If the ancients really knew so much, why didn't they just come right out and say it?

Readers of this blog or the Mathisen Corollary book might be asking themselves, "Why would the ancients hide advanced scientific knowledge in mythology? If they really knew all the things you claim that they knew, why didn't they just come right out and say so?"

Well, for the past several days we have been launching discussions from some of the excellent analysis of Robert Temple in his Sirius Mystery (as well as briefly discussing his latest contribution about the Sphinx of Giza). While not necessarily agreeing with all of his conclusions, it is clear that he has a lot to offer and deserves a lot of credit for advancing the knowledge available to us all in many ways with his work over the years.

When it comes to the question of why the ancients chose to pass down their knowledge inside of myths that had great literary merit in their own right and which were so full of human drama and intrinsic interest that they would be told for generations (right up to our own times!) without any knowledge that they might contain hidden messages about the paths of the stars and planets, Robert Temple provides some valuable insights. First, he articulates a theory that others have made before, which is that by doing so, the authors of these myths could "incentivize" others to pass them on -- because they were such irresistible stories, they would be passed right along in total ignorance of their true meaning.

Beyond this, however, he makes another very good point, which is that ancient cultures were often quite "totalitarian" in nature (my word, not his, with apologies for importing a not-entirely-appropriate modern word, but doing so in order to make a point), structured in such a way that a new regime could completely obliterate knowledge that had been passed down for ages, simply by killing off those who knew it, or by some slightly less violent but equally final form of censorship. In his "Author's Note" at the beginning of his book, Robert Temple says:

It is important that this strange material be placed before the public at large. Since learning was freed from the tyranny of the few and opened to the general public, through first the invention of printing and now the modern communications media and the mass proliferation of books and periodicals and more recently the 'paperback revolution,' any idea can go forth and plant the necessary seeds in intellects around the world without the mediation of any panel of approval or the filtering of a climate of opinion based on the currently accepted views of a set of obsolescent individual minds.

How difficult it is to keep in mind that this was not always the case. No wonder, then, that before such things were possible, there were secret traditions of priests which were handed down orally for centuries in unbroken chains and carefully guarded lest some censorship overtake them and the message be lost. In the modern age, for the first time secret traditions can be revealed without the danger that they will be extinguished in the process.

Robert Temple raises an excellent point in the above. The only point of disagreement might be his concluding sentence, which appears to presume that civilization and progress as we know it cannot possibly collapse into barbarism and backwardness -- an assumption that should be hard to maintain in light of the evidence he finds for extremely ancient and advanced knowledge that was later obliterated in almost every corner of the globe for many centuries (see discussions on this subject here and here).

John Anthony West has even more to say on the subject and adds yet another dimension in his indispensable book Serpent in the Sky, in which he argues that advanced knowledge of harmonics, resonance, and proportion (such as that apparently in use by the ancient Egyptians) can be used for evil and for reducing its targets to abject despair, and thus such information should not be scattered abroad lightly, even today. We discuss this angle in this previous blog post entitled "Mild but persistent torture." Mr. West's analysis suggests yet another reason why the ancients would want to encode their advanced knowledge and keep it from being understood by anyone but those carefully screened and allowed in to the circle of the initiated.

All of this may strike a familiar chord with readers familiar with the New Testament, particularly passages such as the parables of Christ, in which the disciples are given the explanation and told that the true meaning will not be given to all of the hearers. After hearing the famous parable of the sower in Luke 8, for instance, the disciples asked Christ, "What might this parable be?" In verse 10 we read: "Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God: but to others in parables; that seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not understand."

The parallel event in Matthew 13 is even more explicit. This time, the disciples come and ask a slightly different question, "Why speakest thou unto them in parables?" In verses 11 and following, the answer given is: "Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath. Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand."

These verses are strongly suggestive of the same approach that we have been discussing. This subject clearly bears careful consideration. I will leave it to the theologians to explain why these rather stark statements are given to the disciples after the parable of the sower.

Supernatural or extraterrestrial?

In the previous posts discussing the knowledge of the Dogon (see here, here, and here), we made the point that the knowledge apparently preserved by the Dogon poses an enormous dilemma for conventional naturalistic explanations of humanity's ancient past.

We argued that such knowledge could be explained by invoking the supernatural, or it could be explained by invoking the extraterrestrial, but that it was very troubling to what we might call the "conventional naturalistic" narrative that dominates the education of children, which tries to explain all of human history without having to resort to either one (most 4th grade teachers in the US would not teach their class that alien contact was necessary to explain some of the knowledge or artifacts found in history and preserved around the world, and most university professors probably would not either).

Advocates of the conventional naturalistic framework generally either deny that Dogon art and tradition is actually referring to objects such as Sirius B (a white dwarf too small and too dim to see without advanced astronomical technology, due to its proximity to the extremely bright Sirius A) and the four largest moons of Jupiter (also too far away to perceive with the naked eye, although they are called the Galilean moons of Jupiter because they can be seen with telescopes such as the one Galileo used to observe them and report them in the period 1609-1610). Either that, or they argue that modern astronomical knowledge was somehow conveyed to the Dogon and the Dogon absorbed it so deeply into their most sacred and secret traditions that it appeared to be their own even though it was not.

However, as Robert Temple demonstrates with ample evidence in his book the Sirius Mystery, refuting the Dogon is not sufficient to get past this issue, because it appears that ancient civilizations knew much more about Sirius than the conventional narrative would like to admit, as well as about the size and shape of the earth itself -- in fact, he demonstrates that ancient civilizations including the ancient Egyptians may have been the original source of the Dogon traditions.

We have discussed other evidence that appears to point to the conclusion that ancient cultures knew about the size and shape of the earth at a very early date -- prior to the construction of the Great Pyramid, for example, and perhaps prior to the construction of Stonehenge as well (see this previous post).

It would seem that one could explain such extremely advanced ancient knowledge by resorting to a theory about ancient extraterrestrial contact, or by resorting to a theory of supernatural creation of the human race (ie, mankind did not crawl upwards into civilization from extremely primitive ancestors but was relatively advanced almost immediately if not immediately). There may be other possibilities beyond the supernatural or the extraterrestrial routes, but the conventional Darwinian explanation seems to have some problems with extremely advanced ancient knowledge in the very earliest civilizations that we know about.

The conventional Darwinian worldview has another existential problem which we have discussed previously as well, and that is the fact that Darwinian evolution relies on self-replicating molecules, which makes it very difficult to explain where self-replicating molecules came from in the first place (you can't simply say that "self-replicating molecules evolved," since the mechanism for evolving requires them to be present already). As even the arch-defender of Darwinism Professor Richard Dawkins has admitted, it may be necessary to resort to extraterrestrials to explain the original source for self-replicating molecules here on earth. Others, including those in the "intelligent design" movement, have resorted to a supernatural explanation. In other words, when it comes to the origin of self-replicating molecules, conventional naturalism (we might call it "naturalism without extraterrestrials") is at a similar impasse to that raised by the extensive evidence of advanced ancient scientific knowledge, and the main choices today appear to be some supernatural explanation or some extraterrestrial explanation.

Some people are quite comfortable with supernatural explanations for the above-mentioned thorny problems. Many, however, would prefer to stick to naturalistic explanations, which may explain the rise in interest in extraterrestrial theories in recent decades. It is clear to many people that the conventional naturalistic explanation is bankrupt -- it stubbornly refuses to deal with so very much evidence, or to deal with the evidence in such an unsatisfactory way, that an alternative must be sought. For those who wish to avoid a supernatural explanation, extraterrestrial contact can provide a solution. We might call it "naturalism with extraterrestrials," since it is naturalistic in seeking to avoid an explicitly supernatural explanation.

However, as you might have already observed yourself when it comes to the question of where the first self-replicating molecule came from, the extraterrestrial solutions only push the question back in time and out to another part of the universe. Saying that self-replicating molecules might have come to earth from aliens doesn't help us understand how the self-replicating molecules that supposedly enabled the evolution of those aliens came about themselves (unless they came from still earlier aliens!).

There is also something of an evolutionary timeline problem if you keep pushing things back to successive generations of aliens. Scientists who believe in the Big Bang theory (which has its own set of king-sized problems, as we discussed in this previous post) generally say that it took place 13.7 billion years ago. Then, according to that theory, there was some amount of time required for the first stars to coalesce, and then another fairly substantial amount of time for those first stars to go through life cycles that eventually produced later stars with more complex elements. Only then could life forms begin to evolve, and they couldn't begin to evolve right away even then, since their evolution would require the introduction of self-replicating molecules, somehow, and you have to allow some period of time for those self-replicating molecules to develop.

If all earthly evolution didn't get started until some very advanced aliens brought self-replicating molecules here, then we have to put that first importation of alien molecules pretty far back in the past, which pushes the long process of evolution which produced those aliens even further back in the past, and this causes some problems with available time (not to mention the still-unresolved question of how the remote one-celled predecessors of those aliens got their self-replicating molecules).

Nevertheless, the extraterrestrial explanation is satisfying to some people (including, apparently, Dr. Dawkins). There certainly appears to be some evidence to support the extraterrestrial view, including some of the drawings and legends of the Dogon discussed by Robert Temple, as well as some of the artwork and myths of ancient civilizations, such as the histories that mention the Oannes. There are ancient petroglyphs around the world which seem to suggest extraterrestrial life forms as well, such as the one shown above (from Sego Canyon, Utah) or this one from New Mexico (and there are thousands of others).

The main point is that the conventional naturalistic worldview, the one which held sway in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds in England and the US -- which did not see the need for aliens and which inspired stark naturalistic literature such as the novels and short stories of Jack London -- the worldview which is still generally taught to children in schools and universities, should really be identified as the historical relic that it is, and placed in a museum.

In the twenty-first century, based on mounting evidence that the establishment chooses to either ignore or to ridicule, the choices really seem to be between supernatural and extraterrestrial (or perhaps both).

The conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn and the mythology of Saturnian figures such as Osiris, Ptah, and the Oannes

In the previous post, we discussed the possibility that the Oannes may represent something other than a literal description of amphibious, intelligent beings who descended from the stars to teach mankind civilizational knowledge and science and slept each night in the ocean. If these ancient descriptions are in fact metaphorical in some way, what could they be metaphorically depicting?

First off, when trying to piece together the knowledge hidden away inside ancient coded mythology, we would do well to remember the warning given by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend in Hamlet's Mill. There, those intrepid authors warn against:

the danger of simplification and of ruthless identifying; to simplify, however, is the very danger that we most wish to avoid. In other words, we do not mean to make comparative mythology "easier," by procuring simple denominators upon which all these items could be brought; we think, on the contrary, that we are faced with an almost uncountable number of x's for which the fitting equations have to be worked out in long and cumbersome future identifications. 426-7.

Nevertheless, they are quite confident in declaring, "We know well enough that the Oannes of Berossos is Ea, i.e. Saturn, whose 'town' is Eridu/Canopus, the very depth of the sea" (419). The clues in this case are fairly striking: throughout all cultures (both in the "Old World" and the "New World," as de Santillana and von Dechend demonstrate throughout their massive text), the Saturn figure is consistently one who comes down to dwell among men, who imparts civilization and knowledge to them -- Prometheus bringing fire and being punished for it is a manifestation of this same archetype -- and who then retires from the scene to "sleep" in an underwater cave or abode at the bottom of the sea (or a lake, in the case of King Arthur, who is another manifestation of the same myth).

As an aside, although it might seem contradictory for the authors of Hamlet's Mill to "simplify" with the bold statement that "Oannes is Saturn" right before they warn against "the danger of simplification," the fact that Saturn is such a complex figure who truly acts like an algebraic "x" who can take on so many "uncountable" manifestations across mythologies and even within the same mythology, means that by identifying Oannes with Saturn they are not really making things overly simple at all. Some of the most familiar Saturn manifestations include Kronos in Greek mythology, who retires to the mysterious watery cave of Ogygia, and Ptah of Egypt -- although the authors of Hamlet's Mill also point out that Osiris shares Saturnian features in his retirement from the scene to the underworld (they note that both Osiris and Ptah are "divine mummies" on page 299).

Besides the concept of "sleeping beneath the sea" which they share with Oannes, these Saturn figures also suggest a metaphor of two legs fused into one, which Robert Temple discusses with great perception in his book the Sirius Mystery (even though he chooses to interpret the Oannes as literal and not metaphorical).

First, of course, we should make this connection: that Ptah and Osiris are depicted with their legs bound together in their form as divine mummies. The image of a merman or fish-tailed man also suggests two legs fused together as one. This connection is not directly made by either Robert Temple or by the authors of Hamlet's Mill, although it is possible that others have noted it (I haven't done an exhaustive search). However, Robert Temple also points out a compelling metaphorical connection for the concept of "two legs fused into one" and that is the orbital periods of Saturn and Jupiter, which were clearly of great importance to the ancients.

Jupiter goes around the sun in a period of 11.9 years -- which can be encoded in mythology more readily as 12 years and lends itself to all kinds of useful calculations when it is rounded up to 12 years, which it very nearly approximates. Saturn, further from the sun than Jupiter, takes 29.5 years to make an orbit, which can be rounded up to thirty for purposes of encoding in myths and rituals and for mathematical simplicity.

As de Santillana and von Dechend demonstrate, Saturn in depicted as "giving the measures" to Jupiter in many ancient mythologies. Specifically, their two orbital periods of 12 and 30 mean that every 60 years they will have a conjunction in almost the same place in the sky -- with the same constellation as a backdrop, as illustrated in the diagram above by Johannes Kepler (1571 - 1630), who in that illustration shows the conjunctions of Saturn and Jupiter every twenty years and the fact that every sixty years brings them back to the same sign of the zodiac.

It is fairly easy to understand why Saturn and Jupiter will only return to the same conjunction in the same general location on their orbit every sixty years, since 12 years and 30 years will not coincide until 60 years have passed, when Jupiter has gone around the sun five times and Saturn has gone around twice. In the interim, they also align every twenty years, when faster Jupiter can again be seen in conjunction with slower Saturn from the vantage of observers on earth, but not with the same background of stars, since they will not return to the approximately same part of their orbit until the 60 year alignment (all this is contained in the "trigon" diagram of Kepler shown above -- to envision how it actually looks out in the solar system, visit this page and peruse the excellent illustrations of planet "synods" or meeting points).

Now, Robert Temple provides some excellent analysis which explains how this astronomical fact is encoded in mythology by the binding together of two legs. Clearly, based on the 12-year orbit of Jupiter, Saturn must take two revolutions around the sun to align again with Jupiter in the same relative location -- Jupiter's orbital period thus "binds together" two thirty-year "legs" of Saturn. Robert Temple explains in his Appendix III that the Dogon have a very significant Sigui festival every sixty years, and that the calculation of the years to this festival involves a diagram of the Nommo (their name for the Oannes fish-man) with two legs of thirty years each:

The Dogon even break down themselves into '5 series of 12' and twice thirty, which seems a fairly specific indication that our hypothesis has a sound basis. For the last point, the drawing above the door of the Dogon sanctuary of Binou reinforces these ideas. This drawing is used for the computation of the Sigui. Accompanying this drawing is a drawing of the Nommo which is broken down into two major portions: his right 'leg' marks the first thirty years and his left 'leg' the second thirty years.

The legs are joined to represent that only taken together do these thirty-year periods have significance. And, as we know, Nommo did not actually have legs. He had a fish-tail extremity.

The fact that each 'leg' represents a period of years is made quite clear by the information given that 'the left leg is made a little longer every year in such a way that it is the same length as the other (leg) by the time of the Sigui.'

This proces recalls Plutarch's remark, noted much earlier in the book, that Zeus (Jupiter) had his legs joined together. In short, Jupiter's legs were joined together because each of his 'legs' represented one of the orbital periods of his father Saturn, and it was on his father that he stood. For Saturn upheld Jupiter's creation by providing him with the temporal measures, as Santillana and von Dechend explain.

Based on all this, it is really rather remarkable that Mr. Temple chooses to see the Oannes or fish-tailed men as literal depictions of extraterrestrial visitors, but again I wish to state as I stated in this previous post that the level of scientific knowledge clearly possessed by extremely ancient civilizations requires fairly astonishing conclusions.

It is possible to explain it by extraterrestrial contact.

It is possible to explain it by the supernatural creation of mankind.

It is, however, quite difficult if not impossible to reconcile it with the typical naturalistic explanation that has been in vogue for the past hundred to hundred fifty years, which is that mankind simply arose from infinitely primitive beginnings (one-celled predecessors and fishlike vertebral ancestors being pretty close to "infinitely primitive") to primitive hunter-gatherers who stumbled around for a couple hundred thousand years before suddenly coalescing into civilizations whose earliest myths and structures demonstrate that their creators knew the size and shape of the earth, had mastered sophisticated mathematical concepts such as pi and phi, and who were able to construct massive pyramids and other structures with multi-ton blocks that still stand to this day (and which continue to be very precisely aligned to the cardinal directions and to celestial objects).

Thus, if Robert Temple wants to interpret the Oannes myth and related myths (evidence of which appear to be present around the world) as evidence of ancient extraterrestrial contact, we should at least grant him the right to do so, and to consider his explanation as a rational possibility (and we should acknowledge that his book brings together a wealth of important evidence and applies insightful and original analysis throughout). However, as the above discussion attempts to illustrate, it is also quite possible to consider this myth grouping as a very sophisticated metaphorical repository for scientific understanding of celestial phenomena -- and one which is well-suited to surviving, with all of its hidden knowledge intact, for millennia.

Berossus and the Oannes

In his groundbreaking book, The Sirius Mystery, discussed in this previous post, Robert Temple presents convincing arguments for his thesis that the inexplicable understanding of the invisible star Sirius B (and its 50-year orbit) and other astronomical truths by the Dogon people of Mali may have originated from extraterrestrial amphibious beings who imparted their knowledge to the Sumerians and Egyptians, or their predecessors.

Central to his arguments are the accounts of the Hellenistic-era Babylonian priest and astronomer Berossus (sometimes spelled Berosos, Berossos or Berosus), whose actual histories have not survived but who was cited by numerous ancient writers. Berossus described a series of amphibians called the Oannes, who were credited by the Babylons with teaching them all the sciences of civilization and in fact enabling the founding of their civilization. These Oannes were described as having a body like a fish, or a curious "complicated form between a fish and a man," and to plunge beneath the sea when the sun became too hot during the day, as well as every night. Several representations of these intelligent civilizing beings are preserved in ancient Babylonian art and cylinder-seals.

Perhaps the strongest point that Mr. Temple makes in his argument that these accounts of the ancient historians are based in truth and not fable (besides the fact that ancient civilizations appear to have possessed knowledge that they should not have been able to know at very early stages) is his translation of the words used by the ancients to describe these creatures. The nouns chosen to describe this race of beings mean "an abomination" and "a repulsive one." Says Robert Temple:

If ever anything argued the authenticity of their account, it was this Babylonian tradition that the amphibians to whom they owed everything were disgusting, horrible, and loathsome to look upon. A more normal course for any invented tradition of the origins of civilization would have been to glorify the splendid gods or heroes who founded it. But instead we find specific descriptions of 'animals endowed with reason' (Alexander Polyhistor's account) who make their awed and thankful beneficiaries want to be sick with revulsion.

And what is more, the tradition admits this freely! (Chapter 9).

To strengthen his case, Mr. Temple points out that the Dogon also believe they were descended from people taught by creatures sharing the same amphibious and unworldly description.

In our previous post on the subject, we argued that intervention from extraterrestrial beings is a far more likely possibility than that mankind emerged from ages of progress out of very primitive conditions and suddenly displayed evidence of understanding the size and shape of the earth with great precision, ability to construct massive stone monuments with such engineering ability that they are still standing today (incorporating stones the size of which would be difficult to move with all our modern equipment), and detailed knowledge of the mechanics of the astronomical sphere which would take centuries of careful records and an understanding of fairly advanced mathematics to perceive.

However, we also noted that there are reasons to believe that the details recorded by Berossus, like the vivid stories in the myths of the ancients, were actually sophisticated metaphors meant to preserve scientific knowledge, but that they were not really meant to be understood in a literal sense. We cited an eloquent assertion of this very fact by Robert Temple himself, who noted that the myths did their job so well that their message was often preserved by subsequent civilizations who did not understand the hidden information encoded therein. It is at least possible that much of what Berossus discussed falls into this same category (after all, he was a priest of Marduk, the Babylonian Jupiter, and the priests of antiquity were known for keeping secret the true meaning of the ancient tales).

In fact, in the appendices in which Robert Temple provides for reference the translated versions of the many ancient historians who cite Berossus, there are passages in which he relates the reigns of Chaldean kings, some of whom reign for "ten sari" and others for "eighteen sari" -- and then we are told that "a sarus is esteemed to be three thousand six hundred years." Certainly the reader is not meant to understand that Berossus was recording the literal reign of a king that was 36,000 years long, or the even more unbelievable 64,800 years long? If not, then why are we compelled to believe that the description of the Oannes are meant to be understood as literal?

In fact, these numbers, and the reigns of all the kings together, appear to be highly symbolic of celestial information that Berossus was encoding for posterity. Others have pointed out that the king lists of Berossus add up to significant precessional numbers, particularly the frequently-appearing number 432,000.

In her 1992 book Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, Jane B. Sellers notes:

Further, mythologist Joseph Campbell believed that in a Sumerian King List compiled in 280 BC by the Babylonian priest Berossos, the number '432' was a number of special significance. (Berossos gives 432,000 years as the sum of the years reigned by Sumerian mythological kings, and 432,000 as the 'number of the eon.')

When 432 is multiplied by a soss, (60, the basic unit of the Babylonian number system), it yields 25,920, the Great Year, and Campbell believes that this number (25,920) was to be hidden and imparted only to the initiates in the mysteries of the Universe. 188.

It is quite possible, then, that the information related by Berossus is meant to encode celestial knowledge of great importance and secrecy, and that the discussion of the Oannes who came down from heaven to impart civilization to mankind, and who dwelt half the time in the sea, may have a celestial message as well (and indeed, in Appendix 33 of Hamlet's Mill, published in 1969, Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend make that exact argument).

Whether the Oannes cited by Robert Temple represent a literal description of extraterrestrials or a coded mythological transmission of advanced celestial and astronomical knowledge, either conclusion causes serious problems for the conventional understanding of ancient human history. The subtle motion of precession is believed by conventional historians to have been first perceived by mankind after the time of Berossus, but his king lists are just one of many examples (many of them far more ancient) which indicate that the very first civilizations we know of already understood it and encoded it in their mythologies and monuments.

To add further fuel to the fire, the Oannes-figures -- whatever they represent -- appear to constitute evidence for ancient cultural contact between the "Old World" and "New World" (so-called) as well. In his 1995 text, Fingerprints of the Gods, author Graham Hancock argues that certain monumental art found in the Americas appears to contain symbolic references to the story of the Oannes. Describing a massive red sandstone figure in the mysterious South American site of Tiahuanaco, a figure known as "El Fraile" or "the Friar" (shown above), Mr. Hancock says:

From the waist down the figure appeared to be clad in a garment of fish scales, and, as though to confirm this perception, the sculptor had formed the individual scales out of rows and rows of small, highly-stylized fish-heads. The sign had been persuasively interpreted by Posnansky as meaning fish in general. It seemed, therefore, that El Fraile was a portrayal of an imaginary or symbolic 'fish-man.' The figure was also equipped with a belt sculpted with the images of several large crstaceans, so this notion seemed all the more probable. What had been intended?

I had learned of one local tradition I thought might shed light on the matter. It was very ancient and spoke of 'gods of the lake, with fish tails, called Chullua and Umantua'. In this, and in the fish-garbed figures, it seemed that there was a curious out-of-place echo of Mesopotamian myths, which spoke strangely, and at length, about amphibious beings, 'endowed with reason' who had visited the land of Sumer in remote prehisotry. The leader of these beings was named Oannes (or Uan). [. . .]

Surviving images of the Oannes creatures I had seen on Babylonian and Assyrian reliefs clearly portrayed fish-garbed men. Fish-scales formed the dominant motif on their garmets, just as they did on those worn by El Fraile. Fish-scales formed the dominant motif on their garments, just as they did on those worn by El Fraile. Another similarity was that the Babylonian figures held unidentified objects in both their hands. 80-81.

We have discussed the other extensive forms of evidence which argue for ancient contact between cultures across the oceans, many of which are linked in this previous post.

It is clear that the knowledge contained in the writings of Berossus, cited by numerous other ancient authors, was extraordinary. While I believe there are reasons to argue that it was not necessarily meant to imply actual descriptions of extraterrestrial beings, it clearly contains important clues which (along with scores of other pieces of evidence) strongly refute the conventional timeline of mankind's ancient past.

"There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists"

Last week, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Professor Dan Shechtman of Israel's Technion, who discovered and officially reported the first verified quasicrystals -- materials with a structure that is "ordered" or "patterned" but nonrepeating and not symmetrical (unlike true crystals).

As explained in this recent "Review & Outlook" article* entitled "Chemistry's Cinderella Story" in the Opinion section of the Wall Street Journal, Professor Shechtman's discovery took place in 1982, when the scientific community adamantly held that such a structure was a physical impossibility. For daring to utter his interpretation of the evidence he had found, Professor Shechtman endured blistering hostility, and it in fact took him two years to even get a scientific journal to publish his findings.

Multiple Nobel laureate Linus Pauling (1901 - 1994), one of the most influential figures in chemistry of all time, dismissed Professor Shechtman's interpretation with the scathing remark that "there is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists."

Write the Journal's editorial staff:

Today, Mr. Shechtman's observations have been fully validated and quasicrystals are beginning to have commercial applications. But his story is a reminder that a consensus of scientists is no substitute for, and often a bar to, great science. That's especially so when the consensus hardens into a dogmatic and self-satisfied enterprise.

This is an incredibly important point to keep in mind, and the courageous pursuit of the truth by Dan Shechtman should be an inspiration to us all, and a reminder of the principle that consensus (even among those at the pinnacle of a field) does not always equal correctness.

At the end of their reflection upon Mr. Shechtman's achievement, the Journal editors ask "Isn't there another field in which a similar kind of consensus has taken hold, with similarly unpleasant consequences for those who question its core assumptions? Take a guess." We're not sure exactly what field they have in mind, but it is quite likely that this pattern of ossified opinion held by a few dogmatic defenders of orthodoxy, who sneer at anyone who would dare to challenge the foundations of the current model, repeats itself quite broadly across the entire spectrum of academia (though perhaps without translational symmetry).

Perhaps, based on their focus on matters economic and financial, the Journal editors have in mind some of the dogmas of economics or investment theory. Then again, they begin their article with an ode to past thinkers in other fields that they see as previous "Cinderella stories," saying, "When it comes to scientific discovery, the world loves a Cinderella story: The lone genius, from Galileo to Darwin to Wegener, who bucks the received wisdom of his field and makes us see the world anew."

The last two names in this trio -- one the proponent of a model of biological evolution, and the other the proponent of a model of geological plate tectonics -- did indeed endure scorn to stand up for what they believed was the best interpretation for the evidence that they saw. However, it is also apparent that today, over a hundred years after each of them first introduced their controversial interpretations to a skeptical scientific community, their once-novel proposals have now become the reigning orthodoxy, with a consensus every bit as hardened and dogmatic as the opposition these theories once faced themselves.

Although extensive evidence exists that casts doubt upon the interpretations put forth by Darwin in biology and Wegener in geology, those who dare to challenge these reigning models court ridicule, often labeled with derogatory terms similar to those employed by Pauling against Shechtman, in an attempt to marginalize them, and to take away their ability to effectively criticize what is already "known and proven." For example, those who challenge the traditional timeline of mankind's ancient past are often labeled as practitioners of "pseudoarchaeology" -- a term quite reminiscent of Pauling's "quasi-scientists" barb.

The 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry should be an encouragement to all those who are laboring to determine the truth behind mankind's ancient history, even in the face of ferocious resistance from the defenders of orthodoxy. In fact, it should encourage more people to apply their talents and abilities to this important field of study. It just might happen that the critics will eventually be proven wrong and the consensus swing around to a new way of looking at the world. In fact, it has happened quite often in the past, including the recent past, as new Nobel laureate Dan Shechtman can attest.

Congratulations to him and to his family and colleagues!


* A subscription is required to read many articles in the Wall Street Journal. If the link above does not take you to the full article entitled "Chemistry's Cinderella Story," you can read a "free sample of exclusive subscriber content" by doing a regular search for the article's title and clicking on a link that turns up in the search. Here is a link to the results from a popular search engine -- clicking on the second result in the list should take you to the full editorial about the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

The knowledge of the Dogon

Many readers may be familiar with the king-sized puzzle posed to traditional academia by the traditional beliefs of the Dogon people, who live in the West African nation of Mali. Beginning in the 1930s, French anthropologist Marcel Griaule (1898 - 1956) undertook a series of visits to the Dogon, eventually resulting in their decision to impart to him many aspects of their closely guarded and most deeply-held beliefs.

According to Griaule's own descriptions, published with contributions from his student and fellow anthropologist Germaine Dieterlen (1903 - 1999), much of the Dogon's belief system was centered upon the star Sirius, which they call sigi tolo ("the star of Sigui"), and specifically on a tiny companion to that star which they name po tolo, which means "the po star," po being the name they give to the smallest seed they know of, the Latin genus of which is Digitaria. This might be something like naming a star "the sesame seed star" or "the poppy seed star" to us.

These two stars, the larger bright star and its companion po tolo, the Dogon describe as having a mutual orbit about one another in the shape of an ellipse which takes fifty years, and they further say that po tolo is the smallest thing imaginable but also the heaviest. The absolutely stunning aspect of this secret knowledge which occupies such a central place in Dogon religion is that Sirius really does have a tiny star, Sirius B, which is extremely small and extremely heavy, but that this was not discovered until recent centuries with modern telescopes and astronomical techniques -- it cannot be perceived with the naked eye.

























Further, the Dogon apparently are aware of Jupiter's four "Galilean" moons (so-called because they were first reported by Galileo with his telescope -- they are also invisible to the naked eye) and always depict Jupiter with four dots around it (or, if using a rock to depict Jupiter on the ground, with four smaller rocks around it).

Conventional academics, of course, have bristled at the problem posed by Monsieur Griaule's allegations about Dogon secret knowledge, disputing that he understood them correctly, or else arguing that Griaule or some other Europeans must have accidentally imparted news of recent astronomical developments to the Dogon during the eighteen hundreds or early nineteen hundreds, and that the Dogon must then have adapted their belief system around this new information, giving it an appearance of great age even though it was all quite lately learned.

However, in his extensive examination of the subject which began in the 1960s and was not published until 1976 as The Sirius Mystery, Robert Temple (mentioned in this earlier post on the age of the Sphinx of Giza) demonstrates quite conclusively that Dogon beliefs appear to preserve esoteric knowledge regarding Sirius that was known to the ancient Eyptians and Sumerians, and which was later preserved in a more garbled form by the ancient Greeks. He argues that the Dogon appear to have preserved the Egyptian form of the mystery, and provides some convincing evidence from ancient history to explain how that knowledge ended up among this people in Mali (as well as in their neighboring tribes, who appear to have preserved many of the same traditions).

In fact, Mr. Temple provides so much evidence of advanced astronomical and geodetic knowledge preserved in the monuments of extremely ancient civilizations that he demonstrates that the real mystery is not "how did the Dogon come to know about this information?" but rather, "how did the predecessors of the most ancient civilizations that we know about come to know it?"

As most who are familiar with his work know, Mr. Temple's answer to that question is that this knowledge was imparted to mankind at a very ancient point by extraterrestrial visitors from the very star complex of Sirius itself (which is about 8.6 light years from our system, and which some researchers believe may actually be a distant partner to the sun, whose interaction with our system causes very long-period cycles in human history -- further, their mutual orbital path appears to be stunningly similar to that described by the Dogon in their traditional drawings).

Mr. Temple provides evidence to support this theory in the traditions of the Dogon themselves, who apparently so state it, describing amphibious beings from another world whose description matches very closely some of the ancient traditions recorded by historians such as the Hellenistic-era Babylonian author Berossos who described an ancient amphibious visitor who imparted knowledge to the Sumerians.

This explanation need not be the only explanation for the apparently ancient knowledge of Sirius B and other details that we thought were strictly the province of modern astronomy. We can certainly argue that modern man knows about Sirius B without arguing that we must have learned that information from visitors from the star system of Sirius itself. If someone objects by saying, "Of course! That's because we learned about it using science!" it might be then asked, "why could the ancients not have learned about it the same way, using science?" The fact is that the ancients apparently possessed a far more advanced "science" that conventional history is ready to give them credit for.

In fact, as we have argued in this blog and as is explained in the Mathisen Corollary book, it is apparent that the mythology of the ancients was an extremely sophisticated way of preserving and encoding what we would today call "scientific knowledge." As Robert Temple himself quite eloquently explains in his book, in the chapter titled "The Hounds of Hell":

Perhaps something of the true meaning of the myths is now becoming evident. The ancient peoples were not concealing information from us out of spite. Their purpose in disguising their secrets was to see that those secrets could survive. In fact, so successful were the ancient Egyptians in accomplishing their purpose, that the Greeks often preserve earlier Egyptian secrets in total ignorance of their true meaning, retaining only through an innate conservatism certain peculiar archaic details which we now find to be so important.

Based on this very coherent and probable explanation for much of what we find in myth (a conviction that was earlier expounded by the authors of Hamlet's Mill), the fish-like beings found in myth may not be meant to convey visitors from another planet at all, any more than the fifty-headed monsters or fifty rowing Argonauts are meant to convey actual physical counterparts either (Temple argues quite cogently that they probably encode the fifty-year orbit of Sirius B and Sirius A around each other).

However, it is fairly clear that the extraterrestrial explanation is much more likely to be correct than is the conventional explanation of mankind's ancient past, which has absolutely no way to explain the advanced knowledge of the spherical earth -- let alone the advanced knowledge of a distant star system -- displayed by the earliest civilizations discussed in Mr. Temple's work.

It is possible that early mankind had advanced knowledge and understanding because he was divinely created and started out advanced and not primitive (in contradistinction to the Darwinian timeline of slow and laborious progression), or it is possible that early mankind gained advanced knowledge and understanding at the intervention of extraterrestrial visitors. However, it is quite difficult to continue to argue that the knowledge encoded by the earliest Egyptians and Sumerians described in Mr. Temple's book is the result of civilizations which were just beginning to emerge from millennia of hunter-gatherer existence following a descent from apelike predecessors.

In this case, Mr. Temple's extraterrestrial hypothesis strikes us as very closely paralleling the dilemma admitted by Richard Dawkins in the infamous interview with Ben Stein, in which he blurts out that no one knows how the first self-replicating molecule could have arisen on earth, and so it "could have come about" that it was planted here by aliens! In other words, alien visitation is more likely than the standard Darwinian drivel that is taught to children in schools in the most "scientifically advanced" nations on earth.

We would argue that the incredible knowledge preserved by the Dogon falls into exactly the same category. You can explain it by some form of divine creation, such as the Biblical account or something similar, or you can explain it by resorting to extraterrestrial visitors. However, if you try to explain it using the conventional Darwinian timeline, you will run into insurmountable problems (which is why most conventional academics instead choose to deny that the Dogon really know about Sirius B at all).

So, while we don't necessarily agree with all of Robert Temple's conclusions about the Dogon and extraterrestrial visitors, we do not believe that anyone should laugh at him for suggesting extraterrestrials as the solution to the problem. The only explanation that appears really ridiculous is the stubborn denial of the facts that is offered by the defenders of conventional orthodoxy in this case.

Roadcuts of New England provide evidence of ancient geological violence

Extensive areas of New England exhibit strikingly marbled gneiss that can be seen where roads and highways have been blasted through the bedrock. Typically, these exposed rock faces are found in topographic rises in the land which the road engineers decided to cut through, and can be especially impressive on cloverleaf exit ramps from major freeways, although deep roadcuts are also seen along straight stretches of highway as well.

These roadcuts provide a window onto bedrock that would otherwise be rarely if ever seen. They reveal geology that has been broken up over a huge area at some point in the past, and laced with intruding quartzite, producing the kinds of marbled patterns seen in the above photograph, taken along I-495 in northern Massachusetts. Some veins are very wide, while others are narrow, but they are usually fairly uniform in width. Roadcuts show that the bedrock over huge portions of Massachusetts and New Hampshire exhibits this marbling.

The pattern is reminiscent of the marbling found in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, in Colorado, which Walt Brown discusses in his book discussing the evidence supporting the hydroplate theory, which can be found online in its entirety. Dr. Brown provides massive amounts of evidence from a wide variety of physical sciences which support his theory -- evidence ranging from ocean trenches, to Arctic and Antarctic fossils, to subglacial Antarctic lakes, to coral atolls in the Pacific, to submarine canyons carved into the continental shelves below the current levels of the oceans, to the geographic strata found around the world, to specific aspects of the Grand Canyon, to petrified wood, to the sediments along the southern edge of the Himalayas, to clues found on the moon, on Mars, on asteroids, and in the behavior of comets (and many more areas besides those).

In his examination of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Dr. Brown explains that the geological evidence points to violent forces in the past which were able to fracture the darker rock over an enormous area, in conjunction with forces capable of injecting liquid quartz throughout the fractured rock before hardening. He observes that a fairly unique set of conditions would be required to produce such a "marble-cake" appearance, because in most circumstances the quartz would harden before it went very far, and would tend to only travel through the widest path of least resistance (or at most on only a small number of most conducive channels) rather than lacing the entire rock over vast geological distances.

He argues that the conditions that would leave such a "marble-cake" appearance are consistent with the violent forces that would have been present during the events proposed by his hydroplate theory. A full explanation of his reasoning can be found in his own words here (scroll down to the inset about the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, entitled "A Picture with a Story").

























In sum, he demonstrates that the forces typical of those proposed by the dominant tectonic theory (stretching forces or compressing forces acting in one direction over a long period of time) would not explain the extensive fracturing found in the Black Canyon. Only the kind of rapid crushing that would have taken place over huge areas during the compression event described by his hydroplate theory (when the plates slid after the initiation of the flood, and then came to a violent stop accompanied by massive compressive forces similar to a car crash or a train wreck) could have produced the widespread fracturing found in Colorado.

The fact that the same types of forces appear to have acted on huge swaths of New England as well argues that these crushing forces were very widespread. He points out that it seems far more likely that one worldwide event led to this widespread rock crushing, rather than that the very complex conditions required to produce such crushing just happened to "crop up" over and over in various parts of the world.

He then points out the difficulties involved in lacing this crushed rock with the bands that we see today:

Next, magma must rapidly squirt up through the cracks in the black rock. If it happened slowly, or even at the rate a river flows, the front edge of the upward-flowing magma would solidify (freeze), stopping the flow. If water is dissolved in any molten rock, its melting temperature is lowered considerably. Therefore, melted quartz with dissolved water would be more likely to complete the cold, upward journey.

Each channel (or vein) at the Black Canyon has a fairly uniform thickness. This reveals that the liquid’s pressure exceeded the rock’s pressure by nearly the same amount all along the channel. Again, this would not happen if the flow were slow or had the consistency of cold tar.

This marble-cake appearance is exposed for at least 50 miles along the Gunnison River, so the compressive force must have been about the same over at least those 50 miles. Magma, if it came from one spot below, would tend to escape through the shortest cracks leading to the surface. Instead, magma has filled cracks over a 50 mile range. Consequently, the magma source and any water were probably spread over a large area directly below.

The hydroplate theory explains how deep magma was produced in large pockets under the bedrock during the period of rapid drift, when the plates were sliding away from the area that became the Atlantic Ocean towards the great hole that was forming to make the Pacific Basin. The immense friction during this sliding event melted rock into magma.

The presence of such marbled rock over very wide areas in New England, in addition to the massive formations that Dr. Brown discusses in Colorado at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, appears to provide another piece of geologic evidence that supports the hydroplate theory and which is better explained by that theory than by existing tectonic theories that build their explanations on the work of long, slow, non-catastrophic forces.

The next time you have the opportunity to drive through northern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire, be on the lookout for roadcuts that provide a fascinating look into the bedrock, and the tale of violent crushing and marbling that remains etched into the stone for us to observe to this day.