Still believing isolationist theories?

In a previous post, we detailed some of the evidence of mythological parallels found in the legends of cultures as far removed as Scandinavia and the South Pacific. The example of the "world-tree" motif provides clear evidence of some ancient connection, and there are numerous other examples from mythology that are equally compelling or even more compelling.

However, some will argue that these apparent connections are not connected at all, but that numerous cultures simply landed on the same imagery for the same celestial phenomena in their own mythologies -- that they acted "in isolation" from one another. Perhaps, some have argued, there is even some common psychological theme or "collective unconscious" that causes isolated peoples to share similar myths even though separated by vast oceans or centuries of time.

Unfortunately for proponents of the isolationist theory, the mythological evidence is by no means the only evidence that supports the assertion that ancient peoples crossed the oceans quite regularly. There are the startling parallels between the measurements of the Great Pyramid at Giza and the Pyramid of the Sun found at Teotihuacan in modern-day Mexico, for example (the base perimeters of each are remarkably close, and the height of each is related to the base perimeter by a factor of pi: two pi times the height of the Great Pyramid equals the perimeter of its base, while four pi times the height of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan equals the perimeter of its base).

Even more stunning are the hundreds of mummies that have been unearthed in New World locations such as Peru. Many of these mummies have red, golden, or auburn hair. Some of it is wavy. All of these hair traits are very unlike the hair of the South American Indians of the area, which is black and very straight. Martin Doutré has documented this fact on his website in great detail.

As Mr. Doutré points out, red hair is a very rare trait among the peoples of the world, occurring in 1% or perhaps as many as 2% of all humans. Its incidence is highest in Europe, especially western and northern Europe. The fact that hundreds of mummies with light hair, many of them with red hair, exist in Peru is astonishing.

It might be possible to argue that these mummies were Europeans who came after AD 1492, except for the fact that they have numerous characteristics that make this explanation extremely unlikely. They are usually buried in a sitting posture (not characteristic of European burials in the modern or early modern periods), they are often arrayed in very colorful blankets and clothing that is completely unlike European clothing of the time, and they often wear their hair very long and sometimes in two long plaits or braids on either side of the head, which is not typical of Europeans after Columbus either.

It turns out that to continue to hold onto isolationist theories, one must look past an awful lot of evidence that argues differently, including evidence from mythology but also from archaeological sites such as the pyramids and even the extensive evidence from human remains.

Four planets

Try to get up early tomorrow morning.

An hour before sunrise, the waning crescent moon will be above the eastern horizon, as described in this article from Sky & Telescope. Below it and closer to the horizon will be Venus as well as Jupiter, Mars, and Mercury. Binoculars will be necessary to spot Jupiter and Mercury, and Mars will be a real challenge as it is lined up very close to Jupiter (see the illustration in the article linked above).

During the night, Saturn is also visible, arcing along the path of the ecliptic through the sky. Because the paths of Venus and Mercury are closer to the sun than earth, we always see them relatively near the sun, either the rising or the setting sun.

The outer planets, whose paths are further from the sun than earth's, may travel all the way across the sky and are not "tethered" to the sun the way Venus and Mercury appear to be from earth. If you think about it, you will realize why you will never see Mercury or Venus high in the night sky when the sun is on the other side of the earth; if you were looking out into the night from earth and saw Venus out there, it would mean that Venus was traveling along an orbit outside of the earth's orbit around the sun (because when you are on earth looking out into the night along the path of the ecliptic, the sun is "behind your back").

Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend have this to say in Hamlet's Mill about the importance of the planets:

But obviously there is more, and what emerges here lifts the veil of a fundamental archaic design. The real actors on the stage of the universe are very few, if their adventures are many. The most "ancient treasure" -- in Aristotle's word -- that was left to us by our predecessors of the High and Far-Off Times was the idea that the gods are really stars, and that there are no others. The forces reside in the starry heavens, and all the stories, characters and adventures narrated by mythology concentrate on the active powers among the stars, who are the planets. 177.

This is a fundamental concept to their thesis. The interpretation of the last sentence quoted above is important. Stated more directly, it declares: "the planets are the active powers among the stars." They are the ones who shift their places, who move among the fixed stars of the constellations. In de Santillana and von Dechend's words, "the constellations were seen as the setting, or the dominating influences, or even only the garments at the appointed time by the Powers in various disguises on their way through their heavenly adventures" (177). The Powers, in other words, are the planets; the constellations are the disguises or garments that the planets put on and take off.

You can see four of them over the next few mornings, if you only get up early enough.

Yggdrasil

Yggdrasil, the world-tree of Norse mythology, stretched from the deepest underworld of Niflheim, where the horrible dragon Nidhogg gnawed at its roots, up through the center of Midgard (the middle world of men), on through the rest of the nine worlds of Norse cosmology, to the very vault of heaven, where a watchful eagle perched upon its topmost branches. Upon the beak of the eagle sat a small sharp-eyed hawk, helping the eagle keep watch. The eagle, hawk, and the dragon at the roots can be seen in the illustration above, from a seventeenth-century Icelandic manuscript.

At the foot of the world-tree sat the three Norns, spinning out the destinies of men and gods. They also tended to the tree's many wounds with the water from a sacred pool at the base of the tree. Up and down the tree the busy squirrel Ratatosk carried the mutual insults between the eagle and the dragon.

Yggdrasil was sacred to Odin, who had hanged himself on it for nine days and nine nights, and it was there that while staring at the twigs and branches on the ground beneath he had first deciphered the runes that enabled writing and spells by gods and men.

At the battle of Ragnarok, in which the world would be destroyed and the Aesir gods devoured by their ancient enemies Fenris the Wolf and the Midgard Serpent, the dragon would finally gnaw through the roots of Yggdrasil and the entire mighty tree would crack and fall. The significance of the number of the warriors of Valhalla who sallied forth to do battle with the Wolf at Ragnarok has been discussed in a previous post.

Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend explain in Hamlet's Mill that "world-trees" in ancient myth, whose branches are usually described as touching the sky or even piercing the sky, represent the celestial axis around which great machinery of the heavens turns.

They write: "One of the great motifs of myth is the wondrous tree so often described as reaching up to heaven. There are many of them -- the Ash Yggdrasil in the Edda, the world-darkening oak of the Kalevala, Pherecydes' world-oak draped with the starry mantle, and the Tree of Life in Eden. That tree is often cut down, too" (223).

Just as the branches of a mighty tree would all be displaced if the central trunk were moved, all the stars and colures (a term defined and explained in greater detail in the Mathisen Corollary) must move if the celestial axis is altered.

The world-tree of Norse mythology has many parallels in cultures that should have no connection with it, according to the current "isolationist" view of history. There is the sacred erica tree that houses the casket and body of Osiris in ancient Egyptian mythology, and the cedar whose top pierces the sky in the epic of Gilgamesh, but also suspiciously similar tales from the tribes of North America, the far-away Pacific island of Papua New Guinea and even the tiny atoll of Ifaluk in the Caroline Island chain. All of these "world-trees" are examined in greater detail in the Mathisen Corollary.

Perhaps the best illustrations of Yggdrasil the world-tree that I have ever seen come from Norse Gods and Giants by Ingri and Edgar Parin D'Aulaire (1967), which my parents gave to me when I was no older than six or seven. It is a wonderful volume and one I read many times growing up and whose drawings I spent many hours imitating on my own. All parents of young children should consider it for their libraries.

This Friday's interview will be at 1:00 pm Pacific Time

Join us this Friday, April 29th, from 1:00 pm until 2:00 pm (Pacific) for a discussion with author David Warner Mathisen about some of the topics and issues discussed in the Mathisen Corollary.

The interview will be live on KPRL 1230. If you live outside the coverage area (see map here), you can listen over the internet to the live stream here.

Note that this broadcast time is a slight change to the previous schedule. Hope you can be there!

The Cult of Mithras

When my parents gave me a copy of David Ulansey's Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World, I devoured the entire book in a single weekend. While I may be a somewhat extreme case, the subject matter is certainly riveting and the presentation clear, direct, and well illustrated.

Below is a book review I wrote of his text on Amazon:

David Ulansey's Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries is a clear articulation of a new and radically different analysis of Mithraism from the theory that had pertained for about seventy years when Ulansey and others began to question its assumptions.

Professor Ulansey's work has important implications that go beyond the Cult of Mithras, because the celestial phenomena that he convincingly demonstrates are present in the Mithraic symbology turn out to be centrally important to an examination of other ancient myths and symbols.

I have written a book which examines these issues using additional evidence from geology and mythology, and devote a chapter to a discussion of Mithraic archaeological evidence, and Professor Ulansey's theory was absolutely foundational to my own analysis and "corollary"(The Mathisen Corollary).

Professor Ulansey's examination of the evidence and explication of the celestial mechanics of precession are extremely valuable and belong in the library of every student of this phenomenon and its impact on the mythologies of ancient civilizations. The illustrations alone are worth the price of the book.

Further, The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries is extremely readable and Professor Ulansey has a clear and lucid writing style. His discussion of the Stoics and the connection between their observation of the astronomical mechanics and their fortitude in the face of the vicissitudes of this life is similarly worth the price of the book all by itself.

I wholeheartedly recommend Mr. Ulansey's book for its detailed and rigorous yet very readable examination of the ancient Cult of Mithras.

The Cult of Mithras (also commonly referred to as the "Persian Mysteries" at the time) was an important mystery religion in the Roman Empire between the first century BC and the fourth century AD. Because it was a mystery religion and none of its secrets were entrusted to writing, modern scholars have had to deduce what they could about its beliefs and practices from the surviving mithraea, underground temples (or above-ground temples designed to look like underground temples to those inside), and particularly from the prominent scene found in every mithraeum, the so-called "tauroctony" scene of Mithras slaying a bull.

Professor Ulansey's argument is that the symbology of the tauroctony is celestial, and that it represents the world-altering discovery of the phenomenon of precession by Hipparchus in the second century BC.

While I believe there is extensive evidence that the phenomenon of precession was understood over a thousand years before Hipparchus (and that it was understood to a degree of precision that Hipparchus never achieved), I am in agreement with Professor Ulansey that the symbology of the tauroctony is celestial and precessional in nature.

I am somewhat skeptical of his idea that the discovery of precession by Hipparchus could have spread so rapidly and resulted in the popular Cult of Mithras with all its attendant symbology by the first century BC. I think it is more likely that the knowledge of precession demonstrated in the symbology that Ulansey describes came from previous initiates who preserved this ancient understanding.

Nevertheless, Professor Ulansey has done a valuable service in elucidating his arguments for the celestial and precessional content of the Persian Mysteries, and students of the precessional codes that ancient civilizations embedded in their mythologies and monuments should not be without this text and its excellent collection of photographs and illustrations.

The presence of precessional imagery and numerology in the cultural heritage of many widespread ancient civilizations (as well as remote people groups whose cultural heritage was preserved into the nineteenth or even twentieth centuries) is an absolutely critical source of evidence arguing for the existence of ancient contact across even the mightiest oceans.

If precession was initiated by the events surrounding a cataclysmic global flood, as Dr. Walt Brown argues in his hydroplate theory, then this evidence also supports the conclusion that this catastrophic event took place within human memory, and that those who observed its effect on the heavens took great care to record their knowledge of precession in the myths and legends that they passed on, often through secret societies and mystery cults.

The Precessional Numbers

In Hamlet's Mill, Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, following the work of Franz Rolf Schröder (1893 - 1979) point out the presence of significant numbers that appear over and over in mythology around the world.

For example, they point to a passage in the Old Norse Poetic Edda known as the Grimnismal, a passage spoken by the god Odin in his disguise as Grimnir, in which the end of the world is described. Describing the scene in which the slain warriors of Valhalla issue forth to battle against the forces of destruction in the battle of Ragnarok, the Grimnismal tells us that

five hundred gates and forty more
are in the mighty building of Walhalla
eight hundred Einherier come out of each one gate
on the time they go out on defence against the Wolf. Hamlet's Mill 162.

As Graham Hancock points out in Fingerprints of the Gods, this verse invites us to count the warriors of Valhalla: eight hundred warriors times five hundred forty gates, totaling 432,000. This number also happens to be the number of syllables traditionally attributed to the ancient sacred Sanskrit text of the Rigveda, and it is a number associated with the phenomenon of the precession of the equinoxes -- a "precessional number." At this point, de Santillana and von Dechend quote Schröder, who in his own 1929 work in German, Altgermanische Kulturprobleme declares, "To quibble away such as coincidence or to ascribe it to chance, is in my opinion to drive skepticism beyond its limits" (de Santillana and von Dechend 162).

Hancock also points out in Fingerprints of the Gods that the battle of Ragnarok to which the heroes of Valhalla are marching is related to the unhinging of the world's axis that causes the phenomenon of precession in the first place (247).

In another work, Keeper of Genesis: A Quest for the Hidden Legacy of Mankind, co-authored with Robert Bauval, Hancock has also made note of the fact that the dimensions of the Great Pyramid of Giza have been noted to model the dimensions of the earth itself, and on a scale of 1:43,200. Taking the perimeter of the Great Pyramid at its base, Bauval and Hancock explain, which is 3,023.16 feet, and multiplying that number by 43,200 yields a result of 24,734.94 miles, which is within 1% of the true equatorial circumference of the earth.

The concept of "precessional numbers" comes from the rate of the precession of the equinoxes, which itself is a phenomenon caused by the fact that the axis of the earth, while remaining tilted at almost 23.5o, traces out a circle in much the same way that the axis of a toy top or a gyroscope might trace out a circle as it spins. This phenomenon is explained in various places on the web and in much greater detail with numerous illustrations in the Mathisen Corollary.

This precessional movement of earth's axis shifts the background of stars which appear at any given point of the earth's annual orbit around the sun. If there were no precession, then the view from the earth at a precise point in time on the exact same point in its orbit would always be the same: the same constellations would appear at the same height in the sky if viewed from the same vantage point on earth. However, because of this gyroscope-like motion of earth's axis tracing out its own circle in the sky (while remaining at the same angle of obliquity to the ecliptic or plane of the earth's orbit around the sun), the background will slowly shift even if seen from the exact same point each year.

This phenomenon causes the "precession of the equinoxes" -- the shift in the background stars seen before the sun rises on the morning of the equinox each year. The motion is very slight -- a shift of only one degree (out of a complete circle of three hundred sixty degrees) in 71.6 years. Because a human lifespan is only about that long, it would be very difficult to detect without precise records taken over the course of many human lifetimes. Conventional historians do not even believe that mankind began to perceive and discuss the phenomenon of precession until the time of Hipparchus of Nicea (190 BC - 120 BC), and even then only imprecisely.

However, as de Santillana and von Dechend and others have demonstrated, the precessional number of 72 (the number of years for a single degree of precession, rounded to the nearest whole number for convenience in transmission through myth) appears in numerous legends of ancient cultures around the world. Multiplying 72 by the three hundred sixty degrees required to make a full circle (or a full circuit of the earth's axis, if the rate remains constant) yields 25,920 years. Using these two numbers (72 and 25,920) other factors can be derived, including the numbers 108, 216, 432 and 540 (this process is described in greater detail in the Mathisen Corollary). These are the principle precessional numbers.

Once one becomes aware of the precessional numbers, they turn up in the most surprising places. For example, in the Chinese martial arts (and in Chinese numerology in general), the number 108 is extremely significant. The long form of Tai Chi Chuan is traditionally understood to contain 108 movements, as are the forms of many other traditional martial arts. The legends of the Shaolin Temple also make frequent reference to the number 108.

Tthe Mathisen Corollary discusses other places that the precessional numbers surface. As discussed in the previous post, if precession was initiated by the events surrounding a cataclysmic global flood within human memory (as Walt Brown's hydroplate theory suggests, using extensive evidence from the geological record), then it would be understandable that ancient humans who lived immediately after that event both observed and recorded the effect of this new motion of the heavens.

As it turns out, the evidence from both archaeology and mythology suggest that this is exactly what they did.

Geoids, relative gravity differences, and the deep Pacific trenches

Here is a fascinating video from a recent article by Shireen Gonzaga on the excellent EarthSky website.

The article explains (and the video illustrates) the important concept of the relative gravity differences across earth's surface.

Generally speaking, all objects with mass have gravity. A bowling ball has more mass than a marble, but because the earth itself has so much more mass than either of them, we don't notice the force of gravity which pulls objects towards the center of either of them, because the small force vectors pulling towards their centers of mass are totally overwhelmed by the much larger force vectors pulling towards the earth's center of mass.

However, if we moved the bowling ball and the marble into space, far enough away from the earth or other planets, the force of gravity towards the center of the bowling ball and the marble could each be noticed and measured. In fact, if you placed the marble some distance away from the bowling ball, the force of gravity would pull the marble to the bowling ball due to the bowling ball's greater mass.

A person's mass doesn't change if you move him from the earth to the moon, but his weight on a scale would change. On the moon, which has less mass than the earth, the person would be pulled towards the center of the moon with less force than on earth he is pulled towards the center of the earth. Thus a scale beneath his feet on earth would register the greater pull and on the moon the same scale would register the lower pull -- he would weigh less on the moon, although his mass is the same (his mass "with clothing" might even be greater on the moon, if he is wearing a bulky pressurized space suit).

As the article and video above illustrate, this same phenomenon takes place on earth as well, in areas of slightly greater or lesser mass, although you would need an extremely sensitive scale to detect the differences (your bathroom scale at home won't cut it).

Near a very massive mountain, gravity will pull towards the mountain as well as towards the center of the earth, although the force vector towards the center of the earth will be much stronger than towards the mountain. Above the mountain, the force vector pulling on an object (such as a person) will be larger than above a less-dense area of the earth's crust (you can think of it as the force vector towards the mountain being added to or "stacked upon" the force vector towards earth's center). Thus, a very sensitive scale will register a slightly higher weight for a person above a massive mountain or a dense part of earth's crust, and will register a slightly lower weight for a person above a less-dense portion of earth.

This phenomenon is what the geoid in the video illustrates -- an exaggerated view of the areas of relatively greater and lower density and gravity on the earth, as recently measured by the very precise gradiometer onboard the Gravity Field and Steady-state Oceanic Circulation Explorer (or GOCE) satellite.

In his explanation of the hydroplate theory, Dr. Walt Brown explains that it has been known for decades that there is a mysterious deficiency in gravity beneath the deep ocean trenches of the Pacific. He points to an often-cited work by geologists Robert L. Fisher and Roger Revelle, "The Trenches of the Pacific," in which the authors state:

The most striking phenomenon associated with the trenches is a deficiency in gravity. [. . .] Measurements of gravity near trenches show pronounced departures from the expected values. These gravity anomalies are among the largest found on earth. It is clear that isostatic equilibrium does not exist near the trenches. The trench-producing forces must be acting [. . .] to pull the crust under the trenches downward! cited in Brown 122.

While this might seem to make sense, as a trench is something of the opposite of the mountain we considered above, it does not make sense at all under the theory of plate tectonics. According to tectonics, a trench is created when one massive plate subducts underneath another plate, creating a trench. These plates are literally miles thick (which calls into question whether one could really subduct under another in the first place), so there should actually be more mass where one plate dives beneath another plate, rather than less mass.

However, as Dr. Brown explains in pages 122 to 123 of the 7th edition of his book In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood (available on his website), the finding of a deficiency in gravity associated with the trenches of the Pacific accords perfectly with hydroplate theory's explanation for their origin.

According to his theory, the floor of the Pacific was sucked towards earth's center as a result of the movement of earth's crust away from earth's center under what is today the Atlantic, on the opposite side of the earth, when water and tons of rock were removed by the initial rupture of that created the flood event. This explanation also accounts for the arc-and-cusp shape of many ocean trenches that are very difficult to explain under the tectonic theory (see brief discussion here).

What does all this have to do with the timeline of mankind's ancient past and the evidence of ancient civilizations?

If the features on the earth were not created by tectonics (and there is extensive evidence that calls the tectonic explanation into question), and if they were instead created by catastrophic forces (as Dr. Brown's theory posits and as extensive evidence seems to support), then these geologic features would not necessarily have required hundreds of millions of years to form but could in fact have been shaped within the course of weeks, months, or a few years.

This means that they could have been shaped at almost any time, even as recently as a few thousand or tens of thousands of years ago. (Note as an aside that this possibility radically undermines the Darwinian theory, in that Darwinian evolution requires vast amounts of time as a key ingredient in its formula of random mutation plus natural selection). If so, then the catastrophe could have occurred during human memory.

In fact, I argue that the evidence available to us from ancient myth and archaeology supports the assertion that this catastrophic event did take place during human memory.

Dr. Brown's theory explains that the event he posits would have initiated a major roll in the earth that changed the sky. This would help to explain why those who noticed this major change began to closely monitor the sky and came to understand the phenomenon of precession.

While not generally admitted by conventional theories of man's past, I argue (based on the work of others who have gone before, including the seminal work of Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend) that ancient man understood the phenomenon of precession in impressive detail and precision and recorded that knowledge in his mythology and his most enduring physical monuments. The theory of Dr. Brown, which deals primarily with geology and which is therefore not often considered or understood by those studying anthropology or theories of ancient civilizations, could provide (in my analysis) an exciting new explanation for ancient man's grasp of this subtle and sophisticated astronomical concept.

I explain this new possibility in detail in the Mathisen Corollary.