Catastrophism
As I wrote above, in order to form any ideas about a “trigger,” it is important to try to sort out the data that we can get and decide if a Pole Shift is a gradual, uniformitarian event, or if it is sudden and cataclysmic.
There are endless descriptions of possible scenarios, and none of them were ringing any bells in terms of the actual scientific data until I discovered the ideas of Immanuel Velikovsky. Indeed, John White devotes about 20 or so pages to Velikovsky’s ideas, and in general, he merely used them to support the idea of past Pole Shifts, pointing out that Velikovsky made no predictions about future events of this type. We might also note that Velikovsky must have hit a real nerve to have been so viciously vilified. The Scientific Thought Police went into overdrive to suppress him! Velikovsky was condemned basically because he denied that the orbits in the solar system were stable.
When reading Velikovsky’s blow-by-blow interpretation of the events of the Exodus as recorded in the Bible as the result of the close approach of a cometary Venus, I realized that these events mirrored, almost word for word, the events described in the book of Revelation. What is more interesting is that the book of Revelation was written long before the current craze of End Time Prophecies. It is sort of the Mother of all End Time Prophecies. While I didn’t necessarily agree with all Velikovsky had to say, it certainly made me think of the descriptions of myth and legends in a new way.
As it happens, there are many individuals who have noted the evidence in ancient myths and legends. Sitchin is not the first. Theories of the earth encountering a comet did not originate with Velikovsky either.
In 1882, Ignatius Donnelly, a Minnesota congressman and scholar of all-things-Atlantean, wrote a book entitled Ragnarok, wherein he proposed that a giant comet had passed close to the earth in past ages. The intense heat from the comet had set off huge fires that raged across the face of the globe. He suggested that the comet had dumped vast amounts of dust on the earth, triggered earthquakes, leveled mountains, and initiated the ice age. He even explained some of the miracles of the Bible in terms of his comet, proposing that the standing-still of the sun at the command of Joshua was possibly a tale commemorating this event. Donnelly’s readers were thrilled by his descriptions of the “glaring and burning monster” in the sky, scorching the planet with unearthly heat and shaking the land with “thunders beyond all thunders.”
Possibly inspired by Donnelly, Camille Flammarion wrote
The End of the World in 1893 in which he recounted a fictional collision between the earth and a comet fifty times its size. Flammarion’s lurid prose ensured that his book was an immediate sensation!
For thousands of years, comets have been associated with disaster and misfortune. They are harbingers of plagues, earthquakes, floods, natural disasters and wars. In fact, the passing of a comet followed by war has been so frequent as to earn for comets the soubriquet “The Swords of Heaven.” Tradition has assigned responsibility to comets for death and destructions, disease and decay, defeat and dissolution, the deaths of kings, and the fall of empires. It could be said that no celestial phenomenon is so widely and generally feared. Velikovsky believed that this fear had a foundation in fact: it was a sort of global subconscious memory of actual encounters between the earth and other cosmic bodies that were so devastating that the fearful reality of the event was suppressed into the collective subconscious, and only a “comet phobia” remained in evidence.
In 1857, an anonymous German astrologer predicted that a comet would strike the earth on June 13 of that year. The impending catastrophe became the talk of all of Europe. The French astronomer, Jacques Babinet, tried to reassure people by stating that a collision between the earth and a comet would do no harm. He compared the impact to “a railway train coming into contact with a fly.” His words, apparently, had little effect. The Paris correspondent for the American journal, Harper’s Weekly, wrote:
Women have miscarried; crops have been neglected; wills have been made; comet-proof suits of clothing have been invented; a cometary life insurance company (premiums payable in advance) has been created… all because an almanac maker… thought proper to insert, under the week commencing June 13, ‘About this time, expect a comet.’
Naturally, by the time of dawn on July 14, it was apparent that there wasn’t going to be a comet. The point is: an astrologer’s “prophecy” had terrified millions in the total absence of any evidence that there was a comet anywhere near the planet. And this type of scenario has occurred more than once, even down to our own day and time when the Heaven’s Gate cult members committed mass suicide in response to rumors and prognostications regarding comet Hale Bopp.
Immanuel Velikovsky demonstrated rather convincingly that there was massive evidence of both a literary and scientific nature that great catastrophic earth changes had occurred during the second millennium BC due to cometary showers and the close passage of Venus. He settled on a date of 1450 BC, but more recent scientific evidence points to the date actually being between 1644 and 1600 BC. There is also evidence for a disruption circa 5200 BC, 8,800 BC, 12,400 BC, 16,000 BC, 19,600 BC, and by logical extension every 3,600 years previously for an indefinite and unknown period of time. What is more, if the last “return” was in 1600 BC, we are not just due, we are overdue for the next one.
Sitchin’s theories about Nibiru do not take into account many of the literary reports from the ancients regarding these great bombardments of comets. Velikovsky tried to account for this by suggesting that a cometary Venus was hauling around a tail of rocks. It seems that Velikovsky and his supporters, and Sitchin and his supporters, although recognizing serious worldwide catastrophes, have failed to recognize the true nature of such events. Velikovsky proposed that Venus out of orbit was a more or less one-time event rather than a symptom of a long-term cycle. Sitchin came closer with his understanding of the cycle, but he failed to consider all the variables in his solution. What is more, once he settled on his idea as the one and only solution, his efforts to make the mythical elements fit the hypothesis became almost as absurd as the efforts of mainstream science to avoid them!
The confirmed linchpin for the fall of the late Bronze Age cultures, the Middle Eastern Civilizations, and other recorded disasters that are found to be “around that time,” seems to be the period from 1644 BC to 1600 BC. The ice cores show the disturbances starting in 1644 (registering in 1645), and the tree rings show a big spike in 1628, though the entire period was disturbed.107
What is clear is that whatever comes at 3600 year intervals as shown by the ice cores is capable of setting off prolonged periods of earth changes that are above the levels of ordinary uniformitarian geologic and climatalogical changes. But what is important is that the mythical and archaeological evidence suggests that it is a shower of asteroids or comets that are NOT seen until it is TOO LATE.
To ascribe all of the evidence of cyclic catastrophe to a “uniformitarian” idea that it just got cold and then got warm and got cold and warm... with such an evident cycle is sort of absurd. To ascribe it to a “galactic core explosion” is equally absurd.
I think that, based on the observations of the ancients that what we are looking for is a recurring shower of comets that cycles through the solar system regularly, on a 3,600-year orbit. What is more, it seems that this body of comets, clustered together, at some point, resembles a fiery serpent with a mouthful of devouring teeth in the blackness of space. For this reason, it was given the name spdt, spdw, and spd-ibhw (sharp toothed), in the Pyramid Texts. It undoubtedly is a terrifying spectacle!
We return again to the question: what is the “initiator” of these showers, and did they begin in some interaction with an “outside agent?”
According to scientific studies about the possibilities of our Sun having a companion, periodic comets were “bumped” into the solar system by a dark star, a “little brother” or “little sister” of our own Sun, which has a long, elliptical orbit measured, most likely, in millions of years.
(Graph by Matese showing cometary scatter patterns)
If it is a companion star, present day science pretty clearly demonstrates that it must have a very long period; otherwise, we would notice it quite plainly in orbital perturbations of a certain type. In actual fact, the computer model that best fits the various dynamics is that of a 27 million year orbit.108 And this, of course, leads us to a considerable difficulty: the period of return of the Dark Star, as opposed to the period of disasters. Obviously, a body with a 27 million year orbit isn’t likely to be remembered. However, an ancient advanced science may have certainly figured it out exactly as it is being proposed in the present day, and it was remembered and passed down in what came to be seen as fantastic myths and legends.
The work by these experts suggests that the observations of other binary systems demonstrate the model for the projected separation they have given. Such paired stars are “physically connected systems,” and these brown dwarfs are “burning,” though non-nuclear. What is more, if it is out there, it never enters the Inner Solar system, though it may be seen from afar and may interact with our own Sun in dramatic ways. This is what Fulcanelli seems to be suggesting in his many allusions to the sun and to helicoidal tracks of the Sun, and to “doubles” and “diplomacy” and “mirrors,” not to mention the dedication of his books to: The Brothers Heliopolis.
Thus, we understand that it is not this Twin sun that makes its “appearance” at every period of catastrophe.
Nevertheless, the analyses of the periodic comets suggests that it does, at very long periods, again and again, crash through the Oort cloud like a bowling ball through rows of pins, sending a new collection of them spinning into a periodical orbit, and because they follow the the laws of celestial mechanics, they establish an orbit of 3,600 years. This idea has some support from scientific studies, which the theory of the Planet Nibiru as a visitor to the inner solar system does not.
When we look at the mythology of both Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, we suspect that these stories do not refer to a “Tenth Planet,” but to the presence of the Sun’s dark companion, a failed star classified as a “brown dwarf.” It also seems to be the one hypothesis that encompasses all the “sub-hypotheses” of the many researchers who have attempted to deal with different aspects of the problems of the past and future of the earth.
Sitchin proposed that a “10th Planet” caroms through the inner solar system. Scientific evidence does not support a body, the size he suggests, entering into the inner solar system. However, science can support a cluster of comets spread out in space that returns at 3,600-year intervals. In the end, the potential for cataclysmic disruption of the earth is about as bad either way.
Sitchin suggests that his 10th planet is inhabited by the Annunaki/Nefilim. He claims that they are our creators and masters. His ideas are tremendously out of synch with the strong circumstantial evidence about the alien presence on this planet. Sitchin’s ideas are also flawed for the other reasons we have already mentioned, though he has certainly produced interesting work in his interpretations of the Sumerian texts as possibly referring to “alien interactions” and the periodic return of something!
Other theorists suggest that the Dark Companion of the Sun has its own habitable planetary system, home to the mythical ‘gods’ of the ancient world. This theory that a brown dwarf with its own planetary system is able to pass through the Oort cloud and the Kuiper belt, keeping its own mini-solar system intact, is obviously extremely problematical. In the same way that Sitchin simply passes right over the problems of Nibiru seeding life on earth, forgetting that evolutionary processes that are being postulated must apply to both bodies, the creator of the “Dark Star: Have Planets, Will Travel” theory also does not consider the fundamental problem of such an idea.
And so, I repeat: the two great themes of myth are the yearning for the golden age and a terror of a world-destroying catastrophe. The two ideas are inextricably linked to each other. In virtually all of the stories about the Fall from Eden and the Flood of Noah, the great celestial bodies in the heavens were said to have been out of control.
What seems to be a more “pristine” version of the story is that of Amlodhi, of Icelandic legend, who owned a mill, which, in his own time, “ground out peace and plenty.” Later, in decaying times, it ground out salt. Finally, it fell to the bottom of the ocean and was grinding out rock and sand, creating a vast whirlpool, the Maelstrom. According to Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend, this myth was evidence for an astronomical process, the precession of the zodiac. As already discussed, this is the shifting of the sun through the signs of the zodiac, and, according to them, it determines “world ages.” They write:
Now it is time to locate the origin of the image of the Mill, and further, what its alleged breakup and the coming into being of Whirlpool can possibly mean.
The starting place is in Greece. Cleomedes (c. AD 150), speaking of the northern latitudes, states: “The heavens there turn around in the way a millstone does.” Al-Farghani in the East takes up the same idea, and his colleagues will supply the details. They call the star Kochab, Beta Ursae Minoris, “mill peg,” and the stars of the Little Bear, surrounding the North Pole, and Fas al-rahha (the hole of the mill peg) “because they represent, as it were, a hole (the axle ring) in which the mill axle turns, since the axle of the equator (the polar axis) is to be found in this region, fairly close to the star Al-jadi…” These are the words of the Arab Cosmographer al-Kazvini. Ideler comments: “Koth, the common name of the Pole, means really the axle of the movable upper millstone which goes through the lower fixed on, what is called the ‘mill-iron.”
…The Bhagavata Purana tells us how the virtuous prince Dhruva was appointed as Pole star. The particular virtue of the prince, which alarmed even the gods, is worth mentioning: he stood on one leg for more than a month, motionless. This is what was announced to him: “The stars and their figures, and also the planets shall turn around you.”[…]
There is a remark by Trimalchio in Petronius (Satyricon 39): “Thus the orb of heaven turns around like a millstone, and ever does something bad.” It was not a foreign idea to the ancients that the mills of the gods grind slowly, and that the result is usually pain.109
The nine grim goddesses who “once ground Amlodhi’s meal,” working now that “host-cruel skerry quern” beyond the edge of the world, are in Mundlfoeri, literally “the mover of the handle.” The word “mundil…is never used in the old Norse literature about any other object than the sweep or handle with which the movable millstone is turned.” Here we have a clue that refers directly to something that “turns the mill.” The “nine grim goddesses,” whom we may identify with the Egyptian Ennead, are located in the “handle.”
The case is then established. But there is an ambiguity here, which discloses further depths to the idea. “Moendull” comes from Sanskrit “Manthati,” says Rydberg, “it means to swing, twist, bore …Its direct application always refers to the production of fire by friction.”110
And here we see the idea of a binary star system moving in tandem orbit with one another. A cosmic “machine,” the “helicoidal track of the sun,” as Fulcanelli put it. The authors of Hamlet’s Mill struggle on, however, with their uniformitarian idea:
The identity of the Mill, in its many versions, with heaven is thus universally understood and accepted. But hitherto nobody seems to have wondered about the second part of the story, which also occurs in the many versions. How and why does it always happen that this Mill, the peg of which is Polaris, had to be wrecked or unhinged? Once the archaic mind had grasped the forever enduring rotation, what caused it to think that the axle jumps out of the hole? What memory of catastrophic events has created this story of destruction? Why should Vainamoinen … state explicitly that another Mill has to be constructed? Why had Dhruva to be appointed to play Pole star – and for a given cycle? For the story refers in no way to the creation of the world.111
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.112
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.113
Now, did you notice what these two authors have done here? Aside from their abysmally ignorant remark about the orientation of the pyramids to Draconis, they have resorted to Uniformitarianism to explain the great mystery of this worldwide myth of the “unhinging” of the Pole star. They, and many, many others, have followed this path, believing that all the clues from ancient monuments and myths have to do simply with measuring time, “World Ages,” in more or less “cultural” and historical terms. The World Age of the Hebrews was the age of the Ram, symbolized by Abraham taking his son to sacrifice him, and a Ram appeared in the thicket, and such other allusions. The age of Pisces, the age of Christ, is symbolized by the fish, and numerous allusions are dredged up to support that one. Now, we are supposed to be entering (or have already done so, depending on your source), the Age of Aquarius. These more recent descriptions of “ages” directly contradict the ancient ideas of the Yugas and the decline of human morality. The New Age COINTELPRO has worked long and hard to promote the idea of the “Age of Aquarius” as a time of transcendent spiritual progress and “ascension” graded on the curve, of course.
I should also point out right here that if the Precession of the Zodiac was such a great way to measure time and world ages, there wouldn’t be so many opinions about when one began and another ended. As a measure of time that is so “vastly elegant,” it ought to at least work, right? Well, it doesn’t. What is more, the zodiac has been created and altered within recorded history, having at various times ten signs, eleven, twelve and thirteen. So, what’s the point? From this perspective, there isn’t one except for an attempt to deny the possibility that the ancients meant exactly what they said even if later interpreters have assured us that the tales were meant as allegories.
But still, using this Precession as a giant clock, with some fantastic perambulations through archaic lore, a dozen or more authors have produced as many different versions of what a “world age” is, and “when” they begin and end, and how. They then try to link these ages to all sorts of weird theories from the opening of “stargates” to galactic core explosions to “monuments to the end of time.”
The answer is a lot simpler than that. I think those things that point us to the idea that the pole comes “unhinged” do, indeed, point to the Precession. But the important thing about this Precession is that it points us to the fact that the Earth WOBBLES. And I think that the thing the ancients are trying most desperately to point out to us in these stories is that the Earth wobbles for a REASON, and we ought to notice this wobble and ask some questions about the “nine grim goddesses” who “turn the handle” and where and what that “handle” might be that increases friction to the point that fire is produced!
In Snorri’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 answer is that there are several worlds for the good and the bad. Then Gylfi asks: “Shall any gods be alive, and shall there be something of earth and heaven?” And the answer is:
The earth rises up from the sea again, and is green and beautiful and things grow without sowing. Vidar and Vali are alive, for neither the sea nor the flames of Surt have hurt them and they dwell on the Eddyfield, where once stood Asgard. There come also the sons of Thor, Modi, and Magni, and bring along his hammer. There come also Balder and Hoder from the other world. All sit down and converse together. They rehearse their runes and talk of events of old days. Then they find in the grass the golden tablets that the Aesir once played with. Two children of men will also be found safe from the great flames of Surt. Their names, Lif and Lifthrasir, and they feed on the morning dew and from this human pair will come a great population which will fill the earth. And strange to say, the sun, before being devoured by Fenrir, will have borne a daughter, no less beautiful and going the same ways as her mother.”
Again, the authors of Hamlet’s Mill take a prosaic view of these matters, pronouncing sagely that it is “just a metaphor.” And again, I have to disagree. I do not think that the point is to “measure time,” in the sense of “world ages” of culture, civilizations, or even “psychic” or occult influences, except in that they relate to something far more important: WHAT IS CAUSING THE WOBBLE AND WHAT CAN BE THE RESULT? And we have a clear answer in Snorri’s tale: The sun will have borne a daughter - which can only occur via a “mating” or Hieros Gamos.
In this sense, the ancients might have supposed, and quite rightly, that if we ever noticed this fact, if we were pointed in this direction, if we were plainly told that there is a handle that turns the axis, that this handle gets hot, that the axis of the planet comes unhinged, that it started out spinning upright and then gradually wobbled out of place and finally FALLS OVER INTO THE SEA, that we would be clever enough to get it. The clue they are pointing out to us is that there is something OUT THERE that is the HANDLE and we ought to be able to figure out, by applying principles of physics to celestial mechanics, exactly what it is and what it does. The repeated references to the “dying and rebirth of the Sun,” in some sort of cosmic hierogamy, and the Sun giving birth to a daughter, or having a Celestial Twin, ought to be pretty plain clues to anybody who is paying attention to these things.
In the third century BC, Berossus popularized the Chaldean doctrine of the “Great Year“ in a form that spread through the entire Hellenic world. According to this teaching, the universe is eternal but it is periodically destroyed and reconstituted every “Great Year.” What a Great Year is, exactly, varies from school to school. But, according to Berossus, when the seven planets assemble in Cancer, there will be a Great Winter; when they assemble in Capricorn, at the Summer solstice (clearly an astrological opposition to the Sun is implied here), the entire universe will be consumed by fire. Similar ideas are found in India and Iran as well as among the Maya and Aztec.
Now, what we need to remember about these postulations is the inherently optimistic character of them; the consciousness of the normality of the cyclical catastrophe, the certainty of its meaning, and, above all, that it is NEVER, EVER final! The ideas communicate to us that, just as three days of darkness preceding the rebirth of the Moon are necessary, so are the death of an individual and the periodic death of humanity necessary. Any material form, by the mere fact of its existence in time, loses vigor and becomes formless if only for an instant. It MUST return to chaos, to orgy, to darkness, to water; it must be reabsorbed into the primordial unity from which it issued to be reborn. The King is dead: long live the King!
Thus, the New Year celebrations and other initiations served to remind men that suffering is never final; that death is always followed by resurrection; that every defeat is annulled and transcended by the final victory of return to the Edenic state or the beginning of the new cycle.
In Eliade’s opinion, the drama of Tammuz and other variations of the same archetype, including Jesus, reminded men of the sufferings of the just and thereby rendered them tolerable. Tammuz suffered without being guilty. He was humiliated, flogged until he bled, and then imprisoned in a pit, or Hell. It was there that the Great Goddess visited him, encouraged, and revived him. (In later corrupted versions, it was a “messenger” who visited, but the essential story has survived in Gnostic Manichaean and Mandaean prototypes, though with changes acquired during the period of Greco-Oriental syncretism.)
I would like to suggest that the drama of the dying god is not only the symbol of the literal “death of the Sun” in terms of its lengthy obscuration, but also includes the drama of the Cosmic Hieros Gamos between the Sun and its Companion. More than this, the “dying god” drama might also be the enacting of a certain technology that permits passage into other realms; the very technology that will be required to build the Ark and find the Holy Grail.
In the pit of Hell, during the descent into chaos, man is awakened by the Goddess who brings the good tidings of his salvation and imminent liberation and restoration to the Edenic state of innocence. As it was in the days of Noah, Noah built an Ark. The coming of the Goddess represents the coming of knowledge, of wisdom, of understanding the hyperdimensional realities by means of the symbols of our reality which are, ultimately, only shadows on the cave wall of Plato’s allegory.
But something changed the world view. Somehow, the perception of the End of Time became a terrible punishment. Somehow, a god entered the world stage who destroyed the peace of Eden, and tempted man to place his trust in him, and him alone. “I am the Lord your God, and I am a jealous God!” And time became linear and with a prophesied end that was going to be final and complete. And woe to those who were not on the side of the “right god” who claimed to be the only one who could offer “salvation.” The concept of the end being a precursor to a rebirth was lost with the introduction of monotheism. At that point, the End of Time became the End of the World – for everyone except those special chosen ones who were to be saved by a single, specific god to live in some mystical City of God with streets paved with gold, and almond-eyed houris serving dates and wine on every street corner. This single, specific god, has pretty much run the show ever since in any number of disguises. Until this appearance of monotheism, a myth was annually enacted that described a condition of life that was accepted as the way things were: Time was cyclical. The world might end, but if it did, it was only because it had “run down” and needed to be “wound up” again. All of the elements of the story of Noah are found in these myths: “As it was in the days of Noah.”
