Just So Stories: The White Cliffs of Albion

As a child growing up, one of my favorite sources of bedtime stories was certainly Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories (the edition linked is the one I had, and still have to this day, although there are other more complete editions -- this one has wonderful illustrations).

Of all these stories, one of my favorites was (and remains) the delightful story of "How the Whale got his Throat," which relates the tale of the shipwrecked Mariner (a man-of-infinite-resource-and-sagacity) who rather unkindly drags a grating (secured by suspenders) into the throat of the Whale as payback for swallowing him, and to prevent it from happening again.

During his sojourn inside the Whale, the shipwrecked Mariner convinces the cetacean (by means of stumping, jumping, bumping, thumping, and dancing hornpipes) to, as he puts it, "Take me to my natal-shore, and the white-cliffs-of-Albion."

By virtue of this detail, and the illustration in the volume I had as a child (which showed the Mariner debarking from the mouth of the Whale onto a beach very much like the one pictured above), I can never think of the white cliffs of Dover without thinking of the story of the Whale (Albion being a poetic name for England with its white cliffs).

The composition of these famous white cliffs, which are deeply meaningful for Englishmen, is chalk, calcium carbonate, which conventional geology informs us consists of several hundred feet of "coccolithophores, single-celled planktonic algae whose skeletal remains sank to the bottom of the ocean and, together with the remains of bottom-living creatures, formed sediments" (see this Wikipedia entry, which basically relates the well-known orthodox explanation).

On the surface, this explanation for the composition of the cliffs of Dover seems plausible (note that the same explanation is given for the geological origin of the cliffs of Normandy which are found on the other side of the Channel and are very similar in composition and size, and which include the famous Pointe du Hoc up which the US Army Rangers led by Colonel James Earl Rudder, Texas A&M Class of 1932, conducted one of the most daring and difficult assaults against the Nazis on D-Day in World War II).

Digging a little deeper, however, as West Point graduate Colonel Walt Brown does in his examination of the evidence supporting his hydroplate theory, reveals serious problems with the conventional explanation.

For one thing, these cliffs occasionally reach heights of 1,000 feet, and yet the conventional theory which posits that all or most of earth's limestone formations are the remains of slowly settling marine skeletons requires shallow seas for these organisms. How could organisms (primarily corals, which cannot grow at depths below about 160 feet) living in shallow seas produce limestone deposits 1,000 feet high (and probably higher, if these cliffs have been eroding for millions of years)?

To explain such a phenomenon, geologists must argue that the seafloor beneath these shallow seas continued to subside lower and lower, at a rate that was just right to allow continued deposits of calcium carbonate for the millions of years required to build up thousand-foot beds of limestone or chalk (limestone is another form of calcium carbonate). This is difficult to argue, especially since, as Dr. Brown argues in his section on the origin of limestone, "the seafloor cannot subside unless the rock below it gets out of the way. That rock would have nowhere to go" (8th ed. page 224).

We have previously discussed how the catastrophic flood described by Dr. Brown would have created the conditions for the slow sinking of the floor of the Pacific at rates that could allow the growth of the coral atolls found there, but these conditions would not have pertained in the vicinity of the Atlantic and the English Channel. Furthermore, massive calcium carbonate deposits are found all over the world, such as in the Grand Canyon (where the Redwall Limestone layer is 400 feet thick) and -- even more dramatically -- in the Bahamas, which consist of massive limestone banks up to six miles thick!

The fact is that there simply is too much limestone on earth to be explained by the marine skeleton theory so favored by conventional uniformitarian geologists. Further, this entire hypothetical mechanism for the creation of organic limestone begs the question of where the organisms got the ingredients for the limestone they created in the first place -- as Dr. Brown explains, the organisms needed inorganic ingredients precipitated in the oceans of the earth to create the limestone that did come from organic sources. In short, Dr. Brown explains that the vast majority of limestone deposits found around the world today come from inorganic sources, and even the organic limestone had its ultimate origins in the inorganic limestone that was dissolved in the sea which was then processed by the corals and other marine life to become organic limestone when their skeletons sank to the seafloor.

Dr. Brown explains, using clear chemical formulas, where this limestone originally came from and why it is found all over the world. He explains that water trapped under great pressure beneath the earth's surface prior to the flood event would have dissolved minerals in the floor and ceiling above and below them, and that rising temperatures prior to the flood event would have caused increasing amounts of limestone and salt to precipitate out of the solution. During the rupture and subsequent flood event, the escaping subterranean water would have swept this limestone to the earth's surface, distributing it widely in great volumes.

Immediately after the flood event, there would have been greater abundance of dissolved limestone in the oceans of the earth, which would have precipitated into the formations we see today. Limestone also forms the cement which bonds most sedimentary rocks in the geological strata worldwide.

In his book, Dr. Brown gives extensive scientific evidence for the conclusion that most limestone found on earth is inorganic and was not produced by marine organisms over millions of years. Further support for this theory comes from the high limestone content found in some meteorites which have hit the earth, which (as we have discussed previously here and here) probably originated from earth during the flood event in the first place, and have now fallen back to earth after some time in space. It is fairly clear that the limestone in these meteorites did not come from abundant marine life in shallow seas.

Based on the evidence, it appears that the conventional explanation for massive limestone and calcium carbonate formations, including the Bahamas Banks and the White Cliffs of Dover and Normandy, resembles a Just So Story, although not as charming as the Just So Stories of Rudyard Kipling.

As difficult as they are to maintain, however, geologists will often prefer their uniformitarian Just So Stories to the alternative of admitting the possibility of a global catastrophe such as the flood described in the hydroplate theory, because catastrophic explanations severely undermine the Darwinian theories which are built upon uniformitarian geology (for more extensive discussion of this connection, see here).

To read more of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories online, follow this link to a table of contents of the 1902 edition with 1902 illustrations (each title in the list is a link to the corresponding story).

The Dendera Zodiac and the Panel of the Wounded Man at Lascaux

In the previous post, we discussed the evidence that the cave paintings at Lascaux contain images that can clearly be shown to represent celestial constellations -- a truly astounding allegation. In fact, it is such a powerful piece of evidence refuting the conventional timeline of human development that it deserves to be revisited in much greater depth.

In the previous post, we noted the evidence which has received the most attention so far, which is the existence of six dots in an arrangement which traditionally represents the Pleiades, painted in the proper location relative to the enormous Bull #18 image in the Hall of the Bulls at Lascaux.

However, in addition to that, we examined the so-called "Panel of the Wounded Man" in which a bird-headed man (who is drawn from two parallel lines) is inclined at a forty-five degree angle between a bull and a rhinoceros with a tail in the form of the stars in the head of Leo. We saw that the presence of the bull and the Leo-shape indicate that these parallel lines leaning at an angle (the "wounded man") represent the constellation Gemini, the Twins (a constellation which itself consists of two parallel lines, and which appears to incline at the same angle).

We pointed to articles discussing this compelling evidence, and noting that below the wounded man is a bird on a post or pole (see image below).






















Most astonishing was the incontrovertible fact that in the famous Round Zodiac of the Temple of Hathor at Dendera, a Horus-falcon is depicted upon a post directly below a depiction of the Twins of Gemini, in exactly the same location as the bird-on-a-pole relative to the "wounded man" at Lascaux! See the detail from the Round Zodiac below:

























This correlation is truly significant, as it puts the defenders of the orthodox timeline of human history in an extremely uncomfortable position.

First of all, it is very difficult to argue that there is absolutely no cultural connection between these two works of art. The stars in the sky certainly suggest shapes, and it is perhaps possible to argue that two completely isolated human cultures would group the same stars into the same groupings even without any contact with one another.

It is even possible to suggest that some of these groups would suggest identification with the same animals -- the long sinuous form of the Scorpion, perhaps, and even the "V"-shape of the horns of the Bull, Taurus (although the "V"-shape is much less suggestive of a bull than the stars of the Scorpion are suggestive of a scorpion, and in the Mathisen Corollary book itself, I discuss the fact that the "V"-shape of Taurus was also interpreted to resemble an adze in addition to a bull).

However, it is extremely difficult to argue that the stars below Gemini are at all suggestive of a bird on a pillar, and that this image would be seized upon by two completely disconnected cultures which never shared any form of contact.

And yet, this is exactly the argument that defenders of the conventional history must take, if they wish to explain the undeniable similarity between the images at Lascaux and the Round Zodiac of Dendera. The conventional timeline declares that Lascaux is the product of Upper Paleolithic humans operating as far back as 17,500 BC.

Here is an essay typical of the treatment this cave art usually receives, from the website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art website. While acknowledging that they represent a tremendous achievement in the history of mankind, the author of the article describes the paintings from the perspective that their creators were hunter-gatherers who chose to depict animals of "species that would have been hunted and eaten (such as deer and bison) as well as those that were feared predators (such as lions, bears, and wolves)."

The bird on the pole, and its clear connection to the Dendera zodiac, causes a king-sized problem for interpretations like this one. Arguing that these images simply manifested themselves in two cultures with no cultural contact is very unconvincing. However, another alternative -- that there could be some cultural contact between a culture operating in France around 17,500 BC (or even 15,000 BC as the article from the Met's website alleges) and the culture of ancient Egypt that produced the Dendera zodiac (which dates to as recent a date as 50 BC, although some scholars have argued that it is almost certainly patterned upon an earlier model, as was common in ancient Egypt) -- is equally difficult to argue convincingly.

How could a specific set of artistic conventions survive for over 17,000 years (or for nearly 15,000 years, if we select a later date for the creation of Lascaux)? Such a possibility becomes absurd when considered carefully. Fifteen thousand years is more than seven times the number of centuries than the number that separate us from the artists who created the Dendera zodiac. In order to argue that artistic norms were somehow transmitted intact across such a vast gulf of time, one must make various assumptions, all of them distasteful to conventional theories of ancient history. One explanation for such preservation might be the existence of some civilization that existed for many thousands of years before the Egyptians. Another, more plausible explanation might be that the accepted date for the painting of the cave art at Lascaux is incorrect and that it was not actually painted in 15,000 BC or 17,500 BC.

Because it is extremely difficult for conventional theorists to explain how such an image could turn up in two isolated cultures, and because arguing for cultural contact is extremely difficult if the orthodox dates for Lascaux are maintained, conventional academia appears to be ignoring the celestial aspects of Lascaux altogether (and instead chooses to discuss the images as desired hunting targets, or powerful predators that early human hunters wished to emulate).

However, another explanation is possible, and that is that the artists of Lascaux were descended from the same cultural source which influenced the culture of ancient Egypt. In this case, the cave paintings of Lascaux might have been contemporary with the art of ancient Egypt, or might have been created slightly earlier or slightly later than the works of Egypt.

Such a possibility appears to be much more likely than the possibility that the conventional theory of Lascaux, which is confidently taught to children in schools in their segments on "early humans," corresponds at all to reality and the truth.

Celestial imagery in the cave paintings of Lascaux

On the twelfth of September, 1940 -- almost exactly 71 years ago -- four teenage boys and a dog named Robot unexpectedly and accidentally discovered one of the most amazing pieces of ancient art in the world -- the cave system of Lascoux, decorated with nearly 2,000 images which had been preserved for millennia.

Who created them and what they mean is unknown, although conventional history books confidently tell us that they are the product of various "upper paleolithic" cultures that lived in the area and decorated the caves in from about 17,500 BC through 9,000 BC. The images at Lascaux and other nearby sites are often interpreted as artistic renditions of the prehistoric European animals that the paleolithic humans would have encountered at the time -- aurochs and red deer and other mammals -- and the few scenes containing human figures (there is only one such scene at Lascaux) are generally interpreted as "narrative" accounts of hunting episodes, in which certain animals were killed and perhaps in which some hunters were injured or met their end as well. Some scholars go beyond the idea that the paintings are mere narratives and argue that they represent an expression of deep and mystical identification with the power of nature manifested in the mighty bulls and horses and stags.

An evocative description of this view is given by Wade Davis in his deeply thought-provoking book The Wayfinders, a book we have touched on in a few previous posts such as "Some thoughts on the Hokule'a" and "How does barbarism win?" Describing the conclusions of observers who believe that the paintings found in the cave of Lascaux and other nearby sites represent an artistic depiction by very early man -- man barely separated from the animals -- of a nostalgia for the time when mankind and the animal kingdom were not yet sundered, Mr. Davis writes:

I recently spent a month in France in the Dordogne with Clayton Eshleman, who has been studying the cave art for more than thirty years, ever since a fateful morning in the spring of 1974 when he abandoned, as he put it, the world of bird song and blue sky for a realm of constricted darkness that filled his being with "mystical enthusiasm." [. . .]

Northrop Frye struggled in vain to assign purpose to these works. "We can add such words as religion and magic," he wrote, "but the fact remains that the complexity, urgency, and sheer titanic power of the motivation involved is something we cannot understand now, much less recapture." Frye saw the animals portrayed as a kind of "extension of human consciousness and power into the objects of greatest energy and strength they [the humans] could see in the world around them. It was as if in painting these forms on rock, the artist was somehow assimilating "the energy, the beauty, the elusive glory latent in nature to the observing mind." We look at the animal forms with human eyes and "suspect that we are really seeing a sorcerer or shaman who has identified himself with the animal by putting on its skin."

Clayton, too, sensed that the cave art did much more than invoke the magic of the hunt. Human beings, he suggested, were at one time of an animal nature, and then at some point, whether we want to admit it or not, were not. The art pays homage to that moment when human beings, through consciousness, separated themselves from the animal realm, emerging as the unique entity that we now know ourselves to be. Viewed in this light, the art may be seen -- as Clayton has written -- almost as "postcards of nostalgia," laments for a lost time when animals and people were as one. 29 - 30.

As attractive as this vision of the cave art may be, there is evidence that the entire thesis that Lascaux represents the first amazing artistic endeavors of extremely early humans may be completely wrong. Without taking anything away from the power and beauty of the artistic depiction of animals found in the natural world, it may in fact be possible that these images represent celestial formations -- that they in fact represent constellations familiar to us today!

This startling hypothesis has been put forth by several serious scholars in the past two or three decades, reviving theories first suggested in the nineteenth century but generally forgotten, as described in this extremely interesting article by William Glyn-Jones on the website of Graham Hancock (the article is three pages long and full of important images -- be sure to read page 2 and page 3 as well). For a more detailed description of this connection, see the longer discussion on Mr. Glyn-Jones' own blog here, which is also linked at the beginning of the first article.

Mr. Glyn-Jones points to previous work by scholars including Luz Antequara Congregado and Mary Settegast suggesting that the cave art of Lascaux depicts specific constellations, including Taurus (with the Hyades and the Pleiades -- see for example this article arguing for the identification of the Pleiades in one famous image at Lascaux), and that the famous "Panel of the Wounded Man" showing an angled human form next to a charging bull may be associated with the myth of Yima and the Bull.

As Mr. Glyn-Jones explains, in the ancient Zoroastrian texts dating to at least 550 BC, Yima is described as the first being, who led humans into a cave to protect them from destruction by ice, and then led them out again, and sacrificed a bull in an attempt to make humans immortal. Similarly, in Norse mythology, the frost giant Ymir is the first being to arise from the gaping primordial whirlpool of Ginungigap, followed closely by an ice cow. Later, the first three Aesir gods Odin, Hoenir and Lodur overthrew Ymir and fashioned the earth and heavens from his body.

In the articles linked above, Mr. Glyn-Jones notes that not only is Yima (or Ymir, or -- as he appears in ancient Hindu texts, Yama and his sister-bride Yami) always associated with a primordial bovine, but that his name appears etymologically related to the root word which gives us the word Gemini -- the Twins (Yama and Jama and Gem- being linguistically similar). The constellation Gemini is located in the zodiac right next to Taurus the Bull, and in fact leans at an angle relative to the bull at the same angle as the bird-headed human image in the cave.

In the Panel of the Wounded Man, from the cave of Lascaux, Mr. Glyn-Jones notes that the man is drawn quite stylistically and simply, with two parallel lines, in marked contrast to most of the other, very lifelike, images of animals in the caves, and he suggests that this was done to make it quite clear that the so-called "wounded man" represents the constellation Gemini.




















Mr. Glyn-Jones notes that "The Twins constellation, Gemini, is located next to Taurus, the Bull. Gemini consists of two long straight lines leaning at a 45-degree angle with respect to the ecliptic, while the majority of Zodiac figures stand upright at culmination. The Bird Man also leans at this angle, and is drawn from two long straight lines. He is certainly in the right position relative to the Bull."

The observation is amazing and extremely plausible. It becomes even more stunning when Mr. Glyn-Jones notes that the Rhino located to the left of the leaning man appears to represent the constellation Leo the Lion. Note the curious angle of the tail of the Rhino -- it is quite plausible to argue that the shape portrays the same stars that form the head of the constellation Leo (see below, and see also the excellent illustrations in the articles from Mr. Glyn-Jones linked above, which show the images of Lascaux superimposed upon charts of the night sky).





















Even more startling, Mr. Glyn-Jones suggests that the "bird on a pole" next to the "wounded man" is very suggestive of the image of a bird on a pole in the Denderah round zodiac (pictured in this previous post) which is similarly located directly below the image of the Twins there as well!

This connection is utterly astounding, particularly because historians generally agree that the falcon on the pole beneath the Twins on the round zodiac of Denderah is representative of the standard of the Followers of Horus and that it marks the location of the star Sirius. Mr. Glyn-Jones points out that Sirius was not visible from the latitude of Lascaux in the remote epoch of 17,500 BC, and because of this he modifies his position to suggest that perhaps in the Lascaux cave the image represents Procyon instead of Sirius.

He also notes that the presence of such a diagram from a time so far before Egypt must mean that these Upper Paleolithic people may have eventually migrated south to become the forerunners of dynastic Egypt, as incredible as it is to suggest that such cultural iconography could have survived intact for so many thousands of years.

However, we should step back from these two details and look at a bigger issue. The astounding evidence that the cave art of Lascaux appears to incorporate precise celestial imagery suggests that this art is not the product of Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers at all. In fact, the entire ancient timeline that describes mankind emerging from an animal-like state into long ages of paleolithic hunting and gathering and ultimately settling down into neolithic agricultural cultivation and eventually higher and higher forms of civilization is a fabrication of Darwinian assumptions about the origins of man and is in fact built upon extremely suspicious assumptions, as we have argued many times previously in this blog and in the Mathisen Corollary book as well.

It's not that the supposed Paleolithic human beings who were hunter-gatherers were not intelligent or artistic enough to observe constellations and then depict them as art in the form of animals and bird-headed humans. However, which is more likely: that Paleolithic artists depicted a bird-on-a-pole in the position of Sirius at an epoch when Sirius was not even visible at the latitude that it was painted, and that they developed the understanding of the zodiac constellations which was still in use fifteen thousand years later in Egypt and Babylon, or that this cave art was not actually produced in 17,500 BC but at a time when Sirius was quite visible in Europe, perhaps by people who also inherited some portions of the astronomical knowledge that was also passed on to Egypt? As John Anthony West and R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz have observed, much of the science of ancient Egypt appears fully-formed in the very earliest temples and texts -- it does not appear to have been developed by the Egyptians but rather inherited by them.

In other words, it appears to me to be quite possible that the authors of these amazing paintings were descended from the same lost ancient civilization from which the Egyptians were also descended, rather than the less likely possibility that the Egyptians are descendents of these artists (to put it one other way, I would argue that the Egyptians and the artists of Lascaux are co-descendents of the same lost civilization).

For those who would counter that radiocarbon dating firmly establishes the dating of Lascoux, I would point out that in my book, I discuss reasons why carbon dating for ages over 5,000 years may be based on faulty assumptions and thus yield incorrect conclusions, following the arguments that Dr. Walt Brown has published in his book detailing the hydroplate theory.

Also, note well that, contrary to the sequence related in the ancient Yima / Ymir mythology (in which Ymir rises first from the brine, followed by the cow), Gemini does not lead Taurus in the nightly rotation of the zodiac across the heavens. On the contrary, Taurus leads Gemini in the sky's nightly rotation. It is only in the subtle and millennia-long motion of precession that the Age of Gemini leads the Age of Taurus (which in turn precedes the Age of Aries, which precedes the Age of Pisces, which precedes the much-anticipated Age of Aquarius).

Ancient myths which speak of Ymir being overthrown, or of a god who ruled the previous age being superseded and going down to sleep in the underworld (as does Osiris in ancient Egypt or Kronos/Saturn in ancient Greece) clearly indicate extremely ancient awareness of precession. Are we to understand that, in addition to passing along the constellations and many of the icons associated with them, these ancient Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers who painted in caves also found time to make the detailed recordings of astral positions for the successive centuries that would be required to detect and decipher the phenomenon of precession?

In short, the very credible evidence suggesting that the images in the caves of Lascaux and the rest of the Dordogne area encode celestial phenomena completely upends conventional timelines of mankind's ancient past. The clear parallels to iconography used in ancient Egypt as well as to mythology stretching from the Hindu Vedas to the ancient Zoroastrian Avestan texts and even to the Norse myths suggests a cultural connection to a lost ancient civilization that conventional history completely rejects.

Although the theory that these images point to events in the celestial sphere was put forward in the nineteenth century, that possibility was ignored until the 1990s -- most likely because of the deadening effect of the spread of Darwinian theory throughout academia towards the end of the 1800s, enroute to the absolute stranglehold that it has on academic thought today.

To take a virtual tour of the caverns of Lascaux and the ancient artwork they contain, check out the impressive Virtual Lascoux website. It will load in French, but to see it in English (or German, Spanish, or with videos containing sign language), simply move your mouse/cursor-pointer to the far left side of the screen, which will cause a "pop-out panel" to slide into view, and then move your mouse/cursor-pointer to the bottom of this panel, which will reveal flags of the UK, Germany, Spain, and an image of two hands -- click on these and be patient: it will reload the entire website in the desired language.

The tour is visually beautiful and well worth browsing through in multiple sittings. To find the "Panel of the Wounded Man" in the major section of the site entitled "A Visit to the Cave," go to the section of the caverns entitled "The Shaft" and then to the sub-section entitled "Panel of the Wounded Man." To find the image of the Taurus Bull with the clear sign of the Pleiades in the correct astronomical position relative to the horns of Taurus, go to the "Hall of the Bulls" and to the section entitled "Panel of the Black Bear."

Navigation of the massive site is made somewhat easier by the same pop-out panel described above (pops out from the left side of your screen), which contains a square entitled "Visit to the Cave" which contains a sub-menu if you click on the square, showing the sections of the cave: The Hall of the Bulls, the Axial Gallery, the Passageway, the Nave, the Chamber of Felines, the Apse, and the Shaft.

The hydroplate theory and the destruction of Comet Elenin

Earlier this year, a comet discovered in 2010 by Russian amateur astronomer Leonid Elenin was generating numerous theories of collision with earth and other doomsday scenarios (some speculated that it had hordes of alien spacecraft trailing in its wake enroute to a rendezvous with earth).

However, recent observations show Comet Elenin dropping rapidly in brightness and exhibiting signs associated with disintegration, suggesting that it may be tearing apart (see for example this article from Sky & Telescope). Note that Comet Elenin is not to be confused with another comet which is currently visible in the night sky, Comet Garradd.

Comets in fact are quite fragile and susceptible to being torn apart by the gravity effects of planets and the sun, including the same gravitational forces which cause the tides on earth and which are explained in this previous post.

This fact is powerful evidence against the conventional theory that argues that comets originate in a speculated "Oort Cloud" located some distance outside the boundaries of the solar system. The reason that the fragility of comets argues against the Oort Cloud is as follows:

• There are roughly two groups of comets -- short-period comets whose furthest orbital point (aphelion) is close to the orbit of Jupiter, and long-period comets whose aphelion is much further out and which approach the sun at much higher velocities, velocities that are almost fast enough to expel them from the solar system altogether (and which, if given a slight boost in velocity when passing a large planet or slingshotting around the sun, will eject them from the solar system).
• If all comets originated from a point outside the solar system, it would require significant slowing of these long-period comets to bring them down to an orbit that only reached to Jupiter (in other words, it would take a lot of "braking" to turn a long-period comet into a short-period comet).
  
• The forces required to slow a long-period comet (or any comet coming in from outside the solar system) down enough to turn it into a short-period comet would tear the comet apart.

Comet Elenin, a long-period comet, is apparently being torn apart right now. This event is an example of the problem that faces those who postulate an origin of comets outside of the solar system.

This line of argument, and much more detailed scientific evidence to support this line of reasoning, is presented by Dr. Walt Brown in his online book about the hydroplate theory. Dr. Brown explains that the events surrounding the cataclysmic global flood event would have launched water into space at tremendous velocities, sufficient to explain the origin of comets. His theory would explain the existence of short-period comets. It would also explain why long-period comets still exist, despite their fragility (because he presents evidence that this flood event took place only several thousands of years ago; theories which postulate comets circling the sun for many millions of years must be able to explain why they have not all been ripped apart or swept away by planets, particularly Jupiter and Saturn).

The hydroplate theory is not mere speculation, but is supported by literally many hundred solid pieces of geological evidence on earth. It is also supported by many details in the solar system, including the composition and behavior of asteroids, and of comets.

For previous discussions of the mysteries of comets, and the difficulties that they pose to conventional theories, see this previous post and this previous post.

Mild but persistent torture

In his masterful 1979 opus on the High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt, Serpent in the Sky, John Anthony West explains the power of harmony and proportion in art and architecture this way:

In the cathedrals and sacred art and architecture of the past, we see the knowledge of harmony and proportion employed rightly, provoking in all men who have not had their emotions permanently crippled or destroyed by modern education a sense of the sacred. It therefore takes no great leap in imagination to conceive of the same knowledge put to an opposite use by the unscrupulous. In principle, buildings, dances, chants and music could be devised that would reduce the mass of any given population to helplessness. 38.

We have written before about Mr. West's extraordinary vision of what the ancients were up to in Egypt -- his view that their "massive works were designed from the onset to provide insights into the wisdom of the temple, upon every level from the humblest quarryman to the master sculptor, printer and mason," that their entire society and its art and architecture was designed to be "a continuous exercise in the development of individual consciousness" (90) -- for instance in this previous post.

He explains that the Egyptians and later inheritors of the same art used mathematical and harmonic proportion to deliberately evoke certain vibrations in the human body and the human spirit. He examines extensive evidence supporting his assertion that

in ancient civilizations, a class of initiates had precise knowledge of harmonic laws. They knew how to manipulate them to create the precise effect they wanted. And they wrote this knowledge into architecture, art, music, paintings, rituals and incenses, producing Gothic cathedrals, vast Hindu temples, all the marvels of Egypt and many other sacred works that even today, in ruins, produce a powerful effect upon us. This effect is produced because these men knew exactly what they were doing and why they were doing it: it was done entirely through a complex of sensory manipulation. 37.

Let us now examine the opposite effect that he alleges can be evoked by the use of disharmonic proportions and bad vibrations. To do so will not be difficult: the reader can step outside his door in nearly any city in the modern world and find familiar examples of exactly what the author is talking about. Mr. West continues: "Now if we look at our twentieth century, we find no masterpieces of sacred art, but we do see countless examples of scientifically proven harmful effects resulting from a misuse of sensory data" (37).

The photograph above is from a middle school in California, by no means unusual or exceptional in its absolutely hideous proportions and oppressive architecture. It is not from a particularly impoverished neighborhood: quite the contrary -- this architecture is absolutely typical of the school architecture that is found all over the state. The public schools I attended from elementary school to middle school to high school were equally depressing to the human spirit in their external form.

To show that this is not simply a California phenomenon, below is a photograph of a school in Spain, educating students at the secondary school level or what Americans would recognize as the high-school level. Apparently, the same architectural genius of benighted design has been at work across the Atlantic as well, far from the Pacific coast of California.





















Is it any wonder that, when the institutions where we send our children day-in and day-out are built along such architecturally repulsive lines, the effect is not to uplift or to inspire but rather to beat down, to oppress, and to alienate?

Even at the highest levels of education such disharmonious and monstrous proportions are often prevalent, although in older campuses with buildings erected before the second two-thirds of the twentieth century some remnants of the time when architecture still followed the harmonic Golden Ratios handed down from the ancients are still in evidence. The picture below is from the campus of Texas A&M University, a campus replete with glowering lumps of concrete, corrugated dividing walls, and beetling overhangs similar to the green monstrosity in the Spanish high school above (but drab yellow instead), all done on an industrial scale.




















Again, this building is from the halls of higher learning, where students are encouraged to "reach for the stars," where the highest ideals of our civilization are supposedly being passed on to the next generation and where our children are participating in the highest levels of academic inquiry that they will probably ever encounter, at least in a formal setting*.

But perhaps this emphasis on the exterior appearance and proportion of modern academic environments is unfair -- after all, it is inside the classrooms that the real encounters with ideas and ideals take place. Perhaps there, inside the actual temples of learning, the "knowledge of harmony and proportion applied rightly" of which Mr. West speaks so eloquently in regards to ancient Egypt can be found today.

Not likely. In fact, it is difficult to conclude that these environments are not deliberately designed to oppress the children that occupy them. For example, here is an image from inside a classroom of the same California middle school pictured at the top of this page.





















The desks of this classroom feature chairs connected to the writing surface by a thick tube of metal (we are probably all familiar with such desks, although we may have blocked them out of our memory since the seventh grade), such that there is no adjustment possible of the direction of the chair or its distance from the table surface: one size fits all.

In this particular classroom, the desks have all been pushed together into clusters of four, with the students facing one another, a not-uncommon arrangement designed to facilitate group interaction or some other worthy community goal. Note, however, that the teacher and the front of the classroom are located at right angles to the direction of the chairs (at right angles, in fact, both to the pair of chairs shown in the photo, and to the other pair that face these desks, in which case the teacher is at right angles to the left instead of at right angles to the right).

The twelve-year-old consigned to one of these unmovable chairs cannot turn his chair to listen to the teacher talking at the blackboard (in this classroom it is not really a blackboard anymore, but rather a whiteboard for dry-erase markers instead of chalk). Instead, he must either turn his neck and upper back the entire time, or swivel his body in the chair into a slumping contorted position in which half his butt is off of the seat and one arm is draped over the back of the chair, which is no longer supporting his back but is now an ill-designed armrest used to hold him in place from falling off.

If the designer of this environment is seeking to stimulate a conducive landscape for learning and intellectual inquiry, he has failed. If he instead was seeking to try to beat down young minds and the human spirit, he may be onto something.

These are just a few photographs, taken from a few representative institutions of learning, but they are by no means isolated examples in our society -- a similar set of images could be gathered from a stroll through the high-rise districts of many large cities, or from a trip on public transit systems consisting of buses and subways, or even from a comparison of the architecture of a typical family home or apartment built in the past few decades versus a typical home or apartment designed in the 1930s, 1920s, or even the 1890s (in fact, since the ascendency of Darwinism and its vision of mankind's past mirroring the evolution of species from primitive to advanced).

In light of what they show us, John Anthony West's allegations of a modern environment replete with "countless examples of scientifically proven harmful effects resulting from a misuse of sensory data" become undeniable. He continues: "Torture is a misuse of sensory data. [ . . . ] In effect, then, the daily life of city dwellers today is technically a form of mild but persistent torture, in which victims and victimisers are equally affected. And all call it 'progress.' The result is similar to that wrought by deliberate torture" (37-38).

Later, returning to the same theme, he writes: "And this is a contributory cause to the product that is twentieth-century man: devoid of direction, faith or understanding, his head stuffed with facts, his only response to the inevitable stirrings of humanity within him violence, sex, or apathy" (91).

While such lines of argument may seem profoundly negative and pessimistic, Mr. West's work is actually deeply positive. He is laboring to demonstrate that the awesome works of the ancients were not merely some "organised delusion carried out to satisfy priestly and pharaonic megalomania" (as he explains on page 90) or the primitive and superstitious efforts of a society obsessed with death (as he explains on page 95).

He is arguing that by accepting a false storyline of mankind's past, we have been duped into thinking that history is one long and generally uninterrupted march from primitive superstition to modern progress, and that because we uncritically swallow this lie (which is pounded into children's heads in the very same sorts of schools as those pictured above, from the earliest elementary levels to the highest halls of the college and the university), we are unwittingly abandoning the very knowledge and wisdom that can uplift and inspire us.

By calling attention to this false history and false vision of progress (false because all the evidence shows that the very earliest civilizations had unbelievably advanced understanding of medicine, architecture, harmony and proportion, mathematics, geodesy, and ocean navigation), he is trying to help shake us out of the grip of the false paradigm that we have been locked into. This is not a negative effort, but a positive one. We cannot begin to examine the ancient wisdom if we don't even accept that it exists.

This is an urgent message. The images above make it clear that, either deliberately or through ignorance, disproportion and disharmony surround us on a very pervasive and almost inescapable level. That is why the examination of the evidence supporting a very different timeline of mankind's ancient past is no mere discussion of "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin," so to speak. It is a very practical and profoundly important issue.

Everyone who realizes this should be spreading the word!



* The students at Texas A&M have succeeded in creating a decades-old culture that is in many ways inspiring and uplifting in spite of the architecture that has been inflicted upon them, but there is no denying the ugliness of almost all of the buildings on the campus.

Comet Garradd in Sagitta and the Coathanger

A comet designated C/2009 P1 Garradd (aka "Comet Garradd") has been making its way through the solar system and is now crossing through some fairly easily-identifiable territory in the band of the Milky Way galaxy.

As this description of Comet Garradd explains, the comet's path makes a fairly wide pass around the sun, and will not get closer than about 1.55 AU (astronomical units, a measurement equal to the mean distance of the earth from the sun). This means that it will remain pretty far away from earth and be difficult to see with the naked eye even at its brightest (which will be in March 2012). The orbit of Mars averages 1.52 AU, which means that Garradd's path swings it around the sun such that even in its closest approach it is only about the distance of Mars to the sun and no closer.

Currently, Garradd cannot be seen with the naked eye, but it is passing near some constellations and asterisms this week that allow observers to track it down using a telescope or binoculars.

To find Garradd at all, you will need a dark night, away from light pollution. The waxing crescent moon is still very young and following close behind the sun, which just "passed it up" over the weekend, creating a new moon (to see how the waning crescent moon is just ahead of the sun before it is overtaken and swallowed up in the sun's glare to form a new moon, and then emerges on the other side as a waxing crescent trailing the sun, see this previous post).

Because it is so close behind the sun right now, it is far in the west at sunset and exits the scene as night falls, leaving a nice dark sky for stargazing and comet-tracking. However, as it trails further and further behind the sun, it will be higher and higher in the sky later and later into the night after sunset, and as it does so it will also get thicker and thicker, on its way to a full moon on 12 September. Therefore, the next few nights might be good opportunities to look for Comet Garradd.

To get yourself oriented to the right portion of the sky, you will first want to find the constellation Aquila, or the Eagle. If you are using binoculars (which have some definite advantages for stargazing, as explained in this previous post), you will probably do best to actually lie down on the ground looking up, so that you can relax your neck and hold the binos steady. You will also want to remove your glasses if you wear glasses, and use the focus dial to bring the stars into focus with the binoculars instead of with your glasses. Doing so will allow you to get the eyepieces right up to your eyes the way they were intended to work, rather than keeping them a distance away because of your glasses.

To find Aquila if you are not familiar with this constellation, the best place to go is to the marvellous and practical book by H.A. Rey which we have discussed in several previous posts. However, if you want to track it down without his help, you should first find the southernmost beginning of the track of the Milky Way, which rises like the smoke from a campfire between the tail of the Scorpion and the jewel-like stars of the Archer, Sagittarius and then arcs right across the vault of the heavens.

In the Milky Way, two beautiful bird constellations are flying towards one another -- Aquila the Eagle (which you will encounter first on your way up the Milky Way from the Scorpion) and Cygnus the Swan (which is flying towards Aquila from north to south and is quite distinctive with its cross-shaped pattern and very symmetrical triangle wings).

Aquila is pretty easy to identify by its three stars in a row with bright Altair in the center (see the diagram above). Altair in the Eagle and Deneb in the Swan form two corners of the bright Summer Triangle, along with Vega (which, at a declination of +38°, is nearly straight up for observers in much of the US in latitudes close to N 38°). If you remove your binoculars while lying on the ground and look straight up and begin to squint (so that the fainter stars are all squeezed from view) you should be left with the three bright stars of the Summer Triangle being visible through your squinting eyes: Vega, Deneb, and Altair.

The three stars in a row that are the most distinctive feature of Altair reminded the ancient and medieval Arab astronomers of a balance on a scale, and they gave all three the Persian name Tarazed, or "the beam of the scale," as explained in this informative website written by Professor Jim Kaler, Professor Emeritus of Astronomy of the University of Illinois. Over time, this name became affixed to the second-brightest of the three (the upper one for viewers in the northern hemisphere), and the lowest of the three became known as Alshain. The center of the three and by far the brightest of them is, of course, Altair itself.

Using your binoculars or telescope, find the (now enormous) landmark of the three stars of the "beam of the scale" in Aquila, and continue up (north) to locate the constellation of Sagitta, or the Arrow (see diagram above). It consists of stars in a narrow "Y-shape" and a line from the three prominent stars in Aquila will take you right to its "fletching" in the tail of the arrow (the forked part of the "Y"). For a really excellent zoomed-in photograph of Sagitta, along with the three most distinctive stars of Aquila, and two tiny circles marking the comet as it passed by the M71 star cluster in Sagitta, check out this link, and then you can click on the photo one more time to zoom in even further.

Comet Garradd recently crossed through this constellation and is now heading across the rest of the narrow band of airspace belonging to Sagitta (see the dotted yellow boundary around the Arrow itself in the diagram above), enroute to an asterism known as "the Coathanger." An asterism is a group of stars that is not an official constellation but is located within the "airspace" of another constellation, or is part of another constellation (the Big Dipper is an asterism, and is actually a part of Ursa Major, the Great Bear).

To find the Coathanger, use your binos to draw a mental line between the two stars in Sagitta's Y-shaped tail and follow this line upwards (perpendicular to the line that forms the body of the Arrow itself) until you hit a single star, and take a right (for viewers in the northern hemisphere). You will come across the Coathanger -- it's really quite distinctive and unmistakable with binoculars. The comet is now heading for the Coathanger and will pass through it over the next few days (and nights).

To see what the Coathanger looks like, and the star where you "hang a right" to get to the Coathanger from a line going upwards from the tail of the arrow, look at this fantastic map of the area, which also depicts Garradd's progress through the sky in the coming weeks and months. Note that in that map (or, more properly, that chart), the positions of Comet Garradd are given for UTC hour 0 -- midnight in Greenwich, England. Therefore, the chart explains that observers far to the west of Greenwich (such as those in the US or in the Pacific even further west) should subtract a day from those numbers.

Note that this comet will continue to track across our night sky for the next several months, becoming brighter as March 5, 2012 approaches, when earth will come closest to Comet Garradd and observers should be able to make it out with the naked eye (although binos will probably still be preferable). At that time it will have made its way all the way north to the vicinity of the Little Dipper. According to the authors of the previously-linked article from Sky & Telescope, "Not since Hale-Bopp has any comet remained so bright for so long."

Comet Garradd was only discovered two years ago, in August of 2009, by astronomer Gordon J. Garradd, working from Australia's Siding Spring Observatory, in Coonabarabran, New South Wales (west and north of Sydney).

For a discussion of the properties of comets which appear to support the hydroplate theory of Dr. Walt Brown (and which conventional theories have a very difficult time explaining), see this previous post and especially this previous post.

Best wishes in finding Comet Garradd between Sagitta and the Coathanger!

More books that influenced me growing up: Survival -- Training Edition

Yesterday's post discussing Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap and some of the issues surrounding Dr. Bronner and his soap also mentioned the wonderful Redwood Trading Post, which always had racks of fascinating books on all sorts of outdoor-related subjects. I always looked forward to browsing through those books whenever we visited the Trading Post.

One of these books which we actually purchased was the old Air Force survival manual, "Survival -- Training Edition," AF Manual 64-3. I pored over it for hours on end growing up, and it could rightly be included in the list of influential books which was started back in this previous post.

That edition was dated 15 August 1969, and superseded a previous edition of 64-3 dated 16 July 1962. The edition I have contains an update dated August 1978, as well as a US Government Printing Office date stamp from 1983, so I guess we didn't purchase it before then! Apparently, the old 64-3 has now been superseded by a newer Air Force survival manual 64-4 dated July 1985, all of which you can read online here. The newer edition contains much of the material from the edition I grew up with, as well as new illustrations and material, but it also omits some very useful information as well.

One bit that is present in both the newer version and the older version is a helpful discussion of the constellations that point to the south celestial pole. While the north celestial pole is easily identified by the North Star, Polaris (which is within one degree of the actual point of the celestial north pole), the region of the south celestial pole is so devoid of stars compared to the sky around it at night that it is known as the "coal sack."

The diagram below is found on page 2-102 in the older 64-3, and can also be seen in the online version of 64-4 linked above on page 349 out of 580.

















The directions instruct the observer to follow a line from the long axis of the Southern Cross (a line marked "A" in the above diagram) towards the celestial south pole. To know where along this line the actual celestial south pole is located, use another imaginary line extending perpendicular to the midpoint of the "Pointers" indicated in the diagram, which are two bright stars to the east of the Southern Cross (a line marked "C" in the diagram above). This intersection will not be exactly at the celestial south pole, but "within a few degrees" of it.

As discussed in the previous post on the amazing celestial navigation of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, the stars in their courses create circles in the sky as the earth turns on its axis. The largest of these apparent circles is the celestial equator, and they grow progressively smaller towards the celestial north pole and towards the celestial south pole.

In the diagram included on that page, it will be clear that these circles will be "tilted" for an observer who is located between the terrestrial poles and the terrestrial equator, and they will be vertical for an observer on the terrestrial equator itself. It should be fairly clear that an observer at the terrestrial north pole would be able to observe stars located between the celestial equator and the celestial north pole (stars with declinations between 0° and +90°, which designate the celestial equator and the celestial north pole by convention as described in that previous post as well). For that observer, the celestial equator would correspond to his own horizon, and he would be unable to view stars below that line (stars with negative declinations).

As an observer proceeded south from the terrestrial north pole, the celestial north pole (with Polaris) would begin to sink in the sky, and the celestial equator rise up from the horizon, such that by the time he had proceeded 10° south of the terrestrial north pole (to L. N 80° or 80° north latitude) he would be able to observe stars moving on the circles with declinations up to 10° south of the celestial equator (although a star moving on the circle at exactly -10° would only just touch the horizon at its highest point on the circle, and thus would not really be visible, and stars close to that southerly declination would be similarly difficult to make out due to the thickness of the atmosphere at that angle, the glare on the horizon, and any buildings or terrain features that might rise above the theoretically flat horizon).

Thus, by a process of working through this same sort of mental exercise, we can determine how far south a traveler would have to proceed before he could even see the stars of the Southern Cross, let alone the region of the sky containing the south celestial pole. The first of the stars of the Crux that could be seen is Gamma Crucis (or Gacrux), with a declination of -57°. It would briefly crest above the southern horizon for observers in the northern hemisphere at latitudes of N 33° or lower, although to be really visible an observer would want to proceed a few degrees further south than that.

The brightest star of the Southern Cross, Alpha Crucis (or Acrux), at the other end of the long axis from Gacrux, has a declination of -63° and so cannot be seen by observers until they pass south of latitude N 27°. Observers in Hawaii, centered on latitude N 19° can see the Southern Cross, as can observers at Machu Picchu at latitude S 13°, where there is a rock in the shape of the constellation which points to the Southern Cross once a year in May (see image here -- scroll almost all the way to the bottom of the page).

The old 64-3 edition of the Air Force Survival manual contained numerous other useful diagrams related to finding your location using the stars in a survival situation. It is quite a helpful reference and one well worth acquiring.