© Lloyd

THOTH - An Electronic Catastrophics Newsletter
VOL I, No. 1 January 25, 1997

SATURN THEORY OVERVIEW By David Talbott

THE FOLLOWING IS EXCERPTED FROM A SUMMARY-IN-PROGRESS ON A PRIVATE EMAIL GROUP

I - The origins of ancient mythology; the birth of the first civilizations; a violent history of the solar system: these are the primary themes of what has been called the "Saturn Theory."

In the broadest sense, what I have proposed is an explanation of the myth-making epoch as a whole. Astronomers and astrophysicists, historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and students of ancient myth and religion are asked to reconsider the most common assumptions about ancient history, including many that have rarely if ever been doubted.

The underlying principles of the theory are these:

1. Major changes in the planetary order, some involving Earth- threatening catastrophes, have occurred within human memory.

2. Through myth, ritual and symbol around the world, our ancestors preserved a global record of these tumultuous events.

3. The first civilizations arose from ritual practices honoring, imitating and memorializing these events and the planetary powers involved.

It should go without saying that if these principles are correct, there is an extraordinary evidential value to the mythical-cosmological underpinnings of the first civilizations. Hence, the communications challenge: this evidential value is virtually never acknowledged by conventional schools.

Nevertheless, the model I have offered holds one advantage that prior catastrophist notions based on ancient testimony have lacked. It is specific enough to be easily disproved on its own ground if wrong. Whatever else one may think of the thesis, it meets this test of a good theory.

THE POLAR CONFIGURATION

The theory holds that a unique congregation of planets preceded the planetary system familiar to us today. For earthbound witnesses, the result was a spectacular, at times highly unified apparition in the heavens, the obsessive focus of human attention around the world.

For more than 20 years, I have claimed that this fear-inspiring image once stretched across the northern sky, towering over ancient starworshippers. I termed this planetary arrangement the polar configuration because it was centered on the north celestial Pole. And I have proposed that the history of this configuration is the history of the ancient gods, recorded in the fantastic stories, pictographs and ritual reenactments of the first star worshippers.

A vast field of data is therefore available to the investigator. Remarkably similar pictures of a "sun" in the sky, revealing no similarity to our sun today. A pictographic crescent placed on the orb of the "sun" and a radiant "star" placed squarely in its center. The universal chronicles of a cosmic mountain, a pillar of fire and light rising along the world axis. The myth of a central sun or motionless sun at the celestial pole. Identification of this ancient "sun" with the planet Saturn in early astronomies. A radiant city or temple of heaven, providing the prototype for the sacred habitation on earth. Global memories of a star-goddess with long-flowing hair. An angry goddess raging across the sky with wildly disheveled hair, threatening to destroy the world. A flaming serpent or dragon disturbing the celestial motions or attacking the land. An ancestral warrior or hero, born from the womb of the star-goddess to vanquish the chaos-serpent or dragon.

Is it even possible that such diverse motifs could have a unified explanation? Well, one fact remains uncontested after many years of publishing on this subject. The hypothesized planetary configuration does predict or account for hundreds of ancient themes never before explained — and at a level of detail or specificity that could not be denied. Indeed, I have gone so far as to brashly claim that not a single general motif of ancient myth, ritual or symbolism is left unexplained in the most straightforward way by the model. And that's what I mean when I say the model supports a general theory of ancient symbolism as a whole.

It needs to be emphasized, therefore, that the historical argument for the polar configuration is fully testable against a massive historical record. And I would hope that this will provide some assurance to those unnerved by the source material (ancient testimony): if the model is fundamentally incorrect, the experts on ancient myth and symbolism will have no trouble whatsoever refuting it.

[Historical Argument]
Vine Deloria, author of the recently-published book, *Red Earth, White Lies*, has asked a couple of questions which I would like to address. But not in one shot, because the questions are too fundamental for that. I'd like to see if I can divide the issues into segments that could make for useful discussion.

The Saturn theory arose from a "historical argument," in the sense that the argument relates to the human past, as implied by the details of human memory in ancient times and by human artifacts. I shall offer this series of summaries as an exercise in clarifying the historical argument, without the aid of visual presentation.

One obvious and immediate question is whether something as ambiguous as myth could actually qualify as "evidence"? The historical argument focuses on *points of agreement* in the memories of widespread races, suggesting levels of coherence often missed by historians and anthropologists, and raising the possibility that this coherence arises from a core of human experience that has been missed as well.

There is an overarching idea in this argument. We've not only misunderstood the past, we've failed to recognize the consistency of ancient memory in pointing to extraordinary events never considered by modern science. Remarkably, every motive of our early ancestors directs our attention to experiences impossible to comprehend in terms of any natural phenomena occurring today. This consistency will be seen even at the most fundamental levels of human memory, in the most deeply-rooted themes of the first civilizations —

The universal memory of a former age of the gods. The universal memory of an ancestral Golden Age, inaugurating the age of the gods. The universal memory of a celestial "king of the world" whose life inspired the ancestral leap into civilization. Descriptions of the gods as luminaries of immense size and power, wielding weapons of thunder and stone. The universal claim that the ancient world evolved by critical phases or cycles, punctuated by sweeping catastrophe. Global traditions of gods and heroes ruling for a time, then departing amid terrifying spectacles and upheavals. The frequently-stated transfiguration of the departed gods into distant "stars". The identification of these ruling gods with planets in the first astronomies. The relentless urge of starworshippers to draw pictures of celestial forms never seen in our sky. Their desperate yearning to recover the semblance of a lost cosmic order. Their collective efforts to replicate, in architecture, the towering forms claimed to have existed in primeval times. Their festive recreations, through mystery plays and symbolic rites, of cosmic violence and disorder. Their repetition, through ritual sacrifice, of the deaths or ordeals of the gods. Their brutal and ritualistic wars of expansion, celebrated as a repetition of the cosmic devastation wrought in the wars of the gods.

Such motives as these constitute, in fact, the most readily verifiable underpinnings of ancient ritual, myth and symbol. How strange that in their incessant glance backwards, the builders of the first civilizations never remembered anything resembling the natural world in which we live!

What is needed in the face of unusual but widely repeated memories is brutal intellectual honesty. How did human consciousness, emerging from the womb of nature, converge on the same improbable ideas *contradicting* nature? For centuries we've lived under the illusion that our ancestors simply made up explanations of natural phenomena they didn't understand. But that's not the problem. What the myth-makers interpreted or explained through stories and symbols and ritual re-enactments is an unrecognizable world, a world of alien sights and sounds, of celestial forms, of cosmic spectacles and earth-shaking events that do not occur in our world. *That* is the problem.

>From an evaluation of the global themes of ancient cultures, we have hypothesized a world order never imagined by mainstream theory — a world in which *planets* moved on different courses, appearing huge in the sky. Heaven-spanning celestial forms dominated human imagination to the point of obsession at the time of civilization's birth.

Our contention will be that hundreds of ancient themes speak for a unified experience, an experience more specific in context and detail than any of us had ever imagined when we started our research. No universal theme stands alone or in isolation from any of the others. All are connected. All speak for the presence of a coherent memory beneath the surface of seemingly random detail.

In offering these summaries, I am not asking or expecting anyone to embrace the extraordinary theory of planetary history involved, only to consider highly interesting evidence. One of the values of this re-interpretation of evidence is that the model *works*. It explains the subject matter. Even if you do not for an instant believe that the suggested events occurred, merely discovering the active memory will throw remarkable new light on the ancient structures of human consciousness.

In the course of these summaries, questions and challenges will be welcome, and wherever possible I will try to incorporate these into the narrative as we go along.

Dave

__VOL I, No. 2 February 5, 1997

SATURN THEORY, OVERVIEW (2) By David Talbott

Vine Deloria, one of the most enjoyable speakers I've ever had the pleasure of listening to, has provided a catalyst here. I'd like to respond in discrete steps, to avoid getting ahead of myself.

> As to myth interpretation — if we have some scenario that suggests > unusual physical activities and then find in so-called myths FACTS > that must connect to the storyline we are in good shape. I think > basically that is what Talbott is doing. I only wish it was clearer.

Vine is certainly not the only one. But there's a dilemma here. Unlike many competing catastrophist models, the "Saturn theory" involves explicit pictures showing *exactly* what we are proposing the ancients saw. And the claimed celestial images relate specifically to the positions of *planets* in the sky, planets that are *named*. Moreover, the proposed celestial forms behave in an incredibly precise way. Hence, this behavior can be tested against all domains of evidence globally.

A picture of one phase in the hypothesized planetary configuration is shown on the Kronia Communications website. [See listing of websites at the end of this newsletter.] The claimed celestial form is very specific, as I'm sure all will agree.

Readers of this submission who are unaware of the proposed collinear planetary arrangement are referred to either the video documentary, "Remembering the End of the World," or the first overview article in AEON: A Journal of Myth and Science (IV:3).

But there is also an issue of methodology. How can we prove something we are claiming was remembered and celebrated above all else around the world? In the methodology I am suggesting, nothing counts as ground floor evidence except *points of agreement* between widely disbursed cultures. To follow this methodology religiously is to have — well, a religious experience. Suddenly, it becomes crystal clear that ancient races really *did* remember things which, under the spell of the now-uneventful solar system, we have forgotten.

I listed several fundamental and universal principles in my first submission. But it occurs to me that, in working from the general to the specific, I did not start at the *most* elementary level. For example, Vine asked the question, How many mythical themes are there? Well, it all depends. At one level — the most fundamental level of all — there is only one story, told with a thousand symbols.

Here is rough paraphrase of "THE ONE STORY TOLD AROUND THE WORLD."

Once the world was quite a different place. In the beginning, we were ruled by the central luminary of the sky, the motionless sun, presiding over an age of natural abundance and cosmic harmony. Creator-king, father of kings, founder of the kingship rites. And this earliest remembered time was the *exemplary* epoch, the Golden Age, the standard for all later generations.

But the ancient order was disrupted and the entire cosmos fell into confusion, when the Universal Monarch tumbled from his appointed station. Then the hordes of chaos were set loose and all of creation slipped into a cosmic night, the gods themselves battling furiously in the heavens.

And yet, from this descent into chaos, a new world emerged, now re-configured, but with the Universal Monarch himself, rejuvenated and transformed, assuming his rightful place in the heavens.

THE END

Is it really possible that this *one story* — a story so pristine and elementary — was remembered around the world? Is it really possible that all of the recurring storylines of world mythology are only a part of this singular story? Yes, I will swear by this. In fact I am eager for a challenge to this sweeping and seemingly outrageous statement. (A challenge will often help me to clarify such statements, in a context of interest to the one issuing the challenge.)

But remember: I DID NOT SAY THAT I GAVE YOU THE WHOLE STORY. For example, I did not mention the mother goddess, and I did not mention the ancestral warrior-hero. Both are inseparabl[y] linked to this one story. But we're going for simplicity here.

Now let's go back to the most pervasive motivations of early civilizations, a topic I noted in my earlier submission. Is it possible to reduce the cited motives of ancient cultures to more elementary principles, without falling into the reductionist fallacy? I think it is, indeed, possible. There is a singular principle, for example, that is beyond dispute: the builders of the first civilizations were incessantly looking backwards. In the first expressions of civilization, human imagination was dominated entirely by *things remembered*.

Moreover, two contradictory impulses will be discerned in this alignment to the past, and neither will make any sense in terms of conventional assumptions about human history. One impulse is nostalgia, a yearning for something remembered above all else, but lost. The second impulse is terror: the pervasive, ever-present fear that something terrible that happened in the past will happen again. No civilization in the ancient world failed to express these contrasting motives, reflected in monument-building, commemorative rites, hymns and prayers to the gods, kingship rites, ritual sacrifice, and holy war.

How is this to be explained? One possibility has been consistently overlooked by the specialists — the possibility that celestial events of an unimaginable scale cast their shadow over all of civilization.

But why do nostalgia and terror exist side by side in such a paradoxical relationship? A comparative approach will show that this is no accident, that a unified memory lies behind both of the expressions — the memory of an ancient "paradisal" condition, the mythical "Golden Age," giving way to overwhelming catastrophe, universal darkness, cosmic tumult, and wars of the gods.

Look at the deepest yearning of civilization's builders, and you will see the yearning for paradise, a desperate longing to recover the lost Golden Age. For the Egyptians this was the revered Golden Age of Ra, and for the ancient Sumerians it was the Golden Age of An — a theme reverberating around the world.

But now look at the deepest fears of the same peoples, and you will see the Doomsday anxiety, the terror of the great catastrophe. This is not an isolated memory, but a memory inseparably linked to the theme of the ancestral paradise. The remembered events were not just catastrophic; they were the events that brought the Golden Age to an end, when the sky was overrun by chaos.

Two seemingly incompatible motives trace to a common experience, and both bring us back to the ONE STORY TOLD AROUND THE WORLD. Hence, the implication cannot be avoided. Something extraordinary was remembered by the first skywatchers, something profound and yet unexplained.

__VOL I, No. 3 February 18, 1997

SATURN THEORY, OVERVIEW (3) By David Talbott

In the course of these submissions, I'll attempt to engage various comments by others, trying to maintain a sense of direction at the same time.

In response to my previous notes, Vine Deloria wrote —

> OK - then all we need is to establish the various sequences of > interaction with earth and try to get some dates down - even > approximations - and some idea of the disruption of our strata >here plus whatever was "dumped" from the other planets and we >have something to work with. > >We can now ... ask the question - how did human society and/or > civilizations get off the ground ... , etc

Chronology. Physical Evidence. Dynamics. All of these issues intertwine. Moreover, various individuals exploring catastrophist ideas will work from different perspectives, and will hold different ideas as to what constitutes the most solid ground for a starting point.

The solid ground in my own orientation to these things is the substratum of human memory. It is this substratum that raises the deepest historical questions and sends us scurrying about to find answers, even if the answers upset various specialists, asking them to reconsider the most fundamental assumptions of their discipline. My own conclusion came as a great surprise: the substratum of human memory is incredibly dependable. But others would consider that to be a losing proposition out of the gate. So there's an immediate problem of communication here.

(A definition just to avoid misunderstanding: By the "substratum of human memory" I don't mean Jungian collective memory, though Jungian archetypes may indeed come into the equation in the bigger picture. For now, I mean the common mythical, symbolic and ritual themes of widely separate cultures. Another way of putting it might be, "Points of agreement concerning remembered events.")

In this inquiry, I think there are certain things we can all agree on. Truth is unifying, because it eliminates contradictions. When you are looking for the truth of a matter, any significant and incontrovertible fact is good news, because it can save you from heading in the wrong direction. It's particularly good news if it compels you to change your mind, because in doing so it has liberated you from a burden that could only grow. When it comes to the more fundamental errors, a whole life time could be spent on a dead-end course.

Physical data and physical theory will be involved — and implicated — at every step. Whatever happened is not impossible. What is impossible didn't happen. There will be no unified theory in the sense we are all looking for, until what was remembered can be comprehended. Not just comprehended as a set of anciently-supported images, but comprehended in terms of what is possible, and in terms of the physical signature of the events involved.

But before I wander off, let's return to THE ONE STORY TOLD AROUND THE WORLD. Since we are claiming this to be one memory reflected in the myth-making adventure as a whole, I had better republish the story. (Already my second printing. It's not long, you will recall):

Once the world was quite a different place. In the beginning, we were ruled by the central luminary of the sky, the motionless sun, presiding over an age of natural abundance and cosmic harmony. *Creator*-king, father of kings, founder of the kingship rites. And this earliest remembered time was the *exemplary* epoch, the Golden Age, the standard for all later generations.

But the ancient order was disrupted and the entire cosmos fell into confusion, when the Universal Monarch tumbled from his appointed station. Then the hordes of chaos were set loose and all of creation slipped into a cosmic night, the gods themselves battling furiously in the heavens.

And yet, from this descent into chaos, a new world emerged, now re-configured, but with the Universal Monarch himself, rejuvenated and transformed, assuming his rightful place in the heavens.

THE END

What an outrageous claim to make — to suggest that there are no domains of ancient myth that can be isolated from this singular story! But I am not just arguing by proclamation here. I am contending that the truth can be demonstrated by following certain rules. Call these the RULES FOR RE-ENVISIONING HUMAN HISTORY. Our first rule is: we will always work from the general motif to the specific. A second is: only broadly recurring themes count as evidence, particularly in the early stages of the reconstruction. And there is a third rule: Earlier-recorded versions of the recurring themes must be permitted to explain later variants.

Okay, just one more rule: we must allow ancient drawings to illuminate the myths and rites, while permitting the myths and rites to illuminate the drawings. This last rule is crucial because, around the world, ancient skygazers drew remarkably similar pictures of things that do not exist in our sky. And the things depicted are the *subjects* of the myths and rites, though this vital truth has not been generally recognized, either by catastrophists or by mainstream scholars.

Now let's take the ONE STORY a step further, in response to Vine's question: how many archetypal figures of myth are there? There are SEVEN, I say with smug assurance.

Well there *are* just seven! But it all depends how you count these guys (and gals).

For openers, we know there is at least one archetypal figure, because he is the god whose ancient name was "ONE", the primeval, all-encompassing "Unity". This figure is, of course, the Universal Monarch, the subject of our ONE STORY (So our ONE STORY might be subtitled the "The Story of ONE'"). Examples would include: Egyptian Atum and Ra, Sumerian An and Utu, Akkadian Anu and Shamash, Hindu Varuna and Brahma, Greek Ouranos and Kronos, Aztec Ometeotl and Quetzalcoatl, to name a few.

Our claim is that all other[] stories, all other archetypal figures, when investigated at the core, lead back to the ONE STORY, intersecting with this story in the most remarkable and explicit ways.

Here are the other figures:

QUEEN OF HEAVEN

Wherever you find the Universal Monarch you will find close at hand the ancient mother goddess — the goddess whom the Sumerians called Inanna, the Queen of Heaven, and the Babylonians Ishtar, and the Egyptians Isis, Hathor, and Sekhmet, each with numerous counterparts in their own and in other lands, and virtually all of them viewed symbolically as daughter or spouse of the creator-king, and the mother of another, equally prominent figure.

WARRIOR-HERO

This is the great national hero, originally the Demiurge, the servant of the creator-king, but passing into later myth as the laboring warrior, messenger or servant of a great chief or regional ruler. He is the Hercules archetype, a figure combining knowledge and brutish strength, quick wit and episodic foolishness. He defeats the chaos monsters in primordial times, and he reconfigures the world. With a personality clearly dominating the later mythical chronicles, the warrior-hero is the prototype of the famous tricksters and buffoons of later myth and folklore, flowering into thousands of tribal variations. Egyptian Shu, Horus and Sept [Set?], Akkadian Nergal, Hindu Indra, Norse Thor, Greek Ares and Hercules, Aztec Huitzilopochtli. Also, in North America: Coyote and Raven. But countless others as well, because the warrior-hero is far and away the most active figure in the myths.

PRIMEVAL SEVEN

These satellite figures are presented in a variety of contexts, as wise men, patriarchs, seers, children, dwarves, stones of fate, stars, orbs, heads of the chaos monster. They are the first reason for the sanctity of the number seven in ancient symbolism.

CHAOS MONSTER

Here we meet the darker, more menacing powers, possessing an often-hidden link to aspects of the mother goddess or warrior-hero type. Of these darker creatures none is more prominent than the cosmic serpent or dragon, a monster that descends on the world to preside over the twilight of the gods, and whose ultimate defeat signals the birth of a new age or, symbolically, a new year. Babylonian Tiamat. Egyptian dragon of Apep. Greek Typhon. But within every culture, endless variations will be found: hundreds of monsters repeating the primeval catastrophe, each providing a different nuance, a different accent, a different way of remembering the cosmic agent of Doomsday.

CHAOS HORDES

These are the companions of the monster figures. They are the swarming powers of disorder and calamity, the fiends of darkness — flaming, devouring demons which so many magical rites were contrived to ward off. From the Norse Valkyries to the Greek Erinyes, from the Babylonian Pazuzu-demons to the Egyptian "Fiends of Set." Every culture remembered the onslaught of these chaos demons, moving across the heavens as a sky-darkening cloud and ushering in the cosmic night. In their earliest expressions, they do not just announce the primeval catastrophe, they *are* the catastrophe.

REJUVENATED CREATOR-KING

And lastly, there is the compelling personality of the dying god-king, often a resurrected or transformed figure, whose springing back to life is reflected in the dramas of the New Year, symbolically the passing from one age to another. Though his identity is inseparably tied to the Universal Monarch, he nevertheless emerges in distinction from that god as his *son* — the younger version, or *rejuvenated* form of his own father. Examples would include: Egyptian Osiris, Akkadian Marduk; Persian Ahura Mazda; Norse Balder; Hebrew Yahweh; Phoenician Bel, Greek Zeus.

So there are just seven archetypal personalities of myth, if you count them in this way. We are not separating the chaos monster into it's male and female aspects, so we count only one monster. We *are* separating the Universal Monarch into his elder and younger versions, however.

We arrive, therefore, at our first critical juncture. An acid test. Can a mere seven categories actually encompass all of world mythology?

While there are numerous complexities and ambiguities to slow us down periodically, the vast majority of well-documented regional figures of myth can be readily identified in terms of these archetypes. And the implications are quite astounding if you set this principle beside the different theories offered to explain myth in the past. NOT A SINGLE THEORY PROPOSED, BEFORE VELIKOVSKY OPENED THE DOOR, WILL ACCOUNT FOR THE ARCHETYPES, THE BEDROCK OF MYTH.

But the implications become all the more astounding when you begin to see that each of the archetypal figures is linked in no uncertain terms to the ONE STORY. (I'll give some key examples in the next few submissions.) A *universal structure* to ancient memory is present. The six additional biographies re-tell the "story of ONE", but each with a slight turn of the prism, putting the focus on a particular aspect of the story and providing more colorful action and detail. What an amazing principle, if true.

Of all the skills that the independent researcher might bring to this inquiry, none will prove more crucial than that of pattern recognition. There is structure to myth. Structure that has never been sufficiently acknowledged. Structure implies coherence, an integrity between the parts. Clearly human imagination must have gone wild to have produced the incredible vistas of the ancient mythscape. But structure is there too, and structure means that human imagination was not operating in a vacuum. What could have unleashed human imagination in this way, while yet inspiring a universal myth? Nothing less than the most awesome and traumatic experiences in human history, I would say.

Dave

AGE LIMITS OF THE EARTH'S BIOSPHERE By Dr. Robert W. Bass (rbrtbass at ix.netcom.com)

[] In December, 1993, Cook put out a 15-page privately-printed paper which summarizes the main findings (especially the main NOVEL findings in comparison to PEM) of his new book.

[] Cook has chapters on ALL of the radiometric dating methods, and in my opinion, demolishes them all. He also computes that IF the cosmic rays are in "nuclear thermodynamic equilibrium" (NTE) then the Solar System and Earth are about 4.5 billion years old.

However, the surface features of the Earth cannot possibly be more than 100,000 years old for many reasons. For example (& the Editor of "Nature" admitted that this is the biggest anomaly which ever crossed his desk) the radiogenic helium escaping from the Earth's crust at a known rate and escaping into outer space at a known rate "prove" that the present atmosphere cannot be more than 100,000 years old.

See "Where is the earth's radiogenic helium?," _Nature_, vol. 177 (1957), p. 215.

Also, radiocarbon is being produced in the stratosphere at a rate TWENTY FIVE PERCENT discrepant with its well-measured absorption into the hydrosphere, lithosphere & biosphere; Cook once showed me correspondence that he had with Willard Libby over 25 years wherein Libby finally admitted he was wrong, the discrepancy is REAL and cannot be ignored. The deduction is that the Earth's atmosphere cannot be more than 30,000 years old, else it would have attained equilibrium already, which it has NOT! In Cook's view, the radiocarbon balance in the earth's atmosphere has attained 73 percent of its equilibrium value in the approximately 5,000 years "since the Flood."

In his latest unpublished paper Cook is providing evidence for a theory that the Flood resulted from a combination of his ice-cap model tipping the Earth or its crust as a result of certain Asteroid impacts which he thinks he has pinpointed. [this statement is made on Cook's verbal summary to me, and may be inaccurate]

Physicist Dr. Larry Vardiman has jumped onto the helium-escape problem, and written a 32-page mathematical paper — THE AGE OF THE EARTH'S ATMOSPHERE: a Study of the Helium Flux through the Atmosphere, 1990 — in which he reviews in detail dozens of mainstream attempts to explain away the anomaly, and satisfied me (as a professional mathematician who checked his differential equations) that they have failed, and that the present atmosphere could have been produced in at most 2 million years. (This of course is 2,500 TIMES shorter than the uniformitarian age of the earth.) He quotes mainstream experts as admitting that "this helium escape problem will not go away, and it is unsolved." []

Bob

__VOL I, No. 4 March 2, 1997

SATURN THEORY, OVERVIEW (3) By David Talbott

In seeking out the roots of ancient experience, one will continually face an issue concerning the use of ancient testimony as evidence. How can the disparate threads of memory, expressed in seemingly contradictory symbols, through stories that are often barely intelligible, and in archaic words of uncertain meaning, ever provide a dependable guide for reconstructing cosmic events?

The first essential is to expose the *substratum* of memory, and this can only be accomplished by limiting what counts as evidence. Only broadly-repeated themes are to be included in the early phases of the inquiry, and only the clearest facts, or undisputed principles, qualify as building blocks in the reconstruction.

When I speak of the "historical argument" for the Saturn theory, I am referring to all sources of evidence suggesting *things remembered*. Before the Egyptians, Sumerians, Hindus, or Greeks ever raised a temple, they would consciously and deliberately look backwards to a remembered event. The foundation ceremonies would *reenact* an archetypal occasion in the lives of the gods — the construction of a vast dwelling in primeval times, a "temple" brought forth by the Universal Monarch, a temple "floating on the clouds." Similarly, when the warrior-kings of Egypt and Assyria and numerous other lands launched their campaigns against neighboring peoples, they summoned memories of cosmic catastrophe, when the gods themselves battled in the heavens. Symbolically, foreign armies meant "the fiends of darkness," and were to be dealt with accordingly. The warrior-kings saw themselves defeating neighboring forces in the same way that, in primeval times, the great gods devastated and controlled the Chaos Hordes, when these dark powers overwhelmed the cosmic order.

It is a remarkable fact that the builders of civilization declared, with one voice, that the first cities and first kingdoms organized in the ancient world, the first pictographs drawn on rock or on temple walls, the vast complexes of sacred festivals and rites, had their prototypes in dramatic events occurring in the age of the gods. Ancient art and architecture, hymns and prayers, the origins of writing, the rise of kingship, nationalistic wars of expansion, ritual sacrifice, the first athletic competition, the roots of drama, tragedy, and comedy — and all other forms of collective activity associated with the flowering of civilization — were commemorative in nature, remembering, re-enacting, re-living, and honoring above all else the archetypal events, when the gods themselves ruled the world. Such an idea may seem incomprehensible to us, but there is no escaping the festive and commemorative aspects of emerging civilizations, all pointing *backwards* to remembered events.

Hence, the field of evidence we must draw upon includes literally every feature distinguishing these civilizations from the prior, more pastoral epoch of human history. That is a huge library of evidence!

Moreover, there is a taproot feeding the explosive, upward movement of the first civilizations. That taproot is the ONE STORY TOLD AROUND THE WORLD. Every recurring cultural theme, in truth, is linked in the most explicit ways to this global memory. But don't forget that the memory is at once pristinely simple and highly complex, depending on which level you are looking at. To the figure of the Universal Monarch, the subject of the ONE STORY, I added six additional archetypal figures of myth, brashly asserting that these personalities all intersect with the ONE STORY in highly specific ways, and claiming that the myth-making epoch has not presented us with any other elementary types. If true, this will mean that the pervasive motives of the first civilizations, cited above, must bear a direct relationship to the *remembered activities* of the seven archetypal figures. Hence, this is a testable hypothesis. If it is incorrect, it can and will be easily disproved under the groundrules we have proposed.

This leaves two other issues relating to the foundations of a theory. What are the relationships of these root personalities to *planets*? And what is their relationship to the illustration presented on the Kronia website as a starting point for this discussion? It needs to be emphasized that the planetary identifications suggested here did not fall off the wall. They are the result of a patient reconstruction of ancient astronomical traditions over many years. Portions of the material have already been published either in *The Saturn Myth*, or in AEON articles.

So let's go back to the beginning. But to do so I must refer readers to the illustration (see the Kronia website directory under of the "Saturn Theory).

The Universal Monarch, the true subject of the ONE STORY, is the planet Saturn. In the illustration, this is the large sphere visually dominating the sky from its fixed position at the celetstial pole.

The Mother Goddess is the planet Venus, the luminous, central orb seen squarely in the center of Saturn and from which radiating streams of material course outward.

The Warrior-Hero is the planet Mars, the small red orb seen inside the sphere of Venus.

Our subject, in other words, is a *collinear* configuration of planets, with each planet stationed at its own equilibrium position, and all sharing the same period of revolution.

The Primeval Seven, though not shown in the oversimplified illustration, should be considered as seven smaller orbs revolving in the vicinity of Saturn.

The Chaos Monster denotes the interacting forms of Mars and Venus in periods of instability or cosmic *disorder*, as gas and dust (or other material) stretched between planets, giving shape to the evolving forms of the monster in different phases of the configuration.

The Chaos Hordes mean the material stretching between planets. Hence, they constitute both the retinue and the *form* of the Chaos Monster.

(This latter identification is complicated by the fact that, in the illustrated phase, the material is not chaotic. Whatever this stuff is, it moves in the vicinity of the participating planets, with a complex (stable and unstable) history going far, far beyond the illustrated phase.)

The Rejuvenated Creator-King is the planet Jupiter, not visible in the illustrated phase because it was hidden behind Saturn, but becoming visible with the disruption of the collinear system.

But what is the most efficient way to clarify and to test the hypothesis as a whole? The only way to prove a theory is to demonstrate its explanatory power. And what I believe we can demonstrate through rigorous testing is that the Saturn theory does indeed account for, or predict, the recurring themes of myth, ritual, and symbol, down to hundreds of extraordinary details. This testing procedure will show that there was a *myth-making* epoch, involving a natural environment and intense human experiences unlike anything known in our own time.

We can achieve this testing by simply granting the hypothesized condition, then asking if that condition leaves any aspect of a particular theme unexplained. Then we can go to the next theme, then another, until we have explored every general theme of myth (if our endurance holds up that long). This kind of testing can be very explicit and will remove subjective interpretation and selective use of evidence altogether, because only acknowledged or indisputable, broadly recurring themes count as evidence, and once the question is asked, the answers will tend to be self-evident. We need interpret nothing for the skeptic, simply note the acknowledged themes so that he can determine for himself whether the predictive ability is as complete as we have claimed.

Let me explain what I mean by this. While the theory suggests events never entertained by modern science, no one would dispute that *if* Saturn hung immense in the sky, the identity of Saturn as the dominant luminary or "sun" god in most ancient times is explained. *If* the gas giant did indeed occupy the summit of the world axis, there can be no surprise in finding that diverse traditions actually placed the ancient Saturn at this astronomically absurd location. And no one would dispute that *if* Venus formerly appeared as a radiant "star" in the center of Saturn, the worldwide "sun" pictographs depicting precisely this relationship are explained.

Similarly, no one would deny that *if* light from the solar orb placed a crescent on Saturn, the enigmatic crescent wrapped around the ancient, Saturnian "sun" god is explained. And how could anyone claim that, *if* a collinear planetary system once towered above ancient stargazers, the mystery of the Great Conjunction of Saturn's Golden Age would remain unsolved?

Through a comprehensive testing process of this sort, I believe it can be made clear that the Saturn theory does, in fact, achieve what could not be achieved by a fundamentally incorrect hypothesis. Successful predictions in one or another case will never validate such an usual theory. But the ability to predict *all* of the global themes of the myth-making age — and all of the indisputable, concretely-defined relationships *between* these forms — could not be an accident.

Dave Talbott