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.
