Equinox versus Equalday/night

Those who spend much time studying Stonehenge hear a lot about solstice alignments built into the ancient megalithic structure (particularly summer solstice alignments), but very little about equinoctial alignments.

In his amazing work Hidden Stonehenge, Professor Gordon R. Freeman explains that there are in fact subtle equinoctial alignments built into Stonehenge, in addition to subtle lunar alignments and beautiful (and more widely-recognized) solstice alignments as well.

More precisely, Professor Freeman found that Stonehenge contains alignments to the rising and setting of the sun on "Equalday/night" (slightly different from the equinox).  Professor Freeman discovered the distinction by careful observation of the Sun Temple Ring Ómahkiyáahkóhtóohp in Alberta, Canada.  His observations found that the sacred circle site there contains clear alignments for days near the days we call the equinoxes, but slightly before that date in March and slightly after it in September. 

In page 65 of his book, Professor Freeman explains:

[. . .] the time of an Equinox is selected "theoretically" as the time when the centre of the Sun is directly above the Equator, and the "theoretical" Sun rise is when the centre of the Sun is physically horizontal from the observer.  "Theory" treats the Sun as if it were a tiny dot, instead of its actual broad disk.  The radius of the Sun is one-quarter of a degree, and the near-horizontal light of the first flash from the Sun's tip is bent downward more than one-half of a degree as it penetrates the Earth's atmosphere, so the first flash of sunlight appears when the centre of the Sun is more than three-quarters of a degree below the horizon.  So the observed rise time is a few minutes before the "theoretical" sun rise.

  

Similarly, the last flash occurs a few minutes after the "theoretical" Sun set.  At the latitude of Ómahkiyáahkóhtóohp, five minutes are added to each end of the day and taken from each end of the night.  The so-called Equinox days are 12.2 hours long and the nights are 11.8 hours.  So the 12.0-hour-day/12.0-hour-night, or the Equalday/night, occurs to to three days, an average of 2.8 days, before the Equinox as the days lengthen in March, and two to three days after the Equinox as the days shorten in September.

Professor Freeman goes into a great deal more detail about this important concept in his book, which is an absolutely essential reference and full of gorgeous photography and clear and detailed explanation.  

Regarding the alignments at Stonehenge which encode Equalday/night, Professor Freeman deserves credit for being the first in modern history to rediscover these. He notes on page 116, "Strange as it may seem, during a century of speculation about a possible calendar in Stonehenge, nothing was published about an attempt to observe an Equinox Sun rise or set there."  

Professor Freeman explains that the observation lines for the winter solstice sunset and the summer solstice sunrise were well known, and aligned to some of the most massive stonework in the complex, but that the summer solstice sunset and the winter solstice sunrise both used a subtle alignment through the notches carved in Sarsen 58 of the "West Trilithon" (the trilithon composed of Sarsen 58 and Sarsen 57, and topped by the mighty lintel stone 158.  This trilithon can be seen in the image at top, on the right-hand side of the picture -- the notches in Sarsen 58 are clearly visible and form little "windows" with the edge of Sarsen 57 in the photo.

Below is a photograph showing Sarsen 58 and some of the other nearby stones, with their numbers indicated for ease of reference.

Amazingly, Professor Freeman found that the dramatic "windows" on Sarsen 58 also figured in the alignments for the Equalday/night sunrise and sunset, which makes the design and construction of this ancient site all the more mind-boggling in its sophistication.

A sample chapter from his book which is available online explains the Equalday/night sunrise and sunset alignments in detail, with beautiful photographs showing the "sight windows" created by the ancient builders to frame the sunrise and sunset on these important days (the resolution of the online version is not great, but the photographs in the book itself are wonderful and well worth the price of the book all by themselves).  

The discussion of Stonehenge's Equalday/night alignment begins on page 116 in that online chapter (same pagination as the book itself).  The photograph marked "Figure 4-45" on page 126 of that file (and the actual book) is perhaps the most dramatic, clearly showing the window formed by the lower notch on Sarsen 58 framing the setting sun of Equalday/night (taken on September 24, 2002).  That photograph shows that Sarsen 3 (on the other side of the circle from the image above) forms the left edge that creates the window with the notches in Sarsen 58.  

The photograph above is looking towards 58 from almost due west of the center of Stonehenge, with a view towards the northeast, and so the beam of light from the setting sun can be imagined coming in from the left side of the above picture and piercing through the notch in Sarsen 58 on its way towards an observer on the other side of the stones, on the other side of the circle. 

In order to visualize this phenomenon more clearly, the numbered diagram below is provided.  It is from Wikimedia commons here, and comes from a 2008 book by Anthony Johnson called Solving Stonehenge, which Professor Freeman praises highly and at one point declares, "I just want everyone to know that Johnson's work is more important than even he imagined" (317).  

In the online sample chapter linked above, Professor Freeman explains that the sight-line for the Equalday/night sunrise ran along the northern edge of Sarsen 20 (no longer present), which was on the circle just below Sarsen 21 (still standing and visible in the left side of both the photographs above and in the map diagram) and just to the east and a bit north of the fallen lintel stone marked 120 on the map above (you can see 120 lying embedded in the earth in the photos).  From the north edge of 20, the Equalday/night sight-line ran across the circle to the southern edge of a Sarsen on the far side of the circle, Sarsen 2 (still standing and holding up a lintel designated 102, which is also supported by circle Sarsen 1).

The Equalday/night sunset line ran in the opposite direction (of course), and an observer on the eastern side of the Sarsen circle looking west would use the northern edge of Sarsen 3 as the "near sight" and the notched southern edge of Sarsen 58 as the "far sight" to frame the setting sun.  The image on page 126, referenced earlier, shows this important sunset taking place between the edges of Sarsens 3 and 58.

Even after so many thousands of years, the precision of these alignments is breathtaking.  The fact that they are executed using such enormous stones makes the achievement even more so, and the fact that these same stones incorporate solstice and Equalday/night alignments, as well as the more complex lunar rise and set patterns, is almost incomprehensible.

But that's by no means all.  Professor Freeman also discovered that Stonehenge, like  Ómahkiyáahkóhtóohp in Canada, incorporates mechanisms to track a four-year "leap year" pattern (created by the fact that the earth itself does not turn an equal number of times during its circuit from one March or September Equalday/night to the next March or September  Equalday/night each year).  Because the earth turns an additional one-quarter of a rotation (almost -- for more detail see here) during its annual circuit each year, this has the effect of "adding a day" every four years.

Professor Freeman found that the very precise window created by Sarsen 58  sees the setting sun cross from left to right (heading from the south to the north, as one looks to the west) during March (a few days after the spring equinox) and sees the setting sun cross again from right to left (heading from the north back towards the south on its way to the December solstice) in September.  The alignments are constructed such that the sun rises can be seen looking east through Sarsens 2 and 3 (as described above) against even further mounds on the horizon which indicate the first two years of this four-year cycle, and such that sun sets are seen in the Sarsen 58 window during the last two years of this four-year cycle!

This kind of precision beggars belief.  Even more intriguing is the fact that Professor Freeman was alert to such a mechanism at Stonehenge because he had already found a similar "four-year" or "leap-year" mechanism encoded in the alignments at the sacred circle in Canada! 

As he explains in his book, Equalday/night varies greatly by latitude on the globe.  Ómahkiyáahkóhtóohp in Canada is in 51 north latitude, as is Stonehenge over in England!

One final observation is in order, and it is an insightful one which only Professor Freeman could make (because he is the first in modern history to discover these Equalday/night alignments at Stonehenge).  He points out (page 180) that the designers of these incredible sites had to have their alignments already planned out before they began to place stones on the ground.  That means that the widths of the stones at Stonehenge (such as Sarsen 58 and Sarsens 2 and 3 and 20 discussed above), as well as the widths of the trilithons and all the other stones were dictated by these very precise alignments that the architects wanted to establish!  

In other words, the builders of Stonehenge didn't just haul up a bunch of huge stones to the site and see what kinds of alignments they could make with them -- it is not in any way a haphazard arrangement.  They knew what they were doing before they did it, which means they knew what sized stones they would need before they obtained and transported them.  The sophistication of this site, executed in such a ponderous medium, speaks to the genius of the ancients.

As equinox approaches (and the ecliptic plane passes back below the celestial equator during the day for those in the northern hemisphere, as discussed in detail here and here), take some time to consider the vital distinction between equinox and Equalday/night, and then to appreciate the ancient people on either side of the Atlantic who constructed incredible monuments that still encode the subtle aspects of this important concept.

Finding Fomalhaut

As the earth continues its progress around the sun into the fall months (for the northern hemisphere), the time is propitious for finding the brilliant 1st-magnitude star Fomalhaut (its name taken from Arabic and meaning "Mouth of the Fish").

Fomalhaut is located well south of the celestial equator, about thirty degrees to the south in fact, making it difficult to see for the northern hemisphere for much of the year.  However, it is now reaching its zenith during the prime viewing hours after about 9 pm, and reaching it slightly earlier each night, meaning that the next several weeks are some of the best times to go out looking for it.

To locate Fomalhaut, first find the constellation Aquarius.  This previous post tells you how to find him.  Aquarius is pouring two streams from his water vessel towards the Southern Fish (Piscis Austrinis), and Fomalhaut is by far the brightest star in the Southern Fish.   That previous post depicted the stars of the Southern Fish but did not identify them -- they are circled in the version below so you can find them, just beneath the streams from the vessel of the Water Bearer, Aquarius.  For most viewers in the northern hemisphere, only bright Fomalhaut will be visible -- the rest are too dim to be seen so low in the sky.

As explained in that previous post, Aquarius is located between the Great Square of Pegasus (seen to his left in the above diagram) and Capricorn the Goat (seen to his right in the above diagram, with his horn pointing to Aquarius' lower foot).

The diagram below, from Sky & Telescope by way of Wikimedia commons, shows the stars of Piscis Austrinus with their celestial coordinates.

The diagram above actually outlines the constellation in the same manner as does H.A. Rey in his essential and revolutionary The Stars: A New Way to See Them.  In his discussion of the Southern Fish and Fomalhaut on page 56 of that book, Mr. Rey writes:

The faint stars which make up most of this constellation cannot be seen in our latitudes.  They are above the horizon at times but too low to penetrate the ground haze.  The constellation's main star, however, is all the more conspicuous: blue-white FOMALHAUT, one of the 20 brightest stars.  You can hardly fail to see it when it is up; a line through the two bright stars on the Pegasus side of the Great Square and far downward points straight to brilliant Fomalhaut, solitary in a very dull region.  In case you find another bright star halfway between the Great Square and Fomalhaut, it's not a star but a planet passing through the Water Carrier. 

FOMALHAUT is one of our closer neighbors, about 22 light-years away and 13 times as luminous as the sun.  It announces the coming of fall: the leaves begin to turn when you see it for the first time at nightfall, in mid or late September.

Perhaps Mr. Rey had a special affinity for this star, as it became visible right around his birthday (September 16).

The ancient Egyptians depicted the Southern Fish in the Round Zodiac of the Temple of Dendera.  In the close-up below, you can find Aquarius just as you do in the night sky, by finding the Great Square first (in this case, the square is not very big but easily located between the two fish of Pisces, which are tied together by a string -- for the worldwide span of art depicting a square flanked by two water-creatures, see this previous post).  

Then look to the right and find the image of a Water Bearer pouring two streams of water, in this case from two vessels rather than from one as we usually think of him (the Egyptians usually depicted the constellation we know of as Aquarius this way, and associated him with the Nile River god Hapi).  Below the streams issuing from these vessels you will clearly see the Southern Fish (note that Hapi is depicted as wearing the white crown of the South, which is significant):

Below is an image of the "big picture" of the Dendera Round Zodiac, with a box showing the location of the detail depicted above:

Below is one more image of the detailed area containing Aquarius and the Southern Fish, with arrows clearly identifying them.  The larger fish-tail leading out of the frame below belongs to Capricorn (as you can see if you look closely in the image of the entire Round Zodiac above).

If you look closely enough, you will also see that Hapi was usually depicted by the Egyptians as having pendulous female breasts, symbolic of the fact that the fertile Nile nourished all of Egyptian civilization.  There may also be some connection here to the Greek myth regarding Hermaphroditos, discussed at the end of this previous post.

The Bighorn Sacred Circle in Wyoming contains an alignment from Cairn F to Cairn D indicating the rising point of Fomalhaut (see this page for detail).

Finally, Fomalhaut is famous for its amazing elliptical "debris ring," the sharpness of the edges of which led scientists to hypothesize are caused by planets orbiting on either edge of this ring.  In 2008, scientists found evidence in images taken within the visible light spectrum indicating a planet along the inner edge, dubbed "Fomalhaut b."  Later imagery taken during the months September through October of last year appear to have found evidence for a second planet along the outer edge, as suspected.

Take advantage of this time of year to go out on your own mission of observation to admire this mysterious star in the Southern Fish.

Revolution

This week in the US*, a new television series on NBC entitled Revolution will premiere, imagining a future in which the electricity that powers civilization has mysteriously and abruptly been cut off, resulting in a world that slides rapidly into violence, danger, and barbarism.

The pilot episode has gotten some good reviews so far, such as this one entitled "And darkness fell on the world," by Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal.  She writes that Revolution is "not another end-of- the-world fantasy drenched in blood and darkness," describing the landscape after the collapse of civilization as we know it as "a life fraught with dangers, a society devoid of protections, where militias rule."

The show's writers do not portray the collapse as a having much, if any, silver lining, according to Ms Rabinowitz: "there are no messages here about the value of returning to a simpler time, it's a relief to note."  Instead, she writes, there are plenty of powerful reminders of what has been lost.  The writers portray the new barbaric landscape brilliantly, in her opinion: "a place imagined in detail so haunting in its evocation of the lost past, so romantic even in its bleak present, it's impossible to remain unmoved by it all."

As the great teacher -- and Whitman scholar -- professor Dr. Jimmie Killingsworth once taught me, science fiction (including visions of dystopian futures such as the one found in Revolution) often tells us more about the present than about the future: the fears, issues, and struggles taking place in the world when it is written**.  The science fiction from the 1950s and 1960s, for example, often involves political and social themes of immediate importance to the world as it was at that time, in addition to its visions of the future (some remarkably accurate, some less so).

In light of that fact, it is interesting to consider what sorts of issues from our own present day the writers of Revolution are wrestling with -- perhaps questions about the increasingly central role played by technology, and its ability to act simultaneously as both a hedge against tyranny and oppression (by widely diffusing access to knowledge and information) and a tool to enable tyranny and oppression (by those who can gain access to the levers needed to "turn it off" for everyone but themselves, or otherwise turn it to their own ends while denying it to others).

Additionally, it would certainly seem that the show's authors are engaging in commentary about issues of government and the use of power in the United States, particularly in light of their choice of labels rich in historical connotations in US history, such as "militias," as well as the choice of calling the main set of antagonists the "Monroe Militia" (perhaps a sidelong reference to the transformative "Monroe Doctrine" of 1823 which altered the direction of foreign policy in the young nation and which continues to play an important foreign policy role to this day).

Beyond all that, however, the show's premise is intriguing and important in that it imagines and then portrays an entire world plunged into darkness -- not only the literal cessation of electricity, computers, networks, and internal combustion engines but also the metaphorical idea of the loss of "light," which is a word often used to embody learning as opposed to ignorance, civilization as opposed to barbarism, humanity as opposed to brutality.

As such, it is certainly thought-provoking to consider the fragility of whatever level of "light" we now enjoy in the world, and the possibility that it could be lost.  Even more thought-provoking, however, is the chilling possibility that such a catastrophic extinguishing of the light of learning and civilization has already taken place once in humanity's distant past -- and that we, even with all our technological achievement, are still living in the aftermath of that long-ago Revolution!

Many previous posts on this blog have presented tantalizing evidence that such a loss indeed took place, including:

• "Evidence that the Argo crossed the oceans in ancient times" 

• "Did mankind know the precise size and shape of our earth many thousands of years ago?" 

• "The high science of ancient Egypt"

• "The importance of reading the Pyramid Texts"

and

• "Does the Serpent Mound of Ohio indicate astonishing knowledge of precession?"

Also, the fascinating work of Lucy Wyatt argues that an extremely advanced knowledge would have been necessary to get "civilization" going in the first place (breeding domesticated cattle from the wild bovine predecessors would have taken hundreds of generations and required almost unbelievable foresight and patience to arrive at a workable end product, and the same is true for most domesticated grains).  She believes that the extremely advanced knowledge that was passed on to the relatively peaceful and enlightened Bronze Age civilization (or civilizations) was gravely threatened by the arrival of more warlike and less contemplative Iron Age cultures, who ultimately stamped it out in the parts of the world that would become "the West," but not before some of the knowledge was passed along (such as to the Greeks from the priests of ancient Egypt, for example).

Lucy Wyatt's book can be found here, and some previous posts which comment on this important thesis can be found here and here.

Is it important to know that such a catastrophe might have befallen humanity in the unbelievably remote past?

Critically. 

If we know (or at least suspect) that a collapse even more catastrophic than that portrayed in Revolution once took place, then we can ask ourselves "How did it happen?" and (equally or even more importantly) "How can we prevent it from happening again?"  Indeed, if the effects of that great ancient fall are still being felt today in the civilizations which are descended from those Iron Age civilizations, we can also ask, "How can we remedy or undo some of the forces which led to the loss of that light, and which may still stand between us and something that has been lost?"

On the other hand, if we deny the very possibility that such a catastrophe ever occurred, and if our collective institutions of higher learning selectively suppress the examination of the evidence for such a loss, and ridicule theories that contradict the dominant paradigm of ancient history, then we become less capable of avoiding the developments that might have led to the violent extinguishing of "the lights" the first time around.

Finally, it is interesting to note that the protagonists of the upcoming series appear to have the surname "Matheson."  This is obviously a different last name than that of your humble blog author, and no relation or connection is to be assumed or inferred from any similarity.  In the event of any future power outages, please don't look at me.



* Viewers outside the US may be able to watch the series directly on nbc.com (the first episode is already available online here).

** Since I published this, Professor Killingsworth has written to me to gently point out that this idea comes originally from Ursula Le Guin's introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, in which she says:

The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the word was used by Schrodinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future -- indeed, Schrodinger's most famous thought-experiment goes to show that the "future," on the quantum level, cannot be predicted --  but to describe reality, the present world.

Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.

Thanks for the correction!  Nevertheless, Ms Le Guin's brilliant insights were recognized as such by Professor Killingsworth, and all these years later I still remember his comment on this point.  He no doubt mentioned Ms Le Guin as the originator of that insight back then as well -- my apologies for necessitating a gentle reminder on that point! 

The Lesula

Yesterday in the journal PLOS ONE -- part of the Public Library of Science, a nonprofit publisher and advocacy organization dedicated to open access sharing of information that can help spread knowledge  to raise awareness of the importance of preserving biodiversity and treating overlooked diseases -- a team of biologists comprised of John A. Hart, Kate M. Detwiler, Christopher C. Gilbert, Andrew S. Burrell, James L. Fuller, Maurice Emetshu, Terese B. Hart, Ashley Vosper, Eric J. Sargis, and Anthony J. Tosi published a stunning article that has captured the hearts and imagination of all who have seen it (or the photographs contained in it).

The study, entitled "Lesula: A New Species of Cercopithecus Monkey Endemic to the Democratic Republic of Congo and Implications for Conservation of Congo's Central Basin," details the discovery of a new species of guenon, a genus of monkey found in sub-Saharan Africa designated Cercopithecus by Linnaeus (a Latinized word composed of two Greek roots, cerco- [from Greek kerkos] meaning "tail" and -pithecus [from Greek pithekos] meaning "monkey," hence: "tailed monkey").  The genus Cercopithecus is extremely speciated (it is a genus with a huge number of different species) -- "the most speciose clade of extant African primates," according to the report.  The piece reports the discovery of a distinctive species of Cercopithecus living in the remote Lomami Basin in the Democratic Republic of Congo and then presents arguments for ruling that it forms its own species, distinct from another guenon found nearby and designated Cercopithecus hamlyni.  The new species is known in the local vernacular as the lesula, and has been designated Cercopithecus lomamiensis, after the river that dominates the region in which it is found.

The entire article can be found online at the link above, and it makes for fascinating reading as the authors explain the features of C. lomamiensis that argue for its designation as a separate species.  The article provides touching stories of the first scientific discovery of a lesula -- a captive juvenile female which was being raised  by the director of a primary school in Opala, DRC (near the banks of the Lomami River):

The scientific discovery of Cercopithecus lomamiensis was made in June 2007 when field teams saw a captive juvenile female of an unknown species at the residence of the primary school director in the town of Opala (S 0.50721°, E 24.22713°). The school director identified the animal as a “lesula” a vernacular name we had not recorded before, and said that it is well known by local hunters. He reported that he acquired the infant about two months earlier from a family member who had killed its mother in the forest near Yawende, south of Opala and west of the Lomami River (S 0.99772°, E 24.29810°). We took photographs of the animal and made arrangements for its care. We observed and photographed this animal regularly over the next 18 months.

But what really seems to capture the imagination of those who have commented on the various news stories that have reported on this important discovery are the photographs of the lesula monkeys included in the report, particularly their expressive eyes and haunting facial features. Their wistful eyes seem to provide evidence to support the theory that spiritual consciousness inhabits the different beings (animals and plants etc) and takes on different shapes depending on the "shape" or features characteristic to their different forms.  See for example the discussion in Schwaller de Lubicz's Esoterism & Symbol, chapter 13:

Innate consciousness is inscribed in matter and is subject to all its transformations, birth and death, while preserving its essential characteristics, which are transmitted. [. . .]

Let us take an example from the following illustration.  Directly or indirectly, solar radiation is what makes the plant.  This radiation makes a pine tree or an ear of wheat.  The radiation is impartial and universal, but through the seed it is specified as pine tree or wheat.  

From this moment on, it is characterized by the particular innate consciousness of one of these plants.  

When this same radiation returns to its source, after passing through its material form, it bears this innate consciousness.  53.

Or again, the passage from Ross Hamilton cited in this previous post, in which he says of the human consciousness:  "In the body, however, the spiritual currents of the little soul become plastic in order to fit the mold of the human being by way of the nerve fibers" (26).  

Looking into the faces of the lesula monkeys found in the recently-published report, it is hard to deny the possibility that these "spiritual currents" might "mold themselves" into the different nerve fibers and brain matter of the other animals that inhabit this planet with us, projecting their consciousness in a way that is necessarily different from ours (since their nervous systems and brains are different in shape and "wiring"), but also in a way that is akin to ours (one can get the same feeling when gazing into the eyes of a well-known pet dog or cat).

Beyond that, the discovery of this new and amazing species of monkey demonstrates that -- even in this modern decade, at a time when most people might think that every species that can be discovered has been discovered, at least for the larger and more obvious animals such as monkeys -- there are creatures in this world that have yet to be brought to the attention of biologists.  

Just yesterday, in a blog post about the discovery of a species of (presumably extinct) ancient lobe-finned fish designated Laccognathus embryi, reference was made to the coelacanth, a type of lobe-finned fish long declared to have become extinct about 70 million years ago, but which astonished scientists by swimming into a fisherman's net in 1938 (numerous other living specimens have been found in the decades since).  Those who confidently assert that nothing of this sort will ever be discovered again should realize the need to be more cautious in making such pronouncements, when they observe new species such as C. lomamiensis (the lesula) being discovered for the first time, in our very own twenty-first century.

Further, the extremely high speciation of Cercopithecus monkeys -- between 23 and 36 species, according to The Guenons: Diversity and Taxonomy in African Monkeys, by Mary E. Glenn and Marina Cords (2003), with 55 subspecies as of that publication's date (see page 10) -- should remind longtime readers of this blog of the arguments of the eminent 20th-century botanist J. C. Willis, who believed in evolution but argued that Darwin's proposed mechanism was incorrect and that the distribution of speciation within a genus was powerful evidence for a very different mechanism.

Dr. Willis argued that Darwin's theory, in which species slowly changed through mutations and that the new and more successful variations survived (due to natural selection) while the previous and less successful variations died out, was wrong.  He argued that what we find in nature is the evidence of an entirely new genus arising by some force (possibly mutations of a much less gradual type than those proposed by Darwin), which then begins to branch out into a wide variety of species, some very closely related to one another and barely distinguishable.  

If one takes the time to read the careful and extensive arguments of Dr. Willis on this subject (found for instance on pages 65 to 73 of his 1940 text The Course of Evolution by Differentiation or Divergent Mutation rather than by Selection), one might conclude that the diversity and taxonomy of Cercopithicus -- and the new arguments that C. lomamiensis represents a new species, distinct from its "nearest cogenor and sister species, Cercopithecus hamlyni" seem to support the arguments of Willis and not those of Darwin.

Clearly, the discovery of the lesula is an extremely important and significant event in the annals of science, and one fraught with ramifications for our understanding of the world we live in.

If you are moved by these amazing and shy fellow denizens of our planet, and want to learn more about them, be sure to read the entire report linked above, and in particular be sure to listen to the audio files in which their amazing "booms" are recorded (the males apparently issue these echoing calls around dawn each day).  You may even want to change your telephone's ringer to a lesula boom!

We should all be grateful to the work of the authors of this study, and do what we can to protect and preserve these amazing newly-discovered primates.

What was this large ancient river fish doing in Ellesmere Island?

A year ago, paleontologists Jason Downs, Ted Daeschler, Farish Jenkins and Neil Shubin published a study of a previously-unknown species of ancient fish, dubbed Laccognathus embryi ("laccognathus" means "pitted jaw").  

This article from National Geographic describes the fish as measuring up to six feet in length, with powerful jaws and sharp 1.5-inch teeth, and includes an artist's depiction of the beast lying in wait near a tree growing out of a shallow stream, as the fossil remains indicate its eye position and facial structure probably disposed Laccognathus to such a mode of ambushing its prey.

This article from the Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University in Philadelphia, where Dr. Downs and Dr. Daeschler work, notes that the skull of the Laccognathus was found in a fossil-rich site on Canada's remote Ellesmere Island, in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, near the fossils of other ancient lobe-finned fish such as Tiktaalic roseae.

The actual publication of their findings in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology in September 2011 explains that while the taxon Laccognathus had been discovered previously, its fossils had only been found in Latvia and Lithuania before the fossils on Ellesmere Island.  These are the first ever found in North America, and some distinctive features (which they discuss) merit the designation of a new species of Laccognathus, L. embryi (in honor of Canadian geologist Dr. Ashton Embry, born 1946, who first did field work in the Canadian Arctic islands in 1969 and who has continued to study them and to publish numerous studies regarding their geology since then).

Using the conventional framework of geology and biology, the fossil Laccognathus was declared to have lived a staggering 350 million years ago.  The National Geographic article above says that it belongs to the family of lobed-fin fishes whose only surviving members today are lungfish and the coelacanth.  The Drexel University article linked above notes that the presence of Laccognathus fossils in North America and in Latvia and Russia "confirms that North America and Europe were part of the same large landmass during the Devonian."

According to the conventional model, the "supercontinent" of Pangaea had not even formed 350 million years ago, but was slowly coming together out of the pieces of the previous supercontinent, called "Rodinia."  You can read the storyline of these drifting ancient supercontinents here (among many other places), full of declarative pronouncements about the movements of fancifully-named landmasses such as "Baltica" and "Avalonia" and ancient oceans with names like "the Iapetus Ocean" and "the Rheic Ocean."  These proposed movements represent one possible theory to explain the evidence that scientists and paleontologists have found on our planet over the years, but this theory is by no means the only way to explain the evidence, nor is it necessarily the best one.

In fact, the abundance of Laccognathus fossils on Ellesmere Island (the published article by the paleontologists reports that the skull specimen they pieced together was composed of the bones of about 22 different individuals) fits quite well with a completely different theory of earth's ancient past, the hydroplate theory of Dr. Walt Brown.   

The presence of so many river-dwelling fish on the frozen northern island of Ellesmere clearly requires some mechanism of movement, and perhaps by positing 350 million years one could convince people that the island drifted to its current northern latitude over that time period.  However, there is a problem with this explanation.  As discussed in a previous blog post, Ellesmere is home to an astonishing variety of fossils, including fossils of flowering plants!  The conventional theorists do not admit that flowering plants could have existed 350 million years ago (the very earliest are thought to have appeared 140 million years ago, according to the conventional model).

However, the hydroplate theory proposes that the earth underwent a "big roll" which was caused by the rapid thickening of the Asian continent, particularly in the region of the Himalayas, during the violent events that surrounded a single cataclysmic flood event in the ancient past.  There is extensive evidence to support this "big roll" explanation, including the recent discovery of buried palm trees beneath miles of ice in Antarctica, as well as the discovery of other fossils in Antarctica and of wood there that is not fossilized but can be thawed out and used for fuel for fires!

The existence of Lake Vostok and other deep and still-liquid lakes on Antarctica also defies conventional explanations but accords well with the hydroplate theory.

These newly-discovered Laccognathus fossils on Ellesmere seem to be an additional piece of evidence that could support the hydroplate explanation.  Further, the hydroplate theory posits that the flood event originated with a violent rupture along the line that today forms the mid-Atlantic Ridge -- such a rupture would clearly sever the territory where Laccognathus fossils have been found in Latvia and Lithuania and the territory where these more recently-reported Laccognathus fossils were found in Ellesmere.  

Also, the preponderance of fossils buried in stone that was once thick wet silt (as was the case with the Laccognathus and the Tiktaalic fossils of Ellsemere) accords well with the expectations of the hydroplate theory, which argues that almost all fossils were formed by rapid burial during the catastrophic conditions surrounding that flood event -- an event in which tons of sediments were released into the floodwaters and which were later stratified by the process of liquefaction.  

In fact, this previous post discusses the stratigraphy that conventional geology interprets as having been laid down successively over periods of millions of years each, but which the hydroplate theory proposes may have been laid down much more rapidly.  Interestingly enough, that particular post (which was published in June of 2011, prior to the publication of the discovery of the new Ellesmere Laccognathus) discusses the coelacanth, a lobed-finned fish long declared to have lived (and died out) about 70 million years ago.  The discovery in 1938 of the first modern coelacanth -- which somehow stayed the same during all those millions of years, a period of time supposedly sufficient for dinosaurs to evolve into modern chickens and other birds -- should cause some reconsideration of the conventional assumptions underlying the confident declarations of  when various fossils must have lived.

In short, the hydroplate theory would argue that the Laccognathus fossils were produced by rapid burial during a flood event, following a rupture in which what is today northern Europe (where the previous Laccognathus fossils were found) and what is today northern Canada (where the more recently-discovered Laccognathus fossils were found) were separated, previously having been much closer together.  In the aftermath of that event, the earth rolled such that Ellesmere Island was carried much further north, and Antarctica much further south, not by tectonic drifting over a long period of time but relatively rapidly.  Some coelacanths survived this event, and today look just like their fossil brethren, even though those fossil coelacanths supposedly lived 70 million years ago.

Perhaps somewhere a modern line of the Laccognathus family survived as well, and perhaps one is lying in wait in a shallow river somewhere right now, waiting to sink its wicked fangs into some unfortunate creature.

The Seven Rishis

The Big Dipper is one of the most recognizable groupings of stars in the sky, and perhaps the most familiar (at least to those who dwell in the northern hemisphere of our globe).  It is composed of very bright stars which appear to form a very distinctive shape from our vantage point here on earth.  

Not only does almost everyone know how to trace its outline, but nearly everyone also knows that it is located near the north celestial pole, and can be used to locate the point around which the entire sky appears to rotate.  Its front two stars in the bowl, Dubhe and Merak (alpha and beta Ursae Majoris, in the Bayer system of star designation), are known as "the Pointers," because an imaginary line traced through them (starting at Merak and going up and through Dubhe and beyond) will direct the eye to Polaris, the North Star, situated almost on top of the point around which the entire heavens appear to rotate due to the rotation of the earth on its axis.  

The names of the "Seven Stars" of the Dipper, along with the Greek letters of their Bayer designation, are shown below.  The star next-to-last in the "handle" is actually a multiple star.  Its name is Mizar (or zeta Ursae Majoris) and in the image below (and above) if you look closely you can detect Alcor (which appears smaller and situated "above" Mizar from the perspective of the dipper's orientation) right next to it.  These two have often been called "The Horse and Rider" due to this arrangement, and have long been used as a traditional test of eyesight (if you can detect both Alcor and Mizar with the naked eye, you have good vision).  In fact, there are not two but four stars in the immediate vicinity of Mizar, as shown in this excellent web page from a website called Catching the Light by Jerry Lodriguss.

The nearness of the Big Dipper group to the Pole Star means that it can almost always be seen by those in the northern hemisphere, as it circles that central point of the turning sky.  In the "analogy of the dining room" introduced in this blog post and portrayed in this video presentation, the Big Dipper is "on the ceiling" and thus visible any time of the year for those in the northern half of the globe, in contrast to groupings of stars "on the walls" which are occasionally obscured by the bright light of the sun as our earth goes around it (viewers in the southern hemisphere can always see the stars that are "on the floor," although they can't see "the ceiling" at all once they move south of a certain latitude).  The stars that can be seen throughout the year were known as the "imperishable" or "undying stars" to the ancient Egyptians.

The location of this distinctive star-grouping (properly speaking, the Big Dipper is not an actual "constellation," as it is part of the larger constellation Ursa Major or the Great Bear) near the central pivot of the heavens led the ancients to encode it in myth as playing a causative role not just in the turning of the heavens as the earth rotates on its axis each day, but even more importantly as playing a causative role in the ages-long mechanics of precession.  In this, they were not mistaken, as the changing ages of precession and the motion of the north celestial pole caused by the principles of physics (in particular, the law of conservation of angular momentum) are in fact related.

In this role in mythology, these stars usually appear as "Seven Sages" or wise and powerful beings.  For example, the Seven Rishis described in the ancient Vedas of India are identified with the stars we call the Big Dipper, and many Vedic texts ascribe to them the power of turning the heavens and, by extension, driving all the celestial machinery of the cosmos (including precession).   In Hamlet's Mill, Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend tell us that in this role they are responsible for creating the measurements of both time and distance -- which shows that the ancients were completely aware that the rotation of the earth gives us the connection between time and distance, which you can observe for yourself if you think of the concept of a "minute," which is a term that can be used to express both:

Tradition will show that the measures of a new world had to be procured from the depths of the celestial ocean and tuned with the measures from above, directed by the "Seven Sages," as they are often cryptically mentioned in India and elsewhere.  They turn out to be the Seven Stars of Ursa, which are normative in all cosmological alignments on the starry sphere.  These dominant stars of the Far North are peculiarly but systematically linked with those which are considered the operative powers of the cosmos, that is, the planets as they move in different placements and configurations along the zodiac.  3.

De Santillana and von Dechend also note that the ancient Vedic texts inform us that these Seven Rishis have a sister (and wife) named Arundati, who is Alcor (footnote on page 301). 

To illustrate the heaven-moving power of these Seven Rishis, de Santillana and von Dechend cite for example the Vishnu Purana, which in chapter 8 of Book II tells us:

On the north of Agastya, and south of the line of the Goat, exterior to the Vaiswánara path, lies the road of the Pitris. There dwell the great Rishis, the offerers of oblations with fire, reverencing the Vedas, after whose injunctions creation commenced, and who were discharging the duties of ministrant priests: for as the worlds are destroyed and renewed, they institute new rules of conduct, and reestablish the interrupted ritual of the Vedas. Mutually descending from each other, progenitor springing from descendant, and descendant from progenitor, in the alternating succession of births, they repeatedly appear in different housed and races along with their posterity, devout practices and instituted observances, residing to the south of the solar orb, as long as the moon and stars endure.  (See Hamlet's Mill pages 407-408, in Appendix 29).

This "destroying and renewing" of worlds, Hamlet's Mill explains, refers to the changing of the celestial ages through the motion of precession.

The texts of ancient Sumer and Babylon also ascribe great power to the "Seven Sages," explaining that they were the ones who founded or laid out the plan of the sacred city of Uruk (tablet one, line 19 -- also discussed in pages 300-302 in Hamlet's Mill).  There, we read:

Go close to the Eanna Temple, the residence of Ishtar,
such as no later king or man ever equaled!
Go up on the wall of Uruk and walk around,
examine its foundation, inspect its brickwork thoroughly.
Is not (even the core of) the brick structure made of kiln-fired brick,
and did not the Seven Sages themselves lay out its plans?
One league city, one league palm gardens, one league lowlands, the open area(?) of the Ishtar Temple,
three leagues and the open area(?) of Uruk it (the wall) encloses.

 In Keeper of Genesis, Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval outline the connections between the Seven Sages that laid out the plans for Uruk and the  Seven Sages described in the Edfu Building Texts (texts inscribed at the Temple of Edfu), whom that text tells us were "the only divine beings who knew how the temples and sacred places were to be created" (200).

Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval note that:

In the whole corpus of ancient Egyptian writings, the Edfu Building Texts preserve the only references to the 'Seven Sages' that have survived to the present day.  Egyptologists have therefore paid little attention to the identity of these beings beyond conceding that they appear to have played a part in 'a much wider and more general theory concerning the origin of sacred domains and their temples.'  In our opinion, however, there is something notable about the context in which the Texts describe the Sages.  This context is marked by a preponderance of 'Flood' imagery in which the 'primeval waters' (out of which the Great Primeval Mound emerged) are depicted as gradually receding.  We are reminded of Noah's mountain-top on which the Ark settled after the Biblical Deluge, and of the 'Seven Sages' (Apkallu) of ancient Babylonian tradition who were said to have 'lived before the Flood' and to have built the walls of the sacred city of Uruk.  Likewise is it an accident that in Indian tradition 'Seven Sages' (Rishis) are remembered to have survived the Flood, their purpose being to preserve and pass down to future generations the wisdom of the antediluvian world?  200-201.

This connection to the world-destroying flood that Messrs. Hancock and Bauval perceive is quite insightful and important.  If the seven stars of the Dipper are preserved in wide-ranging ancient traditions as turning the sky and of turning the precessional ages, then their association with the world-destroying flood is an important clue to the connection between an understanding of precession and the globe-altering events that would have accompanied the global flood described by the hydroplate theory of Dr. Walt Brown. 

Of course, it could be argued that the "world-ending catastrophes" that usher in new precessional ages are merely mythological conventions to encode celestial events (this is the gist of the argument of de Santillana and von Dechend).  However, as there is extensive geological and other evidence to support an actual catastrophic flood (the latest post to discuss such evidence is here, and the post before that one is here).  It is therefore possible that the connection of the Seven Rishis to the flood is not merely celestial but encodes an understanding of an actual flood and its impact on the heavens.

In any event, an awareness of these issues can give us a greater appreciation for that familiar constellation in our sky, the Big Dipper.  It may be enjoyable to memorize the mysterious-sounding names of each of the stars that form the Seven Rishis, and their sister-wife Alcor / Arundati, and to identify each as you look at the sky. 

The soul does go on

On this day, September 8, in 1993, a good friend of mine passed from this life during a heartbreaking US Army accident.

He was an extraordinary person, with a warm sense of humor that was uniquely his own and impossible to describe accurately -- impossible to pin down in words because it was a sense of humor that was animated by his inimitable personality.

About the uniqueness of such a friend, and the way he enlarges those souls with whom his soul interacts, C.S. Lewis once famously wrote:

Lamb says somewhere that if, of three friends (A, B, and C), A should die, then B loses not only A but "A's part in C," while C loses not only A but "A's part in B."  In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out.  By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets.  Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald's reaction to a specifically Caroline joke.  Far from having more of Ronald, having him "to myself" now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald.  Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves.  Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend.  They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, "Here comes one who will augment our loves."  For in this love "to divide is not to take away."  Of course the scarcity of kindred souls -- not to mention practical considerations about the size of rooms and the audiblilty of  voices -- set limits to the enlargement of the circle; but within those limits we possess each friend not less but more as the number of those with whom we share him increases.  The Four Loves (1960), 61-62.

Not only does our friend live on in eternal agelessness in the memories of the many whose lives he touched, but I believe (as did Lewis) that there are also good and cogent reasons for believing that the human soul does survive the death of the body. 

Some previous posts which have presented some of that evidence or touched on that subject include:

• "A heartfelt portrait of John Blofeld from Daniel P. Reid"

• "Chris Carter's Science and the Near-Death Experience"

• "The ideology of materialism"

• "One of the most famous NDEs ever caught on film"

and

•  "One of the most moving performances of all time"

Some would argue that the NDE evidence included in the blogs above cannot be counted as evidence that consciousness can exist beyond the death of the body or even during brain conditions so similar to actual brain death that they can be described as "death-like."  They argue that such reports are probably just flickers of electrons which create comforting images, often involving loved ones, that the mind forms into a dream-like recollection after it "wakes back up." 

As Chris Carter points out in the book cited in the second link above, this may be a valid objection to consider, but it is countered by the fact that the overwhelming preponderance of such experiences in which subjects reported seeing loved ones involve only loved ones who have already passed from this life.    

I have another close friend who is a doctor and who has worked in hospice and in palliative medicine for some years and who has been present on numerous occasions when a person passes from this life, and many such occasions in which there is a "deathbed vision" in which loved ones are seen before death.  He confirms from his own experience what Chris Carter reports in his book: the witness who sees these presences (unseen by others in the room) invariably describes those who have already gone before, and not who are still living.  Chris Carter reports more than one instance when someone reports seeing a loved one whom they did not know had passed away.  

Unlike near-death experiences (in which the vision usually takes place when the brain of the subject is unconscious), these deathbed visions are reported by completely conscious and often completely coherent subjects, which undercuts the objection described above, as does the fact that they almost always involve visions only of those who have previously passed away.

This is powerful evidence for the conclusion that such reports go beyond mere "wishful thinking" or "comforting delusions of the brain."  

Further, Chris Carter notes that -- in thousands of reports from around the globe by survivors who described a near-death experience -- an extremely high percentage of those who had a powerful near-death experience report that it changed their entire view on the nature of death, that they no longer feared it, and that they were profoundly convinced that the soul survives the death of the body.

This conviction is remarkably similar to that which Oxford scholar and philosopher Dr. Jeremy Naydler reports as forming the most essential result of the mystical experiences described by ancient "Eleusinian and later Hellenistic mysteries, the dialogues of Plato, and certain of the Hermetic dialogues," and which have a parallel in the Pyramid Texts of the Pyramid of Unas (the oldest existing original text in the world that we know of).  In his outstanding book, Shamanic Wisdom in the Pyramid Texts: The Mystical Tradition of Ancient Egypt, Dr. Naydler reports that all these texts describe common experiences, such as "cosmic ascent, or ecstatic flight away from the earth and away from the physical realm," and, most significantly, that afterwords those who have had such an experience have a deep awareness "that he or she is a spiritual being as well as a merely physical being.  This direct experience of one's spiritual and immortal core is often expressed in the language of rebirth" (120-121).

All of this does not undo the terrible loss of a life tragically cut short at the age of 25, or the immeasurable way in which (as Lewis describes above) his departure diminishes the circle of friends and family who were once illuminated by his presence in a way that no other can replace.  

But, for those who dread the arrival each year of the awful date that they can never forget, it may give some solace to know that it was not the ultimate end but that there is real evidence that the soul does indeed go on.

Rest in peace, brother -- we miss you.