Best-selling author GRAHAM HANCOCK
argues that a cosmic explosion will soon strike Earth – triggering epic floods
Extinction Level Event? Within the next 20 years, Earth
faces a collision with the remnants of a comet big enough to end all life as we
know it, according to the author of Magicians of the Gods Graham Hancock
Within 20 years a comet big enough to end life
as we know it will hit Earth
That is view of author Graham Hancock who says
it will trigger epic floods
Says 200 ancient myths tell of a human
civilisation brought to end by fire
He argues scientific evidence now indicates
these are based on hard fact
Around
the world, from Alaska to Indonesia, more than 200 ancient myths tell of a
human civilisation brought to an end by flood and fire. Compelling
scientific evidence, which began to emerge only in 2007, indicates that these
stories, such as the tale of Noah and his Ark, are based on hard fact.
A
cataclysm rocked our planet 12,800 years ago, causing mass extinctions of large
animals such as the mammoth and sloth bears, and all but wiping out our own
race. An entire episode in the human story was rubbed out, a chapter not of
unsophisticated hunter-gatherers but of advanced technology.
All
the signs are that remnants of this civilisation struggled on, sustained by a
few individuals who knew the secrets of the former age. To their primitive
contemporaries, it appeared that they possessed magical, holy powers — they
were what I call the Magicians of the Gods.
These
Magicians left a message for us — not a metaphorical, spiritual message, but a
direct and urgent warning. What happened before can happen again; what
destroyed their world can destroy ours.
Those
warnings have gone unheeded for millennia. Now, we have the scientific evidence
to decode them, but it is almost too late.
Within
the next 20 years, Earth faces a catastrophe a thousand times worse than the
detonation of every nuclear weapon on the planet — a collision with the
remnants of a comet big enough to end all life as we know it.
To
understand what that could mean, we need to look back at the tumultuous epoch
between 10,800 BC and 9,600 BC, which geologists call the ‘Younger Dryas’.
This
was a time of extraordinary shifts in the world’s climate. But the most
devastating change of all came when the ice caps suddenly collapsed, dumping
all the water they contained into the oceans and unleashing a tsunami that
swept across continents.
As
we’ll see, all the evidence suggests this was the result of a comet crashing
into Earth.
Many
Native American tribes describe the devastation in tales passed down through
the generations.
Devastation: A cataclysm rocked our planet 12,800 years
ago, causing mass extinctions of large animals such as the mammoth and sloth
bears, and all but wiping out our own race, Hancock writes
After
the fiery destruction came the floods: ‘The rivers overflowed their banks and
surged across the landscape. Finally, the Creator stamped the Earth, and with a
great quake the Earth split open, sending torrents . . . across the entire
world until only a few mountain peaks stood above the flood.’
This
is not an isolated myth. The Cowichan of British Columbia, the Pima of Arizona,
the Inuit of Alaska and the Luiseno of California have similar stories. But it
is the Ojibwa, people of the Canadian grasslands whose legend seems the most
credible, almost scientific, today.
Their
storytellers remember a comet called Long-Tailed Heavenly Climbing Star which
swept low through the skies, scorching the Earth and leaving behind ‘a
different world. After that, survival was hard work. The weather was colder
than before.’ And the Ojibwa believed this was just a foretaste of an
apocalypse to come.
“A fiery blast shook
the entire world, unleashing a tsunami”
They
spoke of a stark prophecy, foretold by their medicine men: ‘The star with the
long, wide tail is going to destroy the world someday when it comes low again.’
It
was not until the 20th century that scientists even began to consider the
possibility that ancient American myths might be based on real events.
J.
Harlen Bretz, a noted geologist in the Twenties, began to investigate the
notion of a prehistoric flood when he discovered hundreds of ‘erratics’ —
colossal boulders that didn’t belong in the landscape — scattered across the
rocky Scablands of Washington state. Bretz examined a colossal feature, a 600
square mile depression filled with basalt silt 400 feet deep.
He
saw only one explanation: it was scoured by a spectacular flood that had ended
as abruptly as it began.
Amateur
geologist Randall Carlson has taken up Bretz’s work, and he took me to Dry
Falls in Grant County, Washington, to see the most spectacular evidence of the
deluge.
The
waterless falls are on the Grand Coulee, a sheer-sided gash, hundreds of feet
deep and almost 60 miles long, which looks as though the hand of God has seized
a chisel and ripped it along the landscape.
This
chisel was not made of metal but of immense quantities of turbulent,
debris-laden water that flowed for just a few weeks.
In
all directions across the prairie, it has left millions of jagged basalt
boulders, some no bigger than a football, others the size of a family car. Dry
Falls itself is close to three times higher than Niagara and around six times
as wide. The waters 12,800 years ago that carved out this vast cliff, Randall
says, were ‘more like a slurry of thick mud. There’s whole forests torn up by
their roots roiling around in it, and fleets of icebergs jostling on the
surface, and this whole mess is plucking blocks out of the basalt bedrock,
dragging them into the torrent and sweeping them downstream.’
It
might have been the biggest flood, but it was far from the only one. Oceans of
ice melt had been unleashed around the world.
Like
me, Randall believes the most probable explanation for this deluge, literally
of Biblical proportions, was a comet impact — just as the Ojibwa described. A
giant comet travelling on an orbit that took it through the inner solar system
broke up into fragments and some of these, including up to four objects more
than a mile across, smashed into the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice caps
covering northern America in 10,800 BC.
The
heat of these monster meteorites melted the ice. But they also threw vast
clouds of dust and sooty smoke into the upper atmosphere, blotting out the sun.
That
sent temperatures plunging across the Earth and initiated a new Ice Age that
lasted 1,200 years.
This
is not mere speculation and hypothesis. In September 2014, the Journal Of
Geology presented a mass of evidence confirming the copious presence of
so-called nanodiamonds in samples from the Younger Dryas boundary layer.
The
boundary layer is the deposit laid down by a geological event. It can be seen,
for instance, as a stratum in rock.
Nanodiamonds
are microscopic gems that form under rare conditions of great shock, pressure
and heat, and are recognised as signs of powerful impacts by comets and
asteroids.
The
big question was not whether there had been a comet strike 12,800 years ago,
but why there was no crater.
The
explanation is simple: while smaller, low-density particles of the comet would
have exploded in the atmosphere, the larger fragments hit the two-mile ice
caps. The craters they left simply melted away at the end of the last Ice Age.
That long winter is remembered in many legends and sacred texts.
The
Zoroastrian religion in the near East, for example, speaks of a ‘fierce, foul
frost’ and a ‘fatal winter’ inflicted on the whole Earth by an evil spirit who
‘made the world as dark at midday as though it were dark night’.
On
the other side of the world, the ancient Quiche Maya people in Guatemala spoke
of a flood with ‘much hail, black rain and mist, and indescribable cold’.
But
the texts also tell of leaders who arrived in the wake of the disaster, armed
with exceptional knowledge. These are the people I call the Magicians of the
Gods.
They
understood how to construct buildings on a grand scale, how to organise and
govern and how to engineer tools of remarkable sophistication. Some of the
technology they describe appears to rival modern electronic wizardry.
“Temperatures
plunged, starting a new Ice Age”
The
Zoroastrian’s wise man, Yima, was said to possess a miraculous cup in which he
could see anything that was happening anywhere in the world, and a jewelled
glass chariot that could fly.
In
carvings uncovered at ancient sites as far-flung as Turkey and Mexico, these
wise men are depicted in strangely similar costumes: they are bearded men,
holding a bag or bucket with a curved handle, with the heads of birds or fish.
The
Babylonian priest Berossus, writing in the 3rd century BC, described a mythical
figure who arrived in Mesopotamia. His name was Oannes and he had ‘the whole
body of a fish, but underneath and attached to the head of the fish there was
another head, human. Joined to the tail of the fish [were] feet like those of a
man, and it had a human voice.’
It
sounds very much as if Oannes was a human being, wearing an elaborate fish
costume that might have been holy robes or merely a piece of showmanship.
At
the semi-subterranean temple of Tiahuanaco in western Bolivia, South America,
similar shamanic figures are depicted wearing garments from the waist down
patterned in fish scales.
Experts
disagree over the age of these carvings, but they do also show animals that
appear to be toxodons — gigantic, rhino-like animals that became extinct around
12,000 years ago.
The
Magicians of the Gods, it seems, roamed all over the world.
In
the Middle East, Oannes was accompanied by seven sages, who are repeatedly
described as conjurors, sorcerers, warlocks and magicians, who were masters of
chemistry and medicine and who understood carpentry, stone-cutting and
metal-working.
Evidence suggests that a tsunami between 10,800 BC and
9,600 BC was the result of a comet crashing into Earth. Pictured is an aerial
view of Kamiishi city in Japan which was hit by a tsunami in March 2011
Magicians
such as these also turned up in Egypt at the same time. At the Temple of Horus
in the Egyptian city of Edfu, inscriptions known as the Edfu Texts describe
god-like beings who were refugees from a sacred island that was destroyed by
flood and fire.
Their
home, the ‘mansions of the gods’, was utterly destroyed and their civilisation
wiped out, but a few survivors had, luckily, been at sea when the disaster
struck.
They
set sail in ships to wander the world, with one purpose: to reinvent their
homeland. As the Edfu Texts recorded, their goal was ‘the resurrection of the
former world of the gods’.
The
seven sages who arrived in Egypt understood how to lay foundations and plan the
construction of buildings. They were so steeped in knowledge that the primitive
people who revered them believed they were wiser and more powerful than their
own old gods.
Arab
tradition says that the secrets of this technology were buried in the pyramids
at Giza millennia later.
The
9th-century historian Ibn Abd El Hakem believed the pyramids were designed not
as tombs, but as places of safekeeping for books of knowledge dating to before
the Great Flood.
These
books contained ‘profound sciences, and the names of drugs and their uses and
hurts, and the science of astrology, and arithmetic and geometry and medicine .
. . arms which did not rust and glass which might be bent but not broken’.
That
evidence of a civilisation far older than the Babylonians and the Egyptians, a
civilisation that was all but destroyed by a comet 12,800 years ago, has long
been lost.
But
there are other historic sites, just as breathtaking as the pyramids but much
less known.
“Nothing less than an
interplanetary hand grenade”
One
is Gobekli Tepe, which literally means Potbelly Hill, in Turkey. It is the
oldest work of monumental architecture in the world and it is massive.
It
is here, according to the late archaeologist Professor Klaus Schmidt, that
neolithic man discovered farming. It is also the place where ancient humans
first tackled megalithic stone carving, erecting pillars that weighed 20 tons.
This is architecture on the scale of Stonehenge, but far more sophisticated —
and, while Stonehenge is generally reckoned to be 4,600 years old, Gobekli Tepe
is at least 12,000 years old.
Bizarrely,
as far as archaeologists can tell, the astonishing strides in human development
made at Gobekli Tepe came out of nowhere. It’s as if its people quite suddenly
‘invented’ both agriculture and monumental architecture at the same moment.
Now,
it seems unthinkable that primitive hunter-gathers could suddenly dream up all
the technology and know-how required, without any process of experimentation.
Surely
Gobekli Tepe is powerful evidence of knowledge imparted by a prior
civilisation.
But
the site is also significant for a far more ominous reason.
Complex
zodiacal signs are inscribed on one of its limestone pillars, incorporating
astronomical data supposedly not discovered until thousands of years later.
Even
more puzzling is the position of the stars — not quite where they would have
been in the sky 12,000 years ago . . . but exactly where they are today.
It
is as though these mysterious, impossibly learned builders constructed their
temple as though it existed in the present day.
The
explosive power of the Younger Dryas comet was in the order of ten million
megatons, two million times greater than the biggest nuclear bomb detonated and
1,000 times more powerful than all the atomic devices stockpiled on Earth.
But
when the Earth emerged from the path of the comet’s debris stream 12,800 years
ago, that was not the end of the story.
My
intuition is that the Gobekli Tepe pillar is a coded message to the future —
our present — about a second impending comet strike.
As
long ago as 1990, well before the discovery of physical evidence that proved
the Younger Dryas Ice Age was caused by comet fragments colliding with the
Earth, two far-sighted British scientists were sounding the alarm.
Astrophysicist Victor Clube and astronomer Bill Napier believe that a giant
unseen comet is now careering towards us through space. It is concealed within
a cloud of cosmic debris, known to astronomers as the Taurid meteor stream.
This
poses a double danger: we could be hit by any one of the millions of space
rocks in the stream, or by much larger pieces of the unseen comet itself, if
and when it explodes.
And
it could explode at any moment. It is nothing less than an interplanetary hand
grenade.
Sealed
within its thick shell is a seething mass of pitch-like tar, which will gradually
build up pressure until, like an overheated boiler with no release valve, the
comet will detonate and shatter into fragments, a mile wide or more, tearing
through the solar system at tens of thousands of miles an hour.
We
cannot guess exactly when that explosion will occur.
It
could happen as we re-enter the meteor stream, or shortly before, strewing our
planet’s path with hurtling boulders.
All
we can know for certain is that, in around 15 years, the Earth will once again
cross the Taurid meteor stream, that vast highway of cosmic debris, right at
the place where the biggest and most numerous fragments that currently exist
are collected.
Some
of them are three times the size of the asteroid that hit the planet 65 million
years ago, setting off a global firestorm and bringing about the extinction of
the dinosaurs. This is when the risk of a collision is most severe. This is
when the prophecy of the Ojibwa people is set to come true: ‘The star with the
long wide tail is going to destroy the world someday when it comes low again.’
We
can’t say that we weren’t warned. The Magicians of the Gods were trying to get
a message to us, here in the 21st century. We need to listen.
Best-selling author: Magicians of the Gods, by Graham
Hancock, is published by Coronet at £20
Magicians Of The
Gods, by Graham Hancock, is published by Coronet at £20. To order a copy,
visit www.mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0808 272 0808.
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The
planet Venus is Earth's closest planetary neighbor, moving on an orbit
108 million kilometers (67 million miles) from the Sun.
Modern astronomers have always believed that Venus, evolving within its own
enclave in the solar system, has followed its present path for countless
millions of years. Working under this assumption most planetary scientists
believed until the 1960's that Venus might be very much like the Earth, and
many scientists speculated freely on the possibilities of life on Venus.
But the space age brought more than a few surprises. Instead of an earth-like
environment, astronomers discovered an incredibly violent planet, a seething,
volcanic cauldron and a host of paradoxes yet to be unraveled.
The mythical Venus-image presents many paradoxes as well. In the popular
imagination, Venus means something like the love goddess, and many authorities
connect the very name of the planet-goddess with feminine charm.
But
peel away the more familiar layers of symbolism, accented from the classical
age onward, and you will find an ancient goddess of a far more unpredictable character,
a celestial power raging against gods and heroes, a charmer who is the
acknowledged prototype of the world-threatening hag or witch.
From what reservoir of human experience did the curious but immensely powerful
Venus image arise? And how does one account for many parallel symbols of Venus
around the world?
In
myths the world over, Venus is the only planet consistently identified as a
female power, but there is no acceptable reason for this, and on such issues
historians and mythologists are prudently silent.
IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY
In 1950, Immanuel Velikovsky
unleashed an international controversy with the publication of his book Worlds
in Collision.
Very quickly the book became the nation's number one best seller, stirring at
the same time a vitriolic reaction by established science.
In a heavily documented presentation, Velikovsky argued that the planet Venus,
only a few thousand years ago, appeared as a terrifying comet. More than once,
Velikovsky claimed, the comet and protoplanet Venus disturbed the Earth,
devastating early civilizations.
But Velikovsky did not draw significantly on modern data or observations of
Venus. His key sources were historical. In fact his primary source was myth,
and his work implied that the mythical profile of Venus holds a more promising
key to planetary history than either astronomers or historians have ever
imagined.
In 1972, Velikovsky's work became the exclusive subject of a journal I had
founded called Pense, and over the following three years Pense's ten-issue
series, Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered, helped to bring considerable
international attention to the Velikovsky debate.
For myself, Velikovsky's thesis sparked a deeper personal interest than any
subject I had ever encountered. Suddenly a door opened to incredible
possibilities, though scarcely a handful of researchers had yet ventured
through that door. One could not enter the realm of Velikovskian research
without raising the most fundamental questions about the history of the solar
system and planet Earth.
It was interesting to learn that prior to the explosive controversy, many
scholars around the world held Velikovsky in high esteem. He had been a colleague
of Albert Einstein. He was a respected psychoanalyst, and was the founder and
editor of the scholarly journal, Scriptas Universitatis, the physics section
being edited by Einstein.
But
Velikovsky's academic accreditation would not redeem him when it came to
challenging the pillars of modern science.
WORLDS IN COLLISION
In Worlds in Collision, Velikovsky drew on widespread myths and images of the
planet Venus,
all suggesting that in earlier times Venus was anything but a settled planet.
He
claimed that Venus moved on an elliptical orbit intersecting the orbit of the
Earth. And it acquired the form of a comet, with a luminous tail or train of
gas, dust, and stone.
On at least two occasions, the earth passed close enough to the Venus comet to
be disturbed in its motions, and a rain of celestial debris descended on our
planet. This celestial conflagration, Velikovsky claimed, entered global
mythology as the attack upon the world by a cosmic serpent or dragon (and/or
overwhelming wars of the gods).
The Velikovsky controversy is important today for more than one reason. To
begin with, it offers an excellent study in scientific intolerance. Even as
Worlds in Collision topped the national bestseller list, the scientific elite,
led by the respected astronomer Harlow Shapley, threatened a boycott of the
publisher Macmillan, and its collective voice was loud and fierce enough to
cause the publisher to drop the book, which was transferred to Doubleday.
Astronomers and other experts in the affected fields issued sweeping
pronouncements against Velikovsky's thesis most without even reading the book.
This included, for example, the leading astronomers and textbook authors Donald
Menzel, Fred Whipple, and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, whose refutations of Velikovsky
showed virtually no concern for facts.
In various more subtle ways this intolerance of Velikovsky and everything
Velikovskian has thrived over the past twenty years as well, most commonly in
the form of indifference and disdain, and an unwillingness to consider highly
significant revelations about the past.
In an article for a special issue of Analog devoted to the Velikovsky
controversy, Isaac Asimov coined the acronym CP crackpot for those who, like
Velikovsky, would question the suppositions of modern science. One of those who
has helped to set the tone of the scientific establishment's response to
Velikovsky is the popular Cornell University astronomer, Carl Sagan.
Look
up his books published through the 70's and 80's and you will find in most of
them a section debunking Velikovsky.
In
his television series Cosmos, and in the book of the same name, Sagan treated
Velikovsky at length, dismissing the idea of a cometary Venus without regard to
the historical evidence. Sagan himself participated in a politically organized
and controlled confrontation with Velikovsky, intended to debunk Worlds in
Collision, at the 1974 annual meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science.
The Velikovsky affair has provided the twentieth century with one of its most
poignant demonstrations of the difficulties confronting theorists with truly
novel ideas. And I say this knowing full well that the defenders of orthodoxy
will raise a chorus insisting that their more recent responses to Velikovsky have
been a model of propriety and open-mindedness.
Since it is not my purpose here to re-tell an oft-told story, I will simply
state my opinion that the scientific elite's response to Velikovsky will, in
the end, prove to be much more of an embarrassment to science than ever it was
to Velikovsky.
When
all is said and done, the Velikovskian inquiry into the past will change the
way we view the solar system, the history of planet Earth, and the history of
man.
VENUS THE PLANET
As if to symbolize an ancient tie to the Earth, Venus returns to its same position
in the sky every 584 days, called a synodical year.
Five
Venus synodical years equal eight Earth-years. At its closest approach to the
Earth, it always shows the same hemisphere. Hence, both its rotation and its
revolution around the Sun present a fascinating synchronous relationship with
the movement of our planet: a Venus day or full rotation turns out to be longer
than its sidereal year (revolution around the Sun) but is equal to the interval
between the planet's closest approaches to the Earth.
Though Venus is about the same size as Earth (Venus= 12,080 kilometers in
diameter; Earth= 12,728 kilometers) and its orbit quite close to that of the
Earth, there is little else in common between the two worlds.
For reasons not easily explained, Venus appears as a fish out of water in our
solar system, since astronomers consider both its rotation rate and direction
of rotation as bizarre. Whereas the usual planetary pattern is rotation from
west to east, Venus rotates from east to west.
And
while the enshrouded orb of Venus spins very, very slowly, taking 243
Earth-days to complete one rotation, above the surface the massive atmosphere
races around the planet at twice hurricane force, or almost 400 kilometers per
hour, circling the planet in just four days. No prior theory of planetary
dynamics can account for this seemingly impossible situation.
Astronomers, in drawing the new profile of Venus, often summon medieval images
of the fires of Hell. Venus, it turns out, is a doomsday world looking for an
explanation. Massive clouds of sulfuric acid and carbon dioxide 20,000 meters
high create an atmospheric pressure at the surface some 90 times that of the
Earth.
The
temperature at the surface may be as high as 900° Fahrenheit, vastly hotter
than scientists expected 40 years ago.
For astronomers, the most dramatic new look at Venus came with the Magellan
probe, launched in 1989. When Magellan moved into orbit around Venus on August
10, 1990, its detailed radar-portrait of our closest neighbor displayed
features as small as 100 meters across. The result was the most sweeping change
in theoretical perspective since scientific study of Venus began.
Nothing is more striking about Venus, or indicative of unanticipated planetary
stresses than the dominating presence of volcanoes covering virtually every
square kilometer, this presence being emphasized as well by broken volcanic
rock strewn across the face of the planet. A minimum of 100,000 volcanoes have
been estimated, causing one scientist to declare that the entire planet is one
big volcano! . But what was the source of the massive planetary stresses
involved?
In geological terms, much of the lava flow is incredibly recent, covering vast
portions of the surface, and throwing normal dating systems into chaos.
Astronomers have traditionally guessed at the formative periods of a planet's
or moon's surface by the number of impact craters. The more craters, the older
the surface.
But
in the case of Venus, much of the surface has been so recently covered
(eliminating all craters) that no reliable dating is possible. On the
geological time scale, for all we know, whole portions of the surface were
re-sculpted only yesterday.
The
mystery was duly noted by Science magazine.
The planetary geologists who are studying the radar images streaming back from
Magellan find that they have an enigma on their hands. When they read the
geologic clock that tells them how old the Venusian surface is they find a
planet on the brink of adolescence. But when they look at the surface itself
they see a newborn babe.
Indeed, a great deal of volcanic activity is apparently still going on,
certainly much more than any astronomer had expected.
Complementing the planet-wide lava flows are the many suggestions of crustal
movement, with continental scale stretching and folding, together with
stupendous rifts, creating zigzag lines or fractures reaching across much of
the planet's surface. Immense fractures in spider-like patterns called
Arachnoids having no terrestrial counterpart stretch up to 250 kilometers
across.
Even larger formations, likened to failed souffls (both in appearance and in
formative process), are the giant coronae great volcanic domes hundreds of
kilometers in breadth, rising under the pressure of expanding lava, then
collapsing as the lava oozed away. That an Earth-sized planet, settled in its
own quiet corner of the solar system, would generate volcanic activity on such
a scale is a mystery not easily resolved by traditional theories of planet
formation.
Add one more piece to the Venusian puzzle: astronomers are now musing over the
paradox of water or one should say the absence of water for there are
indications that Venus once had water in abundance.
Now
there is none.
On
any scenario accounting for this disappearance of water, there has been a
massive escape of gas from Venus, at the very least the hydrogen component, due
to dissociation of hydrogen and oxygen in the upper atmosphere.
VELIKOVSKY'S LEGACY
What does the astronomer's dilemma mean for the historian seeking to account
for ancient mythical images of Venus?
At
the present time the unveiling of Venus means nothing to the historian, because
neither the historian nor the astronomer acknowledges any connection between
the mythical history of Venus and the planet's actual history.
But it was this presumed chasm between myth and science that Velikovsky
challenged in Worlds in Collision, when he claimed that the mythical record
presents a coherent story of celestial disaster, with Venus as provocateur.
I must emphasize at the outset that I do not know of a single Velikovskian
researcher who accepts Velikovsky's interpretation of myth in detail. Later
investigation has shown that major dimensions of the mythical material must be
re-interpreted. But to evaluate Velikovsky's place in the history of science
you have to focus on fundamentals.
It
was at the most fundamental level that Velikovsky's new perspective threatened
modern theoretical frameworks, for he claimed:
·Planets
now moving on stable orbits many millions of miles from Earth have not always
moved on these paths.
·The
solar system has been unstable within human memory. That means not millions or
billions of years ago, but within the past few thousand years.
·More
than once in recent history, errant planets menaced the Earth.
·In
myths and legends, man preserved a record of spectacular celestial events. The
primary powers in the myths are planets.
·Hence,
we cannot understand the myths by any reference to the way things are today.
·More
specifically, Velikovsky offered a dramatic profile of the planets, based on
myth and symbol
·The
planet Venus once possessed a comet-like tail, and its orbit brought the planet
into confrontation with the Earth.
·The
planet Mars, the war-god of the ancient world, participated directly in
Earth-changing catastrophes and appeared to battle other celestial bodies in
the sky.
·During
an epoch remembered as the Golden Age, the planet Saturn once shone as the
dominant light in the sky when the Earth was possibly a satellite of Saturn.
These
principles are not just novel, but central to an entirely new way of looking at
man, the Earth, and its celestial habitat.
Now, more than forty years after publication of Worlds in Collision, as
astronomers wrestle with new images of Venus, it is only appropriate that we
ask for a reassessment of Velikovsky's place in history, and pose the question
once again: did Venus enter ancient history as a comet?
It is time to raise the question because only Velikovsky's claims anticipated
the present glaring mysteries about Venus. What extraordinary stresses on Venus
occurred so recently that the most candid of astronomers are unwilling to
assign any geological age to massive resurfacing of the planet?
If the emerging profile of Venus does indeed provoke astronomers and historians
to ask the forbidden question, there will be no stopping the avalanche: to ask
the question is to open the door to other unasked questions, and ultimately to
legitimize a field of research with no prior legitimacy in the eyes of popular
science.
And
where will this lead? The astronomer Shapley's now-famous words have become a
two-edged sword: If Velikovsky is right, the rest of us are crazy.
The shifting perspective caused by the new Magellan data is barely a hint of
the upheaval to come, once the mere possibility of a comet Venus is
entertained. For Velikovsky's comet will, in fact, be found on every page of
ancient sources.
Grant
an authentic celestial reference for the global pictographs and accounts of
Venus and your perception of the past will be forever changed.
CATASTROPHIC HISTORY OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM
According to Velikovsky, the planet Venus sprang originally from the gas giant
Jupiter,
its elliptical orbit around the Sun intersecting the orbit of the Earth.
Velikovsky
called the protoplanet Venus a comet because, as it circled the Sun, it carried
with it a trail of gas and debris. The largest portion of Velikovsky's Worlds
in Collision is devoted to aspects of his thesis concerning Venus, a planet he
says nearly collided with the Earth twice first around 1500 B.C. and then again
some 52 years later.
The
axis of the Earth was disturbed, and fire, gas, dust and stone descended on the
Earth, accompanied by earthquakes and wind, decimating whole populations around
the world.
Was Venus a comet in early historic times? If so, a hundred secondary issues
debated by Velikovsky and his critics are virtually irrelevant to Velikovsky's place
in the history of science.
Are
there hydrocarbons in the atmosphere of Venus as Velikovsky had suggested? Did
vermin actually descend on the earth as a result of a Venus encounter? Did a
destructive encounter with the Earth really occur around 1500 BC, followed 52
years later by another? Is it physically possible that a planet-sized body
could have been ejected from the gas giant Jupiter?
It
is certainly conceivable that questions such as these, which have tended to
draw much of the attention over the 40-year Velikovsky debate, could all be
answered in the negative with Velikovsky still emerging victorious for having
brought to light the cometary Venus, the previously unrecognized roles of
planets in myth, and the more general catastrophic motifs.
If
Venus did indeed enter history as a fear-inspiring comet, settle into its
present orbit only in geologically recent times, and emerge as a primary
subject of world mythology, then neither friend nor critic could dispute
Velikovsky's pioneering role in one of the great intellectual revolutions of
modern times.
VENUS AND THE PLANETARY GODS
In Worlds in Collision, Velikovsky noted many tales of disaster and upheaval in which the agent
of destruction possesses cometary attributes, even as it is identified with the
planet Venus.
The
anomalous cometary traits of Venus in ancient myth and astronomy became key
pieces of the argument, and the strength of the argument derived from the
breadth of sources. Velikovsky did not rely on traditions of one region only,
but drew on key evidences from every ancient civilization. He noted, for
example, that in Mexican records, Venus was the star that smoked, the very
phrase natives employed for a comet.
He
found in both the Americas and the Near East a recurring association of Venus
with celestial hair and with a celestial beard, two of the most common
hieroglyphs for the comet in the ancient world. But another popular glyph for
the comet was the serpent or dragon, a form taken by the planet Venus in
virtually every land.
The
same planet, among the Babylonians and other races, was called the flame, or
torch of heaven, a widespread symbol of a comet among ancient peoples.
According to Velikovsky the accounts and symbols of the comet Venus speak for a
memory of global upheaval: earthshaking battles in the sky, decimation of
ancient races on Earth, an extended period of darkness, the end of one world
age and the birth of another.
THE CRITIC BOB FORREST
When it comes to debunking Velikovsky's historical argument, no critic has
applied himself more energetically than Bob
Forrest of England. In a six volume work, Velikovsky's Sources, Forrest
undertook to analyze virtually every historical reference employed by
Velikovsky, concluding that, when taken in their actual contexts, the data
brought forth by Velikovsky simply do not support the thesis of Worlds in
Collision.
Forrest's work was later updated, corrected and summarized in a very readable
volume called A Guide to Velikovsky's Sources, which is the source we will use
in this overview.
Since publication of his comprehensive criticism, Forrest's work has been
frequently cited by scientific skeptics as a definitive blow to Velikovsky,
delivered on Velikovsky's own turf (ancient myth and history). And whatever
one's opinion on the merits of Forrest's analysis, it is to his credit that, in
the forty years since publication of Worlds in Collision, Forrest's effort is
the only substantial critique of Velikovsky's use of myth.
Despite the scholarly appearance of Velikovsky's work, Forrest writes, I think
the theories put forward in Worlds in Collision are wrong at an elementary and
common sense level.
And what, at an elementary level, does Forrest object to? The gist of the
objection to it is that one will nowhere find anything like a direct historical
reference to catastrophic bombardments by the planets Venus and Mars.
Having devoted more than twenty years to the exploration of myth, I find the
objection particularly interesting because my own conclusion is quite the
opposite.
The
planetary subjects of Worlds in Collision are Venus and Mars, and the
catastrophic roles of these planets in ancient times are not only evident, but
provable through normal rules of logic and demonstration. (For the sake of
focus, this article will consider only the cometary Venus.)
It
is not only possible to answer the question was Venus formerly a comet?
But
to answer the question in overwhelming detail, with incontrovertible data and
an inescapable conclusion: Velikovsky's comet Venus lies very close to the
center of ancient religious, artistic and literary traditions.
VELIKOVSKIAN RESEARCH AND CATASTROPHISM
How can it be that two researchers, approaching the same field of data, can draw such
incompatible conclusions?
The
heart of the issue, I suggest, has to do with one's approach to the subject
matter. In penetrating to the core of ancient celestial imagery, methodology is
everything.
The gap separating the mainstream sciences and social sciences from
Velikovsky's revolutionary approach to myth needs to be appreciated: the
Velikovskian investigator has discovered that few if any of the primary themes
of myth answer to our familiar sky. Hence, to focus on recurring themes is to
focus on the recurring anomalies of myth.
But rather than confront the issue of recurring anomalies, Forrest descends
into a swamp of marginal details, picking at virtually every paragraph of
Worlds in Collision while rigorously avoiding cross-referencing. As a result,
the author consistently fails to see past the veil in which modern perception
has wrapped ancient myth.
It
is as if general patterns and connections are of no interest.
In
every case of an anomaly noted by Velikovsky, Forrest's answer is simply to
cite someone else's guess at an explanation (and I do mean guess) though many
of the cited authorities offered their guesses prior to Velikovsky's novel
interpretation, and few if any of these authorities seem aware of the larger
patterns detected by Velikovsky.
In this way, Forrest reverses Velikovsky's approach, for Velikovsky connected
anomalous Venus images of one land with corresponding anomalies from other
parts of the world. Recurring anomalies, as correctly perceived by Velikovsky,
are a key to discovery.
A useful example of the methodological issue is the recurring world catastrophe
myth. For the Velikovskian researcher, the question is whether
globally-experienced events will account for the repeated theme of the
world-destroying cataclysm. Or must all such themes be explained by wholly
separate, localized disasters?
If
one resorts to the latter explanation, then no underlying integrity of
catastrophe myths is even possible in significant detail. But the inescapable
counterpart of this observation is that, if the myths of widespread cultures
present the same improbable story in significant detail, then it is the
localized explanation that becomes impossible.
A reasonable methodology cannot ignore the convergence of recurring themes on
an underlying idea, even if that idea stands outside modern theoretical
frameworks.
In recognition of this principle, I have chosen in this series of articles to
draw periodically upon Bob Forrest's critique as a means of clarifying the
methodological issues.
I
trust the reader will take this use of Forrest's work in a constructive spirit
and find in our approach no attempt to discredit the researcher himself, since
Forrest is, after all, the best of Velikovsky's critics and deserves much
credit for having raised questions no Velikovskian researcher can afford to
ignore.
CHALLENGE OF COMMUNICATION
To set the context for our analysis of myth in this series of articles, let me register a
few preliminary observations.
It has been my own sense that the greatest difficulty for the Velikovskian
researcher is communication, a difficulty compounded, paradoxically, by the
success of the methodology.
By
removing certain common suppositions about the past, the methodology enables
one to penetrate to core ideas expressed in every ancient culture. It permits
this breakthrough by revealing underlying celestial forms and episodes and
showing that certain highly specific occurrences are reflected in widely
divergent symbols.
But historians and mythologists have virtually never considered the possibility
that extraordinary events may have occurred in the sky. A communications
problem arises, therefore, from the methodology's success in exposing a unified
substratum of ancient experience. Since the underlying forms of myth will not
be found in our sky today but are almost always interpreted by the experts in
relation to our sky language itself becomes an obstacle to discovery.
That
issue, however, quickly becomes very large and cannot be adequately resolved
within the brief space of a single article, or even a series of articles.
Therefore, some compromise is necessary, requiring us to set aside temporarily
certain questions, even when they seem to clamor for recognition.
I will give a simple example of the difficulty, based on the overarching conclusion
of my own investigation. In seeking out the underlying patterns of myth, I
found three key figures:
·Creator-king.
This figure stands at the head of the line of kings. He may be translated as
heaven, or as the sun-god (a stationary sun ruling before the present epoch),
or as the primeval Unity from which arose all of the secondary powers in the
age of the gods.
·Mother-goddess.
She is the mother, daughter or spouse of the creator-king, standing in a very
concrete relationship to him. At root, the mother goddess is a radiant star
shining as the great god's central heart and soul, his glory and power
departing from him in a period of cosmic upheaval.
·Warrior-hero.
He is the most post popular figure of myth, presented in so many guises that
the elementary structure of his biography is easily missed. In the most
frequently-stated versions of the story, he is the son of the mother goddess
and prototype of the great prince who defeats chaos monsters in primeval times.
As such he is the exemplary model in the sky of the terrestrial warrior-king.
Now
here is the problem: I have never found a practical way to undertake a
discussion of the comet Venus, without confronting all three mythical figures.
There
are two reasons for this:
1.The planet Venus is
inseparably linked to the mother goddess
I make this observation in full recognition that many cultures did not preserve
an astronomy or empirical discipline necessary to retain the identification.
Fortunately, where astronomies did preserve the connecting link with Venus,
more than sufficient evidence is available to decide the issue.
2.The mother goddess is
inseparably linked to both the creator-king and the warrior-hero
Because the goddess is the departing heart-soul of the creator-king and also
the mother or consort of the warrior-hero, it is virtually impossible to
explore the cometary symbols attached to Venus without continually bumping into
the two companion personalities.
But
the fact of the matter is that the cometary images of Venus give us more than enough
material to work with, and to go beyond this material would be to invite a
communications breakdown.
Therefore
I have resorted to the briefest possible summary of the creator-king and
warrior-hero roles, without any attempt to clarify (much less substantiate) the
identifications I have elaborated in previous AEON articles.
Our
approach will be to acknowledge relationships only where such an acknowledgment
is unavoidable, and hope at the same time that the many new readers of AEON
will be able to look past this limitation.
Our goal in this series of articles is to demonstrate that the Velikovskian
methodology works. We will begin, in the present installment, by applying that
methodology to Mesoamerican myths, symbols and astronomical traditions of
Venus.
That
will be followed, in subsequent articles, by summaries of the Venus-image among
other cultures, with sufficient cross-referencing to verify that the primary
themes occur on every continent and that all of the acknowledged hieroglyphs
for the comet are repeatedly and inexplicably affixed to the planet Venus.
This
was Velikovsky's controversial message, now supported by much broader research.
SMOKING STAR
In arguing for the cometary character of Venus, Velikovsky cited Aztec records
suggesting that the planet Venus shared the same title given a comet.
The early traditions of the peoples of Mexico, written down in pre-Columbian
days, relate that Venus smoked. The star that smoked, la estrella que humeava,
was Sitlal Choloha, which the Spaniards called Venus.
Now, I ask, says Alexander Humboldt, what optical illusion could give Venus the
appearance of a star throwing out smoke?
Sahagun, the sixteenth century Spanish authority on Mexico, wrote that the
Mexicans called a comet a star that smoked. It may thus be concluded that since
the Mexicans called Venus a star that smoked, they considered it a comet.
In Bob Forrest's mind, the Aztec references could have nothing to do with what
may or may not have happened back in the mid second millennium BC because the
references to Venus smoking come from the sixteenth century A.D.
In a number of instances Aztec records say that the earth shook and the star sitlal
choloha (Venus) smoked.
To
account for the curiosity Forrest simply accepts the guess of Alexander von
Humboldt, who suggested that the smoke' related to the volcano Orizaba,
situated to the east of the city Cholula, and whose glow, when seen in the
distance, resembled or was symbolically related to the rising Morning Star.
Forrest was apparently satisfied with the first guess he uncovered. All we have
are some sixteenth century records which say, every so often, that the star
smoked, but since the smoking seems frequently to be intertwined with
earthquake activity.
Humboldt's
assumption seems reasonable. With that stated, Forrest moved on, never
returning to the issue of the Aztec smoking star.
A quite different approach would have been to explore the possibility of a
broader Venus-comet association to see where the available evidence leads.
Guided by this intent, Forrest would have quickly found, for example, that
Aztec association of earthquake activity with smoking stars belonged to the
general mythology of the comet among the Aztecs.
Thus,
with respect to the comets portrayed in the Codex Vaticanus and Codex
Telleriano-Remensis, the respected authority on Mexican astronomy, Anthony Aveni, writes:
Comets
(citlalimpopoca, or the stars that smoke) are represented frequently by the
surviving historical documents, usually by a stellar image on a blue background
with emanating streams of smoke.
These
usually signify that a person of nobility will die; for example [one picture]
tells of the death of the ruler of Tenochtitlan following the apparition of a
comet; later another comet occurs, then an earthquake, all of nature's events
being connected in the Aztec cosmic view.
As
I hope to demonstrate fully in this series of articles, the connectedness of
these images derives from a universal substratum of myth.
Appearance
of a comet, death of a great ruler, quaking earth not in Mexico alone, but in
one ancient culture after another, the skywatchers repeatedly placed these
unusual themes in juxtaposition, despite this crucial fact: no comet observed
by science has ever justified the symbolic connection.
But
Forrest seems unaware that the language employed in astrological texts and
omens is drawn from ancient mythical images. Following his methodological
ground rules, therefore, no records of portents in the sky recorded in the last
three millennia would be of any relevance to Velikovsky's argument, even when
repeatedly attaching explicit cometary images to Venus!
With respect to the image of the planet Venus as the smoking star in the Codex
Telleriano-Remensis, Aveni offers his own attempt at an explanation: Perhaps a
cometary object appeared near the planet. Of course, Forrest could just as
easily have cited this guess, then dropped the whole issue.
But
is there something more worth investigating here?
Throughout the Americas, including Mexico, natives called a comet the star with
hair, or a long-haired star, or a maned star, an appellation that fits
comfortably with the global language of the comet. In fact, the long-haired
star is the single most common phrase for the comet around the world, and our
own word for comet comes from the Greek kometes, the long-haired star.
Yucatec
Maya dictionaries give as a gloss for smoke star the manned comet.
But
curiously, the Aztecs used this very language for Venus. As noted by Velikovsky,
they called the planet Tzonte-Mocque, meaning the mane-star, or long-haired
star. And not the Aztecs alone: for one finds among the Maya the same enigmatic
association of the planet Venus with long flowing hair.
A
commonly observed Maya hieroglyph is the Caban-curl, a flowing tassel or lock
of hair repeatedly attached to acknowledged Venus symbols, including the
glyph-name of Venus itself. (See Figure 1)
FIGURE 1
Mayan Caban-curl
To
encounter the long flowing locks of Venus, one need only consult available
sources.
Turn
to the Incan language of Venus, for example. I can remember, in the first few
days of investigating images of Venus, looking through a standard summary of
Incan mythology and encountering the name of Venus as Chasca, translated as the
long-haired star the precise phrase for the comet in the global lexicon. It was
instances such as this that continued to fuel my own interests in learning
more.
According to William Prescott,
Venus was known to the Peruvians by the name of Chasca, or the youth with the
long and curling locks.
Burr
Cartwright Brundage tells us that among the Inca, Venus was the Radiant Star
with the Flowing Hair. The morning star, Chasca (The Disheveled One),
dispensed stores of freshness and loveliness upon flowers, princesses, and
virgins below. She was the deity of the rosy cloud rack of morning, and when
she shook out her long hair she scattered the dew upon the earth.
The point here is that Forrest's explanation of the Aztec Venus/smoking star
association fails to acknowledge converging lines of evidence: Aztec comet as
smoking star, Aztec Venus as smoking star, Aztec and Mayan long-haired star as
comet; Aztec Venus as long-haired star, Mayan Venus with or as flowing lock or
tassel, Incan Venus as long-haired star.
Hence,
the methodological issue is placed in sharp relief.
Here is another way of looking at the issue logically: Around the world there
are only a small number of pre-astronomical hieroglyphs for the comet.
You
could, in fact, count the primary glyphs on the fingers of one hand:
·heart-soul
of a deceased god-king or great leader rising in the sky
·long-haired
star (star with flowing locks, mane, tresses, disheveled hair, beard, hairy
tail)
·torch-star
(ember, flame, smoke, smoking star, train of fire, spark, or train of sparks)
The
remaining general hieroglyphs for the comet could be counted on the fingers of
your second hand!
They
include: a sword, a bundle of grass or straw (whisk, broom), or a spiraling
rope (cord, tie, or knot).
At what point, then, does a coincidence or seemingly irrational use of language
(comet-words or glyphs attached to Venus) become an anomaly worth pursuing?
Forrest not only sidesteps the implications of parallel cometary images of
Venus in other lands, he ignores the convergence of such images in Mexico.
As
a methodology, the approach is disastrous, because there is much, much more.
QUETZALCOATL
In the popular Aztec myth of Quetzalcoatl, the Venus-comet anomaly grows by leaps and
bounds. And in this case, the completeness of the cometary motifs leaves no
room for ad hoc explanations.
Whether remembered by the Aztecs as a former great king and founder of the
golden age, or a former sun god ruling a primordial epoch, Quetzalcoatl was a
cultural hero without equal in the Aztec pantheon, his countenance adorning
temple walls and the stucco bases of pyramids, painted on countless frescoes
and codices, and engraved on sarcophagi and monoliths strewn across Mexico.
The climactic event in the Quetzalcoatl myth is the god's catastrophic death
and transformation in an overwhelming disaster an event endlessly repeated in sacrificial
rites and supplying the cornerstone of Aztec calendar rituals and astronomical
symbolism.
In
a pervasive version of the myth, at the death of Quetzalcoatl the god's heart
or soul rose in the sky as a great spark or ember, trailing smoke and fire a
star whose fiery train the Aztecs portrayed as the streaming tail of a
quetzal-bird. Was this flaming star a comet?
One
notes that the Quich Maya called a comet uje ch'umil, tail of the star,
and Aztec artists often drew comets as stars with quetzal tails, the bright and
luminous plumes of the quetzal providing a particularly well-suited hieroglyph
for a comet. (Figure 3)
FIGURE 2
Former sun god Quetzalcoatl
The
symbolism accords well with that of other peoples.
The
Pawnee gave to the comet the name pirikis kuhka, feathered headdress (an
appellation that proves telling; see later discussion of the plumed headdress
in our next installment). In Africa, the streaming comet's tail was identified
as the feathers of the nightjar, and the natives say of a comet, it is wearing
streaming feathers. Astronomer Carl Sagan, in his review of worldwide comet
motifs, notes that comets are called tail stars and stars with long feathers.
Germanic
races called a comet the peacock's tail, while in China a comet was seen as
both a peacock's tail and a pheasant's tail.
FIGURE 3
Quetzal-bird, with bright streaming tail
That
Quetzalcoatl's flaming or plumed heart-soul meant a comet-like star is
substantiated by converging lines of evidence.
Its
cometary character, for example, would agree with a general tradition among the
Aztecs that comets were the ascending souls of great chiefs. That Quetzalcoatl
was the model of the good king gives perfect sense to the symbolic motif. But
Quetzalcoatl was also the prototype of the Aztec shaman (that is, he was the
celestial figure whose biography provided the general myth and symbolism of the
shaman).
It
is thus worth noting that in South American lore, the soul of a shaman was
believed to depart in the form of a comet. Noteworthy as well is the fact that
a comet appearing some time prior to the conquest of the Aztecs by Cortez was
reckoned as a positive sign that Quetzalcoatl would eventually return to
Mexico.
To suggest that the heart-soul of Quetzalcoatl rose as a comet is simply to
place the Aztec symbolism alongside a universal tradition: cultures around the
world proclaim the comet to be the soul of a dying king.
Thus,
we have listed this significant theme as number one in our short list of comet
symbols above.
FIGURE 4
Aztec comet with plumed tail
But
there is a problem here.
While
several variations on the story of Quetzalcoatl's death have been preserved,
one of the central elements is the identification of the heart-soul as the
planet Venus.
Burr Cartwright Brundage gives this summary:
The god's heart, like a great spark, flies up to become a new and splendid
divinity, the Morning Star.
Thus
a native source declares,
Then
the heart of Quetzalcoatl rose into heaven and according to the elders, was
transformed into the Morning Starand Quetzalcoatl was called the Lord of Dawn.
We
shall have more to say about this transformation.
The
fact at hand is that in their myths and rites the Aztecs say the separated
heart-soul of Quetzalcoatl, following a period of darkened sky and cosmic
upheaval, rose as the planet Venus.
If
the story has roots in any celestial occurrence (as explicitly claimed in the
myths), the death of Quetzalcoatl must have involved a cosmic disaster of
unprecedented scale, for no mythical-historical event left a deeper impression on
Aztec thought and culture.
Upon
this traumatic episode, the Aztecs evolved their collective sense of cyclical
time, including a calendar of world ages: the death of Quetzalcoatl, the onset
of celestial confusion, and the transformation of his heart-soul into the
planet Venus meant nothing less than the end of one world age and the beginning
of another.
SOUL-BIRD, WINGED STAR
In connection with the departure of the god-king's heart-soul as a plumed or
burning star, one notes that Mesoamerican traditions produced many variations
on the underlying idea.
One
influential variant was the idea of the heart-soul sprouting wings and soaring
away. On the death of a great noble, his soul was thought of as taking flight
like a bird or a butterfly. At such a time he was addressed by those attending:
Awaken,
it has reddened, dawn has set in. Already, the flame-colored cock has sung, the
flame-colored swallow, already the flame-colored butterfly flies.
The
most popular form of the soul-bird appears to have been the quetzal, the
national bird of Guatemala.
My
friend Phil Peters, who lived
for several years among the Quiche Maya of the Guatemala lowlands, recounts the
story of the famous hero, Tecúm-Umám, who lived at the time of the Spanish
invasion. On the plains of Xelaju, the story goes, Tecúm-Umám was killed by
Pedro de Alverado, of Cortez' army. Then the quetzal bird that was in his
headdress took flight, and since that tragic occasion, the quetzal no longer
sings.
What is crucial in any study hoping to comprehend such ideas is the ability of
the celestial reference the mythical archetype to give meaning to the symbol.
In the Vienna Codex, or Vindobonensis, the planet Venus is depicted with
wing-like appendages.
Can
the wings of Venus said to represent Venus' radiance or greatest brilliancy be
separated from the global myth of Venus as the soul-bird?
Though we cannot here stop and review the countless parallels in other lands,
we would be remiss if we failed to observe that the avian flight of the heart-soul
is a world-wide theme. The earliest instances will be found in Mesopotamia and
Egypt, where the Venus goddesses Inanna, Ishtar, Isis and Hathor (to name only
the most prominent instances) all represent the soul in the form of a bird
taking flight.
Thus,
the great god-kings, whose heart-souls are the star Venus, customarily depart
in the form of a dove, partridge, or swallow, virtually universal symbols of
Venus, of transformation, and of the departing soul. (The reader will find many
examples in the remaining installments.)
Are
these widely dispersed recollections of Venus as soul-bird different from the
universal myth declaring that the great king's or chief's soul appeared in the
sky as a comet? Though the issue will not be resolved in a few paragraphs,
cross referencing will suggest potentially fruitful lines of inquiry. It is
certainly of interest, for example, that the Babylonians employed the phrase
winged star for the comet.
Additionally,
as we will see, it is when Venus as soul-bird spreads its wings that the
cometary images are most emphatic.
FEATHERED SERPENT
In our brief list of comet glyphs cited earlier we have also listed the cosmic serpent
or dragon, and in Mexico this fascinating theme proves to be crucial.
Once
the researcher has learned that Mesoamerican stargazers considered a comet to
be the ascending heart-soul of a great chief, he can no longer ignore the full
range of related symbols:
the
planet Venus, the rising heart-soul of Quetzalcoatl, is not just portrayed as
an ember-like star (= comet), not just depicted as a star with quetzal-tail ( =
comet), but is said to have taken the form of a great cosmic serpent (= comet
both in Mexico and in the universal language of comets).
The
name Quetzalcoatl itself is simply a combination of two Nahuatl terms that for
the quetzal-bird, known for its long brilliant turquoise tail, and the serpent
or coatl.
Thus
two of our listed five most common comet glyphs are brought together in the
name of the god. And the combined hieroglyphs clearly have a long history. The
earliest known version of the plumed serpent pre-dates the Aztecs by many
centuries, appearing on monuments of the Formative Olmecs. Conceptually, the
avian serpent reached significantly beyond Aztec culture.
The
Maya name for the same god, Kulkulkan, carries an equivalent meaning, as does
the Quich figure, Gucumatz. The same figure appears to have entered Zuni ritual
as the plumed serpent Kolowisi and Hopi ritual as the plumed serpent
Palulukong.
Though the figure of Quetzalcoatl is complex and appears to combine originally
distinct traditions, the identification of the spiraling serpent itself (the
transformed heart-soul) with Venus has survived even into modern times. Some of
the Tzotzil groups, for example, still describe Venus as the Big Serpent (Mukta
Ch'on.)
Among
the Chichimec tribes, Venus is still remembered as the Serpent Cloud.
FIGURE 5
Aztec serpent-comet
Is
it significant, then, that Aztec manuscripts depict a comet as a fiery serpent
or dragon-like creature descending from the stars? (Figure 5)
The
priest-astronomers knew the comet as the star serpent. In his exploration of
comet symbolism, Peter Lancaster Brown observed that the natives of Mexico
represented comets by the plumed serpent depicted in various forms. But what
does this say about the acknowledged identification of the plumed serpent with
the planet Venus, the ascending heart-soul of Quetzalcoatl?
It
seems very likely that the white and bearded god who appeared in the east
associated with the Quetzalcoatl (Serpent God) legends of pre-Columbian Middle
America relates to the apparitions of spectacular comets in the morning sky and
not to the planet Venus, Brown writes.
Here
again we see an author attempting to rationalize a clearly stated Venus-comet
connection, offering his own explanation. But in this instance the explanation
involves nothing less than a rewriting of the Aztec religion: for the identity
of the transformed heart-soul of Quetzalcoatl as the planet Venus was an
unshakable tenet of the myths and rites.
With respect to the Mesoamerican celestial serpents and dragons, there is also
the issue of attached streamers that often look more like long-flowing,
spiraling locks of hair than like feathers. (Figure 6)
This
unique feature is particularly significant since the disheveled mane of the
celestial serpent-dragon is a worldwide motif. And yet, remembering that
pre-Columbian astronomy depicted the comet as both a celestial serpent and a
mane-star, should it surprise us that the serpentine form of Venus possesses
streamers suggestive of the flowing hair of countless celestial serpents and
dragons in other lands?
Since
Venus was itself the mane or long-haired star, the underlying integrity is
undeniable.
FIGURE 6
Feathers and mane appear to merge in the
Mesoamerican serpent-dragon
In
fact, no stretch at all is needed to establish the equation of flowing mane and
serpent-dragon or chaos monster.
The
Aztec Tzonte-Mocque, identified with the planet Venus, and whose name Brasseur
translated as mane, was depicted as a dragon-like monster approaching the Earth
in periods of eclipse or universal darkness. (As we will discover, every
eclipse of the Sun and Moon became a symbol or reminder of the primeval cometary
disaster and the arrival of the world-ending night).
A
counterpart of this chaos- or eclipse-demon is the Aztec Tzitzimitl, with madly
disheveled hair, descending upon a darkened world.
This is, of course, precisely the image of the raging comet in numerous other
lands. A comet was supposed to be a tendril of the Great Mother's hair
appearing in the sky as the world was slowly overshadowed by her twilight
shadow of doomsday, writes the noted student of world mythology, Barbara
Walker.
But the interconnected comet glyphs attached to the chaos monsters range far
beyond these instances. A symbolic counterpart of this streaming hair is the
enigmatic, but frequently depicted beard of the Mesoamerican serpent-dragon.
The
Aztec Plumed Serpent, the Mayan Great Bearded Dragon and numerous counterparts
of these celestial monsters are distinguished by flowing beards that are every
bit as preposterous, on the face of it, as their streaming manes. (Figure 7)
The
reader will recall the celestial beard or bearded star in our short list of
comet symbols, as a logical extension of the long-haired star. (Thus the Greek
pogonias, the beard-star, means comet.)
While
a bearded serpent is a biological absurdity, the anomalous beard is immediately
explained if the Venusian serpent is a long-haired star or comet. If the
celestial beard did not mirror a comet-like form in the sky, then the bearded
serpent is one more anomaly left unanswered, despite a consistent pattern that
seems to cry out for recognition.
FIGURE 7
Bearded Dragon
To
keep all of this in perspective it needs to be remembered that Quetzalcoatl
whose heart-soul became the plumed serpent was himself the white and bearded
god, with many counterparts spread across pre-Columbian America one more
anomaly to add to the equation.
Thus
Frank Waters, surprised at the
prevalence of this unusual figure among the dark-skinned natives of the New
World (typified by Quetzalcoatl and the Incan Viracocha), assures us the myth
was so common throughout all of pre-Columbian America that we can regard it as
arising from a concept in the unconscious.
A relationship with the planet Venus is clear, though not without wide-ranging
interpretations by the specialists.
According
to Thompson, the Maya described Venus as being "very ugly with a heavy
beard," and the Aztecs preserved a similar tradition:
of
Ehecatl, whom most authorities identify with Venus, it was said that his beard
was exceedingly long.
Lastly,
on the matter of the flowing hair, mane, or beard of the celestial serpent or
dragon, I should like to register an opinion on one additional oddity that of
the Mesoamerican feline dragon.
Here,
too, we are dealing with an image begging for a comparative study, since the
outlandish merging of cat, lion, jaguar, tiger, or lynx with a celestial
serpent seems to have occurred in all major cultures. Since noticing the oddity
in Mesoamerica, I have noted as well the general disinterest of the specialists
in accounting for such an incongruous monster.
A
cat and a serpent?
Here,
nature itself provides not a clue as to how anyone (much less skywatchers
around the world) could think of the one when confronted with the other. But an
analysis of this mythic creature can be advanced dramatically by the
Velikovskian methodology.
What
one looks for is an underlying shared attribute (not of the terrestrial
symbols, which offer no shared attribute, but of the celestial reference
inspiring the symbols), and in this instance there can be no doubt that it is
the mane of the celestial feline figure and the twisting body or tail of the
celestial serpent.
While this is not the place to attempt a summary of evidence I shall present in
future installments, I will simply mention the Egyptian instance of the goddess
Tefnut, the Eye (= heart-soul) of the former sun god Ra.
The
Eye of Ra, on its departure, becomes the raging Uraeus serpent. But in the
account of the goddess Tefnut as departing Eye, the raging goddess (serpent) is
also depicted as a lion head with flaming, smoking mane. Of course it is not
one instance, but the repeated instances of such motifs that will make the case
secure.
I
register the supposition now to prepare the way for a comparative test,
beginning with our next installment.
XIUHCOATL
Throughout Mesoamerica one will find numerous variations on the theme of the
celestial serpent and just as many connections with the planet Venus.
A
particularly fascinating instance is the so-called Fire Dragon Xiuhcoatl, whose
name, translated literally, means Turquoise Dragon.
Significantly, Xiuhcoatl was described as a heavenly torch. In mythology he
becomes the fiery weapon hurled by the victorious sun at his enemies, the
stars, writes Brundage.
Perhaps
there is more here than the reader will immediately recognize. A torch or flame
in the sky, only a minor variation on the smoking star, belongs to the
universal comet myth item three in our list of the five most common comet
glyphs. Moreover, as I intend to demonstrate, one of the repeated themes in the
myth of the prototypical comet is that it appears as a divine weapon hurled
against rebelling powers.
Consider
the lines of Shakespeare, in Henry VI I.I.1:
Comets,
importing change of times and states
Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky
And with them scourge the bad revolting stars.
That have consented unto Henry's death.
The
motifs are: death of the king, celestial rebellion, and appearance of the comet
as both a sign of world change (passing of world ages) and a weapon launched
against the rebels.
Similarly,
the Aztec dragon Xiuhcoatl, the flaming serpent, appears as the fire stick
wielded by the celestial hero Huitzilopochtli when the heavens were overrun by
the demons of darkness.
Was the comet-like Turquoise Dragon, then, linked to the planet Venus? In
Teotihuacan the dragon is plainly portrayed as an overarching sky motif, a path
for stellar objects, writes Brundage. He is a plumed rattlesnake [i.e., a
counterpart of the plumed serpent of the Quetzalcoatl myth]
He
can be identified, from the quincunx (the five points that together form the
emblem of the morning star) that adorns him, as the planet Venus.
FIGURE 8
The Cometary Dragon Xiuhcoatl
THE GREAT COMET
In seeking out the general patterns of the Mesoamerican Venus as serpent-dragon,
we cannot fail to observe that our listed cometary symbols are not just
present, but prominent, that they are enigmatically but self-evidently
connected, that they do not direct us to any present forms either in the sky or
in the natural world today (rather, they contradict all natural forms at every
level), and that they remain unexplained, despite decades of microscopic
examination by the best experts.
One conclusion is inescapable, even if interpretations will differ: the
Mesoamerican symbolism of the planet Venus in that planet's guise as
serpent-dragon or chaos-monster is a compendium of globally-recognized comet
symbols, representing in one mythical form all five of the most frequently
employed cometary glyphs!
Yet
in more than forty years since Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision, no mainstream
scholar has even acknowledged this stunning fact.
Of course, no comet admitted by modern science has ever justified the lines of
Shakespeare cited above, or the Aztec image of a comet-like weapon in the form
of a fiery dragon.
But
our appreciation for the symbolism changes dramatically once we entertain a new
possibility that in earlier times mankind experienced a far more spectacular
and devastating comet than ever experienced in more recent times, a cometary
archetype that could fully account for the later symbols. It was said of the
great fire serpent Xiuhcoatl that it spewed forth comets.
That
is exactly the language we should expect if Xiuhcoatl was not just a comet, but
the parent of comets, the concrete source of a mythical archetype, from which
arose the entire reservoir of comet images.
Every
cometary apparition, taking its symbolism from the cosmic original, would then
be considered a child of the primeval, flaming serpent or dragon remembered in
the myths.
EVIDENCE AND LOGIC
In all of this there is a fundamental issue of logic. How does one
properly weigh the lines of evidence, the repeated convergence of comet words
and symbols upon Venus?
Having
had many opportunities to muse over the way the experts skirt the issue, I am
convinced the real question never enters their minds. Until one asks the
question did Venus formerly present itself as a spectacular comet? even the
most obvious evidences will be seen as something else, as confirmation of the
recklessness and confusion of myth, another reason not to take myth seriously.
The
question is not asked because the Velikovskian field of study lacks all
credibility in the eyes of mainstream authorities.
Thus the Mayan scholar Peter Joralemon
explained the highly unnatural convergence of symbols on the celestial dragon
The primary concern of Olmec art is the representation of creatures that are
biologically impossible. Such mythological beings exist in the mind of man, not
in the world of nature.
It's easy to see how one might draw this conclusion. But if the symbolism lacks
any roots in the world of nature and is simply the result of chaotic
imagination, then an even greater issue arises: Why do the same symbols
continually occur in juxtaposition? Once the critic resorts to unbridled
imagination as an explanation of highly specific forms, he is left with nothing
but coincidence to account for the convergence.
But
when it comes to the convergence of all five of the world's most common
cometary symbols on one celestial creature, is it reasonable to expect sheer
imagination and coincidence to account for the situation?
In truth, virtually all of the respected authorities continually look for
natural references, because no one could seriously believe that such dramatic
images as the plumed serpent could dominate an entire civilization without a
link to natural experience.
Only
the rarest of specialists would suggest that the primitive mind conjured its
primary mythical forms out of a wholesale denial of the world. In truth, if
they can find even the most remote natural explanation, the experts will use
it. Miguel Le n-Portilla, for example, offers a picturesque explanation of the
Venus-Quetzalcoatl relationship
The association of Venus and Quetzalcoatl can probably be attributed to the
fact that when this planet sets upon the moving waters of the Pacific, its
reflection seems not unlike a serpent with brilliant scales and plumes.
Here is a natural explanation that would fit easily into Bob Forrest's analysis,
as if there is nothing in the plumed serpent crying out for a comparison with
the highly improbable yet similar images of other peoples and as if the
combined cometary associations attract no attention.
How, then, does one break through the vicious circle? Go back to the list of
the five most frequently-employed comet images, each of them occurring not only
in Mexico but in the global symbolism of the comet. How does one weigh the fact
that all five comet glyphs are attached to the Mexican Venus? Indeed not only
the general motifs but virtually all of the listed variations are attached to
Venus.
Is
sheer coincidence even possible in such an extreme case as this?
For starters, it needs to be understood that we are not dealing with a multiple
choice situation with respect to possible interpretations: If one is permitted
to include in the lexicon of comets the shooting star, whose mythical image is
drawn from the same reservoir, then the only known and provable celestial
phenomenon called a long-haired star is a comet; the only celestial phenomenon
known to have been called a torch star or a flaming star is a comet; the only
celestial phenomenon known to have been represented as a star with streaming
tail feathers is a comet.
The
only celestial phenomenon known to have been represented as a star with a
serpentine tail is a comet. That these very glyphs are consistently attached to
Venus cannot be explained away by ad hoc reasoning.
Now add the mythical role of the comet as the ascending soul of a former great
king, and the explicit role of Venus as the ascending soul of the prototypical
king Quetzalcoatl, and you will begin to see what is at issue here. If nothing
else the stunning convergence of cometary images should make clear that
Humboldt's guess about the smoking star Venus and a local volcano is not a
sufficient answer!
The
juxtaposition of cometarymotifs with the now-peaceful planet a planet whose
appearance today could not begin to explain these associations forces us to
confront the logical alternative:
if
Venus did appear as a comet, the entire assembly of improbable coincidences
disappears.
THE MYTH OF THE COMET VENUS
To establish the co-incidence of cometary themes relating to Venus is not to end the
subject, but simply to open the door to a new vantage point, one in which the
researcher enjoys the freedom to consider unusual possibilities.
Do
the Aztec and Mayan codices, the inscriptions on stone, the oral histories and
the towering monuments speak for events no longer occurring in the skies?
The unexpected symbolic parallels give the researcher a new way of perceiving
his subject. Grant the possibility of a world-threatening comet Venus
frightening enough and destructive enough to substantiate man's deepest fears
and the culture will no longer look the same.
Re-envisioning
the ancient world in this way will not remove the role of magic and
superstition in the myths; nor will it soften the profoundly barbaric
components of native rituals; nor will it give to the myths and rites that
loftier wisdom we so often seek in ancient words. What it will do is lend the
missing perspective, providing new frameworks for understanding the
experiential roots of the culture.
The candid researcher must first admit that even the most capable authorities,
when considering the core of pre-Columbian thought and culture, find that
convincing explanations elude them. Can modern scholars, for example, really
claim to understand the cloud of anxiety that hung over Mexican cultures an
anxiety only heightened by the arrival of the Spaniards?
Nothing
in that civilization's monumental splendor could hide this apprehension. But to
expose its roots the researcher must be willing to follow the clues, rather
than dismiss them just because they seem so out of touch with the world we
know. These clues will lead inescapably past the cover of cultural anxiety to
its roots in celestial terror.
The sensitive chronicler, Fray Diego Duran, writing just a generation after
Columbus, recounted a story about the great emperor Moctezuma, concerning an
experience prior to arrival of the conquistadors. It happened that Moctezuma
had received word of a comet hanging over Mexico at sunrise.
Though
the report did not come from his personal astrologers, he was so filled with fear
that he thought his death would arrive within the hour. Moctezuma then asked
the king of neighboring Texcoco to tell him what the comet meant.
The answer was as Moctezuma must have feared
It
is an ill-omen for our kingdoms; terrible, frightful things will come upon
them. In all our lands and provinces there will be great calamities and
misfortunes, not a thing will be left standing. Death will dominate the land!
All our dominion will be lost
On
hearing this news, Moctezuma wept bitterly, saying,
O
Lord of All Created Things! O mighty gods who gives life or death! Why have you
decreed that many kings shall have reigned proudly but that my fate is to
witness the unhappy destruction of Mexico?
It
would be senseless to attempt to isolate or explain Moctezuma's fears outside a
cultural tradition far more telling than the individual biographies of kings.
No
king in earlier times could free himself from the mythical and ritual contexts
of kingship. And in the overarching symbols of the power and fate of kings one
encounters invariably the archaic language of the comet.
Of
the comet in Moctezuma's day, Duran's modern translators write: it is curious
to note that the Aztecs looked upon comets as ill omens, just as the
contemporary Europeans regarded them as signs of war, famine and pestilence.
Among the Aztecs, Comets and earthquakes, which were always carefully marked
down each year in the hieroglyphic manuscripts, were always considered omens of
misfortune, notes Jacques Soustell.
In our investigation we have grouped comet and meteor symbolism together
because mythically the two are synonymous.
Comets
are referred to in Quich [highlands Maya] as uje ch'umil, tail of the
star,' and are considered omens of massive pestilence, observes Barbara Tedlock. Throughout the Mayan
area, meteors are thought to be evil omens forecasting sickness, war, and
death.
The Mesoamerican theme resonates with a global fear that no comparative study
can ignore: around the world, the comet signaled the approach of doomsday. And
it mattered not how quietly and unobtrusively the visitor made its appearance,
because the archetypal image did not originate in the little wisps of gas that
periodically adorn our sky.
With
the rarest of exceptions, the cometary omen was ominous (the two English words
being derived from the same Latin root). For the ancient stargazers, the comet
was the fear-inspiring portent of disaster, the ill-omened star.
And
thus does our word dis-aster (evil star) echo the ancient fear of a star
(comet) presiding over universal catastrophe (another word reflecting the evil
aster or star, the comet of world mythology). But this brief note on language
of the evil star does not even scratch the surface when it comes to the depth
of man's memory of a world-ending cometary disaster.
METHODOLOGY AND OUTCOME
We have previously observed that, in seeking out Velikovsky's comet, methodology is
everything.
A
useful methodology will not dismiss a widespread theme just because it appears
highly irrational or incapable of explanation. In Bob Forrest's critique he
acknowledges such comet themes as the death of a king or great leader at the
appearance of a comet, good wine in the year of a comet, and the comet
signaling outbreaks of war. As to the roots of such odd ideas, heaven only
knows, he exclaims.
So
why should we accept only those comet ideas that support Velikovsky's thesis?
Here Forrest missed each and every opportunity to account for what he assumed
could never be explained. If worldwide comet symbolism originated in the
experience of a truly terrifying intruder, it is simply impossible to know
which portions of comet lore are relevant prior to reconstructing the story
from the global evidence.
And
in truth, ALL of the comet themes cited by Forrest are illuminated by the
biography of the Great Comet, as I intend to demonstrate with more than
sufficient evidence in this series.
First there is the matter of pervasive fear for when it comes to irrational
terror carried as luggage from the past, little else compares to the universal
fear of THE COMET.
Carl Sagan and Ann
Druyan, in their book Comet, find the fear to be virtually universal:
Rarely
have so many diverse cultures, all over the planet, agreed so well. In the
history of the world, more societies have advocated incest or infanticide than
have taught that comets were benign, or even neutral. Everywhere on Earth, with
only a few exceptions, comets were harbingers of change, ill fortune, evil. It
was common knowledge.
Most
of us are, in fact, so accustomed to the common expressions of this fear that
we fall into a trap of illogic:
Comets,
of course, were always regarded in antiquity as omens of disaster, wrote the
esteemed authority on comparative religion, Theodore Gaster.
It
sounds as if (of course) the overwhelming fear is completely natural and needs
no explanation because it is so universal.
The trap also caught author David Ritchie: For thousands of years comets have
been associated with all manners of disasters and misfortune. This association
is easy to understand. But logic does not permit us to assume that the
pervasiveness of an irrational fear is an explanation.
I find it of interest that Fred Whipple, one of the deans of modern astronomy,
did not find an easy explanation for the hysteria Why should comets those
graceful, sometimes majestic, creatures of the sky frighten people? They move
very slowly, without startling changes in shape or aspect. They make no sounds
and emit no dazzling flashes of light. In short, they do nothing that seems to
me to be threatening.
Yet
comets have terrified people as long as there have been people to terrify.
The ancient and poorly understood fear aroused by the appearance of a comet
continued through the Middle Ages and even (in a more tempered expression) into
the twentieth century, with the arrival of Halley's Comet in 1910. We may all
die laughing when the comet [Halley] comes, the French astronomer Camille
Flammarion was quoted as saying, with language that fed a widespread
pre-existing apprehension of the fin du monde, the end of the world.
In earlier times the extent of comet fear was deadly. On the arrival of the
comet of 1528, the famous French surgeon Ambroise Par described the public
reaction: This comet was so horrible and so frightful and it produced such
great terror in the vulgar that some died of fear and others fell sick.
The range of comet fears is impressive. According to Aristotle, the comet
brings wind and drought. Among both the Greeks and Romans, The comet was
inevitably the presage of some cataclysmic event, states A. Barret.
Josephus reports in his History of the Jews that
prior to the destruction of Jerusalem by Roman armies, a comet shaped like a
sword hung over the city for an entire year. (While Carl Sagan hastens to point
out the impossibility of the literal occurrence, it effectively mirrors the
mythical role of the comet.) According to Servius, the ancient and infamous
comet Typhon produced terrible famine.
The
Anglo Saxon Chronicle recorded firedrakes fiery dragons seen flying in the air
at the time of a great famine in 779, observing as well that a great comet
appeared at the time of famine in 975. And so too does a comet bring great
famine in the traditions of the Masai of East Africa.
In Byrhtferth's Manual, published in the year 1011, occurs this description of
a comet:
There
is a star called a comet. When it appears it betokens famine or pestilence or
war or the destruction of the earth or fearful storms. Similarly the Eghap of
Nigeria say that pestilence is the regular companion of the feared comet.
Even
the historian Isidor Bishop of Seville (602-636), a well known skeptic when it
came to astrology, could not set aside the belief that the comet presaged
revolutions, wars, and pestilence.
Gregory
of Tours (c. 541-594), writing in De Cursu Stellarum, tells us that when a
comet spreads its hair abroad darkly, it announces rain to the country. Nor is
it surprising to find the rumor that the Great Plague of London was due to the
appearance of a comet; or that a comet is also said to have accompanied the
great earthquake at Lima, Peru, in 1746.
While the association of the comet and wide-ranging disaster is worldwide, the
pattern may initially seem diffuse, with insufficient coherence to support any
unified theory of comet fears. Funk and Wagnall's encyclopedia, for example,
included the following description under the heading comet:
Not only in antiquity, but through the centuries among all peoples, comets have
aroused in man a feeling of terror and foreboding. These mysterious visitors in
the heavens have been thought to be connected with war, famine, the plague, the
downfall of kings and monarchs, the end of the world, universal suffering,
ill-luck, and sickness.
How, then, did this curious profile of the comet arise? The darkly pessimistic
ideas about comets inspired Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan to muse
There is an overwhelming sadness to the literature of comets. With melancholy
consistency we discover that disaster has always been a commonplace; that any
comet at any time viewed from anywhere on Earth is assured of some tragedy for
which it can be held accountable.
Such is the logic of efforts to explain mythical ideas through experiences
familiar to our own day: when a comet appeared the undisciplined primitive mind
must have freely associated it with one or another disaster occurring around
the same time.
But
this suggested habit, which is verifiable, will not explain why, when a
disaster occurred, the first instinct of stargazers was to look for a comet to
explain it (or to provide the mythically-required divine signal of impending
catastrophe).
Nor will the ease with which the stargazers found a catastrophe to associate
with a comet's arrival explain the deeper theme of the world ending apocalypse.
If one looks at comet lore more closely, it will be realized that what the
stargazers feared most was no local disaster. Ancient Chinese comet astrology
held that Comets are vile stars.
Every
time they appear in the south, something happens to wipe out the old and
establish the new. In the language of myth that means the end of the world.
Both
the Sibylline Oracles and a Dead Sea Scroll (War of the Sons of Light and
Darkness) present the comet as a sign of the Last Days all of which sounds very
much like the Aztec's comet-like plumed serpent presiding over the end of one
world age and beginning of another.
Consider, for example, why it is that the comet soars into prominence as the
calendar approaches a critical moment, such as the end of a millennium. (Yes, it
seems that round numbers and critical moments go hand in hand, fed by the sense
of cyclical time and the global myth of a world age ending in sweeping
catastrophe.)
Mary Proctor tells us that as the year 1000 approached even the most simple
phenomena assumed terrible proportions. And this included, not surprisingly,
reports of earth-quakes, and a comet visible for nine days. (Here again is the
earthquake-comet association despite the failure of any known comet to redeem
the association.)
The
role of the mythical comet in reports of ostensibly historical comets will be
clearly seen in the following chronicle of the year 1000, cited by Proctor
The heavens having opened, a kind of burning torch fell upon the earth, leaving
behind a long train of light similar to a flash of lightningas this opening in
the heavens closed, imperceptibly there became visible the figure of a dragon,
whose feet were blue, and whose head seemed continually to increase.
Even the world-famous dragon finds its way into the story, when the calendar
calls for it! But a fundamental distinction is necessary, between the symbol
and the thing symbolized.
Every
break in the natural order was a reminder (symbol) of what world mythology
presents as a universal disaster; in this sense, the local pestilence needed a
comet to find its place in the scheme of things, particularly at the end of the
millennium!
In
the same way, even today the apocalyptic fear expresses itself with every local
catastrophe, offering a sign of the anticipated end of the world just as, for
century after century, virtually every wisp of a comet played its required part
in the psychic drama. How the underlying story and its symbols originated is an
entirely different matter, involving patterns that could never be explained by
any local disaster.
That many of the most significant patterns are poorly recognized is due to the
common methodology of the investigators, and the accompanying suppositions. The
result is a heap of evidential fragments more than sufficient to illustrate the
global fear of comets, but without an adequate sense of the ancient experience
from which the patterns emerged.
The portentous news brought by the comet can be summarized as follows:
the
comet foretells the fall of the kingdom;
the comet predicts the arrival of plague, famine, earthquake, pestilence;
the comet means the end of a world age, the arrival of universal darkness or
night, the occlusion of the sun by chaos monsters, a victory (though temporary)
of rebelling powers. (We have here only a minor variation on end of the
kingdom, since the kingdom and the world were originally synonymous in the
language of myth; that which lay outside the kingdom belonged to chaos,
darkness, rebellion);
the comet forecasts the death of kings or great rulers;
the comet heralds cataclysmic wars. (Among other things, it provides the
warrior-king or chief with a divine signal: now is the propitious moment to
attack barbarian nations outside the realm.)
In
a later installment in this series, These Things a Comet Brings, I shall
seek to document the full accord of these cross-cultural themes with the
collective memory of the Great Comet Venus.
For
the present discussion, I shall simply cite enough instances to illustrate the
key ideas.
While
comets observed in our time only accent the irrationality of ancient fears, the
worldwide portent symbolism of the comet answers so completely to the
archetypal Great Comet (Venus) as to logically preclude the customary
explanations of these fears.
THE GREAT COMET AND THE DEATH OF KINGS
We began this section with a note on the Aztec emperor Moctezuma's terror
on the arrival of a comet.
The
focus of this fear is significant because it was shared by emperors and kings
and tribal chiefs the world over. The comet means the death of great leaders.
The idea appears to be as old as Babylonian astronomy, which associates a comet
with the death of kings. The Roman poet Lucan offers a vivid description of
cometary disaster, when the skies, blazing fire, bring forth the hair of the
baleful star the comet which portends changes to monarchs. So too did the Greek
mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy connect the comet with the death of kings.
The profound fears of royalty at the appearance of the comet continued well
into the present era. The third century Christian theologian Origen cites the
comet as heralding a change in dynasties. It was a common belief that the comet
of AD 336 had announced the death of the great emperor Constantine.
In
connection with the assassination of Julius Caesar, it was said, a comet had
appeared in the sky. On learning of a comet Nero was seized with fear, and
chroniclers assure us that a comet preceded the death of the Emperor Macrinus
in A.D. 218, and of Attila in A.D. 451.
According to Synesius, writing in the fourth century A.D., a comet means great
disaster: And whenever these comets appear, they are an evil portent, which the
diviners and soothsayers appease. They assuredly foretell public disasters,
enslavements of nations, desolations of cities, deaths of kings.
The Frankish bishop and historian Gregory of Tours, writing in the sixth
century, reports that the flaming diadem of a comet portends the death of
kings. Geoffrey of Monmouth connected the death of Aurelius Ambrosius with the
appearance of a spectacular comet whose political symbolism was said to have
been explained by Merlin.
Even the brilliant astronomer Tycho Brahe, several centuries later, was unable
to free himself from the idea that the comet brought overwhelming pestilence,
war, and the death of kings.
When Halley's Comet appeared in April 1066, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gave this
report:
In
this year King Harald came from York to Westminster at Easter, which was after
the mid winter in which the king (Edward the Confessor) died. Then was seen
over all England such a sign in the heaven as no man ever before saw; some say
it was the star Cometa.
Among the ancient Germanic peoples, according to Grimm, the belief persisted
that a comet's appearance betokens events fraught with peril, especially the
death of a king.
The memory of the comet is well preserved in the song of German schoolchildren
in the time of Martin Luther
[These] things a comet brings
Storm, plague, famine,
death of kings,
War, earthquake, flood, and upheaval.
A
drawing of a comet in the Chinese cometary atlas from the tomb at Mawangdui is
accompanied by the simple statement: There will be deaths of kings.
The
Chinese Record of the World Changes, by Li Ch'un Feng, (602-667 AD) warns of dire consequences: When a
comet travels into the Constellation Taurus within three years the emperor dies
and the country is in chaos. So, too, do the Luba of Africa say that comet
means the death of a leader. And in the same way, natives of the Polynesian
Islands, claimed that a comet signified the death of a chief.
Here, then, is the universal mythical context in which we must understand
Moctezuma's fears. In the global tradition it is as if the comet bore
particularly ominous news for heads of state, and the Aztec world view was no
exception.
Aveni,
noting the intense interest in cometary phenomena among Mesoamerican peoples,
tells us that illustrations of comets are frequently accompanied by
interpretations of these portents: These usually signify that a person of nobility
will die.
The paradox is accented in Shakespeare's famous lines,
When
beggars die there are no comets seen;
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.
Of
course kings knew very well the special perils of comets.
When
a comet in 837 drew the attention of King Louis the Pious of France, The king
went into a veritable orgy of prayers and devotions, ordering churches and
shrines built to appease the imagined wrath of God. The Carthaginian general
Hannibal in 184 B.C. was warned that a recently-discovered comet meant he would
die soon. He answered the comet by committing suicide.
Is there something to be explained in the comets threat to kings? When Carl
Sagan and Ann Druyan encountered the death of kings idea, they offered the
usual explanation, calling such ideas the triumph of superstition and assuming
the fear arose from the random coincidence of certain kings dying at the time
comets appeared.
Velikovsky's critic Bob Forrest was even less impressed with the strange idea.
While noting that the death of kings is perhaps the commonest theme of all, he
adds
Certainly I see no pressing need to postulate cometary collisions on the basis
of the evil reputation of comets any more than I need to invoke
cometary/planetary exhalations to explain good wine years.
But again the critic has drawn his conclusion prematurely, and we are left only
with what amounts to a guess as to whether there is a connection with planetary
upheaval. What happens, on the other hand, if instead of setting the fragments
aside once gathered, we look for connecting links? In summarizing the curious
theme of the comet and the death of kings, Mary Proctor adds a telling
observation.
The comet of A.D. 451 or A.D. 453 announced the death of Attila, and the comet
of A.D. 455 that of the Emperor Valentinian.
So
widely spread was the belief in the connection between the death of the great
and those menacing signs in the heavens that the chroniclers of old appear to
have recorded comets which were never seen, such as the comet of A.D. 814,
which was supposed to have presaged the death of Charlemagne.
The note concerning the death of Charlemagne is significant. Can one really
believe that localized, random, and disconnected events caused the same theme
to arise on every continent and with such oppressive influence that a comet
would be invented when the expected visitor failed to materialize at the death
of a powerful ruler?
According
to Peter Lancaster Brown, Every bright comet which appeared during the medieval
period, the Middle Ages, and even the Renaissance had itself affixed to the
death or misfortune of a prominent historical figure.
These
beliefs were so widespread that (according to Pingre) the chronicles recorded
in good faith comets which were never actually seen. This suggests that the
death of kings motif, rather than reflecting random local events, conditioned
man's perception of local events for century upon century. For those familiar
with the way core mythical ideas work their way down through history, this is a
key indicator of a very ancient and well-rooted idea.
The
chroniclers would happily re-write history to bring it into accord with the
great mythical traditions of kingship and the gods.
To the modern reader it may appear as if the ideas dropped randomly out of the
sky, but a closer look will eliminate that impression completely. The patterns
are the key. One fascinating idea about comets, for example, provides a
unifying thread, while directing our attention to earlier mythical sources. A
comet was frequently claimed to be the soul of a great ruler rising in the sky
(certainly a good reason for loyalists to find a comet on the death of a ruler,
even if the sky is not cooperating). Consider the famous case of Julius Caesar.
On
the death of that ruler, according to the Latin poet Ovid and others, a great
cometary spectacle occurred in the sky, as Caesar's soul itself rose as a
comet. And from Ovid's reverent description it seems that it could not have
been otherwise for a leader of such stature.
Clearly,
the mythically-rooted story celebrating the cometary soul of a great leader
preceded Ovid's poetic license!
Aristotle, not given to celebrate the mythical tradition, tells us that the
Greek philosopher Democritus held that comets were the souls of men of renown.
Among the Polynesian Islanders, according to Williams, a comet did not just
signify the death of a king, a comet meant the flight of the soul.
Similarly,
the eminent student of comparative myth and religion, James Frazer, produced
extensive proof that a widespread superstition associates meteors or falling
stars with the souls of the dead. Often they are believed to be the spirits of
the departed on their way to the other world.
With respect to the departing cometary soul of Caesar, which I shall take up in
a summary of the Greek and Roman material, I cannot resist passing on to the
reader one fascinating detail. When Robert Schilling, perhaps the world's
leading authority on the Latin goddess Venus, gathered the references to Caesar's
apotheosis, he noticed a curious blend of two ideas: one that the soul rose as
a comet, the other that the soul rose as the planet Venus.
And
the two ideas were actually joined as one, for the poet Ovid describes the soul
as a flaming comet carried aloft by Venus. In more than one instance the soul
itself is celebrated as Venus. A curiosity indeed. What general conspiracy,
Schilling asks, seems to have tacitly excluded the comet to the profit of the
star [Venus]?
That
the specialist did not discern the connection to a larger pattern (Venus =
comet in a global tradition) is why the comparative study is so crucial.
SOUL OF THE CREATOR-KING
We are thus brought back to Moctezuma's terror. One explanation for his fear of the
comet asks unidentified local experiences to account for it and asks
coincidence to account for parallel comet fears around the world. But another
explanation is possible, in terms of an ancient story known to every native of
Mexico and reflected in the most powerful cosmic images of Aztec culture.
I
refer to the myth of Quetzalcoatl, whose soul rose as the comet-like Venus. If
Quetzalcoatl's departing heart-soul provided a prototype of the comet myth, we
do not need to look further for an explanation of the comet's relation to the
death of kings .
In
this case, the relationship is self-evident: the comet means the death of the
king because it is the king's soul leaving him in a cosmic disaster. And the
comet brings the end of the world because, in the death of the god-king and the
departure of his heart-soul as a comet, a former world age ended
catastrophically.
Having raised the question rhetorically, I do not expect the critic to accept
the suggested explanation of comet symbolism apart from the complete
presentation of evidence in this series. Nevertheless, for the sake of saving
time, it may be helpful to give the gist of the idea I intend to develop and
substantiate with each future installment
Within human memory extraordinary changes have occurred in the solar system.
Planets
now remote from the Earth once moved in much, much closer proximity to our
planet, appearing as gigantic powers looming over man. Hence, we cannot
understand the mythical age of the gods without confronting the gods as visible
forms in the sky, forms that are no longer present. In all mythical systems the
gods rule for a time, then depart amid celestial upheaval.
Mythically, there was once a founding king, a celestial model of the good king.
But neither this charismatic figure, nor his celestial progeny will answer to
familiar references in a now-settled sky. Nor will the mythical powers of
darkness, in their monstrous dress, find any explanation in our experienced
world.
Inherent in the myths of the gods is the collective human experience of
extraordinary trauma. An idyllic world, a paradisal condition, a Golden Age
ruled by the former great king (mythically, the creator-king), came crashing
down in a world-ending disaster: wars of the gods, earthquake, famine, wind and
flood, the arrival of universal night.
Of this universal catastrophe the Great Comet Venus, the departing heart-soul
of the creator-king was remembered as both symbol and agent.
QUETZALCOATL AND THE FEARS OF KINGS
The apprehension of Moctezuma cannot be separated from a sweeping mythical tradition,
personified in Mexico by the life and death of Quetzalcoatl, the cultural hero.
From
him it began, from Quetzalcoatl it flowed out, all art and knowledge, the
Aztecs sang.
Quetzalcoatl was called the sun, but the mythical and ritual sources remind us
that this does not mean the light we call Sun today. The most revered figure of
Mexican myth, Quetzalcoatl ruled for a time, then disembarked for other realms.
As the great teacher, the exemplary ruler, his life and death defined the
duties, expectations and fears of kings. Which is to say, Moctezuma's fear, the
fear of the neighboring king of Texcoco, and the fear of every emperor before
him must be understood in terms of a cosmic crisis at the center of the myth.
When Quetzalcoatl died or departed, a world cycle ended catastrophically.
But of course it was not just the myth of Quetzalcoatl that reminded rulers of
their tenuous hold on the kingdom and on life itself. Such is the message of
universal myth, for two principles emerge from a comparative study
As above, so below. The theme couldn't be more clearly stated throughout
Mesoamerica: the terrestrial king lives in the shadow of the celestial king,
the Great Example for later kings. But if the references of kingship are
originally celestial, that does not mean they will be found in the present sky.
Thus
the unsettling implication for the specialists:
if
the forms and episodes of myth relate to spectacular former occurrences, then
no mainstream approach will ever reach the central motives of myth.
As
before, so again.
This
is the key to all mythically-rooted fear. What happened before will happen in
the future. Countless variations on the underlying themes cannot obscure the
expectation of the eternal return. Quite apart from their interesting
mathematics, for example, the mythical context of the Mesoamerican calendar
system was the periodic cataclysm.
But
that deeply-imbedded fear reached far beyond the calendar and into every
expression of culture: The collective goal was to reckon with divine caprice,
to employ every device available to bargain for a new lease on life, to avoid
the recurring disaster.
Though Velikovsky did not give substantial attention to the myth of
Quetzalcoatl, he did observe the relationship to Venus, and the catastrophic
nature of the god's death and transformation. To which Bob Forrest replied with
considerable skepticism, claiming that in the life and death of Quetzalcoatl
there is certainly no reference to the planets in a Velikovskian sense.
True,
Quetzalcoatlwas symbolically related to the Morning Star, but this is a far cry
from being told that the planet Venus brought about the End of the World with a
cosmic hurricane! Quetzalcoatl is here a Great Teacher, rather than a rampant
super-comet.
Notice the critic's reasoning: if Quetzalcoatl was a great teacher, his story
could not involve an account of Velikovsky's comet. It seems that Forrest could
not imagine a celestial form filling the role of exemplary model in the myths,
nor could he imagine the death of this charismatic personality in terms of a
sweeping natural catastrophe.
But
this is precisely where comparative study becomes so essential. Had he known
that virtually all of the founding kings of myth suffer some variation on the
fate of Quetzalcoatl, he might have noticed as well a recurring corollary: the
god-king's heart-soul the planet Venus departs to join in a celestial
conflagration.
And
where astronomical data is available, the skywatchers insist with stunning unanimity
that the majestic heart-soul emerged as the planet Venus. (On such a sweeping
claim as this, I can only ask the reader's indulgence as the evidence unfolds
in this series.)
Forrest's concluding exclamation mark only emphasizes the gap that separates
conventional students of myth from the world of the earliest skywatchers.
Coherent
motives disappear, and the primary cultural symbols dissolve into sand under
the specialist's microscope. Then it becomes possible to believe that a host of
different and unrelated experiences came together as the doomsday fear, or that
the pervasive role of sacrifice arose from a different experience than the
meticulous observations of Venus, or that the memory of great wars in the sky
was at best a rationalization for the relentless Mesoamerican wars of conquest.
This is where Velikovsky's comet Venus will help to rescue ancient myth and
ritual from a theoretical vacuum. It will do so by providing a coherent
reference, sufficient to substantiate an entirely new approach to the subject
matter. The comet Venus enters ancient myth as the celestial agent of disaster,
and its emergence is synonymous with the death of the creator-king.
The
great god's heart-soul departs from him (or is removed violently, or is flung
into the ensuing holocaust) to become a comet-like flaming star, then presides
over the re-establishment of celestial order, the dawn of a new world age.
To see Velikovsky's comet in its globally-defined and catastrophic role is to
realize something overlooked by the specialists: that a planetary history we
have forgotten will do more to explain the pervasive fears of ancient cultures
than all of the more fashionable speculations combined.
How
are we to understand the unending ritual wars and sacrifices in which rulers
remembered, honored and satisfied the gods, hoping to hold the heavens
together? How do we interpret the complex calendars of world ages, anticipating
a recurring doomsday with every turn of the wheel? Or the endless preoccupation
with catastrophic omens and portents? For centuries the priest- astronomers
reacted with terror to any natural phenomenon that might suggest the return to
world chaos. In what experience did this fear arise?
Surely
one way of illuminating the symbols of celestial terror is to consider the
possibility of terrifying events.
To make this point completely clear it will be useful to look at a few of the
Mesoamerican symbols of the doomsday fear, asking the reader at each stage
whether we are considering separate symbols, or the expressions of a more
coherent, highly traumatic experience.
MESOAMERICAN ASTRONOMY
Velikovsky reminded us that to the natives of Mexico the planet Venus
bore a very special significance.
No
celestial body loomed more centrally in their meticulous observations of the
sky. To emphasize the point Velikovsky noted the Augustinian friar Ram n Y
Zamora's report that the Mexican tribes held the Morning Star in great
veneration and kept a precise record of its appearance. So exact was the book-record
of the day when it appeared and when it concealed itself, that they never made
mistakes, stated Zamora.
In Velikovsky's interpretation, the carefully recorded observations of Venus by
the Mexicans, Babylonians, Chinese and other cultures was a very old custom
originating in a past when Venus moved on an elongated orbit.
And
for many centuries after the cometary disaster, the astronomers perceived
closer approaches of Venus as a grave potential threat. Out of this
preoccupation also evolved ritual calendar systems based on the movements of
Venus. It was not the remote and peaceful star we see today that provoked this
new science, but the celestial agent of disaster as it gradually settled into a
circularized orbit.
In
response to an unpredictable celestial power, the observational science strove
to bring the movements into a system of comprehension, enabling the priest
astronomers to evolve forecasts as part of a collective endeavor to reckon with
the gods.
The special place of astronomy in Mesoamerican myths and rites is acknowledged
by the best authorities, though the origins of this culture-wide theme appear
lost in a gray past. It has been clear to all serious students of Mesoamerican
culture, writes David Kelley, that there was an intimate relationship between
astronomical knowledge, the calendar, and religious beliefs and rituals. Or, as
Aveni puts it, Quite unlike our modern astronomy, the raison d'tre of
Mesoamerican, particularly Mayan astronomy, was ritualistic and divinatory in
nature.
But
what were the roots of the religious motive, placing such an emphasis on
astronomy?
The recurring role of the planet Venus through all of the interacting levels is
noted by Burr Cartwright Brundage
The true role of the planet Venus in the development of the Mesoamerican
cultures is not understood. It might not be far wrong to look upon the
Mesoamerican's great skill in numeration as a child of that planet and to state
that their intellectual life pulsed to its periods.
Certainly
a significant portion of their mythology involved that planet, and their
concepts of family legitimacy and challenge were colored by the bonds that
united the planet to the sun, the fount of all authority.
To observers approaching the Mesoamerican cultures from an interdisciplinary
vantage point, the cultural preoccupation with Venus immediately stands out. E.
C. Krupp, a popularizer of modern archaeoastronomy, was impressed with the
Venus profile in Mesoamerica, noting that the priest-astronomers computed
portentous moments based upon their calendar and the behavior of Venus.
They
installed their kings, sacrificed prisoners and went to war by these omens.
But
why? Must we assume unhesitatingly that the anxiety over Venus' movements arose
under a tranquil sky?
VENUS AND COSMIC UPHEAVAL
Across Mesoamerica Venus was celebrated as the radiant heart-soul of the great
cultural hero whom the Aztecs called Quetzalcoatl. Yet enigmatically, the
appearances of the star after periods of absence stirred extraordinary fear.
Evidently, the reappearance of Venus in different quarters after a prolonged
absence carried various evil connotations for the people of Yucatan.Obviously,
they were deeply concerned about where and when Venus might appear to reverse
their fortunes.
Expressions of this fear will be found at both the general and specific levels.
There is the general association with death, as noted by Thompson and others,
but also the more specific association with the death of kings. Thus the Mayan
date name of Venus, Hun Ahau was a day of death and darkness. But more
specifically, the same day among the Aztecs signified the death of Quetzalcoatl
and the transformation of his heart-soul into Venus.
There seems to be no doubt that unlucky days were associated with the heliacal
rise of Venus (its first appearance as morning star, after a period of
absence), each to be regarded with appropriate ritual, Aveni writes.
The fear engendered by the heliacal rising of Venus was noted centuries ago by
one of the earliest European chroniclers, Sahagun:
And when it (Venus) newly emerged, much fear came over them; all were
frightened. Everywhere the outlets and openings of [houses] were closed up. It
was said that perchance [the light] might bring a cause of sickness, something
evil when it came to emerge.
In response to the new and bright appearance of Venus, kings called for
sacrifices of captives to please the gods, for it seems that the planet's
appearance could invite great calamities from the outbreak of war to famine and
flood. Could this be a key to understanding the mysteries of Venus-portents? As
will become clear, the perils of Venus are the perils of the comet in the
global lexicon.
We have already noted that, throughout the ancient world, the comet portended
the death of great kings. But interestingly, the heliacal rising of Venus
conveyed the same celestial message, as reported by Brundage.
It is curious that the Mesoamerican peoples thought of the morning star so
consistently as malign. He was to them, whether they were Aztec or Mayan, the
very father of calamity. The dates of his heliacal rising were forecast so that
the dooms ahead could be adequately read and prepared forSignificantly, his
malice could also be directed at rulers, for if he arose on the trecana opened
by one-reed, then great lords sickened and died.
Thus, the Anales de Quahtitlan, a chronicle from the Mexican highlands
(colonial times), describes the perils of the piercing rays of Venus. On the
day One Reed, (the day of Quetzalcoatl's birth, and the day of the same
god-king's death), the rising of Venus is deadly: It shoots the kings, the
texts say. Notice here that an underlying logic is at work, running from the
specific to the general, from the archetype to the symbol.
Quetzalcoatl
died at the critical calendar moment, both the end and the beginning of the
time-reckoning system, mythically the end of one world age and the beginning of
another. In the calendar system and in the sacred rites, the cyclical principle
established by the life and death of Quetzalcoatl is both repeated and
generalized: as above, so below; as before, so again.
Hence,
kings will die on the day One Reed, the day that Quetzalcoatl's heart-soul
departed to become the planet Venus.
What, then, is the significance of the fact that the symbolism of Venus
replicates so precisely the global symbolism of the comet? The new appearance
of Venus as morning star, is a moment of great peril for the kingdom (the
world), as is the appearance of the comet. It harkens back to the death of the
god-king, as does the comet. It is the heart-soul of the god-king rising in the
sky, as is the comet. Is this, then, just another coincidence to add to all of
the others?
The further one descends into the various cultural levels at which the fear was
expressed, the more clear becomes the equation:
the
fear of Venus' rising was, in every way, identical to the fear instilled by the
arrival of a COMET.
VENUS AND THE END OF THE WORLD
Immanuel Velikovsky, in developing the theme of cometary disaster, noticed that one
ancient culture after another spoke of former catastrophes so devastating that
the world came to an end.
This
collective memory, in turn, seems to have given rise to the general notion of
recurring cycles, or world ages.
While
Velikovsky noticed surprising parallels among far-flung nations, including the
Babylonians, Greeks, Hebrews, Chinese, and Polynesians, he was particularly
fascinated with the Mexican ideas:
An
old tradition, and a very persistent one, of world ages that went down in
cosmic catastrophes was found in the Americas among the Incas, the Aztecs, and
the Mayas. A major part of stone inscriptions found in Yucatan refer to world
catastrophes.
The
most ancient of these fragments [katuns, or calendar stones of Yucatan] refer,
in general, to great catastrophes which, at intervals and repeatedly, convulsed
the American continent, and of which all nations of this continent have
preserved a more or less distinct memory.
Codices
of Mexico and Indian authors who composed the annals of their past give a
prominent place to the tradition of world catastrophes that decimated humankind
and changed the face of the earth.
In
the chronicles of the Mexican kingdom it is said:
The
ancients knew that before the present sky and earth were formed, man was
already created and life had manifested itself four times.
To
Velikovsky, this language sounded remarkably close to that of the Greeks and
other ancient peoples, who similarly recounted the passing of former ages and
destruction by water, fire, wind or flood.
For
some nations, he said, the transition from one age to another meant a new sun
in the sky.
An oft-repeated occurrence in the traditions of the world ages is the advent of
a new sun in the sky at the beginnings of every age. The word sun is
substituted for the word age in the cosmogonic traditions of many peoples all
over the world.
The Mayas counted their ages by the names of their consecutive suns. These were
called Water Sun, Earthquake Sun, Hurricane Sun, Fire Sun. These suns mark the
epochs to which are attributed the various catastrophes the world has suffered.
The nations of Culhua or Mexico, Humboldt quoted G mara, the Spanish writer of
the sixteenth century, believe according to their hieroglyphic paintings, that,
previous to the sun which now enlightens them, four had already been
successively extinguished.
These
four suns are as many ages, in which our species has been annihilated by
inundations, by earthquakes, by a general conflagration, and by the effect of
destroying tempests. Symbols of the successive suns are painted on the
pre-Columbian literary documents of Mexico.
Cinco soles que son edades, or five suns that are epochs, wrote G mara in his
description of the conquest of Mexico.
To Velikovsky, the idea of former world ages or suns belonged to a collective
memory of upheaval and world-changing shifts in the order of the solar system.
The earth was disturbed in its rotation, its axis tilted, the path of its
revolution around the sun changed, and vast nations were devastated. Then, from
the ensuing chaos, the world was born anew under an altered celestial order.
CALENDAR
Sacred astronomy throughout Mesoamerica was particularly conscious of the heliacal
rising of Venus, the planet's first annual pre-dawn appearance (beginning its
phase of greatest brilliance due to its proximity to the Earth).
According
to Aveni, this first appearance as Morning Star was probably the most important
single event in Maya astronomy.
One of the extraordinary coincidences of Venus' present behavior is the
resonance of its observed cycle with our year of 365 1/4 days. Like clockwork,
due to the synchronous movements of Venus and Earth we noted earlier, Venus
first appears as morning star on the same calendar day every eight years, and
during that span of time it rises heliacally a total of five times.
This synchronous relationship of Earth and Venus is reflected in the
Mesoamerican calendar rites. Many centuries ago, a sacred calendar system was
perfected within a cultural environment that is not yet clear to
archaeoastronomers. The original system is unknown.
What
we do know is that at the time of the Spanish invasion, all of the primary
Mesoamerican cultures shared a common calendar structure, an outgrowth of the
unidentified original system, in which the Venus-cycle played a crucial role,
but not one that appears fully comprehensible to the scholars seeking to
understand it.
The calendar combined two time-keeping systems: one based on the familiar solar
year, which was divided into 18 months of 20 days, to which five unlucky days
were added at the end of the year, rounding out a 365-day year. In their
veintena festivals, the Aztecs celebrated the end of each 20-day cycle of the
solar year, making sacrifices and offerings to the gods in the hope that the
sun and stars would continue their orderly movement across the heavens.
The other calendar was based on a 260-day cycle whose original meaning is still
being debated. Enigmatically, this ritual calendar appears to have no
self-evident logic in terms of the natural cycles one would expect to find
reflected in calendar phases. And yet, for ritual reasons, the sacred 260-day
calendar dominated the solar calendar.
This,
Robert and Peter Markman tell us, was a sacred
calendar tied directly to no single cycle observable in the world of nature.
Rather,
it embodied and celebrated the essence of cyclicity abstracted from its
occurrence in natural phenomena. This was the calendar used for prophecy and
divination since in its workings it allowed man his closest approach to the
world of spirit. How, then, did it connect man with the world of the gods?
The 260-day ritual calendar combined two different sequences, one a series of
20 days-signs, the other a sequence of 13 day-numbers, so that there were a
total of 260 combinations of the two sequences to complete a sacred calendrical
period. Since each day and each number had its own gods and associations, every
day in the 260-day cycle had a different ritual significance.
Understanding calendrical lore allowed a special group of priests to understand
the implications of the signs of the calendar and to divine the future These
periods could determine the augury of each of the days, since the essence of
the day (kin among the Maya) was itself the prophecy (also kin).
Possibly, the authors say, there was a connection of the 260-day cycle with
Venus: The interval between the appearance of Venus as morning and evening star
is close to 260 days.
The mystery is heightened by another fact that rarely receives attention: in
the Maya calendrical ritual the listed movements of Venus do not accord with
the planet's observed movements today.
The
synodical revolution of Venus divides into four periods:
1.after inferior
conjunction Venus appears as Morning Star for an average of 263 days
2.during superior
conjunction the planet disappears for an average of 50 days
3.the planet reappears
as Evening Star for an average of 263 days
4.Venus then disappears
again for 8 days during inferior conjunction; after which it reappears as
Morning Star, to complete the synodical period
But
these are not the values in the Mayan Venus cycles, which seem to follow an
unfamiliar logic of their own. The considerable discrepancy is emphasized by
Aveni
They assigned an eight day period to the disappearance at inferior conjunction,
which is close to that observed today. But, peculiarly, their manuscripts
recorded a disappearance interval of 90 days at superior conjunction, nearly
double the true value.
Furthermore,
they assigned unequal values to the intervals as morning and evening star:
250
and 236 days, respectively.
In
fact, the true intervals are equivalent at approximately 263 days. Since we
know that the Maya were careful and exacting timekeepers, there may have been
ritualistic reasons for these changes which overrode the observations.
It seems as if another anomaly rears its head: the ancient Mesoamerican
astronomers, so admired for their accurate record keeping of Venus' motions, do
not have Venus moving on its present course. Yet Aveni assures us that the Maya
developed the observational precision and reasoning power to predict eclipses
and to determine the length of the Venus year and the lunar month to accuracies
of less than a day in several centuries. Thus, the calendar discrepancy, to say
the least, should draw one's attention!
Let us not forget Velikovsky's admonition as to the significance of the
recurring anomaly. The anomalous movement of Venus in the ritual calendar, a
calendar originating in an undefined period preceding any of the known cultural
variants, has a significant and more ancient Near Eastern parallel.
As
Velikovksy himself observed almost 45 years ago, the Babylonian astronomers, in
the famous Venus tablets of Ammizaduga, recorded extensive observations of
Venus' movements. Like their Mesoamerican counterparts, these founders of
astronomy were revered for their observational skills and mathematical
accuracy.
Nevertheless,
the Ammizaduga records of Venus' appearances and disappearances are filled with
errors suggesting that (in the minds of the stargazers, at least) Venus did not
move on its present visual path.
And speaking of recurring anomalies, the seemingly preposterous 90-day
disappearance of Venus at superior conjunction may prove to be more of a
headache for orthodox archaeoastronomers than they have bargained for. In the
erroneous Babylonian records of Venus, one encounters a 90-day disappearance as
well
It is curious that the Babylonians also counted a three-month disappearance
interval, indicating that the planet would move approximately one-fourth of the
way around its cycle in the tropical year.
While an anomalous variance in the movement of Venus may frustrate mainstream
investigators, for anyone believing that Velikovsky's comet participated in
Earth-disturbing events as recently as a few thousand years ago, the
troublesome records of Venus' motions are more likely to bring a bemused smile.
Following
the great cometary catastrophe recorded in the myths, nothing would seem more
reasonable to the Velikovskian researcher than a transitional period perhaps
millennia in which Venus did not move on its present path as seen from the
earth.
The larger issue, of course, is that posed by the very existence of the sacred
260-day calendar. How could it be that a calendar with no firm basis in an
observed natural cycle could have had such a broad cultural influence? Even as
late as 1940, the ethnologist J.S. Lincoln was able to confirm that the Ixil
peoples of northwest Guatemala continued to use this calendar.
Ethnologist
J.A. Remington, living among the
Quich and Cakchiquel peoples of the Guatemala highlands, found that the 260-day
cycle was still practiced for purposes of forecasting, with this unnatural
calendar still dominating the time-keeping rituals.
When it comes to ancient calendars, one of the possibilities that should be
considered but never is considered is that of a shifting length of the year.
Velikovsky argued, for example, that in former times a calendar of 360 days
prevailed throughout much of the ancient world, and that the five added days
(called nothing days by the Aztecs) came only after a disruption of the earth's
motions.
Though
I have some doubt about this, there is no reason in the world to categorically
exclude such possibilities in advance of serious consideration.
But whether or not calendar changes are indicated, one can be certain that the
260-day ritual calendar bore an extremely significant relationship to the myth
of collapsing world ages, as we shall now see.
52-YEAR CALENDAR ROUND
Across Mesoamerica, the combination of two calendars, the solar or
seasonal calendar and the 260-day ritual calendar, produced an extended
sequence of sacred time, in which the two calendars concluded on the same day
only once every 52 solar years a cosmic cycle of extreme import.
This 52-year cycle the Maya called the Calendar Round and the Aztecs a bundle
of years or Perfect Circle of years. Interestingly, the Maya never indicated
dates in hieroglyphic texts or historical documents by the solar year
designation alone. Most often the date was specified by its designation in the
Calendar Round.
Among the Aztecs this extended cycle was intimately tied to the myth of
Quetzalcoatl, who was born on the day ce acatl (One Reed) and departed on the
day ce acatl 52 years later. He will return, the Aztecs claimed, on a future
day ce acatl. It is only reasonable to assume, therefore, a close relationship
between the symbolism of the Calendar Round and the symbolism of the founding
god-king.
Mesoamerican timekeepers show an extreme ambivalence about this extended
calendar period. Its conclusion was both a renewal the end of the old cycle and
the beginning of a new cycle and a potential moment of disaster, since the
Aztecs believed that the entire world order was then in jeopardy. At that
critical moment the astronomer priests anticipated world destruction by fire,
wind, or water, repeating the great cataclysm that ended the Golden Age of
Quetzalcoatl.
The synchronous Earth-Venus movements appear to have figured prominently in the
calendar, enabling priest astronomers to draw on the mathematics of Venus
cycles to anticipate the recurrence of doomsday. For example, 65 Venus cycles
were equivalent to 104 solar years, or two 52-year cycles, which the Aztecs
called huehueliztli, an old age or long-period.
To Velikovsky, this role of Venus in calculations of world ages was, at the
very least, evidence to be considered in assessing Venus' catastrophic role in
the past.
The works of Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, the early Mexican scholar (circa
1568-1648) who was able to read old Mexican texts, preserve the ancient
tradition according to which the multiple of fifty-two-year periods played an
important role in the recurrence of world catastrophes.
He
asserts also that only fifty-two years elapsed between two great catastrophes,
each of which terminated a world age.
Now there exists a remarkable fact: the natives of pre-Columbian Mexico
expected a new catastrophe at the end of every period of fifty-two years and
congregated to await the event. When the night of this ceremony arrived, all
the people were seized with fear and waited in anxiety for what might take
place. They were afraid that it would be the end of the human race and that the
darkness of the night may become permanent: the sun may not rise anymore.
It happened that the end of a cycle occurred in mid-November, 1507, and
available records give us a good sense of the collective fears embedded in the
symbolic rites of renewal. It is said that five priests moved in procession
with a captive warrior out of the city of Tenochtitlan to the great ceremonial
center on the Hill of the Star.
The
occasion was proceeded by ritual extinction of fires across Mexico, the casting
of statues and hearthstones into the water, and rites of sweeping all of these
gestures bearing a significant symbolic tie to an ancient cultural memory of
catastrophic transition.
We
are also told that on this frightening occasion women were locked in granaries
to avoid being turned into man-eating monsters, pregnant women donned masks of
maguey leaves, and children were kept awake to keep them from turning into mice
while asleep. (That these fears trace to the cosmic night and the associated
chaos hordes should become clear in the course of this series.)
For on this one night in the calendar round of 18,980 nights the Aztec fire
priests celebrated when the night was divided in half: the New Fire Ceremony
that ensured the rebirth of the sun and the movement of the cosmos for another
fifty-two years. This rebirth was achieved symbolically through the heart
sacrifice of a brave, captured warrior specifically chosen by the king. We are
told that when the procession arrived in the deep night at the Hill of the Star
the populace climbed onto their roofs. With unwavering attention and necks
craned toward the hill they became filled with dread that the sun would be
destroyed forever.
When the priest astronomers did confirm that the heavens were still in order, the
country broke into celebration, the Sacred Fire was rekindled, houses, roads
and walkways were swept clean and normal life resumed, the gods having granted
man another 52-year cycle.
As in the case of disaster portents, the fears implicit in the calendar
symbolism flowed from a core idea of recurrence. In the same way that the
appearance of a comet, the rising of Venus, an earthquake, or eclipse recalled
the world-ending catastrophe, so did the calendar system, undeniably related to
observed Venus cycles, rest on a memory of former upheaval, when heaven fell
into confusion.
Could
the terrestrial king, whose life but mirrored that of the founding god-king,
escape the fate of the great predecessor, whose death ended a cosmic cycle?
Would the world itself survive a full turn of time's wheel?
It's too easy for archaeoastronomers, when chronicling the calendar symbolism,
to slip into a state of enchantment over the system's mathematical symmetry,
forgetting that there is a far more vital question: what were the experiential
origins of the collective fear of a world going out of control?
And
why did the planet Venus figure so prominently in the calculations of world
ages?
FIGURE 9
Mexican Calendar Stone
Perhaps
the answer lies in the famous Calendar Stone, on which the time-keeping
hieroglyphs are recorded (Figure 9).
Enclosing
the stone, and thus encompassing the entire cycle or world age is the two-fold
form of the great serpent Xiuhcoatl, the mythical parent of comets, the great
celestial torch launched against the rebel powers when the world was overrun by
demons of chaos.
That
the archetypal comet should define the great cycle of time does not surprise
us, since ending one world age and inaugurating another is, in the universal
tradition, the comet's most distinctive role.
ONE FEAR, MANY EXPRESSIONS
Due to fragmentation of the subject, the experts have missed the most
significant fact of all:
Mesoamerican cultures as a whole expressed their greatest fear in recurring
patterns (noted in the sections to follow):
·the
rites of sweeping practiced in every sacred precinct
·the
great festivals reckoning with critical moments in the calendar and repeating
memorable episodes in the age of the gods
·the
virtually endless rites of sacrifice, by which tens of thousands died in a
culture-wide bargaining with celestial powers
·the
ritually-ordained wars by which the city's bravest and strongest achieved a
glory like unto that won by the heroic ancestor-god, whose own deeds, during
the catastrophic interlude between two world ages, had served as a model for
the battlefield contest of strength and will
Together
with the available information on disaster portents, these mythically-rooted
themes provide a great reservoir of evidence as to the character of the
remembered catastrophe.
The
repeated patterns speak of a world falling into darkness; the death of the
creator-king, whose heart-soul was torn from him; the end of the kingdom
(world); a sky filled with celestial dust and (comet-like) debris or overrun by
chaos-hordes; the gathering of great armies in the heavens to wage celestial
combat; and overwhelming commotion:
reverberating
shouts and cries, the earthshaking moans of the great goddess, the shrieks of
whistles, trumpets blaring, the beating of drums, and in the very midst of this
world-ending havoc a smoking star (archetypal comet, planet Venus) announcing
the disaster in the most literal, causative sense and presiding over the
recovery of order, as if sweeping clear the darkened and cluttered heavens.
DEMONS OF DARKNESS
Let us consider the role of darkness, since the coming of cosmic night was
re-enacted at many different levels, from macrocosm to microcosm, from the deep
night into which the world momentarily or symbolically sank at the end of the
52-year cycle, to the settling of darkness over the household every evening.
It is not just a darkened sky that the fears reflect back to us, but the
letting loose of the (cometary) chaos-hordes, represented ritualistically by
crowds of warriors and other participants adding through their dress and
gestures the elements of commotion, disarray and mock combat these celebrants
being as much a part of the commemorative occasion as the officiating priests
or sacrificial victims.
Do
these images tell us something about an event far more terrifying than
historians have dared imagine?
The
overlapping components of the darkness theme in rites re-enacting celestial
death and disaster are significant throngs of people shouting in confusion,
running about with feathered ornaments, paper streamers waving in the wind, a
pervasive fear that their children will be turned into mice, the fear that
monsters with disheveled hair will rise out of the darkness to devour them do
in fact constitute a tapestry of cometary myths and symbols.
And
the repeated fears and gestures are not fixed to one rite or to one symbolic
occasion, but to every level at which the darkness theme plays its part.
In a significant mythical and symbolic sense, every day contained an aspect of
the former disaster, the end of the world in microcosm. When dusk arrived it
came as a minor echo or reminder of the deep night the twilight of the gods.
Natives of pre-Columbian Mexico retired to their own dwellings and covered
themselves as night descended.
At
night the chaos-demons were out, and children could be turned into mice. And
while the people slept, it was the priest astronomer's duty to monitor the
heavens at dusk, midnight and dawn, to divine the course of events. Then, in
the morning the obligatory sweeping of patios and walkways occurred
symbolically, the sweeping away of the night.
Not
just the darkness, but the gathered dust and clutter filled a symbolic role in
Mesoamerican daily life and ritual, together with the symbolism of the female
head of the house as sweeper, a role defined by the mother goddess Toci
herself, whose broom is a prominent feature in the commemorative rites (see
discussion of Toci and sweeping rites below).
No doubt the symbolism at the daily, microcosmic level was diluted over time and
progressively gave way to the growing complexities of culture and practical
necessity, but the residue of an ancient and unrecognized experience was still
there at the time of the Conquest.
The recollection of the cosmic night becomes more dramatic when an unusual
occurrence of darkness breaks the normal pattern. Consider Sahagun's
description of the people's response to an eclipse
Then there were a tumult and disorder.
All
were disquieted, unnerved, frightened. Then there was weeping. The common folk
raised a cup, lifting their voices, making a great din, calling out, shrieking.
There was shouting everywhere. People of light complexion were slain [as
sacrifices]; captives were killed. All offered their blood, they drew straws
through the lobes of their ears, which had been pierced.
And
in all the temples there was the singing of fitting chants, there was an
uproar, there were war cries. It was thus said: If the eclipse of the sun is
complete, it will be dark forever!
The
demons of darkness will come down, they will eat men!
In these fleeting moments of the eclipse, the people relived the unforgettable
night, repeating the great din of the world-ending catastrophe and venting
their fears of the all-devouring chaos hordes. Were these fears, in origin,
different from the (tempered) fear of dusk, or different from the terror
aroused by the conclusion of the 52-year cycle?
The same mythically-rooted fears will be seen in relation to the eclipse of the
moon.
When the moon was eclipsed, his face grew dark and sooty, blackness and
darkness spread. When this came to pass, women with child feared evil; they
thought it portentous; they were terrified [lest], perchance, their [unborn]
children might be changed into mice; each of their children might turn into a
mouse.
There was, in other words, an archetypal darkness, with deeper and broader
meaning than could be extracted from any single occasion (natural event or
commemorative rite). Alone, the symbols can only point ambiguously backwards to
unrecognized trauma. But in combination the symbols will provide a rich profile
of the world-ending catastrophe, accessible to any research willing to break
free from a methodology that sees only fragments and looks to the fragments to
provide their own meaning.
The planet Venus would seem an unlikely candidate for sky-darkening powers (or
for sky-clearing sweeping, for that matter). And yet the remarkable
Mesoamerican association of Venus with the eclipse has been documented by the
vigorous research of Ev Cochrane. Like most ancient peoples, the Maya
considered eclipses of the sun to be a time of dire peril, Cochrane writes.
It
was commonly believed, in fact, that the world might end during a solar
eclipse. In the eclipse tables contained within the Dresden Codex, an eclipse
is symbolized by the figure of a dragon descending from the glyph of the sun.
On the relationship of the eclipse-dragon to Venus, Cochrane gives us the
verdict of the eminent Mayan scholar, Sir Eric Thompson:
The head of the monster is hidden by a large glyph of the planet Venus. One is
instantly reminded of the Aztec belief that during eclipses the monsters called
Tzitzimime or Tzontemoc (head down) plunged earthwards from the sky. These
monsters include Tlauizcalpanteculti, the god of Venus as morning star. It is
therefore highly probable that the picture represents a Tzitzimitl plunging
head down toward earth during the darkness of an eclipse.
A
glyph immediately above the picture appears to confirm this identification, for
it shows the glyph of Venus with a prefix which is a picture of a person placed
upside down.
A remote star could darken the entire sky? Here we see, in a clear profile, the
dilemma for conventional study.
Under
the standard approach to this subject, the images are far too incredible to
have any foundation in natural experience. Hence, they must be entirely
fanciful. Hence, any attempt to see natural experience in these hieroglyphs
would be preposterous.
That is the fundamental circular reasoning on which modern understanding of
myth and symbol has been constructed. As a result, the patterns suggesting
deeper levels of coherence are not even noticed. What could never be is of no
interest.
So
we do not realize that the fears of the darkness speak with one voice for a
collective memory, that the later symbols of this fear were but shadows cast by
a far greater terror, when the whole sky became the theater for the twilight of
the gods.
RITES OF SACRIFICE
Both the Aztecs and Maya are known to have practiced sacrifice on a horrendous
scale, in intimate correspondence with the gods.
To
honor the gods and heroes of former times, the priests performed rites ordained
by these divine ancestors, with a meticulous reverence for the way things
happened in ancestral times (the age of the gods). Critical events in the gods'
own lives provided the ritual drama, and in these biographical rituals,
sacrifice was usually the central episode.
In the Mesoamerican world view, it was a sacrifice of cosmic proportions that
preceded the dawning of the present world age. As noted by Carrasco, the role
of cosmic sacrifice in regenerating the world was at the basis of the
extraordinary practice of bloodletting and sacrifice throughout Mesoamerica.
The present age was created out of the sacrifice of a large number of deities
in Teotihuacan, or elsewhere, depending on the tradition. It was believed that
this age would end in earthquakes and famine. What is clear is that cosmic
order is achieved in the Aztec universe out of conflict, sacrifice, and the
death of humans and gods.
In addition to the calendrically ordained sacrifices, there were many other
occasions on which the gods themselves seemed to call for sacrifice.
For
minor challenges in the course of daily life, offerings of food or ornaments
might be sufficient, but in times of greater common need, particularly when the
kingdom was beset by drought, or hurricanes, or plagues of locusts, the gods
called for human victims.
It is through sacrifice that two realms of time, the time of the gods and the
time of humans, are linked together and renewed, states Carrasco. But why did
sacrifice fulfill the divine requirement at strategic calendar moments, or on
occasions of distress? Again, it is imperative that one distinguish between archetype
and symbol.
The
contexts of the ritual response suggest that a drought was not seen as a thing
in itself but a symbol of the greater drought of the cosmic night. In the same
way, every hurricane became a symbol of the irresistible cosmic wind that once
overcame the world; or a plague of locusts referred back to the devastating
chaos hordes.
A symbol is a reflection of some aspect of a prior experience.
As
such it does not, on its own, disclose the full character of that experience.
Thus the researcher, to gain any sense of the true reference, must draw upon
patterns revealed through the conjunction of symbols. Under the conventional
analysis, however, the regional drought or the regional hurricane is the worst
thing the analyst can imagine, so there is no prior reference for the symbol,
only the symbol itself.
Students
of the culture are left, therefore, with a madhouse of symbols and meaningless,
unexplained, barbaric practices and superstitions. Here, the ritual sacrifice
does not mean anything because it has no discernible relationship to the events
calling for it.
And yet, the mythical context of sacrifice leaves no question as to a
connection. When the creator-king Quetzalcoatl died, his heart was removed from
him. The primeval sacrifice, in the various traditions, occurred at a time of
cosmic upheaval, of great wind and drought, of darkness, earthquake and flood,
with the god's own heart the smoking star presiding over the regeneration of
the world.
Mythically
speaking, the rites of sacrifice came into being through the critical events in
the life, the death and the transformation of the god-king.
Why, then, did a drought or plague call forth a sacrifice?
Because
the sacrificial rites replayed, on a microcosmic scale, the overarching
celestial drama, honoring the gods through remembrance, and repeating the
events of a divine ordeal and resolution.
FIGURE 10
Removal of the heart in sacrifice
The
followers of Quetzalcoatl, as noted by Carrasco, insisted that all ceremonies
and rites, building temples and altars imitated the ways of that holy man.
That
is what the Aztecs meant by the repeated statement that Quetzalcoatl was the
exemplary king, the model upon which kingship arose. And more than one
sacrificial rite served to mirror essential episodes in the god's life and
death. Citing a native informant, Duran summarizes a commemorative ritual
involving a mock king, a captured enemy warrior chosen for his beauty and
physical perfection and dressed in the attire of the founding king himself.
For
40 days this human symbol of Quetzalcoatl was honored in feasts and
celebration. This living man was bought to represent the god for forty days,
and he was served and revered as such, Duran writes. At the conclusion of his
reign, and with great ceremony, the assistants to the officiating priest laid
the mock king on the sacrificial stone.
Then
the priest, with a crude stone knife, tore his heart from his body.
Removal of the heart was, in fact, the most common form of human sacrifice throughout
Mesoamerica, a recurring pattern recalling a celestial power's own sacrifice in
the age of the gods. Interestingly, the officiating priests at the Templo Mayor
bore the name quequetzalcoa, after Quetzalcoatl himself suggesting that
priest and sacrificial victim were, in their respective capacities,
representing one and the same cosmic power.
In the common pattern of the sacrifice, when the priest tore the heart from the
victim, he raised it, still steaming, before the sun the sacred steam of the
removed heart offering a poignant reminder of the smoking heart of the great
god himself.
The
high priest then opened the chest and with amazing swiftness tore out the
heart, ripping it out with his own hands. Thus steaming, the heart was lifted
toward the sun, and the fumes were offered up to the sun.
Or again, they opened his chest and took out the heart, and holding it up, they
presented it to the Sun until its steam had cooled. Then, as if to re-play the
mythic flight of the heart-soul, the priest turned and flung the heart toward
the image of the god.
FIGURE 11
Aztec sacrifice as removal of the heart,
with emerging plumes
The
steam of the removed heart thus stood in symbolic correspondence with the
plumes of the transformed heart-soul as plumed star, and with the smoke of the
heart-soul as smoking star.
In
Figure 10 we see the Aztec priest raising the removed heart of the victim, with
the steam rising before the sun.
In
figure 11 it is rather the plumes that rise from the heart. But other contexts
involve a smoking heart. In a widespread ritual counterpart to human sacrifice,
the celebrants formed a model of the heart from copal or pom, a resin derived
from the copal tree, and set it burning as incense.
The
dark smoke rising from the ritual heart thus provided a vivid reminder of
Quetzalcoatl's burning heart-soul, the smoking star Venus. A conjunction of
three symbols steaming heart, plumed heart and smoking heart meaningless in
themselves, derives a self-evident and spectacular significance when referred
to the celestial prototype, the ascending, comet-like heart-soul of
Quetzalcoatl.
The relentless practice of human sacrifice in every well-documented
Mesoamerican culture, a source of horror to the conquering Spaniards, can
produce great ambivalence in the treatments by historians, archaeologists and
ethnologists. But what is really missing is the sense of context. How did such
a widespread practice come to rule an entire civilization?
Seeing
the role of collective apprehension will bring the dark and fearful motives
into the light of day, for the ceaseless acts of remembering and bargaining
with the gods do become intelligible when referred to a world-shattering
catastrophe.
In sacrifice the practitioners remembered and nourished the gods, and the two
aspects of the practice seemed to go hand in hand, fueled by the memory of the
all-devouring, smoking star. Why were the Aztecs so deeply concerned about
where and when Venus might appear to reverse their fortunes (Aveni's words)?
Why was sacrifice so frequently regulated by the rising of Venus?
Sahagun
tells us that Captives were slain when it emerged that it might be nourished.
They sprinkled blood toward it, flipping the middle finger from the thumb, they
cast the blood as an offering.
Seen from one vantage point, there is only meaninglessness in these rampant
practices, by which whole nations responded to uncertainties large and small.
Seen
from another, there is the long shadow of celestial terror, when planets did
move out of control and affect the fate of mankind.
VENUS AND HOLY WAR
A powerful conjunction of Venus symbolism and comet symbolism will be seen in the
vast tribal wars and conquests that fed the growth of empires in Mesoamerica a
conjunction that will only grow in significance as we find the same nexus of
symbols in other major cultures as well.
Around the world, comets were seen as harbingers of devastating invasion, war,
and conquest. A comet, according to the Chinese, could mean that there are
uprisings and war continues for several years. When a comet travels into the
Constellation Taurus, in the middle of the double month, blood is shed [and]
dead bodies lie on the ground. Within three years the emperor dies and the
country is in chaos.
The Roman poet Tibullus cites the comet as the evil sign of war. Pliny,
treating comets in his Natural History, tells us they bring war and commotion,
while the Greek mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy associates them with
foreign invasion. The third century Christian writer Origen saw the comet as
heralding war and the collapse of dynasties.
Centuries
later (1011), Byrhtferth's Manual lists war as one of the disastrous effects of
a comet's appearance.
The extraordinary power of the mythic tradition will explain why many of early
history's most brutal wars had affixed to them the appearance of a comet, even
in cases in which the actual arrival of a comet may be in doubt.
A
comet and shooting stars are said to have appeared before the battle of
Pharsalus in central Greece, heralding Caesar's defeat of Pompey. Josephus
mentions in his History of the Jews that a comet in the form of a sword hung
over Jerusalem for a whole year, foretelling the destruction of the city in the
reign of the Emperor Vespasian.
The belief persisted into medieval and later ages, writes Theodor Gaster. A comet heralded the
Norman conquest of Britain in 1066. Disasters suffered by the Christians at the
hands of the Turks in 1456 were popularly attributed to the appearance of a
comet.
In 1456 a comet described as having a fan-shaped tail like that of a peacock is
said to have stretched across half the sky. With the Turkish army at the gates
of Belgrade, Pope Calixtus III feared a domino effect from a Mohammedan
victory. Thus a Vatican historian wrote:
A hairy and fiery starmade [an] appearance for several days, [and]
mathematicians declared that there would follow great calamity. Calixtus
[ordered] prayers, beseeching God that if this meant impending evils for
mankind, God would turn them all upon the Turks, the enemies of Christendom.
The Zulu of South Africa also say that a comet brings war.
The same portentous significance of the comet seems to have prevailed in the
Americas. In 1835, the warrior-chief Osecola,
leader of the Seminole tribe in Florida, saw an appearance of Halley's Comet as
an omen, and called on his people to launch a war against white settlers. The
Seminoles overwhelmed the army garrison at Fort King and killed every last
soldier. Osecola personally scalped the fort's commander, General Wiley
Thompson.
In the light of the general tradition, the retrospective accounts of
Mesoamerican chroniclers, remembering that a comet preceded the Spanish
invasion, take on greater meaning for us.
The
motif is strikingly familiar in an Aztec poem:
I
foresaw, being a Mexican, that our rule began to be destroyed,
I went forth weeping that it was to bow down and be destroyed.
Let me not be angry that the grandeur of Mexico is to be destroyed.
The smoking stars gather together against it.
One
of the principles I intend to establish in this series of articles is that, in
the earlier expressions of comet imagery, the fiery star did not just herald
war; it was itself an active agent of celestial upheaval.
Originally,
the flaming sphere of the comet is hurled into the midst of a great
conflagration in the sky. Of course the peaceful celestial visitors of a later
age could never achieve the violent role of the prototype, and over time this
would only accentuate the distance between archetype and symbol.
Originally, the comet shook heaven and earth, summoning celestial armies and
inspiring a clash of opposing forces in the sky. Latin poets seemed to have
remembered the tradition well when, on the death of Caesar, they sought to
portray a recurrence of the world-threatening tempest. When Caesar died, Virgil
recounted, the sun veiled his shining face and an evil age dreaded eternal
night.
Then
Germany heard the clash of armor fill the sky; the Alps quaked with unwonted
shocks. Moreover a voice was heard of many among silent groves, crying aloud,
and phantoms pallid in wonderful wise were seen when night was dim Never
elsewhere did more lightnings fall from clear skies, or ghastly comets so often
blaze.
The
poet is here asking history to accommodate a more ancient tradition, in which
the clash of armor, the cries of heaven, the appearance of phantoms (as in the
Mexican counterpart), and the bursts of lightning all accompanied the
appearance of the Great Comet and its retinue, the chaos hordes.
Of an ancient tradition that Athens was decimated by a comet, the poet Manilius recorded
Such
are the disasters which the glowing comets oft proclaim. Death comes with these
celestial torches, which threaten earth with the blaze of pyres unceasing,
since heaven and nature's self are stricken and seem doomed to share men's
tomb. Wars, too, the fires portend, and sudden insurrection, and arms uplifted
in stealthy treachery.
When,
in their wars with barbarous Germany, the enemy made away with the Roman commander
Varus, the poet was quick to assert the comet's presence; for it is the
archetype (Great Comet) that grants meaning to the symbol (devastating war).
Then
did menacing lights burn in every quarter of the skies; nature herself waged
war with fire marshaling her forces against us and threatening our destruction.
That the great wars of early civilizations had a ritual character and purpose
is often stated, though the connection with remembered tumult in the sky is
rarely confronted. One of the underlying attributes of ritual is its
commemorative function repeating exemplary actions originally performed by gods
and celestial heroes, and cataclysmic moments in the biographies of the gods.
The
motive was announced repeatedly by the warrior kings, who saw themselves as
extending the glory of the ancestral gods.
The
gods desired that their deeds be remembered. Remembering through re-enactment
was thus the essential nature of ritual combat. It is significant, therefore,
that the great wars of early nations, in their ritualistic aspect, involved a
deliberate repetition of great noise and havoc, endlessly blended with the
motives of sacrifice, since in the general mythic tradition sacrifice and war
belong to one and the same cosmic sequence.
In Olmec times, according to Carrasco, war was the place where the jaguars
roar,
'where
feathered war bonnets heave about like foam in the waves.'
The
original reference is not to a terrestrial engagement but to the contest of the
gods, in which jaguar warriors (including Quetzalcoatl's jaguar form) engaged
each other on the celestial battlefield.
The
great havoc of that conflagration meant nothing other than the frightful sights
and sounds of the cosmic night, the occasion of the god king's own sacrifice
and the letting loose of the chaos-powers.
The model for both the ritual war and the closely related sacrificial rites was
the life of the great initiate Quetzalcoatl, as duly noted by Carrasco.
Topiltzin
Quetzalcoatl was born into a world of war. According to many primary sources
the gods were periodically at war with one another during the mythic erasIn the
vivid creation story of the Historia de los Mexicanos por Sus Pinturas, the
gods created the Chichimec people in order to gain sacrificial blood through
human warfare and the ritual sacrifice of captive warriors. Remembrance through
repetition thus honored and satisfied the gods, because it acknowledged and
glorified the ordeals of the gods.
There is an interesting battlefield account by the Spanish soldier Bernal D'az
del Castillo, depicting a scene in the wake of a Spanish retreat near the Great
Temple. A number of Spanish soldiers had been captured alive during the
engagement, and the chronicler gazed back at the ensuing spectacle.
There was sounded the dismal drum of Huichilobos and many other shells and
horns and things like trumpets and the sound of them was terrifying, and we all
looked toward the lofty Pyramid where they were being sounded, and saw that our
comrades whom they had captured when they defeated Corts were being carried by
force up the steps, and they were taking them to be sacrificed.
Sacrifice and war here merge as overlapping symbols, together with the
terrifying sounds of a more ancient holocaust. Through sacrifice and war the
divine ordeals were re-lived and the nation brought into more intimate
correspondence with the gods, thus animating the gods themselves.
According
to Duran, the Aztec priests periodically approached the rulers, telling them
that the gods were famished and wished to be remembered. The rulers then
consulted among themselves regarding the hunger of the gods, and told their
neighbors, the Tlaxcalans, to prepare for war clearly a ritual occasion with
agreed groundrules and calendar.
When
the men were placed in formation and the troops set in order, the squadrons
departed toward the plains of Tepepulco, where the armies met. The whole
contest, the entire battle, was a struggle whose aim it was to capture
prisoners for sacrifice.
At the risk of redundancy, we must emphasize again the necessary distinction
between archetype and symbol. The challenge to the investigator is this: the
gods demanded sacrifice and remembrance, but the prevailing theoretical
framework does not provide a prior event to give sense to the idea. What had
occurred, in the age of the gods, that the gods asked mankind not to forget?
According to Floyd Lounsbury, one of the most respected authorities on Mayan
religion, the warrior kings synchronized their wars to the movements of Venus.
The
point is stated more than once by Linda
Schele:
the
appearance of Venus after superior conjunction, when Venus passes behind the
sun and disappears from view, was often the occasion of war between Maya cites.
Thus
the Maya kings believed that Venus played a tremendous role in war, and it
appears that they invoked its assistance, looking for the day augured by Venus
as appropriate for battle.
But
is this not the very role of the comet in the universal lexicon?
Archaeoastronomers have come to call the bloody wars sanctioned by Venus the
Star War events, a fitting title, since the Venus-dragon was the great weapon
by which the chaos powers were defeated. Citing studies by leading Mayan
experts, Carlson notes that the Maya conducted certain battles, raids or martial
contests timed for significant stations in the Venus cycle, such as first
appearances as Morning Star and Evening Star.
Thus
the Star War events were Venus regulated.
What is there about the speck of light we call Venus that could account for
this power over war and warriors? And is it only a coincidence again that
Venus, as herald of war, stands in complete alignment with the comet as herald
of war?
My
intent in this series of articles will be not just to demonstrate the full
convergence of cometary symbols on Venus, but to unveil that planet's original
character as the Great Comet, when it was nothing less than the celestial
tempest itself.
SWEEPING AWAY THE NIGHT
Discerning the relationship of archetype and symbol is particularly crucial when the symbol, in
its familiar associations in daily life, does not convey the extraordinary
power of the archetype, the original experience from which the symbol takes its
meaning.
Without
that relationship in view, the symbol can only appear random and absurd.
A recurring symbol among the Aztecs is that of the broom, seemingly an emblem
so far removed from our subject as to have no place in this analysis. Yet since
the symbol does recur in ritual contexts of darkness and upheaval, it begs for
an interpretation.
The broom plays a part, for example, in defining the character of Cihuacoatl,
or Woman Snake, the chief advisor to the Aztec ruler, a figure standing in
close but enigmatic association with both the horrifying serpentine goddess
Coatlicue and the broadly revered mother goddess Toci.
Strangely,
Cihuacoatl's relationships and symbols suggest two extremes, with no
intelligible bridge between them. In her most familiar role, she offers a
reminder of domestic responsibilities (she holds a broom and was remembered in
the daily sweeping of the household shrine); but she was equally at home as the
goddess of Terrible Aspect, the man-eating mistress of chaos.
We must remember what Mircea Eliade and other perceptive students of
comparative religion have taught us about the motives of myth and ritual.
Inherent in the idea of correspondence with the gods was the idea of sacred
moments, sacred domains, and sacred gestures, distinguished from the
insignificant and profane by their connection with the great events and deeds
of the gods.
And
the principle applied at all levels of activity, not just the publicly visible
centers of collective ritual. Every household had its sacred aspect, as did the
kingdom.
Women had care of the household shrines, and the presentation of the little
broom at birth signaled their sacred responsibility to keep the home zone well
swept, and so free from potentially dangerous contamination, writes Inga
Clendinnen. In this single statement lies the key the relationship of macrocosm
and microcosm.
Dangerous
contamination operates at all levels and draws its meaning from the epoch of
gods and heroes.
It may be hard for many of us today to fully appreciate that the morning
sweeping of the household shrine was a commemorative occasion, the sweeping
away of the darkness. The disorder, the gathered dust and debris, received its
ritual significance from the cosmic night. And this elementary symbolic
relationship is the missing bridge between the domestic goddess and the
all-devouring, raging hag with disheveled hair, rushing across the sky with
broom in hand, pursuing the chaos hordes, sweeping away the celestial debris of
the world-ending cataclysm.
Every
household was an extension of the sacred order defined in ancestral times. In
each household was thus kept the sacred fire, symbol of the animating light of
heaven, ritualistically extinguished at the end of every 52-year world cycle,
then re-ignited with the dawn of the new cycle. Every 52 years, the household
re-lived a cosmic disaster.
Then,
each subsequent morning, as a symbol of the same events, the ritually-ordained
sweeping occurred, to the sounds of a beating drum this drumbeat signifying the
voice of Ehecatl, the Dawn Bringer, avatar of Quetzalcoatl. In the words, of Jacques
Soustelle, The morning star shines with the brilliance of a gem and to greet it
the wooden gongs beat on the temple-tops and the conchs wail.
Every
dawn was thus an echo of the cosmic morning when the world was set in order
after the great cataclysm.
In ritual symbolism, matters of degree and scale cannot change original
meanings. Goddess, broom, sweeping, drumbeat the clearing of the cosmic night
was remembered with each dawn of day. The holder of the household broom,
therefore, fills the symbolic role of the goddess. And though broom and
celestial conflagration may not seem compatible, the mythical memory does place
them side by side.
A
hymn to the broom-goddess celebrates Cihuacoatl plumed with eagle feathers,
with the crest of eagles, painted with serpents blood with a broom in her hands
goddess of drum beating. She is our mother, a goddess of war, our mother a
goddess of war, an example and a companion from the home of our ancestors She
comes forth, she appears when war is waged, she protects us in war that we
shall not be destroyed She comes adorned in the ancient manner with the eagle
crest.
The hymn makes our point for us. The goddess is the example the exemplary
figure to which the sweeping rites refer us. The symbols of disaster, of war
and of drum beating combine with those of the broom and of protection.
A goddess who appears when war is waged has a now-familiar sound. That is
precisely the mythical role of the comet, and precisely the role of Venus in
Mesoamerican astrology. It seems as if the commentators have failed to notice
that a broom or whisk, be it constituted from straw or feathers, is a cometary
symbol. (See our brief list supplementing the five major comet symbols.)
A
bundle of straw is an old European symbol of the comet.
As
we will discover also in our discussion of the world-destroying hag, the famous
flying broom of the European witch stands beside the witch's disheveled,
flaming hair and her serpent-dragon apotheosis as a cometary image.
And
most interestingly, in China comets were above all else remembered as brooms
sweeping away one kingdom (world age) and introducing a new order the very
function of the broom in the ritual re-enactments of the cosmic night in
Mesoamerica.
In fact, the broom plays a symbolically crucial role in more than one Aztec
rite. A major celebration of the mother goddess Toci fell on the sixteenth of
September, which was also a special day in the calendar of world ages. The name
of the feast was Ochpaniztli, which means Sweeping of the Roads. The chronicler
Duran calls it the Feast of Sweeping.
The
feast, as reported by Duran, was marked by human sacrifice, terrible commotion
and feigned skirmishes in which the goddess Toci herself symbolically
participated. In the ritual celebration, the goddess was personified by a
warrior who, donning the skin of a sacrificed female victim and armed with a
broom, pursued a chaotic mob of warriors.
At
her descent (i.e., the descent of the impersonator), and in response to the
moans of Toci, the earth moved and quaked at that moment. (Remember the moans
in the air when Caesar died, his soul to rise as a comet above the quaking
earth.)
Hearing this report Duran was highly incredulous. I tried to investigate this
and attempted to laugh off and mock this absurd belief. But I was assured that
this part, this area of the temple, trembled and shook at that moment.
Imagination may have served them well in this case, and the devil, always
present, undoubtedly aided the imagination.
Such is the power of archetypes. The commotion in the sky, moaning heavens,
quaking earth, goddess with a broom pursuing the hordes of darkness.
In these rites, the sky-darkening hordes themselves were personified by
warriors armed with brooms and appareled with colored streamers and plumed
ornaments. A bloody fray then took place among them. With sticks and stones
countless men came to the combat and fight, something awesome to see In such
manner was the havoc of the cosmic night re-enacted every year.
The
harsh sounds, the great din of clashing arms, the comet-like brooms and
streamers of the unleashed mobs themselves a dramatic personification of the
ancient rebel powers all accented by hurled stones and debris.
Could
one concoct a more vivid portrait of the remembered cosmic upheaval terminating
a former world age? A cometary disaster, involving vast armies of swarming
debris in the vicinity of earth, pitted against the parent of comets, the
dragon-like Venus sweeping away the cosmic night, would provide us with a Velikovskian
scenario par excellence.
Inga Clendinnen, in her book Aztecs, has given us an intensely dramatic account
of the sweeping festival and its key ritual components, noting again and again
the role of darkness and terror, and emphasizing the paradox of the domestic
goddess hurled into a fray with the best warriors of the city.
These
men, who scorned to turn their back in battle, fled through the dark streets as
Toci and her followers pursued them with brooms, the' domestic' female symbol
par excellence, speaking of the tireless cleansing of the human zone, but now
sodden with human blood. It was Toci herself, in her paper regalia and her
great bannered headdress and her symbolic broom, who inaugurated the ritual
slaying of captives.
Then
she confronted the warrior-mob again, driving them ahead of her with war cries
and her broom, the hordes scattering as she chased them, until Toci was alone
and victorious, having swept away the warriors of darkness triumphant as the
pitiless mistress of war, insatiable eater of men.
The great sweeping festival, says Clendinnen, was a brilliantly constructed
horror event, in its abrupt changes of pace and its teasing of the imagination
through the exploitation of darkness.
Here
we see the image of the women's broom dipped into human blood and so become a
weapon of terror, before which warriors famed for their courage were driven
like leaves. A paradox indeed! The broom wielded as a weapon of terror. But let
us be clear on this: as a broom, it instills no fear, but as an acknowledged
hieroglyph for the comet, the terrifying weapon hurled against the rebels of
the cosmic night, the paradox dissolves before our eyes.
Duran tells us that on the day of the feast to Toci, the people swept their
houses and pathways, guided by some ancient belief he is unable to illuminate.
Significantly, community roads and highways were also swept on this day,
according to Duran, particularly the road passing by the shrine to the goddess
Toci.
The
feast itself, as we have noted, was called The Sweeping of the Roads, and this
too is a key, for it enables us to complete the circle with respect to the
sweeping rites. In Evon Vogt's book Zinacantan, the author gives a poetic tale
from the Highlands of Chiapas concerning the planet Venus.
It
seems that the people remember Venus as a girl with a broom, for the folk tale
describes the Morning Star (Venus), who is believed to have been a Chamula girl
transformed into a Sweeper of the Path' for the Sun. It is the astronomical
association, then the connection with celestial sweeping, the clearing of the
way for the new sun or world age that finds the planet Venus in the very guise
we should expect.
Even
in the wake of vast cultural evolution and fragmentation, the nations of
Mesoamerica kept alive the ancient link of Great Comet and planet Venus, in the
symbolic character of the girl and her broom.
CONCLUSION, PART I
In this first installment of an extended series, we have asked whether Immanuel
Velikovsky's comet Venus is supported by Mesoamerican evidence,
cross-referenced with more general traditions about comets in other cultures.
We
find that, to a stunning extent, the acknowledged symbols or hieroglyphs for
the comet stand in an unexplained conjunction with the planet Venus in Mesoamerica.
Not only the five most frequently-occurring hieroglyphs for the comet, but
virtually all of the variations on these symbols are attached to each other and
to the planet Venus.
Additionally we find that the deepest fears of Mesoamerican culture turn out to
be the fears which ancient astronomies consistently associated with the arrival
of the comet: the end of the world, death of kings, overwhelming wars, plague,
pestilence, drought. What explains these fears is the myth of the ancient
god-king the founder of the kingship rites whose death brought a former world
age to a catastrophic close, and whose soul took flight as a comet-like star,
identified enigmatically with the planet Venus.
And
thus did the stargazers, in their most visible expressions of the culture-wide
fear their calendars of world ages, their responses to unexpected disruptions
of natural cycles (eclipses, etc.), their ritual sacrifices, their relentless
holy wars, and their commemorative festivals and rites, look to Venus as the
cause or sign of the very disorder that world myth ascribes to the Great Comet
of primeval times.
In the course of this review, I have suggested more than once that an entirely
new approach to ancient myth and religion is warranted.
Early
man's preoccupation with the mythical age of the gods reflects an ancient,
celestial source for the collective anxiety. But if this is true, then nothing
could do more to obstruct meaningful insight than the modern belief that the
great civilizations of the past oriented themselves to a sky almost exactly
like our sky today.
The
evidence on behalf of an unfamiliar sky is both massive and compelling. But to
appreciate even the first levels of that evidence one must break free from the
trance of prior teaching and beliefs Only then will evidence be seen as such,
rather than as a witness to the absurdity and contradictions of the first star
worshippers.
Our proposed Great Comet Venus takes us beyond generally-acknowledged comet
symbolism. It says that, by virtue of its history (Venus eventually shed its
cometary tail and settled into a peaceful orbit), the symbolism of the Great
Comet fragmented into two primary streams: one relating to the periodic
cometary visitor, the other relating to the planet Venus.
Hence,
wherever systematic, empirical astronomy kept alive the Great Comet's
connection with Venus, the cometary symbols should pervade the culture's images
of the planet. If the thesis is correct, it could not have been otherwise. So
we are not surprised to find in Mexico the five universal glyphs of the comet
attached to Venus.
It should not surprise us either that the planet Venus was, in a hundred
different ways, the regulator of the fate of kings and kingdoms in Mexico.
The
Great Comet did determine the fate of the king's celestial prototype, the
god-king remembered by every ancient civilization as the first in the line of
kings. A compelling logic will thus be seen in the role of Venus in regulating
the cosmic cycles, ordaining great festivals commemorating the age of the gods,
sending the kingdom's strongest men to war, and sending the victims of war to
the sacrificial stone.
And
even in the tempered rituals of daily life, the keeping of the sacred fire, the
morning sweeping of the shrine (and other rites too numerous to mention here),
one discerns the ever-present memory of a world falling into confusion, but
rising again to the drumbeat of the Dawn Bringer.
When Bob Forrest said that he could find no direct historical reference to the
Venus-comet, I believe he spoke from conviction. But since the language of myth
was the language of the first civilizations, every civilization fails Forrest's
test. There are no direct historical references to the age of the gods, because
that age precedes historical chronicles.
Did
the events suggested by consistent mythical expression and ritual acts of
remembering actually occur?
Given
the nature of the language involved, the sheer scale of evidence is stunning;
and one wonders how the Mexican star worshippers were supposed to have told us
something more about the catastrophes, without a crash course in the King's
English, or astronomy lessons from Carl Sagan.
Thus the imperative need for cross-referencing when taking up such issues. No
approach that isolates each evidential fragment, explaining away that fragment
without explaining parallels and converging cometary images, can remove the
Venus-comet issue, and in this sense Forrest's analysis breaks down completely
with the very first instance cited.
My
intent in this series is to demonstrate with more than sufficient evidence that
the comet Venus is a global myth, and the one credible explanation of the myth
is that Venus did look like a comet that it did participate in literally
earthshaking events, not all that long ago.
One
only has to follow the evidence to know that this is so.
LOOKING AHEAD
It will be useful in our next instalment to look at a few additional Mesoamerican symbols
linked to the planet Venus symbols that are not generally connected to comets,
but which can be brought to light through a cometary interpretation.
We
will then begin an excursion into ancient Mesopotamian myth and religion,
finding a symbolic resonance with the dominant religious motifs of Mesoamerica.
And
here, where was born the world's first astronomy, we will encounter once more
the planet Venus, wearing the full dress of the Great Comet.
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