"When Jupiter was first born, he defeated Saturn and the Sun by his brilliance," reports the Taitiriya Brahmanna [1] .
Declares Jupiter-Marduk in a Babylonian epic poem: "When I stood up from my seat and let the flood break in, then the judgement of Earth and Heaven went out of joint.... The gods, which trembled, the stars of heaven-their position changed, and I did not bring them back." [2]
The Age of Saturnia ended in the Biblical Deluge. The Age of Jovea (5700 to 4400 B. P.) began. The planets Saturn, Neptune [3] , Uranus [4] , and perhaps a "Planet 'X' " (suspected to exist but not yet discovered) [5] had receded. They were retired gods; mythologists have applied this concept of deus otiosus to Saturn and Uranus. Mankind might have seen all of them recede into the farther reaches of the developing solar system.
Jupiter was the new central body of the sky, shining alternately or together with the Sun, while still looming large to Earth. Even in the time of Biblical Abraham, Jupiter was said to make the night-time bright [6] . It was the name of the planet and of the new reigning god who ordained a new phase of celestial stability. Impressionable mankind, eternally grateful for favors tendered by its cruel gods. exalted Jupiter as the god of law and order. To him was attributed a strict righteousness that not only bound up his father Saturn, but bound up himself so that he would obey his own laws. The ancients unmistakably perceived the rings of Saturn and the bands of Jupiter, and gave this explanation of the phenomena.
Figure 27 .
ALBRECHT DURER'S "DELUGE" (1525).
Dürer painted this picture following a nightmare. A most remarkable feature is the cyclone-like form of the cataclysm. The waters are bursting like giant pellets upon the Earth. not in sheets of rain. This physical mechanism is plausibly the way in which waters might be hurled through space, that is, like stone meteoroids, and it may be the only mechanism for supplying the great flood volume in a short period of time. How Durer got this dream is a matter of considerable scientific interest -- was it a Jungian archetype, a Velikovskian buried memory, a product of the Renaissance-connected genius of Durer? In 1515, Durer drew the first star map.
Jupiter is a god-name that the Romans took from their Etruscan neighbors. "Jove" was an exclamatory form of Jupiter, whence we take Jovea here to denote the period. Zeus was the Greek equivalent. He was Marduk of Babylon; Shiva of the Hindus; Mazda of the Persians; Thor or Donar of the Teutonic peoples; Amon and Horus of the Egyptians; Zeden and also Yahweh (Jehovah) of the Hebrews. Pausanias gives 47 appellations of Zeus. A most common appellation has to do with his lightning-hurling. Shiva carries the lightning fork; so do Zeus and Jupiter.
Sometimes names and traits of Saturn were kept and transferred to the new god. Thus the Great Fish (Saturnian) symbol is associated with Shiva in proto-India. Baal is interchangeably Saturn and Jupiter in Babylon; Odin among the Teutons seems to be Zeus and yet Hermes and even Saturn (who is perhaps better Bor son of Buri, "son" of Ymir); then, too, Ishtar of Mesopotamia is to become the child of Jupiter, planet Venus, and even the Moon.
The names of the gods are innumerable, and often overlap. Varro, the Roman scholar, counted 30,000 god-names used in Greece alone, according to Vico. Some of this confusion is in the nature of the events themselves; Saturn emerged from Super-Uranus and in turn bore Jupiter, which may have given birth to Venus, so that there were initial periods of doubt when the planets carried their "father's" names. Confusion has also characterized the minds and desires of theologians and scientists who came afterwards, down to our own day.
There appears now with Horus, the hawk-figured Jupiter of Egypt, another divine figure. He is the enemy of Horus and even replaced him briefly in the Second Dynasty, probably as the result of a calamity. He is called Set or Seth. He has a peculiar dog-like appearance that, with his other traits, makes him comet-like. The Romans called a sea-monster whale "cetus", and a cetus appears upon some carved stones of prehistoric Scotland that represent catastrophes [7] . (See the Golspie stone of Figure 28.) The Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology [8] carries this description of Seth : "Set is represented as having the features of a fantastic beast with a thin, curved snout, straight, square-cut ears, and a stiff, forked tail.
Figure 28
CETUS OR SETH, THE DEVIL-DOG.
The Golspie Stone of prehistoric Scotland. The arrow indicates the Cetus beast, the "Devil-Dog" Seth. (Source : Spalding Club). For a complete analysis see Beaumont (1949), 79.
This creature cannot with certainty be identified as of a species live or extinct, and is commonly called the 'Typhonian Animal. ' Sometimes Set is depicted as a man with the head of this strange quadruped." To the Greeks this must be Typhon, hence Phaeton; thus Seth also later ties into Venusian events. Perhaps the constellation and Latin word came long after the sky-seas monster called Setesh (Egp.) and Seth.
But what was Seth before he was Typhon? He was the leader of a band of conspirators who murdered Osiris. Later, or alternately, in Egypt, he dismembered Osiris. Later, or alternately, he fought with Horus, and was plunged into hell. Later he was adjudged fit only for hell by Hermes-Thoth who was called upon to hear the case of Seth vs Horus, and to hell Seth returned. It is likely that Seth is ultimately the Christian devil conceived originally in the Saturnian disaster.
Now again, in Greece, Jupiter destroyed the rule of Kronos and imprisoned him. Jupiter did not wear his new crown easily. For his new order of the world was attacked in earthshaking revolts, first by the Titans, who were Saturnians, and then by the Giants, who were ferocious humanoid dragons. Then later, Typhon came to threaten his rule and was sent crashing to Earth. In all of these battles Jupiter's thunderbolts racked the universe. The Earth was violently convulsed.
Seth, then, must somehow supply in Egyptian myth and in the sky the material for the four great battles of Zeus or Jupiter. We therefore make Seth an alter ego for Zeus in the revolt against Saturn in Egyptian legends: he does the dirty work against the old god, whereas Zeus in Greek legend had to do the job personally. Second, Seth in Egypt dismembers Osiris-Saturn; Zeus and his cohorts destroy and scatter the Titans. Astronomically this was a sequence perhaps preceding the great Deluge of Saturn, when enormous electrical and material storms invaded the magnetic tube. The debris of Saturn's fission could be considered either as Saturn's dismemberment or as a clearing of rebellious Saturnians from the skies. Again Seth is taking the onus for Horus' action, while Zeus is doing his own job.
The next phase, perhaps upon the occasion of the destruction of planet "Apollo" and the major displacement of Mercury, sees, in Egypt, Seth and Horus battling, and in Greece, a revolt of the giants against the Olympians led by Zeus. This set of events, then, would occur over a thousand years later than the death of Osiris and would mark the appearance of Mercury, Hermes, or Thoth as a new great god -- that is, a god who is threatening the Earth with destruction.
The last battle against Typhon will be described below on the occasion of the Venusian catastrophes. There Seth is Typhon.
The primeval clouds that had gathered around the pulsing electric axis between Sun and Super-Uranus had furnished atmosphere to the magnetic tube in which the planets grew and moved. The flow and the magnetic field diminished, but the skies were not fully open until Jovean times. Remnant gases from the tubes, when not at last dissipated into space, were distributed as atmospheres among the planets.
Not until the nineteenth century were the rings of planet Saturn and the bands of planet Jupiter clearly defined. In both cases, the clouds extend for thousands of kilometers above the planets and are not to be confused with the low-lying clouds that form and dissolve over Earth. The banded clouds of the great planets Jupiter and Saturn are immense, global, and composed of hydrogen, ice, and debris. They remain in indefinite suspension, moving downward into the surface atmosphere, or exploded into space under cataclysmic circumstances.
Man's knowledge of clouds in primeval times was considerable and based upon observation. Not only were the Earth's cloud canopy and modern clouds known, but also those of the mantle of clouds (figure 13). The Greek theogony as set forth by Hesiod reported that the great god Saturn-Chronos had swallowed all his children but Zeus, and the infant Zeus was substituted for by a stone, which significantly, was swaddled in cloth (clouds). Saturn, deceived, swallowed the stone. The grown Zeus caused him to disgorge his brothers. They dethroned Saturn, bound him up and consigned him to outer space. Then Zeus became "Lord of the Bright Skies" (ca. 5700 B. P.).
Proclus (ca. 410-485 A. D.) in his commentaries on Plato indirectly gives further details of the events in the guise of philosophy. Jupiter, the god of law and order most powerful and supreme intellect and Demiurge, confronts his father, Saturn, also an all-perfect intellect and places his intellect under bonds to control its activity according to Jupiter's new ordering principles. Then, because he is logical and just, he binds himself so that he will be subject to his own laws as well. "In placing bonds about his father, he at the same time binds himself." [9] Proclus repeatedly refers to the "bonds" and the "bonding" of the two gods, and explicitly mentions the "Saturnian sections and bonds." We must take note how philosophy, like myth, has proceeded as a sublimation of catastrophic memory. It is fairly certain, then, that the cloud bands and belts of Jupiter were well-known in the earliest times.
The mythical aegis of Zeus, which was occasionally lent to Pallas Athene (planet Venus), and which is depicted in art and sung of in poetry, was known to be the clouds of Zeus from which lightning came [11] . The lightning, say some scholars, is represented by the eyes of the Gorgon's head on the aegis, but more likely these are the eyes of god, two of them seen when Super-Saturn fissioned. Or perhaps this may be the double-eyed magnetosphere of Jupiter, more dense with particles then, and illuminated. The Gorgon (Phaeton, Lucifer, etc.) was carried by Zeus to symbolize what he had destroyed and what was destructive in himself.
Zeus was everywhere the god of the bright skies, and of lightning. His Jovian bolts are pictured in many places (see figures 29). "Jove hurls his bolts and fells the giants, and every gentile nation had its Jove," wrote Vico [12] . They are gigantic, not at all to be relegated to normal atmospheric phenomena of today. They helped to dispatch Saturn to far places; they struck the erratic monster, Typhon, that threatened Earth 2400 years later; they cleansed the Earth's atmosphere of much of its mists at the beginning of the Jovean period; they lit up the skies often as they played about the magnetic tube; they reached out to destroy mountain ranges upon Earth on occasion. Late in his divine career, Jupiter was watched with great care at the New Year of the Vernal Equinox [13] .
All that was historically reported of Jupiter is directly or obliquely consistent with the present cosmogony, as are numerous discoveries concerning Jupiter made in recent years. Actions and traits ascribed to Jupiter earlier plus new types of behavior listed here and those to be treated confirm it as the ultimate heir of Super-Uranus.
The heat of Jupiter's interior is greater than that of the photosphere of the Sun. Jupiter rotates in nine hours 55 minutes. The composition of Jupiter is of a star. Its outermost layer of atmosphere consists of hydrogen and helium gas with a lacing of ammonia and water-ice clouds. Below is a seething "surface" of liquid hydrogen, then hydrogen compressed into metallic hydrogen, and centrally there may exist a core of rock or iron. [14]
Jupiter emits continuously streams of charged particles that penetrate deeply into space. Radio emissions of trapped charged particles of the magnetic field of Jupiter are akin to those launched through space by the stars and received by radio astronomers on Earth. Jupiter's signal emerges at 50 million kilowatts. Super-hurricanes and Jovian lightning discharges, found to reach even its satellite Io, are common [15] .
The Great Red Spot in Jupiter's cover may be the great depression still preserved by cyclonic action, whence sprang cometary Venus, or another large body, perhaps of giants in the rebellion described above. The Spot is a surface as well as cloud phenomenon. The radio noises have been audited for a few years but the Red Spot has been observed for centuries. During this longer period, on a number of occasions, the Spot has made dramatic moves [16] . Hence, the rotation of Jupiter has repeatedly suffered marked interruptions even though the force required to change the angular momentum of such a rotating body is far beyond the force imagined to be able to originate in a stable system.
Figure 29
JUPITER: LIGHTNING AND THUNDER.
a. Greek Zeus-Jupiter, hurling a lightning-bolt Juergens suggests that this "unreal" bolt may be all too real, a plasmoid of electricity of immense power, well beyond the bi-dental fork that represents Jovean lightning in the typical artistic sublimation.
b. Zin-Chin, a Chinese Jupiter-God, the Thundermaker, hawk-like [10] . The Egyptian Horus was also hawk-like.
The generally turbulent nature of Jupiter shows it to be not only a dark star, but one that may recently have undergone a nova experience. The radio activity marks still dispersing charged gases that would have been exploded and trapped in the nova of 6000 B. P. that it shared with Saturn. The dissolution of Solaria Binaria may be completed now, with the assistance of the novas of Super-Uranus and Super-Saturn. If "membership in a certain type of close-binary system is a necessary condition for a star to become a nova," [17] then a third nova may be beyond the capacity of Jupiter.
The Roman poet, Ovid, was probably telling true history when he wrote :
After Saturn was driven to the shadowy land of death, and the world was under Jove, the Age of Silver came in... Jove made the springtime shorter, added winter, summer, and autumn, the seasons as we know them... icicles hung down in the winter. And men built houses for themselves... and the oxen struggled, groaning and laboring under the heavy yoke [18] .
The Earth's biosphere took on its modern form in Jovea. The seasonal cycle existed with relation to the Sun. The seasons were more severe because the heavy warming and insulating gases of the binary were practically gone. Pastoralism flourished in consequence of the diminution of wild life after the dessication of the land, and helped, also, to supplement a reduced vegetarian product. Komarek remarks upon the succession of forests by grasses in Midwestern America following an orogenic or other climate-transforming event [19] .
It is possible, following Ovid again, that during the Saturnian period, before Jovea, humans were not typically carnivores. The eating of animals is then depicted or recounted in the Jovean setting until modern times in the context of sacrifice. The hunters of the "Upper Paleolithic" long regarded their prey as holy. Either, then, the Lunarians were, unlike Saturnians, carnivores but maintaining a holy relationship with their prey, or else the Upper-Paleolithic hunters" were actually of the Age of Jovea and therefore survivors of the Saturnian floods.
The electrical phenomena, the terrors of the end of the Golden Age, the harsher life, and possibly the de-ionization (especially the denegativizing) of the new atmosphere stimulated human aggressiveness. The organized forms of law and order were also enhanced, rules being the reciprocal of lawlessness and resistance to law. As the internal structure of tribes was strengthened, the aggressiveness was turned towards the construction of kingdoms and empires.
About the same time as the Unification of Egypt may be placed the founding or resettlement from practically disappeared antecedents of Dilmun on the Persian Gulf, the Indus Valley proto-Indian towns, Tepe Yahya in Iran, the Olmec culture of Meso-America Sumer, and Minoan Crete. These represent discoveries of social systems which certainly existed throughout the habitable world. The physical presence of Saturnian cultures, like the Uranian, had been practically obliterated.
Huge stone and brick structures were erected in Middle Americas, Mesopotamia Egypt and elsewhere. These coupled a rapidly redeveloped service of astronomy to the frantic needs of absolute rulers and priesthoods for protection against deluges and for electrical roadways to heaven. Tunnels, mazes, megaliths, ziggurats, and pyramids were built. The time was after 5700 B. P.( 3700 B. C.). Copper was dug, and bronze and brass were made of it, with the help of tin and lead.
Euan MacKie's work on megalithic cultures places this immense human effort, that is today exhibited in ruins throughout Europe and the Western Mediterranean, between Jovean and Venusian times [20] . He accepts Euro-Near East communication, but reserves judgment as to whether the West European culture is indigenous or derived. My position is that the megalithic cultures of Spain, France, Ireland, England and Scandinavia are survivors of the larger realms of Atlantis. Painstaking attempts to demonstrate that Stonehenge and other megalithic formations are accurate astronomical indicators by retrocalculations of the present order of the skies have not succeeded. Few doubt that they are sky-oriented, part of the human obsession with the celestial order which is one of our basic principles in this work. In careful analysis of the constructions of Ballochroy and Kintraw in Scotland, by way of the work of MacKie, A. Thom, and others, Dwardu Cardona has disproved the theory that these sites represent celestial conditions unchanged since before 687 B. C.; that is, they cannot be used to contradict quantavolutionary earth movement as late as 2700 years ago.
Humans worked even while the heavens remained unsettled. The species was repeopling the Earth from a few thousands of survivors to many millions. Mankind was recovering from the Saturnian floods, restoring agriculture where the land had not been devastated by salted water, or dried by the lack of rain and by the brilliant Sun. Menes, the first king of Egypt, found a land of marshes, drained them, and built dikes along the Nile. In the Pyramid texts and related histories, Professor W. Mullen has uncovered evidence of repeated disasters. Herodotus quotes Egyptian priests to the effect that the sun had changed its course four times since Egypt possessed its first king [21] . Notably, these Egyptians came with a distinct language, culture, and a new race or races, perhaps one from the West to the Delta and a second from the South to Upper Egypt, the time being early Jovea. By 3200, dynastic Egypt had begun, with a Deluge myth underlying it [22] .
Nearly all of the royal monuments of the First Dynasty were obliterated by fire [23] . Calamities are associated with the Second Dynasty, too. Though the Third Dynasty, builders of Pyramids, appears to have been stable, a great catastrophe "brought down the whole Old Kingdom." [24] The "Old Bronze Age" was succeeded by the "Middle Bronze Age" which we associate with the Age of Mercury.
Typical of the mysteries encountered when one attempts to reconstruct the disasters of Jovea is a buried pyramid, described by Zakaria Goneim [25] . It is placed early at 3000 B. C. but not finished. Its builders were supposedly fickle: they "often changed their plans during construction." Both alignment and level were altered. A large wall of it was buried very shortly after being constructed. Clear, crude drawings and marks of the workers are left on its white limestone. Goneim offers no conclusion; to us the circumstances appear to have involved a rampant planet, a belief in the efficacy of pyramids against catastrophes and continual geophysical upsets, during which construction could not be carried out. Probably the pyramid belongs at the end of Jovean times.
One may conjecture that the pyramid-building epoch began in the period of transition from Jupiter to Mercury, which probably lasted for centuries. The Great Pyramid of Ghiza (ca. 2100 B. C. and 4th Dynasty) presents a superlative stability. It is oriented only 4 minutes of a degree west of geographical North. Its interior shows signs of enormous stresses. It was probably shifted in a great earthquake [26] .
The Jovean Binary establishment continued to deteriorate. The deterioration is treated in Greek legend as the story of the Olympian family of Zeus. We make of this, and of similar family histories in Mesopotamia. Egypt, Meso-America, the Teutonic regions and elsewhere, a history of the solar system marked by the transgressions of major gods -- Apollo, Mercury, Venus, and Mars. The Olympians were nouveaux arrivés, a group who appeared after the Saturnian family had been displaced, and before these the Uranians.
The Jovean gods were in some cases new sky objects; in other cases they exchanged names and identities with older gods, partly out of amnesia, partly out of the changed motions and obscured vision of the time of transition. No new sky god has been "invented" in any part of the world since the Martian age, and Mars was part of the Jovean assemblage of Greco-Roman culture. Nor did the Teutonic peoples invent new gods, try as they might, after the "Ragnarok" or "Gotterdammerung." Nor did a new sky god come out of India, China, or America.
Whence one concludes that "real gods" cannot be "invented" by the human mind as a pastime, or as a cold decision. Further, the abstract God of the Jews and of Christians and Muslim, and the abstract Heaven of the Chinese, are gods of philosophy. Insofar as a tangible presence is given to them, that presence becomes manifest in the behavior, appearances, visitations, rituals and iconography of the ancient sky gods and their heavenly hosts.
The most abstract of the ancient great gods might appear to be Apollo [27] . He was regarded anciently, too, as the most mysterious. Pausanias listed 58 different appellations for Apollo, compared with 67 for Zeus. Apollo is Boreal Apollo, who came from the northernmost lands of the Hyperboreans, hence, existed in late Urania and through Saturnia, when the Boreal opening in its half-closed later period was the cynosure of human eyes. The routes of the Baltic amber shores were dotted with shrines of Apollo. Delos, the Aegean Island, where stood the great classical religious center, was devoted to him; also Delphi, greatest prophetic center, for Apollo was the god of prophecy. He was Phoebus Apollo, a shining god, without phases. He was not originally connected with farmers and shepherds, but was a master of animals and the hunt, as was his twin sister Artemis (Diana). He was a healer of sickness, and sender of plagues. He was not a war god. He was wise, as befitted a prophet. He was youthful and a god of youth. He was god of gatherings, assemblies, colonies, and politics. Through his sister and younger brother, Hermes, he was related to the mining of silver; most silver mines of ancient Attica were called by their names. He was god of music. He bore a distant gaze, a kind of vague Mona Lisa expression; he showered arrows from afar. His name suggests an old Greek verb meaning "to repel or set aside" and an ancient form of a verb meaning "to destroy." And, finally, Miller feels that Apollo was not his earliest name.
Apollo in Egypt may have been Ammon (Amon, Amen) who is hard to distinguish from Horus-Jupiter and Thoth-Mercury, not to mention the conventional attempts to tie him to the Sun (" a solar deity"). Perhaps Ammon and Apollo both mean "not" (a) "visibly present" (pollomon). Perhaps Mercury and Apollo were close together, with Apollo much the larger.
To accord with revolutionary theory, Apollo was once important, and then disappeared. He was more probably a planet, I would guess, than a satellite of Uranus, or Saturn, or finally Jupiter, his father. He shone in the Boreal North to human observers, and was helpful in the hunt of day and night. His size and speed as he orbited between Earth and the larger planets may have made him seem young. Perhaps his orbit between Earth and the binary complex carried him across the stringed lines of colored clouds framed by the boreal arch. whereupon the invention of the harp or lyre was attributed to him [29] . Both he and his brother, Hermes, also god of music, were visible to the human eye. (Both were pictured as small suns, as Kerenyi writes.) [30] Among the stretched strings of the heavenly lyre, they moved, plucking the harmonies of the spheres.
The fate of planet Apollo was catastrophic. "Shining Apollo" was perhaps the most brilliant member of the Olympian family. Early in the Mercurian period, Apollo either collided with a Saturnian fragment, or was struck by Jovean thunderbolts, and exploded. It was probably behind the Sun at that time and human observers could not report the event. Much of the debris of Apollo may still be orbiting the sun as the asteroidal belt between Jupiter and Mars. Other debris struck Earth, appearing to be and behaving as vast showers arrows and missiles, clouds of fumes that healed or plagued living things, and chunks of precious metal.
The material of Apollo is still moving eccentrically and dropping upon Earth. The theory of an exploded planet of the meteoroid belt between Jupiter and Mars was mentioned in Chapter One. "Without such an explosion the fragments would scarcely have been able to deviate from the orbit of the protoplanet." [31] Meteoritic material that has been analyzed shows elements in excess of their proportions on Earth [32] , leading to the surmise that elements have formed at different times in the history of the solar system. Hydrocarbons have been detected on meteorites and durable primitive forms of life are being watched for. Though sometimes advanced, the latter claims are never accepted.
The gift of prophecy is closely tied to the gift of disappearance, movement beyond sight into the realms of the mysterious unsighted future. Apollo was like the grin of the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland; the cat vanished but the grin remained fixed in mid-air. The enigmatic smiles of some sculptures of Apollo are recalled.
Escaping the fate of Apollo, Mercury fled the neighborhood of Jupiter. We conjecture that it was driven or exploded from its near-in position. After following an erratic career, it settled in its present position near the Sun. Greek myth suggests that it passed close by its "older brother," planet Apollo, much the larger, seizing some of its abundant clouds and electrical charge. The incident is related in the Greek myth of Hermes' theft of the flocks of Apollo; this he did soon after he was born. Hermes was herald and guide to mankind, patron of thieves, gamblers, merchants, and wayfarers. He was the messenger of the Olympian gods, a reckless and careless fellow. He was Thoth, a great, perhaps dominating God of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. "When Horus resigned earthly power Thoth succeeded him to the throne." [33] He guarded the Moon and played games with it. He was a great god of Western Europe where Beaumont, in studies of English and Scottish pre-history, ascribes to him disasters and obsessive worship. The Vedic Hindu Pushan is amazingly close to the Greek Hermes in traits [34] .
In Meso-America, he was Xolotl, drawn like a big-eared dog or opossum of human body, who assisted in the deadly ball-games when Venus played against the "Sun." [35] De Leonard tells us so, but I am uncertain and think that this creature may be none other than the cetus-figure or Seth, whom we have earlier described. For Rock has identified the Meso-American god Tezcatlipoca with Mercury and Wotan [36] . Tezcatlipoca is the god of wanderers, of travelling merchants. His cult places are at crossroads. He carries a rod. He is the inventor of ornate speech and knows how to read dead languages. He is god of song and dance, god of magic and witches. He is a god who moves easily into the underworld, and his followers can find themselves in the dark. He is a medical expert who helps women in the throes of childbirth.
Perhaps he was called "lucky Mercury" because he avoided the fate of Apollo, but more so because the Earth was lucky to have avoided colliding with him. The small planet came close to Earth, on occasion, and treated the globe to electrical shocks that unsettled the minds of people. The Biblical story of the Tower of Babel seems to be saying so. The Greek Hermes puts people to sleep and awakens them; he is an arch-deceiver. wizard, patron of magic. Table 30 attempts to arrange some notable events to help in general orientation. Everywhere, writes Schaeffer of the early Middle Bronze Age, the newcomers were few, weak, and very different.
Archaeological excavations give some support to the theory of Mercury's destructive career. The Table that follows names some of the incidents in which the planet seems to have been involved, as well as catastrophes of the succeeding two periods.
Figure (table) 30
SOME DISASTERS FROM MERCURY TO MARS
(tentatively placed)
| Periods and Dates Reconstructed Chronology | Equivalent in Conventional Chronology( x) | Catastrophic Events( y) |
|---|---|---|
| MERCURIA | . | . |
| 2400 | (2400-2300) | Universal destruction[ s], including collapse of Old Kingdom in Egypt [w] and Old Minoan Age in Crete [ma] |
| 2300 | . | Techuacan [Cave 30] |
| 2200 | . | Akkadians Fall [fr] Yu begins Hsin Dynasty in China [f] Tepe Yahya (Iran) [k] Fall of Ebla (Syria) [e] |
| 2100 | (2100) | Great destructions |
| 2000 | . | Proto-Indian Trouble [r] Neo-Sumerian Period Ends [rf] |
| 1900 | . | Revolt of the Giants [o] Tower of Babel [st] Abraham's Battle [p] Earthquakes [ot] Sodom and Gomorrah [p] |
| 1800 | . | Jacob (OT) p |
| 1700 | . | Job (OT) p |
| 1600 | . | . |
| 1500 | . | Joseph Famine (OT) ps |
| VENUSIA | (1750-1650) | . |
| 1450 | . | Exodus (OT) ps |
| 1400 | . | Great Destruction [sv] Indus Valley Ruin [ro] |
| 1300 | . | . |
| 1200 | . | . |
| 1100 | (1450) | Great destruction [s] |
| 1000 | (1365) | Great destruction Thira-Santorini Explodes |
| 900 | . | . |
| 800 | (1250-1225) | Great destruction[ s] |
| MARTIA | . | Mars Destructions [v] Mycenaean Destruction [l] |
| 700 | . | . |
Note to the table: (x) The six conventional dates are the central points of Schaeffer's catastrophic periods for the Near and Middle East, (1948) 563-5. (y) The footnotes refer to the following sources; many dozens of additional sources exist and, of these, many are cited in Schaeffer and Velikovsky, and elsewhere in the present work. (S) Schaeffer, 563-5 Summary. (Many sites). (M) MacNeish 29-37, (Ro) Rowland, 11-2. (G) Goodrich, 3rd (1963) p. 5. (V) Velikovsky, 1950 (Many sites) (F) Fitzgerald, 14. (Fr) Frank-Fort, 47-54. (LK) Lamberg-Karlovsky, 102-11. (R) Rawlinson, 19- 21. (P) Patten, 252,255, et passim. (MA) Matz, 73,239, (OT) Old Testament. (PS) Parker and Sieff. (I) Isaacson. (O) Ovid. (W) Bell (1971). (E) "Ebla" Maccoby (1977), (ST) Strickling.
Goblet d'Aviella points out that both Thoth and Hermes have the ram as a sacred animals; both were personified by steles, hermata or bethels; both carried the caduceus; both had human figures with wings. Both were guides to the Underworld, teachers, and scribes. Pausanias claims "Par-Ammon is the surname of Hermes," which is not irreconcilable with Ammon as Apollo, "par" meaning "Father".
The caduceus or Kerykeion is the famous wand of Mercury (and the emblem of the modern medical profession). It resembles the Hindu trisula, which in turn "bears a singular resemblance to the sign of the planet Mercury...." [37] . Furthermore the caduceus "produced fire and would slay," says Goblet [38] . It is too similar to the serpent-entwined magical staff of Moses for the staff to have been independently contrived by him. In the turbulent electrical atmosphere of the times, wands could be made to produce glowing and crackling discharges with fair reliability. Thus would priests be tied to the gods [39] .
It may also be notable that the Hebrew word for "planet" and "luck" mazal, are the same [40] and may refer to Hermes. Beaumont asserts that Thoth is also "Ham" of the Old Testament and Baal (Lord) Hammon of the Carthaginians; further, that the name Abram is from Ram and Ramah was the ancient Hebrew capital city. The King of Tyr was Hiram, or "High Ram." [41] The Ram is associated with Fricka, Frigga, Frye, who is Venus (Venerdi in Italian is Friday in English) and who is said to be the wife of Odin (Wotan) who is the Teutonic Mercury or Hermes.
It is Beaumont's theory, which deserves credence, that the pillars of Hercules refer to the large number of stone columns (dolmens) that line the coasts of Southern Britain and Northwestern France leading into the English Channel [42] . However, not Hercules, but Hermes is the god commemorated so strikingly there that the passage was known to the ancients. (Hercules is most clearly identified with the planet Mars.) [43] Beaumont relies partly upon Goblet d'Aviella who relies upon Tacitus [44] . What does Tacitus say? He says that the sacred stone columns found frequently in the region of the lower Rhine are called Pillars of Hercules, but adds that Hercules is given credit for many things that do not belong to him. Could the columns have been erected to Hermes and a thousand years or more later accredited to Hercules-Mars? A comparative study of the stones would answer the question; we know the myriad Hermes stones that marked the roads of Greece.
Otto concludes his study of Hermes by telling us not to think that all his later qualities were inconsistent with his earlier ones. "If a single trait actually did come to the fore later than others, it still retains the same basic meaning which has found a new expression". Then naively he says, "Whatever may have been thought of Hermes in primitive times, a splendor out of the depths must once have so struck the eye that it perceived a world in the god and the god in the whole world." [45] We already have pointed out that Hermes was viewed as a sun.
The planet Mercury possesses today some features that are less puzzling when viewed in the perspective of quantavolutionary primevalogy. It is a little-known planet and the recent discoveries concerning it are sometimes reported with exclamations of surprise. It is more dense than the Earth; probably it has a huge core of iron. It has no atmosphere. It is covered with a thin dust of silicate, like the Moon. Like the Moon, too, it reflects sunlight and radar pulses, and emits infra-red radiation.
Mercury rotates on its axis thrice while circling the sun twice. This very slow spin is attributed to the sun's tidal or gravitational pull. Why this "spin-orbit coupling" in a 3 to 2 ratio has not become a firm lock in the "several billions of years" of revolution is unknown. The Moon, after all, is locked into the Earth, showing always the same face to us. Even were I mistaken in assigning only a couple of thousands of years for the Moon to acquire its earth-lock, and were to accept instead the several billions of years attributed to the satellite's origin, the Moon-to-Earth tidal ratio is not as great as the Mercury-to-Sun tidal ratio. Hence Mercury should be in firm lock. So, for that matter, should be the Earth and possibly Mars. (Venus is retrograde in its rotation and, if anything, locked into or resonant with Earth, so this, too, is an anomaly of excess.) [46]
Already disquieting hypotheses are being voiced about how long ago Mercury may have been emplaced; figures in the hundreds of thousands of years are heard. If Mercury, then Venus, pari passu; and then, logically, Earth and Mars must be even more recently emplaced; but of course, the quantavolutionary theory does not rely exclusively upon the conventional theory of what causes rotational and orbital speed. Forces usually uncalculated affect all planetary motions.
Mercury's orbit is not a true circle, but is eccentric [47] . This, too, is surprising, considering the supposed ages during which, free from the influence of other planets to all purpose, it might be expected to have developed the elegant Platonic and Galilean form.
The axis of Mercury is perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic. If the planet has moved, as is claimed here, from one extreme of the binary axis (now the plane of the ecliptic) to the other, this condition is not readily deducible. One may conjecture that so long as there was focussed solar wind heavy enough to constitute some type of electrical axis, a planet descending upon the axis would present its electrically compatible equator to the arc or, in any case, wind and spin with the driving wind.
Mercury has magnetic field, stronger than that of Mars and the Moon. This may be largely a remnant of its magnetization, when it was a body immersed in the powerful magnetic tube. An authority declares, on this phenomenon, "That Mercury has a bipole magnetic field aligned with its spin axis very similar to the Earth's field although weaker, is to me particularly unexpected." [48] Conventional theory once posited a dynamo action, whereby a metallic core, rapidly moving, produced a magnetic field, such as with Earth. Venus has a larger and hotter core, and has no magnetic field, and no rotation to speak of. "Perhaps," he says, "the Mercurian magnetic field arises from causes still unimagined." [49]
The surface of Mercury appears as revolutionary theory would expect. It is devastated. It has large plains but is heavily cratered. There are long escarpments or "wrinkles" everywhere. A single basin, scene of a horrendous blast, is 1400 kilometers across. This Caloris Basin is apparently filled with smooth debris like the Imbrian Basin of the Moon. There appears to have been little or no change owing to vulcanism or tectonism, or even atmospheric evolution within the large craters following their creation.
There is no noticeable distinction between the types of craters found on Moon and Mars and those of Mercury. Again this is a surprising finding, considering how differently placed the three bodies are in relation to the Sun and to the asteroidal belt. A single bombardment -- why it should be "single" is difficult to understand even from a uniformitarian viewpoint-is postulated to have devastated the planet [50] .
Again Bruce C. Murray may be quoted, as representing so frankly the puzzles confronting solar system evolutionists : "The bombardment could have originated... with a single object perturbed to pass near the earth or Venus from an initial orbit beyond Jupiter, Tidal disruptions on the earth or Venus might then conceivably have created a shower of bombarding objects that would have been rapidly swept up through collisions with the four minor planets." [51] Indeed, this theory might well have been employed in claiming that the Moon was caused to erupt from the Earth by a passing body from beyond Jupiter that spread Earth and other planetary debris throughout the system.
It is appropriate that, some passages later on, the same author should remark : "The debate now developing over the early history of the inner solar system is reminiscent of an earlier debate between the uniformitarians and catastrophists over the causes of the earth's geological features. There the uniformitarians won." [52]
Notes (Chapter Nine: The Olympian Rulers)
1. 5-1,1 nakshatra pushya is the word for sun and /or Saturn; Santillana and von Dechend (1969) 434.
2. Gossman (1956) quoted in Santillana and von Dechend (1969) 325.
5. "Planet X," Ency. Britannica (1969).
6. Ginzburg (1909) I, 232. Patten sets this incident at about 1900 B. C.
10. Figure from W. Simpson (1896), The Buddhist Praying Wheel, Macmillan, fig. 41.
15. Time mag. (Sept. 16, 1974) 56.
17. Kraft, quoted by Payne-Gaposchkin (1977) 669.
18. Metamorphoses, I, lines 112-24.
20. MacKie (1977); cf Müller (1970); Bord (1976); W. L. Cook, ed. (1977); Trento (1978).
21. 11-142 cited in Mullen (1973) 12.
23. Ibid., 13 citing W. B. Emery 71-3.
24. Ibid., 13 cf. Schaeffer (1948).
26. Pawley and Abrahamsen (1973); Velikovsky (1973A).
32. Kerr (1978) 203; Crew (1977A) 26; Birgham (1881).
43. Eratosthenes: "Third is the star of Mars, which others have called the star of Hercules."
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