CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The great god, Saturn, identified by many names, of many cultures, and often associated with the planet, which has been known in the most ancient times by that name, is the son of a god. In the ancient Buddhist liturgy he is called Ravisuta, or "Son of the Sun". Uranus, by his many names, does not have a father; but he is often referred to as the father of Saturn, Uranus is killed, castrated, defeated, retired, or dismissed, and usually it is the work of a Saturn Figure. The physical circumstances of his end are those that may be associated with a stellar nova, as we have described it. So, too, Saturn comes to his end in a disastrous struggle, thousands of years later, in favor of a new planetary god, Jupiter, also called by many names, and usually made the son of Saturn. There is reason to believe that the ancients, when they used the metaphor father-son to refer to sky bodies, meant the most direct and close relationship of one body to another.
Saturn came into his own as king of the gods in the period following the destruction of Super Uranus and the ejection of the Moon. We have recited only a portion of the mythic evidence for the period immediately following the rise of the moon god or goddess; there is little coherent knowledge of human societies of the time. Thousands of years were required for the reconstruction of the Earth's surface and the recovery of a biosphere; the possibilities of monumental and record-keeping cultures were low for many generations. Perhaps the Moon would receive the extensive and obsessive worship of a great god, or even the great god, for some three thousand years before Saturn came into his own as ruler of the gods. More likely, we think, would be an earlier determination that the Moon was fixed and captive, pallid, and earthly in origin, hence capable safely of dependent status, along with the Earth, under Saturnian rule. Saturn would have ruled therefore either from 11 500 (or from about 8 000) down to 5 700 years ago.
The concluding date of 5 700 BP is related to proto-historical times, the time of the Great Deluge of Noah in the Bible and the First Dynasty of Egypt. The date is likely to be fixed with exactness someday. A Sumerian prism, for instance, names ten kings who ruled before the Flood, and says, "then the Flood swept over the Earth. After the Flood swept over, kingship again descended from Heaven." Wiseman, the editor of the prism, adds that "there is actually a line drawn across the text to separate the postdiluvian events from those occurring before the Flood".
At this time, as the Saturnian era moved towards a close, the disc of Saturn appeared three times larger than today's Sun. Its orbit about the Sun took about sixty-four present days. Earth was still wheeling in orbit between the Sun and Saturn, such that from Earth Saturn looked about four-fifths as large as the Sun. In a time close to three present days Earth completed its circuit about the arc.
Granted an elliptical orbit similar to that for binary stars of 64- day period (note D), Saturn and the Sun would apparently expand and diminish in size (cf. Talbott, D. N., p181). With this movement, time-keeping would be suggestible and simple. The Earth would also enjoy two seasons, cooler and warmer, each of more than thirty days duration.
Brahma as Super Saturn absorbs, regurgitates and reabsorbs as the ages pass (Mullen, p15), So does Kronos, identified here with Super Saturn. As with Super Uranus, Kronos' instability made him less than an ideal father. In Greek myth, the great god Kronos (Saturn) swallowed at least five of the children born to him out of his sister-wife Rhea. She then hid her youngest, Zeus, and fed a wrapped stone to Kronos. When Zeus matured, he led a revolt that ended in the banishment of Kronos, after he had vomited up all his children alive. The interpretation here is that Super Saturn was absorbing fragments that remained from the Super Uranus debacle or ones erupted later by Super Saturn itself. Then during its instability, it exploded back a number of them, before as a nova it fissioned into four major parts, corresponding in the myth to Jupiter - Zeus, his brothers Hades and Poseidon, and Saturn Minor, the distant planet of today.
That Saturn possessed satellites was known to the ancients (Tresman and O'Gheoghan, p36). That Saturn was regarded as a Second Sun, a Night Sun, is shown by Cardona (1977, p33) and others. That it was bright is claimed by numerous ancient texts and authors, surveyed by Jastrow, Mullen, Greenberg and Sizemore, Velikovsky (1973, 1978a), Cardona (1977), Tresman and O'Gheoghan, and Talbott (1980). That it became exceedingly brilliant just before the Deluge of Noah is implied in Hebrew legends (Tresman and O'Gheoghan, quoting Ginzberg). One Hebrew source has the star "as bright as one hundred suns". That widespread cultures held Saturn, the god, responsible for the Deluge is made clear by several authors already cited. That Saturn the planet was deemed responsible for the Flood is equally plain (see especially Velikovsky, 1978a, 1979). Velikovsky appears to have been the first to claim that Saturn became a nova, an idea that he found buried in Jewish rabbinical commentaries on the Deluge. That Jupiter was a prime element in the nova and subsequent events is evidenced in many of the same places; Ea, the Akkadian Saturn, reproaches Enlil, or Jupiter, for having caused the sky-waters to fall (Mason, p77). Trisiras, a son of Prajapati and a saintly Saturn figure, was a three headed god with heads resembling the Sun, the Moon and the fire, which we interpret respectively as Saturn itself, the celestial crescent and the electric arc. Indra (a Hindu Jupiter) slew Trisiras with a thunderbolt, whereupon Trisiras' three heads shone with brilliant energy until they were cut off, and then flocks of birds flew out of them and his fever left his body.
The powers that acted in the Heavens were manifested to humans amidst increasing disaster. In terror, self-abasement and pleading, man created a Uranus-Heaven religion and hoped for cosmic tranquility. Unanimously the legends of the world acknowledge the human to be an imperfect creation; some have him created more than once, as for instance, the Olmecs of Mexico; they sensed faults in their powerlessness against cosmic forces. They projected then retrojected their faults to the behavior of the gods. These notions of imperfection were indelibly imprinted. Perhaps never until the past two hundred years did humans believe that they and the natural environment might be benignly controlled through human intelligence. What may have most bothered the early humans was their inability to manage their internal psychic systems. They were interminably made anxious and self-reflective by their lack of self-control. From their ungovernable alter egos arise the huge variety of traits and behaviors of the gods; they are artifacts of human conduct analogized to objective features of the natural environment. In every aspect of nature could be found some physiognomic and behavioral parallel with the self and with the primary human group with which the self identified. This intrinsic, practically congenital, confusion of the inner and outer worlds of mankind was a two way transaction that led humans to emulate the most extreme and complex manifestations of nature, with results upon human nature and culture that were in modern perspective often richly "constructive", but frequently "self-destructive" as well.
When the skies opened after the lunar disaster, the new great god, Super Saturn, was visible dimly, through the clouds, to Earth's inhabitants. They had already been "religious" for millennia and might readily once more identify the sky objects with human forms and actions and project their hopes and fears upon the heavenly objects newly visible. Magic, spiritualism and animism, which have been regarded sometimes as substitutes for, and predecessors of, celestial religion, were derivative accompaniments of the human preoccupation with celestial behavior; they were forms of homeopathic social medicine for the "great disease".
The first religions were in the broadest sense "monotheistic." [92] Heaven was worshipped as the active power. As we set forth earlier, from the very beginning, humans have tended towards a supreme god. The Chinese, with T'ien, may have been the most persistent in abstracting a monotheistic idea from the Heavens and using it through a succession of specifically powerful heavenly forces. The I Ching gives this sequence: the First Principle is Heaven (T'ien) eternally present, chaos without form; the Second Principle and First Sun, giver of time, called "The Arouser"; the Third Principle, and Second Sun, an orderer, "The Limiter". "The arouser" appears to have been both Super Uranus and Saturn, a merging of memories over time also to be found in other cultures.
Figure 32. The Chinese Craftsman God and His Paredra
Fu Hsi and Nu Kua measure the "squareness of the Earth" and the "roundness of Heaven" with their implements. The god is depicted enthroned atop a serpent-like column arm-in-arm with his mate. It is tempting to suggest that this picture illustrates the situation during the Age of Saturn, with the god-star perched stop the "fiery" electric arc, which rose above the world and faded in the distance into the golden sky.
The ancient Persians and others asserted that God created Saturn (whence Saturday) on his sixth and last day of labor, before resting on the seventh day (whence Sabbath = rest) (Cardona, 1978a, p34). The implication is that all things - the separation of Heaven and Earth, the other celestial objects thus revealed, the biosphere, the advent of the Moon, and mankind - were all accomplished before Saturn appeared.
Various scholar identify the Biblical Elohim as Saturn (de Santillana and von Dechend, p146; Tresman and O' Gheoghan; Cardona, 1973a; and others). More likely, the story adopts the designation of god employed during the Saturnian Age (as for example, it was assertedly retold by Moses in Genesis). But "Elohim" at the beginning of Genesis is behaving like the great inactive demiurge brooding over the Pangean chaos, who then becomes activated as Super Uranus in the troubled phase, and creates the world, as mankind, born on the sixth day, received and perceived the Cosmos. Whereupon a more detailed account begins, relating the Hebrew experience with Saturn as distinct from the more general, aboriginal human experience.
When the gods changed, humans bowed to the changes. This repeated behavior over thousands of years is a significant motif in religious history. The lamentations over the death of Saturn were worldwide. Because Saturn "died" in what was an historical period, although little of its civilization remains, the hysterical and obsessive mourning shows mankind affected by, not affecting, a real tragedy. Thousands of years after the death of the second sun and the end of his age, the Roman government was acting to suppress infant sacrifice to Saturn. The parallels between Saturn and Christ as a Saturnian figure are numerous: the passion of Christ is historically and psychologically a re-enactment of the character, the unjust death, and the resurrection of the god who had died some four thousand years earlier as Osiris-Saturn. Frequent efforts philosophically to cover over the deep trench of tradition connecting the two gods have failed to divert the mainstream. Such efforts have built a distinctive existential character for Christ. The => Age of Saturn in cultural terms was probably what is usually designated as upper Paleolithic and Neolithic. It would be the age of Atlantis and other civilizations lost to view in the disasters that followed.
Saturn, who was generally accredited with bringing agriculture and other useful arts to mankind, was the first Lord of the Mill, a sky wheel grinding out material and spilling it upon the Earth-gold, salt, sand, and stones. Before it sank in a cosmic mael-strom, it ground salt into the sea (de Santillana and von Dechend). The Saturnian Deluge was caused by a salt-water tree cut down by a tapir, according to the Cuna Indians (ibid). In Hindu myth, the gods were churning the heavenly waters and ground salt into the seas (Tresman and O'Gheoghan, p39, and see Figure 33).
Salt domes are among the most common of the mineral intrusions that are scattered over the Earth's surface. Small ones are about one cubic kilometer in extent, but some are several hundred times this extent. The largest known salt dome is in Calliou Island Bay, Marchland Louisiana; its size is unknown but it is estimated to be 43 kilometers long, 20 kilometers wide
and 6 kilometers deep; if so, it contains about 10 13 tons of salt. Globally 950 large salt domes are being used for mining. In some regions these domes are associated with petroleum and natural gas deposits. Other places have sulfur deposits associated with the salt intrusions. Since most salt domes have been found scattered widely from the three major salt-dome fields known today, it is not unreasonable to think that only a small fraction of the buried salt has been discovered. These immense deposits of salt in the ground suggest a non-marine source of all salt. The salt in the seas can be explained in terms of salt falls from space.
Figure 33. The Churning of the Sea
Vishnu sits atop mount Mandara accompanied by his wife Lakshmi. The mountain of the world is being spun as the great snake Vasuki is pulled to and fro by the devas (grasping the snake's neck, to the left) and the asuras (holding its head, to the right). Together they churn the sea of milk, producing the liquid of immortality. Unfortunately their churning became so violent that it threatened the Earth, whereupon Vishnu, as the avatar of the turtle (seen here below the mountain), came to save the world by assuming the role as its pivot. Still the world was threatened by the heat of the churning until Indra sent the Deluge from Heaven to quench the fire. -courtesy Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology
Whence comes "The Golden Age" of Saturn? Saturn is golden. So is the light on Earth. The interruptions of absorbing the children were spaced out, perhaps half a dozen marking disasters over the 2 300 years that followed the lunar period. Meanwhile life on Earth may have been easy in most places. There was no ice age. Travel by boat was easy, for the breezes were mild. Antarctic may have been mapped in this age, since an ancient map showing its outline beneath the present snow has been found and since no later age would have been able to produce it because the coastline was invisible (Hapgood, 1966). The northernmost and southernmost regions were quite habitable, even tropical. The continental shelves and slopes had become livable. There was a plentitude of moisture and all-year warmth. The plenum and electrosphere were still insulating. Further, Earth was holding its own surface atmosphere despite the thinning of the plenum under Saturn. The plenum became increasingly more transparent.
The arc was less brilliant and more intermittent, yet the fire was there, binding Earth to its great god. Kronos is addressed in an Orphic Hymn as "you who hold the indestructible bond", while his Babylonian alter ego held "the bond of heaven and earth" (Tresman and O'Gheoghan, p36). The "central fire" is also represented, likely, in the innumerable pillars, phalluses, bonds, pinnacles, pyramids, and one-legged gods (Talbott, D. N., pages: 190, 368, 188). Even the jagged sickle, with which Kronos castrated Uranus, may have symbolized the electrical axis being severed from Super Uranus. Manu, a Hindu creator god of the Flood, stood on one leg for thousands of years, contemplating his world design. All of these images are closely connected with Saturn, often by name as well as by symbol. Yahweh is imagined in Jewish legend as radiant atop Mount Zion, and Kronos-Saturn ruled Mount Olympus before Zeus toppled him.
Super Saturn sat atop the sky, a dull red disc three times the size of the present Sun. Because of the Earth's offset from the arc, the sub-solar position on Saturn's face was askew 21 per cent from the center of its disc. The arc impinged upon about five per cent of Saturn's face. Below Saturn it widened like a tree until it passed Earth's horizon, where it was something like 15 degrees wide.
The insistent worldwide legendary connections between the Pleiades, the Deluge, and Saturn as god and planet (Cardona, 1978b) point to the likelihood of the Deluge as having occurred at the time when Super Saturn had masked this star group, and of the Pleiades having emerged for the first observable time in the sky at the zenith following the clearing of this place by the actual bodies and the debris of the nova. The Pleiades were widely taken to be the remnants of the Deluge nova by the myths.
The report of Seneca, about Berossus' history, to the effect that when the stars are lined up in Capricorn, a great flood occurs, can be interpreted to mean that the Deluge occurred at the time of year when Capricorn was astrologically dominant, which, in the period when astrology crystallized, would have fallen near the end of the year. But the end of the year is the end of the Age of Saturn, hence the floods of Capricorn are associated with the Saturnian Deluge.
Also to be considered is the naming of the large sky area, "the Celestial Sea", where the two Pisces (the zodiacal one and the southern one), Cetus (Whale), Eridanus (Styx, the river), Capricornus, and Aquarius are the dominant constellations. These aquatic images suggest the presence of vast celestial waters, and their one-time general location. Celestial aquatic motifs are common, as in the Golspie Stone discovered near the small town of that name in northern Scotland (Figure 34).
At the moment of the nova the electric arc was interreputed long enough to free Mars, Earth, "Apollo" and Mercury from their million-year captivity along the axis of the binary partners. Thereupon they orbited the Sun independently for the first time, moving along a plane close to that of the old binary. Their new, roughly co-planar orbits, were similar to, but much more closely spaced than the orbits of these same planets today [93] .
At the time of its nova Super Saturn broke into at least three major fragments; these pieces, constituting the present Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune, all receded from the Sun following the fission. Jupiter, the largest surviving piece, took up a position near the Earth's present orbit; Saturn Minor, the intermediate-sized part, blew into space beyond Mars present orbit; Neptune receded beyond Jupiter's present orbit after depositing much water into the Earth's electrosphere [94] . In the nova, charge was expelled from Super Saturn into the plenum and dispersed in surrounding space; it was as if the mass of the system had been reduced two-and-one-half-fold; so, the planetary motions slowed considerably.
Neptune is the Latin identity of the Greek god Poseidon, brother of Jupiter, who with another brother Hades, helped Jupiter overturn their father in the nova revolt. Poseidon then was granted sovereignty of the seas and assumed his role on Earth. Before him there had been Tethys, goddess of the sea on Earth, and Okeanos, god of the celestial sea girdling Earth. By implication we conclude that Poseidon played a role in the deluging of the Earth.
An interesting collection of ancient celestial motifs. We find aquatic creatures associated with the Flood which ended the Age of Saturn; the destroyer god, who felled Saturn from his perch stop the column at the center of the world; the two stars connected, representing the earlier state of the world; and the intertwined serpents, or the electric arc, which was quenched by the Deluge.
Synchrotron radiation emitted by the planets Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus has been detected and cosmic ray sources have now been associated with these planets. Saturn, like Jupiter, emits much more energy that it receives from the Sun (Milton, 1978; Hunt and Burgess) [95] . The heat excess given off by the gaseous planets is an indication of their electrical nature. The emission of X-rays by a stellar source is often taken by astronomers as an indication of a very recent thermonuclear nova. Following our theory, the X-rays emitted by stars and these gaseous planets of the Solar System come from electrical transactions.
The effects of the deluges of Saturn are a subject beyond the scope of this book (see Patton, pp51-64; Frazer, 1916). Judging by the civilizations reported to have been inundated, the fall of waters must have been worldwide and extremely heavy. Those cultures that disappeared beneath the waters (de Grazia, 1981) are presumed to have been located at the low-lying coasts of continents on what are now the continental shelves and slopes. The disappeared civilizations are not the only clues to how much water was involved. The great river canyons that course down the continental slopes to the abyss were in existence before the Deluge and were now inundated and probably greatly eroded, as were all of the valleys on higher land.
The Great Deluge would thus top up the ocean basins of the globe, covering the continental margins left dry after the Uranian deluges. Not only would more water fall on the Earth than in the earlier cataclysms, but it would fall in a much shorter period. If indeed the water came down as the Hebrew Book of Genesis reports, in forty days and forty nights [96] , then fifty-one per cent of the Earth's water descended in three and one-half million seconds: 411 tons per square kilometer-second, 1.5 meters of rain each hour. The whole Deluge would have amounted to a 1.42-kilometer depth of rain upon the Earth's entire surface. Much of this water would have to drain into the basins in order to deepen the seas by more than two kilometers. That such a Deluge has dominated the myths and legends of the survivors is understandable [97] .
Saturn is reputed to have lit up brilliantly and preserved its light for seven days before the Deluge hit the Earth. This may be interpreted as a set of pre-fission flare-ups climaxing with the nova that destroyed Saturn. If the Earth were still only 14 Gm from Saturn, the debris expanding away at 200 km/ s would encounter Earth in a little more than 19 hours. If the 40- days/ nights period were of present duration, the problem of depositing so much water on the Earth would be practically impossible. Millions of heavy cyclones would be needed, even one per 30 square kilometers all over the Earth. If they were concentrated at the poles by the electrosphere high above the Earth and funneled down there, the damage might be less. But then the tremendous erosion would be visible today. We think that a longer span of time may have been required, and "a day" was a translated memory of a longer regular interval unknown to us, a magical cipher, or an historical error.
The problem of deluging the Earth is nearly as difficult to cope with as the recent eruption of the Moon from the Earth. In both, almost unimaginable physical phenomena must be conjectured. The biospheric aspect, which often comes first to mind, can be rationalized on the equally incredible capacity of living populations to renew themselves. Even postulating Manu and his tiny crew or Noah and his family as sole survivors, a thousand years of exponential growth could fill the land to overflowing. As with the deluges, one does not have to move far from the extremities of legend to enter the realms of the possible.
The astrophysical aspect is more intimidating (see Kofahr). To launch the waters and other debris from Saturn is readily conceivable, given the nova. To guide it and land it requires the invention of low-probability solutions. Even if the dynamics thus far presented can be accepted with respect to Earth, how does one explain the absence of water on Mercury, Moon, and Mars, all of which would have been in or near the rush of water [98] ? If they were inundated, where has the water gone? There is almost no sign of water on them, or its having been on them in oceans. Where, too, is the salt?
Two types of probability occur. The two planets may have burst out of the magnetic tube ahead of the Flood churning down towards the Sun, whereas the Earth was entrapped. Or else, the Flood can have descended the tube by a passage occupied at the moment by the Earth alone. In this case, the Moon occupied a special position besides, for it was a considerable distance from the Earth towards the perimeter of the tube. In any case, the Earth would still be luckier than Mercury, or Mars, for both of these planets have ruined surfaces and no biospheres.
Three different Jewish legendary statements refer to a diminution of the Moon in size (Tresman and O'Gheoghan). This would occur presumably after the Deluge, when the Moon followed the Earth out of the old magnetic tube and was repelled by Earth into a larger, but still captive, orbit. Two legends imply that the stars multiplied then, an expected improvement of visibility in the star-system sac. The age of Jupiter, now upon the world, introduced mankind to the light of the stars in the darkness of the night.
Notes on Chapter 14
93. See ahead, Chapter Fifteen, p. 174, for the fate of Apollo.