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HOLY BIBLE Scofield Reference Page 1351 REVELATION C 21 V 1And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.2 And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men,and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. 4 And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. 5 And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful. 6 And he said unto me, It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely. 7 He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son.
I THAT AM THE HE AS IN SHE THAT IS THEE
FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS A QUEST FOR THE BEGINNING AND THE END Graham Hancock 1995 Chapter 32 Speaking to the Unborn Page 285 "It is understandable that a huge range of myths from all over the ancient world should describe geological catastrophes in graphic detail. Mankind survived the horror of the last Ice Age, and the most plausible source for our enduring traditions of flooding and freezing, massive volcanism and devastating earthquakes is in the tumultuous upheavals unleashed during the great meltdown of 15,000 to 8000 BC. The final retreat of the ice sheets, and the consequent 300-400 foot rise in global sea levels, took place only a few thousand years before the beginning of the historical period. It is therefore not surprising that all our early civilizations should have retained vivid memories of the vast cataclysms that had terrified their forefathers. A message in the bottle of time" 'Of all the other stupendous inventions,' Galileo once remarked, what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very distant either in time or place, speaking with those who are in the Indies, speaking to those who are not yet born, nor shall be this thousand or ten thousand years? And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangements of two dozen little signs on paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of men.3 If the 'precessional message' identified by scholars like Santillana, von Dechend and Jane Sellers is indeed a deliberate attempt at communication by some lost civilization of antiquity, how come it wasn't just written down and left for us to find? Wouldn't that have been easier than encoding it in myths? Perhaps. "What one would look for, therefore, would be a universal language, the kind of language that would be comprehensible to any technologically advanced society in any epoch, even a thousand or ten thousand years into the future. Such languages are few and far between, but mathematics is one of them" "WRITTEN IN THE ETERNAL LANGUAGE OF MATHEMATICS"
THE LIGHT IS RISING NOW RISING IS THE LIGHT
MATHEMATICS A LANGUAGE OF LETTERS AND NUMBERS
MATHEMATICS A LANGUAGE OF LETTER AND NUMBER
JUST SIX NUMBERS Martin Rees 1 OUR COSMIC HABITAT I PLANETS STARS AND LIFE Page 24 "A proton is 1,836 times heavier than an electron, and the number 1,836 would have the same connotations to any 'intelligence' "
"A proton is 1,836 times heavier than an electron, and the number 1,836 would have the same connotations to any 'intelligence'"
HAMLET'S MILL AN ESSAY INVESTIGATING THE ORIGINS OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE AND ITS TRANSMISSION THROUGH MYTH Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend 1969
Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend 1969 Intoduction Page 1 (number omitted) " The unbreakable fetters which bound down the Great Wolf Fenrir had been cunningly forged by Loki from these: the footfall of a cat, the roots of a rock, the beard of a woman, the breath of a fish, the spittle of a bird. The Edda Toute vue des choses qui n'est pas estrange est fausse. VALERY
The figure of Hamlet as a favorable starting point came by chance. Many other avenues offered themselves, rich in strange symbols and beckoning with great images, but the choice went to Hamlet because he led the mind on a truly inductive quest through a familiar landscape-and one which has the merit of its literary setting. Here is a character deeply present to our awareness, in whom ambiguities and uncertainties, tormented self-questioning and dispassionate insight give a presentiment of the modern mind. His personal drama was that he had to be a hero, but still try to avoid the role Destiny assigned him. His lucid intellect remained above the conflict of motives-in other words, his was and is a truly con/ Page 2 / temporary consciousness. And yet this character whom the poet made one of us, the first unhappy intellectual, concealed a past as a legendary being, his features predetermined, preshaped by longstanding myth. There was a numinous aura around him, and many clues led up to him. But it was a surprise to find behind the mask an ancient and all-embracing cosmic power-the original master of the dreamed-of first age of the world. This essay will follow the figure farther and farther afield, from the Northland to Rome, from there to Finland, Iran, and India; he will appear again unmistakably in Polynesian legend. Many other Dominations and Powers will materialize to frame him within the proper order. Amlodhi was identified, in the crude and vivid imagery of the Norse, by the ownership of a fabled mill which, in his own time, ground out peace and plenty. Later, in decaying times, it ground out salt; and now finally, having landed at the bottom of the sea, it is grinding rock and sand, creating a vast whirlpool, the Maelstrom (i.e., the grinding stream, from the verb mala, "to grind"), which is supposed to be a way to the land of the dead. This imagery stands, as the evidence develops, for an astronomical process, the secular shifting of the sun through the signs of the zodiac which determines world-ages, each numbering thousands of years. Each age brings a World Era, a Twilight of the Gods. Great structures collapse; pillars topple which supported the great fabric; floods and cataclysms herald the shaping of a new world. 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, dictated 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. The ancient Pythagoreans, in their conventional language, called the two Bears the Hands of Rhea (the Lady of Turning Heaven), and called the planets the Hounds of Persephone, Queen of the Underworld. Far away to the south, the mysterious ship Argo with its Pilot star held the depths of the past; and the Galaxy was the Bridge out of Time. These notions appear to have been common doctrine in the age before history-all over the belt of high civilizations around our globe. They also seem to have been born of the great intellectual and technological revolution of the late Neolithic period. The intensity and richness, the coincidence of details, in this cumulative thought have led to the conclusion that it all had its origin in the Near East. It is evident that this indicates a diffusion of ideas to an extent hardly countenanced by current anthropology. But this science, although it has dug up a marvelous wealth of details, has been led by its modern evolutionary and psychological bent to forget about the main source of myth, which was astronomy -the Royal Science. This obliviousness is itself a recent turn of events-barely a century old. Today expert philologists tell us that Saturn and Jupiter are names of vague deities, subterranean or atmospheric, superimposed on the planets at a "late" period; they neatly sort out folk origins and "late" derivations, all unaware that planetary periods, sidereal and synodic, were known and rehearsed / Page 4 / in numerous ways by celebrations already traditional in archaic times. If a scholar has never known those periods even from elementary science, he is not in the best position to recognize them when they come up in his material. Ancient historians would have been aghast had they been told that obvious things were to become unnoticeable. Aristotle was proud to state it as known that the gods were originally stars, even if popular fantasy had later obscured this truth. Little as he believed in progress, he felt this much had been secured for the future. He could not guess that W. D. Ross, his modern editor, would condescendingly annotate: "This is historically untrue." Yet we know that Saturday and Sabbath had to do with Saturn, just as Wednesday and Mercredi had to do with Mercury. Such names are as old as time; as old, certainly, as the planetary heptagram of the Harranians. They go back far before Professor Ross' Greek philology. The inquiries of great and meticulous scholars such as Ideler, Lepsius, Chwolson, BoIl and, to go farther back, of Athanasius Kircher and Petavius, had they only been read carefully, and noted, would have taught several relevant lessons to the historians of culture, but interest shifted to other goals, as can be seen from current anthropology, which has built up its own idea of the "primitive" and what came after. One still reads in that most unscientific of records, the Bible, that God disposed all things by number, weight and measure; ancient Chinese texts say that "the calendar and the pitch pipes have such a close fit, that you could not slip a hair between them." People read it, and think nothing of it. Yet such hints might reveal a world of vast and firmly established complexity, infinitely different from ours. But the experts now are benighted by the current folk fantasy, which is the belief that they are beyond all this-critics without nonsense and extremely wise. In 1959 I wrote: But they are tantalizing fragments of a lost whole. They make one think of those "mist landscapes" of which Chinese painters are masters, which show here a rock, here a gable, there the tip of a tree, and leave the rest to imagination. Even when the code shall have yielded, when the techniques shall be known, we cannot expect to gauge the thought of those remote ancestors of ours, wrapped as it is in its symbols. Their words are no more heard again Through lapse of many ages. . . We think we have now broken part of that code. The thought behind these constructions of the high and far-off times is also lofty, even if its forms are strange. The theory about "how the world began" seems to involve the breaking asunder of a harmony, a kind of cosmogonic "original sin" whereby the circle of the ecliptic (with the zodiac) was tilted up at an angle with respect to the equator, and the cycles of change came into being. This is not to suggest that this archaic cosmology will show any great physical discoveries, although it required prodigious feats of concentration and computing. What it did was to mark out the unity of the universe, and of man's mind, reaching out to its farthest limits. Truly, man is doing the same today. Einstein said: "What is inconceivable about the universe, is that it should be at all conceivable." Man is not giving up. When he discovers remote galaxies by the million, and then those quasi-stellar radio sources billions of light-years away which confound his speculation, he is happy that he can reach out to those depths. But he pays a terrible price for his achievement. The science of astrophysics reaches out on a grander and grander scale without losing its footing. Man as man cannot do this. In the depths of space he loses himself and all notion of his significance. He is unable to fit himself into the concepts of today's astrophysics short of schizophrenia. Modern man is facing the nonconceivable. Archaic man, however, kept a firm grip on the conceivable by framing within his cosmos / Page 6 / an order of time and an eschatology that made sense to him and reserved a fate for his soul. Yet it was a prodigiously vast theory, with no concessions to merely human sentiments. It, too, dilated the mind beyond the bearable, although without destroying man's role in the cosmos. It was a ruthless metaphysics. Not a forgiving universe, not a world of mercy. That surely not. Inexorable as the stars in their courses, miserationis parcissimae, the Romans used to say. Yet it was a world somehow not unmindful of man, one in which there was an accepted place for everything, rightfully and not only statistically, where no sparrow could fall unnoted, and where even what was rejected through its own error would not go down to eternal perdition; for the order of Number and Time was a total order preserving all, of which all were members, gods and men and animals, trees and crystals and even absurd errant stars, all subject to law and measure. This is what Plato knew, who could still speak the language of archaic myth. He made myth consonant with his thought, as he built the first modern philosophy. We have trusted his clues as landmarks even on occasions when he professes to speak "not quite seriously." He gave us a first rule of thumb; he knew what he was talking about. Behind Plato there stands the imposing body of doctrine attributed to Pythagoras, some of its formulation uncouth, but rich with the prodigious content of early mathematics, pregnant with a science and a metaphysics that were to flower in Plato's time. From it come such words as "theorem," "theory," and "philosophy." This in its turn rests on what might be called a proto-Pythagorean phase, spread all over the East but with a focus in Susa. And then there was something else again, the stark numerical computing of Babylon. From it all came that strange principle: "Things are numbers." Once having grasped a thread going back in time, then the test of later doctrines with their own historical developments lies in their congruence with tradition preserved intact even if half understood. For there are seeds which propagate themselves along the jetstream of time. Page 7 And universality is in itself a test when coupled with a firm design. When something found, say, in China turns up also in Babyionian astrological texts, then it must be assumed to be relevant, for it reveals a complex of uncommon images which nobody could claim had risen independently by spontaneous generation. Take the origin of music. Orpheus and his harrowing death may be a poetic creation born in more than one instance in diverse places. But when characters who do not play the lyre but blow pipes get themselves flayed alive for various absurd reasons, and their identical end is rehearsed on several continents, then we feel we have got hold of something, for such stories cannot be linked by internal sequence. And when the Pied Piper turns up both in the medieval German myth of Hamelin and in Mexico long before Columbus, and is linked in both places with certain attributes like the color red, it can hardly be a coincidence. Generally, there is little that finds its way into music by chance. Again, when one finds numbers like 108, or 9 x 13, reappearing under several multiples in the Vedas, in the temples of Angkor, in Babylon, in Heraclitus' dark utterances, and also in the Norse Valhalla, it is not accident. There is one way of checking signals thus scattered in early data, in lore, fables and sacred texts. What we have used for sources may seem strange and disparate, but the sifting was considered, and it had its reasons. Those reasons will be given later in the chapter on method. I might call it comparative morphology. The reservoir of myth and fable is great, but there are morphological "markers" for what is not mere storytelling of the kind that comes naturally. There is also wonderfully preserved archaic material in "secondary" primitives, like American Indians and West Africans. Then there are courtly stories and annals of dynasties which look like novels: the Feng Shen Yen I, the Japanese Nihongi, the Hawaiian Kumulipo. These are not merely fantasy-ridden fables. In hard and perilous ages, what information should a well-born man entrust to his eldest son? Lines of descent surely, but what else? The memory of an ancient nobility is the means of preserving the / Page 8 / arcana imperii, the arcana legis and the arcana mundi, just as it was in ancient Rome. This is the wisdom of a ruling class. The Polynesian chants taught in the severely restricted Whare-wananga were mostly astronomy. That is what a liberal education meant then. Sacred texts are another great source. In our age of print one is tempted to dismiss these as religious excursions into homiletics, but originally they represented a great concentration of attention on material which had been distilled for relevancy through a long period of time and which was considered worthy of being committed to memory generation after generation. The tradition of Celtic Druidism was delivered not only in songs, but also in tree-lore which was much like a code. And in the East, out of complicated games based on astronomy, there developed a kind of shorthand which became the alphabet. As we follow the clues-stars, numbers, colors, plants, forms, verse, music, structres-a huge framework of connections is revealed at many levels. One is inside an echoing manifold where everything responds and everything has a place and a time assigned to it. This is a true edifice, something like a mathematical matrix, a World-Image that fits the many levels, and all of it kept in order by strict measure. It is measure that provides the countercheck, for there is much that can be identified and redisposed from rules like the old Chinese saying about the pitch pipes and the calendar. When we speak of measures, it is always some form of Time that provides them, starting from two basic ones, the solar year and the octave, and going down from there in many periods and intervals, to actual weights and sizes. What modern man attempted in the merely conventional metric system has archaic precedents of great complexity. Down the centuries there comes an echo of Al-Biruni's wondering a thousand years ago, when that prince of scientists discovered that the Indians, by then miserable astronomers, calculated aspects and events by means of stars-and were not able to show him anyone star that he asked for. Stars had become items for them, as they were to become again for Leverrier and Adams, who never troubled to look at Neptune in their life although they had computed and discovered it in 1847. The Mayas and the Aztecs in their / Page 9 / unending calculations seem to have had similar attitudes. The connections were what counted. Ultimately so it was in the archaic universe, where all things were signs and signatures of each other, inscribed in the hologram, to be divined subtly. And Number dominated them all (appendix # I ). This ancient world moves a little closer if one recalls two great transitional figures who were simultaneously archaic and modern in their habits of thought. The first is Johannes Kepler, who was of the old order in his unremitting calculations and his passionate devotion to the dream of rediscovering the "Harmony of the Spheres." But he was a man of his own time, and also of ours, when this dream began to prefigure the polyphony that led up to Bach. In somewhat the same way, our strictly scientific world view has its counterpart in what John Hollander, the historian of music, has described as "The Untuning of the Sky." The second transitional figure is no less a man than Sir Isaac Newton, the very inceptor of the rigorously scientific view. There is no real paradox in mentioning Newton in this connection. John Maynard Keynes, who knew Newton as well as many of our time, said of him: Newton was not the first of the Age of Reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual world rather less than 10,000 years ago. . . Why do I call him a magician? Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher's treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of elements (and that is what gives the false suggestion of his being an experimental natural philosopher), but also partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original cryptic revelation in Babylonia. He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty-just as he himself wrapt the discovery of the calculus in a cryptogram when he communicated with Leibniz. By pure thought, by concentration of mind, the riddle, he believed, would be revealed to the initiate.1 Page 10 Lord Keynes' appraisal, written ca. 1942, remains both unconventional and profound. He knew, we all know, that Newton failed. Newton was led astray by his dour sectarian preconceptions. But his undertaking was truly in the archaic spirit, as it begins to appear now after two centuries of scholarly search into many cultures of which he could have had no idea. To the few clues he found with rigorous method, a vast number have been added. Still, the wonder remains, the same that was expressed by his great predecessor Galileo: But of all other stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind must have been his who conccived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any othcr person, though very far distant either in time or place, speaking with those who are in the In dies, speaking to those who are not yet born, nor shall be this thousand or ten thousand years) And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangement of two dozcn little signs upon paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of man. 'Way back in the 6th century A.D., Gregoire de Tours was writing: "The mind has lost its cutting edge, we hardly understand the Ancicnts." So much more today, despite our wallowing in mathematics for the million and in sophisticated technology. Page 2 Note *. The indulgence of specialists is asked for the form of certain transliterations throughout the text; for example, Amlodhi instead of Amlodi, Grotte instead of Grotti, etc. (Ed.) Page 9 Note 1 1 "Newton the Man," in The Royal Society. Newton Tercentenary Celebrations (1947), p. 29.
HAMLET'S MILL AN ESSAY INVESTIGATING THE ORIGINS OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE AND ITS TRANSMISSION THROUGH MYTH Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend 1969
Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend 1969 Page 162 "Finally, there is one remarkable and disturbing coincidence from the same direction. It is known that in the final battle of the gods, the massed legions on the side of "order" are the dead warriors, the "Einherier" who once fell in combat on earth and who have been transferred by the Valkyries to reside with Odin in Valhalla-a theme much rehearsed in heroic poetry. On the last day, they issue forth to battle in martial array. Says the Grimnismal (23): "Five hundred gates and forty more-are in the mighty building of Walhalla-eight hundred 'Einherier' come out of each one gate-on the time they go out on defence against the Wolf."
HAMLET'S MILL AN ESSAY INVESTIGATING THE ORIGINS OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE AND ITS TRANSMISSION THROUGH MYTH Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend 1969 Amlodhi the Titan and His Spinning Top
Chapter xi
Tops of different sorts, and jointed dolls, and fair golden apples from the clear-voiced Hesperides . . . Orpheus the Thracian
Though I am not by nature rash or splenetic Yet there is in me something dangerous Which let thy wisdom fear. . . Hamlet, Act V Page 137 (number omitted)
A REASONABLE CASE has been made for the extreme antiquity and continuity of certain traditions concerning the heavens. Even if Amlodhi's Quern, the Grotte and the Sampo as individual myths cannot be traced back beyond the Middle Ages, they are derived in different ways from that great and durable patrimony of astronomical tradition, the Middle East.
Now it is time to locate the origin of the image of the Mill, and further, what its alleged breakup and the coming into being of the Whirlpool can possibly mean.
The starting place is Greece. Cleomedes (c. A.D. 150), speaking of the northern latitudes, states (1.7): "The heavens there turn around in the way a millstone does." Al-Farghani in the East takes up the same idea, and his colleagues will supply the details. They call the star Kochab, beta Ursae Minoris, "mill peg," and the stars of the Little Bear, surrounding the North Pole, and Fas al-rahha (the hole of the mill peg) "because they represent, as it were, a hole (the axle ring) in which the mill axle turns, since the axle of the equator (the polar axis) is to be found in this region, fairly close / Page 138 / to the star Al-jadi (he-goat, Polaris: alpha Ursae Minoris)." These are the words of the Arab cosmographer al-Kazvini. Ideler comments: 1 1 Ludwig Ideler: Untersuchung uber den Ursprung und die Bedeutung der Sternnamen (1809), pp. 4, 17.]:
Koth, the common name of the Pole, means really the axle of the movable upper millstone which goes through the lower fixed one, what is called the "mill-iron." On this ambiguity is founded the analogy mentioned by Kazvini. The sphere of heaven was imagined as a turning millstone, and the North Pole as the axle bearing in which the mill-iron turns. . . Fas is explained by Giggeo . . . as rima, scissura etc. . . . The Fas al-rahha of our text, which stands also in the Dresden globe beside the North Pole of the Equator, should therefore represent the axle bearing.
Farther to the east, in India, the Bhagavata Purana tells us how the virtuous prince Dhruva was appointed as Pole star [n2 F. Normann, Mythen der Sterne (1925), p. 108. See now The Srimad-Bhagavatam of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa 5.3 (trans. J. N. Sanyal, vol. 2, pp. 248f.): "Just as oxen, fastened to a post fixed in the center of a threshing floor, leaving their own station, go round at shorter, middle or longer distances, similarly fixed on the inside and outside of the circle of time, stars and planets exist, supporting themselves on Dhruva; and propelled by the wind, they range in every direction till the end of a kalpa."]. The particular "virtue" of the prince, which alarmed even the gods, is worth mentioning: he stood on one leg for more than a month, motionless. This is what was announced to him: "The stars, and their figures, and also the planets shall turn around you." Accordingly, Dhruva ascends to the highest pole, "to the exalted seat of Vishnu, round which the starry spheres forever wander, like the upright axle of the corn mill circled without end by the labouring oxen."
The simile of the oxen driven around is not alien to the West. It has remained in our languages thanks to the Latin Septemtriones, the seven threshing oxen of Ursa Major: "that we are used to calling the Seven Oxen," according to Cicero's translation of Aratus.
On a more familiar level there is a remark by Trimalchio in Petronius (Satyricon 39): "Thus the orb of heaven turns around like a millstone, and ever does something bad."
It was not a foreign idea / Page 139 / to the ancients that the mills of the gods grind slowly, and that the result is usually pain.
Thus the image travels far and wide by many channels, reaches the North by way of Celtic-Scandinavian transmission and appears in Snaebjorn's account of his voyage of discovery in the Arctic. There should be added to those enigmatic lines of his what is known now of the background in Scandinavian lore. The nine grim goddesses who "once ground Amlodhi's meal," working now that "host-cruel skerry quern" beyond the edge of the world, are in their turn only the agents of a shadowy controlling power called Mundilfoeri, literally "the mover of the handle" (appendix 15).
The word mundil, says Rydberg, "is never used in the old Norse literature about any other object than the sweep or handle with which the movable millstone is turned," [n3 V. Rydberg, Teutonic Mythology (1907), pp. 581ff. Webster's New International Dictionary, 2d ed., lists "mundle": A stick for stirring. Obsolete except for dialectical use. (We are indebted for this reference to Mrs. Jean Whitnack.)] and he is backed by Vigfusson's dictionary which says that "mundil" in "Mundilfoeri" clearly refers to "the veering round or revolution of the heavens."
The case is then established. But there is an ambiguity here which discloses further depths in the idea. "'Moendull' comes from Sanskrit 'Manthati,'" says Rydberg, "it means to swing, twist, bore (from the root manth-, whence later Latin mentula), which occurs in several passages in the Rigveda. Its direct application always refers to the production of fire by friction." [n4 To term it "friction" is a nice way to shut out dangerous terms: actually, the Sanskrit radical math, manth means drilling in the strict sense, i.e., it involves alternate motion (see H. Grassmann, Worterbuch zum Rig-Veda [1955], pp. 976f.) as we have it in the famous Amritamanthana, the Churning of the Milky Ocean, and this very quality of India's churn and fire drill has had far-reaching influence on cosmological conceptions.].
So it is, indeed. But Rydberg, after establishing the etymology, has not followed up the meaning. The locomotive engineers and airplane pilots of today who coined the term "joy stick" might have guessed. For the Sanskrit Pramantha is the male fire stick, or churn stick, which serves to make fire. And Pramantha has turned into the Greeks' Prometheus, a personage to whom it will be necessary / Page 140 / to come back frequently.
What seems to be deep confusion is in reality only two differing aspects of the same complex idea. The lighting of fire at the pole is part of that idea. But the reader is not the first to be perplexed by an imagery which allows for the presence of planets at the pole, even if it were only for the purpose of kindling the "fire" which was to last for a new age of the world, that world-age which the particular "Pramantha" was destined to rule. The handle, "moendull," and the fire drill are complementary: both have had great developments which superimpose on each other and on a multitude of myths. The obstacles which imagination has to overcome are the associations which are connected spontaneously with "fire," that is, the real burning fire in chimney or hearth, and the kind of "fire" associated with the mentioned "joy stick." Both are irrelevant as far as cosmological terminology is concerned, but they lent the linguistic vehicle which was used to carry the ideas of astronomy and alchemy.
It should be stated right now that "fire" is actually a great circle reaching from the North Pole of the celestial sphere to its South Pole, whence such strange utterances as Rigveda 5.13.6: "Agni! How the felly [n5 The rim of the wheel in which the spokes fit.] the spokes, thus you surround the gods." (Agni is the so-called "fire-god," or the personified fire.) The Atharva Veda says, moreover, that the fire sticks belong to the skambha [n6 10.8.20 Cf. RV 10.24.4 and 10.184.3 with Geldner's remark that in this stanza of the Atharva Veda the fire sticks are treated as a great secret and attributed to skambha.], the world's axis, the very skambha from which the Sampo has been derived (see above, p. 111) .
The identity of the Mill, in its many versions, with heaven is thus universally understood and accepted. But hitherto nobody seems to have wondered about the second part of the story, which also occurs in the many versions. How and why does it always happen that this Mill, the peg of which is Polaris, had to be wrecked or unhinged? Once the archaic mind had grasped the forever-enduring rotation, what caused it to think that the axle jumps out of the hole? What memory of catastrophic events has created this
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story of destruction? Why should Vainamoinen (and he is not the only one) state explicitly that another Mill has to be constructed (see p. 110)? Why had Dhruva to be appointed to play Pole star--and for a given cycle? [n7 The Vishnu Purana 1.12 (d. 2.8, p. 187 of the Wilson translation) betrays the Indian predilection for huge and unrealistic numbers and periods: Dhruva is meant to last one kalpa--4,320,000 years.] For the story refers in no way to the creation of the world. One might even ask, as the alternative solution to Rydberg's challenging "limb-grist," whether Bergelmer was not heaved in the same manner "upon the millstone," that is, appointed to play Pole star (see above, p. 92).
The simple answer lies in the facts of the case. The Pole star does get out of place, and every few thousand years another star has to be chosen which best approximates that position. It is well known that the Great Pyramid, so carefully sighted, is not oriented at our Pole Star but at alpha Draconis, which occupied the position at the pole 5,000 years ago. But, as has been mentioned above (Intermezzo, p. 66), it is the more difficult for moderns to imagine that in those far-off ages men could keep track of such imperceptible shifting, as many of them are not aware of the mere facts. As Dr. Alexander Pogo, the Palomar astronomer, has written in frustration: "I give up quoting further examples of the obstinate belief of our Egyptologists in the immobility of the heavenly pole." [n8 "Zum Problem der Identifikation der nordlichen Sternbilder der alten Aegypter," ISIS 16 (1931), p. 103.]. Yet there is quite a collection of myths to show that once upon a time it was realized that the sphere of fixed stars is not meant to circle around the same peg forever and ever. Several myths tell how Polaris is shot down, or removed in some other way. That is reserved for an appendix (15).
Most of these myths, however, come under a misleading name. They have been understood to deal with the end of the world. But there are extremely few "eschatological" myths entitled to this label. For example, the Twilight of the Gods is understood as the world's end, yet there is unambiguous testimony to the contrary from the Voluspa and other chapters of the Edda. What actually comes to an and is a world, in the sense of a world-age. The catastrophe
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cleans out the past, which is replaced by "a new heaven and a new earth," and ruled by a "new" Pole star. The biblical flood was also the end of a world, and Noah's adventure is rehearsed in many traditions and many forms all over the planet. The Greeks knew of three successive destructions.
Coherence will be re-established in this welter of traditions if it is realized that what is referred to is that grandest of heavenly phenomena, the Precession of the Equinoxes. The phenomenon has been dealt with in the Intermezzo already, but it is essential enough to be taken up more than once. Being so slow, and in a man's age so imperceptible, it has been taken for granted [n9 I.e., during the last hundred years, at least. In former times, when the Humanities had not yet been "infected" by the biological scheme of evolution, the scholars showed better confidence in the capacities of the creators of high civilization.] that no one; could have detected the Precession prior to Hipparchus' alleged discovery of the phenomenon, in 127 B.C. Hipparchus discovered and proved that the Precession turns around the pole of the ecliptic [n10 See Ptolemy, Syntaxis 7.3 (Manitius trans., vol. 2, pp. 16f.). The magnitude calculated by Hipparchus and accepted by Ptolemy was I degree in 100 years.]. It is said that it must have taken an almost modern instrumentation to detect the motion over the brief space of a century, and this is certainly correct. Nobody claims, however, that the discovery, as deduced from observations during one century. And the shift of 1 degree in 72 years, piling up over centuries, will produce appreciable shifts in certain crucial positions, if the observers have enough intentness of mind and know how to keep records. The technique of observation was relatively simple. It was based on the heliacal rising of stars, which remained a fundamental feature in Babylonian astronomy. The telescope of early times, as Sir Norman Lockyer has said, was the line of the horizon. If you came to realize that a certain star, which was wont to rise just before the equinoctial sun, was no longer visible on that day, it was clear that the gears of heaven had shifted. If that star was the last one of a given zodiac figure, it meant that the equinox was moving into a new figure. For is there any doubt--as was already said--that far antiquity was already aware of the shifting of the Pole star.
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But was it capable of connecting both motions? This is where modern specialists, operating each from his own special angle of vision, have long hesitated.
What is the Precession? Very few have troubled to learn about it, yet to any man of our time, who knows the earth to be spinning around on her axis, the example of a spinning top with its inclined axis slowly shifting around in a circle makes the knowledge intuitive. Anyone who has played with a gyroscope will know all about the Precession. As soon as its axis is deflected from the vertical, the gyroscope will start that slow and obstinate movement around the compass which changes its direction while keeping its inclination constant. The earth, a spinning top with an axis inclined with respect to the sun's pull, behaves like a giant gyroscope, which performs a full revolution in 25,920 years.
Antiquity was not likely to grasp this, since dynamics came into this world only with Galileo. Hipparchus and Ptolemy could not understand the mechanism. They could only describe the motion. We must try to see through their eyes, and think only in terms of kinematics. Over a period of a thousand years ancient observers could discern in the secular shifting of the Great Gyroscope (it is here in fact that the word "secular" now used in mechanics originates) a motion through about ten degrees. Once attuned to the secular motion, they were able to detect, in the daily whirring of heaven around the pole, in its yearly turning in the round of the seasons, in the excruciatingly slow motion of the pole over the years, a point which seemed intrinsically more stable than the pole itself. It was the pole of the ecliptic [n11 See A. Bouche-Leclerq, L'Astrologie Grecque (1899), p. 122: "On sait que le pole par excellence etait pour les Chaldeens le pole de l'ecliptique, lequel est dans la constellation du Dragon." Cf. also A. Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1653), vol. 2, pt. 2, p. 205: "Ponebant Aegyptii non Aequatorem, sed Zodiacum basis loco; ita ut centrum hemispherii utriusque non polum Mundi, sed polum Zodiaci referret."], often referred to as the Open Hole in Heaven because in that region there is no star to mark it. The symmetries of the machine took shape in their minds. And truly it was the time machine, as Plato understands it, the "moving image of eternity." The "mighty marching and the golden burning," cycle upon cycle, even down to shifts barely perceptible over the centuries, were the Generations of Time itself, the cyclical symbol of everlastingness:
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for, as Aristotle says, what is eternal is circular, and what is circular is eternal.
Yet this uniformly working time machine could be marked with important stations. The gyroscopic tilt causes continual shifting of our celestial equator, which cuts the inclined circle of the ecliptic along a regular succession of points, moving uniformly from east to west. Now the points where the two circles cross are the equinoctial points. Hence the sun, moving on the ecliptic through the year, meets the equator on a point which shifts steadily with the years along the ring of zodiacal signs. This is what is meant by the Precession of the Equinoxes. They "precede" because they go against the order of the signs as the sun establishes this in its yearly march. The vernal equinox--we called it the "fiducial point" previously--which was traditionally the opening of spring and the beginning of the year, will take place in one sign after another. This gives great meaning to the change of signs in which the equinoctial sun happens to rise.
Some additional words of guidance may be called for here, where "signs" are mentioned--those "in" which the sun rises. For roughly two thousand years official terminology has used only zodiacal "signs," each of which occupies 30 degrees of the 360 degrees of the whole circle. These signs have the names of the zodiacal constellations, but constellations and signs are not congruent, the equinoctial sign (= 0° - 30°) being called Aries regardless of the constellation that actually rises before the equinoctial sun. In our time, the constellation rising heliacally on March 21 is Pisces, but the "sign" preserves the name Aries, and will continue to do so when in the future Aquarius rules the vernal equinox. So much for sign versus constellation [n12 Here, we leave out of consideration the much discussed question of exactly when signs. of equal length were first introduced; allegedly it was very late (see below, p. 431, n. 1). The actual constellations differ widely in length--the huge Scorpion, e.g., covers many more degrees than 30, whereas the Ram is of modest dimensions. One would think that this lack of uniformity would have so hampered the ancient astronomers in making their calculations that they would have worked out a more convenient frame of coordinates in sheer self-defense.
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As concerns the second ambiguous expression, namely, the sun's rising "in" a constellation (or a sign)--this means that the sun rises together with this constellation, making it invisible. There are several reasons for assuming that a constellation (and a planet which happened to be there), "in" which the equinoctial sun rose, was termed to be "sacrificed," "bound to the sacrificial post," and the like; and this might explain eventually why Christ, who opened the world-age in which Pisces rose heliacally in the spring, was understood as the sacrificed lamb. When Pisces is the last constellation visible in the east before sunrise, the sun rises together, i.e., "in," the constellation following next, the Ram.
Since the beginning of history, the vernal equinox has moved through Taurus, Aries, and Pisces. This is all that historic experience has shown mankind: a section of about one-quarter of the whole main circle of the machine. That it would come back full circle was at best an inference. It might also, for all men knew, have been part of an oscillation, back and forth, and in fact there were two schools of thought about it, and the oscillation theory seems to have exercised a greater attraction upon the mythographers of old.
For us, the Copernican system has stripped the Precession of its awesomeness, making it a purely earthly affair, the wobbles of an average planet's individual course. But if, as it appeared once, it was the mysteriously ordained behavior of the heavenly sphere, or the cosmos as a whole, then who could escape astrological emotion? For the Precession took on an overpowering significance. It became the vast impenetrable pattern of fate itself, with one world-age succeeding another, as the invisible pointer of the equinox slid along the signs, each age bringing with it the rise and downfall of astral configurations and rulerships, with their earthly consequences. Tales had to be told for the people about how successions of rulerships arose from an origin, and about the actual creation of the world, but for those in the know the origin was only a point in the precessional circle, like the 0 = 24 of our dials. Our clocks today show two pointers only; but the tale-tellers of those bygone days, facing the immense and slow-moving machine of eternity, had to / Page 146 / keep track of seven planetary pointers beside the daily revolution of the fixed sphere and of its secular motion in the opposite direction. All these motions meant parts of time and fate.
That things are not as they used to be, that the world is obviously going from bad to worse, seems to have been an established idea through the ages. The unhinging of the Mill is caused by the shifting of the world axis. Motion is the medium by which the wrecking is brought about. The Mill is "transported," be it Grotte or Sampo. The Grotte Song says explicitly that the giantesses first ground forth enemy action whereby the Mill was carried, away and then, shortly afterwards, ground salt and wrecked the machine. It was the end of "Frodhi's peace"--the Golden Age. Even in Snaebjorn's famous lines, the grim goddesses "out at the edge of the world" are those "who ground Amlodhi's meal in ages past." They can hardly be doing it now, because the wrecked millstone is at the bottom of the sea, with its hole become the funnel of the whirlpool. So that Mill has been transferred to the waters, and it is now the sea itself which has become "Amlodhi's churn." The heavenly Mill has been readjusted, it goes on working in a new age. It churned once gold, then salt, and today sand and stones. But one cannot, expect the rough Norse mythography to follow it in these legends, which are centered upon storm and wreck, the end of that first age.
Even Hesiod is far from clear about the early struggles and cataclysms; it is enough that in his Works and Days he marks a succession of five ages. A more coherent picture can only be built out of the convergence of several traditions, and this shall be the task of further chapters. But right now, there is at least one age designated as the first, when the Mill ground out peace and plenty. It is the Golden Age, in Latin tradition, Saturnia regna, the reign, of Saturn; in Greek, Kronos. In this dim perplexing figure there is an extraordinary concordance throughout world myths. In India it as Yama; in the Old Persian Avesta it was Yima xsaeta [n13 See H. Collitz, "Konig Yima und Saturn," Festschrift Pavry (1933) pp. 86-108. See also A. Scherer, Gestirnnamen hei den indogermanischen Volkern (1953), p.87.], a name which became in New Persian Jamshyd; in Latin Saeturnus, then Saturn's.
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Saturn or Kronos in many names had been known as the Ruler of the Golden Age, of that time when men knew no war and bloody sacrifices, not the inequality of classes--Lord of Justice and Measures, as Enki since Sumerian days, the Yellow Emperor and legislator in China.
If one wants to find the traces of his sunken Mill in classical mythology, they are not lacking [n14 Although the Telchines are entitled to be investigated thoroughly, we can only mention them here: this strange family of "submarine magic spirits" and "demons of the depth of the sea"--they are followers of Poseidon in Rhodes--have invented the mill; i.e., their leader did so--Mylas, "the miller." Knowing beforehand, it was said, of the predestined flood which was to destroy Rhodes, these former inhabitants left for Lycia, Cyprus and Crete, the more so, as they also knew that Helios was going to take over the island after the flood. On the other hand, these envious creatures--they have the "evil eye," too-are accused of having ruined the whole vegetation of Rhodes by sprinkling it with Styx-water. As will come out later (see "Of Time and the Rivers," p. 200), the waters of Styx are not so easily to be had; that the Telchines, the "mill gods" (theoi mylantioi) had access to Styx proves beyond doubt that these earliest defoliators had turned, indeed, into citizens of the deep sea. See Griechische Mythologie, Preller-Robert (1964), vol. I, pp. 650ff.; M. Mayer, Giganten und Titanen in der antiken Sage und Kunst (1887), pp. 45, 98, 101; H. Usener, Gotternamen (1948), pp. I 98f.]. The oldest is to be found where one would not expect it, in the Great Magical Papyrus of Paris, which is dated about the first half of the fourth century A.D. [n15 K. Preisendanz, Papyri Graecae Magicae (1928), vol. I, p. 64.]. In its recipes is the "much demanded Oracle of Kronos, the so-called Little Mill":
Take two measures of sea salt and grind it with a handmill, repeating all the while the prayer that I give you, until the God appears. If you hear while praying the heavy tread of a man and the clanking of irons, this is the god that comes with his chains, carrying a sickle. Do not be afraid, for you are covered by the protection that I give you. Be wrapped in white linen such as the priests of Isis wear [here follow a number of magic rites]. The prayer to be said while grinding is as follows: I call upon thee, great and holy One, founder of the whole world we live in, who sufferest wrong at the hands of thy own son, thee whom Helios bound with iron chains, so that All should not come to confusion. Man-Woman, father of thunder and lightning, thou who rulest also those below the earth. [There follow more rites of protection, then the formula of dismissal]: Go, Lord of the World, First Father, return to your own place, so that the All remain well guarded. Be merciful, O Lord [n16 4.308ff., Preisendanz, vol. I, p. 173.].
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Sorcerers and conjurors are the most conservative, people on earth. Theirs is not to reason why; they call upon the Power in terms they no longer understand, but they have to give an exact list of the archaic attributes of the fallen god, and even grind out sea salt from the Little Mill, the model of the whirlpool that marked his downfall. What had once been science has become with them pure technology, bent on preservation. A. Barb once coined a simile--he had revealed religion in mind, however, not science; dealing with the relation between magic practices and religion, he pointed to Matt. xxiv.28, Luke xvii.37: "Wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together," and "Too many critical scholars have been ready to assume that the carcase is therefore a creation of the eagles. But eagles do not create; they disfigure, destroy and dispense what life has left, and we must not mistake the colourful display of decay for the blossoms and fruit of life." [n17 "Sr. Zacharias," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 11 (1948), p. 95. It has not escaped his attention, by the way, that it should be vultures.]. Poignant as this image is, namely, in establishing the proper consecutio temporum, it leaves out of consideration the preserving function of magic and superstition: where would the historian of culture be left without those "eagles"?
For all the titles and attributes here listed, there is justification in archaic myth. Right here, only one point is of importance. The Lord of the Mill is declared to be Saturn/Kronos, he whom his son Zeus dethroned by throwing him off his chariot and banished in "chains" to a blissful island, where he dwells in sleep, for being immortal he cannot die, but is thought to live a life-in-death, wrapped in funerary linen, until his time, say some, shall come to awaken again, and he will be reborn to us as a child.
HAMLET'S MILL AN ESSAY INVESTIGATING THE ORIGINS OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE AND ITS TRANSMISSION THROUGH MYTH Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend 1969
Chapter x
THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS
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THERE WAS ONCE, then, a Golden Age. Why, how, did it come to an end? This has been a deep concern of mankind over time, refracted in a hundred myths, explained in so many ways which always expressed sorrow, nostalgia, despondency. Why did man lose the Garden of Eden? The answer has always been, because of some original sin. But the idea that man alone was able to commit sin, that Adam and Eve are the guilty ones, is not very old. The authors of the Old Testament had developed a certain conceit. Christianity then had to come to rescue and restore cosmic proportions, by insisting that God alone could offer himself in atonement.
In archaic times, this had seemed to be self-evident. The gods alone could run or wreck the universe. It is there that we should search for the origin of evil. For evil remains a mystery. It is not in nature. The faultless and all-powerful machine of the heavens should have yielded only harmony and perfection, the reign of justice and innocence, rivers flowing with milk and honey. It did, but that time did not last. Why did history begin to happen? History is always terrible. Philosophers from Plato to Hegel have offered their own lofty answer: pure Being was confronted of a necessity with Non-Being, and the result was Becoming, which is an uninsurable business. This was substantially the original answer of archaic times, but because of the lack of abstractions, it had to be derived in terms of heavenly motions.
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Aristotle, the Master of Those Who Know, has cleared up this matter in a most important, yet little noted passage of Book Lambda of Metaphysics (I074b) where he talks about Kronos, Zeus, Aphrodite, etc.:
Our forefathers in the most remote ages [archaioi kai panpalaioi] have handed down to their posterity a tradition, in; the form [schema] of a myth, that these bodies are gods and that the divine encloses the whole of nature. The rest of the tradition has been added later in mythical form. . . ; they say that these gods are in the form of men or like some of the other animals. . . But if one were to separate the first point from these additions and take it alone--that they thought the first substances to be gods, one must regard this as an inspired utterance, and reflect that, while probably each art and each science has often been developed as far as possible and has again perished, these opinions, with others, have been preserved until the present like relics [leipsana] of the ancient treasure.
Aristotle, being a true Greek, cannot conceive of progress in our sense. Time proceeds for him in cycles of flowering and decay. But this absence of modern preconceptions had left his mind open to an ancient certainty. This certainty is what shines through the mist of ages and through a language dimly understood. It was attention to the events of heaven which shaped men's minds before recorded history; but since there was as yet no writing, the thoughts have receded, as astrophysicists would say, over the "event horizon." They can survive only through fragments of tale and myth because these made up the only technical language of those times.
Yet an enormous intellectual achievement is presupposed in this organization of heaven, in naming the constellations and in tracing the paths of the planets. Lofty and intricate theories grew to account for the motions of the cosmos. One would wonder about this obsessive concern with the stars and their motion, were it not the case that those early thinkers thought they had located the gods which rule the universe and with it also the destiny of the soul down here and after death.
In modern language, they had found the essential invariants where Being is. In paying respect to those forefathers, Aristotle shows himself clearly aware that his philosophical quest started with them.
One should pay attention to the cosmological information contained in ancient myth, information of chaos, struggle and violence.
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They are not mere projections of a troubled consciousness: They are attempts to portray the forces which seem to have taken part in the shaping of the cosmos. Monsters, Titans, giants locked in battle with the gods and trying to scale Olympus are functions and components of the order that is finally established.
A distinction is immediately clear. The fixed stars are the essence of Being, their assembly stands for the hidden counsels and the unspoken laws that rule the Whole. The planets, seen as gods, represent the Forces and the Will: all the forces there are, each of them seen as one aspect of heavenly power, each of them one aspect of the ruthless necessity and precision expressed by heaven. One might also say that while the fixed stars represent the kingly power, silent and unmoving, the planets are the executive power.
Are they in total harmony? This is the dream that the contemplative mind has expressed again and again, that Kepler tried to fix by writing down the notes of his "Harmony of the Spheres," and that was consecrated in the "turning over" of the sky. This is the faith expressed by ancient thinkers in a Great Year, in which all the motions brought back all the planets to the same original configuration. But the computations created doubt very early and with it anxiety. Only rarely is there an explicit technical statement of those views. Here is one from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Osiris speaking:
"Hail, Thot! What is it that hath happened to the divine children of Nut? They have done battle, they have upheld strife, they have made slaughter, they have caused trouble: in truth, in all their doing the mighty have worked against the weak. Grant, O might of Thot, that that which the God Atum hath decreed (may be accomplished)! And thou regardest not evil nor art thou provoked to anger when they bring their years to confusion and throng in and push to disturb their months; for in all that they have done unto thee, they have worked iniquity in secret!" [n1 Chapter 175, 1-8, W. Budge trans. The italics are ours.].
Thot is the god of science and wisdom; as for Atum, he precedes, so to speak, the divine hierarchy.
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Described only in metaphysical terms, he is the mysterious entity from which the All sprang: his name might be Beginning-and-End. He is thus the Presence and the secret Counsel whom one feels tempted to equate with the starry sky itself. His decree must be of immutable perfection. But here it appears that there are forces which have worked iniquity in secret. They appear everywhere, these forces, and regularly they are denounced as "overbearing," or "iniquitous," or both. But these "forces" are not iniquitous right from the beginning: they turn out to be, they become overbearing in the course of time. Time alone turns the Titans, who once ruled the Golden Age, into "workers of iniquity" (compare (appendix 12).
The idea of measure stated or implied will show the basic crime of these "sinners": it is the overreaching, overstepping of the ordained degree, and this is meant literally [n2 It is only the careless manner in which we usually deal with precise terms that blocks the understanding: e.g., Greek moira, also written moros, is translated as "fate," "destiny," sometimes as "doom"; moira is one degree of the 360° of the circle; when we keep this in mind we understand better such lines as Od. I.34-35, where Aegisthus is accused twice of having done deeds "hyper moron," beyond degree. How could one overstep one's destiny? How could one be overmeasured against fate? This would invalidate the very concept of "destiny."]. Says the Mahabharata about the Indian Titans, the Asura: "assuredly were the Asura originally just, good and charitable, knew the Dharma and sacrificed, and were possessed of many other virtues. . . But afterwards as they multiplied in number, they became proud, vain, quarrelsome. . . they made confusion in everything. Thereupon in the course of time. . ." they were doomed [n3 V. Fausboll, Indian Mythology according to the Mahabharata (1902), pp. 40f.].
Thus severe consequences must be expected when Gen. vi. I commences with the formula, "when men began to multiply on the face of the earth. . ." And sure enough, ten verses later, Gen. vi. 11, the time for grave decisions has come: "And God said to Noah, 'I have determined to make an end of all flesh!' " More outspoken is the 18th chapter of the Book of Enoch, where an Angel acts as Enoch's guide through the celestial landscape. In showing him the quarters destined for iniquitous personalities, the Angel tells Enoch: "These stars which roll around over the fire are those who, at rising time, overstepped the orders of God: they did not rise at their appointed time.
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And He was wroth with them, and He bound them for 10,000 years until the time when their sin shall be fulfilled." [n4 E. Kautzsch, ed., Die Apokryphen una Pseudoepigraphen des Alten Testaments (1900), vol. 2, pp. 249f.]
Yet one must beware of simplifications. The wording, "assuredly were the Asura originally just, good and charitable," goes for the Titans, too, the forces of the first age of the world. But seen through the "eyeglasses" of the preceding state of things, Titans, Asura and their like had committed atrocities first. And so did Saturn, the "originator of times," and in the drastic measure he took to accomplish the "separation of the parents of the world," which stands for the falling apart of the axes of equator and ecliptic. Before this separation time did not exist. These "united parents"--heartlessly called "chaos" by Macrobius--resented the breaking up of the original eternity by the forces which worked iniquity in secret [n5 There is no complete unanimity among mythographers, though; in Hesiod's Theogony, Gaia "rejoiced greatly in spirit" (173) when Kronos promised to do away with Father Ouranos according to Gaia's very own plan and advice.]. These forces as they appear in the Enuma elish, the so-called Babylonian Creation Epic, are the children of Apsu and Tiamat and they crowded in between their parents. "They disturbed Tiamat as they surged back and forth; yea, they troubled the mood of Tiamat. Apsu could not lessen their clamor . . . Unsavory were their ways, they were overbearing." [n6 EE Tabl. 1.22-28 (E. Speiser trans.), ANET, p. 61.].
Not having "multiplied" yet, this first generation of the world established the Golden Age under the rule of Him of many names--Enki, Yima, Freyr and many more. "But these sons whom he begot himself, great Heaven [megas Ouranos] used to call Titans [Strainers] in reproach, for he said that they strained and did presumptuously a fearful deed, and that vengeance for it would come afterwards," as Hesiod has it (Theogony 207-10) [n7 This translation by H. G. Evelyn-White (LCL) pays no tregard to a "pun," a rather essential one, indeed. Hesiod makes use, side by side in these few lines, of both radicals from which "Titan" was supposed to have been derived: titaino, "to strain," and tisis, "vengeance."].
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And so it would, after their "multiplication," when they overstrained the measure. And it was bound to happen again when future generations would construct "forbidden ways to the sky [n8 Claudianus 26.69-71, speaking of the Aloads, who piled Ossa upon Olympus.], or build a tower which happened to be too high. The one secure measure, the "golden rope" of the solar year [n9 See e.g., RV 5.85.5: "This great feat of the famous Asurian Varuna I shall proclaim who, standing in the air, using the Sun as an inch scale, measured the earth."], is stretched beyond repair. The equinoctial sun had been gradually pushed out of its Golden Age "sign," it had started on the way to new conditions, new configurations. This is the frightful event, the unexpiable crime that was ascribed to the Children of Heaven. They had nudged the sun out of place, and now it was on the move, the universe was out of kilter and nothing, nothing--days, months or years, the rising or setting of stars--was going to fall into its rightful place any more. The equinoctial point had nudged and nuzzled its way forward, in the very same way as a car with automatic gearshift will nuzzle its way forward unless we put it in neutral-and there was no way of putting the equinox in neutral. The infernal pushing and squeezing of the Children of Heaven had separated the parents, and now the time machine had been set rolling forever, bringing forth at every new age "a new heaven and a new earth," in the words of Scripture. As Hesiod says, the world had entered now the second stage, that of the giants., who were to wage a decisive battle with the restraining forces before their downfall.
The vision of a whole world-age with its downfall is given by the Edda. It comes in the very first poem, the Song of the Sibyl, the Voluspa, in which the prophetess Vala embraces past and future in adequately strange and obscure language. At the beginning of the Age of the Aesir, the gods gather in council, and give; names to sun and mon, days and nights and seasons. They order the years and assign to the stars their places. On Idavollr (the "whiirl-field"; ida = eddy), they establish their seat "in the Golden Age " and play checkers with golden pieces, and all is happiness until "the three awful maidens" come (this is another mystery) [n10 The three maidens from Jotunheimr are not the Norns, this much can be safely said, but should be Gulveig the "thrice born," whom the Aesir killed, "thrice, and still she is Jiving" (Voluspa 8): one more "iniquity" asking for vengeance,].
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But once before, it is hinted, there has been a "world war" between Aesir and Vanir, which was terminated by a sharing of power. In a vision in which past and future blend in a flash, Vala sees the outcome and announces it to the "high and low children of Heimdal," that is, to all men. She asks them to open their eyes, to understand what the gods had to know: the breaking of the peace, the murder of Thjassi, Odin himself abetting the crime and nailing Thjassi's eyes to heaven. With this a curtain is lifted briefly over a phase of the past. For Thjassi belongs to the powers that preceded the Aesir. In Greek terms, the Titans came before the gods. The main Vana or Titanic powers (in Rydberg's thoughtful reconstruction) are the three brothers, Thjassi/Volund, Orvandil/Eigil, and Slagfin: the Maker, the Archer, and the Musician. This finally locates Orvandil the Archer, the father of Amlethus. He is one of the three "sons of Ivalde," just as their counterparts in the Finnish epic are the "sons of Kaleva." [n11 Strange to say, the three brothers, Volund, Eigil and Slagfin, are called "synir Finnakonungs," i.e., "sons of a Finnish king" (J. Grimm, TM, p. 380)], And Ivalde, like Kaleva, is barely mentioned, never described, at least not under the name Ivalde: there is a glimpse at him under his other name, Wate. Like Kaleva, he is a meaningful void. But all this is of the past. The Sibyl's vision is projected toward the onrushing end. True, Loke has been chained in Hell since he brought about the death of Balder, the great Fenrir wolf is still fettered with chains, once cunningly devised by Loke himself, and they are made up of such unsubstantial things as the footfall of a cat, the roots of a rock, the breath of a fish, the spittle of a bird [n12 Again, strange to say, this very kind of "un-substance"--including the milk of Mother Eagle, and the tears of the fledglings--had to be provided for by Tibetan Bogda Gesser Khan, who also snared the sun.].
Now the powers of the Abyss are beginning to rise, the world is coming apart. At this point Heimdal comes to the fore. He is the Warner of Asgard, the guardian of the Bridge between heaven and earth, the "Whitest of the Aesir," but his role, his freedom of action, is severely limited. He has many gifts--he can hear grass grow, he can see a hundred miles away-but these powers seem to
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remain ineffectual. He owns the Gjallarhorn, the great battle horn of the gods; he is the only one able to sound it, but he'll blow it only once, when he summons the gods and heroes to Asgard to their last fight.
Nordic speculation down to Richard Wagner has dwelt with gloomy satisfaction on Ragnarok [n13 For the etymology of ragnarok, see Cleasby- Vigfusson, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, in which regin (whence ragna) is defined as "the gods as the makers and rulers of the universe"; rok as "reason, ground, origin" or "a wonder, sign, marvel"; and ragna rok as "the history of the gods and the world, but especially with reference to the last act, the last judgment." The word rokr, a possible alternate to rok, is defined as "the twilight. . . seldom of the morning twilight," and "the mythological phrase, ragna rokr, the twilight of gods, which occurs in the prose Edda (by Snorri), and has since been received into modern works, is no doubt merely a corruption from rok, a word quite different from rokr." Taking into consideration that the whole war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas, as told in the Mahabharata, takes place in the "twilght" between Dvapara and Kali Yuga, there is no cogent reason to dismiss Snorri's ragna rokr as a "corruption." But then, the experts also condemned Snorri's comparison between Ragnarok and the Fall of Troy: the logical outcome of their conviction that "poetry" is some kind of creatio ex nihilo, whence the one question never raised is whether the poets might not be dealing with hard scientific facts.], the Twilight of the Gods, which will destroy the world. There is the prediction in the Song of the Sibyl, and also in Snorri's Gylfaginning: when the great dog Garm barks in front of the Gnipa cave, when the Fenrir wolf breaks his fetters and comes from "the mouth of the river," [n14 Lokasenna 41; see also V. Rydberg, Teutonic Mythology (1907), p. 563.] his jaws snatching from heaven to earth, and is joined by the Midgard Serpent, then Heimdal will blow the Gjallarhorn, the sound of which reaches through all the worlds: the battle is on. But it is written that the forces of order will go down fighting to atone for the initial wrong done by the gods. The world will be lost, good and bad together. Naglfar, the ship of the dead, built with the nail parings of the living, will sail through the dark waters and bring the enemy to the fray. Then, adds Snorri:
The heavens are suddenly rent in twain, and. out ride in shining squadrons Muspel's sons, and Surt with his flaming sword, at the head of the fylkings [15 Gylf. 51.].
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All-engulfing flames come out with Surt "the Black," who kills Freyr, the Lord of the Mill. Snorri makes Surt "Lord of Gimle" and likewise the king of eternal bliss "at the southern end of the sky." [n16 Gylf. 17; cf.. R. B. Anderson, The Younger Edda. (1880), p. 249. That Surt is Lord of Gimle is a particularly important statement; it will not be found in the current translations of Snorri, but only in the Uppsala Code: "there are many good abodes and many bad; best it is to be in Gimle with Surt” (Rydberg, p. 651).]. He must be some timeless force which brings destructive fire to the world; but of this later.
Hitherto all has been luridly and catastrophically and murkily confused as it should be. But the character of Heimdal raises a number of sharp questions. He has appeared upon the scene as "the son of nine mothers"; to be the son of several mothers is a rare distinction even in mythology, and one which Heimdal shares only with Agni in the Rigveda [n17 RV 10.45.2 points to nine births, or mothers; 1.141.2 tells of the seven mothers of Agni's second birth. Most frequently, however, Agni has three "mothers," corresponding to his three birthplaces: in the sky, on the earth, in the waters.] and with Agni's son Skanda in the Mahabharata. Skanda (literally "the jumping one" or "the hopping one") is the planet Mars, also called Kartikeya, inasmuch as he was borne by the Krittika, the Pleiades. The Mahabharata [n18 Mbh. 9-44-46 (Roy trans. vol. 7, pp. 130-43). It should be emphasized, aloud and strongly, that in Babylonian astronomy Mars is the only planetary representative of the Pleiades. See P. F. Gassmann, Planetarium Babylonicum (1950), p. 279: "In der Planetenvertretung kommt fur die Plejaden nur Mars in Frage."] insists on six as the number of the Pleiades as well as of the mothers of Skanda and gives a very broad and wild description of the birth and the installation of Kartikeya "by the assembled gods. . . as their generalissimo," which is shattering, somehow, driving home how little one understands as yet [n19 The least which can be said, assuredly: Mars was "installed" during a more or less close conjunction of all planets; in Mbh. 945 (p. 133) it is stressed that the powerful gods assembled "all poured water upon Skanda, even as the gods had poured water on the head of Varuna, the lord of waters, for investing him with dominion." And this "investiture" took place at the beginning of the Krita Yuga. the Golden Age.].
The nine mothers of Heimdal bring to mind inevitably the nine goddesses who turn the mill. The suspicion is not unfounded. Two of these "mothers," Gjalp and Greip, seem to appear with changed / Page 158 / names or generations as Fenja and Menja [n20 For the names of these mothers, see Hyndluljod 38; for Gjalp and Greip, daughters of the giant Geirroed, see Snorri's Skaldskaparmal 2, and Thorsdrapa, broadly discussed by Rydberg (pp. 932-52), who established Greip as the mother of the "Sons of Ivalde." R. Much claims the identity of Geirroed with Surt ("Der germanische Himmelsgott," in Ablandlungen zur germanische Philologie [1898], p. 221). The turning up of a plurality of mothers in the ancient North, and in India (see also J. Pokorny, "Ein neun-monatiges Jahr im Keltischen," OLZ 21 [1918], pp. 130-33) might induce the experts eventually to reopen the trial of those perfectly nonsensical seven or nine, even fourteen, "motherwombs" which haunt the Babylonian account of the creation of man. (Cf. E. Ebeling, Tod und Leben [1931], pp. ] 72-77; E. A. Speiser (trans.), "Akkadian Myths and Epics," ANET, pp. 99f.; W. von Soden, Or. 26, pp. 309ff.)]. Rydberg claims Heimdal to be the son of Mundilfoeri. The story is then astronomical. Where does it lead? Thanks to the clues provided by Jacob Grimm, Rydberg and O. S. Reuter, and thanks to many hints hidden in the Rigveda, Atharva Veda and at other unexpected places, one can offer a probable conclusion: Heimdal stands for the world axis, the skambha. His head is the "measurer" (mjotudr) of the same measures that the Sibyl claims to understand: "Nine worlds I know, nine spaces of the measure-tree which is beyond (fyr) the earth." "Measure.-tree" is the translation of mjotvidr [n21 O. S. Reuter, Germanische Himmelskunde (1934), pp. 236, 319. As concerns mjotudr (measurer) and its connection with Sanskrit matar and with meter, mensar, etc., see Grimm, TM, pp. 22, 1290. Reuter (p. 236) quotes Lex. Poet. Boreale 408, where mjotudr = fate.] which so-called poetic versions usually render as "world tree." The word fyr appears here again; it connotes priority; in this verse 2 of Voluspa it is translated as "below" in most of the cases. The question "who measures what?" would require an extensive analysis; here, with no need for so many details, it is important only to learn that Heimdal is honored by a second name, Hallinskidi (appenpix #16). This name is said to mean a bent, bowed or slanted stake or post. To be bent or inclined befits the world axis and all that belongs to it, with the one exception of the observer who stands exactly at the terrestrial North Pole. Why not call it "oblique" or slanting right away [n22 We have more of this mythological species of oblique posts or trees—e.g., the Rigvedic "sacrificial post"—and even Bears are not afraid to inhabit the one or the other. See F. G. Speck and J. Moses, The Celestial Bear Comes Down to Earth: The Bear Sacrifice Ceremony of the Munsee-Mohican in Canada (1945).]?
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Whether bent or oblique, Grimm rightly says that it is "worthy of remark that Hallinskidi and Heimdal are quoted among the names for the ram [n23 TM, p. 234. Rydberg (p. 593) spells it: "In the old Norse Poetry Vedr (wether, ram) Heimdal and the Heimdal epithet hallinskidi, are synonymous."]. Heimdal is the "watcher" of the much-trodden Bridge of the gods which finally breaks down at Ragnarok; his "head" measures the crossroads of ecliptic and equator at the vernal equinox in Aries [n24 A. Ohlmarks, Heimdalls Horn und Odins Auge (1937), p. 144, makes the god a he-goat. That would not be bad, either, if he is right, since Capella, alpha Aurigae, "capricious" all over, whether male or female, has the name "asar bardagi = Fight of the Aesir" (Reuter, p. 279). Of Auriga-Erichthonios we shall hear more in the future.], a constellation which is called "head" also by Cleomedes [n25 Instead of "head" (kephalos), Nonnos calls Aries mesomphalos, "midnavel," of Olympus.], and countless astromedical illustrations show the Ram ruling the head (Pisces the feet). Accordingly, one might say that the Sibyl addresses herself to "the high and low children of Aries."
Recalling Rigvedic Agni, son of seven to nine mothers like Heimdal, and remembering what has been said of "fire" that it means more understandable. Heimdal stands for the equinoctial colure which "accompanies" the slowly turning, wholly abstract and invisible axis along the surface of the sphere. It will emerge presently that "axis" always means the whole "frame" of a world-age, given by the equinoctial and solstitial colures [n26 It should be remarked, that Snorri's identification (Gylf. 13) of the bridge Bifroest with the rainbow made scholars rush to rescue a definitely regular phenomenon from the hazardous existence which is allotted to a rainbow; they voted for the Milky Way instead. With this we are not likely to agree. See A. Ohlmarks, "Stellt die mythische Bifroest den Regenbogen oder die Milchstrasse dar?" Medd. Lunds Astron. Observ. (1941), ser. II, no. 110, and Reuter, p. 284, quoting additional literature.]. More understandable also becomes another epithet of Heimdal, namely, Vindler, of which Rydberg states (p. 595): "The name is a subform of vindill and comes from vinda, to twist or turn, wind, to turn anything around rapidly. As the epithet 'the turner' is given to that god who brought friction-fire (bore-fire) to man, and who is himself the personification of this fire, then it must be synonymous with 'the borer.'"
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The Sibyl's prophecy does not end with the catastrophes, but it moves from the tragic to the lydic mode, to sing of the dawning of the new age:
Now do I see the Earth anew Rise all green from the waves again. . . Then fields unsowed bear ripened fruit All ills grow better.
Even if that generation of gods has perished, the younger ones remain: Balder and Hoder, also the two sons of Thor, and Vidar the son of Odin. The House of the Wise Vanir is not affected as a whole, even if Freyr fell in battle. As the Vanir belong to a past age, this crisis apparently does not concern them. There is in fact a certain perversely nightmarish or neurotic unreality about the tragedy as a whole. The Wolf's fetters were made of nothing but he was able to snap them only when the time came, when Odin and the Sun had to be devoured. The next instant, young Vidar kills the monster simply by thrusting his shoe down his throat (he has one shoe only, just like Jason). It is guilt and the ensuing chaos, more than actual forces, which dragged down the Establishment once the appointed time came, as decreed by fate and sounded on the Gjallarhorn.
What happens after (or happened, or will happen sometime, for this myth is written in the future tense), is told in the Voluspa, but it is also amplified in Snorri's Gylfaginning (53), a tale of a strange encounter of King Gylfi with the Aesir themselves disguised as men, who do not reveal their identity but are willing to answer questions: "What happens when the whole world has burned up, the gods are dead, and all of mankind is gone? You have said earlier, that each human being would go on living in this or that world." So it is, goes the answer, there are several worlds for the good and the bad. Then Gylfi asks: "Shall any gods be alive, and shall there be something of earth and heaven?" And the answer is::
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"The earth rises up from the sea again, and is green and beautiful and things grow without sowing. Vidar and Vali are alive, for neither the sea nor the flames of Surt have hurt them and they dwell on the Eddyfield, where once stood Asgard. There come also the sons of Thor, Modi and Magni, and bring along his hammer. There come also Balder and Hoder from the other world. All sit down and converse together. They rehearse their runes and talk of events of old days. Then they find in the grass the golden tablets that the Aesir once played with. Two children of men will also be found safe from the great flames of Surt. Their names, Lif and Lifthrasr, and they feed on the morning dew and from this human pair will come a great population which will fill the earth. And strange to say, the sun, before being devoured by Fenrir, will have borne a daughter, no less beautiful and going the same ways as her mother."
Then, all at once, concludes Snorri's tale wryly, a thunderous cracking was heard from all sides, and when the King looked again, he found himself on the open plain and the great hall had vanished.
The times and tenses are deliberately scrambled, but the statements, even if elliptical, are pregnant with ancient meaning. The rediscovery of the pieces of the game lying around in the grass, already told in the Voluspa, becomes clearer if one thinks of the Rigveda, where the gods themselves are said to go around like ayas, that is, casts of dice [27 RV 10.116.9; in 10,34.8, the dice are called vrata, i.e., an organized "gang" under a king; the king is Rudra.]. It becomes more understandable still when one considers that the name of the Indian world-ages (Yuga) has been taken from the idiom of dicing [n28 Krita, Treta, Dvapara, Kali, this last one being the worst cast (which the Greeks termed "dog"). See H. Luders, Das Wurfelspiel im alten Indien (1907), pp. 41, 63f.]. But both data could be dismissed as unrevealing were it forgotten that in several kinds of "proto-chess" –to use an expression of J. Needham—board games and dicing were combined: the number of eyes thrown by the dice determined the figure which was to be moved [n29 H. Luders, p. 69; see also S. Culin, Chess and Playing Cards (1898), p. 857.]. That this very rule was also valid for all the board games mentioned in the Voluspa, has been shown by A. G. van Hamel [n30 "The Game of the Gods," Arkiv fur Nordisk Filologi 50 _1934), p. 230.]. Thus, the dice forced the hands of the chess player—a 30 "The Game of the Gods," Arkiv fur Nordisk Filologi 50 _1934), p. 230.]. A game called "planetary battles" by the Indians, and in 16th-century Europe still termed "Celestial War, or
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Astrologer's Game," [n31 A. Bernhardi, "Vier Konige," BA 19 (1936), pp. 17If. See J. Needham, Science and Civilization in China, vol. 4, Pt. I: Physics (1962), p. 325, about a book on chess published in 1571 under the title Uranomachia seu Astrologorum Ludus.] whereas the Chinese chessboard shows the Milky Way dividing the two camps. Which goes to show that the Icelanders knew what they were talking about.
Finally, there is one remarkable and disturbing coincidence from the same direction. It is known that in the final battle of the gods, the massed legions on the side of "order" are the dead warriors, the "Einherier" who once fell in combat on earth and who have been transferred by the Valkyries to reside with Odin in Valhalla—a theme much rehearsed in heroic poetry. On the last day they issue forth to battle in martial array. Says the Grimnismal (23): "Five hundred gates and forty more are in the mighty building of Walhalla—eight hundred 'Einherier' come out of each one gate—on the time they go out on defence against the Wolf."
That makes 432,000 in all, a number of significance from of old. This number must have had a very ancient meaning, for it is also the number of syllables in the Rigveda. But it goes back to the basic figure 10,800, the number of stanzas in the Rigveda (40 syllables to a stanza) which, together with 108, occurs insistently in Indian tradition. 10,800 is also the number which has been given by Heraclitus for the duration of the Aion, according to Censorius (De die natali 18), whereas Berossos made. the Babylonian Great Year to last 432,000 years. Again, 10,800 is the number of bricks of the Indian fire-altar (Agnicayana) [n32 See J. Filliozat, "L'Inde et les echanges scientifiques dans l'antiqite," Cahiers d'histoire mondiale 1 (1953), pp. 358f.].
"To quibble away such a coincidence," remarks Schroder, "or to ascribe it to chance, is in my opinion to drive skepticism beyond its limits." [n33 F. R. Schroder, Altgermanische Kulturprobleme
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serpent with nine heads. Only, they do not "carry" that serpent, they are shown to "pull" it, which indicates that these 540 statues are churning the Milky Ocean, represented (poorly, indeed) by the water ditch [n34 R. von Heine-Geldern, "Weltbild und Bauform in Siidostasien," in Wiener Beitriige zur Kunst- und Kulturgeschicte 4 (1930), pp. 41f.], using Mount Mandara as a churning staff, and Vasuki, the prince of the Nagas, as their drilling rope. (Just to prevent misunderstanding: Vasuki had been asked before, and had agreeably consented, and so had Vishnu's tortoise avatar, who "was going to serve as the fixed base for that "incomparably mighty churn," and even the Milky Ocean itself had made it clear that it was willing to be churned.) The whole of Angkor thus turns out to be a colossal model set up for "alternative motion" with true Hindu fantasy and incongruousness to counter the idea of a continuous one-way Precession from west to east.
Now there is a last paragraph in the Gylfaginning, which is usually considered an afterword, and its authorship is in doubt, for it is supposed that Snorri's Edda was completed by Olaf Hvitaskald (d. 1259), Snorri's nephew. In any case, this addition is somewhat out of the previous context, but it reinforces it:
The Aesir now sat down to talk, and held their counsel, and remembered all the tales that were told to Gylfi. They gave the very same names that had been named before to the men and places that were there. This they did for the reason that, when a long time had elapsed, men should not doubt that those to whom the same names were given, were all identical. There was one who is called Thor, and he is Asa-Thor, the old. He is Oeku-Thor (Chariot-Thor) and to him are ascribed the great deeds by Hektor in Troy.
As for the rebirth of the world, another "Twilight" comes to mind. It is in the Kumulipo, a Polynesian cosmogonic myth from Hawaii. "Although we have the source of all things from chaos, it is a chaos which is simply the wreck and ruin of an earlier world." [n35 R. B. Dixon, Oceanic Mythology (1910), p. 15.].
Now turns the swinging of time over on the burnt-out world Back goes the great turning of things upwards again As yet sunless the time of shrouded light;
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Unsteady, as in dim moon-shimmer,< From out Makalii's night-dark veil of cloud Thrills, shadow-like, the prefiguration of the world to be.
[n36 A. Bastian, Die Heilige Sage der Polynesier (1881), pp. 69-121. Along with Roland B. Dixon, who translated the last three lines above, we have relied on the German of Bastian, who was an outstanding authority on Polynesian culture and language. Modern experts have their own way. M. Beckwith (Hawaiian Mythology [1940], p. 58) translates these lines thus: "At the time when the earth became hot/ At the time when the heavens turned about/At the time when the earth was darkened/To cause the moon to shine/The time of the rise of the Pleiades." As concerns Makalii (Maori: Matariki; Micronesian and Melaesian dialects spell it Makarika, and the like), it is the name for the Pleiades, although more often we come across the phrase "the net of Makalii" (the correct fom: Huihui-oMatariki, i.e., the cluster of M.). The "person" Makalii, to whom, this net belongs, as well as a second one (see p. 175) which we have reason to take for the Hyades, remains in the dark. See E. Tregear, The Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary (1891) s.v. Matariki; N. B. Emerson, Unwritten Literature of Hawaii (1909), p. 17; M. W. Makemson, The Morning Star Rises: An Account of Polynesian Astronomy (1941), nos. 327, 380; Beckwith, p. 368; K. P. Emory, Tuamotuan Religious Structures and Ceremonies (1947), p. 61. For the Hyades and Pleiades as "celestial hunting nets" of the Chinese sphere, see G. Schlegel, L'Uranographie Chinoise (1875; repro 1967), pp. 365-70.]
So sang an Oceanian Empedocles long ago. The poem was drawn from very old royal tradition, just as Virgil had drawn his from the story of the Gens Julia, for the true original line of Hawaiian kings was supposed to come from Kane, the Demiurge God of the Pacific.
www.indigogroup.co.uk/edge/9sisters.htm The Nine Sisters and the Axis MundiAlby Stone "According to the medieval Icelandic poet Snaebjorn, as quoted by Snorri Sturluson in the Skaldskaparmal section of his Prose Edda, 'nine skerry-brides turn fast the most hostile island-box-mill out beyond the land's edge'. This mill (eyludr) is cognate with mills mentioned or hinted at in other Icelandic texts - the poems Grottasongr and Vafthrudhnismal from the Poetic Edda; and Snorri's own Gylfaginning - and closely related to the mill-like Sampo described in the Finnish traditions preserved in the Kalevala. These mills, sources of wealth and abundance, are cosmic structures; they are models of and metaphors for the world itself. The essential image is that of the rotary quern, comprising a flat, unmoving lower millstone and an upper stone revolved by turning a handle. The lower stone represents the earth as perceived by early cosmologists: a flat, immobile disc. The upper stone represents the sky, which is seen as revolving about the celestial axis in the far north. The imagery is extended by the English abbot lfric in his Homilies, composed in the last decade of the tenth century. He incorporates the paddles used to power early vertical water-mills, so that the earth and sky are augmented by the underworld, giving a tripartite division of the cosmos, in accordance with other, pagan cosmological patterns. The nine 'skerry-brides' who power the mill in Snbjorn's poem are a curiosity. In Grttasongr, the mill is said to be operated by two giant-women; while in Vafthrudnismal the mill is implied by the name of Mundilfoeri, who is the father of the sun and moon. The name Mundilfoeri means, roughly, 'he who turns the handle of the mill', so the character may be presumed to have had some important cosmological function. The only other Scandinavian mill of any significance is the box-mill (ludr) that saves the family of the giant Bergelmir, when he and his kin climb upon it to avoid a deluge; but that is all we are told concerning it. The Sampo operates under its own power, but when it is concealed within the Mount of Copper it is secured with nine locks. Now, while it is ultimately a representation of the entire cosmos, the world-mill has a specific affinity with the axis mundi, the notional centre of the earth, which is analogous to the celestial axis, the point about which the sky rotates. The location of the latter is observably in the far north, and is marked by the Pole Star; while the former can be located at any appropriate sacred or significant place. The relationship that exists between the two centres is defined by a number of parallels in form and function. For example, the Sampo has three world-encompassing roots, like those of Yggdrasill, the World Tree of Norse tradition, and its name derives from the same source as Sanskrit skambha, which denotes a pillar or support. Furthermore, both terrestrial and celestial centres are closely associated with bodies of water. There is said to be a well beneath each of Yggdrasill's roots; when Charlemagne destroyed the Irminsul, the cosmic pillar of the Saxons, there was first a drought and then a flood at the site; in Irish tradition, the druidical centre at Uisnech was supposed to have had a white-rimmed well, source of the twelve major Irish rivers; and in another tradition nine hazels grew above the inspirational Well of Segais, whence sprang the seven chief rivers of Ireland. The world-mill of Snbjorn's poem is on an island; Bergelmir's mill saves him from a flood; and the mill Grtti and the Sampo are both lost or destroyed at sea. The Norse god Heimdallr is said in the poem Voeluspa hin skamma to be the son of nine giant-women 'at the edge of the earth'; Snorri says that Heimdallr's mothers were nine sisters, and that he lives at a place called Himinbjorg, 'Sky Mountain', close by Bifrost, the 'trembling path' that joins earth and sky. Despite his name, 'He Who Shines upon the World', Heimdallr is by no means a solar deity. Other texts refer to his immobility, which is not a characteristic of the sun, or of any other heavenly body but one. That exception is the Pole Star, which appears to remain stationary in the night sky while all the other stars seem to revolve around it. Heimdallr's home, Himinbjorg, suggests the cosmic mountains of the Indo-European and Uralic traditions, which are either located directly below the Pole Star or are given other axial traits. However, Heimdallr is more or less equivalent to Agni, the Indian god of fire, with whom he shares many traits, including multiple maternity - nine mothers are claimed for Agni, but their number is variable, unlike those of Heimdallr. Nonary themes are also associated with Yggdrasill, according to the poem Voeluspa, in a difficult stanza, part of which is usually rendered along the following lines: 'I remember nine worlds, nine abodes of the famous World Tree'. This is the usual interpretation; but it is by no means as straightforward as it might seem. For a start, heima - translated above as 'worlds' - can also mean 'homes' or 'dwelling-places'. That, in itself, does not raise any great problems; but ividi, commonly translated as 'abodes', is a different matter entirely. One school of thought holds that it means 'voids' or 'spaces', thus repeating the meaning of heima with a different emphasis. Another idea is based on a reconstruction of a putative Old Icelandic word from a known Old Swedish one, innvidir, 'internal supports' (i.e., 'pillars'), which would be cosmologically satisfying if it were less doubtful. However, one manuscript version of Voeluspa gives the word as ividjur, the plural of vidju, which occurs in other texts with the meaning 'troll-wife' - that is, a woman of divine or supernatural provenance. This form ividju may originally have meant something like 'she who dwells in the woods'. It would partly fit in with another interpretation of the word, as 'twigs' or 'wands'. The word that is usually rendered 'World Tree', is mjoetvid, literally 'measuring-tree', which can be taken as a reference to the way that Yggdrasill encompasses and limits the whole of the cosmos. The lines can plausibly be read thus: 'I remember nine homes, nine tree-women of the measuring-tree'. It is not clear if the 'tree-women' would have had anything to do with giants mentioned earlier in the stanza, who are said to have given birth to the seeress whose words the poem purports to be; but it is a distinct possibility. If such is the case, then the nine 'tree-women' are probably to be identified with the nine mothers of Heimdallr. These nine, who give birth to Heimdallr 'at the edge of the earth' - by or in the sea, in other words - can in turn be identified with the nine giant-women who power the eyludr in Snaebjorn's poem. Alternatively, the nine ividi might be rendered as 'branches'. This would accord with those traditions in which the World Tree has nine branches or levels. For example, the Yakut shaman uses a tree with nine notched steps to facilitate his celestial journeys. Other Asian shamans set up groups of nine trees to represent the different levels. The cosmic structure is also reflected in the divine family, so that the Buryat and Mongols believe that the supreme god has nine sons. Indeed, in Central and North Asia, the number nine is interchangeable with seven as the most important cosmological number, usually relating to the cosmic centre or to the supreme, celestial deity that dwells there. The god Bai Ulgn, according to the Altaic Tatars, has seven sons and nine daughters. While the cosmological significance of the number seven can be traced ultimately to the position and prominence of the seven main stars of the constellation Ursa Major, the number nine is more difficult to pin down. The two numbers are closely linked, as Celtic traditions testify. In Irish and Welsh myth and cosmology, seven and nine are as interchangeable as they are in Altaic and Uralic lore, with a similar emphasis on themes associated with images of the axis mundi, and as expressions of wholeness and totality. Of particular interest here are certain groups of nine women or goddesses, such as the nine maidens whose combined breath heats the cauldron of the Head of Annwfn in Caer Sidi, the rotating island-fortress of the poem Preiddeu Annwfn; the nine sisters who rule the Fortunate Isles; and so on. Various Celtic texts also refer to a tradition of nine-roomed royal halls - although seven or twelve rooms are also mentioned in this context, again indicating a cosmological motif - which is reminiscent of the nine worlds or dwellings claimed for Yggdrasill. The cosmic centre is often associated with serpents, such as Nidhoeggr, who gnaws at one of Yggdrasill's roots from below; the various serpents and dragons, such as the Lambton Worm, associated with terraced hills and similar landmarks; and the fighting dragons at the centre of Britain in the Welsh tale Lludd and Llevelys. These serpents are also associated with bodies of water - Ndhggr with the primal well Hvergelmir, the Lambton Worm with a well, and the dragons of Lludd and Llevelys with a vat of mead. The Lambton worm is thrown into the well when it is quite small, but leaves when it has grown to an enormous size, wrapping itself around Penshaw Hill; similarly the Midgardsormr, the world serpent of Norse myth, starts out as a tiny creature, but grows mightily after it is flung into the sea, eventually circling the entire world. It is also known as Joermungandr, the second element of which denotes a magic staff or wand, suggesting the axis mundi represented as a pillar. The serpent's two names hint at the way the axis mundi symbolises the whole cosmos, in addition to being the central point. In a similar vein, in Greek myth there is Ladon, the serpent who guards the apple-tree on the island garden of the Hesperides; and the primal serpents Ananta and Vasuki, who in the ancient Indian epic Mahabharata help the gods to churn the ocean with Mount Mandara, to make ambrosia. It is interesting that several medieval Germanic sources associate serpents with the number nine. The Old English Nine Herbs Charm says that 'Woden took nine glory-twigs and struck the adder so that it flew into nine parts'. The cognate Scandinavian god Odin, of course, hung upon the World Tree for nine nights to acquire knowledge of the runes, according to the poem Havamal. The nine 'glory-twigs', wuldortanas, echo the nine vidhi of Voeluspa. Two continental German charms, known as Contra Vermes and Pro Nessia, begin with identical lines: 'Go out, worm, with nine wormlings'. These two charms are designed to counter infestations of parasitical worms, rather than to get rid of snakes; but it must be borne in mind that invertebrate worms were seen as smaller versions of genuine serpents, and terms for the two types of creature were more or less interchangeable. In Greek myth, the Lernaean Hydra, a serpentine beast with nine heads (but sometimes eight, or even fifty or more), lived beneath a tree that stood at the 'sevenfold source' of the river Amymone. The association of the cosmic centre with groups of nine or with ninefold structures appears to have arisen partly because that number is three multiplied by itself. The cosmos has three main levels - sky, earth, and underworld - and Indo-European societies have, from a very early period, been divided into three social strata, based upon a division of society into priests, warriors, and farmers/artisans, a division that is reflected by and codified in sociogonic myth and religious organisation. The cosmic and social tripartitions are probably jointly responsible for an archaic threefold organisation of land - fossilised in the three 'ridings' of Yorkshire, and hinted at by Tacitus in his Germania, where he tells us that the Germans are divided geographically according to their descent from the three sons of Mannus - and an ancient division of the year into three parts, of which only vestigial traces remain. The basic tripartition has become merged with other structural factors, such as the horizontal division of the earth into quadrants based upon the four directions, changes in social requirements, festive and calendrical developments, and so on; but it is still discernible. Important though the tripartition of the physical and social aspects of the cosmos undoubtedly is, it can only have had an incidental influence upon the association of ninefold motifs with the axis mundi. The idea that nine is the cosmic tripartition multiplied by itself is attractive, as it stresses the notion of the cosmos as a self-contained and complete structure, accomplished by the interaction of the social and physical totalities. It also reduces the need to look elsewhere for a possible template for the nonary phenomena discussed above, leaving a suitably economic and elegant hypothesis. However, explaining the cosmological signficance of the number nine as three multiplied by itself is really only a justification of one number in terms of another. There are a number of problems. For one thing, it does not really explain the cosmological significance of ninefold structures in those traditions which have only a minor link with those of Indo-European cultures, and which either do not share the inherited socio-religious tripartition or have had little influence from that quarter. The Uralic and Altaic traditions have had prolonged and repeated contacts with Indo-European traditions, it is true; and the same can also be said, if to a lesser extent, of the Chinese, whose bureaucratic organisation, always cosmologically based, stressed the number nine as a power, reflecting the nine celestial 'Palaces' and the ninefold land division of feng shui. But as an expression of three times three, nine is not a factor in Chinese systems. The ninefold pattern is actually a development of the basic pentadic structure of the Chinese cosmos: the central point plus the four cardinal directions subdivided to accommodate the eight trigrams of the I Ching, compiled in the second millenium BCE; although there is some evidence to suggest that the resulting ninth place, the central point, was also subdivided at one stage, so doubling the original pentad. The same explanation - the centre plus eight directions - has been given for ninefold structures in European myth; but these eight directions are a late development, a consequence of increasingly complex navigational requirements. In China, ninefold cosmological structures are clearly not derived from Indo-European tripartite social models. Nor, indeed, is the ninefold underworld of the Maya of Central America. It must also be recognised that early cosmologists almost certainly tended to limit themselves to those phenomena that could be observed, or those that could be inferred from existing and accepted patterns; and that magical or significant numbers were primordially derived from the observation of nature rather than from ponderous mathematical abstractions. In his book The Ancient Wisdom (London, 1977), Geoffrey Ashe has demonstrated that, whatever mathematical properties have been attributed to it through the ages, the mystique of the number seven derives first and foremost from the seven stars of the Great Bear, and the constellation's relationship to the celestial axis. Seven is important because there is a group of seven stars that is highly important in ancient cosmological traditions throughout Europe and Asia. In a different way, the cosmological importance of the number four is based on the human body: the four directions are left, right, front, and back, imposed upon the landscape by orientation, where the observer faces the rising sun; and the analogy is extended to the four outstretched limbs, as in Vedic myth. Three is important because of the three perceived levels of the cosmos; but in Indo-European culture that is reflected in the three levels of the human body: the head; chest and arms; belly, genitals, and legs - the cosmos conceived in human form -and these in turn relate to the tripartition of society into rulers, defenders, and feeders/workers. Likewise, the number two is significant because of observed dualities, interactive opposites, in nature: night/day; dark/light; male/female; fire/water; and so on. Where, then, does nine occur in nature? Some have suggested that Heimdallr's nine mothers are waves, because of the tradition that every ninth wave is bigger and stronger than the eight preceding it. However, the ninth wave is observably not more powerful than any other; and, in spite of his connections with water, Heimdallr is quite definitely not a sea-god in the accepted sense. The tradition of the ninth wave, in fact, would appear to derive from the same image or template that underlies the other examples cited above. Also of interest in this context is Odin's golden ring Draupnir, from which dripped eight more identical rings every ninth night. In other words, on every ninth night there were nine rings. The idea here seems to be that the nine represents a complete cycle or pattern that brings fruition. This can be seen in the nine nights that it takes Odin, hanging on Yggdrasill, to attain knowledge of the runes. With this in mind, it seems obvious that the elusive template is one of the most basic human physical characteristics, the nine months of pregnancy - actually the nine periods, analogous to lunar cycles, when an adult woman's menstrual cycle does not take place. The ninth bloodless moon brings fruition, childbirth. The heathen English festival known as modranect, 'mother night', observed at midwinter, the axial point of the year, seems to owe something to this concept. Thus, Heimdallr has nine 'mothers', as Agni is often said to have. These are related to the nine 'skerry-brides' that operate the eyludr, the cosmic mill that, like the nine-locked Sampo, makes the sea fruitful; and perhaps nine 'tree-women' who dwell in Yggdrasill. Similar to these are the nine maidens whose breath heats the cauldron in Caer Sidi, which is cognate with the cauldron of rebirth that occurs elsewhere in Celtic tradition. The nine black-clad disir or fylgjur, and the same number dressed in white, of the Icelandic Flateyjarbok and Brennu-Njals saga, women who represent the luck and well-being of a family, as well as promoting the fertility of its female members, may also be relevant in this context. The disir are similar in some respects to the three nornir, who dwell at the root of Yggdrasill, and who are sometimes represented in folklore as overseers of childbirth and bestowers of gifts at birth. This links with the axis mundi as a source of fecundity and wealth, the riches of earth and sea. The image of the mill is particularly apt in this respect, as is the World Tree, which bears numerous fruits, including wisdom - the runes and the nine hazels at the Well of Segais - and humanity itself, created by the gods from trees, according to Norse myth. As the primordial tree, Yggdrasill is present in all trees, so humanity is indeed its offspring; and so the nine months of pregnancy are appropriately reflected in the nine heima and vidhi. Heimdallr and Agni, who father the ancestors of the different social classes, are sons of the nine mothers, personifications of the human reproductive process. The serpent has a particular connection with the bodies of water associated with the cosmic centre or which delineate the cosmos. This has meant that, in myth, the serpent has acquired some characteristics more properly attributed to other aspects of axial tradition.One such characteristic is the use of the number nine to denote totality. It would seem more useful if the charms Pro Nessia and Contra Vermes urged the worm to come out with all its wormlings, rather tham just nine; but the idea seems to be that nine are specified because that number signifies the creature's offspring in their entirity. The same factor has influenced the fate of the adder in the Nine Herbs Charm, and also occurs in the Greek myth of the Hydra. The World Serpent dwells in the water below or surrounding the cosmic axis, which contains within itself the image and structure of the cosmos at large. It guards the centre and the wealth it produces, like Ladon, who guards the apples of the Hesperides. But serpents are also chthonic creatures, signifying death, rebirth, and the underworld, which are often seen in terms of a return to the womb of the Earth, as ancient funerary practices testify. The nine underworlds of the Maya are probably to be viewed in the same way: each underworld corresponding to one of the bloodless moons, and together recreating the duration of human pregnancy." One such characteristic is the use of the number nine to denote totality.
www.answers.com/topic/king-of-kings The 99 Attributes of Allah I found many different versions of the 99 names. The above 99 are on a poster I have. Another list includes Al-Mu'tiy - The Bestower, The Giver and does not have Al- Ahad - The One. Another list did not have Al- Ahad -The Sustainer, The Provider but did have Al - Razzaaq The Noble, The One who is Majid. Allah (subhanahu wa ta' ala)s' There are a couple of evidences, one is the du`aa where one calls upon Allah by the names He (subhanahu wa ta`ala) has kept to Himself (obviously not taking these names since Allah has not revealed them to us); another is the fact that in the narrations of the famous ninety nine names hadith that do contain 99 names, the names are not consistent between narrations (for example, imam al-bayhaqi reports two versions of this hadith, with different 99 names in each). It is suggested by one commentator that the names were not explicitly stated by the rasul (sallallahu `alayhi wa sallam).
We be of one blood, ye and I ! Rudyard Kipling. 1865 - 1936 ... If you can dream - and not make dreams your master; If you can think - and not make thoughts ... vivovoco.rsl.ru
The Thousandth Man One man in a thousand, Solomon says, 'Tis neither promise nor prayer nor show You can use his purse with no more talk His wrong's your wrong, and his right's your right,
"Nine hundred and ninety-nine..." "Nine hundred and ninety-nine..." "Nine hundred and ninety-nine..." "Nine hundred and ninety-nine... "With the whole round world agin you.
HAMLET'S MILL AN ESSAY INVESTIGATING THE ORIGINS OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE AND ITS TRANSMISSION THROUGH MYTH Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend 1969 Intoduction Page 10 Lord Keynes' appraisal, written ca. 1942, remains both unconventional and profound. He knew, we all know, that Newton failed. Newton was led astray by his dour sectarian preconceptions. But his undertaking was truly in the archaic spirit, as it begins to appear now after two centuries of scholarly search into many cultures of which he could have had no idea. To the few clues he found with rigorous method, a vast number have been added. Still, the wonder remains, the same that was expressed by his great predecessor Galileo: But of all other stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind must have been his who conccived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any othcr person, though very far distant either in time or place, speaking with those who are in the In dies, speaking to those who are not yet born, nor shall be this thousand or ten thousand years) And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangement of two dozcn little signs upon paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of man.
FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS A QUEST FOR THE BEGINNING AND THE END Graham Hancock 1995 Chapter 32 Speaking to the Unborn Page 285 "It is understandable that a huge range of myths from all over the ancient world should describe geological catastrophes in graphic detail. Mankind survived the horror of the last Ice Age, and the most plausible source for our enduring traditions of flooding and freezing, massive volcanism and devastating earthquakes is in the tumultuous upheavals unleashed during the great meltdown of 15,000 to 8000 BC. The final retreat of the ice sheets, and the consequent 300-400 foot rise in global sea levels, took place only a few thousand years before the beginning of the historical period. It is therefore not surprising that all our early civilizations should have retained vivid memories of the vast cataclysms that had terrified their forefathers. A message in the bottle of time" 'Of all the other stupendous inventions,' Galileo once remarked, what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very distant either in time or place, speaking with those who are in the Indies, speaking to those who are not yet born, nor shall be this thousand or ten thousand years? And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangements of two dozen little signs on paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of men.3 If the 'precessional message' identified by scholars like Santillana, von Dechend and Jane Sellers is indeed a deliberate attempt at communication by some lost civilization of antiquity, how come it wasn't just written down and left for us to find? Wouldn't that have been easier than encoding it in myths? Perhaps. "What one would look for, therefore, would be a universal language, the kind of language that would be comprehensible to any technologically advanced society in any epoch, even a thousand or ten thousand years into the future. Such languages are few and far between, but mathematics is one of them" "WRITTEN IN THE ETERNAL LANGUAGE OF MATHEMATICS"
THE FAR YONDER SCRIBE AND OFT TIMES SHADOWED SUBSTANCES WATCHED IN FINE AMAZE THE ZED ALIZ ZED IN SWIFT REPEAT SCATTER STAR DUST AMONGST THE LETTERS OF THEIR PROGRESS
NUMBER 9 THE SEARCH FOR THE SIGMA CODE Cecil Balmond 1998 Cycles and Patterns Page 165 Patterns "The essence of mathematics is to look for patterns. Our minds seem to be organised to search for relationships and sequences. We look for hidden orders. These intuitions seem to be more important than the facts themselves, for there is always the thrill at finding something, a pattern, it is a discovery - what was unknown is now revealed. Imagine looking up at the stars and finding the zodiac! Searching out patterns is a pure delight. Suddenly the counters fall into place and a connection is found, not necessarily a geometric one, but a relationship between numbers, pictures of the mind, that were not obvious before. There is that excitement of finding order in something that was otherwise hidden. And there is the knowledge that a huge unseen world lurks behind the facades we see of the numbers themselves."
THE LIGHT IS RISING RISING IS THE LIGHT
THE DEATH OF GODS IN ANCIENT EGYPT Jane B. Sellars 1992 Page 204 "The overwhelming awe that accompanies the realization, of the measurable orderliness of the universe strikes :modern man as well. Admiral Weiland E. Byrd, alone In the Antarctic for five months of polar darkness, wrote these phrases of intense feeling: Here were the imponderable processes and forces of the cosmos, harmonious and soundless. Harmony, that was it! I could feel no doubt of oneness with the universe. The conviction came that the rhythm was too orderly. too harmonious, too perfect to be a product of blind chance - that, therefore there inust be purpose in the whole and that man was part of that whole and not an accidental offshoot. It was a feeling that transcended reason; that went to the heart of man's despair and found it groundless. The universe was a cosmos, not a chaos; man was as rightfully a part of that cosmos as were the day and night.10 Returning to the account of the story of Osiris, son of Cronus god of' Measurable Time, Plutarch takes, pains to remind the reader of the original Egyptian year consisting of 360 days. Phrases are used that prompt simple mental. calculations and an attention to numbers, for example, the 360-day year is described as being '12 months of 30 days each'. Then we are told that:Osiris leaves on a long journey, during which Seth, his evil brother, plots with 72 companions to slay Osiris: He also secretly obtained 'the measure of Osiris and made ready a chest in which to entrap him. The, interesting thing about this part of the-account is that nowhere in the original texts of the Egyptians are we told that Seth, has 72 companions. We have already been encouraged to equate Osiris with the concept of measured time; his father being Cronos. It is also an observable fact that Cronos-Saturn has the longest sidereal period of the known planets at that time, an orbit. of 30 years. Saturn is absent from a specific constellation for that length of time. A simple mathematical fact has been revealed to any that are even .remotely sensitive to numbers: if you multiply 72 by 30, the years of Sattun's absence (and the mention of Osiris's absence. prompts one to recall this other), the resulting product is 2,160: the number of years required, for one 30° shift, or a shift: through one complete sign of the zodiac. This number multplied by the /Page205 / 12 signs also gives 25,920. (And Plutarch has reminded us of 12) If you multiply the unusual number 72 by 360, a number that Plutarch mentions several times, the 'product will be 25,920, again the number of years symbolizing the ultimate rebirth. This 'Eternal Return' is the return of, say, Taurus to the position of marking the vernal equinox by' 'riding in the solar bark with. Re' after having :relinquished this honouured position to Aries, and subsequently to the to other zodiacal constellations. Such a return ,after 25,920 years is indeed a :revisit to a Golden Age, golden not only because of a remarkable symmetry In the heavens, but golden because it existted before the Egyptians experienced heaven's changeability. But now to inform the reader of a fact he or she may already know. Hipparaus did: not really have the exact figures: he was a With Hipparchus's incorrect figures a 'Great Year' takes from 28,173.9 to 28,800 years, Incorrect by a difference of from 2,397.9 years to 3,024. Since Nicholas Copernicus (AD 1473-1543) has always been credited with giving the correct numbers (although Arabic astronomer Nasir al-Din Tusi,11 born AD 1201, is known to have fixed the Precession at 50°), we may correctly ask, and with justifiable astonishment 'Just whose information was Plutarch transmitting' AN IMPORTANT POSTSCRIPT Of course, using our own notational system, all the important numbers have digits that reduce to that amazing number 9 a number that has always delighted budding mathematician. Page 206 Somewhere along the way, according to Robert Graves, 9 became the number of lunar wisdom.12 This number is found often in the mythologies of the world. the Viking god Odin hung for nine days and nights on the World Tree in order to acquire the secret of the runes, those magic symbols out of which writing and numbers grew. Only a terrible sacrifice would give away this secret, which conveyed upon its owner power and dominion over all, so Odin hung from his neck those long 9 days and nights over the 'bottomless abyss'. In the tree were 9 worlds, and another god was said to have been born of 9 mothers. Robert Graves, in his White Goddess, Is intrigued by the seemingly recurring quality of the number 72 in early myth and ritual. Graves tells his reader that 72 is always connected with the number 5, which reflets, among other things, the five Celtic dialects that he was investigating. Of course, 5 x 72= 360, 360 x 72= 25,920. Five is also the number of the planets known to the ancient world, that is, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus Mercury. Graves suggests a religious mystery bound up with two an cient Celtic 'Tree Alphabets' or cipher alphabets, which as genuine articles of Druidism were orally preserved and transmitted for centuries. He argues convincingly that the ancient poetry of Europe was ultimately based on what its composers believed to be magical principles,the rudiments of which formed a close religious secret for centuries. In time these were-garbled, discredited and forgotten. Among the many signs of the transmission of special n umbers he points out that the aggregate number of letter strokes for the complete 22-letter Ogham alphabet that he is studying isf and that this number is the multiple of 9, 'the number of lunar wisdom'. . . . he then mentions something about 'the seventy day season during which Venus moves successively from. maxium eastern elongation 'to inferior conjunction and mazimum western elongation'.13 Page 207 "...Feniusa Farsa, Graves equates this hero with Dionysus Farsa has 72 assistants who helped him master the 72 languages created at the confusion of Babel, the tower of which is said to be built of 9 different materials We are also reminded of the miraculous translation Into Greek of the Five Books of Moses that was done by 72 scholars working for 72 days, Although .the symbol for the Septuagint is LXX, legend, ,according to the fictional letter of Aristeas, records 72. The translation was done for Ptolemy Philadelphus (c.250 BC), by Hellenistic Jews, possibly from Alexandra.14 Graves did not know why this number was necessary, but he points out that he understands Frazer's Golden Bough to be a a book hinting that 'the secret involves the truth that the Christian dogma, and rituals, are the refinement of a great body of e beliefs, and that the only original element in Christi- is the personality of Christ.15 Frances A. Yates, historian of Renaissance hermetisma tells, us the cabala had 72 angels through which the sephiroth (the powers of God) are believed to be approached, and further, she supplies the information that although the Cabala supplied a set of 48 conclusions purporting to confirm the Christian religion from the foundation of ancient wisdom, Pico Della Mirandola, a Renaissance magus, introduced instead 72, which were his 'own opinion' of the correct number. Yates writes, 'It is no accident there are seventy-two of Pico's Cabalist conclusions, for the conclusion shows that he knew something of the mystery of the Name of God with seventy-two letters.'16 In Hamlet's Mill de Santillarta adds the facts that 432,000 is the number of syllables in the Rig-Veda, which when multiplied by the soss (60) gives 25,920" (The reader is forgiven for a bit of laughter at this point) Thee Bible has not escaped his pursuit. A prominent Assyriologist of the last century insisted that the total of the years recounted Joseph Campbell discerns the secret in the date set for the coming of Patrick to Ireland. Myth-gives this date-as.- the interest- Whatever one may think-of some of these number coincidences, it becomes. difficult to escape the suspicion that many signs (number and otherwise) -indicate that early man observed the results.. of the movement of Precession . and that the-.transmission of this information was .considered of prime importance. 'With the awareness of the phenomenon, observers would certainly have tried for its measure, and such an endeavour would But one last word about mankind's romance with number coincidences.The antagonist in John Updike's novel, Roger's Version, is a computer hacker, who, convinced.,that scientific evidence of God's existence is accumulating, endeavours to prove it by feeding -all the available scientific information. into a comuter. In his search for God 'breaking, through', he has become fascinated by certain numbers that have continually been cropping up. He explains them excitedly as 'the terms of Creation': "...after a while I noticed that all over the sheet there seemed to hit these twenty-fours Jumping out at me. Two four; two,four.Planck time, for instance, divided by the radiation constant yields a figure near eight times ten again to the negative twenty-fourth, and the permittivity of free space, or electric constant, into the Bohr radiusekla almost exactly six times ten to the negative twenty-fourth. On positive side, the electromagnetic line-structure constant times Hubble radius - that is, the size of the universe as we now perceive it gives us something quite close to ten to the twenty-fourth, and the
strong-force constant times the charge on the proton produces two point four times ten to the negative eighteenth, for another I began to cirle twenty-four wherever it appeared on the Printout here' - he held it up. his piece of striped and striped wallpaper, decorated / Page 209 /
with a number of scarlet circles - 'you can see it's more than random.'19 So much for any scorn directed to ancient man's fascination with number coincidences. That fascination is alive and well, Just a bit more incomprehensible. COMPREHENSIBLE
OSIRIS SO IRIS IS
ASTROLOGY A STARRY LOGO I S
SHEM SU HOR ROH US MEHS SHEM HORUS SUROH MEHS
FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS Graham Hancock 1995 Page 409
SHEMSU HOR ROH USMEHS HORUS SHEM MEHS SUROH SHEM HORUS SUROH MEHS SHEMSU HOR ROH USMEHS
VENERABLESOFMEMPHIS VENERABLESOFTHENORTH
SHEMSU HOR The "Hallway Of Records" (HOR) "The Egyptian Language Was Founded On The Hallway Of Records, left by the Shemsu Hor And the pyramid is carbon: 6 electrons, 6 protons, 6 neutrons, the 666/999 game as one and the same [caught by the cubeoctahedral crystal hierarchy], just the head and tail of one snake, the head is light: 9, the tail is dark: 6 etc etc ET-C. http://phoenix.akasha.de/~aton/HOR.html
THE NEW BOOK OF REVELATION INNER LIGHT PUBLICATIONS 1995 COMPILED BY TUELLA THE HOLY 999 Page 32 Part 6 "3. You have finally located in your search the only passage or use of the number 666 in the entire written record. In vain did you search for another, for no other corresponding witness exists any- where. For it is here at this point in the record (Rev. 13:18) that the perversion of this number made entry, calculated and deliberate in its destructive intent. In the (four) references to this subject that follow, the number becomes a mark that is not My Seal. The few references that follow go on to expand the prized lie that it is the "mark of the beast" and even that it appears in the forehead as well as the hand. Once an awareness is born of these interferences and the motive, the entire proposal is clearly exposed. 4. The number 999 is identified as truly of My Kingdom. It represents a Divine number of the Creation of Life itself in this and other Universes. This is a widely known fact in other worlds. It is a code number within the consciousness of many who have come to /Page 32 / this planet to serve the father, and who are actual extensions of myself. To disguise this number as a mark of the fallen ones has diabolically and thoroughly confused the souls of this planet, but it was easily accomplished by another source simply by inverting the number upside down." Page 32 Part 6 "...3. You have finally located in your search the only passage or use of the number 666 in the entire written record. In vain did you search for another, for no other corresponding witness exists anywhere. For it is here at this point in the record (Rev. 13:18)..." 4. The number 999 is identified as truly of My Kingdom. It represents a Divine number of the Creation of Life itself in this and other Universes."
"...but it was easily accomplished by another source simply by inverting the number upside down."
DICTIONARY OF SCIENCE Siegfried Mandel 1969 Page number (omitted) "Appendix 5. Symbols Atomic Numbers, and Atomic Weights of Elements (1947) Dysprosium . Symbol Dy . Atomic Number 66. Atomic Weight of Elements 162.46 Einsteinium. Symbol Es . Atomic Weight 99. Atomic Weight of Elements 253" Alphabetical sequence as presented in book
IN SEARCH OF SCHRODINGER'S CAT John Gribbin 1984 "QUANTUM PHYSICS AND REALITY"
THE FULCANELLI PHENOMENON Kenneth Rayner Johnson 1980 Page 263 "It will be as well to recall here what Fulcanelli's reply was when Bergier asked him what the real nature of alchemy consisted in. He said: 'The secret of alchemy is that there exists a means of manipulating matter and energy so as to create what modern science calls a force-field' This force field acts upon the observer and puts him in a privileged position in relation to the universe. From this privileged position he has access to realities that space and time matter and energy, normally conceal from us. This is what we call the Great Work.' "
I HE HER YOU YOU HER HE I
Freiheit - Keeping The Dream Alive lyrics. From the Original Motion Picture ... In my fantasy I remember their faces The hopes we had were much too high ...
Mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm.
THE HOPES WE HAD WE'RE MUCH TWO HIGH WAY OUT OF REACH BUT WE HAVE TO TRY NO NEED TO HIDE NO NEED TO RUN 'CAUSE ALL THE ANSWERS COME ONE BY ONE THE DAY WILL NEVER BE OVER BECAUSE WE 'RE KEEPING THE DREAM ALIVE
Freiheit - Keeping The Dream Alive "The game will never be over because we're keeping the dream alive" 1988: I was introduced to this fantastic German band ... www.topblogarea.com/sitedetails_1281-3.html www.zshare.net/audio/4468667f61800e/ Congratulations advertisement You are the 999,999th Visitor Congratulations you WON! Date Sunday 20/01/2008 20-52pm
IN SEARCH OF SCHRODINGER'S CAT John Gribbin 1984 "QUANTUM PHYSICS AND REALITY"
THE DAY WILL NEVER BE OVER BECAUSE WE'RE KEEPING THE DREAM ALIVE
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