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And so, I repeat: the two great themes of myth are the yearning for the golden age and a terror of a world-destroying catastrophe. The two ideas are inextricably linked to each other. In virtually all of the stories about the Fall from Eden and the Flood of Noah, the great celestial bodies in the heavens were said to have been out of control.
What seems to be a more "pristine" version of the story is that of Amlodhi, of Icelandic legend, who owned a mill, which, in his own time, "ground out peace and plenty". Later, in decaying times, it ground out salt. Finally, it fell to the bottom of the ocean and was grinding out rock and sand, creating a vat whirlpool, the maelstrom. According to Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend, this myth was evidence for an astronomical process, the precession of the zodiac. As already discussed, this is the shifting of the sun through the signs of the zodiac, and, according to them, it determines "world ages". They write:
Now it is time to locate the origin of the image of the Mill, and further, what it alleged breakup and the coming into being of Whirlpool can possibly mean.
The starting place is in Greece, Cleomedes (c AD 150), speaking of the northern latitudes, states: "The heavens there turn around in the way a millstone does". Al-Farghani in the East takes up the same idea, and his colleagues will supply the details. They call the star Kochab, Beta Ursae Minoris, "mill peg", and the stars of the little bear, surrounding the North Pole, and Fas a-rahha (the hole of the mill peg), "because they represent, as it were, a hole (the axle ring) in which the mill axle turns, since the axle of the equator (the polar axis) is to be found in this region, fairly close to the star Al-jadi..." These are the words of the Arab Cosmographer al-Kazvini. Ideler comments: "Koth, the common name of the Pole, means really the axle of the movable upper millstone which goes through the lower fixed on, what is called the 'mill-iron."
...The Bhagavata Purana tells us how the virtuous prince Dhruva was appointed as Pole star. The particular virtue of the prince, which alarmed even the gods, is worth mentioning: he stood on one leg for more than a month, motionless. This what was announced to him: "The stars and their figures, and also the planets shall turn around you."...
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There is a remark by Trimalchio in Petronius (Satyricon 39): "Thus the orb of heaven turns around like a millstone, and ever does something bad." It was not a foreign idea to the ancients that the mills of the gods grind slowly, and that the result is usually pain.
The nine grim goddesses who "once ground Amlodhi's meal", working now that "host-cruel skerry quern" beyond the edge of the world, are in Mundlfoeri, literally "the mover of the handle". The word mundil...is never used in the old Norse literature about any other object than the sweep or handle with which the movable millstone is turned." Here we have a clue that refers directly to something that "turns the mill." The "nine grim goddesses", whom we may identify with the Egyptian Ennead, are located in the "handle".
The case is then established. But there is an ambiguity here, which discloses further depths to the idea. "Moendull" comes from the Sanskrit "Manthati", says Rydberg, "it means to swing, twist, bore...Its direct application always refers to the production of fire by friction".
And here we see the idea of a binary star system moving in tandem orbit with one another. A cosmic "machine", the "helicoidal track of the sun", as Fulcanelli put it. The authors of Hamlet's Mill struggle on, however, with their uniformitarian idea:
The Identity of the Mill, in its many versions, with heaven is thus universally understood and accepted. But hitherto nobody seems to have wondered about the second part of the story, which also occurs in the many versions. How and why does it always happen that this Mill, the peg of which is Polaris, had to be wrecked or unhinged? Once the archaic mind had grasped the forever enduring rotation, what caused it to think that axle jumps out of the hole? What memory of catastrophic events has created this story of destruction? Why shouldn't Vainamoinen...state explicitly that another Mill has to be constructed? Why had Dhruva to be appointed to play Pole star- and for a given cycle? For the story refers in no way to the creation of the world.
The simple answer lies in the facts of the case. The Pole star does get out of place, and every few thousand years another star has to be chosen which best approximates that position. It is well known that the Great Pyramid, so carefully sighted, is not oriented at our Pole star, but at alpha draconis, which occupied the position at the pole 5,000 years ago. ...It is the more difficult for moderns to imagine that in those far-off ages men could keep track of such imperceptible shifting, as many of them are not aware of the mere facts,
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This remark about the Pyramid being oriented to Draconis is misleading. The fact is, the orientation of the pyramid to the terrestrial pole remains constant. It is only the pole stars that change by the shifting of the terrestrial axial orientation.
Most of these myths, however, come under a misleading name. They have been understood to deal with the end of the world. ...What actually comes to an end is a world, in the sense of a world-age.
Coherence will be reestablished in this welter of traditions if it is realized that what is referred to is the grandest of heavenly phenomena, the Precession of the Equinoxes.
Now, did you notice what these two authors have done here? Aside from their abysmally ignorant remark about the orientation of the pyramids to Draconis, they have resorted to Uniformitarianism to explain the great mystery of this worldwide myth of the "unhinging" of the Pole star. They, and many, many others, have followed this path, believing that all the clues from ancient monuments and myths have to do simply with measuring time, "World Ages", in more or less "cultural" and historical terms. The World Age of the Hebrews was the age of the Ram, symbolized by Abraham taking his son to sacrifice him, and a Ram appeared in the thicket, and such other allusions. The age of Pisces, the age of Christ, is symbolized by the fish, and numerous allusions are dredged up to support that one. Now, we are supposed to be entering (or have already done so, depending on your source), the Age of Aquarius. These more recent descriptions of "ages" directly contradict the ancient ideas of the Yugas and the decline of human morality. The New Age COINTELPRO has worked long and hard to promote the idea of the "Age of Aquarius" as a time of transcendent spiritual progress and "ascension" graded on the curve, of course.
I should also point out right here that if the Precession of the Zodiac was such a great way to measure time and world ages, there wouldn't be so many opinions about when one began and another ended. As a measure of time that is so "vastly elegant", it ought to at least work, right? Well, it doesn't. What is more, the zodiac has been created and altered within recorded history, having at various times ten signs, eleven, twelve, and thirteen. So, what's the point? From this perspective, there isn't one except for an attempt to deny the possibility that the ancients meant exactly what they said, even if later interpretations have assured us that the tales were meant as allegories.
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But still, using this Precession as a giant clock, with some fantastic perambulations through archaic lore, a dozen or more authors have produced as many different versions of what a "world age" is, and "when" they begin and end, and how They then try to link thee ages to all sorts of weird theories from the opening of "stargates" to galactic core explosions to "monuments to the end of time".
The answer is a lot simpler than that. I think those things that point us to the idea that the poles comes "unhinged" do, indeed, point to the Precession. But the important thing about this Precession is that it points us to the fact that the Earth WOBBLES. And I think that the thing the ancients are trying most desperately to point out to us in these stories is that the Earth wobbles for a REASON, and we ought to notice this wobble and ask some questions about the "nine grim goddesses" who "turn the handle" and where and what that "handle" might be that increases friction to the point that fire is produced!
In Snorri's Gylfaginning, there is a prediction for the future given in the Song of the Sybyl, followed by a dialogue between King Gylfi and the Aesir, disguised as men. King Gylfi asks, "What happens when the whole world has burned up, the gods are dead, and all of mankind is gone? You have said earlier that each human being would go on living in this or that world." The anwer is that there are several worlds for the good and the bad. Then Gylfi aks, "Shall any gods be alive, and shall there be something of earth and heaven?" And the answer is:
"The earth rises up from the sea again, and is green and beautiful and things grow without sowing. Vidar and Vali are alive, for neither the sea nor the flame of Surt have hurt them and they dwell on the Eddyfield, where once stood Asgard. There come also the sons of Thor, Modi, and Magni, and bring along his hammer. There come also Balder and Hoder from the other world. All sit down and converse together. They rehearse their rune and talk of event of old days. Then they find in the grass the golden tablets that the Aesir once played with. Two children of men will also be found safe from the great flames of Surt. Their names, Lif and Lifthrasir, and they feed on the morning dew and from this human pair will come a great population which will fill the earth. And strange to say, the sun, before being devoured by Fenrir, will have borne a daughter, no less beautiful and going the same ways as her mother."
Again, the author's of Hamlet's Mill take a prosaic view of these matters, pronouncing sagely that it is "just a metaphor". And again, I have to disagree. I do not think the point is to "measure time", in the sense of "world ages" of culture, civilizations, or even "psychic" or occult influences, except in that they relate to something far more important: WHAT IS CAUSING THE WOBBLE AND WHAT CAN BE THE RESULT? And we have a clear answer in Snorri's tale: The sun will have borne a daughter - which can only occur via a "mating" or Hiero Gamos.
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In this sense, the ancients might have supposed, and quite rightly, that if we ever noticed this fact, if we were pointed in this direction, if we were plainly told that there i a handle that turns the axis, that this handle gets hot, that the axis of the planet comes unhinged, that it started spinning upright and then gradually wobbled out of place and finally FALLS OVER INTO THE SEA, that we would be clever enough to get it. The clue they are pointing out to us is there is something OUT THERE that is the HANDLE and we ought to be able to figure out, by applying principles of phyics to celestial mechanics, exactly what it is and what it does. The repeated references to the "dying and rebirth of the Sun", in some sort of cosmic hierogamy, and the Sun giving birth to a daughter, or having a Celestial Twin, ought to be pretty plain clues to anybody who is paying attention to these things.
In the third century BC, Berossus popularized the Chaldean doctrine of the "Great Year" in a form that spread through the entire Hellenic world. According to this teaching, the universe is eternal but it is periodically destroyed and reconstituted every "Great Year". What a Great Year is, exactly, varies from school to school. But, according to Berossus, when the seven planets assemble in Cancer, there will be a Great Winter; when they assembled in Capricorn, at the Summer solstice (clearly an astrological opposition to the sun is implied here, the entire universe will be consumed by fire. Similar ideas are found in India and Iran as well as among the Maya and Aztec.
Now, what we need to remember about these postulations is the inherently optimistic character of them; the consciousness of the normalityof the cyclical catastrophe, the certainty of its meaning, and, above all, that it is NEVER, EVER final! The ideas communicate to us that, just as three days of darkness preceding the rebirth of the Moon are necessary, so are the death of an individual and the periodic death of humanity necessary. Any material form, by the mere fact of its existence in time, loses vigor and becomes formless if only for an instant. It MUST return to chaos, to orgy, to darkness, to water; it must be reabsorbed into the primordial unity from which it issued to be reborn. The King is dead: long live the King!
Thus, the New Year celebrations and other initiations served to remind men that suffering is never final; that death is always followed by resurrection; that every defeat is annulled and transcended by the final victory of return to the Edenic stateor the beginning of the new cycle.
In Eliade's opinion, the drama of Tammuz and other variations of the same archetype, including Jesus, reminded men of the sufferings of the just and thereby rendered them tolerable. Tammuz suffered without being guilty. He was humiliated, flogged until he bled, and then imprisoned in a pit, or Hell. It was there that the Great Goddess visited him, encouraged, and revived him. (In later corrupted versions, it was a "messenger" who visited, but the essential story has survived in Gnostic Manichaean and Mandaean prototypes, though with changes aquired during the period of Greco-Oriental syncretism.)
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I would like to suggest that the drama of the dying god is not only the symbol of the literal "death of the Sun" in terms of its lengthy obscuration, but also includes the drama of the Cosmic Hieros Gamos between the Sun and its Companion. More than this, the "dying god" drama might also be the enacting of a certain technology that permits passage into other realms; the very technology that will be required to build the Ark and find the Holy Grail.
In the pit of Hell, during the descent into chaos, man is awakened by the Goddess who brings the good tidings of his salvation and imminent liberation and restoration to the Edenic state of innocence. As it was in the days of Noah, Noah built an Ark. The coming of the Goddess represents the coming of knowledge, of wisdom, of understanding the hyperdimensional realities by means of the symbols of our reality which are, ultimately, only shadows on the cave wall of Plato's allegory.
They aren't physical of course, but with the nature of the verbal attacks/accusations it seems like I am being set up for something I've not done. With the things in my past, my troubled teen years when I was also basically railroaded by the TPTB over trivial things (truancy), I will have a difficult time defending myself since I will already have been judged guilty by others. I've felt for a while now like things were changing in general, the energy in the air is different. I've also had what might be milder physical attacks for quite sometime manifesting as chronic fatigue and bouts of respiratory infections (another of those just started a couple days ago) but thought that was just par for the course due to the "quickening of the universe" but now am not so sure after reading about all the High Strangeness happening to forum members. I guess my semi-sleep and lack of awareness (and discipline) isn't enough to render me a non-threat to the MCS. I'm worried about what might happen to those who are farther along and more committed than myself, especially since they seemed to have been able to take out PF so easily. 
