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Chapter 6
History and Catastrophe
The Noah Syndrome
The story of Noah and the Ark is the primordial story of salvation;
the original Quest for the Holy Grail; - the building of the Ark;
and - the Great Work of Alchemy. The Flood has other connotations
such as the occlusion of the Sun representing the “Dying God”,
sacrificed for the sins of mankind. In this sense, the Ark is the
symbol of the Cosmic Hieros Gamos, or the mode of passage to the
realm of the “Once and Future King”, Arthur/Arca and the Shepherds
of Arcadia.
In our present time, the Christian religion, (and its
New Age offshoots), is the chief proponent of the many End of the
World scenarios with which we are most familiar.
However, they do
not seem to note that the most important point is that Jesus
definitively connected the so-called End of the World with the story
of Noah, thereby affirming the “Primitive Chiliasm” view.
In
Matthew, chapter 24, verses 37 and 38:
As were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of man.
For just as in those days before the flood they were eating and
drinking, marrying and being given in marriage, until the day when
Noah went into the ark, and they did not know or understand until
the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the
Son of man.
In the story of Noah, to which Jesus has directly related the “End
of Time”, a man had a dream, a prophecy (who knows how God spoke to
him), and he acted upon this revelation in a positive way to the
saving of himself and his family. The most important part of the
story of Noah is that it was NOT the end of the world in the sense
that the physical earth ceases to exist. Nor did Noah transit
through the Flood to become a “light being”. He built the Ark and
survived the Flood and emerged into a different world.
It was the
End of Time in the sense that the world before was altogether
different from the world after the Flood.
The Earth continued to
exist, and Noah and his metaphorical family, (there were apparently
quite a number of Noah’s all over the globe), came out of the ark
into a world so different that the existence of a rainbow is noted
here for the first time as evidence of this extreme, fundamental
change in the nature of reality.
Over and over again, for a thousand years or more, this group of
people, or that one, has decided that the end is coming. They will
sell all they own, move out to the woods or gather on a mountain, or
huddle in jungle huts, waiting for God - or nowadays, the ETs - and
when the sun finally rises on the glorious morn of redemption, well, some are so disappointed, or
so determined to be right, that they will sink to any level to prove
that their interpretation was the correct one.
The Solar Cult and
the
Heaven’s Gate group are just two cases of recent note. Such
prognosticators obviously went wrong – terribly and disastrously
wrong. And they were only the latest in a long line of similar
groups. It is a pattern that repeats over and over again.
So, again
we ask, is there anything to any of it at all, and if so, what?
Carefully considered, the story of Noah is highly informative. The
story does not tell us that some supernatural force prepared a place
for Noah. On the contrary, Noah was told to perform certain tasks to
ensure his survival as well as that of his family and certain
animals. Assuming that the story is more than merely a metaphor for
the Great Work, had Noah chosen not to exert these tremendous
efforts, we would never have heard of him, whoever he might have
been, in whatever culture or context he existed.
Do we have any way of knowing that we are presently in the so-called
“End Times”? Of course, there is no way to say so with absolute
certainty. However, we do have what I call the “Noah Syndrome” to
guide us.
A “syndrome” is a constellation of signs and symptoms that, taken
together, characterize or indicate a particular condition. “As it
was in the days of Noah” can be interpreted on several levels. What,
precisely, might have been meant by this clue? In Genesis, Chapter
six, we read about the first “symptom”. When men began to multiply
on the face of the earth, the sons of God saw that the daughters of
men were fair, and they took wives of all they desired and chose.
That is certainly a loaded statement!
There have been endless
speculations on the identity of these “sons of God”, or “Nephilim”.
But before we even approach that, let’s look at the first curious
part of the statement is that referring to men “multiplying on the
face of the earth”, as though it was a singularly significant
factor. “As it was in the days of Noah” seems to suggest a
tremendous population growth. Could it be at all possible that a
certain population figure – as suggested by this remark – was a sort
of “critical mass” that precipitated the interaction with these
“sons of God”?
The Cassiopaeans - us in the future - have remarked
that, at the time of the prior high civilization, the population of
the world was right around the same figure we have on the planet at
present: six billion.
The series of remarks in Genesis get even more impossible, I am
sorry to say, because it goes on to declare:
There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward,
when the sons of God lived with the daughters of men, and they bore
children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, men of
renown.
What in the world are we going to do with something like that if we
claim to be rational thinkers?
Nevertheless, it seems to be the crux
of the matter. In the many myths and legends, it was the offspring
of these unions mentioned above that brought destruction on the
Earth. On the one hand, we can suppose that this was a commentary on
the intermixing of the two races:
Organic Portals and Souled humans.
But it seems that such intermixing of the races led to a specific
problem: the manipulation of individuals of great Creative power by
the use of the Organic Portals.
As we have already noted, at the
present time, there seems to be a veritable invasion of hyperdimensional visitors masquerading as
“aliens”. This was recorded in the ancient legends as “invasion by
the souls of the dead”. There is a curious “sexual interest” in
humanity expressed by these visitors concomitant with sexual excess
of mankind at large. Could the two be related?
And this leads us to
the next symptom:
The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was very great in the earth,
and that every imagination and intention of all human thinking was
only evil continually.
The passage comes back to this further on saying:
The earth was depraved and putrid in God’s sight, and the land was
filled with violence (desecration, infringement, outrage, assault,
and lust for power). And God looked upon the world and saw how
degenerate, debased and vicious it was; for all humanity had
corrupted their way upon the earth and lost their true direction.
Those are harsh words. Do they apply to us in this day and time?
Fulcanelli writes:
Already, because of the multiplicity of scientific acquisitions, man
cannot live without tremendous energy and endurance, in an
atmosphere of hectic, feverish and unhealthy activity. He created
the machine that increased his means and his power of action a
hundred fold, but he has become its slave and its victim. […]
[O]n
the other hand, what does he know of himself, that is, of his
origin, his essence, and his destiny? […] Carried away by his
passions, his desires, and his phobias, the horizon of his hopes
recedes indefinitely. It is the frantic race towards the abyss. […]
Finally, we will reveal nothing by saying that the greatest part of
discoveries, first oriented towards the increase of human
well-being, were rapidly diverted from their goal and specifically
applied to destruction. Instruments of peace are turned into
machines of war and we already know too well the dominating role
science played in modern cataclysms.
Such is, unfortunately, the
final goal, the outcome of scientific investigation; and such is
also the reason why many who pursued it with criminal intent, called
divine justice upon him and finds himself bound to be condemned by
it. 88
88 Fulcanelli, Dwellings, pp.
503-504.
But Noah found favor in God’s eyes. He was, undoubtedly, the
one who was thought to be “sick” by all of the other people around
him. He didn’t fit, he was an anomaly – a man of discernment and
circumspection in a time and place where everything that mankind had
ever thought was good had been corrupted, perverted, turned upside
down and twisted out of recognition. But Noah “found grace in the
eyes of the Lord”.
We are told in the Pauline Letter to the Hebrews
that:
Prompted by faith Noah, being forewarned of God concerning events of
which as yet there was no visible sign, took heed and diligently and
reverently constructed and prepared an ark for the deliverance of
his own family. By this he passed judgment and sentence on the
world’s unbelief and became an heir and possessor of
righteousness.” 89
89 The
Bible, Hebrews 11:7. All citations from The Bible are taken from the
Amplified version published by Zondervan.
That’s an interesting clue: being forewarned
concerning events of which as yet there was no visible sign.
But
isn’t that the same thing as the many “doomsday cults” that have
prophesied the end, only to discover that their prognostications
failed? In considering this question, we find the point of the
insertion of the “twist” in the story. Certainly, the tale has
already given us “clues” that must have been apparent to Noah. But
then, the story tells us that “God” warned Noah. Was that really the
case? Or was there something else upon which Noah based his
assessment of the situation?
Let’s return to consider the earlier
remark:
“There were giants on the earth in those days, and also
afterward, when the sons of God lived with the daughters of men, and
they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of
old, men of renown.”
On the one hand, we could think that “giants”
meant literally very large men. But considering the words that
follow it: “mighty men, men of renown”, it could also mean men who
were “giant” in their deeds. Since the passage is, overall,
discussing the great and oppressive evil of the day, what we suspect
about this symptom of the syndrome was that there were wars and evil
deeds in high places, scandalous wickedness perpetrated by political
“giants” who were directly responsible for the conditions of the
time.
The fact that this little story is part of the story of Noah
suggests to us that it was his observation of the conditions of the
planet in specific terms that gave him the idea that something was
up and he ought to “build an ark”.
Looking at our idea of a Syndrome
from another direction, acting in response to a consciousness of
impending disaster might be seen as a form of mental aberration, a
syndrome not common to all of humanity, but defining in very
specific terms the “Noë of the Elect” and “the Chosen”, those moved
to see the End as a beginning of a new order. And, as in the time of
Noah, those not afflicted with this particular cast of consciousness
will react to it with derision and ridicule.
So we find that the Noah Syndrome
describes both a condition of the planet in terms of its
sickness-unto-death, as well as the condition of certain individuals
who are sickened by the sickness. And just as an animal will sniff
out the proper herb for its cure, such people begin to feel a
restlessness, a questing spirit, and a drive to seek out and
discover the thing that will bring relief to this nagging ache in
their soul.
Such a quest can only be undertaken with
faith that is open and adventurous, following the nose, so to say,
and finally, ingesting that which is of truth when it is finally
discovered. Looking at our constellation of symptoms, it does seem
to be that we are in a time period “as it was in the days of Noah”.
And so, many individuals, including yours truly, have embarked on
quests for truth, for knowledge, and for
understanding of the reality in which we live and why it is that the
Terror of History still stalks us.
In the course of such a quest, the open-minded individual will,
naturally, come across many anomalies that are inexplicable in terms
of standard, uniformitarian science and history. Eventually, the
question will be asked: could these things be evidence of an
ancient, advanced civilization that perished?
And once that question
has been asked, the next question will be: how did it perish and
could it happen again?
Atlantis. Did this mysterious island, of which
Plato left the
enigmatic description, ever exist?
A question difficult to solve,
give the weakness of the means which science possesses to penetrate
the secret of the abysses. Nevertheless, some observations seem to
support the partisans of the existence of Atlantis. […] Faith in the
truthfulness of Plato’s works results in believing the reality of
the periodical upheavals of which the Mosaic Flood90, we said it,
remains the written symbol and the sacred prototype.
To those who
negate what the priests of Egypt entrusted to Solon, we would only
ask to explain to us what Aristotle’s master wanted to reveal by
this fiction of a sinister nature. For we indeed believe that beyond
doubt, Plato became the propagator of very ancient truths, and that
consequently his books contain a set, a body of hidden knowledge.
His Geometric Number, and Cave have their signification; why should
the myth of Atlantis not have its own?
Atlantis must have undergone the same fate as the others, and the
catastrophe, which submerged it, falls obviously into the same cause
as that which buried, forty-eight centuries later, under a profound
sheet of water, Egypt, the Sahara, and the countries of Northern
Africa. But more favored than the land of the Atlantean, Egypt
gained from a raising of the bottom of the ocean and came back to
the light of day, after a certain time of immersion.
For Algeria and
Tunisia with their dry “chotts” covered with a thick layer of salt,
the Sahara and Egypt with their soils constituted for a large part
of sea sand show that the waters invaded and covered vast expanses
of the African continent.
The columns of the Pharaohs‘ temples bear
on them undeniable traces of immersion; in the hypostyle chambers,
the slabs, still extant, which form the ceilings have been raised
and moved by the oscillating motion of the waves; the disappearance
of the outer coating of the pyramids and in general that of the
stone joins (the Colossus of Memnon who used to sing) the evident
traces of corrosion by water that can be noticed on the sphinx of
Giza, as well as on many other works of Egyptian statuary have no
other origin.91
90 Indeed it is strange that Fulcanelli refers to
the destruction of Atlantis as the “Mosaic Flood.” Either he is
referring to the book of Genesis as being written by Moses, or he is
giving a clue.
91 Fulcanelli, Dwellings, pp. 511-512.
What Plato Tells Us About Atlantis
One of the oft-reiterated themes of
Fulcanelli is that the “ancient
Greeks” - not the Egyptians - were the source of the Hermetic
science.92 Timaeus and Critias, written by
Plato some time around
360 BC93 are the only existing written records which specifically
refer to Atlantis. The dialogues are conversations between Socrates, Hermocrates, Timaeus, and Critias. Apparently in response to a prior
talk by Socrates about ideal societies, Timaeus and Critias agree to
entertain Socrates with a tale that is “not a fiction but a true
story”.
92 One of the threads we
follow is that of these “ancient Greeks” and who they really were.
We will cover this material partly in this discussion, but for full
explication, the reader may wish to obtain copies of future volumes
in this series as they become available.
93 Translated by Benjamin Jowett.
The story is about the conflict between the ancient
Athenians and the Atlanteans 9000 years before Plato’s time.
Knowledge of the ancient times was apparently forgotten by the
Athenians of Plato’s day, and the form the story of Atlantis took in
Plato’s account was that Egyptian priests conveyed it to Solon.
Solon passed the tale to Dropides, the great-grandfather of Critias.
Critias learned of it from his grandfather also named Critias, son
of Dropides.
Let’s take a careful look at the main section of the
story, omitting the introduction that describes Solon going to Egypt
and chatting up the priests.
Thereupon one of the priests, who was of a very great age, said: O
Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children, and
there is not an old man among you. Solon in return asked him what he
meant. I mean to say, he replied, that in mind you are all young;
there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition,
nor any science, which is hoary with age. And I will tell you why.
There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind
arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by
the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable
other causes. There is a story, which even you have preserved, that
once upon a time Phaeton, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds
in his father’s chariot, because he was not able to drive them in
the path of his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth, and
was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt.
Now this has the form of a
myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the
heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon
the earth, which recurs after long intervals; at such times those
who live upon the mountains and in dry and lofty places are more
liable to destruction than those who dwell by rivers or on the
seashore. And from this calamity the Nile, who is our never-failing saviour, delivers and preserves us.
When, on the other hand, the Gods purge the earth with a deluge of
water, the survivors in your country are herdsmen and shepherds who
dwell on the mountains, but those who, like you, live in cities are
carried by the rivers into the sea. Whereas in this land, neither then
nor at any other time, does the water come down from above on the
fields, having always a tendency to come up from below; for which
reason the traditions preserved here are the most ancient. The fact
is, that wherever the extremity of winter frost or of summer does
not prevent, mankind exist, sometimes in greater, sometimes in
lesser numbers.
And whatever happened either in your country or in
ours, or in any other region of which we are informed - if there
were any actions noble or great or in any other way remarkable, they
have all been written down by us of old, and are preserved in our
temples.
We want to here make note of the fact that present day
evidence suggests that it is true both that Egypt has been inundated
and that it experienced a rainy climate. Fulcanelli even commented
upon the inundation of Egypt.
This leads us to question whether or
not this story actually came from the mouth of a true Egyptian
priest with the full knowledge of the ancient cataclysms. If so, he
would have known of the period of heavy rain and shallow seas in
Egypt, by which the Sphinx and other monuments were eroded, and
which deposited a layer of salt on the interior of the pyramids and
other structures.
And so we suggest, to reconcile this difficulty,
not that the story is false - because Fulcanelli has told us to
“have faith in the account of Plato” - but rather that the speaker
was not aware of certain ideas specifically relating to Egypt, and
that the dialogue has been put into the mouth of an Egyptian priest
in order to preserve it in the context of the then current “Egyptian
craze”.
It might even be thought that this was a deliberate exoteric
“blind”.
Whereas just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided
with letters and the other requisites of civilized life, after the
usual interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes
pouring down, and leaves only those of you who are destitute of
letters and education; and so you have to begin all over again like
children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either
among us or among yourselves. As for those genealogies of yours
which you just now recounted to us, Solon, they are no better than
the tales of children.
In the first place you remember a single deluge only, but there were
many previous ones; in the next place, you do not know that there
formerly dwelt in your land the fairest and noblest race of men
which ever lived, and that you and your whole city are descended
from a small seed or remnant of them which survived. And this was
unknown to you, because, for many generations, the survivors of that
destruction died, leaving no written word.
For there was a time,
Solon, before the great deluge of all, when the city which now is
Athens was first in war and in every way the best governed of all
cities, is said to have performed the noblest deeds and to have had
the fairest constitution of any of which tradition tells, under the
face of heaven.
Again, let’s interrupt the dialogue to point out
that it is hardly likely that a priest of Egypt would have declared
the Athenians to be “the fairest and noblest race of men”, nor that
they “performed the noblest deeds” and had the “fairest constitution
… under the face of heaven”!
Another clue that the speaker is giving
us that it is NOT Egypt that is the source of this information - at
least not Egypt as we know it now.
Solon marveled at his words, and earnestly requested the priests to
inform him exactly and in order about these former citizens. You are
welcome to hear about them, Solon, said the priest, both for your
own sake and for that of your city, and above all, for the sake of
the Goddess who is the common patron and parent and educator of both our cities. She founded your
city a thousand years before ours, receiving from the Earth and
Hephaestus the seed of your race, and afterwards she founded ours,
of which the constitution is recorded in our sacred registers to be
eight thousand years old.
Yet again, the Egyptian priest is giving greater antiquity to the
Greeks than to the Egyptians! Another clue for the reader to
understand that this is not an Egyptian story! What is being said is
being put in the mouth of an Egyptian priest to “conceal”. Indeed,
the worship of the Goddess, is the older form of worship in Egypt.
But all of that came to an end, probably with the conquest of Narmer, the building of the temple to Hephaestus, the demoting of
the Goddess and the Moon calendar, and the instituting of the Solar
worship and the solar calendar of 365 days.94
As touching your
citizens of nine thousand years ago, I will briefly inform you of
their laws and of their most famous action; the exact particulars of
the whole we will hereafter go through at our leisure in the sacred
registers themselves. If you compare these very laws with ours you
will find that many of ours are the counterpart of yours as they
were in the olden time.
Here, of course, we come to the idea that there was an ancient
connection and communication between the truly “old Egyptians” and
the Northern peoples. Georges Gurdjieff once remarked that Christianity was taken from Egypt, a statement that might suggest
that he agreed with the Pan-Egyptian school. But no:
Christianity, he hastened to explain, was not taken from the Egypt
of history, but from a “far older Egypt” which is unrecorded.95
94 Which event may have been
merely another of the cyclic events assimilated to an even earlier
archetype.
95 Ashe, Geoffrey, The Ancient Wisdom, (London: Sphere 1979) p. 8-9.
In
the first place, there is the caste of priests, which is separated
from all the others; next, there are the artificers, who ply their
several crafts by themselves and do not intermix; and also there is
the class of shepherds and of hunters, as well as that of
husbandmen; and you will observe, too, that the warriors in Egypt
are distinct from all the other classes, and are commanded by the
law to devote themselves solely to military pursuits; moreover, the
weapons which they carry are shields and spears, a style of
equipment which the Goddess taught of Asiatics first to us, as in
your part of the world first to you.
The remark that the right function of society was “first taught to
the Asiatics” is most interesting. The reference to “Asiatics” in
this context from an historical “Egyptian Priest” is extremely
questionable because, in the many Egyptian inscriptions of
historical times, the Asiatics are always referred to as “Vile”.
Nevertheless, even in historical times, it is indeed true that the
Egyptians borrowed their military equipment and war strategies from
the Asiatics, but that was a much later development than the
above story would suggest. The issue of who the “vile Asiatics” were
is an ongoing debate, but it seems to devolve on such as the
Hittites, Hyksos, and other Indo-European tribes that came down from
the Steppes in various waves.
We will discuss, further on, the
evidence that the Steppe peoples were the worshippers of the Goddess
in the most ancient times, and that the war God, the weather God,
the God of fire and the mountains, was introduced later from the
South.
Then as to wisdom, do you observe how our law from the very first
made a study of the whole order of things, extending even to
prophecy and medicine which gives health, out of these divine
elements deriving what was needful for human life, and adding every
sort of knowledge which was akin to them. All this order and
arrangement the Goddess first imparted to you when establishing your
city; and she chose the spot of earth in which you were born,
because she saw that the happy temperament of the seasons in that
land would produce the wisest of men.
Wherefore the Goddess, who was
a lover both of war and of wisdom, selected and first of all settled
that spot which was the most likely to produce men likest herself.
And there you dwelt, having such laws as these and still better
ones, and excelled all mankind in all virtue, as became the children
and disciples of the Gods.
Again and again, this very strange
“Egyptian” priest is saying things that completely contradict the
more “historical” Egyptian view that they are the most “ancient and
noble race”.
In the above remarks, he has said that the Goddess
imparted to the Greeks first all of the laws of health and those
things needed to preserve and prolong life. The Greeks are
pronounced to have been the “wisest of men”, and those “most like
the Goddess” herself.
And again “excelled all mankind in all
virtue”, which is not very likely to have been said by an Egyptian
priest.
Many great and wonderful deeds are recorded of your state in
our histories. But one of them exceeds all the rest in greatness and valour. For these histories tell of a mighty power which unprovoked
made an expedition against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to
which your city put an end.
This power came forth out of the
Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and
there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by
you called the Pillars of Heracles; the island was larger than Libya
and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from
these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which
surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits
of Heracles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that
other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly
called a boundless continent.
Now in this island of Atlantis there
was a great and wonderful empire, which had rule over the whole
island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and,
furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya
within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far
as Tyrrhenia. This vast power, gathered into one, endeavourer to
subdue at a blow our country and yours and the whole of the region
within the straits; and then, Solon, your country shone forth, in
the excellence of her virtue and strength, among all mankind.
She
was preeminent in courage and military skill, and was the leader of
the Hellenes. And when the rest fell off from her, being compelled
to stand alone, after having undergone the very extremity of danger,
she defeated and triumphed over the invaders, and preserved from
slavery those who were not yet subjugated, and generously liberated
all the rest of us who dwell within the pillars.
Of all the things the “Egyptian priest” has said, the above is the
most astonishing and the most telling. Again he is giving
pre-eminence to the Greeks, that they performed the most heroic deed
of all times, which was to defeat the Atlantean Empire!
And this is
the point that is so often just simply overlooked by all the
Atlantis lovers! Atlantis was the original “evil empire of the
Borg”!
And what is more, in this passage, the clue is given that the
ancient Egyptian civilization - the pyramids and other monumental
architecture upon which so much of the current Egyptian craze is
based, stemming from the work of Schwaller de Lubicz, and which is
declared to be the offspring of Atlantis - the ancient Egypt that is
so admired by the current day flock of Egyptophiles - was very
likely an attempt to re-construct the EVIL EMPIRE OF ATLANTIS!
In
other words, the “priestly science” of the Egyptians, referred to by
Fulcanelli, antedated the material so diligently studied and
propagated by Schwaller and others for “clues” to alchemical secrets
and methods of “ascension”.
But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in
a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body
sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner
disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in
those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal
of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the
island. I have told you briefly, Socrates, what the aged Critias
heard from Solon and related to us.
And when you were speaking
yesterday about your city and citizens, the tale which I have just
been repeating to you came into my mind, and I remarked with
astonishment how, by some mysterious coincidence, you agreed in
almost every particular with the narrative of Solon; but I did not
like to speak at the moment. For a long time had elapsed, and I had
forgotten too much; I thought that I must first of all run over the
narrative in my own mind, and then I would speak.
Here we find
another interesting clue.
Critias has just told us that Socrates was
discussing the very things that are included in this story - that
everything Socrates had been saying the previous day “agreed in
almost every particular with the narrative of Solon”.
Apparently,
this story had been handed down via another line of transmission.
And so I readily assented to your request yesterday, considering
that in all such cases the chief difficulty is to find a tale
suitable to our purpose, and that with such a tale we should be
fairly well provided. And therefore, as Hermocrates has told you, on
my way home yesterday I at once communicated the tale to my
companions as I remembered it; and after I left them, during the
night by thinking I recovered nearly the whole it.
Truly, as is
often said, the lessons of our childhood make wonderful impression
on our memories; for I am not sure that I could remember all the
discourse of yesterday, but I should be much surprised if I forgot
any of these things which I have heard very long ago. I listened at
the time with childlike interest to the old man’s narrative; he was
very ready to teach me, and I asked him again and again to repeat
his words, so that like an indelible picture they were branded into
my mind.
As soon as the day broke, I rehearsed them as he spoke them to my
companions, that they, as well as myself, might have something to
say. And now, Socrates, to make an end my preface, I am ready to
tell you the whole tale. I will give you not only the general heads,
but the particulars, as they were told to me.
The city and citizens, which you yesterday described to us in
fiction, we will now transfer to the world of reality. It shall be
the ancient city of Athens, and we will suppose that the citizens
whom you imagined, were our veritable ancestors, of whom the priest
spoke; they will perfectly harmonize, and there will be no
inconsistency in saying that the citizens of your republic are these
ancient Athenians.
Let us divide the subject among us, and all
endeavor according to our ability gracefully to execute the task
which you have imposed upon us. Consider then, Socrates, if this
narrative is suited to the purpose, or whether we should seek for
some other instead.96
96 Plato, Timaeus, translated by B.
Jowett.
And we come to the final understanding that
conveys to us the secret of the story of Atlantis: that it did not
actually come from an Egyptian priest, but that this was a story
that was created to “execute the task which you [Socrates] have
imposed upon us”, which was to veil in fiction something that was
Truth.
Does this mean that they were “making it up”? No, indeed. It
means that they were attempting to find a vehicle for the history
that would insure its preservation.
Thus we come to the conclusion that it is entirely possible that the
story was not given to Solon by an Egyptian priest, but that it was
attributed to same because at the time everyone was convinced of the
antiquity of the Egyptians. It was as much a fad then as now, due to
the presence of the pyramids and other monuments.
If Fulcanelli is
correct about the cult of the dead of the Egyptians being a
distortion of this knowledge, and this cult was encouraged,
supported, and furthered by the Egyptian elite of the past several
thousand years, then it is almost a certainty that they were not in
possession of the knowledge that was conveyed to Solon.
But it seems
apparent that he did, indeed, get it from somewhere. And he tells us
that the Greeks were instructed by the Arabs which certainly makes
us wonder who were the original “Arabs” since the time referred to
was long before Abraham and his son Ishmael, the alleged “father of
the Arabs”.
Getting back to Fulcanelli and
Hendaye and primitive Chiliasm, let
us take the hint from some comments made by an old man in Florence
who was speaking to Mark Hedsel, recorded in his book The Zelator,
which will save us a lot of grief:
…[S]ometimes even Fulcanelli wraps his mysteries in mysteries, for
he knows that some things may not be spoken, even today. […]
Fulcanelli is far wiser than most of his readers know. He sets down
less in words than he could, and delivers parables in parables. In
this there is real wisdom. The alchemists insisted that one should
heat the retort many times before making the final distillation.
This is an emblem of true thought: one must pass one’s thinking
through the furnace many times, to be sure. One should think with a
hammer, rather than with a brain, as one shapes our thought from
dross matter.
As though imitating the hammer blows of Vulcan, he tapped his stick
on top of the balustrade. “Iron, you see. Cast iron. Yet it looks
like stone. That is the true
Philosopher’s Stone, which never appears to be what it is. […] There
are deeper secrets in stone than in iron.”
97
The reader will be far
more aware of what it means to “think with a hammer, rather than
with a brain” by the time they are finished with this discussion.
But for the moment, suffice it to say that the old master is
pointing out that until a certain “initiation” has occurred in terms
of achieving mental mastery over the tracks of emotional thinking
(and nearly all thinking is emotional, no matter how logical it may
seem), there is no possibility of understanding Fulcanelli.
Further,
this process of “rewiring” the brain by deliberate hammer blows of
the will against the programmed circuits is the “heating of the
crucible” of the alchemical transformation - the thing that produces
the “stone”, a particular “state” that comes to exist in the brain
of the individual who has repeatedly “hammered” their thinking,
producing what the ancients called the “magnetic center”.
The Double Catastrophe: The Brothers Heliopolis
Fulcanelli did not write about architecture, or even this particular
monument at
Hendaye, with the intent that the reader would find it necessary to
go and see the
items in question, to puzzle over them, to dissect them to extract a
secret. That is
the method of puffers. He wrote about the chosen subjects simply
because it was
the platform of exposition of ideas.
Canseliet wrote in his
introduction to Le Mystere, obviously written under instruction from Fulcanelli:
Thanks to [Fulcanelli], the Gothic cathedral has yielded up its
secret. And it is not without surprise and emotion that we learn how
our ancestors fashioned the first stone of its foundations, that
dazzling gem, more precious than gold itself, on which Jesus built
his Church. All Truth, all Philosophy and all Religion rest on this
unique and sacred Stone. Many people, inflated with presumption,
believe themselves capable of fashioning it; yet how rare are the
elect, those who are sufficiently simple, learned and skilful to
complete the task!
The hermeticists - those at least who are worthy of the name - will
discover other things here. From the clash of ideas, it is said,
light bursts forth; they will recognize here that is from the
confrontation of the Book and the Building that the Spirit is
released and the Letter dies.98
97 Mark Hedsel, The Zelator – A Modern Initiate Explores The Ancient
Mysteries (York Beach:
Samuel Weiser, Inc. 2000) p. 306
98 Fulcanelli, Mystery of the Cathedrals, Introduction p. 6-7.
The “clash” of ideas is an
expression of “thinking with a hammer”.
The cathedral, the
“building” is the “temple”; in other words, the temporal lobes of
the brain - the ability to think and later to see. The “Book” is
what is accepted fact and history, not to mention the “book of our
DNA”, or programmed limitations.
Fulcanelli says that one must be “indifferent to theories, systems
and hypotheses, which are generally accepted without question on the
testimony of books”. It is in the clash between that which is
generally accepted, that which is published in books, which is
accepted due to wishful thinking and lazy research, and the thinking
processes that take effort, time and patience, that the light bursts
forth in the magnetite that collects in the temporal lobes as a
result of repeated “heating” of the crucible by thinking with a
hammer and its consequent development of additional receptors and
neuronal circuitry, not to mention production of specific ligands.
One has to chisel away the barriers to truth, one hammer blow at a
time. And it is a long, arduous, and difficult work.
For those who can see, I have just given away the fundamental secret
of alchemy. And those who can see also see immediately how difficult
a process it is. For those who can’t see, it doesn’t matter anyway.
All else in alchemy follows from this process. It is “the first
stone of its foundations”, and “All Truth, all Philosophy and all
Religion rest on this unique and sacred Stone.”
The stone of the
mind, the prima materia, must be shaped by the hammer blows of
thinking before anything else can proceed. This was the process that
I led myself through from the future state of adeptship as the
“Cassiopaeans”.
In the Hendaye chapter, there is a mysterious inscription on the
cross that Fulcanelli discusses, pointing out that the important
thing about it is that the letter S,
“which takes on the curving
shape of a snake, corresponds to the Greek khi (X) and takes over
its esoteric meaning”.
“It is the helicoidal track of the sun,
having arrived at the zenith of its curve across space, at the time
of the cyclic catastrophe. It is a theoretical image of the Beast of
the Apocalypse, of the dragon, which on the days of Judgment, spews
out fire and brimstone on macrocosmic creation.”
Fulcanelli then
gives the clue:
“Thanks to the symbolic value of the letter S,
displaced on purpose, we understand that the inscription must be
translated in secret language, that is to say in the language of the
Gods, or the language of the birds, and that the meaning must be
found with the help of the rules of Diplomacy.”
Fulcanelli discussed the subject of the “double catastrophe” much
earlier than the second edition of Le Mystere, in which the Hendaye
chapter first appeared. In his book
Dwellings of the Philosophers,
he launches his remarks on the platform of a mysterious obelisk
located in the Crecy forest, that he describes as,
“the tangible,
expressive image, absolutely conforming to tradition, of the double
terrestrial calamity, of the conflagration and of the flood, on the
terrible Judgment Day”.
This suggests to me that someone - perhaps it was Fulcanelli himself - realized that the true message of
Dwellings of the Philosophers
was not getting through, and that a new mode of drawing attention to
it had to be discovered.
So, let me ask the reader a question to
contemplate: why are all of Fulcanelli’s books dedicated to “The
Brothers Heliopolis”, and how does that relate to a “Double
Catastrophe”?
As Fulcanelli says,
“Nature does not open the door of
the sanctuary indiscriminately to everyone.”
Cyclic Catastrophes
In the present day and time, the causes of cosmic catastrophe are
generally assigned by so-called “alternative researchers” and
purveyors of esoteric wisdom to the idea of Pole Shift. The Pole
Shift idea was described as the “ultimate disaster” by John White in
his book appropriately entitled Pole Shift. White listed numerous
psychic prophecies that are clearly describing a Pole Shift and
attempted to relate them to scientific ideas.
One source claims that
the Hawaiian Islands will rise and become peaks of a great mountain
chain on a new continent that will rise in the Pacific. Another
source predicts that the Hawaiian Islands will sink beneath the sea.
Such contradictions among psychics are often handily explained with
the “branching universe” theory with a twist: both are true, they
just refer to different periods of future history.
As it turned out, most of the psychic predictions analyzed by John
White concerned the period right around the year 2,000. Well, it has
come and gone, the pole didn’t flip, and we are still here.
Naturally, many of the psychics and channels of the space brothers
say that we ought to thank their guides or “guardians” for that
fact, since they all pulled together to keep us from falling into
the pit. Nice try, but, as the Cassiopaeans have said,
“Tales are
easy to sew/sow, when the past is yours only to know”.
And how true
that is.
In the end, the chief problem of all the theories is that of the
“trigger mechanism”.
-
What is driving the machine?
-
What is changing
in our solar system that we may not be told about?
-
Why are the
rumormongers and the theorists of such things as “Planet Nibiru” or
“galactic alignment” or “precessional ages” allowed to promulgate
their nonsense, while the real data is being so carefully hidden?
The fact that the Earth’s magnetic poles have changed many times in
history is now a well accepted scientific fact. But this actually
says nothing at all about the planet itself “flipping”. It just
signifies a reversal of the magnetic field. As we now know, the Sun
reverses its magnetic field regularly and cyclically with no
apparent cataclysmic effects. So, a simple reversal of the magnetic
field cannot be used in support of a physical and literal “Pole
Shift”.
In the end, the chief problem of all the “End of the World” theories
is that of the “trigger mechanism”. What is driving the machine?
The most popular theory of the present moment is that of
Zecharia
Sitchin who analyzed the myths of the Sumerians, concluding that
they referred to a massive unseen planet, and further, that all of
the stories point to a cyclical return at intervals of 3600 years.
For so many years we have heard about “End of the World” hoaxes and
panics that it is becoming rather tiresome and tedious. When was the
last time you heard about
the Photon Belt nonsense? That one was
pretty popular for awhile. Kept everybody going like crazy while
dozens of folks made lots of money selling books and “ascension”
courses to help people survive the “enlightening” of the planet.
Well, the “photon belt” apparently fizzled and then
the Hale Bopp
Frenzy cranked up leading to some mass suicides and a general air of
paranoia all over.
What a lot of people didn’t notice was that there were some
extremely strange things going on here on the Big Blue Marble while
Hale Bopp was decorating our skies - the weather was changing
dramatically and Europe experienced what was called “The Flood of
the Millennium”. One has to wonder if the Hale Bopp affair was not
just another form of distraction away from what was really going on - sort of a
Cosmic O.J. Simpson trial?
After Hale Bopp Flopped, the Planet X Panic got its motor warmed up
and Nancy Leider - deluded or a con artist, who can say? - may be
facing some lawsuits for leading people astray with that one. Most
certainly, our researches into secret government mind control
projects suggest that Nancy and others are really not to blame for
their lunacy: it is planned and deliberate.
Of course, all the while that was going on, the political world was
going crazy and we are now sitting on a planet that is like a powder
keg just waiting for somebody to casually light a cigarette...
In order to form any ideas about a “trigger”, it is important to try
to sort out the data that we can get and decide if a Pole Shift is
even possible and if so, is it a gradual, Uniformitarian event, or
if it is sudden and cataclysmic. It is commonly accepted among
scientists nowadays that there is a “cycle of extinction.”
However,
until recently, they continued to attempt to put it off so far into
the past and future that it could not possibly concern our present
civilization. It is only fairly recently that hints and clues have
begun to emerge into public awareness - a sort of “testing the
waters” - though, as usual, there is much back and forth debate.
Generally, those who say that cyclic extinctions DO happen - and
rather frequently - approach the subject from the point of view of
collecting and presenting data. The naysayers generally approach the
subject from the point of view of “explaining away” the data as
being “faulty” or “misunderstood”. They also tend to get emotional
and attack the personalities of those who present data.
Still, more
and more facts, data, and confirmable information, keep coming to
light.
The relative importance of an idea and the implications of the
conclusions that can be drawn from that idea ought to determine the
level of attention given to the idea. The fact is, the idea that
something may be whacking through our solar system at periodic
intervals is a concept of such importance that it simply cannot be
overstated.
The Russians theorized in the 60s that there may be not one, but
three planetary bodies existing in our solar system beyond Pluto.
Aberrations in the orbital motion of Neptune and Uranus have
convinced many other scientists that there is a strong likelihood
that some kind of large body exists in solar space beyond Pluto and
exerts strong gravitational attraction on the outermost planets.
So
we agree with Sitchin that, if a definite cycle exists, one of the
most logical explanations for it is that it is caused by a
planetary-like body making regular, predictable appearances. But we
disagree that such a body travels into the inner solar system.
“If
it does exist, and it does reappear cyclically, why doesn’t science
know about it?”, the skeptical reader will ask.
This issue of the cycle of this purported “return” is of the utmost
importance; we find ourselves facing the idea that the world is
either due shortly for great geologic and meteorological events, or
it is not. If we consider the remote possibility that this is going to happen, and if we are
interested in human destiny, it behooves us to investigate whether
or not there is a correlation between cyclical geologic changes in
the earth’s past and the future, and what that cycle might be.
What
is more, there is also compelling hard scientific evidence that our
planet has relatively recently experienced cataclysmic geological
changes. It has only been in recent years that some of the more
convincing evidence of this kind, such as ice core samples and tree
ring analysis, has been revealed.
If we, for one second, think that there is even a one-percent
possibility that such events are cyclic, and that we may be
approaching such an event, we ought to be putting the whole force of
all our science and all the great minds of our civilization into
researching the matter.
But that does not seem to be the case.
-
Are
the leaders of our nations so stupid that they cannot think that far
ahead?
-
Or are they so greedy and power hungry that they don’t care?
-
Do they intend to “get while the getting’s good”, and then when -
and IF - the final curtain comes down, they will think that they
were the stars of the show?
-
This poses a peculiar problem. How do we
assess who really knows what?
Over and over again, as we have pushed deeper and deeper into our
research, we find that investigating these matters is problematic
for a lot of reasons. On the surface, what we see is that academic
and professional geologists, glaciologists, geophysicists,
paleontologists, oceanographers, astronomers, astrophysicists,
physicists, mathematicians, archaeologists, and so on, do not take
kindly to intrusions into their private little worlds. They have
their Gods of convention, whom they worship, and God forbid that
anyone should criticize the acceptable protocols of the conventional
interpretation.
They are warm and safe and their career is protected
by their covenant with the scientific Thought Police who are, in
turn, high priests to the Control System.
And this is where we discover the problem.
The Control System, via
the offices of its high priests of science, ensures that
glaciologists do not cross over into astrophysics and that
geologists do not cross over into archaeology. In this way, there is
no such thing as Comparative Science, and this is most especially
true in the United States where the lines between disciplines are
most strongly demarcated, patrolled, and enforced by the Scientific
Thought Police. These conditions bring our problem into sharp focus.
As we have attempted to get to the very bottom of many of the claims
of the experts in the various fields, we have discovered that there
is much data that is completely suppressed by this system. There is
also a great deal of data that falls under the control of government
agencies, and access to it is severely limited. I discovered that
there is, indeed, an effort on the part of various government
agencies to investigate these cyclical returns and cometary impact
matters, but that the results are generally unavailable to the
public.
They consist of technical papers, stored on microfiche,
buried in research and special collections sections of university
libraries. Some of it makes its way into print, but the volumes are
so costly that the researcher in these fields must be well financed
to be able to afford them. Those things that make it to print in
technical journals are couched in such amazingly obtuse and opaque
terminology that one must be as sharp as a Damascus sword to cut
through the nonsense.
And it is almost a given that only a trained
scientist who knows the “hidden jargon” will be able to decipher the
code.
I must also tell the reader that, for weeks on end, as we have
ordered and read technical papers, books, files of data, reports and
so forth, the enormity of the problem of suppression of information
has become overwhelmingly evident. Every night, after a long day of
analysis, calculations, plugging numbers into formulas and compiling
results, we would prepare for bed, both of us shaking our heads and
muttering over and over again:
“lies, lies, lies; nothing but lies.”
COINTELPRO everywhere.
And so it is. Not only are the separate scientific disciplines most
often unaware of developments in other fields which may have
important data that would help their own studies, they are also
conditioned - programmed - to consider it scientific blasphemy to
compare their own conclusion with the data from other fields. And
somebody is controlling this system of suppression.
The terrestrial axis is currently inclined at 23.5 degrees. The
early Greek philosophers viewed this tilt as an “irregular
condition”, and not something that had been fixed since the
beginning.
Anaxagoras wrote:
In the beginning the stars moved in the sky as in a revolving dome,
so that the celestial pole, which is always visible, was vertically
overhead; but subsequently the pole took its inclined position.
Hesiod discussed the cyclical conception of time in his
Works and
Days, saying that the human race had five ages: Gold, Silver,
Bronze, Heroic, and Iron. The Heroic age is seen by many scholars as
an addition to an earlier scheme meant to accommodate Greek history.
During the first of these ages, mankind lived under the rule of Kronos, or Saturn, and was on friendly terms with the Gods, and was
free from hard work, pain, and old age.
Plato wrote about a periodic
reversal of the rotation of “the world”, probably meaning the entire
“cosmic machine”, rather than just the planet, as being the cause of
the end of one age and the beginning of another.
He tells us that
all the stories of the changes in the rising and setting of the sun
and planets originate from the same event in cosmic history: the
usurpation of the rule of Chronos by Zeus.
When God was shepherd there were no political constitutions and no
taking of
wives and begetting of children. For all men rose up anew into life
out of the earth,
having no memory of the former things. Instead they had fruits
without stint from
trees and bushes; these needed no cultivation but sprang up of
themselves out of the
ground without man’s toil. For the most part they disported
themselves in the open
needing neither clothing nor couch, for the seasons were blended
evenly so as to
work them no hurt, and the grass which sprang up out of the earth in
abundance
made a soft bed for them.99
99 Plato, The Statesman, 272ª, trans. J.B. Skemp.
But this age came to a close and the Gods of that age gave up their
benevolent governance, turning the rule of the world over to
something “other”.
Plato describes the close of the era in terms of
Pole Shift:
The Gods of the provinces, who had ruled under the greatest God,
knew at once what was happening and relinquished the oversight of
their regions. A shudder passed through the world at the reversing
of its rotation, checked as it was between the old control and the
new impulse which had turned end into beginning for it and beginning
into end. This shock set up a great quaking, which caused - in this
crisis of the world just as in the former one - destruction of
living creatures of all kinds. Then, after the interval needed for
its recovery, it gained relief at last from its clamors and
confusion, and attaining quiet after great upheaval it returned to
its ordered course and continued in it, having control and
government of itself and of all within it.100
Herodotus seems to be
quoting from the same source that Plato utilized when he reports:
Thus in the period of eleven thousand three hundred and forty years
they said that there had arisen no God in human form; nor even
before that time or afterwards among the remaining kings who arose
in Egypt, did they report that anything of that kind had come to
pass. In this time they said that the sun had moved four times from
his accustomed place of rising, and where he now sets he had thence
twice had his rising, and in the place from whence he now rises he
had twice had his setting; and in the meantime nothing in Egypt had
been changed from its usual state, neither that which comes from the
earth nor that which comes to them from the river nor that which
concerns diseases or deaths.101
100 Ibid.
101 Herodutus, The Histories, Book II: 142.
Both Herodotus and Plato are
explicit in saying that the phenomenon is dual natured, that
something happens “out there” in the Solar system and the results on
the earth are cataclysmic. Herodotus says that it happened four
times in an 11,500-year period, and Plato says that it is an
ever-recurring phenomenon. Modern interpreters of these passages
generally divide into two groups: the catastrophists and the
uniformitarians.
The catastrophists suggest that the description is
that of a literal 180-degree flip of the earth.
The Uniformitarians
like to talk in terms of “world ages” according to the “Precession
of the Zodiac”.
Uniformitarianism
In his Principia Mathematica,
Isaac Newton demonstrated that the
precession of the equinoxes is the result of the earth’s oblate spheroidal shape, which causes it to spin in something less than a
perfectly aligned motion. In short, it inscribes a very gradual
circle in relation to the celestial axis and, according to Newton,
the period in which this entire circle
is completed is 26 thousand years. This means that not only does the
sun rise in a slightly different location, but also the terrestrial
axis points to a different area in the heavens as time goes by.
As it happens, the general area of the heavens pointed to by the
terrestrial pole, does not have an abundance of visible stars to
consistently have a pole star. So it is only occasionally that it
really has one, and even then, the pole star is not quite “on the
money”.
Twelve thousand years ago, the time at which many occultists point
out that one of the stars in Draco, Thuban, was the pole star, it
was actually less of a pole star than the current one if we take
into account the decreasing angle of the axis of the earth. That is
assuming, of course, that present observations can be extrapolated
backward.
Most of the occult or psychic speculations link the Pole Shift with
Noah’s Flood and the destruction of Atlantis, the fabled ancient
high civilization. But, the uniformitarian view is also well
represented in the occult literature. Sampson Arnold Mackey, a
shoemaker in Norwich, England, formulated a grand theory of the ages
of the world that is pretty much based on De Louville’s gradual
diminution of the angle of the terrestrial axis to the plane of the
ecliptic, but also incorporating ideas based on the precession of
the equinoxes. And here is where we find the first fully expounded
idea that the precession itself is important as a clock that strikes
the hours of world ages.
Mackey assumed the precessional cycle to be 25 thousand years. He
also accepted the gradual diminution of the axial orientation at one
degree every 6 thousand years. He assumed (from where, we don’t
know), that each completion of the precessional cycle diminished the
angle of the earth axis by four degrees. Therefore, it will take
four more precessional cycles to get to the “Golden Age”, at which
time the terrestrial axis is aligned with the celestial axis. Four
more precessional cycles equals 150 thousand years from now. This is
certainly an idea to make glad the heart of any scientist who
projects catastrophe way into the distant past, or impossibly far in
to the future.
Helena Blavatsky adopted some of Mackey’s ideas during her short
term of membership in a “secret society” called the Hermetic
Brotherhood of Luxor, (HB of L) which taught Mackey’s doctrine in
an essay called The Hermetic Key composed by Thomas H. Burgoyne,
secretary of that order.
However, the H B of L made some
“adjustments” to Mackey’s ideas so they would better fit some other
scheme of their own. They altered the degrees of change per cycle
from 4 to 3°36! so that a complete cycle takes one hundred turns.
They also changed the precessional period from 25 thousand years, to
25,920 years, coming closer to Newton’s original figure.
Mackey believed that he had discovered the key to universal
mythology in astrology. His entire scheme was based on certain
mythological interpretations, and the H B of L claimed Mackey as a
member, but of course, only after he was dead. This seems to be a
common practice of many putative secret societies that seek to align
themselves with certain ideas or people for one reason or another.
Nevertheless, the adoption of this precession idea by the H B of L,
later taken up by the occultists Papus, Barlet, Guenon, Reuss,
Kellner and Steiner, ensured that it would become a foundational
philosophy among groups such as the Ordo Templi of the World Orientalis, the
Theosophical Society, the
Golden Dawn, and so on.
Most of their ideas are founded on this
uniformitarian, cosmic clock of precession and slow, spiraling
movement of the earth’s pole in a grand, shifting circle that
reverses the polar directions every two million years or so.
There is another interesting motion of the earth’s axis called the
Chandler Wobble. The Chandler wobble, discovered by astronomer
S. C.
Chandler in 1891, is a variation in the earth’s axis of rotation
amounting to 0.7 seconds of arc over a period of 435 days, or about
14 months. This means that the earth’s poles wander a bit as the
planet spins, describing an irregular circle ranging from 10 to 50
feet in diameter. There’s also nutation, an aggregation of
sub-wobbles, the most significant of which has a period of 18.6
years and results from variations in the distance of the moon.
Scientists have been particularly intrigued by the Chandler wobble
since its cause has remained a mystery, even though it has been
under observation for over a century. Its period is only around 433
days, or just 1.2 years, meaning that it takes that amount of time
to complete one wobble. The amplitude of the wobble amounts to about
20 feet at the North Pole.
It has been calculated that the Chandler
wobble would be damped down, or reduced to zero, in just 68 years,
unless some force were constantly acting to reinvigorate it. But
what is that force, or excitation mechanism? Over the years, various
hypotheses have been put forward, such as atmospheric phenomena,
continental water storage (changes in snow cover, river runoff, lake
levels, or reservoir capacities), interaction at the boundary of
Earth’s core and its surrounding mantle, and earthquakes.
Researcher Michael Mandeville has charted and analyzed the
Chandler
Wobble and suggests that it is progressively shifting the location
of the poles at an accelerating rate. His conclusion is that
something is “driving” this change - possibly some interaction
between the earth and the Sun and/or Moon.
Whatever is driving it,
it seems that the result is a heating up of the interior of the
earth resulting in increased El Niño activity, and accelerating
earthquake activity.
Catastrophism
As I wrote above, in order to form any ideas about a “trigger”, it
is important to try to sort out the data that we can get and decide
if a Pole Shift is a gradual, uniformitarian event, or if it is
sudden and cataclysmic.
There are endless descriptions of possible scenarios, and none of
them were ringing any bells in terms of the actual scientific data
until I discovered the ideas of
Immanuel Velikovsky. Indeed, John
White devotes about 20 or so pages to Velikovsky’s ideas, and in
general, he merely used them to support the idea of past Pole
Shifts, pointing out that Velikovsky made no predictions about
future events of this type. We might also note that Velikovsky must
have hit a real nerve to have been so viciously vilified.
The
Scientific Thought Police went into overdrive to suppress him! Velikovsky was condemned basically because he denied that the orbits
in the solar system were stable.
When reading Velikovsky’s blow-by-blow interpretation of
the events
of the Exodus as recorded in the Bible as the result of the close
approach of a cometary Venus, I realized that these events mirrored,
almost word for word, the events described in the book of Revelation. What is more interesting is
that the book of Revelation was written long before the current
craze of End Time Prophecies. It is sort of the Mother of all End
Time Prophecies.
While I didn’t necessarily agree with all Velikovsky had to say, it certainly made me think of the
descriptions of myth and legends in a new way.
As it happens, there are many individuals who have noted the
evidence in ancient myths and legends. Sitchin is not the first.
Theories of the earth encountering a comet did not originate with
Velikovsky either.
In 1882, Ignatius Donnelly, a Minnesota congressman and scholar of
all-things-Atlantean, wrote a book entitled
Ragnarok, wherein he
proposed that a giant comet had passed close to the earth in past
ages. The intense heat from the comet had set off huge fires that
raged across the face of the globe. He suggested that the comet had
dumped vast amounts of dust on the earth, triggered earthquakes,
leveled mountains, and initiated the ice age.
He even explained some
of the miracles of the Bible in terms of his comet, proposing that
the standing-still of the sun at the command of Joshua was possibly
a tale commemorating this event. Donnelly’s readers were thrilled by
his descriptions of the “glaring and burning monster” in the sky,
scorching the planet with unearthly heat and shaking the land with
“thunders beyond all thunders”.
Possibly inspired by Donnelly, Camille Flammarion wrote
The End of
the World in 1893 in which he recounted a fictional collision
between the earth and a comet fifty times its size. Flammarion’s
lurid prose ensured that his book was an immediate sensation!
For thousands of years, comets have been associated with disaster
and misfortune. They are harbingers of plagues, earthquakes, floods,
natural disasters and wars. In fact, the passing of a comet followed
by war has been so frequent as to earn for comets the soubriquet
“The Swords of Heaven”.
Tradition has assigned responsibility to
comets for death and destructions, disease and decay, defeat and
dissolution, the deaths of kings, and the fall of empires. It could
be said that no celestial phenomenon is so widely and generally
feared. Velikovsky believed that this fear had a foundation in fact:
it was a sort of global subconscious memory of actual encounters
between the earth and other cosmic bodies that were so devastating
that the fearful reality of the event was suppressed into the
collective subconscious, and only a “comet phobia” remained in
evidence.
In 1857, an anonymous German astrologer predicted that a comet would
strike the earth on June 13 of that year. The impending catastrophe
became the talk of all of Europe. The French astronomer, Jacques Babinet, tried to reassure people by stating that a collision
between the earth and a comet would do no harm. He compared the
impact to “a railway train coming into contact with a fly”.
His
words, apparently, had little effect.
The Paris correspondent for
the American journal, Harper’s Weekly, wrote:
Women have miscarried; crops have been neglected; wills have been
made; comet proof suits of clothing have been invented; a cometary
life insurance company (premiums payable in advance) has been
created… all because an almanac maker… thought proper to insert,
under the week commencing June 13, ‘About this time, expect a
comet’.
Naturally, by the time of dawn on July 14, it was apparent that
there wasn’t going to be a comet. The point is: an astrologer’s
“prophecy” had terrified millions in the total absence of any
evidence that there was a comet anywhere near the planet. And this
type of scenario has occurred more than once, even down to our own
day and time when the
Heaven’s Gate cult members committed mass
suicide in response to rumors and prognostications regarding comet
Hale Bopp.
Immanuel Velikovsky demonstrated rather convincingly that
there was massive evidence of both a literary and scientific nature
that great catastrophic earth changes had occurred during the second
millennium BC due to cometary showers and the close passage of
Venus. He settled on a date of 1450 BC, but more recent scientific
evidence points to the date actually being between 1644 and 1600 BC.
There is also evidence for a disruption circa 5200 BC, 8,800 BC,
12,400 BC, 16,000 BC, 19,600 BC, and by logical extension every
3,600 years previously for an indefinite and unknown period of time.
What is more, if the last “return” was in 1600 BC, we are not just
due, we are overdue for the next one.
Sitchin’s theories about Nibiru do not take into account many of the
literary reports from the ancients regarding these great
bombardments of comets. Velikovsky tried to account for this by
suggesting that a cometary Venus was hauling around a tail of rocks.
It seems that Velikovsky and his supporters, and Sitchin and his
supporters, although recognizing serious worldwide catastrophes,
have failed to recognize the true nature of such events.
Velikovsky
proposed that Venus out of orbit was a more or less one-time event
rather than a symptom of a long-term cycle.
Sitchin came closer with
his understanding of the cycle, but he failed to consider all the
variables in his solution. What is more, once he settled on his idea
as the one and only solution, his efforts to make the mythical
elements fit the hypothesis became almost as absurd as the efforts
of mainstream science to avoid them!
The confirmed linchpin for the fall of the late Bronze Age cultures,
the Middle Eastern Civilizations, and other recorded disasters that
are found to be “around that time”, seems to be the period from 1644
BC to 1600 BC. The ice cores show the disturbances starting in 1644
(registering in 1645), and the tree rings show a big spike in 1628,
though the entire period was disturbed.102 What is clear is that
whatever comes at 3600 year intervals as shown by the ice cores is
capable of setting off prolonged periods of earth changes that are
above the levels of ordinary uniformitarian geologic and
climatalogical changes.
102 I am
going to omit here the extensive evidence I have assembled which
confirms this date of around 1600 BC. This will be treated in a
future volume.
But what is important is that the mythical
and archaeological evidence suggests that it is a shower of
asteroids or comets that are NOT seen until it is TOO LATE.
To ascribe all of the evidence of cyclic catastrophe to a
“uniformitarian” idea that it just got cold and then got warm and
got cold and warm... with such an evident cycle is sort of absurd.
To ascribe it to a “galactic core explosion” is equally absurd.
I think that, based on the observations of the ancients that what we
are looking for is a recurring shower of comets that cycles through
the solar system regularly, on a 3,600-year orbit. What is more, it
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