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 seems that this body of comets, clustered together, at some point, resembles a fiery serpent with a mouthful of devouring teeth in the blackness of space. For this reason, it was given the name spdt, spdw, and spd-ibhw (sharp toothed), in the Pyramid Texts. It undoubtedly is a terrifying spectacle!


We return again to the question: what is the “initiator” of these showers, and did they begin in some interaction with an “outside agent”?


According to scientific studies about the possibilities of our Sun having a companion, periodic comets were “bumped” into the solar system by a dark star, a “little brother” or “little sister” of our own Sun, which has a long, elliptical orbit measured, most likely, in millions of years.

Graph by Matese showing cometary scatter patterns, which may suggest the orbit of the “Perturber”.

By permission.

 

If it is a companion star, present day science pretty clearly demonstrates that it must have a very long period; otherwise, we would notice it quite plainly in orbital perturbations of a certain type. In actual fact, the computer model that best fits the various dynamics is that of a 27 million year orbit.103

 

103 Matese, J.J., Whitman, P.G., Whitmore, D.P., “Cometary Evidence of a Massive Body in The Outer Oort Cloud”, Icarus 141: 354-366. 1999.

 

And this, of course, leads us to a considerable difficulty: the period of return of the Dark Star, as opposed to the period of disasters. Obviously, a body with a 27 million year orbit isn’t likely to be remembered. However, an ancient advanced science may have certainly figured it out exactly as it is being proposed in the present day, and it was remembered and passed down in what came to be seen as fantastic myths and legends.

 

The work by these experts suggests that the observations of other binary systems demonstrate the model for the projected separation they have given. Such paired stars are “physically connected systems”, and these brown dwarfs are “burning”, though non-nuclear. What is more, if it is out there, it never enters the Inner Solar system, though it may be seen from afar and may interact with our own Sun in dramatic ways. This is what Fulcanelli seems to be suggesting in his many allusions to the sun and to helicoidal tracks of the Sun, and to “doubles” and “diplomacy” and “mirrors”, not to mention the dedication of his books to: The Brothers Heliopolis.


Thus, we understand that it is not this Twin sun that makes its “appearance” at every period of catastrophe. Nevertheless, the analyses of the periodic comets suggests that it does, at very long periods, again and again, crash through the Oort cloud like a bowling ball through rows of pins, sending a new collection of them spinning into a periodical orbit, and because they follow the the laws of celestial mechanics, they establish an orbit of 3,600 years.

 

This idea has some support from scientific studies, which the theory of the Planet Nibiru as a visitor to the inner solar system does not.


When we look at the mythology of both Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, we suspect that these stories do not refer to a “Tenth Planet”, but to the presence of the Sun’s dark companion, a failed star classified as a “brown dwarf”. It also seems to be the one hypothesis that encompasses all the “sub-hypotheses” of the many researchers who have attempted to deal with different aspects of the problems of the past and future of the earth.


Sitchin proposed that a “10th Planet” caroms through the inner solar system. Scientific evidence does not support a body, the size he suggests, entering into the inner solar system. However, science can support a cluster of comets spread out in space that returns at 3,600-year intervals. In the end, the potential for cataclysmic disruption of the earth is about as bad either way.


Sitchin suggests that his 10th planet is inhabited by the Anunnaki / Nefilim. He claims that they are our creators and masters. His ideas are tremendously out of synch with the strong circumstantial evidence about the alien presence on this planet. Sitchin’s ideas are also flawed for the other reasons we have already mentioned, though he has certainly produced interesting work in his interpretations of the Sumerian texts as possibly referring to “alien interactions” and the periodic return of something!


Other theorists suggest that the Dark Companion of the Sun has its own habitable planetary system, home to the mythical ‘Gods’ of the ancient world. This theory that a brown dwarf with its own planetary system is able to pass through the Oort cloud and the Kuiper belt, keeping its own mini-solar system intact, is obviously extremely problematical. In the same way that Sitchin simply passes right over the problems of Nibiru seeding life on earth, forgetting that evolutionary processes that are being postulated must apply to both bodies, the creator of the “Dark Star: Have Planets, Will Travel” theory also does not consider the fundamental problem of such an idea.


And so, I repeat: the two great themes of myth are the yearning for the golden age and a terror of a world-destroying catastrophe.

 

The two ideas are inextricably linked to each other. In virtually all of the stories about the Fall from Eden and the Flood of Noah, the great celestial bodies in the heavens were said to have been out of control.


What seems to be a more “pristine” version of the story is that of Amlodhi, of Icelandic legend, who owned a mill, which, in his own time, “ground out peace and plenty”. Later, in decaying times, it ground out salt. Finally, it fell to the bottom of the ocean and was grinding out rock and sand, creating a vast whirlpool, the Maelstrom. According to Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend, this myth was evidence for an astronomical process, the precession of the zodiac. As already discussed, this is the shifting of the sun through the signs of the zodiac, and, according to them, it determines “world ages”.

 

They write:

Now it is time to locate the origin of the image of the Mill, and further, what its alleged breakup and the coming into being of Whirlpool can possibly mean. The starting place is in Greece. Cleomedes (c. AD 150), speaking of the northern latitudes, states: “The heavens there turn around in the way a millstone does”.

 

Al-Farghani in the East takes up the same idea, and his colleagues will supply the details. They call the star Kochab, Beta Ursae Minoris, “mill peg”, and the stars of the Little Bear, surrounding the North Pole, and Fas al-rahha (the hole of the mill peg), “because they represent, as it were, a hole (the axle ring) in which the mill axle turns, since the axle of the equator (the polar axis) is to be found in this region, fairly close to the star Al-jadi…”

These are the words of the Arab Cosmographer al-Kazvini.

 

Ideler comments:

“Koth, the common name of the Pole, means really the axle of the movable upper millstone which goes through the lower fixed on, what is called the ‘mill-iron.”


…The Bhagavata Purana tells us how the virtuous prince Dhruva was appointed as Pole star. The particular virtue of the prince, which alarmed even the Gods, is worth mentioning: he stood on one leg for more than a month, motionless. This is what was announced to him: “The stars and their figures, and also the planets shall turn around you.”[…]

There is a remark by Trimalchio in Petronius (Satyricon 39):

“Thus the orb of heaven turns around like a millstone, and ever does something bad.”

It was not a foreign idea to the ancients that the mills of the Gods grind slowly, and that the result is usually pain.104 The nine grim Goddesses who “once ground Amlodhi’s meal”, working now that “host-cruel skerry quern” beyond the edge of the world, are in Mundlfoeri, literally “the mover of the handle”.

 

The word “mundil… is never used in the old Norse literature about any other object than the sweep or handle with which the movable millstone is turned”. Here we have a clue that refers directly to something that “turns the mill”. The “nine grim Goddesses”, whom we may identify with the Egyptian Ennead, are located in the “handle”.


The case is then established. But there is an ambiguity here, which discloses further depths to the idea. “Moendull” comes from Sanskrit “Manthati”, says Rydberg,

“it means to swing, twist, bore …Its direct application always refers to the production of fire by friction”.105

And here we see the idea of a binary star system moving in tandem orbit with one another. A cosmic “machine”, the “helicoidal track of the sun”, as Fulcanelli put it.

 

The authors of Hamlet’s Mill struggle on, however, with their uniformitarian idea:

The identity of the Mill, in its many versions, with heaven is thus universally understood and accepted. But hitherto nobody seems to have wondered about the second part of the story, which also occurs in the many versions. How and why does it always happen that this Mill, the peg of which is Polaris, had to be wrecked or unhinged? Once the archaic mind had grasped the forever enduring rotation, what caused it to think that the axle jumps out of the hole? What memory of catastrophic events has created this story of destruction? Why should Vainamoinen … state explicitly that another Mill has to be constructed? Why had Dhruva to be appointed to play Pole star – and for a given cycle? For the story refers in no way to the creation of the world.106

 

The simple answer lies in the facts of the case. The Pole star does get out of place, and every few thousand years another star has to be chosen which best approximates that position. It is well known that the Great Pyramid, so carefully sighted, is not oriented at our Pole Star, but at alpha Draconis, which occupied the position at the pole 5,000 years ago. …It is the more difficult for moderns to imagine that in those far-off ages men could keep track of such imperceptible shifting, as many of them are not aware of the mere facts.107

104 De Santillana & Von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill (Boston: David R. Godine 1977) pp. 137-138.

105 Ibid., p. 139.
106 And here I beg to differ.

107 It is far more difficult for me to comprehend how these two authors can be talking about the ancients grasping this concept, and then to wonder why anyone with the brains to do so would even care! That is, assuming it is just a “concept.”

This remark about the Pyramid being oriented to Draconis is misleading. The fact is, the orientation of the pyramid to the terrestrial pole remains constant. It is only the pole stars that change by the shifting of the terrestrial axial orientation. Most of these myths, however, come under a misleading name. They have been understood to deal with the end of the world. …What actually comes to an end is a world, in the sense of a world-age.


Coherence will be reestablished in this welter of traditions if it is realized that what is referred to is the grandest of heavenly phenomena, the Precession of the Equinoxes.108


108 De Santillana & Von Dechend, op. cit., p. 141.

 

Now, did you notice what these two authors have done here? Aside from their abysmally ignorant remark about the orientation of the pyramids to Draconis, they have resorted to Uniformitarianism to explain the great mystery of this worldwide myth of the “unhinging” of the Pole star. They, and many, many others, have followed this path, believing that all the clues from ancient monuments and myths have to do simply with measuring time, “World Ages”, in more or less “cultural” and historical terms.

 

The World Age of the Hebrews was the age of the Ram, symbolized by Abraham taking his son to sacrifice him, and a Ram appeared in the thicket, and such other allusions. The age of Pisces, the age of Christ, is symbolized by the fish, and numerous allusions are dredged up to support that one. Now, we are supposed to be entering (or have already done so, depending on your source), the Age of Aquarius. These more recent descriptions of “ages” directly contradict the ancient ideas of the Yugas and the decline of human morality.

 

The New Age COINTELPRO has worked long and hard to promote the idea of the “Age of Aquarius” as a time of transcendent spiritual progress and “ascension” graded on the curve, of course.


I should also point out right here that if the Precession of the Zodiac was such a great way to measure time and world ages, there wouldn’t be so many opinions about when one began and another ended. As a measure of time that is so “vastly elegant”, it ought to at least work, right? Well, it doesn’t. What is more, the zodiac has been created and altered within recorded history, having at various times ten signs, eleven, twelve and thirteen. So, what’s the point?

 

From this perspective, there isn’t one except for an attempt to deny the possibility that the ancients meant exactly what they said, even if later interpreters have assured us that the tales were meant as allegories.


But still, using this Precession as a giant clock, with some fantastic perambulations through archaic lore, a dozen or more authors have produced as many different versions of what a “world age” is, and “when” they begin and end, and how. They then try to link these ages to all sorts of weird theories from the opening of “stargates” to galactic core explosions to “monuments to the end of time”.


The answer is a lot simpler than that. I think those things that point us to the idea that the pole comes “unhinged” do, indeed, point to the Precession. But the important thing about this Precession is that it points us to the fact that the Earth WOBBLES. And I think that the thing the ancients are trying most desperately to point out to us in these stories is that the Earth wobbles for a REASON, and we ought to notice this wobble and ask some questions about the “nine grim Goddesses” who “turn the handle” and where and what that “handle” might be that increases friction to the point that fire is produced!


In Snorri’s109 Gylfaginning, there is a prediction for the future given in the Song of the Sybyl, followed by a dialogue between King Gylfi and the Aesir110, disguised as men.

 

109 Sturlson, Snorri, The Prose Edda – Tales From Norse Mythology, p. 90-92.

110 Norse Gods.

 

King Gylfi asks,

“What happens when the whole world has burned up, the Gods are dead, and all of mankind is gone? You have said earlier that each human being would go on living in this or that world.”

The answer is that there are several worlds for the good and the bad.

 

Then Gylfi asks,

“Shall any Gods be alive, and shall there be something of earth and heaven?”

And the answer is:

“The earth rises up from the sea again, and is green and beautiful and things grow without sowing. Vidar and Vali are alive, for neither the sea nor the flames of Surt have hurt them and they dwell on the Eddyfield, where once stood Asgard. There come also the sons of Thor, Modi, and Magni, and bring along his hammer. There come also Balder and Hoder from the other world. All sit down and converse together. They rehearse their runes and talk of events of old days.

 

Then they find in the grass the golden tablets that the Aesir once played with. Two children of men will also be found safe from the great flames of Surt. Their names, Lif and Lifthrasir, and they feed on the morning dew and from this human pair will come a great population which will fill the earth. And strange to say, the sun, before being devoured by Fenrir, will have borne a daughter, no less beautiful and going the same ways as her mother.”

Again, the authors of Hamlet’s Mill take a prosaic view of these matters, pronouncing sagely that it is “just a metaphor”. And again, I have to disagree. I do not think that the point is to “measure time”, in the sense of “world ages” of culture, civilizations, or even “psychic” or occult influences, except in that they relate to something far more important: WHAT IS CAUSING THE WOBBLE AND WHAT CAN BE THE RESULT?

 

And we have a clear answer in Snorri’s tale:

The sun will have borne a daughter - which can only occur via a “mating” or Hieros Gamos.

In this sense, the ancients might have supposed, and quite rightly, that if we ever noticed this fact, if we were pointed in this direction, if we were plainly told that there is a handle that turns the axis, that this handle gets hot, that the axis of the planet comes unhinged, that it started out spinning upright and then gradually wobbled out of place and finally FALLS OVER INTO THE SEA, that we would be clever enough to get it.

 

The clue they are pointing out to us is that there is something OUT THERE that is the HANDLE and we ought to be able to figure out, by applying principles of physics to celestial mechanics, exactly what it is and what it does. The repeated references to the “dying and rebirth of the Sun”, in some sort of cosmic hierogamy, and the Sun giving birth to a daughter, or having a Celestial Twin, ought to be pretty plain clues to anybody who is paying attention to these things.


In the third century BC, Berossus popularized the Chaldean doctrine of the “Great Year” in a form that spread through the entire Hellenic world. According to this teaching, the universe is eternal but it is periodically destroyed and reconstituted every “Great Year”. What a Great Year is, exactly, varies from school to school. But, according to Berossus, when the seven planets assemble in Cancer, there will be a Great Winter; when they assemble in Capricorn, at the Summer solstice (clearly an astrological opposition to the Sun is implied here), the entire universe will be consumed by fire. Similar ideas are found in India and Iran as well as among the Maya and Aztec.


Now, what we need to remember about these postulations is the inherently optimistic character of them; the consciousness of the normality of the cyclical catastrophe, the certainty of its meaning, and, above all, that it is NEVER, EVER final! The ideas communicate to us that, just as three days of darkness preceding the rebirth of the Moon are necessary, so are the death of an individual and the periodic death of humanity necessary. Any material form, by the mere fact of its existence in time, loses vigor and becomes formless if only for an instant. It MUST return to chaos, to orgy, to darkness, to water; it must be reabsorbed into the primordial unity from which it issued to be reborn. The King is dead: long live the King!


Thus, the New Year celebrations and other initiations served to remind men that suffering is never final; that death is always followed by resurrection; that every defeat is annulled and transcended by the final victory of return to the Edenic state or the beginning of the new cycle.


In Eliade’s opinion, the drama of Tammuz and other variations of the same archetype, including Jesus, reminded men of the sufferings of the just and thereby rendered them tolerable. Tammuz suffered without being guilty. He was humiliated, flogged until he bled, and then imprisoned in a pit, or Hell. It was there that the Great Goddess visited him, encouraged, and revived him. (In later corrupted versions, it was a “messenger” who visited, but the essential story has survived in Gnostic Manichaean and Mandaean prototypes, though with changes acquired during the period of Greco-Oriental syncretism.)


I would like to suggest that the drama of the dying God is not only the symbol of the literal “death of the Sun” in terms of its lengthy obscuration, but also includes the drama of the Cosmic Hieros Gamos between the Sun and its Companion. More than this, the “dying God” drama might also be the enacting of a certain technology that permits passage into other realms; the very technology that will be required to build the Ark and find the Holy Grail.


In the pit of Hell, during the descent into chaos, man is awakened by the Goddess who brings the good tidings of his salvation and imminent liberation and restoration to the Edenic state of innocence. As it was in the days of Noah, Noah built an Ark. The coming of the Goddess represents the coming of knowledge, of wisdom, of understanding the hyperdimensional realities by means of the symbols of our reality which are, ultimately, only shadows on the cave wall of Plato’s allegory.


But something changed the world view.

 

Somehow, the perception of the End of Time became a terrible punishment. Somehow, a God entered the world stage who destroyed the peace of Eden, and tempted man to place his trust in him, and him alone.

“I am the Lord your God, and I am a jealous God!"

And time became linear and with a prophesied end that was going to be final and complete. And woe to those who were not on the side of the “right God” who claimed to be the only one who could offer “salvation”.

 

The concept of the end being a precursor to a rebirth was lost with the introduction of monotheism. At that point, the End of Time became the End of the World – for everyone except those special chosen ones who were to be saved by a single, specific God to live in some mystical City of God with streets paved with gold, and almond-eyed houris serving dates and wine on every street corner.

 

This single, specific God, has pretty much run the show ever since, in any number of disguises.

 

Until this appearance of monotheism, a myth was annually enacted that described a condition of life that was accepted as the way things were: Time was cyclical. The world might end, but if it did, it was only because it had “run down” and needed to be “wound up” again.

 

All of the elements of the story of Noah are found in these myths.

“As it was in the days of Noah.”

Back to Contents

 

Back to La Atlantida

 

Back to Earth Changes

 

Back to Asteroids, Comets and Meteorites

 

Previous    Next