-god Ra.
In Mesopotamia, the crescent is repeatedly drawn wrapped around the sun-god Shamash,
a crescent Horn turning in the sky.
The image appears throughout the world,
a vast crescent, unlike anything in our own sky today.