Planetary Catastrophe,
Ancient Myth & Modern Science
Special thanks to Susan Schirott and
the Mainwarings and Jerry Simonson
for putting me on this event.
It's just fantastic to see so many old
friends and get a chance to rub elbows
with the scientific dignitaries
that are here so...
That's great!
Real quick before starting
I wanted to give everybody
an update on Duardu Cardona.
I called him the day I left for the
conference to see how he was doing,
he's about halfway through his chemo and
radiation treatments for lung cancer right now
and the very first words
out of his mouth were,
say, make sure and say thanks to everybody
at the conference for me if you would. So
that's what I'm doing and he seems
to be doing great he's very positive
so hopefully he's going
to have many more years
to finish up his volumes
that are in the wings.
Just real briefly,
I first became interested in this
subject matter while I was in college,
one of my professors had a complete
ten series of Pensée Magazine
and so I read that and got
kind of interested in the
the spectacle of a maverick Scholar
taken on establishment science
and so I eventually got the Kronos
Journal and Velikovsky Reconsidered
and then in 1980 Lynn Rose, who was a
longtime speaker at these symposium,
alerted me to Dave Talbott's
book The Saturn Myth
and, you know, said that I
should track that down.
And so I did
and then I was so impressed by the
logical coherence of that argument
that I hitchhiked from Princeton,
New Jersey to Portland to see Dave,
to meet him for the first time
and we've essentially been
friends ever since, that was 1981,
and in the early 80s we published a series
of articles together for Kronos Magazine
on the comet Venus
and then in 1988 Dave
started the journal Aeon
and so I was, kind of, his right-hand
man on that journal for many years
and then Dwardu joined us
and so, you know, we had that together
for about 20 years and so...
basically it's become
my life's work.
I would say that of the many great
insights in the Saturn Myth,
the one that stood out to me was the
idea that creation was something
that human beings actually experienced
and witnessed up close and personal
and so that's kind of the, that's the
subject matter of my talk here today.
Okay, this is just a picture of what we
think The Polar Configuration looked like
at one time during
a specific phase.
This is actually a simulation
done at a top company
with a Mars sized object, a Venus sized
object and a Saturn sized object behind it.
And so, that's the image
you come up with.
And so, one of our favorite scholars
is guy named Mircea Eliade
and he's written extensively
on myths of creation
and so he says; "Myth
narrates a sacred history;
it relates an event that took place in primordial
time, the fabled time of 'beginnings'.
In other words, myth tells how, through
the deeds of Supernatural Beings,
a reality came into existence.
Myth, then, is always an
account of a 'creation'.
Myth tells only of that
which really happened.
So I'm going to discuss
two myths today,
one of the oldest known
from ancient Mesopotamia
and then one from the New World.
In ancient Mesopotamia the one of the oldest
rites, you know, recorded about 3,000 BC,
there's pictures of
it, vases showing it,
an early text describing it, is
called "the sacred marriage rite"
and this described a marriage of
the king whose name was Dumuzi
and the Queen of Heaven who was the
planet Venus, known as Inanna.
So the Babylonian paradigm
for love and marriage
was a relationship between
these two figures.
By the way, every single
slide I show today,
I'm quoting one of the top
scholars in the world
recognized by all the top Mesopotamian
ancient Near East scholars.
The ritual in question
originated in ancient Uruk
where the deified king Dumuzi, familiar
from biblical passages as Tammuz,
married Inanna and thus entered
the Sumerian Pantheon.
The sacred marriage in Ur's Third Dynasty
was celebrated during the New Year festival
when the King, representing Dumuzi,
united with the planet Venus Inanna.
Their union was believed to revive the forces
of life and fertility in nature and society,
and to ensure abundance for
Sumer in the subsequent year.
So basically what this
rite involved is the king
would enter into a dwelling specially
constructed for this situation
and make love to this woman who
represented the planet Venus.
The earliest texts we have
describing this very well-known rite
comes from about 2100 BC
and it's this King Iddin-Dagan's
hymm to the goddess Inanna
and it describes what he did
on his sacred marriage rite.
So here's the opening
couple of lines,
"I shall greet her who
descends from above...
I shall greet the great
lady of heaven, Inanna!
I shall greet the holy torch who fills
the heavens, the light, [Inanna]
her who shines like the daylight,
the great lady of heaven, [Inanna]
the most awesome lady;
the respected one who fills heaven and
earth with her huge brilliance...
Her descending is
that of a warrior."
Now if you guys go out tonight
and look into the western sky,
you'll see that Venus is about as
bright tonight as it's ever going to be
during your lifetime and
Jupiter's right next to it
and so see if, as bright as it is,
if any of you guys would think that to
describe it as it's filling all of heaven
or it's shining as daylight
or it's descending
like a warrior.
"On New..." to continue
with the same text,
"On New Year's day, the day of the
ritual, They set up a bed for my lady.
They cleanse rushes with
sweet-smelling cedar oil,
They arranged them for my lady,
for their (the Queen
and Kings) bed...
The King approaches
(her) pure lap proudly,
Dumuzi lies down beside her,
He caresses her pure lap...
She makes love with
him on the bed."
Again this is a Sumerian text, this is not
some scholar and it's certainly not me,
this is the Sumerian king
himself writing these words.
"After the union is completed,
Inanna rises from the King's lap,
and immediately 'flax rose up with
her, the barley rose up with her,
the steppe had been filled (with
abundance) like a blossoming garden'".
And so now this is the top scholar
in Sumerian studies today,
he says: "Quite a few sources indicate
that through the performance of this rite
ritual great abundance
immediately followed".
"Deified kings who enacted
the role of the bridegroom
were said to be placed
'in the holy garden'.
By analogous symbolism the divine
bride..." (Inanna or Venus)
"...was compared to
a green garden."
The language of the ancient Sumerian
texts is so explicitly sexual
that it seems beyond question
that they describe a sexual union
between the king and the queen
or the goddess, the
consummation of their marriage.
The crucial question
however is, why?
Why did this union take place, and why was
it performed ritually year after year?
For thousands of
years by the way.
"Despite all the various
suggestions reviewed above,
no scholarly consensus has been reached
regarding this basic question.
While the importance of the sacred marriage
right for the Sumerians is obvious,
it has remained enigmatic
to modern scholars".
We could use that sentence for virtually
the the next 50 slides I'm going to show,
all this stuff remains
enigmatic to modern scholars.
"Despite all the various
suggestions reviewed above,
no scholarly consensus has been reached
regarding this basic question.
While the importance of the sacred marriage
is obvious, it remained enigmatic".
Alright, it didn't go forward.
"Unfortunately, our sources say next to
nothing as to how the Venus aspect of Inanna
was linked to her functions as a
goddess of eros, love and fertility".
Because every serious scholar
recognizes that Inanna
is intimately associated with eros,
love and fertility from 3,000 BC on.
"The belief that the
king could in some sense
actually have sexual
intercourse with the goddess
is intimately connected to the belief in
the divinity of the kings of this period."
So reading the ancient text, you
will find that after the king
engages in this rite
with the planet goddess,
that's when his name starts
getting a little D besides it
meaning he's now a God himself.
Samuel Kramer, one of the top
scholars in Mesopotamian studies,
discovered a very obscure text that
has hardly gotten any attention
from the other authorities
and it describes Inanna taking
Dumuzi up to heaven with her
and placing him as a
star alongside her
and so this is his
conclusion to that text,
"Since, as is well known, the king of
Sumer, as the husband of Inanna,
was identified with Dumuzi, it may
be, to judge from this ancient text,
that there was current in Sumer a theological
tenet that the king upon his death
was turned into a heavenly star situated
close to the Venus-star Inanna".
Oops, went one too far.
Okay, this is a guy named Wolfgang
Heimpel at the University of California
and this is how he wrote the definitive
article on Sumerian mythology
for the standard
encyclopedia in the field.
"While the fragmentary nature of our
knowledge of Mesopotamian culture
does not allow us to exclude the existence
of astral allegorization among Babylonians,
the plots of the myths provide clear
evidence that the primary concern of myth
was with the great
stages of human life,
and that astral connections
and allegorization
cannot have shaped the myths
in any significant way".
A more erroneous view
could hardly be imagined
but that's the standard
current opinion.
And that opinion flies in the
face of what is very well known
and that's that, in the again the most
ancient texts we have from 3,000 BC,
the only gods mentioned
are star gods and so...
The leading scholar on the earliest
writing in the world from Uruk
is a gal named Krystyna Szarzynska from
Czechoslovakia and here was her comment:
"In the most archaic period
the determinative dingir...",
which is actually a star,
"...was associated with
astral deities only".
So the leading gods of
the time like Inanna
they would always have this little star besides
their name identifying them as a star.
So how do you reconcile that with the
previous comment from Wolfgang Heimpel that
all these myths describing these figures
have nothing to do with stars or planets?
So, you know, we've worked in
this area for 30-some years now
and you're always trying to come up with
a argument showing these guys wrong
because they're never going to listen
no matter how many articles you write
so you want to come up with an argument
that kind of draws attention and so
a couple years ago I
stumbled across a myth
from the New World here in
America, from the Pawnee
and they lived around
Nebraska on the Great Plains
and towards the end of the 19th
century the anthropologist,
just as the tribe was basically
dwindling down to nothing,
the anthropologists started visiting
them and recorded their sacred myths
and so that's well, that's what
we're going to move to now.
So says: "No other primitive people has
such an extensive and accurate record
of its myths, tales, and legends
as the North American Indian."
"The peoples of ancient..." they're
talking about the Aztecs now
but it's applicable to the
Pawnee as well as we'll see,
"The peoples of ancient [Mesoamerica]
keenly observed the sky
and used the calendar to predict
solar and lunar eclipses,
the cycles of the planet Venus,
the apparent movements of the
constellations and other celestial events.
To them, these occurrences were not the
mechanical movements of innate celestial bodies
but they constituted the
activities of the gods,
the actual recapitulation of mythical
events from the time of creation".
So in the standard text
studying the Pawnee religion
by an anthropologist named James Murray,
who was actually Pawnee himself,
here's what it said:
"...it has been said that they
were obsessed with planets
and had a sky oriented theology perhaps
without parallel in human history".
The Skidi Creation Myth, which we're
going to come back to again and again,
summarized in one sentence
by top scholar, it says:
"The Morning Star married
the Evening Star."
That's their creation myth.
So back to Murray, this is what
he said about those two figures,
"The first one he placed in the
heavens was the Morning Star...
He was to be dressed like a warrior
and painted all over with red dust...
Through him people were to be created
and he would demand of the people..."
a human sacrifice.
This was the planet
Mars or the God of War.
The second figure
involved the evening star,
The second God placed
in the heavens
known to the white people as
Venus...She was a beautiful woman...
"Through this star and Morning
Star all things were created.
She is the mother of the Skidi".
(Pawnee)
"Through her it is possible for people to
increase [reproduce] and crops to mature".
She is the planet Venus, [and
it] is the source of fertility.
This is an another scholar, summary
of this creation myth of the Pawnee,
"In the creation story, fruitfulness
and light had come into the world
because Morning Star"
(the planet Mars)
"and his realm of light had conquered and
mated with Evening Star" (the planet Venus)
"in her realm of darkness".
This is an artist's rendering
of the human sacrifices
that were still being
offered well into the 1800s,
I think the last successful
one was like 1830
but they kept trying
to do it after that
and there were actually some heroic
interventions where, you know,
some cowboy somewhere would ride up and
take the gal off the scaffold but...
this is an artist's rendering
of what was involved,
they would put this gal, kidnapped
usually, up on this scaffold
and they would have the Mars figure come
up and shoot an arrow right in her heart
and they would direct the blood
down into a pit below the scaffold
and that pit was called
the Garden of Venus.
So we'll come back to
that here in a second.
Whoops, I went too far.
"The sacrifice is said to have been
claimed by Morning Star as a reward
for his effort in bringing about the
conditions for marriage and fertility,
except for which the world of
the Pawnees would not exist.
In many ways the ceremony amounted
to a reenactment of the legend
with the sexual penetration
of..." the planet Venus by Mars
represented by the arrow
being shot into her heart.
"The sacrifice as a whole must be
considered as a ritual dramatization
of the overcoming of Evening Star by the
Morning Star and their subsequent connection,
from which sprang
all life on earth.
The girl upon the scaffold seems to have
been conceived of as a personification
or embodiment of the [planet
Venus] surrounded by her powers.
When she was overcome, the
life of the earth was renewed,
ensuring universal
fertility and increase".
Where have we heard that before?
Virtually the exact same sentences
from ancient Mesopotamia
(and so) involving the exact
same planet, planet Venus.
Back to the human sacrifice,
"The pit..." below the where
the blood was directed
"...symbolized the Garden of the Evening
Star from which all life originates."
Again I'm just citing
anthropologists, this has nothing...
...these are top scholars,
this isn't me filling-in the
details here, writing over them,
substituting words.
"In theory the Skidi Pawnee
ceremonies all have as their object
the performance
either through drama
or through ritual of the acts which
were performed in the mythological age.
The ritual is a formal
method of restating
the acts of the supernatural
beings in early times..."
in this case the planet
Mars, the planet Venus.
So this is back to the original
scholar cited Eliade again
and he's summarizing rituals all
around the earth and he goes,
"Every ritual has a divine
model, an archetype;
this fact is well known enough for us to
confine ourselves to recalling a few examples.
'We must do what the gods
did in the beginning'
'Thus the gods did thus
men do' [this theory]
This Indian adage summarizes all the theory
underlying rituals in all countries."
To summarize the Skidi
Pawnee myth then,
I'm just going to throw three
different sentences that we've read
already together, they're by three
different authorities but the first one,
"The Morning Star married
the Evening Star"
the second one,
"All things were created through sexual
union between the planet Mars and Venus."
And three, "with their sexual union
the life of the earth was renewed
bringing Universal
fertility an increase."
Comparing that now to what
we learned from Mesopotamia...
The first sentence describes,
"The king's union with the goddess
[Inanna] resulted in her granting
a favorable promise of fertility and
abundance for the land and its inhabitants."
Second sentence,
"Inanna's character as a
goddess of fertility,
who brings about intercourse
between the sexes,
is also manifested in
numerous other sources."
Finally,
"As the Skidi held that 'all life'
originated from Venus's sacred garden
so, too, did the Sumerians deem the
planet Venus to be a garden-like matrix
and the 'divine
source of all life'."
Divine source of
all life is in quotes
because that was an epithet
associated with the planet Venus.
Okay, just briefly now
I'll touch on Greek myths
since that might be more
familiar to some of you guys.
This is one of my favorite pictures,
very early on, of Aphrodite.
So Aphrodite was
invoked as follows,
"Blessed Queen of Heaven... celestial Venus,
who at the time of the first creation
coupled the sexes
in mutual love."
Pindar, Bill Mullen's
favorite writer,
describes Aphrodite as "mother of
loves in the sky... Aphrodite."
Moving now to a top modern
scholar, whose book just came out,
"The artistic evidence
makes it abundantly clear
that Aphrodite is a sine qua
non of wedding ritual."
"[Venus is] the star which in
poetry enjoys a close association
with Aphrodite and with
marriage ceremonial."
that's James Diggle, another
top top guy in Greek studies.
The final sentence
there's from Euripides,
"We sing the heavenly daughter of
Zeus, the mother of loves, Aphrodite,
who brings nuptials
(weddings) to maidens."
Walter Burkert, arguably the top
Greek scholar in the world today,
"Admittedly, the connection between Ares and
Aphrodite is firmly rooted in cult and myth."
Ares is well known to be the husband of
Aphrodite in numerous Greek sources.
This just came out here
in the last couple of years,
the top Greek guy at Harvard Gregory Nagy
put out a book discussing Sappho's poems.
Sappho wrote about 700 BC
and here's what it says,
"In the wedding songs of Sappho, the god
Ares is the model for the ... 'bridegroom',
who is explicitly described as ...
'equal to Ares'."
That leads us to the question,
who might that bride be?
Again these are Nagy's words,
"Correspondingly, there are many
instances of implicit equations
[between] the generic bride
and the goddess Aphrodite:
in Sappho song 112, for example, the
bridegroom is said to be infused
with the divine
charisma of Aphrodite,
evidently by way of his direct
contact with the bride."
So if you can imagine that somehow
this Ares-like figures being infused
with power or glory or something,
light call it, from Aphrodite.
Where have we heard that before?
So in various books I've
discussed the Persian,
the Persian goddess of the planet
Venus and here's how she's described,
"She legitimated the enthronement of the
king, providing him with his charisma."
Again this is a universal motif
as it was found on everywhere.
For all practical purposes the
planet Venus imbues the king
or her lover, her bridegroom with
his charisma, his glory, his power.
Back to Mesopotamia.
"The love songs portray Inanna, the
'life-force of the teeming people',
passing the divine influx
onward to her spouse, the king."
Will go back to the sacred
marriage ceremony again
and here's a specific quote from
a different marriage ceremony,
"You, oh mistress [Inanna], you have handed
over to him your power as is due to the king,
and [Dumuzi] causes a radiant
brilliance to burst out for you."
And one of my favorite scholars,
a gal named Bruschweiler,
was talking about this passage
and here's what she said,
"This passage is interesting
due to the way in which,
in the context of the
sacred marriage,
the luminous essence of the goddess
is passed over to the king,
who is identified for the
occasion with Dumuzi."
Again it's the exact same thing we
just read about with Aphrodite.
So all of you that are
familiar with Dave's work,
we've been talking about this
image for 20 years, I suppose,
where we imagine Mars
being the inner orb there
surrounded by the glory
of the planet Venus.
The Odyssey we're
all familiar with,
Ares and Aphrodite are caught
in making love surreptitiously
and they're caught in this net
and so Homer turns it into
an act of comedy by asking,
Would you, despite all these
ropes holding you tight
and embarrassing you in
front of the other guys,
"Would you, ..., like to lie
in bed with Aphrodite?"
And I think Hermes answers,
"O yes, even if there were
three times as many fastenings
and all the gods and
goddesses were watching."
And so then a commentator
called Lucian wrote this,
"All that he [Homer] hath said of
Venus and Mars, [his passion has]
also manifestly composed from no other
source than this science [astrology].
Indeed, it is the conjuncture of Venus and
Mars that creates the poetry of Homer".
Not surprisingly, here's the top
scholar on Aphrodite's cult,
"Originally, the goddess Aphrodite
had nothing to do with the planet.
The link was in all
probability made
as a result of Babylonian influence
in the field of astronomy."
Okay, all of us, I'm sure, are familiar
with the expression 'tying the knot',
it's a proverbial expression for a wedding
and it goes back thousands of years,
for example Virgil in the first sentence
there talked about Venus tying the knot.
This is a very ancient picture
of Inanna holding a knot
and it's called either the ring
or the knot of sovereignity.
Sovereignity meaning kingship.
Again back to a top scholar
talking about Ishtar's mythology,
"Many astral motifs in
fact are attested...
Ishtar's Elevation tells us
that [the god] An married her
on the urging of the gods and asked her
to hold and rule the 'tie' (riksu)",
tie also means knot.
Another recent text found Ishtar as
the planet Venus described as 'Kisru'.
The word 'Kisru', however, means a
knot or a meteor-like object.
An ancient text from
about 2900 BC said,
"When Inanna had tied the lordship
with the kingship for..."
this figure, the Sumerian king,
"... she let him exert
kingship in Uruk".
Again and again and again,
Inanna is described as tying on the
Royal headband of the royal crown.
Back to the sacred
marriage rite,
again and again and again
Inanna is in this text, there's hundreds
of lines of, in this particular text
but on about ten different occasions Inanna
is said to embrace the king, embrace Dumuzi
and the word used also
means to knot, to tie up.
From the same text: "May the Lord
whom you have chosen in your heart,
the king, your beloved husband, enjoy
long days in your holy and sweet embrace!,
again this embrace
meaning a knot.
Give him a propitious
and famous reign...
and give him the righteous (headband) headdress
and the crown which glorifies his head".
I like that quote because it almost
ties all three things together,
her tying on the crown, her tying him with
the knot and her giving him kingship.
So here's kind of
my summary to that,
Inanna's "embracing" or knotting of
the king equals his sacred marriage.
Inanna's "tying" or "knotting" of
the royal headband on the king
is his investiture
with the crown.
At the same time, however, her tying on
this knot or sexual union with the king
turns him into a god.
So here's another familiar sign that
Dave and I have used hundreds of times,
back to, again, Inanna's knot
that symbolized kingship.
This is the same sign
or an analogous sign, I guess, would be the
better way to put it, from ancient Egypt,
where there is the goddess that hands
the king this shen bond or shen knot
"thereby legitimizing his
crown and sovereignity".
Does that look familiar?
And finally, I'd like to just discuss
in passing the greening of the world
because it's so important to this sacred
marriage that's always associated with fertility,
why would they associate the planet Venus
with causing fertility everywhere?
Here's back to the
sacred marriage theme,
"The holy embrace... Fresh fruits and shoots...
As she rises from the King's embrace,
the flax rises up with her..."
everything appears like
a glorious garden.
So here's what we think
things looked like,
There was actually a greening of the
sky associated with this conjunction,
that's where this fertility
motif comes from
and again and again and again you will
read that the heavens became greened.
Back to the sacred marriage, Of the royal
bed on where this marriage was performed
it was called 'g', 'i',
'r', 'i', 'n', GIRIN.
The word itself means
blossoming, fruitful, shining.
So the King again and again is invoked as
"Long may he live on the flowered throne!"
One of the most ancient symbols of
Inanna from again, prehistoric times,
was the Rosette,
this figure here,
an eigth fold flower-like star.
Again, back to one of the
top scholars in the world,
"Another early symbol refers
to Inanna: the rosette,
which somehow was connected
with the sign for 'star',...
...Already in 1922 Deimel
proposed their common origin...
My own preliminary investigation
of this connection
is that the rosette is meant
to represent the flower,
the earthly counterpart
of the star".
Evidently he was unaware that this
pictograph is found all around the world.
This is an example from Ireland.
So to take away from
this speech in summary,
I would emphasize that creation was something
actually witnessed in prehistoric times.
There were extraordinary celestial
events involving the planets,
witnessed by people
all around the globe.
The sacred marriage rite commemorated
the historical planetary conjunction
between prototypical
male and female powers.
The greening of the world
equals a specific phase in the
unfolding of the polar configuration.
Again, we'll be describing this, I'm sure, for
the next 20 years with thousands of parallels,
it's so obvious, it's unbelievable, no one's
ever seen this before so far as I'm aware.
The garden itself associated
with the planet Venus
was a celestial place,
a celestial structure
associated with the prototypical
sexual act between Mars and Venus.
Is it any wonder that flowers to this
day are still associated with marriage
or that rings or bands are
still associated with marriage?
In our configuration here, the planet
Mars has to be in front of Venus.
I would suggest to you that
you can take that to the bank
that Mars was originally stationed
in front of the planet Venus.
However if that's true,
virtually every modern astronomical
textbook will need wholesale revision.
Thank you very much.
Thunderbolts.info
