FUNDAY

EC/ SATURN CONFIGURATION BREAKUP, NO INFO
NO EVIDENCE INNER PLANETS CAME FROM OUTER SOLAR SYSTEM
MAJOR PREHISTORY EVENTS ... occurred ... by the time of Unis's pyramid in 2450 BCE:
... i.e. Creation, Venus/Mars catastrophes, the polar configuration, the Flood, the ladder to heaven and/or World Pillar, etc.
VENUS COMET DARK PERIOD BEFORE CREATION
VENUS/MARS MARRIAGE WAS CREATION
POLAR COLUMN DID NOT RETRACT BEFORE CREATION
VENUS CROWNED MARS KING DURING CREATION
SATURN'S RINGS, NO INFO
SATURN'S CIRCUMSTELLAR DISK, NO INFO
GOLDEN AGE DURATION, NO INFO
CELESTIAL FLOOD
ICE AGE, SEE CARDONA
CELESTIAL CONFLAGRATION JUST BEFORE CREATION

CHINESE DRAGON. In Newborn Star, Dwardu said this on pages 158-159.
"Sutherland was entirely mistaken when, in attempting to corroborate one of Velikovsky's main theses, he misidentified the dragon and its pearl as the planet Venus in its previous near-cometary aspect.11 In all honesty, I have to confess that, in my pioneering days, and in support of Sutherland's thesis, I was just as guilty of so misidentifying the Chinese dragon and its fiery pearl.12 It is now quite apparent that, in comparison with the myths of other ancient nations, the encircling Chinese dragon is to be understood as the outflow of debris from proto-Saturn's axial pole, which debris continued to spiral out so far that, in time, witnesses of the event could actually see it circumventing proto-Saturn's flaming globe. And it is the very watery illusion of proto-Saturn's circumstellar disk across which this debris spiraled that eventually associated the Dragon in Asian minds with water, rivers, lakes, and oceans."
Since you said Dwardu often erred in attributing to Saturn events that actually involved Venus and/or Mars, do you disagree with Dwardu on the above?

RETRACTION. On page 279 of Flare Star he said this.
"There was a general belief among the ancient Egyptians that, at one time, Ra cut off his own phallus.2 Since, as we have already seen, the phallus of Ra was actually the plasma column or axis mundi we have been analyzing, what this self-castration seems to indicate is a detachment of that axis. This castration motif is one that recurs often enough in myth, although, to be sure, some of it refers to a much later, but similar, event."
Dwardu concluded that a retraction of the polar column caused the Saturn flareup of Creation. But you say there was no retraction before Creation and Creation was a flareup of Venus instead of Saturn. Is that right? And was there a retraction or severing of the polar column later, after Creation, which was interpreted as Saturn's or Mars' self-castration, which led to the tradition of circumcision?

.3/16/16) 9:33AM)
____Road to Saturn

____The Road To Saturn [Aeon]
https://www.aeonjournal.com/articles/road_to_saturn/road_to_saturn.html
[by Cardona]
_I have read less than a handful of books that can be said to have influenced my way of thinking. Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision has not only been one of them, in the end it totally changed my life.
_In this work Velikovsky proposed that, in the distant past, but still within man's memory, the planet Jupiter ejected from itself a smaller but sizeable body that careened across the solar system in the form of a giant comet. Coming into close contact with Earth, but avoiding an actual collision, this cometary body caused a series of catastrophic events which mankind remembered and passed on to his descendants in an oral and written tradition that eventually evolved into the well-known mythologies of the various nations. Thus the gods and goddesses of antiquity seem to have really been the deified planets of the solar system. Their divine actions were merely reflections of errant orbits in a cosmic drama which man witnessed and immortalized in his religious rites, his liturgies and, finally, his sacred texts.
_Worlds in Collision was first published in 1950. At that time, having been raised in one of Roman Catholicism's most impregnable strongholds, I was still being taught that the world had been created in six consecutive days. During our science courses at Stella Maris College, Gzira, on the island of Malta, we were informed that the Earth came into existence long after the Sun. But in the course of our religious upbringing during the same semester at the same college, we were also expected to believe that the Earth was created shortly before the Sun. Upon questioning this inconsistency, we were told that in matters of science we were to follow the teaching of the scientists, but that in religion, honoring the words of Genesis, we were to accept the precepts of God.
__II
_It was on an evening in 1955, while I was browsing through a store in Valletta, that a book title caught my eye. It was Velikovsky's Ages in Chaos. I picked it up, leafed through it, and read a few pages. I did not buy the book. I merely placed it back on the shelf. I never even noticed the author's name.
_Here, I thought to myself, was another foolish attempt by some pseudo-scholar who was out to prove, in some pseudo-scientific way, that the miracles of the Old Testament, especially those of Exodus, were really misunderstood natural phenomena.
_By this time the radio noises from Jupiter, as predicted by Velikovsky, had already been detected. Textbooks on astronomy, however, were still preaching a universe void of any forces other than gravitation. Entire galaxies, it had already been discovered, were even then colliding with one another. But mere planets, it was still being argued, could not so collide.
_I was at that time working on high tension voltage during my stint at the Mains Section while in training at her Majesty's Dockyard. My instructor was George Wickman. He was partly deaf but his wit and wisdom had turned him into something of a legend throughout the entire section of the E.E.M. His appetite for knowledge was voracious; his reading voluminous. He not only possessed a unique philosophical mind, he had an encyclopedic memory to boot. I took so much to him that, more than being his apprentice, I considered myself his protege. I told him about Ages in Chaos -- or what I had thought Ages in Chaos was all about. As best I can remember, this is what he said to me:
_"No amount of human reasoning can ever hope to make sense of God's madness. Murder in God's name, as described in the Bible, is a contradiction in moral precepts; hail stones that burst into flames, as described in Exodus, is a contradiction in scientific terms. The man who will make logical sense of God's miracles will never be born."
__III
_My next meeting with Velikovsky occurred in 1960 in another book store, this time in Montreal, Canada. The title of another book had attracted my attention. It was Worlds in Collision. I leafed through it and the passages I read instantly made me connect it with what I remembered of Ages in Chaos. I did not yet know that both books were written by the same man. I did not remember having heard of Immanuel Velikovsky. But I did remember George Wickman's words and, maybe because it was a second-hand copy, I purchased the book. I still have that same worn-out edition on one of my shelves. I devoured it in one sitting -- although heaven only knows how often I have had occasion to return to it. There are times when I actually curse the day I came across that work. Like many others whom I was to come in contact with later, I was utterly enchanted by Velikovsky's seductive reasoning. The next day I was out hunting for Ages in Chaos.
_The man George Wickman had said will never be born had already lived half his life. True -- Velikovsky might not have been entirely correct about the specific set of "miracles" he sought to explain; but, in a more general way, he had shed a bright and scholarly light on the meaning behind religious beliefs to say nothing of many of the world's ancient marvels.
_In the meantime, scientific discoveries had already vindicated several of the crucial points he had raised. More than that, as in the case of the radio dispatches from Jupiter, some of them had actually been predicted by him. Evidence was discovered pointing to past shifts in the direction of the Earth's astronomical axis and the position of its geographical poles. The Earth's magnetosphere had been discovered. Spectral analysis had revealed the presence of hydrocarbons in cometary tails. The net negative charge of the Sun had been detected. Electro-magnetic interactions had been found to be sufficiently strong to affect the Earth's rotation, even if only minutely. Yet, despite these correct prognoses, the world of science continued to ignore him. Today's belief is that his advance claims, as he preferred to call them, were mostly derived through erroneous deductions and that, in any case, they are inadequate in proving his theory of nearly-colliding worlds. To this day, in the halls of science, Velikovsky's name remains strictly anathema.
_My studies of Velikovskian catastrophism can be said to have commenced as soon as I turned the last page of Worlds in Collision. Burying myself in Montreal's libraries, scrounging around second-hand book stores, I brought myself up to date on the sordid controversy that has become known as the Velikovsky Affair. I set out on an extensive inquiry which has led me through the libraries of three Canadian universities and those of their cities. Nor has this research yet come to an end. What commenced as mild curiosity metamorphosed into an ogreish obsession. I examined every facet of Worlds in Collision, checked its every detail, and weighed all its possibilities, plausibilities and probabilities. I investigated every alternative to Velikovsky's contentions.
_My initial reaction, of course, was to disbelieve the whole thing. After all, Worlds in Collision is not a faultless work. Far from it. Even as I read it that first time, I could already detect certain weaknesses in Velikovsky's knowledge of mythology on which the major portion of the book is based. One did not have to be an expert on the subject to spot these flaws. In fact, right from the start I have been utterly amazed at Velikovsky's detractors, none of whom, until recently, seem to have been intelligent enough to finger the sore spots contained in his work. As I have twice stated before elsewhere in my accumulating works, the battle against Velikovsky might have been over in a year had the assault come form knowledgeable mythologists rather than the pompous astronomers who took part in the debate during the 1950s. Had I not had an open mind, I would have laughed Worlds in Collision right out of my life. In some ways, I might have been better for it. But because there were aspects of the work with which I was not overly familiar, I decided to give Velikovsky the benefit of the doubt. To that end, my research continued and flourished.
__IV
_One of the first things I unearthed was that the idea of cosmic catastrophism did not originate with Velikovsky. Granted that he might not have been aware of his precursors when he first embarked on his work, Velikovsky himself soon realized it and, despite the accusations of his detractors, did not hide the fact. Without taking into account what the ancients and present primitive peoples have had to say about the subject, free thinkers have been writing on cosmic catastrophism since the 17th century. Among the best known have been William Whiston, theologian, mathematician, and deputy at Cambridge to Sir Isaac Newton; Ignatius Donnelly, member of congress, reformer, and politician extaordinaire: Hans Hoerbiger and Philipp Fauth, the one a self-styled cosmologist, the other a renowned selenologist, who collaborated amid an "ill-tempered battle of books" during the rise of the Nazi regime; and Hans Schindler Bellamy, a British student of mythology who became Hoerbiger's disciple in the English-speaking world. There were a few others and while their hypotheses, long since relegated to the dust bins of history, varied from one another, they had one thing in common: They all emphasized a dissatisfaction with the then- prevailing views concerning the nature of the solar system and its formation, to say nothing about its later history.
_On the mythological front, it was not long before I had to accept that the deities of the ancient nations originated as personifications of cosmic bodies, prime among which were the very planets of the solar system. It did not take Velikovsky, or any of his precursors, to convince me of this. The ancients, who were in the best position to know what they themselves believed in, so stated in many of their texts. It therefore struck me as strange that most modern mythologists would go to such great pains in attempting to explain mythological characters and themes in anything but cosmic terms. In this respect, whatever else may be said of him, Velikovsky proved superior. Not that he was always correct when identifying specific deities with specific planets but, had he dug deeper in a field which I now know to have been novel to him, he would have discovered that, in many instances, the ancients themselves had already supplied the identities of their gods. Where they did not, the rules of comparative mythology unerringly lead the way. But that is something that only crept slowly on me as my research continued to unfold. After reading Velikovsky I should not have been surprised at the sheer amount of mythological tales which hinted at, referred to, and sometimes explicitly described catastrophic events. These appeared of such magnitude that, were they to be believed, they could only be explained by the shaking of the Earth's framework. Predominant among these disasters was the universal deluge, which the Biblical account associates with Noah. Moreover, the cosmic thread that ran through the ages was intertwined with these disasters so that it did not take long to realize that Velikovsky had been right when he insisted that catastrophism was literally heaven-caused. What became more and more obvious was that the celestial order with which ancient man was so obsessed was entirely different from the one we are presently acquainted with. Ancient man described the Sun as rising in the west, setting in the east, stopping in mid-course, and turning right around. According to ancient texts, the planets seem to have occupied different positions in the sky [than now]; they moved in different orbits and, in all cases, looked entirely different from the way they do now. Prime among these examples was the planet Venus which, very much as Velikovsky had claimed, was described as having had the form of a comet which followed a changing orbit entirely different from the one it follows at present. As everyone knows, the planets, like the stars, appear to the naked eye as nothing more than pin-points of light in the night sky. Yet ancient traditions seem to leave no doubt that these same planets, often described and even depicted as spheres and/or discs, were viewed at close quarters and often in terrifying circumstances. Thus most of mythology turns out to be a reflection of cosmic disorders which ancient man seems to have witnessed and survived. In this generality, if in nothing else, Velikovsky was entirely correct.
__V. Between 1961 and '62, while still in Montreal, I [wrote] a work of fiction, ... woven around the impending disaster of the universal deluge and its final culmination. ... n the end it was never published ... [and] I was eventually glad ... [as] I had committed two major blunders: I presented Noah as a human protagonist...; and I described the cosmic events in terms which ... did not reflect the traditional sources correctly. ... It was while waiting for the outcome of my book that ... back to the libraries I went in order to ascertain what else our forebears could divulge about the deluge and, if possible, about earlier times. What I continued to discover amazed me, for, even before the deluge, it seems that cosmic catastrophism had been rampant, and today it is my belief that mankind owes its emergence as the unique race it has become to such disasters in the celestial sphere.
- VI. Catastrophism betokens destruction, but our ancient forebears seem to have been just as obsessed with creation. Tales of creation are among the most abundant in the world's repository of mythology. Our ancestors not only described the creation of the world, they did so as if they had actually witnessed the occurence. There is no point in countering that such cosmogonical tales are the result of philosophical reasoning. It does not seem possible that primitive peoples, with whom it all started, and who were separated by vast mountain, desert and ocean stretches, would arrive at similar, and sometimes identical ideas in their philosophical quest for primal beginnings. Predominant among such identical ideas, the recognition of which was to carry me far, was the shedding of a bright light, exactly as described in Genesis, at the very commencement of creation. Proponents of the diffusion theory might accuse me of gullibility, but my contention is that such ideas would be too unnatural to survive diffusion and the test of time had there not been some universal cause in the real world upon which they might have been based. Had primitive reason required the abolishing of an imagined primal darkness by the shedding of light, logic would have chosen the Sun as the source of that sudden illumination. What would have been more logical than to have the creation of the Sun dissolve this fictional gloom? And yet in all cases where the light of creation is spoken of, the Sun was said to have been created later. This posed an enigma that took me long to resolve. When I finally did, it was again through Velikovsky.
- VII. It was during my investigation of the myths of creation that I finally came face to face with Saturn. Actually, I had been bumping into him from the beginning, but it was not until now that I saw this planetary deity as something more than a murky figure lurking behind some of the most engaging mythological motifs I had yet encountered. From then on every avenue that I followed brought me back into his shadow. As intrigued as I had been with the idea of cosmic catastrophism, this new turn of events piqued my interest even more and, in the end, there was no escaping the clutches of this most ancient mythological character. ... In Worlds in Collision, Velikovsky had offered next to nothing about Saturn. He only hinted, somewhat teasingly, that, prior to the catastrophe of the Exodus, the Earth had suffered a more severe series of disasters, one of them being the deluge, at the hands of the giant gas planets.
... What I ... was uncovering about Saturn was beginning to puzzle me to no end. ... I kept coming across these strange allusions to Saturn as having once been an immobile planet. How could a planet, at close quarters or otherwise, have not appeared to move across the sky? Other textual bits and pieces kept hinting at Saturn having once occupied a position in Earth's north celestial pole. As a pole star, Saturn's apparent immobility would be explained but there was nothing in celestial mechanics that would accommodate any planet in that role. To be quite frank, I had no idea what to do with this information other than to disbelieve it. I therefore decided to ignore all such allusions and put them down to misinterpretation by those early writers who had striven to record the beliefs of their more ancient forebears. I should have asked myself: Would all these misinterpreters have misinterpreted in the same way?
- VIII. I do not remember who it was that first brought Hamlet's Mill to my attention or exactly when. In this work, published in 1969, Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend analyzed some of the most obscure motifs in all of mythology and came up with a cosmic interpretation. This was refreshing, to say the least. Even so, they hamstrung themselves by disallowing any conclusions that threatened to trespass [on] uniformitarian precepts. What these authors proposed was that ancient man derived his beliefs concerning the end of all things from the slow displacement of the pole star through the precession of the equinoxes over the millennia. Cosmic catastrophism was explained as the dissolution of an order brought about by this slow change in the celestial sphere. Creation consisted in the establishment of a new celestial order. In other words, an era ended every time the reigning pole star was displaced; the "selection" of a new pole star through precession was the beginning of a new world age. The universal deluge was perceived by these writers as having been a purely celestial occurrence which early man transcribed in earthly terms. So also with other deluges, with fire from heaven, world-encompassing hurricanes, and days of darkness. These early disasters, they claimed, were merely analogies of what actually transpired in the night sky with each passing pole star. The documentation of this thesis was presented in a heavy tome of 505 pages, including 39 lengthy appendices, and generously annotated with rare-source material. The book is a heady excursion into the intricate labyrinth of mythology and, if nothing else, serves as a veritable mine of mythic information. It has, however, long been understood that most of mythology derives from primitive times, from those eras preceding the birth of writing. While major mythological themes have changed their dress more than once, the messages contained within their core have remained unchanged. It is therefore difficult to accept that the primitive mind of ages past had already noted the extremely slow change of the pole, let alone that the change was understood. De Santillana and von Dechend were, of course, quite aware of this objection, so it is not surprising that they attempted to overrule it. The discovery of the precession of the equinoxes has long been attributed to Hipparchus, one of the greatest astronomers and mathematicians of antiquity, who flourished sometime between 146 and 127 B.C. Yet, as the authors of Hamlet's Mill argued, this does not prove that the phenomenon had not been observed prior to his time. But, even given that it was, it remains difficult to accept that this extremely slow change, the perception of which requires thousands of years, could have given rise to a world-wide belief in the cataclysmic end of all things --with flood and fire and the shaking of the terrestrial globe itself. After all, when one pole star is displaced by another, no disaster ensues, either on Earth or in heaven. More important is the fact --and the authors in question were well aware of this --that certain items of myth and ancient astronomical lore not only refuse to fit the precessional scheme of the equinoxes but are notorious in not fitting anything else that is presently known about our universe. Prime among such misfits is the ancient notion that Saturn had once played the role of pole star which they could not help but run into. Like myself, de Santillana and von Dechend did not know what to do with this odd piece of information; and, like myself, they relegated it to the limbo of unacceptable data. Their verdict on this particular oddity was that it arose through "figures of speech" that "were an essential part of the technical idiom of archaic astrology"--which, let's face it, does nothing to explain the oddity itself. This non-acceptance made me view mine in a different light. To begin with, if others had detected this northernism with which Saturn is associated, the knowledge could not be as obscure as I had first imagined it to be. Also, it was easier to imagine Saturn as pole star than it was to accept that primitive man would have noticed the slow precession of the equinoxes. It was then that I realized that if we were to reconstruct a cosmic history based on ancient records, we would have no option but to accept what the ancients recorded. I also decided that, for the time being, it did not much matter whether what the ancients recorded was deemed possible or not. The testing of such possibilities could come later. Temporarily it was enough to attempt a reconstruction as dictated by the message of myth. Moreover, in those cases where the message was unambiguous, it would have to be accepted at face value. And such was the message which stated that Saturn had once played the part of pole star. Much as I wanted to disbelieve it, I had to accept it. It was either that or disbelieve everything else I had thus far uncovered.
- IX. In February of 1970 I heard Velikovsky lecture at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in which city I had finally dug my roots. Until then Velikovsky had been very reticent about the part Saturn had played in the early catastrophes. Even so, that same year, an article written by Joseph Goodavage, appearing in the September issue of SAGA, contained a new clue which, so to say, made me prick up my ears. Goodavage, who had interviewed Velikovsky, stated that the good doctor was somewhat guarded when it came to novae or "exploding" stars. "I prefer not to discuss {the subject}," Velikovsky is there reported as saying. "It would disclose too much about my future plans and work." Could Velikovsky have been hinting that the light of creation, with which I was still grappling, had been shed by a nova?- I found myself wondering. This could only have been so if the "exploding" star happened to be one of those relatively close to Earth. Even so, its blinding radiation would have been drastically diminished at that distance. The flare, even if prominent, would have been a far cry from what the later Hindus were to describe as a light that shone as bright as a "thousand suns."
- X. ... On February 22 [1972], the CBC aired an hour-long documentary by Henry Zemel that was devoted to Velikovsky and his work. In it, Velikovsky touched upon some of the basic ideas he had aired at Valais, [Switzerland] and his views on Saturn became then a matter of public knowledge. ... [T]hrough this documentary ... I first learned about Velikovsky's ideas concerning the universal deluge. ... Thus Velikovsky spoke of two filaments of water--"because I cannot [rightly call them comets," he said --through which the Earth had passed. ... It was the manner in which these watery filaments were born that I, like others, found most illuminating. Velikovsky's scenario of the flood was this: Saturn and Jupiter had once been much closer to Earth. Saturn was a water planet. More than that like Jupiter, it had once been a "dark" star. Through a near collision of the two, which took place somewhere between five and ten thousand years ago, Saturn erupted in nova-like brilliance. The water it ejected from its body took the form of two watery filaments which, seven days after the flare-up, hit the Earth and caused the deluge. The water, which fell on Earth in torrential rains, was warm and salty and resulted in more than doubling the Earth's hydrosphere. Jupiter reacted differently. It fissioned and expelled from itself the comet that was later to cause the catastrophe of the Exodus before turning into the planet we now call Venus. [The theory that Venus was ejected from Jupiter is no longer part of the Saturn Theory.] Bizarre as this scenario appeared at the time --and how tame it now looks when compared to what else was yet to come --it answered one major riddle which had been plaguing me ever since I had entered the Saturnian maze. Although Velikovsky himself does not seem to have been much concerned with the myths of primal beginnings, I finally had the answer to the blinding light of creation. I realized then what Saturn had to do with this most mystifying of events and why it had been misunderstood down through the ages. With the disclosure of Saturn's flare-up, which Velikovsky himself, while proposing it, had badly misapprehended, the myths connected with the creation of the cosmos began to fit neatly into a larger picture. It was at this point that I decided to give up fiction and publicly enter the Velikovsky debate.
- XI. I met Velikovsky in person at the three-day symposium held at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon, in August of 1972. ... [Afterward,]  I immediately embarked on a three-front attack. The first of these was ... a lengthy work, ... "An Objective Criticism of Worlds in Collision" ... [which] never progressed beyond a few introductory chapters. My second attack consisted of a lengthier work devoted entirely to the part Saturn had played in cosmic catastrophism. This one held the promise of evolving into a series of books for, already, my material on Saturn was reaching "mountainous" proportions. The title of this work was many times changed but, eventually, I settled on The God Star. ... My third front was the most successful. I began a series of articles ... laying the ground for my Saturnian disclosures. The first of these went to Pensée ... as "Letters to the Editor." A few others were rejected. One ... was ... titled "Cows, Caste, and Chaos." [It was d]ealing primarily with Hindu myths.... Stephen Talbott, the editor of Pensée, ... replied with ... criticisms.... I received the impression that Talbott had Velikovsky's unpublished manuscript on the Deluge open before him as he penned his various criticisms to my work. ...
- XII. ... What was disconcerting about all this was that, obviously, I was not the only Velikovskian scholar working on the Saturn problem. Worse than that, one reference Talbott had made concerning the pole as the abode of the mother goddess made me suspect that he, also, had come across the ancient belief in Saturn's former placement in the north. Seeing that he was on Saturn's track, how could he not have? All of this transpired in 1973. With renewed vigor I spent most of the next two years honing my work on Saturn.... Unfortunately, the more it progressed, the more it inspired disbelief so that, more than ever, I decided to keep it under wraps until I could formulate a working hypothesis to account for the celestial mechanics involved. ... The need to return to the basic originals [of myth] necessitated the utilization of Egyptian, Hebrew and other dictionaries. ... [M]any ancient tracts had been mistranslated simply because the metaphrastic meaning of certain passages made absolutely no sense when compared to what was known about the present cosmos. Moreover, the confusion that ensued from this was not always due to word-juggling by modern mythologists. As Wallis Budge stressed in more than one of his voluminous works, the ancients themselves were often guilty of not having understood what their ancestors had been alluding to. ...
- XIII. On March 6, 1975, Professor Lewis Greenberg, whom I had met at Lewis and Clark, phoned me from Pennsylvania and asked me to join the editorial staff of KRONOS. ...
- XIV. On April 24 of that year, Professor Robert Hewsen invited me to submit an article for an anthology that was to be presented to Velikovsky at a dinner held in his honor. This supplied me with an opportunity to [write] ... "Cows, Caste and Comets" ... [which] included all of Talbott's objections, as also all my former rebuttals. ...
- XV. ... From Genesis to Hiroshima joined my ever growing list of uncompleted works. The only saving grace was that these unfinished manuscripts served as a repository of material from which I lifted a series of independent articles. To this day, I am still mining them. ...
- XVI. In the fall 1975 issue of KRONOS, Greenberg and Sizemore published a half-page article titled "Saturn and Genesis." In it they briefly analyzed Maurice Jastrow's 1910 paper, "Sun and Saturn," in which the Assyro-Babylonian belief in Saturn as a sun that shone at night is discussed at some length. This was an idea I had already encountered but, because of Velikovsky's belief that Saturn had been a "dark" star, I had been assuming that the luminary had shone, much as it does now, through the Sun's reflected light. When I unearthed and read Jastrow's original paper, I became convinced that Saturn, despite the author's expected disclaimer, must have been a true sun of night, radiating its own light. With this new datum, my reconstruction of Saturnian events took on a more coherent chronological sequence. The scenario, bizarre in many ways, and faulty in others, evolved into the following: In prehistoric times, Saturn was the most conspicuous object in the sky. This body was observed by ancient man as a rotating sphere, which means that markings of some sort were clearly visible on its surface. Since tradition insists there was no way of telling time in those "days," these markings must have been of a fluctuating nature with no specific form retaining a recognizable shape that could have been timed with each rotation. Fluctuating surface markings bespeak an active atmosphere, perhaps in turmoil, and the impression one receives, especially in view of what transpired later, is that Saturn was an unstable gaseous body. Unlike the Sun, the luminary did not rise or set. It simply hung suspended in the north celestial pole, which could only mean that it shared the same axis of rotation with Earth. More than that --and this was a puzzle I had not yet solved --the texts speak of this planetary deity as having ruled alone and in darkness. The Sun, it is stated, was completely absent from the sky. Man remembers this age as a time of perpetual night. But for Saturn to have been visible, it must have shed some light. Since the light did not dissolve the gloom the illumination must have been feeble. For fauna and flora to have thrived, Saturn must also have shed warmth. Man himself went completely naked. He knew nothing of chilling winds, cold rain, of snow, or ice. During this period, the Saturnian orb does not seem to have been paid much heed. It was simply there, invoking neither fear nor reverence. But then an event transpired of such stupendousness that it went down in the annals of mankind as Day One. Saturn suddenly flared up in nova-like brilliance, flooding the Earth and its inhabitants with a blinding light. The act of creation had commenced. When the light of the flare-up finally ebbed, man was presented with a ghastly sight. Spewing out from the central orb was a multi-spiralled black mass that revolved and wound itself around its parent. Viewed as a monster which the transformed god had to subdue, this was also the chaos out of which creation progressed. It seems to have been precisely at this point that the Sun made its appearance. Day now succeeded night. Time had come into the world. Saturn itself continued to shine as a sun in its own right. It was bright enough to keep the stars, except those of first magnitude, from being seen. It was not however as bright as the Sun and, during the day, it paled into a cloud-like ghost. Two filaments detached themselves from Saturn's spiralling matter and were temporarily "lost" in the reaches of space. The rest of this watery debris congealed into a ring around the orb [Saturn]. The god had organized his cosmos. It was this "world" that man had witnessed the god create, for in truth the creation did not originally refer to a terrestrial realm. In time this ring resolved itself into a series of concentric bands --first into three and later, for the longest time, into seven. These were the original seven "heavens" or seven "earths." They were also the seven stages of creation, long after misunderstood as seven "days." The light from the unveiled Sun illuminated Saturn's encircling ring as a gigantic crescent, and later as seven nested ones. The other half of the band was only dimly lit, forming a crescent in shadow that was nonetheless visible. Both crescents revolved in unison, perpetually chasing each other, around the stationary orb. This, together with the now rising and setting Sun, enabled man to calculate the passage of time. The visual revolution of these crescents was naturally due to the rotation of the Earth. This means that the Saturn-Earth System must have been at right angles to the Sun-Earth vector (although, as Chris Sherrerd was to point out to me years later, not necessarily perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic). Nine smaller satellites, which were not formerly apparent, now appeared to revolve around Saturn. In mythology they became the nine followers, or company, of the god. A cruciform star-shape also appeared as four bright rays radiating from the central orb. Rightly or wrongly, I initially interpreted these as an atmospheric illusion. A singular beam of light also appeared to taper upward from Earth's northern horizon, connecting our humble abode to Saturn's glorious realm in the sky. All mythologies speak of this singular beam, this polar column or cosmic tree, this bond which tied heaven to Earth. Despite the apparent impossibility of the system I had managed to reconstruct, nothing perplexed me more at the time than this effulgent axis mundi. Together with the puzzle of the primeval darkness, this so-called world-axis stymied me. What could it really have been? It is obvious now in retrospect that I still retained a mental block. Had I taken the ancients at their word, as I had resolved I would, this problem would have been solved with the rest. When the answer was finally in my hands, as in the case of Saturn's flare-up, it was only because it was given to me by another. Mythology also speaks of a universal world mountain located at the north. This was a phenomenon I had understood as a lithic bulge that was raised in gravitational response to Saturn's close proximity. The axis mundi would have rested on top of this bulge which would have accounted for the world-wide belief in the archaic deity resting on his mountain of glory. Various atmospheric phenomena also appeared in conjunction with this polar sun in the form of parhelia [sun dogs] and Parry halo arcs, although these, because of their very nature, were understandably impermanent. The most amazing aspect of the Saturnian structure, however, was the uncanny resemblance it bore to the human form, especially around the hour of midnight, when the sunlit crescent of its encircling ring(s) appeared as two uplifted arms. The entire apparition was like a resplendent giant towering above the world for all mankind to see. As I have stated elsewhere, no earthly description can ever hope to do this phenomenon justice. We will never be able to fully appreciate the impact it must have had on the primitive psyche. The Sun itself might have been brighter, but Saturn was much more glorious. For untold generations Saturn's strange apparition became the very focus of man's existence. It was the fountainhead of all religious beliefs and, more than that, the impetus behind the rise of civilization. Unstable as this system might have been, it managed to sustain itself for an unspecified but long period of time. Its formation ushered in an era that mythology remembers as the Golden Age. This was the Edenic childhood of mankind, a time of prosperity and peace, during which the earth was said to have given freely of its bounty. It was an age that man was forever after to recall with nostalgic longing. But in time it, also, came to an end. The two filaments that had detached themselves from Saturn's former spiral had gone into orbit around the Sun. Each successive passage had brought them back into close proximity of the Saturnian system. These were seen as monsters which periodically threatened the god. Eventually at least one of them collided with the Earth. Composed mainly of water, this filament dispersed itself across the Earth in a deluge that lasted for days. Thus the universal flood was a direct result of Saturn's initial flare-up. Saturn, with its cosmos, became unhinged. It was now seen to circle around the sky as the Earth, knocked off its balance by the impact of the collision, began to wobble and topple. Slowly but surely the Saturnian apparition slid down the sides of heaven and sank beyond Earth's trembling horizon. Earth had actually turned head over heels. The god of mankind, dying his death, had drowned in the deluge. With the overturning of the Earth, the Sun reversed its path across the sky, rising where it had formerly set and setting where it had formerly risen. The quarters of the world had been displaced. But all was not lost. After a while the Earth righted itself and Saturn was seen to return to his post in his former glory. The god had risen from the dead. To others he had been saved by building an ark. Noah was actually Saturn- and where was my work of fiction now?- while his ark was the sunlit crescent. Textual evidence of Noah having sailed through the sky actually exists. Moreover, the word "ark" derives from a root that, in more than one language, translates into an ancient name for Saturn. The panic with which mankind had witnessed the death and disappearance of its divinity was temporarily allayed. But, ere long it became apparent that something was amiss with the deity. The central orb lost its brightness; wrinkles and blotches began to appear over its surface. The luminary's gaseous envelope was re-asserting itself. To those who looked on in horror, the risen deity had been struck with leprosy; to others, he was beginning to show signs of his advancing age. In the end, whatever force had held the planets rotating on the same axis dissipated. The polar column severed itself from the main body, while the ringed structure was seen to break up. Saturn's cosmos had become unglued and literally fell apart. The god, to some still dead, had been dismembered. Earth and Saturn parted company. The giant planet, growing ever dimmer, was seen to move slowly away. No longer a sun, it grew smaller as it rose above the Earth until, eventually, it became the pin-point of light we now see in the night where it was free to reconstruct a new system of rings. In the surrounding sea of stars that now became the order of the night, mankind saw the dissected members of its god. Thus Saturn was the only deity who was born his own son; who lived on Earth; who died and descended to the underworld; who rose again from the dead and finally ascended into heaven. If the tale sounds familiar, you now know its origin. ...
- XVII. ... I held back my major criticisms of Worlds in Collision until the San Jose seminar of 1980. ...
- XVIII. The long-awaited copy of Talbott's paper on Saturn arrived. Titled "The Universal Monarch: An Essay on the Lost Symbolism of Saturn," it outlined the mythological motifs associated with Saturn's northern cosmos. The first thing that struck me on reading it was the close similarity --nay, near identity --that Talbott's Saturnian configuration had to my own model. It was immediately obvious that Talbott and I had been digging in the same well. There were differences, especially in interpretation, but, in the totality of the scheme, these were minor. On the other hand, it did not take much to realize that in no way could Talbott have borrowed any of his ideas from my correspondence with his brother. Having been as secretive about my rediscoveries as he himself had been with me, I had never said anything to Stephen about Saturn's northern placement or the bizarre structure Saturn had organized around itself. While Talbott's paper included many items which were not contained in my work, nothing I had divulged to Stephen was to be found in David's outline. The paper contained nothing about the events prior to Saturn's flare-up, nor did it so much as hint at Saturn's dissolution. The method through which he proferred his revelations was entirely different from mine, stressing symbol rather than myth. A chronological sequence was not even attempted. ... I was elated because if two researchers, working independently of each other, could come to the same unconventional conclusions about a most unconventional celestial arrangement, the derived model could hardly have been the result of an overworked imagination. In what did Talbott and I differ? Where my research had unearthed nine satellites revolving around the Saturnian orb, Talbott vouched for only seven. Among the varied symbolism associated with the revolving crescents of light and shadow, Talbott included that of the ever battling cosmic twins, a mythological motif I had not yet accounted for. But our main difference concerned the polar column or axis mundi. While I had visualized the world mountain as an actual uplift of land, Talbott saw the mountain as an analogy of the polar column. In other words, to Talbott, mount and axis were one and the same. Actually, certain texts do speak of mount and axis as if they were one and the same portent; others, however, seem to intimate that the two were separate, even if closely connected, phenomena. Certain mythological themes had also made me believe that, at some point, the planet Mars had passed through the fabric of the polar column, temporarily trapping itself there before passing on. A repeat performance was what later severed the polar column. In Talbott's scheme, the polar column is shown to have stretched earthward from Mars, which planet would have been permanently suspended between Saturn and the Earth, rotating on the same common axis with them. Visually, Mars was thus part and parcel of the same configuration. The polar column would then have been seen as belonging to the Saturnian complexity without losing its identity with Mars. While this was not entirely spelled out in Talbott's paper, it was clarified by him in later works. Of the planets Jupiter and Venus nothing was mentioned. This was somewhat strange because my earlier debate with Talbott's brother had eventually led to the role Venus had played in the Saturnian age, and why it was that the Venerian deities of later times were often imbued with Saturnian motifs. I was to live and learn.
- XIX One of my most stimulating correspondents during this time, and for many years afterwards, was Frederic Jueneman. As I later found out, he had known about Talbott's work on Saturn since 1972. In discussing the subject with me, Jueneman told me that anyone who wanted his ideas could have them for the asking. Emboldened by this offer, I did not hesitate to pick his mind. Although I did not always accept whatever he threw at me, he managed to solve many a problem for me. In March of 1976 I asked him if he had any ideas on what could have constituted the fabric of the polar column, or, as I phrased it, the trunk of the cosmic tree. His reply reached me that same month and, when I read it, I felt like kicking my own behind. Jueneman supplied me with more than I had asked for. To him the axis mundi and world mountain were separate phenomena. Very much much as I had, he interpreted the latter as a tidal uplift of land. But the most important thing he disclosed was the mechanics he had worked out to account for the polar column. Its major constituents he had ascertained to have been air and water vapor. According to him, these were "carried upward towards the nul[l]-gravity at the apex between the two planets" in "a columnar Rankine vortex." To put it in a nut-shell, the axis mundi would thus have been a cosmic tornado seen from a distance. The fact is that various texts which had already passed through my hands had actually described the axis as a cyclone, a whirlwind, or churning hurricane. Had I listened to the collective voice of the ancients, I would have had this solution much earlier. I vowed never to make that mistake again. The Rankine vortex, if that is what it really was, answered another mystery. On the basis of an Assyro-Babylonian text, de Santillana and von Dechend had inferred the occurrence of a second deluge caused by Mars. If, now, the polar column consisted of water vapor, the immense volume of moisture it would have contained would have been released when Mars swooped by and severed it. As the column twisted and sank in its death throes, it would have poured its water on Earth's northern hemisphere. This would account for those traditions which insist on a calamitous flood that roared down from the north. Going further, Jueneman also described the effect of a bolus flow complete with Coriolis tendency which, at times, would have split the central pillar into two serpentine spouts. Entwining about each other, these were later to give rise to the god's twisted legs and the mythic caduceus popularly associated with Mercury. ...
- XX. In my endeavor to discover the possible physics behind Saturn's polar configuration, I approached various members of the KRONOS staff with a related set of problems. Professor Lynn Rose, among others, was very receptive. ... While Rose's model may appear to be more mechanically viable than Jueneman's, Talbott's, and/or mine, it violates the universal message of myth which insists in placing the Saturnian sun unequivocally in the north celestial sphere. ...
- XXI. My investigation of the possible mechanics responsible for the Saturnian configuration resulted in an ever increasing circle of correspondents. ... These convinced me that, while my re-discoveries were arrived at independently, David Talbott had managed to reconstruct the polar configuration before my own model had approached completeness. This claim to priority was a fact I had to acknowledge. It also taught me something about presumption. I published "The Sun of Night," my first article on Saturn, in the fall 1977 issue of KRONOS. This paper merely discussed the ancient belief in Saturn's former sun-like appearance.
... As it turned out, ... Talbott published his views on the polar configuration at about the same time I published "The Sun of Night." ... In his opinion, Jupiter would have been invisible from Earth since it was hidden directly behind Saturn. My own research, on the other hand, had disclosed what seemed to be exactly the opposite. Ancient texts from various quarters describe Jupiter as the god and/or star of the south. This led me to believe that Jupiter must have been located in Earth's south polar sky. This configuration would coincidentally have lessened the Roche limit problem since the Earth would have been gravitationally attracted to both giants without succumbing to either.
- XXII. Hard on the heels of "Saturn's Age," Talbott released a slightly longer paper titled "Saturn: Universal Monarch and Dying God." Offered as a special publication through the Research Communications Network, it consisted of a numbered thesis that included the outline of events connected with the polar configuration's dissolution that he had earlier mentioned. To begin with, Talbott proposed a tentative date for the cosmic catastrophism associated with Saturn. Whereas Velikovsky had opted for a period between 5 and 10,000 years ago as the time slot within which the universal deluge had occurred, Talbott reduced the time span to "within the past 6- 8,000 years." ... Talbott described the bending of the axis mundi as the beginning of the Saturnian destruction. The bent pillar would have lent the configuration a hunch-backed appearance that was interpreted by the onlookers as a sign of the god's decrepitude. He said nothing about the mottled appearance of the central orb in this respect. According to him it was at this point that the cosmic pillar commenced on a churning motion while the ringed structure began to move "in ever widening circles." He gave no indication, however, as to what might have caused this apparent motion. Still according to Talbott, the deity was seen to devour the seven satellites orbiting around it and that these actually began to disintegrate. Saturn's disappearance was then explained as the clouding of the central orb by the ensuing debris. The seven disintegrating satellites, in Talbott's view, continued to revolve around the clouded center while spewing their own detritus in a multi-spiralled manner. This spiral eventually segregated itself into the seven concentric bands of myth. At some point during this destruction, according to Talbott's scheme, Jupiter finally appeared from behind Saturn, "stole" Saturn's encircling band, and then wandered away from the celestial center. Thus Talbott made it clear that the original ringed structure had actually surrounded the hidden Jupiter and that it was only Earth-bound perspective that had made it appear to encircle Saturn. This tenet was not very well explained. In more than one place, Talbott had made it appear that the enclosing band was formed from material ejected by the Saturnian orb. It is hard to conceive that material ejected by one celestial body would encircle another x-miles away. Or was this, according to Talbott, but another celestial illusion in which the primeval matter had actually been ejected by Jupiter? Was it Jupiter then that flared up? In contradistinction, my scenario had Jupiter appearing from beyond Earth's horizon when the latter flipped over. Saturn and Jupiter were seen to change places. It was said that Saturn made his acquaintance with the southern constellations while the star of the south rose to occupy Saturn's vacated post. In my scheme the seven bands had actually surrounded the Saturnian orb, rather than merely appearing to do so, from long before the dissolution. These disappeared with Saturn when the luminary dropped out of sight. Jupiter was encircled by its own ringed system, which accounts for the apparent "theft." This mythological evidence could actually have been used to predict the later discovery of the Jovian rings. That no one did made us all miss the chance of a lifetime. According to Talbott, it was this partial destruction of the Saturnian configuration that was later remembered as the universal deluge. Thus, along with de Santillana and von Dechend, but for different reasons, Talbott saw the deluge as a strictly, but perhaps not entirely, celestial event. In Talbott's scheme, the resurrection of the deity is explained as the clearing of the obscuring debris which again brought the Saturnian orb into full view. Whether the Jovian planet ever returned to its position behind Saturn was not made clear. The second and final destruction, blamed on Mars, was described in terms closer to my scenario, as was the deity's final withdrawal to the "great beyond." Of the planet Venus there was not a single mention in either of Talbott's two papers. The above mentioned points were not my only disagreements with Talbott's model, but they were the major ones. I mention all this here not because I was obviously right and Talbott wrong for that might not be the case at all, but merely to record our differences as they existed at the time. In the end it may turn out that he was closer to being correct than I was. But one thing was obvious: One of us, or perhaps even both, had confused some of the earlier events associated with the creation of Saturn's cosmos with those connected with its destruction. This brought home one particular lament of the ancients themselves who, among other things, had often stated that the sequence of events had long been forgotten. In any case, I have had many an occasion to change some of my views since then as, naturally enough, so has Talbott. And this is as it should be for we can best progress by constantly discarding, changing, and refining unsatisfactory
 portions of the theory in an endeavor to get ever closer to the historical truth. Talbott and I did not correspond any further --at least not for many years --and we both went our separate ways. To be continued

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4:21 PM 4/15/2022
The Road to Saturn (Excerpts from an Autobiographical Essay) [Journals] [Aeon]
_From: Aeon I:3 (1988) - Dwardu Cardona PART II
__I. 1977 saw the publication of George Michanowsky's The Once and Future Star. In this work Michanowsky maintained that the rise of civilization and the origin of religious beliefs owe their impetus to the ____sudden appearance of a bright light in the sky. But the similarity to the theory of Saturn's flare-up ends there. Michanowsky's theory was based on the remains of a supernova, in the form of a pulsar, discovered in 1968 by the Molonglo Radio Observatory in Australia. The pulsar was detected in the southern constellation Vela and thus received the popular designation Vela X. The stellar explosion that gave birth to this pulsar occurred somewhere between 1300 and 1500 light years away and must therefore have appeared in Earth's sky for many months as a prominent light that might even have shone as a smaller second sun by day. Searching in Sumerian documents for a possible reference to this ancient stellar outburst, Michanowsky believed he found it in a cuneiform list of star names. The item that matches the event reads: "The gigantic star of the god Ea in the constellation Vela of the god Ea." As seen by the ancient peoples of Mesopotamia, Vela X would have appeared low on the horizon with its luminosity reflected "like a shiny ribbon" on the waters of the Persian Gulf. This sudden celestial apparition, according to Michanowsky, so awed ancient man that its psychological impact was responsible for a "quantum jump in human achievement." The supernova, however, cannot be dated more precisely than "sometime between 9000 and 4000 B.C." Michanowsky opted for the lower date on no particular astronomical evidence. He merely wished to bring it as close to the beginning of Sumerian civilization as possible. But if by "human achievement" is meant such things as herding, farming, smelting, and building, it will have to be admitted that civilization is older than 4000 B.C. If Michanowsky, on the other hand, was to raise his date, it would remove the occurrence beyond the reaches of the Sumerian data. What is curious about Vela X is its Sumerian connection with the god Ea since Ea was one of the personifications of the planet Saturn. In fact, as I have already noted elsewhere, Michanowsky's entire work is littered with purely Saturnian motifs, though he did not seem to recognize this. Only once did he acknowledge a connection between Saturn and Vela X - when he noted that, in one Greek-written version of the Mesopotamian Deluge myth, the god Ea is rendered Kronos, which is Greek for Saturn. He then lamented that "Most of what is known of Cronus is quite uncharacteristic of Ea [which is not strictly true], with a single very striking exception. In classical literature and in subsequent esoteric writings, the name Cronus is identified with a former Golden Age and its eagerly awaited return." [Emphasis added.] It was, however, not merely the return of the Golden Age that was eagerly awaited by the ancients, but also the return of the god-king that had ruled over it. The Jews are not the only ones who await the coming of their Messiah. Christians also await the second coming of Jesus who was said to have been born under a star. Both these beliefs, as well as others, trace to an ancient hope. The Saturnian deity, who had once disappeared only to return and disappear again, had long been expected to affect another appearance. This hope, maintained through various religious rituals that were perpetuated down through the ages, was to culminate in the belief of cyclic repetition that Mircea Eliade termed the "myth of the eternal return." Michanowsky was not oblivious to all this. Referring to this mythic theme as the "Prophecy of the Return," he erroneously believed it owed its origin to Vela X's awaited reappearance. Had he been aware of the Saturnian scenario that others had been slowly unfolding, he might have realized that this ancient hope culminated, albeit falsely, rather than originated with Vela X. Judging by the Sumerian record discovered by Michanowsky, the supernova of Vela X would have to have occurred sometime around 4000 B.C. In that much I agree. It would, however, have  occurred too late to inaugurate the rise of civilization and its attendant religious beliefs. What it might have done is help to perpetuate both. As the appearance of a sudden bright light in the sky, it would have been enough to remind our ancestors of that more ancient burst of illumination that had heralded the appearance of their god and the beginning of the Golden Age. To the inhabitants of Mesopotamia, its "shiny ribbon" of a reflection on the waters of the Persian Gulf would even have lent it a slight resemblance to the original Saturnian configuration, with its column of radiant light, as it had been described by their more ancient forebears. Add to that the fact that the new starburst appeared in a constellation that was already sacred to Ea / Saturn and the implication of its appearance becomes quite clear. Those who witnessed it merely mistook it for the long awaited Saturnian return. Thus it was called "the gigantic star of the god Ea," that is "the star of Saturn." A few months later, however, it faded without ever having ushered in a new Golden Age. In time, its memory degenerated into a mere designation in an ancient star list. Not so with the original Saturn whose various names and motifs continued to permeate all of mythology and religious beliefs down to the present. Vela X turned out to be one of many false messiahs with which the world has often been plagued.
__II. Michanowsky's opus prompted me to make haste with an article on Saturn's flare-up that I had written in April of that year. I had already revised it once in September but, in order to accommodate some objective criticisms raised by members of the KRONOS staff, I revised it once more in December and sent it to my Editor-in-Chief. While waiting for it to be published, two British writers beat me to the punch. Writing under the name of Brendan O'Gheoghan, Bernard Newgrosh had teamed up with Harold Tresman to produce an exploratory paper on the subject that was published in the December 1977 issue of the S.I.S. Review. While I could not concur with each and every item that the paper touched upon, it was becoming obvious that interest in matters Saturnian was growing. Coincidentally or not, that same issue of the S.I.S. Review contained a reply by Ralph E. Juergens to his critics in which he proposed a conjectural scenario through which he attempted to account for Saturn's flare-up. According to Juergens, this primordial nova-like eruption could have occurred if the Saturnian system had been invaded, dismembered, and its parts captured by the interloping Solar one. What Juergens envisioned was this: Not massive enough to have been a thermonuclear star, Saturn could very well have been an electric one, induced to shine through galactic electrification. With a retinue of smaller planets that included the Earth, Saturn could thus have constituted a system independent from the Solar one. The Solar System, to which we did not yet belong, would have consisted of the Sun, Jupiter, and some minor planetary objects. At some point in time, the Solar System would have invaded the Saturnian one (or vice versa) resulting in a near-collision of Jupiter with Saturn. The planets would then have been scattered to be recaptured in newly acquired orbits around the Sun. In the process, Saturn would also have become harnessed to the Sun but, more than that, it would have found itself too highly charged for its new environment. As Juergens himself phrased it "How otherwise end such embarrassment than by shedding [its] excess charge in a mighty explosion?" As conjectural as this scenario was, it answered more, on a theoretical basis, than Juergens himself at first assumed. Besides accounting for Saturn's flare up, it could also be made to account for the primeval darkness preceding that event if it could be assumed that Saturn had been a dark electric star prior to its invasion of, or by, the Solar System. Thus the Earth, already suspended beneath Saturn's south pole, would have been enveloped by the darkness of outer space even while its life forms, including man, would have been kept from freezing to death by the warmth dispensed by Saturn's close proximity. As the mythological record implies, Saturn would only have shone as a sun following its flare-up through the period of the Golden Age. What enticed me about this theory was that I had already encountered one ancient legend that spoke of a time when the Sun was still far away, appearing to man no bigger than a star. Unfortunately, while one or two other myths can be interpreted in the same light, they are not that specific. What is worse, I have not been able to trace the one that is specific to its original source. ____How would the Earth's southern hemisphere have been warmed enough to sustain life? This question could be answered by again positing a southern placement for Jupiter where the Earth would have been suspended between the two giants as some myths seem to imply. If we are to believe the ancients, Jupiter also once shone as a sun. Its position beneath Earth's southern pole would have warmed that hemisphere facing away from Saturn. Thus Jupiter would have belonged to the Saturnian, rather than the Solar, system. Out in the far reaches of space, the skies of Earth should have been peppered with stars. Why is it then that the mythic report insists on a starless night prior to Saturn's flare-up? While the stars would have been rendered invisible by Saturn's luminosity during the Golden Age, they should have shone through in their multitude in the preceding era had Saturn truly then been a dark star. This problem could be circumvented by appealing to the immense attractive forces that must have existed between Saturn and the Earth. If, as I still believed at the time, the giant's attraction could exert the Earth's lithosophere into the gravitational bulge that had been the World Mountain, Earth's hydrosphere and atmosphere would also have responded to Saturn's close proximity. This heaping of the Earth's atmosphere, not to mention the fine mist that might have been generated by Saturn's stationary heat source, would have rendered the air murky enough to effectually shield the glittering stars from mortal view. But could such a heat haze, opaque to the point of hiding the stars, have been transparent enough to reveal Saturn's axial spin? And would warmth, with only a feeble heavenly light, have really been sufficient to sustain life?
__III. The adaptation of Juergens' conjectural theory to the Saturnian scenario obviously merited a deeper study. Even so, I decided to bounce the idea off my growing circle of colleagues. In May of 1978 I wrote a lengthy paper under a title borrowed from Vardis Fisher - "Darkness and the Deep" - and sent it to a selected few for comment. Needless to say, Juergens was delighted to discover that his conjecture had not fallen on deaf ears. More than that, he dove headlong into the problem concerning the manner in which the Earth's hydrosphere could have maintained itself in a raised heap around the north polar region. Could this not have been the watery deep out of which creation was said to have progressed? Frederic Jueneman did not agree. In a report he wrote on my paper, dated May 21, 1978, he dwelt at length upon the subject. He argued strongly in favor of a cosmic, as opposed to a terrestrial, deep. To him the deep signified the concentric rings around the boreal body in the sky. Although, at the time, I was somewhat opposed to this concept, I might as well confess that, in the end, I was forced to accept it. Saturn's rings lend themselves most beautifully to the mythic concept of the cosmic ocean. But, on the other hand, I did not altogether give up on the notion of a terrestrially heaped ocean. On the one hand, Jueneman chided me for not availing myself of the opportunity to disclose the boreal placement of Saturn; on the other, he cautioned me to make haste slowly. He also indicated dissatisfaction with Juergens' interloping Saturnian system. Thus in a letter to me dated May 24, he wrote: "There seems to be any number of interpretations as to the cause of such diminution of light. You appear to opt for the miasmal darkness of interstellar space as a dimly glowing Saturnian system wended its way with its terrestrial satellite toward a rendezvous with the Sun, a curious tableau which is not without its charm... However, I believe that there are at least a couple of causes of darkness, not the least of which is an immense cloud cover that once enshrouded the Earth, where the Sun's light was diffused throughout the atmosphere making day a deep, dull grey and night a somewhat darker manifestation." Jueneman's proposed dark cloud had its problems. For one thing, such a cloud would have hidden the Saturnian orb from view (whereas my postulated heat haze might not have); for another, the change in brightness between day and night would have enabled man to calculate the passage of time, concerning the inability of which the mythic record is quite adamant. The Sun, therefore, had to have been elsewhere - or so, at least, I then believed.
__IV. The late Professor David Griffard did not deride the idea of an interloping Saturnian system as long as it was presented as a purely speculative theory in need of more corroborative evidence than Juergens and I had thus far managed to provide. As for the invisibility of stars, Griffard was of the opinion that the Earth "could have been enshrouded in some obscuration emanating from the parent body itself." [Emphasis added.] This notion, which was entirely different from Jueneman's, and which did not reach me until November of 1979, was not without merit - but not as a cloud that enshrouded the Earth within it. What triggered a favorable reaction in my mind was Griffard's suggestion that this ____obscuring medium might have emanated from Saturn. Griffard's suggestion directed me to the accretion disc, or placental cloud, theory. A dramatic painting of such a cloud by the noted space artist Chesley Bonestell appeared in one of the volumes in my library. It depicted the Earth and the Moon, "reddened by the heat of their own internal fires," surrounded by the enormous and dark placental cloud of matter out of which they had supposedly accreted. Turning the picture upside down, and disregarding the Moon, gave me an inkling of what Saturn might have looked like prior to its flare-up had it been the one surrounded by a placental cloud. The sky would have been completely obscured by the colossal accretion disc, thus effectively hiding not only the stars but also the Sun; Saturn's southern hemisphere would have protruded bodily through its equatorial cloud, thus rendering itself quite clearly as a fast rotating globe to Earthly eyes; and its red glow would have been sufficient to heat the Earth at close proximity without actually dissolving the gloom. The same placental cloud, rotating as a giant whirlpool in the sky, would also have been the dark abysmal deep out of which creation was said to have progressed, the very chaos out of which Saturn was to organize his heavenly realm. The flare-up, when it finally occurred, would then have blown this placental cloud into the far reaches of space to be replaced, but only temporarily, by the new spiralling matter that Saturn was seen to spew from its still rotating orb. The next step was to hunt throughout ancient literature all over again - and oh, how many more times did I make this trip! - looking for records that might hint at the one-time existence of this placental whirlpool. Unfortunately, what I discovered was not explicit enough and the placental cloud theory was put temporarily on hold.
__V. In the meantime my article on Saturn's flare up, titled "Let There Be Light," was published in the Spring 1978 issue of KRONOS. While I did not expect a pat on the back from Velikovsky for having furthered his theory, I did not expect resentment either. As I later learned through the grapevine, his pronouncement on reading it was: "Cardona has made the flare-up his own." This disconcerted me because I had given him full credit for having originated the idea. But, as Stephen Talbott had written in the closing issue of Pensée, "The continuing non-publication of major portions of Velikovsky's research ... has become, after two decades, a serious damper to all discussion." Those of us who wished to plunge forward on our own were forever risking a head-on collision with Velikovksy's fear of being pre-empted, a fear that was by then becoming legendary. What upset me further was that my next paper, "The Mystery of the Pleiades," was to deal with another Velikovskian item that had long been promised. This concerned the identification of the Biblical Khima and Khesil as the planets Saturn and Mars, an identification that had been proposed, but left undocumented, in a footnote in Worlds in Collision. One British writer had already written about the subject, disagreeing with Velikovsky's proposed equation. I wanted to straighten the record, showing that, in this instance, Velikovsky was correct. But, more than that, remembering Jueneman's gentle increpation, I saw the subject as an excellent opportunity to finally introduce my readers to Saturn's polar configuration. The question became one of how to do so without appearing to be stepping on Velikovsky's toes. At some point during this dilemma, I hit upon the idea of provoking Velikovsky into publishing his own material on Khima and Khesil alongside mine. This would achieve a double result: It would allay Velikovsky's fear of pre-emption while, at the same time, his disclosure would indirectly act as an endorsement of mine. In a way, my ruse worked. Velikovsky did publish his paper with mine in the Summer 1978 issue of KRONOS. But the plan also had its dire effects. Velikovsky remained displeased especially about that portion of my paper which delineated, in outline, the thirteen points I chose to disclose concerning Saturn's former northern placement. Through Jan Sammer, then acting as his secretary, Velikovsky let me know that he was emphatically against the concept of Saturn's polar configuration that Talbott and I were independently working on. The grapevine had it that, either in humor or disdain, Velikovsky started to refer to Talbott and me as "Portland and Vancouver."
__VI. Having now spelled out the Saturnian scenario to the KRONOS readers, I waited for the storm of criticism that I was sure was bound to follow. I was surprised when none came. This did not elate me since I knew, or thought I knew, exactly what it meant. The Saturnian scenario was obviously seen as so far-fetched that serious scholars thought it best to ignore it. The stratagem then became one of finding some means to convince my readers of its viability. I therefore returned my attention to the solution of the celestial mechanics that could account for the bizarre configuration of planets that constituted the Saturnian system prior to, and through the period of, the Golden Age. At the same time I knew from my past toying with this Augean task that this was a problem I could not hope to solve on my own. Even before "The Mystery of the Pleiades" had appeared in print, I had already accosted some authorities outside the Velikovskian field with the mechanical problems inherent in Saturn's configuration. Because I suspected that I would be met with a certain amount of derision, I initially approached these conventional mechanists by telling them I was embarked on a work of science fiction. When the truth was out, most of them informed me that I had been right the first time and the majority of them would have nothing more to do with me. Five of them however promised to look into the matter despite their obvious disbelief, although they all bound me to keep their names out of the literature, at least until such time as their endeavors showed any results. Their fear of being ridiculed by their peers for even considering such an outrageous astronomical arrangement was spelled out in no uncertain terms. And before Velikovskians deride such attitudes, allow me to inform them that I was later to meet with identical restraints even among some members of their own fold. Since I have never been released from this pledge, I remain unconditionally bound to safeguard their identity and reputation to this day. Over the years some calculations petered in but, without exception, they all involved some amendment of the model they were meant to quantify. This was not much help since no problem can be solved through its own modification. The answer to a question is unacceptable if the question itself is altered. When I pointed this out, I was lectured on the scientific method and told I was being stubborn. In the end, the verdict was that my model was physically impossible. The argument that Wegener's model of shifting continents was also once thought to be impossible went unheeded. My five staunch mechanists deserted me, leaving me with a pile of impressive calculations that explained everything except what I had wanted them to explain.
__VII. The result was somewhat different when I approached Professor Earl Milton with the same request. Being also a Velikovskian scholar who had already questioned the tenets of astrophysics, he did not see the problem as insoluble but simply as one concerning a scheme with which he did not entirely agree. This was not to be wondered at because, as I was soon to find out, he, also, had been working on a model of his own. This was based on a scenario which his colleague, Professor Alfred de Grazia, was, somewhat like myself, trying to wed to the Velikovskian one. Later correspondence with de Grazia himself was to indicate - (and this became more obvious when his quantavolution series was finally published) - that he had not investigated Velikovsky's work in any depth and he ended up by repeating many of the erroneous assertions and mythological interpretations contained in Worlds in Collision. Worse than that, de Grazia, as I myself had once done, continued to build on these errors, extending their natural fall-out to include the cosmic catastrophes of those eras preceding that of the Exodus. On top of all that, while de Grazia acknowledged the universality of the mythological record, he showed a distinct penchant for using Greek sources as the yard-stick against which to measure his cosmic scheme. This tendency, which had exhibited itself on an earlier occasion, had already been criticized by Peter James but de Grazia, perhaps because he was already too deeply committed to his views, chose to ignore it. Thus de Grazia saw it as imperative to accommodate the Greek generation of gods in which each deity was considered to have been the offspring of the preceding one. In Worlds in Collision Velikovsky had made the unfortunate statement that "The mythologies of all peoples concern themselves with the birth only of Venus, not with that of Jupiter, Mars, or Saturn" - which, of course, is simply not so. In fact, with perhaps one exception, every planetary deity was described as having been born of another. But because Velikovsky had interpreted the birth of Athene from the head of Zeus as the expulsion of the cometary Venus from the planet Jupiter, de Grazia deceived himself into believing that the actual ejection of one planet from another has to be implied by all such divine births. And Milton, unfortunately, followed suit.
__VIII. The generation of planets from one another was not unheard of in the astronomical world. Back in 1960, well after Velikovsky, R.A. Lyttleton had also theorized that the terrestrial planets had been born by disruption from the larger ones. In following de Grazia's scheme, however, Milton's conclusion had to be somewhat the reverse of this. If the Greek generation of deities was to be kept intact, it was the giant planets that would have to have been born from one another. Milton introduced me to his model in June of 1978. The same was outlined in de Grazia's Chaos and Creation in 1981. But it was not until the 1984 appearance of their combined effort, Solaria Binaria, that the theory was presented in full. In the barest of outlines, the theory was this: Solaria binaria refers to the solar binary system that preceded the current uni-solar one. It consisted of the Sun, acting as the primary, with super-Uranus, a smaller glowing sun, as the secondary partner in the system. An excessive potential on the Sun discharged an electrical current that sent "its powerful pulses across the axis of the binary." An induced magnetic field rotated around this enormous axial current. This field consisted of ionized gases containing a number of chemical elements. Stacked above each other, a number of smaller planets, including Earth, rotated inside this magnetic tube in the atmosphere of which they had originally evolved. The Earth rotated nearest the Sun but its inhabitants could not well distinguish super-Uranus or the Sun because of the "vast cloudy environment and the intervening atmosphere of the tube." As in other binaries detected throughout our galaxy, the two giants revolved around a common centre while spinning on their own axes. The connecting axial tube, carrying the planets with it, would have rotated with them as a rigid rod around what was to become the plane of the ecliptic. About 14,000 years ago, this system began to disintegrate. As the discharge from the Sun lessened, so did the density of the magnetic gases within the axial tube. Planetary atmospheres within the tube began to clear and super-Uranus began to be seen, as the secondary sun it was, in Earth's north celestial sphere while the Sun became visible in the south. As super-Uranus slowed down in its rotation, it began to break apart. A large fragment, which the authors refer to as Uranus Minor, exploded from it and "arched through" the binary system. As Uranus Minor passed close to Earth, fragments were torn from its body and hit the Earth. A goodly portion of the Earth's crust was sucked high into space and pursued "the rapidly retreating intruder." The "greater part of it," however, was "unable to continue the pursuit." It therefore "relapsed into an orbit" around the Earth. In a matter of "a few years," this orbiting material "assumed the globular form of the Moon." This event was dated to have taken place approximately 11,500 years ago. What was left of super-Uranus then became super-Saturn. Mankind's Golden Age commenced. The Sun continued to shine "feebly" in the south while super-Saturn dominated the northern sky. De Grazia described the Earth's climate during that period as "even and damp" - "a tropical greenhouse." It was during this time that language, music, and agriculture developed under a benign government ruled over by god-kings. As super-Saturn continued to slow down it, also, underwent fragmentation. The luminary's downfall was hastened by absorbing the debris generated by its predecessor. This item was included to account for the Greek myth in which Kronos was said to have swallowed his children. As de Grazia phrased it, super-Saturn "progressively engorged material from space it could ill digest." About 6,000 years ago, super-Saturn, as per Velikovsky, fissioned. It flared up in nova-like brilliance and deluged the Earth with its erupted water. Contrary to Velikovsky, who had seen Saturn's flare-up as the result of its near-collision with Jupiter, it was super-Saturn's fissioning that gave birth to the Jovian planet. (Which is where it became obvious that the yard-stick of Greek mythology was favored above that of Velikovsky). "An electric storm of cosmic dimensions ensued as Jupiter and Saturn separated." The stacked planets, including Earth, "reacted to the drop in electrical power" and "their axial rotational speed changed into self-rotational motion." In the interim, they also changed the tilt of their axes. On Earth, with its axis now angled almost perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic, the seasons came into being. Earth's major cloud cover was blown away. Snow and ice collected in its polar regions while the Sun, no longer appearing in the south, commenced on its daily course across the sky. Jupiter now became the dominant ruler in the system. Its celestial career, however, was not a peaceful one. Time and again it was destined to encounter the various streams of debris left running loose by its disrupted predecessors. These tribulations were perceived by ancient man as the wars of Zeus against his various enemies. It was during this age of "Jovea" that the Egyptian civilization flowered. Jupiter's retinue included two larger satellites - planets actually - one of which, Apollo, was annihilated under somewhat mysterious circumstances. The other was Mercury which, after it "fled the neighborhood of Jupiter," followed an erratic career of its own. Occasionally coming close to colliding with Earth, it was eventually flung closer to the Sun where it continues to orbit to this day. The rest of de Grazia's scenario followed Velikovsky's. Cometary Venus erupted from Jupiter, causing the catastrophes associated with the Exodus; Venus disrupted Mars, which caused the calamities of the 8th and 7th centuries before the present era; while, during one of these last periods, Mars involved itself in a "disastrous love affair" with the Moon. There is no doubt that, as scenarios go, this was quite a neat package. Not only was it all-encompassing, it cleverly conformed to Hesiod's divine succession while keeping within the bounds of Biblical lore. More than that, de Grazia had managed to accommodate both of Velikovsky's schemes, that of Worlds in Collision and its as yet unpublished prequel. There was also a smattering of ideas from competing models with which de Grazia was familiar. Portions of Talbott's work found their allotted place in Chaos and Creation, as so did something of my own. Best of all, the scenario was upheld by the mechanics that Professor Milton had tailored for it. A physicist had finally lent his support.
__IX. This is not the place to criticize de Grazia's scenario in any detail but a few examples, in order to stress the unacceptability of his scheme, would be in order. I therefore turn the reader's attention to the Greek goddess Aphrodite. As Peter James had earlier pointed out to de Grazia, Velikovsky had been in error when he identified Aphrodite as the Moon. In the Greek system that de Grazia so staunchly upheld, Aphrodite is unquestionably identified as Venus. Unfortunately, de Grazia would not divorce himself from Velikovsky on this issue. Followed by Milton, he sought to accommodate Aphrodite's birth from the severed genitals of Uranus as described in Greek myth. These genitals, it was said, had fallen into the ocean where they generated a miraculous foam from which Aphrodite was born. In the scheme of solaria binaria, this was explained as the falling of "fire fragments" from Uranus Minor into the West Central Pacific from which the Earth's oceanic crust exploded into the sky to form the Moon. In orthodox circles, the formation of the Moon from the Earth's crust has long competed with the theory of lunar capture and, recently, the former has again received a measure of respectability among some physicists. Those conventional astronomers who hold to this view, however, place the event in the remote past by millions of years. Not that I wish to subscribe to such antiquity but, if the Moon was formed from the Earth during mankind's sojourn, it is difficult to believe that witnesses of the event could have survived a calamity which, according to de Grazia, tore away "as much as half of the Earth's continental material." In March of 1979, Milton countered this objection in one of his informative missives to me. "Clearly if [the] Moon came from [the] Earth," he wrote, "only those inhabitants away from the encounter [could have] survived, [and obviously] they couldn't see it happen." (Emphasis added). But if no one saw it happen how, then, according to de Grazia, did the event find its way into the myth of Aphrodite's birth? In Milton's model, the stacked planets are made to orbit around the electrical discharge axis. As seen from Earth, this motion would have made the northern sun appear to circle around an invisible centre. Yet one of the characteristics of the north celestial sun about which ancient records are adamant is that it stood perfectly immobile in its boreal placement. Like many of Velikovsky's adherents, de Grazia accepted too much of him on faith. Thus Velikovsky explained Saturn's flare-up as the demise of that planetary deity with the deluge following seven days after the occurrence. ____The texts, however, leave no doubt that the flare-up constituted the birth, and not the death, of the Saturnian deity. It does not take much browsing through ancient literature to realize that the shedding of the light heralded the creation and that the long and prosperous era of the Golden Age intervened between it and the deluge. Velikovsky had unfortunately confused the flare-up with the much later dismemberment of the god and de Grazia, together with Milton, fell into the same trap. De Grazia's blind reliance on Velikovsky particulalry showed through in his treatment of the planet Mercury. In Ramses II and his Time, Velikovsky promised that, in a future work, he would show "that what is known as the catastrophe of the Tower of Babel ... was caused by a close passage of Mercury." Corroboration of this event would have been understandable had some independent research been conducted by way of verifying the existence of evidence in its favor. De Grazia's glaring lack of data connecting Mercury to the Tower of Babel indicates that he was content to accept Velikovsky's statement without an iota of evidence to support it. The pity is that the evidence exists. ____Ancient texts, however, more than intimate that the Tower was not a man-made edifice but, rather, a celestial apparition that was nonetheless physical. As Frederic Jueneman had much earlier surmised, the celestial object that was originally called Mercury was itself the Tower. In fact it was nothing more than the Tower of Kronos/Saturn or, to be more specific, Saturn's churning axis mundi. The stacked planetary system of solaria binaria was not entirely dissimilar to Talbott's which had the planets Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, and the Earth all rotating on the same axis. But Milton's electrical discharge axis could not be made to account for Talbott's model primarily because Talbott's model, as also mine, would seem to require planets stacked at right angels to the plane of the ecliptic. This is necessitated by ancient documents which unequivocally demand the solar illumination of Saturn's ring(s) as a rotating crescent of light around the central orb. Even so, following Milton, I did toy with the idea of electrical charges. Could these be made to reduce the attractive tensions that would ensue between the stacked planets of the polar configuration had this been purely a gravitational system? In June of 1978, Milton assured me that if the Sun and the planets possessed "electrical charge excesses of the same sign," they would rotate in their locked positions without swallowing each other because of the currents flowing between them. "These currents would eventually equalize the potential on all of the bodies but need not discharge them." This was all fine and dandy but, despite the noble efforts of Ralph Juergens, Eric Crew, C.E.R. Bruce, and others, the electrical nature of the universe remains itself an unorthodox theory that has generated as much quibbling among its proponents as the Saturnian scenario was now raising among its competing adherents. I do not wish to be as uncharitable as de Grazia himself was in his Cosmic Heretics but, personally, I would have been more inclined to lean toward Milton's theory had it not been tailored to fit the former's particular scenario.
__X. I met Roger Ashton in October of 1979. He had approached KRONOS with a proposal that Professor Warner Sizemore dumped in my lap. Ashton wanted to organize a series of debates on the Velikovsky phenomenon to be broadcast from Vancouver Co-op Radio, a community station with which he was loosely associated. His intended project asked for various scholars to tape on their own a variety of pre-planned talks and debates, which tapes were then to be sent to him for editing into a short but comprehensive series of programs. I liked the idea especially since the final result would later have been made available to other interested radio stations. Such coverage would have aided in promoting the aims of the Velikovsky movement to a general public that was mainly unaware of the controversial impact Velikovsky had had on the scientific establishment. I therefore agreed to give Ashton all the help I could. Invitations to participate, together with rules and instructions, were sent to promising members of the KRONOS staff as also to the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies in England. Professor Robert Hewsen was the first to reply, telling us he would be more than happy to take part. He did, however, add: "I should warn you that I am more a partisan of fairness and open mindedness than I am of Velikovsky. I think that he has been disgracefully treated and I would like to see his ideas seriously discussed. I am not at all convinced that they are correct as he sets them forth. I remain associated with the Center [for Velikovskian and Interdisciplinary Studies] for the express purpose of keeping it balanced and preventing it from becoming a cult sanctuary. This understood, count me in." Hewsen's attitude was heartening rather than disconcerting for neither Ashton nor myself had any intention of presenting Velikovsky as an unfailing patriarch. Unfortunately, many Velikovskian scholars were still bent on defending Velikovsky's every tenet come hell or high water. With Hewsen on it, Ashton's proposed programme would therefore have been assured of at least one voice that would not be rooting for the blind acceptance of Velikovsky's work as ipse dixit. But whatever hopes Hewsen's positive response raised were soon dashed to the ground. Apart from one or two other persons, no one else ever even bothered to reply. Ashton's project had to be disappointingly scuttled. By this time Ashton and I had spent many hours of pleasant conversation, both on the phone and at my home where, for a while, he became a frequent visitor. I found my new colleague to be a man of many talents, with interests ranging from classical Asian music to the study of butterflies. He was also quite conversant with Hindu mythology but it was his knowledge of Sanskrit that I found most illuminating. Our interminable discussions of Velikovskian matters did not take long to focus on Saturn. I do not know how much he believed of the Saturnian phenomenon when I first broached the subject to him. But, without my asking, and mostly to satisfy his own curiosity, he embarked upon a cursory exploration of Indic lore in search of Saturn's polar configuration. What he discovered was enough to hook him. In January of 1980, at his own request, I prepared for him a 58-point thesis delineating the formation of Saturn's bizarre cosmos, its history through the period of the Golden Age, and its final dissolution. Ashton's studies of matters Saturnian commenced in earnest after that. Ashton's incursion into Hindu mythology pumped new blood into the Saturnian phenomenon. His ever broadening analysis combined Talbott's method with mine in that he embraced both mythic lore and its attendant symbolism. His knowledge of Sanskrit enabled him to analyze the shared meaning of words in this amazingly complex language, through which he was permitted to extract some of the original and arcane information often embedded in the language of myth. His in-depth study further clarified the mythological identities of Hindu planetary deities; uncovered tentative new events in the configuration's history; and added tremendously to the evidence in favor of its one-time existence in man's ancient sky. Unlike many other scholars in the Velikovskian field, Ashton was not content with the insights of his own rediscoveries. In an attempt to verify the message of myth as a factual and historic occurrence, he began to focus on the detectable effects that the Saturnian  sequence of events should have left indelibly imprinted on the present nature of things. Not feeling quite comfortable with the accepted scheme, he urged a re-examination of the palaeontological succession that is based on ecological communities, traceable evolutionary change, stratigraphic accumulation, assumed rates of sedimentation, and the supposedly correct decay rates of radioactive materials. Granted that many of these conventional tenets had already been questioned, and in some cases re-examined, by Velikovskian scholars, Ashton went one better. He devised a series of experiments, to be conducted in the laboratory, in the field, and through additional research, by which the effects of the Saturnian events could be tested. These tests touched upon a wide range of subjects from such diversified fields as astrophysics, chemistry (both organic and otherwise), geology, paleontology, botany, palaeobotany, entomology, dendrochronology, ecology, and others. In the years that followed, Ashton bombarded me with a series of "research memoranda" that started coming in faster than I could digest their contents. The amount of information, suggestions, and overall insights that these memoranda contained was, and remains, invaluable. Hoping for re-direction of energy among Velikovskian scholars, I relayed many of these compilations to various members of the KRONOS staff. But when I realized they were falling on deaf ears, as had Ashton's radio programme proposal, I decided not to waste my time any further. In later years, a similar appeal I made to the members of the Canadian Society for Interdisciplinary Studies in a paper I read at one of their seminars met with an identical lack of interest. Unperturbed by this non-reaction, Ashton continued to feed me the fruits of his endeavors. More than that, he kindly allowed me the freedom of utilizing his ideas and their results as I saw fit as long as proper credit was duly given. Not having the physical, not to mention the financial, means to carry out the various experiments that Ashton devised, his tests remain, to date, unconducted but definitely not forgotten.
__XI. One problem that especially intrigued Ashton was that concerning the primeval darkness prior to Saturn's flare-up. Although he did not have a ready answer for it, it was not long before he formulated one. At first sight, his solution had an intrinsic simplicity but, as both he and I realized, it was not one that did not raise its own dilemmas. His reasoning was this: "[In order] for the vast assemblages of diurnal creatures to have survived [such gloom], some measure of visible light would have been required ... Above all, ultraviolet and infrared would have been required for all links in the terrestrial food chain. This suggests a form of light that was low in the visible wavelengths, but ascending from red into strong infrared, and from violet into strong ultraviolet. Since there would have been no sunlight to scatter pale blue in the sky, the sky would have appeared a ____deep purple or magenta." None of this, of course, did much to solve the problem of stellar invisibility. Ashton did not seem to think much of my accretion disc, so he played around with a few ideas of his own. In the end he settled on a shell of gas, or gas bubble, within the hollow of which the Saturn-Earth system would have abided. This would have served a double purpose: It would effectively have shielded the stars from mortal eyes while leaving Saturn clearly visible in the sky; and it would have reflected back the infrared and ultraviolet radiation emanating from Saturn. While Ashton would not commit himself in any detail on ____the origin of this bubble, I could visualize such a shell as having been formed from the gases expelled by an even more ancient Saturnian flare, which gases would then partly have been held back and sustained by the double attraction of Saturn and Jupiter between which the Earth would have been suspended. Ashton was not unaware of Talbott's alternative scheme in which Jupiter was hidden directly behind Saturn but, at the time, he had to admit that his own sub-system worked much better with a southern positioning of Jupiter. The result of all this was that Ashton sent me back to the sources in search of mythic hints of a purple sky. As it turned out, I already knew of one, concerning which I had not previously known what to do with. Before long, I unearthed another. These two data came from opposite sides of the world, from two different civilizations that were as unlike each other as the proverbial day and night. Yet both spoke fondly of a purple dawn, specifically described in one as the dark purple dawn of creation. There were other hints, and more have come to light since then, but none, so far, that are as explicit as the two mentioned above. Nevertheless, as Ashton himself admitted, these were enough to warrant further research. He therefore sent me hunting for other clues. Was there any hint in the mythic record that humans had once possessed larger eyes or that they once had a greater ability to see in darkness? Was there, during these primeval times, any hint of blindness, or other harm to human eyes, induced through mysterious causes? Do the myths contain description of colors that differ from those seen at present? To be sure, some of the information that Ashton was after was already contained in my shelved paper, "Darkness and the Deep." Other bits and pieces - for they were never more than that - were hastily exhumed in a scrambling effort to produce further evidence. What I managed to dredge up on short notice was not enough to clinch the case but, together with what I have since collected, it was, to say the least, quite interesting. Of larger eyes I could find absolutely no reference, but of mysterious optical ailments I found this: That the gods, having decided man to have been too perfect, had shortened his sight. One text even had it stated that blindness was the first plague with which god had cursed mankind. If we are to take such mythological hints seriously, it seems that man was not only able to see better in darkness during what Ashton now began to term the age of purple darkness but, contrary to what one would expect in such a gloomy environment, he could see farther before the gods altered his vision. This was one of the points I had previously argued at some length with Professor Griffard who could only understand the change in this ability as a change in the human eye. As he correctly reasoned, such a change could not have been accomplished in such a relatively short time. Further study of the problem since then has however convinced me that the change in this ability could have been occasioned by the changed nature of the light itself. An increased density of the air would have altered the passage of light through it, causing its wave front to be refracted, thus displacing images beyond the horizon to appear above it. This, of course, is the principle behind that atmospheric optical illusion known as a mirage. As previously noted, the Earth's atmosphere might have been gravitationally heaped at the northern latitudes due to Saturn's close proximity. It could therefore be argued that such an attraction would have tended to diffuse the air column, thus lessening rather than increasing its density. On the other hand, the bottom layers might have been denser than at present due to their own weight and a cooler ground temperature - precisely the conditions necessary for the formation of such a mirage. Following Saturn's flare-up and the formation of the axis mundi, the atmospheric environment would have changed. If, as per Jueneman, the axis was a cosmic cyclone, it would have drawn much of the Earth's atmosphere into its hungry vortex. This would have lessened the density of the air while the increased heat from the unveiled Sun, augmented by the increased heat from Saturn itself, would have evened out the atmospheric temperature. The mirage-like effect would have come to a sudden end. Of miraculous colored stones of light, which could be understood as the fluorescence activated by ultraviolet light on certain minerals, there were also some hints in the myths. The most rewarding evidence, however, came from a particular source which claimed that, during the age of darkness, the human skin was of different hue. Under ultraviolet light, it definitely would have been. Moreover, this source describes the awe with which men looked upon the changed color of their skin in the light of the unveiled Sun. In fact it is stated that humans did not easily get accustomed to this change and that it was for this very ____reason that clothing was invented. This brings to mind the indigo dye extracted from the plant Isatis tinctoria, popularly known as woad, with which the ancient Britons were said to have dyed themselves. Was this custom originated in an effort to retain the "original" hue of the human epidermis prior to the Golden Age? And what of the dyes extracted from the sea snails, murex trunculus and murex brandaris, of the eastern Mediterranean, a dye that was reserved for the violet robes of monarches, the well known royal purple? Were the kings of ancient times not perhaps imitating the hue of their Saturnian forebear, from whom it was said that royalty itself descended, the very first king of the world? Was Saturn himself not described as having once been blue-black in color? - But perhaps not. Perhaps there are other and better interpretations behind these usages. One matter concerning which Ashton was certain was that "if an age of darkness had existed at all, it could not have [lasted] long in palaeontological terms." In other words, the age of darkness would have to have been preceded by an age of visible light. Palaeotological remains demand it. To my way of thinking, eras prior to the age of darkness could still have existed in a Saturnian sub-system. Since, judging by ancient records, Saturn was known to have gone through three disruptions within man's memory, there is nothing to discount even earlier outbursts. Saturn seems to have commenced his sojourn among men as a dimly illuminated sphere. This seems to indicate a cloudy atmosphere obscuring its surface that would have partly shielded its infrared and ultraviolet radiation, perhaps rendering them a little less harmful to those who lived at the time. Saturn's cloudy atmosphere, akin to that which enwraps the planet today, would have been blown away, together with Ashton's shell or my accretion disc, when the luminary flared up. Saturn also seems to have ended his days among men as a wrinkled, or leprous, old man, which again indicates the formation of a new mottled atmosphere around its once glorious self. The age of darkness could then be seen as the interim between one subsidence and the next flare. Could not such recurring outbursts have been responsible for the closing of the great geological ages with their attendant extinctions and the mutational changes of life? But let us not get carried away. Nothing of the above should be allowed to seduce my readers into believing that the age of purple darkness had once been a factual reality. Neither Ashton nor I ever mistook our furtive gropings as the last word on the subject. With Ashton, it had never been more than a possibility in need of verification; an interesting exercise in conjectural theory. If anything, Ashton was neither gullible nor glib. He himself was the first to raise objections against his own scheme. But, on the positive side, as was usual with him, he also devised a set of tests to be carried out in an effort to verify the possibility. When, in 1980, he finally disclosed his ultraviolet theory to the public at the San Jose seminar sponsored by KRONOS, it was these tests that he stressed. Moreover, at the end of his paper, he strictly admonished that "the only fitting attitude for dealing with Saturnian problems [should be] agnostic in every possible sense." When Ashton sent his paper to KRONOS for publication, I inveigled upon him to hold off for a while until I could lay the ground for him by publishing my own "Darkness and the Deep" which I had intended to exhume and revise. I should never have done so for, due to other pressures, "Darkness and the Deep" remained on the shelf. When I finally told Ashton to go ahead on his own, he informed me that he had abrogated the whole idea. He had by then fallen victim to his own objections. He was now of the steadfast opinion that the age of primeval darkness was but a fiction and that all ancient records that described such a state of affairs must have originally alluded to a cosmic analogy. For reasons of my own, I was not convinced.
__XII. Having satisfied himself that a polar configuration was indeed described in myth, Ashton concentrated on amending and refining its interpretation. The age of purple darkness was not the only theory with which he began to show dissatisfaction. Having been strict in dismissing his own ideas, he was just as stringent in repealing those of others. Thus, while he had at first accepted Juergens' interloping Saturnian system, and had even theorized further about it, he could not, in the end, abide by it. Not only was the mytho-historical data weak, but so was the astronomical evidence. For a while he held on to the idea of a southern placement for Jupiter but, as time went by, he began to think better of Talbott's model in which Jupiter is placed directly behind Saturn, even though he had not yet seen the latter's evidence. At one point he even suggested that both theories might be correct if combined in a scheme in which a southern Jupiter was later displaced to move and occupy Talbott's favored positioning. This idea was not, of itself, without merit especially since some myths can be made to accommodate it. Temporarily at least, I decided to hold on to it. Ashton's belief also changed in relation to the World Mountain. Having at first accepted this phenomenon as a lithic bulge, later calculations convinced him that, even had it existed, it would not have been prominent enough to be visible as a towering massif from anywhere within the northern hemisphere. His proposed planetary distances would not permit it. He therefore "sided" with Talbott in interpreting the World Mountain of myth simply as an analogy of the more verifiable polar column. Of this I was still not entirely convinced especially in view of Desmond King-Hele's 1967 geodesic study. This seemed to reveal a "fossilized" retention of just such a bulge, together with its southern isostatic ____rebound-dimple, in the present shape of the Earth. While King-Hele might be the last person to subscribe to a former World Mountain, his findings could not help but intrigue me. One particular idea I had bounced off Ashton was initially derived from William Warren who was one of the first moderns to notice and document the northernism with which mythology abounds. Back in 1885, Warren interpreted this northernism in an anthropological light. He theorized that the cradle of civilization was to be found in the north polar regions. It was here, according to him, that mankind had discovered its identity; and it was from here that ____mankind had migrated southward in separate bands. As he pointed out, most prehistoric migrations have been traced in a southward moving pattern. Few nations were there whose primitive ancestors were not known to have come from the north. A few snippets of myth had meanwhile convinced me that a vast population movement did take place in primeval times. This was, however, a northward journey embarked upon by those who desired to move closer to their northern god. Thus, while it is unlikely that mankind originated in the north, it could have congregated there during the Golden Age. The southward migrations that Warren spoke of might therefore still have taken place. If early races moved northward at Saturn's appearance, they might also have returned southward when their planetary god shifted his position. One can almost visualize them picking up en masse and trekking southward in search of their lost god. Saturn, however, does not seem to have lasted long in the south if, indeed, the luminary was ever displaced to that locality, and the nations might have stopped dead in their tracks when the world next tipped over. They could there have dug their roots while awaiting the god's next return. Ashton never accepted any of this and he looked upon my theorizing with wry humor. I was therefore flabbergasted when he showed up one day with a 1960 article on this very subject written by no less an authority than Dr. V. S. Apte. Titled "Support for the Arctic Home Theory," it proved that Warren's conjecture had at least survived seventy five years. It did not prove much else - hardly that mankind originated in the Arctic or that ancient races had once congregated there. But it did present some evidence of an ancient civilization that thrived 11,000 years ago on the shores of the then ice-free Arctic Ocean. Might not archaeological excavations of similar areas reveal more of the same?
__XIII. Ashton's short foray into Mesoamerican culture brought him face to face with an old quandary - namely, that Mesoamerican astronomy is silent when it comes to the planet Saturn. Comparative mythology can point to various American deities that can be identified as Saturnian gods but in no instance did the indigenes themselves ever equate any of them with the actual planet. This led Ashton to a rather rash conclusion. If the Americans did not remember the northern body of myth to have been Saturn, he argued, it could not have been Saturn. This was a monster that, years later, was to rear its ugly head again among the members of the Canadian Society for Interdisciplinary Studies. And the snag is this: In the absence of a time machine that could transport us to the past, incontrovertible proof of Saturn's former boreal placement cannot be had. What must not be overlooked, however, is that this places a burden on the shoulders of those who oppose the belief rather than on those who accept it since the opposition is left with a crucial question: If the northern body of myth was not Saturn, then why, despite the meso-Americans, did so many ancient peoples insist that it was? While he continued to pursue the subject, Ashton grew increasingly cautious of identifying gods directly with planets, and he began to allude to the former merely as divine representatives of the latter. In view of his penchant for succumbing to his own impediments, his next step was actually predictable. Since the ancient records were too persuasive even for him to ignore, he never stopped believing in the former existence of the polar configuration but he finally convinced himself that an astronomical interpretation had to be ruled out. The last I heard he was preparing a paper to illustrate the utter impossibility of such a planetary arrangement. (1) One may well ask Ashton: If not cosmological in nature, then what could this abominable apparition have been? That, however, is for him to answer. 1. *See Ashton's paper in this issue.
__XIV. Ralph Juergens died suddenly on November 2, 1979. Immanuel Velikovsky followed him fifteen days later, passing peacefully away in his favorite chair while talking to his wife. Both men had striven for a clearer understanding of the cosmos. Juergens' contributory knowledge has yet to be assessed; that of Velikovsky yet to be appreciated. My only misgiving at that point was that I had postponed my major criticisms of Velikovsky's work for far too long since I would rather have broken my lance with him while he was still alive. I had listened to those who had sought to draw in my horns against my better judgement and I was now in danger of falling prey to the fear of being labelled a traitor. But in my mind I knew I could not hold back any longer. "Other Worlds, Other Collisions," the paper I prepared for the San Jose seminar sponsored by KRONOS, was meant to raise more than just a few eyebrows. In fact I had expected to be crucified. I not only took Velikovsky to task for his erroneous planetary identifications and the chronological misplacement of mytho-historical events, but also those supporters of his who had relied blindly on his statements without having checked the original sources on which Velikovsky had based them. I advised Velikovskian scholars to clean their own backyard before pointing the accusing finger at the opposition and I pleaded for a cognizance of the rising tide of Biblical fundamentalism which I saw, and still see, as a colossal detriment to our cause. Due to time constraint, I knew I would not be able to read the entire paper so I decided on the middle section of its three parts since this contained what I believed to be one of my major criticisms: The lack of mytho-historical evidence concerning the supposed birth of Venus from Jupiter. On its own, this criticism does not invalidate the thesis of Worlds in Collision. But behind it lay a force I myself had long resisted in my effort to incorporate the cosmic events described by Velikovsky into my own scenario. But, unlike de Grazia, I finally had to concede that the two schemes could not easily be wed. Early in my Saturnian studies I had lifted the veil of that elusive entity known throughout mythology as the Mother Goddess. It did not take me long to realize that this mater dei was actually the feminine aspect of the Saturnian deity. More than anything else, the polar configuration had resembled a gargantuan figure towering above Earth's northern horizon with uplifted arms. Our ancient forebears had looked upon this effulgent phantasm as having been both male and female. The Saturnian deity had truly appeared androgynous. In mythology, however, this Mother Goddess displayed an uncanny and persistent habit of merging with the Venerian deities of all races. As my early correspondence with Stephen Talbott shows, I had originally attempted to keep the two goddesses apart mainly in order to keep Velikovsky's scheme intact. In the end I had to throw in the sponge. The two goddesses were obviously one. This raised a dilemma - and how many had I already encountered? If the goddess was in fact an aspect of the Saturnian deity, how did she come to be identified in the ancients' minds with the planet Venus? The logical answer was to assume that only later was the the goddess imbued with Venerian traits. Talbott had already detected as much - as he indicated when he had written these words to me: "The whole issue of the mother goddess seems to warrant deeper thought than heretofore given it in discussion of Velikovsky's work. It is well established that numerous mother goddesses are identified with Venus (as well as the Moon) in the late period. In origin they certainly were not Venus. With surprising unanimity their abode is placed at the pole or the so-called World-navel' ... "What needs to be established is when the character of this goddess was acquired by Venus and what characteristics distinguish the Venus goddess from the earlier mother of the gods and spouse of Heaven." (Emphasis as given.) In Worlds in Collision Velikovsky had utilized the events connected with this goddess indiscriminately. Thus, much of what he stated about Venus rightly involves the feminine aspect of the Saturnian deity. Moreover, with one exception, there seems to be no mythic record of the Venerian deity having been given birth by the Jovian one. That one exception, the birth of Athene from the head of Zeus, is contested by other Greek myths - and definitely by a multitude of sources from the rest of the ancient world. With close to unanimity, the Venerian goddess is universally spoken of as the daughter (but also the wife and/or mother) of the Saturnian god. I had been burdened with Velikovsky long enough. It was time I divorced myself entirely from his scheme. Whatever my colleagues may think, there was no point in pleading for a backyard cleaning unless I was willing to abide by my words.
__XV. In January of 1980, Chris Sherrerd sent a most surprising paper to KRONOS. The title itself - "The Plausibility of the Polar Saturn" - was such a positive statement that it made me devour its contents with childlike eagerness. Here, out of the blue, was the very first serious attempt at resolving the physics of the polar configuration without tampering with the model behind it. It had been dumped, without my asking, right into my lap for comment or criticism. Sherrerd had no compulsion about stating that such a planetary system was "not only plausible but likely." He considered that "a 4-body linear configuration," consisting of Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, and the Earth, "twirling in orbit about the Sun, is a feasible and stable arrangement according to well-known principles of modern physics." (Emphasis as given.) His two assumptions, that ____both of the larger bodies in the configuration would have to have had high spin rates and strong magnetic fields, were borne out by both the mytho-historical record and recent planetary discoveries. Moreover, since both electrostatic repulsion and gravitational attraction obey the inverse square law, Sherrerd argued that accepted physics suffices in determining their relative motions at close proximity to each other. The strong magnetic fields of two such bodies in close proximity would, according to Sherrerd, "interact in such a way as to induce torques on each other." These torques would tend to align the magnetic, and hence the spin, axis of each with the other's magnetic field. As each body revolved about the other, their spin and magnetic axes would have shifted, causing each to track the other's magnetic field. This precession, strongest when the misalignment was at its greatest, would in turn have shifted "the local magnetic fields each body [was] affected by" in a tendency to co-align with the magnetic and spin axis of the other. The addition of Mars and Earth to this 2-body configuration could result in one of various models. Much smaller in size and mass, the motions of these bodies would be entirely dominated by the gravitational and electromagnetic fields of the two giants. Depending on the genesis behind the system, they could end up revolving either around Jupiter or Saturn or, perhaps, around the Jupiter-Saturn system as a whole. The insertion of these two terrestrial planets between Saturn and Jupiter would, howeverr, also make for a stable system. In the latter case, the two smaller bodies would have reacted similarly to the larger, more massive ones as long as they, also, possessed high spin rates and strong magnetic fields. They would have gyroscopically precessed until their spin and magnetic axes co-aligned with those of the two larger bodies. Sherrerd's insertion of the two terrestrial planets between Saturn and Jupiter surprised me because, as yet, nothing had been published about Jupiter's ancient fame as the Star of the South. In April of that year I asked him what had prompted him to consider such a southern placement for Jupiter. His reply of May 15 outlined the logic behind his consideration. His twirling configuration first required "that the two main bodies be of commensurate size and electromagnetic properties." In view of the mythic record, Jupiter was chosen as Saturn's most likely companion. But since, according to the same record, Jupiter was not visible in Earth's sky during the Golden Age, the planet would have had to have been hidden somewhere. Talbott's postulate of a Jupiter hidden behind Saturn was given consideration - and never quite ruled out - but Sherrerd felt that "with Mars and Earth between the two big boys',"the configuration would have been lent greater stability. Despite the fact that Sherrerd's theory conformed precisely to what I had discovered in the mythic record, I was not so naive as to hook on to it. It was the most promising explanation to date, to say the least. But I was not in a position to pass judgement on it primarily because the intricacies of the theory were somewhat beyond my competence. Also, as Thomas McCreery was later to lament, Sherrerd's paper suffered from a simplified compactness. Thus, a fuller explanation of the gyroscopic precessions at work, as also some sample calculations of the torques involved, would have greatly clarified the processes that Sherrerd understood much better than most of his readers would. McCreery also questioned some of the planetary electromagnetic properties that Sherrerd accepted but which had not yet been quantitatively demonstrated. To be fair to both men, however, McCreery did confess that some of his criticisms might have been due to his misunderstanding of some of Sherrerd's postulates. My immediate plan was to try and get Sherrerd together with McCreery, and also with Ashton, Jueneman, and Milton, so that they could work together as a team and iron out all visible creases in the model. I should have known better by then. Most of these would-be participants still had their own models to push and they invariably started amending Sherrerd's theory to fit their own. As for Sherrerd himself, he was not at that time predisposed to enter a lengthy debate via long distance phone and mail. As he wrote to me in his reply of May 15: "I think you would like to understand my motive [which is] not to prove' the Polar Saturnian scenario ... but rather to establish credibility before things get out of hand." (Emphasis as given.) He had also said as much to Jueneman who had shown some indication of rewriting Sherrerd's paper but, in the end, this loose collaboration fizzled to a halt. In retrospect I realize I should have pushed for publication of Sherrerd's paper in KRONOS. If nothing else, it might have given someone, who had no model of his own to boost, a chance to properly evaluate it. Who knows how further advanced in this particular study we might have been by now?
__XVI. 1980 finally saw the publication of David Talbott's book. To those who were already familiar with his earlier works, The Saturn Myth contained no surprises. It nevertheless was, and remains, a work of high standards. Talbott had not only done his home-work, he set an excellent example among Velikovskian scholars concerning the thoroughness with which research should be conducted. His opus consisted of an in-depth analysis of the Saturnian configuration. In that much he offered nothing new to what he had already stated in his previous short papers. In fact he said less. The formation of Saturn's cosmos was only superficially delineated. There was no mention of Jupiter's role in the Saturnian events and even Mars was excised from the general scheme in an effort to simplify this first major sampling of his theory.  It was understood by those who knew that these topics would be introduced in his promised sequel. The thesis, however, was now lent the support of weighty evidence and this, to say the least, was impressive. Talbott's arguments were now solidified, his case wrought taut around a near-water-tight array of well-chosen mythological sources. Despite some unfortunate mislocation among his references, the work remains close to being scholarly faultless - and that is saying a lot. Despite all this, and for various reasons, the book failed to gain popularity. Talbott's publishers did not promote it as well as they should have. Book reviewers virtually ignored it and it received very little notice in the "outside" world. This was probably due to the work's lack of sensationalism. Worlds in Collision it was not. While, other than in a pioneering way, it was, in my opinion, superior to Velikovsky's opus, it lacked the latter's epic sweep. For that reason it was not about to grab the public's imagination. This short-coming should have been compensated for on the scholarly front but there, also, the response was meagre. Velikovskian scholars, if no one else, should have embraced it but, sad to say, few of them were prepared to acknowledge, let alone laud, it. Most of those with whom I discussed it were not impressed. This chagrined me for two reasons: In the first place I could not understand how such an important work could fail to interest those who had the most to gain by it; in the second, it boded ill for my own slowly progressing study of the same subject. Velikovskians might have looked upon The Saturn Myth as an anti-Velikovskian blow which, in a way, it is. But, at the same time, those who viewed it in this light missed the fact that Talbott's work was the logical fall-out of Velikovsky's own endeavors. It was of course already widely known by then that Velikovsky himself had refused to stand behind Talbott's scheme and my near-identical one. And this might have had a lot to do with the unfortunate repudiation of Talbott's work. It therefore became imperative to make Velikovskian scholars aware that their mentor's outpouring was not as solid as some die-hards were still maintaining.
__XVII. The KRONOS-sponsored San Jose seminar scheduled for August was drawing near. I therefore decided to include a few references to Talbott's work in the paper I meant to read there in the hope that others would pick up the thread and follow suit. My only fear was that this might make me appear to have abandoned Velikovsky's camp in favor of Talbott's. The truth was that I did not want to belong to either. After all I, also, had my own horn to blow. I was not crucified at San Jose. "Other Worlds, Other Collisions" was received quite well and the questions that followed its reading indicated that my listeners were willing to consider my alternatives. The criticisms, for there were bound to be some, came later - mostly from those who had not been present at the seminar. But even these were mainly concerned with my lack of evidential material. Not that I had failed to annotate my paper with the proper references but, as I was later to argue privately with my critics, it would have been impossible to present all the evidence in one short article on the subject. I had told Professor Lewis Greenberg that he would not like what I had to say at the seminar. As he was to say later to another: "Cardona was right, I did not." And yet it was he who encouraged me to present my case in more depth and with all the evidential material at my disposal. "Child of Saturn," my lengthy serialization, owes its evolution to Greenberg's encouragement as so do many of its spin-offs. They were all published by Greenberg in KRONOS without the least obstacle being placed in my path. These criticisms of Worlds in Collision have been received by other Velikovskian scholars with mixed feelings but my intentions, at least, have been accepted in good faith. Not so with my continuing defence of those Velikovskian particulars which I still deem to be valid. Downright detractors remained vehement. My backyard cleaning seems to have had absolutely no effect on them.
__XVIII. Bob Forrest had been virtually unheard of among Velikovskian scholars. He was not so to remain. Premonishment of what he was up to cast him as the proverbial stormy petrel but my own warnings to undermine his coming razzia through a concentrated admission of Velikovsky's shortcomings went completely unheeded. Part One of Forrest's privately published series, titled Velikovsky's Sources, was out in July of 1981 but it did not come to my attention until a little while later. By then there was not much of Velikovsky's scheme, as outlined in Worlds in Collision, that I still adhered to. In fact when, in September that year, Mrs. Velikovsky asked me at the Princeton seminar how much of her husband's work I aimed to leave untouched, my reply was: "Very little." I could still acknowledge Velikovsky's pioneering thrust in matters of cosmic catastrophism and, of course, I continue to applaud his scholarly insights on the subject to this day. But the scenario of Worlds in Collision was no longer, in my opinion, as solidly founded as it had originally appeared. Apart from the unverifiable birth of Venus from the planet Jupiter, I had also failed to discover any concrete connection between cometary Venus and the Exodus. Granted that the tale of Exodus hinted at a natural catastrophe of sorts, it had by now become obvious that Velikovsky had mistaken many earlier occurrences as parallels of this event. Granted also that a celestial body had been associated by the ancients with the Exodus - and Velikovsky had amazingly missed the most telling of this evidence - I could find nothing by which to identify this body as Venus. Moreover, whatever the disaster of the Exodus, it was much smaller in scale than Velikovsky had assumed. So, also, with the proposed Martian catastrophes of the 8th and 7th centuries B.C. ____I accept that some cosmic disturbances occurred during those times but nothing in ancient literature connects those commotions - again much milder than Velikovsky had envisioned them - with the planet Mars. In this, the works of Donald Patten et al. are just as much in error as Velikovsky's. Bob Forrest could have been one of my greatest allies. Instead we ended up crossing swords. Virtually of a mind concerning Velikovksy's misuse of the sources, we differed on the overall validity of his work. In his monumental series, which stretched into seven mini-volumes over a period of three years, Forrest did Velikovskian scholars a service by exhuming their mentor's original sources and presenting them in their proper context. Unfortunately, since he chose to dissect Worlds in Collision source by source rather than subject by subject, he managed to scatter Velikovsky's evidence on any one topic across some five hundred odd pages, thus robbing the work of its concentrated strength. His unfamiliarity with mythology showed transparently through as so did his misunderstanding of Velikovsky's method. Worst of all, casting Velikovsky in the mold of Erich von Däniken, he treated him rather unkindly while peppering his remarks with sarcastic barbs. This shabby treatment was not only uncalled for, it proved detrimental to the serious consideration his work might have received by Velikovskian scholars. Granted that Forrest proved shrewd enough to finger many of the sore spots contained in Worlds in Collision, he also managed to commit a few blunders of his own. In his relentless discarding of the evidence, he ended up throwing the baby out with the bathwater. As I have stated elsewhere, Velikovsky's Sources could have been a great work had it not suffered too much from lack of objectivity. No matter what good may be said of it, it is not the work to refer to if a truly unbiased evaluation of Velikovsky's work is what is being sought.
__XIX. I finally met David Talbott in September of 1983 at the Haliburton seminar sponsored by the Canadian Society for Interdisciplinary Studies. He came to the seminar with Ev Cochrane who, in 1979, had been bold enough to include the Saturnian phenomenon, as gleaned from the pages of KRONOS, in his Master's thesis on evolution and racial memory. When, sometime later, The Saturn Myth was published and brought to his attention, he contacted Talbott and the two of them ended up collaborating on a new series of Saturnian events. The two of them had thus attended the Haliburton seminar with the intention of introducing their first paper on the subject. Cochrane and I were not exactly strangers. We had met and discussed Saturnian matters at previous seminars. But this was my first eye-to-eye with Talbott. I had not known what to prepare for but I was in for a pleasant surprise. Talbott and I got on well together. He turned out to be quite a fun guy with a somewhat mischievous sense of humor. Together with Cochrane, we were almost immediately, and somewhat derisively, christened "the Saturnists." The subject of their paper took me unawares. It concerned the role played by the planet Venus during Saturnian times. On this particular topic, their thesis had carried them well beyond mine. Even so, this further unfolding of the Saturnian scenario did coincide in one very important aspect with what I, only recently, had resolved. In some of the earliest literature from Sumer, the ____planet Venus is referred to as the "edge star" or "star of the periphery." Together with other mythological motifs, this had led me to conclude that Venus had once orbited Saturn on the periphery, or edge, of its encircling band(s). Its cometary tail - which, unlike my colleagues, I did not conceive of having been curled - would have thus appeared as a short protrusion, lending the human-shaped likeness of the Saturnian configuration a tufted countenance. This, in my opinion, could account for the descriptions of a bearded Mother Goddess as encountered in the mythology of the races. Having reserved this revelation for the coming conclusion of my "Child of Saturn" serialization, I did not expand this motif any further. Using an entirely different, and more comprehensive, set of mythological data, Talbott and Cochrane, I now discovered, had inadvertently anticipated me - or had I anticipated them? (I did not reach this conclusion until about 1980.). More than that, they went one better. It was, according to them, from the cometary tail of Venus, as it orbited Saturn, that the initial Saturnian ring had been primordially fashioned. Having learned from my experience with Ashton's paper on purple darkness, I was not about to ask Talbott and Cochrane to wait for the conclusion of my serialization before publishing their paper. Heaven only knew how many years down the line this was to be. It would not, in any case, have been fair. Besides, my dealings with Velikovsky had convinced me of the childishness behind the fear of pre-emption. I therefore asked Talbott if he, or Cochrane, would have any objections to publishing their paper in KRONOS. Talbott assured me he had none but he correctly pointed out that, having been presented at a CSIS seminar, the paper rightly belonged to that Society. This was no obstacle because Professor Irving Wolfe, the Society's Chairman, had already given me a carte blanche option to relay any of their papers to KRONOS as long as I obtained the individual author's permission. Thus, having cleared the matter with my Editor-in-Chief, Talbott and Cochrane joined the ever growing list of KRONOS contributors. Talbott's and Cochrane's first paper on the subject appeared in the Fall 1984 issue of KRONOS. In deference to Velikovsky, they titled their article "The Origin of Velikovsky's Comet." This was followed by two more essays on the subject, published in the Fall 1985 and Winter 1987 issues respectively. In these informative articles, the authors strove to show that, not only did Saturn's initial band owe its origin to the circling detritus emitted by the cometary tail of Venus, but that, in the minds of the ancients, the band was synonymous with the comet. (Talbott, of course, had long been of the opinion that the Mother Goddess of myth was represented by the band around Saturn rather than the Saturnian configuration as a whole.) While the evidence they presented for all this seemed rather persuasive, certain mythological subtleties kept me from accepting it in toto. The fine mythological line which often separates the goddess from her renowned beard seemed to me to warrant further study. This was one aspect of the problem which I had meant, and still mean, to resolve in the concluding installment of "Child of Saturn." This slight disagreement, concerning whether cometary Venus originally represented the goddess or merely her beard, might seem like a splitting of academic hairs. The issue, however, becomes of crucial importance in view of the "later" acquisition of Saturnian traits and names by the planet Venus. Be that as it may, it cannot be overemphasized that Talbott's and Cochrane's in-depth study of this particular subject is most illuminating, touching on mythological motifs that I myself had never considered, and definitely merits the most serious deliberation. But then Talbott surprised me by throwing what seemed to be a spoke in his own wheel. Hard on the heels of his first co-authored essay with Cochrane, he individually published his "Guidelines to the Saturn Myth" in the Summer 1985 issue of KRONOS. Toward the end of this challenging article, Talbott included a view, with explanatory notes, of Saturn's configuration as seen from the outer reaches of space. In this "celestial bird's eye view," Jupiter is still shown "hidden" behind Saturn, with Saturn, Mars, and Earth sharing their rotational axis while orbiting around Jupiter in unison as a rigid rod. The Saturnian band, however, is shown to have circled neither Saturn nor Jupiter. It was now indicated to have been suspended in isolation between the two giants. In part, this was a reversion to Jueneman's model which also includes an isolated ringed structure suspended between Mars and the Earth. Moreover, Talbott's band was shown for the first time as a doughnut shaped "torus-cloud." This might have been his answer to Milton Zyman's oft repeated objection concerning the "impossibility" of illuminating a flat ring of fine debris so as to appear in the form of a crescent when viewed from Earth. Saturn's cruciform, which I had once envisioned as an atmospheric illusion, was depicted in Talbott's scheme as a physical outburst radiating from Saturn's north polar region. This immediately reminded me of the multiple jets, or fountains, which are sometimes seen "adorning" the heads of comets and it dawned upon me that Talbott might be trying to explain the Saturnian cruciform through a similar process. The biggest surprise, however, concerned the placement of cometary Venus which was here shown to have orbited around the planets' common rotational axis but well below Saturn and high above Mars. Its positioning was such that only from Earth would it have appeared to circle the edge of the enclosing band. But how, then, could the "torus-cloud" have been formed from the detritus emitted by the cometary tail of Venus when the latter was so widely separated from the former? And through what mechanism, as opposed to Jueneman's model, could the Saturnian band have sustained itself in isolation out of the gravitational attraction of both Jupiter and Saturn? In private discourse on the phone and through the mail, Talbott has furnished me with a few explanations and I can promise the readers of this journal some very exciting revelations. Talbott has tantalized his readers, as I have done myself at times, and we both owe them a fair amount of dissertation.
__XX. The same issue of KRONOS that carried Talbott's "Guidelines to the Saturn Myth" also contained a paper by Ragnar Forshufvud titled "Protosaturn and Velikovsky's Cosmogonical Reconstruction." In part an answer to some of Leroy Ellenberger's previous criticisms of Velikovsky's cosmogony, the paper touched upon such issues as interplanetary discharges, shock waves through interplanetary gas, rapid change of solar radiation, change of planetary orbits, and decreasing interplanetary dust clouds. Obviously unhappy with Talbott's model as, quite naturally, also with mine, Forshufvud then attempted to account for the Saturnian events through what he considered a simpler scheme. Forshufvud accepted that the Sun and Protosaturn, as he correctly referred to it, had constituted a primordial binary. The latter, according to him, could have flared up when its expansion drove its gaseous envelope "beyond the boundaries of the Roche lobe." The expelled gas, as hypothesized for other binaries found in the galaxy, was attracted to the Sun where it formed "a large rotating disc-shaped cloud around it." If Protosaturn, as had already been surmised, had once been more massive, it would have been critically reduced to the limit permissible for thermonuclear reaction by previous outbursts. Continuing dissipation of its gases would have further lowered Protosaturn's mass which, due to its decreased gravitational force, would have led to a final disintegration. At first sight, Forshufvud's accretion disc around the Sun, as my postulated one around Saturn, might be seen as the answer to the primeval darkness insisted on by myth. But while a disc around the Sun would have been effective in hiding the major portion of the stars, it would not have shielded the solar orb itself from view. The southern hemisphere of the Sun, or most of it, would still have been visible below the equatorial plane of the disc. Forshufvud, however, went further. Accepting also that Earth had then been a satellite of Protosaturn, Furshufvud correctly recognized that it could not have orbited the Saturnian orb outside the Roche lobe. But since the giant's gaseous envelope had expanded beyond this limit, the Earth would have found itself in the distinctive position of orbiting inside Protosaturn. This had been one of Jueneman's prime objections to a Saturnian system consisting solely of Earth and Saturn with the two revolving around a common barycenter. Jueneman's original calculations had placed the barycenter within the Saturnian sphere and hence disqualified the concept. But, as Forshufvud indicated, Protosaturn's atmosphere might have mainly consisted of "very thin gas," thus enabling the Earth to survive within it. And, in truth, such a state of affairs is not exactly deemed impossible by conventional astronomy. As Thomas Van Flandern pointed out, there is reason to believe that the famous Jovian Red Spot could be due to an Earth-sized object "floating" within Jupiter's atmosphere. Forshufvud's idea is therefore not as outlandish as it might appear. In this model, Protosaturn's "core" would have appeared as the bright shining Saturnian sun of myth at the centre of the gaseous shell within the inner periphery of which the Earth itself was embedded. The cruciform rays radiating from this sun would have consisted of the circulation pattern of gases flowing back and forth between the core and the outer shell. The axial column would have been formed from the steady flow of one of these streams when gravitationally attracted toward the Earth. Later, when the Earth would have left Protosaturn, the thin and semi-transparent shell would have appeared as the ring described by myth to have circled the Saturnian orb. In comparing his Saturnian model to those proposed by others, Forshufvud professed a preference for those closest to conventional views. This is all fine but, to repeat the admonition I have already pitched, there is no point in formulating a workable model if this fails to satisfy the message of myth. One may argue that there is also no point in formulating a mythological model if this fails to satisfy accepted physics. But the one thing to remember is that what we have all been attempting to reconstruct are the events which our ancient forefathers reported. If, then, we disregard the very record we have been trying to substantiate, we end up defeating the very purpose of our studies. In order to reconstruct ancient events, we must first accept their reality. Our purpose is not to find a workable model but one that fits the events. Never mind that what we postulate is believed to have been physically impossible. If the events described in myth truly occurred, they would have had to have been possible. If, on the other hand, it could incontrovertibly be demonstrated that the mythological model is physically impossible, we would have to admit that the events described by the ancients never transpired. My heartfelt conviction, however, is that the mythological model Talbott and I have been developing has not yet received the proper scientific attention it deserves. Most of those who have thus far tried to account for it have felt commpelled to alter it. I cannot believe that this model is incapable of being accounted for without tampering with its construction. Some may argue that myth is open to interpretation. My only retort to that is to repeat what I have often stated: That while the above may be true for certain mythic themes, there are definite aspects of myth that can only by interpreted one way. In the past, even those conventional mythologists who could not bring themselves to believe the message of myth were left with no recourse but to accept the meaning of that message. Despite its ingenuity, it is some of these incontrovertible aspects of myth that Forshufvud's model violates. I do not wish to appear as if I'm castigating Forshufvud. He and I have corresponded amicably for many years. But what he has worked out is a scheme tailored to account for what he believes could have happened. That this is not what the ancient record insists to have happened is what he, like others, has yet to come to grips with. Thus, like others before him, Forshufvud sees the Earth as having orbited Protosaturn when the mythic record leaves no doubt that Earth and Saturn must have shared the same axis of rotation. The sheer quantity of available evidence that points conclusively to this dictum cannot be ignored. The band which the mythic record describes to have circled the Saturnian sun could not have been Protosaturn's shell as seen from Earth after the latter had left the former because this Saturnian band had been prominent during the Golden Age when the Earth was still very much a satellite of Saturn. If, during the Golden Age, the Earth was still within Protosaturn's shell, what would have appeared as a ring around the Saturnian orb? And then, what would one do with the seven concentric rings that eventually wrapped themselves around Saturn? Are we to have Protosaturn's atmosphere stratifying itself into seven semi-transparent shells? The placement of Earth within the Protosaturnian atmosphere is not that different from Ashton's previous postulate of a similar shell surrounding Saturn and the Earth. Of itself, this is not inconceivable even with an axial sharing of the two bodies. Forshufvud's opinion that "an ever bright" sky would have "surrounded the Earth on all sides" is, however, incompatible with the ____cycle of night and day experienced during the Golden Age as also insisted on by myth. If, on the other hand, Forshufvud's model is made to apply to those times previous to the Golden Age, especially if the core's radiation was to be theoretically lowered in the visible-light spectrum, it might be helpful in accounting for the age of primeval darkness. As Forshufvud himself commented, the stars would not have been seen through the atmospheric medium while the Sun's visibility would have depended "on the optical density of the shell." Even so, is such a shell necessary? Ashton had used his bubble in order to facilitate the reflection of ultraviolet and infrared radiation from Saturn to all parts of the Earth, including its southern hemisphere. But if Jupiter had been shining in the south during the northern age of darkness, the bubble theory becomes redundant. Ashton's UVIR bombardment would have been limited to the northern hemisphere. Are there any intimations that Earth's southern hemisphere never experienced the primeval darkness? As it turns out there is one Amazonian myth which states that, at the beginning of time, there was no such thing as night. It was always day. This would contest Lynn Rose's hypothesis that Earth's southern hemisphere had been a place of perpetual shadow as he saw it echoed in the counter-Earth of Philolaos. But I shall not be adamant about this because, after all, one myth does not a case make. On the other hand, I have not yet had the opportunity to look for others.
__XXI. In 1986, Bob Forrest attempted to amend some of his previous remissness. An abridgement of his Velikovsky's Sources appeared in Stonehenge Viewpoint as a new serialization titled "A Guide to Velikovsky's Sources." (Emphasis mine.) After having been castigated for his ploy in dispersing Velikovsky's evidence, Forrest reorganized his material in a more equitable thematic analysis. This did not make Worlds in Collision appear any more valid - how could it? But it should have isolated its convincing features. That it did not was mainly due to Forrest's steadfast prejudice and intractability. Despite additional reading on the subject, comparative mythology remained his terra incognita. Some corrections were made but many of his old misconceptions resurfaced. Further corrections were then attempted in 1987 when Forrest collected his Stonehenge Viewpoint essays in a book bearing the same title - A Guide to Velikovksy's Sources. But, as I asked Forrest before I had even read it, where does he next intend to correct the misconceptions that continue to appear in this new venture? The worst part of all this is that Forrest has committed his harm, much more so than any other critic of Velikovsky. He has not only taken Velikovsky to task in his own backyard, he has done it quite comprehensively. That much, and more, I grant him. Unfortunately, Forrest has not only cast Velikovsky in the mold of a shoddy scholar, which he definitely was not, but also all those who take his work seriously. Nor are objective critics of Velikovsky, like myself, immune to his harm. As he himself recently informed me, it matters little that some of us have left Velikovsky to branch out on our own version of cosmic catastrophism. To him we are all "much of a muchness." And he is right. We can ill afford Forrest's searing judgement, even if it is biased and in error. His form of criticism, while faulty, has always appeared persuasive to the uninitiated. It now becomes all the more dangerous because not only are our scenarios more bizarre than Velikovsky's but, speaking for Talbott and myself, they keep getting increasingly so. We are thus opening our doors ever wider to derision by critics of Forrest's ilk. Who, in his right scientific mind, is going to believe what we are proposing? I was therefore elated when, in mid-1987, David Talbott invited me to participate in the monthly symposium on myth and science, an ongoing debate to be carried out in the pages of his newly inaugurated periodical, AEON. Talbott means to allow everyone his say regardless of the wildness of the theories proposed. The emphasis, however, is meant to rest on the eventual distillation of models into a possible single comprehensive one and its physical testing. This should be an exciting endeavor especially since I already know there are many novel surprises in store. My hope is to be able to live up to the challenge by supplying new material as well as pro and con arguments in an increasing effort to resolve the many and varied competing theories that are currently vying for recognition and acceptance. I intend to be harsh in my criticisms, as I have always been, but I do hope that those who will come within range of my disapproval will understand the intent behind my ruades. Others are welcome to treat my own work in like manner as long as the confrontation is conducted in a sober and scholarly manner. Personally, I have never been afraid of criticism and, in most cases, I have even welcomed it despite the vehemence of my past retorts to it. As those who are familiar with my past works should know, I have more than once had a change of mind on certain issues but I have never been afraid to publicly retract whatever statements of mine I retrospectively discovered to be amiss. In the interest of fairness I shall even play devil's advocate to particular aspects of Talbott's model which, in effect, is also mine. De Grazia once called me "a harsh critic, but a sweet man."  Let me try, then , to live up to that name while inviting others to join me in an equitable but stimulating debate which should be devoted to nothing less than the scholarly quest for truth. Only in this way can we ever hope to iron out the differences between us in a continuing effort to exhume the ultimate reality, or as much of it as we possibly can, concerning the astronomical and historical past so that this can then be applied to correct present ailments in the hope of salvaging what often appears to be a very dim future. To that end, I intend to start ab initio - Where else?

9/7

SPACE

Sunspot activity reaches 23 year high, DOUBLE the official forecast for solar cycle 25
https://www.sott.net/article/494562-Sunspot-activity-reaches-23-year-high-DOUBLE-the-official-forecast-for-solar-cycle-25

six new 'rogue worlds' that provide clues to star formation
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-webb-rogue-worlds-clues-star.html

Double-peaked supernovae offer clues to pre-supernova outbursts
https://phys.org/news/2024-09-peaked-supernovae-clues-pre-supernova.html

newborn stellar cluster
https://phys.org/news/2024-09-explore-nature-newborn-stellar-cluster.html

first gamma-ray burst
https://phys.org/news/2024-09-nasa-mini-burstcube-mission-gamma.html

largest MeerKAT radio source catalog to date
https://phys.org/news/2024-09-astronomers-largest-meerkat-radio-source.html

The Martian polar caps are not created equally
https://phys.org/news/2024-09-martian-polar-caps-equally.html

Phaethon, a weird asteroid that thinks it's a comet
https://phys.org/news/2024-09-phaethon-weird-asteroid-comet.html

Gigantic asteroid impact shifted the axis of solar system's biggest moon
https://phys.org/news/2024-09-gigantic-asteroid-impact-shifted-axis.html

New cataclysmic variable system
https://phys.org/news/2024-09-cataclysmic-variable.html

Life on alien planets probably wouldn't experience day and night
https://phys.org/news/2024-09-life-alien-planets-wouldnt-day.html

distorted galaxy forming
https://phys.org/news/2024-09-webb-reveals-distorted-galaxy-cosmic.html

bright low-mass X-ray binary system
https://phys.org/news/2024-09-astronomers-nature-bright-mass-ray.html

the mystery of Mars's escaping water
https://phys.org/news/2024-09-nasa-hubble-maven-mystery-mars.html

galaxies are much much bigger than previously thought
https://phys.org/news/2024-09-deep-imaging-techniques-reveal-galaxies.html

Nearby super-Earth has a sulfur-rich atmosphere {like Venus?}
https://phys.org/news/2024-09-nearby-super-earth-sulfur-rich.html

spiral galaxy IC 4709
https://phys.org/news/2024-09-image-hubble-spiral-galaxy-ic.html

'blaze star' T Corona Borealis
https://phys.org/news/2024-09-flares-blaze-star-corona-borealis.html

origin of supermassive black hole QUASAR at galaxy's center
https://phys.org/news/2024-09-massive-merger-reveals-evidence-supermassive.html

Solution to a cosmic mystery—the eccentric orbits of trans-Neptunian objects
https://phys.org/news/2024-09-solution-cosmic-mystery-eccentric-orbits.html

Dark Matter Searches Continue to Fail
https://crev.info/2024/09/dark-matter-searches-continue-to-fail

Milky Way’s Mysterious Ripple Could Be a Scar From an Ancient Collision
https://www.sciencealert.com/milky-ways-mysterious-ripple-could-be-a-scar-from-an-ancient-collision

Jupiter’s moon Ganymede was struck by asteroid bigger than dinosaur-killing rock
https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/sep/03/jupiter-moon-ganymede-struck-asteroid-bigger-dinosaurs


PHYSICS & TECH
https://milesmathis.forumotion.com/t632p150-latest-mm-eu-related-science-articles#7742


EARTH SCIENCE

Submerged ancient bridge discovered in a Spanish cave reveals earlier human settlement in the western Mediterranean
https://www.sott.net/article/494441-Submerged-ancient-bridge-discovered-in-a-Spanish-cave-reveals-earlier-human-settlement-in-the-western-Mediterranean

Megalithic structure found in Kazakhstan
https://www.sott.net/article/494476-Megalithic-structure-found-in-Kazakhstan

oldest known eclipse reference in 6,000-year-old Hindu tex
https://www.sott.net/article/494583-Astronomers-discover-oldest-known-eclipse-reference-in-6000-year-old-Hindu-text

shipyard at Lothal, the commercial center of the Harappan civilization and world's oldest port
https://www.sott.net/article/494603-New-studies-confirm-that-there-was-indeed-a-shipyard-at-Lothal-the-commercial-center-of-the-Harappan-civilization-and-worlds-oldest-port

NASA
 discovers a long-sought global electric field on Earth
https://www.sott.net/article/494374-NASA-discovers-a-long-sought-global-electric-field-on-Earth

Evidence of human genetic adaptation to carbohydrates since adoption of agriculture 12,000 years ago
https://www.sott.net/article/494582-Evidence-of-human-genetic-adaptation-to-carbohydrates-since-adoption-of-agriculture-12000-years-ago-revealed-in-new-study

Briefly Exposed Diluvial Sediments origin for coal
https://creation.com/beds-coal-origin

Termites Are Master Ecosystem Builders
https://crev.info/2024/09/termites-ecosystem-builders/

Darwinists Try Another Excuse for Dinosaur Soft Tissue
https://crev.info/2024/09/another-excuse-for-dinosaur-soft-tissue/

human dispersal across Europe
https://phys.org/news/2024-09-population-phases-human-dispersal-europe.html

NEW Discovery at 11,400-Year-Old Karahan Tepe
https://youtube.com/watch?v=5rUUr14iOGA

Karahan Tepe: A Great Mystery Solved?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=GCVQO1SAcXI

5000 Years of Millennial Cosmology
https://youtube.com/watch?v=5kavOXNEI0E

Ash from NZ Supervolcano Found in Tasmania
https://youtube.com/watch?v=IJm36SJRbZI

What's at the site of Troy? Find out.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=4gJY0fbwECU

Yangshan Quarry & The Most Ambitious Megalithic Monument Never Constructed
https://youtube.com/watch?v=tVDmsw91Q6s

How Did The ANCIENTS Build The DOLMEN OF MENGA?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Z8LvkbGSXNw

Archaeology is DEAD.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=MSGoS6mng3A

Gobekli Tepe Olive Trees: Threat to Site or Erosion Control?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=2BX93Z0fitk

Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis Vs Scientific Ethics
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Np67Eh2y9NM

8/31

SPACE

The moon was once covered by an ocean of molten rock
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-moon-ocean-molten-india-space.html

What makes a supercluster?
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-supercluster.html

spectacular star cluster
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-hubble-captures-unique-ultraviolet-view.html

Early galaxies not as massive as initially thought
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-early-galaxies-massive-thought.html

New hyperluminous quasar
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-hyperluminous-quasar.html

hidden magmatism at the Chang'e-6 lunar landing site
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-geologists-hidden-magmatism-lunar-site.html

Ice caps on Mars offer clues to ancient climates
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-ice-caps-mars-clues-ancient.html

more star birth clues
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-rogue-worlds-webb-telescope-star.html

new open cluster
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-astronomers-cluster-gaia.html

Perseverance rover on Mars begins steep climb to rim of a crater
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-nasa-perseverance-rover-mars-steep.html

star formation in nearby nebula NGC 261
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-hubble-star-formation-nearby-nebula.html

variable star population of globular cluster NGC 1851
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-variable-star-population-globular-cluster.html

extended ionized gas around Messier 77
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-astronomers-ionized-gas-messier.html

the rosy tendrils of Andromeda
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-hubble-rosy-tendrils-andromeda.html

merging galaxies from 12.8 billion years ago
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-astronomers-merging-galaxies-billion-years.html

solar wind gets a magnetic push
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-solar-orbiter-magnetic.html

Alfvén waves drive the acceleration and heating of the solar wind
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-space-probes-alfvn-solar.html


PHYSICS & TECH
https://milesmathis.forumotion.com/t632p150-latest-mm-eu-related-science-articles#7735


EARTH SCIENCE

Humans were living near West Papua at least 55,000 years ago
https://www.sott.net/article/494242-Humans-were-living-near-West-Papua-at-least-55000-years-ago-study-finds

6,000-year-old Dolmen of Menga suggests Neolithic builders had 'amazingly' precise understanding of science
https://www.sott.net/article/494247-6000-year-old-Dolmen-of-Menga-suggests-Neolithic-builders-had-amazingly-precise-understanding-of-science

Mysterious structures in Earth's mantle that scatter and slow seismic waves found 'everywhere'
https://www.sott.net/article/494246-Mysterious-structures-in-Earths-mantle-that-scatter-and-slow-seismic-waves-found-everywhere-study-suggests

first successful detection of Earth's ambipolar electric field, lifts charged particles in our upper atmosphere to greater heights
https://www.sott.net/article/494374-NASA-discovers-a-long-sought-global-electric-field-on-Earth

that fell in Eastern Cape was a car-size meteorite
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-space-junk-fell-eastern-cape.html

Dinosaurs in the Bible
https://creation.com/behemoth-leviathan

Carbonyl sulfide and the origin of life
https://creation.com/carbonyl-sulfide-and-ool

Helium gives evidence that the earth is young
https://creation.com/blowing-old-earth-belief-away

Lowermost mantle becomes more complicated
https://creation.com/lowermost-mantle-becomes-more-complicated

More Mixed Land and Marine Fossils in Wales
https://www.icr.org/article/more-mixed-land-and-marine-fossils-wales/

Long Ages and the Bible—What’s the Problem?
https://www.icr.org/article/long-ages-and-the-bible/

DNA Code Has Grammar
https://crev.info/2024/08/dna-grammar/

Epic Monument From 6,000 Years Ago Is a Feat of Stone Age Engineering
https://www.sciencealert.com/this-epic-monument-from-6000-years-ago-is-a-feat-of-stone-age-engineering

Stunning Astronomical Observatory Unearthed in Ancient Egypt
https://www.sciencealert.com/stunning-astronomical-observatory-unearthed-in-ancient-egypt

Study links fear of conflict to population changes in Neolithic Europe
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-links-conflict-population-neolithic-europe.html

submerged ancient bridge discovered in a Spanish cave
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-submerged-ancient-bridge-spanish-cave.html

Ancient Egyptians used so much copper, they polluted the harbor near the pyramids
https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/ancient-egyptians/5-000-year-old-copper-pollution-found-near-the-pyramids

ELECTRIC UNIVERSE EYES Channel
https://youtube.com/@ElectricUniverseEyes/videos

Shocking Mysteries Of Ancient Texts
https://youtube.com/watch?v=dlKzbgUgBT4
0' Babel text star map of inner solar system 5300-5600 years old from China
1' Ebers papyrus 1550 BC medical text
10' Dispilio Tablet 8 pointed Star Map from artificial island in Macedonia 5200BC
50' Babylonian Flood Tablet (11th tablet of Epic of Gilgamesh) re Uta-Napishtim and the Great Flood.
53' Turin King List from Ramses II
58' Kashmir Himalayan Sky Map with Supernova
1h8' Egyptian Book of Two Ways to Rostau
1h10' Osiris Tomb 6th Dynasty
1h32' Maya Codex with Venus Calendar
1h34' Kish Tablet Sumeria
1h40' Oldest Love Poem Mesopotamia
1h44' Tale of Ship-wrecked Sailor

The Babylonian Map of the World
https://youtube.com/watch?v=LUxFzh8r384
Clay tablet from the 6th century BC Mesopotamia showing cities of Babylon within a double ring called the Bitter River with 8-pointed star triangles showing lands beyond the river - One triangle depicts the ark of the Great Flood which is nearest the city of Urartu, which means Ararat.

Andrew Hall: Granite Cauldron and the Electric Winds
https://youtube.com/watch?v=zGfm8D7USmg

Andrew Hall: Electricity in Ancient Egypt
https://youtube.com/watch?v=i4jWPfNJ0rM

What Happened When Mount St. Helens Erupted?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=hiTyyqt3NKU

Lidar reveals the ancient landforms that most Carolina Bays researchers won't show you
https://youtube.com/watch?v=fim_hQNivxs
Windblown sand dunes on bays probably means there was strong wind as the bays were forming from ice boulder impacts. A.Z. said last week the jet stream came down to Earth.

Göbekli Tepe Latest: NEW 2024 Archaeology Update, Discoveries & Theories
https://youtube.com/watch?v=HJpEEypdPpk

4 Massive Asteroid Impacts That Hit Australia
https://youtube.com/watch?v=O7OyPdiPSco
https://youtube.com/watch?v=E4W-9cqfnbg

Viewers Ply Me with Ancient History Questions
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ep7twaK5r0U

Cloud Ladder Hall: The Giant Chinese Cave That Creates Its Own Weather
https://youtube.com/watch?v=8NbFuqAhQWc

How Did The ANCIENTS Build The DOLMEN OF MENGA?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Z8LvkbGSXNw

The Gobekli Tepe “Situation” is WORSE Than I Thought
https://youtube.com/watch?v=2BXsMgp8KLc

The Underhanded Ways Archaeologists Combat Criticism
https://youtube.com/watch?v=P_k0CYBWzng

WHY Did Stonehenge Have a Stone From Scotland?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=X2L2sl9w3hU

8/17

SPACE

Compelling evidence of past life on Mars
https://www.sott.net/article/493962-NASA-made-a-world-shaking-discovery-Compelling-evidence-of-past-life-on-Mars

gassy baby stars
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-webb-captures-image-gassy-baby.html

X-ray binary system contains a white dwarf
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-newly-ray-binary-white-dwarf.html

oceans of water on Mars. It's just too deep to tap.
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-scientists-oceans-mars-deep.html

Are Andromeda and the Milky Way doomed to collide? Maybe not
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-andromeda-milky-doomed-collide.html

massive eccentric brown dwarf
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-massive-eccentric-brown-dwarf.html

galaxies in denser environments are as much as 25% larger
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-astronomers-galaxies-denser-environments-larger.html

there may not be a 'Hubble tension'
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-analysis-webb-universe-expansion-hubble.html

newly discovered hypervelocity star
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-tracking-newly-hypervelocity-star-citizen.html

more than one thousand new star cluster candidates
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-astronomers-thousand-star-cluster-candidates.html

Hubble rings in a new galactic view
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-hubble-galactic-view.html


PHYSICS & TECH
https://milesmathis.forumotion.com/t632p150-latest-mm-eu-related-science-articles#7722


EARTH SCIENCE

Stonehenge altar stone hails from Scotland
https://www.heritagedaily.com/2024/08/stonehenge-altar-stone-hails-from-scotland/153227

unprecedented atmospheric changes during May's geomagnetic superstorm
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-unprecedented-atmospheric-geomagnetic-superstorm.html

dino-killing asteroid's origin: past Jupiter
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-scientists-dino-asteroid-jupiter.html

Earth's rotation history shows deceleration has been in a staircase pattern
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-earth-rotation-history-deceleration-staircase.html

phenomenon impacting Earth's radiation belts
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-scientists-phenomenon-impacting-earth-belts.html

The Nile Valley was carved in Noah’s Flood
https://creation.com/nile-valley-noahs-flood

Do Tiny Mammal Fossils Corroborate Pre-Flood Longevity?
https://www.icr.org/article/tiny-mammal-fossils-corroborate-longevity/

Fossil Indicates Homo floresiensis Smaller than Thought
https://crev.info/2024/08/hobbit-news-bergman/

Climate Change: What the Science Says
https://crev.info/2024/08/climate-change-what-the-science-says/

Gobekli Tepe in the News
https://www.sis-group.org.uk/news/2024/08/13/gobekli-tepe-in-the-news/

Carvings in Ancient Temple of Göbekli Tepe Could Be Earth's Oldest Calendar
https://www.sciencealert.com/carvings-in-ancient-temple-of-gbekli-tepe-could-be-earths-oldest-calendar

Martin Sweatman Drops Facinating Paper on Turkish Tepes
https://cosmictusk.com/martin-sweatman-drops-paper-on-turkish-tepes/

Seamount near Lanzarote
https://www.sis-group.org.uk/news/2024/08/14/seamount-near-lanzarote/
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/volcanos/this-could-be-the-origin-of-the-atlantis-legend-mountain-that-sank-beneath-the-waves-discovered-off-canary-islands

Earliest Plant Artifact Outside Africa
https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2024-08-13/ty-article-magazine/archaeologists-report-earliest-plant-artifact-outside-africa/00000191-484e-d16c-afbd-4c5e2ad10000

how and when humans first moved into the Pacific
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-evidence-west-papua-fresh-clues.html

Neanderthal Adaptability in Ancient Rock Shelter
https://www.sciencealert.com/surprising-signs-of-neanderthal-adaptability-discovered-in-ancient-rock-shelter

tardigrade fossils embedded in amber
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-technology-tardigrade-fossils-embedded-amber.html

Sarcasm and Frustration about the Carolina Bays
https://youtube.com/watch?v=h-P8yJLV_zM

RARE Sphinx Excavation Photographs
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ThgLNXAKyT4

Andrew Hall: Megalithic Chemistry
https://youtube.com/watch?v=5qUkG34GKHc

Rupert Sheldrake Vs Praveen Mohan
https://youtube.com/watch?v=zBEwy8cpt8M

A River Full of Ramayana
https://youtube.com/watch?v=RuMNh9zDQUU

Tasmania Was Once Connected to the Grand Canyon
https://youtube.com/watch?v=MIFwkCbDeKs

The Massive Asteroid Impact in Central Australia
https://youtube.com/watch?v=RHlov3BeLAY

DeDunking Channel SLAMS One of My Videos
https://youtube.com/watch?v=jDsgvee-J5c

No Cruder Work Under Megaliths? Is this True?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=lRXi_IrTqr8

Archaeologists Discover Buried Maya Remains Deep Inside An Ancient Cave
https://youtube.com/watch?v=86MgCNnAuug

The Lost Iron Age Capital Of Wales?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ilXyQTjcSZg

OLDEST Example of VISUAL STORYTELLING Identified in ROCK ART
https://youtube.com/watch?v=NPBwWAX3KGQ