© Lloyd

__VOL II, No. 6 March 31, 1998

ON THE RELIABILITY OF HUMAN WITNESSES By David Talbott

In THOTH II:5, Amy Acheson wrote: "But will we cultivate the necessary discipline to find the EVENT which first gave meaning to the symbols?"

Finding the event behind archaic symbols is indeed the challenge. Could any lines of reasoning be dependable, when the "evidence" includes such enigmatic sources as myth, magical rites, and cultic symbols? Many specialists in the hard sciences will find abhorrent our claim that myth points to unusual natural events. And particularly objectionable to them will be our insistence that, under certain circumstances, human memories can give us considerable detail about events unknown to science (Of course the limitations of scientific knowledge come into the equation as well.)

When reports by more than one person imply a shared experience, issues of logic and probability arise. We deal with such issues all the time in judicial proceedings — and in fact we do not hesitate to send someone to the electric chair based on the memories of three people. But the principles for assessing testimony are generally ignored when it comes to the patterns of ancient memory.

Rules of evidence need to be clarified, and perhaps we can work upward from a couple of simple examples. The first question is whether the occurrence of contradictory versions of an underlying story excludes the possibility of a reliable reconstruction. On this issue, common opinion is almost never correct. There are rules for finding reliable testimony in a sea of contradictions.

Imagine an experiment involving a dozen groups with a dozen members in each group and no communication permitted between the groups. From each group, one individual is allowed to witness a newly-written play, then asked to convey the story verbally to another individual in his group, recalling as much detail as possible. The second individual then reports to the third, and so on until the story reaches the last person in each group, who will then report the story to you.

>From this exercise you would likely receive many different ways of telling the story, with many contradictions between versions. But to come as close to the original as possible you would give greatest weight to those story elements retained in several accounts. And despite horrendous errors in transmission within various groups, if you follow this simple principle, your reconstruction will be generally reliable. Even if it lacks the full texture of the original, you can be confident in the basic structure.

To see why comparison of accounts can produce a reliable reconstruction, you only have to recognize what a mistake in transmission will do to a remembered event or story It will introduce a contradiction to the way the story is told by others. It is typically much easier to make mistakes than to make the SAME mistakes others have made. So in the cross-referencing of stories, the first key is to follow the points of agreement.

More significantly, there is a common paradox which even the experts in comparative study frequently ignore. One might think that when two groups share an improbable story element, it becomes more likely that the two groups made the same error of transmission. But actually the reverse is true. The more unusual or bizarre the points of agreement, the more likely it is that they speak for the original story. Here's why: it's much easier to make a mistake on matters of routine background, than on unexpected or startling detail. How many chairs were in the room when the protagonist died? Well, there were five, but who was counting? Here, not just mistakes, but similar mistakes would be predictable. Consider, however, that when the protagonist died, a dove leapt from his chest and flew away. The recurrence of that particular element in just three of the accounts will create a virtual certainty that the motif was part of the original story, even in the unlikely event that the nine other accounts failed to mention it. Short of cross contamination of our storytelling groups, it is simply too dramatic and too unusual to have been injected into the story by more than one storyteller, either through a mistake or through deliberate deception.

Now these principles are extremely relevant to the cross-cultural comparison of human memories. But there is still much more to consider here. It is often noted that human witnesses are notoriously unreliable. In judicial proceedings this unreliability is properly noted — and demonstrated — all the time. But commonly overlooked is a further consideration. In certain circumstances the accounts of UNRELIABLE witness can produce ABSOLUTELY RELIABLE conclusions.

To make this point I have concocted an episode called "The Unfortunate Peter Smith" —

On Tuesday morning, a man robbed the bank down the street, escaping with about $12,000. When the police arrived they faced a dilemma. The man was seen rushing from the bank toward a blue Honda, jumping in, and speeding off. But the car was too far away for anyone to catch the license plate.

Inside the bank, the police found only three witnesses, and as it turned out all were highly unreliable. One had a history of lying relentlessly. Another was a schizophrenic, often hallucinating. And the third was dyslexic.

Immediately on their arrival, the police had separated the witnesses and interviewed them. There seemed to be general agreement that the robber was wearing a ski mask, a black leather jacket, and blue jeans. But there were more discrepancies than points of agreement. This was partly because the known liar freely made up details as he answered police questions, the schizophrenic described things seen by no one else, and the dyslexic could not even get the name of the bank right.

Nevertheless, when the police compared notes they immediately sent out a bulletin, and it wasn't long before a fellow officer stopped a blue Honda, driven by a man named Peter Smith. When the officer looked inside the car, he did not see a ski mask, and he did not see any money. But the moment he observed the driver, he made an arrest. And he was certain he had nabbed the robber.

How did he know?

His confidence came from certain details the police had noted in their interviews with the witnesses. While much of what the congenital liar reported was self-serving and almost certainly invented, one thing he had said was most unusual, and was remembered by the police interviewer. He had laughed about the robber wearing two different running shoes. On his left foot he was wearing a Nike, and on his right foot he was wearing an Adidas, the man said. The second witness said nothing about the shoes, and seems to have heard strange voices and seen things reported by no one else. But he did mention that when the robber started to leave the bank, several bills fell from the paper bag, which the robber bent down to pick up. That was when the witness noticed that the tag on his tee-shirt was on the outside; his shirt was inside out. He could even read the label. The third witness, the dyslexic, also had noticed the tag up close, but said he couldn't read it. Additionally, he reported the robber wearing two different running shoes — a Kine and a Daddies.

So the police drew a conclusion — formulated a "prediction," if you will — that the bank robber was driving a blue Honda, wearing two different running shoes and a shirt inside out. And when they found Peter Smith, they had every reason to be confident. Short of a conspiracy to deceive them, this WAS the robber, beyond a shadow of a doubt. THE WITNESSES DO NOT EVEN HAVE TO BE DEPENDABLE!

In this example the confidence of the police relates directly to THINGS OUT OF PLACE. A liar, a schizophrenic, and a dyslexic may create havoc in their contradictory accounts, and yet the force of agreement on highly unusual details is far greater than the burden of contradictions. In fact, the convergence of testimony on the two cited details is simply inconceivable — astronomically improbable — unless Peter Smith was the robber. The police would not need DNA tests, lie detector tests, fingerprints, or any other wonders of modern science and technology to draw a reliable conclusion.

So the moral of this story is that in certain situations a simple comparison of human testimony can achieve exceptional reliability, even though the witnesses are not inherently trustworthy.

And how does all of this apply to the patterns of more ancient human memory — those distinctive, archetypal complexes referring us back to the mythical age of the gods? In this series of explorations we will illustrate the following principles —

1) Cultures around the world, using quite different words and symbols, describe remarkably similar experiences;

2) These points of agreement consistently include unique, but well-defined forms in the sky;

3) The recurring forms have no relationship to things seen in our sky, or to any natural experience today;

4) Granting the presence of these extraordinary forms will make possible a unified explanation of myth, removing hundreds of contradictions and anomalies left unexplained by prior theories of myth.

In seeking to reconstruct ancient memories through cross-cultural comparison, we will discover a substructure of remarkable depth and coherence. The power of human memory is incomparably greater than scholars have typically assumed.

__VOL II, No. 7 April 15, 1998

THE LOGIC OF HISTORICAL EVIDENCE David Talbott

In my previous article I noted that "in certain situations a simple comparison of human testimony can achieve exceptional reliability, even though the witnesses are not inherently trustworthy." Though the principle is not generally acknowledged, it can easily be verified through an example such as that of "The Unfortunate Peter Smith," presented in that article.

With respect to the use of evidence based on human testimony, I recently received the following comment from Maurice Gilroy:

> I believe that if you want to claim that you are going to provide a scientific explanation of past events, your explanation must be a "bottom up" one, not "top down." Your explanation must be evolutionary in the sense that it must start with sound physics, and proceed up through whatever chemistry, biology, psychology, and sociology is necessary to explain the mythic description. To make Greek rationalist judgments about Oriental myths, and then try to figure out some plausible chemistry and physics, is working "top down," (and backwards). This may be necessary in the very early "searching for some logical explanation" phase. However, if sound physics will not support some appealing vision of the past, then that vision is in some way flawed. This appears to be the status of Velikovsky's and Dave's visions of biblical and mythic events. This judgment may seem arrogant to someone with a humanistic background, but the foundation of science is the physics and planetary geology that make the carbon chemistry of biology possible. I am convinced that there is no sound physics that will support the Velikovskian of Saturnist vision of ancient catastrophes.

To Mr. Gilroy's credit, his posture has been one of complete fairness and open-mindedness. So I am happy to include him in our "Critic's Corner", in the hope of stimulating constructive discussion.

Also, in fairness to Mr. Gilroy, I must mention that he proceeds to outline several objections to the Saturnian model based on physical considerations. These objections are, in fact, those we most frequently encounter, and there is no likelihood of our gaining broad support from the scientific community unless the challenges are fully addressed. Though various parties working on physical models HAVE addressed Mr. Gilroy's objections at one time or another, a unified model has yet to be proposed. Certain vital principles, however, have been illuminated, including that of collinear equilibrium and tidal friction, balanced by the more far-reaching electrical considerations overlooked in conventional models of planetary history.

It should go without saying that an immense amount of work on models is needed. And the compelling reason for proceeding is a vast field of evidence which science has ignored. Neither the recent history of our Earth, nor the geological history of our planetary neighbors, nor the cultural history of humankind will be comprehended until we confront the great celestial spectacles witnessed by our ancestors. And that investigation will require much more than the usual scant attention to methodology. Because these spectacles involved well-defined forms in the sky, it is essential that critical principles of reasoning be appreciated.

Nothing is more fundamental to the reconsideration of planetary history than a rigorously-developed comparative approach to human testimony. For many years I have continually looked for the clearest ways to convey the reasoning process without which the extraordinary value of ancient testimony will not be recognized. But always I have found myself returning to a bedrock principle. In any theoretical exploration involving a new hypothesis, one question must be asked relentlessly.

IF THE HYPOTHESIS IS CORRECT, WHAT SHOULD WE EXPECT TO FIND?

That question is at the heart of the scientific method, whatever the field of inquiry. And the investigation must address the entire range of data bearing on the answer.

When it comes to our own subject - ancient planetary catastrophe - excluding the value of human testimony would be a potentially fatal mistake, since, in advance of an investigation, it is impossible to know which sources of data will provide the most telling insights. To see why this is the case, just imagine how researchers might reconstruct ancient events if huge planetary forms DID once hang above the world, fueling veneration, terror, and an explosion of human imagination. If such planetary drama did occur, and included catastrophic interactions of the planets, how much do you think that the planets today could tell us about what the ancient SAW, or about the specific sequence of events? Whatever the nature of the catastrophes, we would certainly expect to find scars and telltale indicators of past upheaval on the planets. But it would be absurd to deny in advance the potential for vastly more specific details from those who witnessed the events. And we would quickly see the absolute necessity of honing our investigative skills and critical judgment in order to gain the full value of that testimony.

It is not a matter of taking myths or symbols or ritual practices LITERALLY, of course. It is a matter of analyzing worldwide patterns, to see if they point to a coherent experience, one that could only be explained by the presence of certain external forms or globally-experienced events. For example, the flaming, long-haired or feathered celestial serpent is a global mythical image. Its power over human imagination was immense, but it was clearly a PRODUCT of human imagination as well. So the investigation must rely on principles of logic and probability. On every habitable continent stargazers celebrated a remarkably similar, biologically absurd monster. Is it reasonable to assume that imagination, even though working in a vacuum, continually hit upon the same highly specific idea, in flagrant contradiction of all natural experience? Or were the stargazers responding imaginatively to something APPEARING IN THE SKY and inspiring the great terror consistently evident in the ancient accounts? The key will be found in the symbolic language, the natural hieroglyphs (serpent, flowing hair, feathers, streams of fire). Once it is realized that, among all of the great cultures, the most common glyphs attached to the cosmic serpent - not to mention the serpent itself - were hieroglyphs for the COMET, the door is opened to stunning discovery.

Suddenly one sees a vital principle almost uniformly ignored in comparative cultural studies. When an entire complex of symbols points to a singular celestial form, it is only reasonable to presume the presence of that form, and to look for corroborating references. If a unique form or celestial object WAS present, we should expect all manner of corroborating evidence; and if it was NOT present, it is inconceivable that one would consistently find widely varying words and symbols pointing to that very celestial form.

But to this general and quite obvious point, Wayne Throop responded —

> Uh ... no, not at all. You are saying "if the sky were so-and-so, then human myths would be thus-and-such; human myths ARE thus-and-such, therefore the sky was so-and-so".

> This is the same syllogism as "if a being is a human, that being is a biped; my parrot is indeed a biped; therefore my parrot is a human".

This reasoning is not correct. The issue has nothing to do with syllogisms. We are dealing with probabilities, in this case the kind of astronomical IMPROBABILITIES which we illustrated in "The Unfortunate Peter Smith" analogy. If Peter Smith had been dressed "normally", it would be astronomically improbable that the police would have received INDEPENDENT testimony suggesting the man wore two different running shoes and a shirt inside out. Therefore the reasoning of the police was virtually ironclad, despite the fact that the witnesses were not even dependable under the standard tests.

Needless to say, this issue of probability is not affected by the dating of the memories, though it is amazing how little attention scholars have given to the principles involved here. When independent testimony points to the same HIGHLY SPECIFIC, BUT HIGHLY UNUSUAL EVENTS, that testimony is of huge evidential value.

__VOL II, No. 8 May 15, 1998

A BRIEF ORIENTATION David Talbott

With the next issue of THOTH, I shall begin a series of articles focused on a single "snapshot" of the planetary configuration which we have claimed dominated human imagination in ancient times. As a prelude to that series, I am submitting the following introductory questions and answers for the benefit of the many new subscribers to this newsletter.

WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT MYTH?

I think there's a very good reason to care about myth, even though myth as a whole may seem to speak a language too obscure for rational, feet-on-the-ground folk. Myth is, I believe, a window to early human history, a more intense period of history than we've realized. The myths have their roots in a time of celestial catastrophe, and more often than not the appearance of confusion results from viewing myth as something other than what it is.

In the course of cultural evolution and scientific advance, we left behind the fabled "long ago," whose images seemed wholly out of touch with our own world. Yet my personal conviction is that ancient myth, when seen as a symbolic record of earth-shaking events in the sky, will permanently change man's view of his celestial environment.

BUT YOUR CONCLUSIONS ARE NOT THOSE OF OTHERS WHO DEVOTED LIFETIMES TO THE STUDY OF MYTH. HOW DOES YOUR APPROACH TO MYTH PRODUCE SUCH SURPRISING CONCLUSIONS?

For more than 25 years I've been working to solve a puzzle. Why do ancient chronicles of celestial gods and heroes tell such similar stories? Though the names differ, the various biographies of the gods reveal more parallels than I had ever believed possible. And the deeper I looked the more clear it became that ancient races around the world recorded many identical experiences, even when they used different symbols to tell their stories.

Many common themes run through the folklore of diverse cultures. From ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia to the Americas, from India to China, Scandinavia, Africa, and the Pacific Islands, one finds surprisingly similar accounts: celestial temples and cities, a lost paradise or "Garden of Eden," a cosmic mountain, a flaming serpent or dragon in the sky — and surprisingly similar stories of global calamity ranging from wars of the gods, to a great flood or a devastating rain of fire and gravel.

If we'll look at these collective memories carefully, it will change our understanding of the past. Many of the myths concern planets, but the accounts make no sense to us in terms of the movement of these remote bodies today. Why did the planets, these little pinpricks of light, play such a powerful role in the mythical "age of the gods"?

Along with others working in this field, I've come to interpret the myths and drawings and ritual practices from a new vantage point. Here is the conclusion in a nutshell: A few thousand years ago, the sky did not look anything like it appears today! Planets hung as gigantic, sometimes terrifying bodies above the ancient stargazers. In periods of stability this involved incredible beauty, but there were also periods of mind-altering catastrophe — the most traumatic experiences in human history.

WHAT IS YOUR EVIDENCE FOR THIS?

The primary evidence comes from ancient pictures and chronicles, submitted to extensive cross-referencing. By comparing accounts from around the world, one can begin to reconstruct the way the sky looked in ancient times. Is it possible that the myths and pictographs recorded, in a language unique to the star-worshippers, large-scale events we've forgotten? By keeping that possibility firmly in mind, the researcher will begin to identify crucial themes of myth — themes found on every continent, but pointing to an alien sky.

As one begins to see the past differently, recent space age discoveries will take on a new significance. Our probes of other planets, such as the Mariner explorations of Mars, the Voyager missions to Jupiter and Saturn, and more recently the Magellan mapping of Venus, the Galileo probe of Jupiter, and the Mars Surveyor have produced many stunning images of the planets and their moons, together with undeniable evidence of large-scale catastrophe within the planetary system. Taken as a whole, these stark profiles of our neighbors challenge traditional theories claiming slow and uneventful planetary evolution. Moreover, a new possibility arises from a reconsideration of the historical material: the possibility that at least some of the horrendous scars on our planetary neighbors resulted from events witnessed by man not all that long ago.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY THE STATEMENT THAT THE PLANETS APPEARED AS "GIGANTIC BODIES IN THE SKY"?

At the core of the argument is the idea that several planets were once joined in a spectacular gathering of planets, together with gases and dust, smaller moons and cosmic debris. For prehistoric man — who witnessed all of this — the effect was a massive celestial display in the northern sky. I've called this celestial assembly "the polar configuration" because in its stable phases it was centered on the north celestial pole. In the beginning, the primary form was the planet Saturn, stationary but immense in the sky. Numerous lines of evidence suggest that Saturn once towered over man and inspired the most dramatic leaps in human imagination the world has ever known.

Our work puts a new emphasis on the unusual celestial events reflected in the myths. When you first dive into world mythology, all of your prior training will tell you to dismiss the myth-makers as fabricators or victims of hallucination. But there's another way to see the myths. Ancient man experienced extraordinary events, then strove to remember and to reenact them in every way possible. The result was not only a global mythology, but entirely new forms of human expression. And the whole range of expressions — sacrifices to the gods, wars of conquest, monumental construction, pictographic representations, and endless celebrations of the lost age of the gods — left us a massive reservoir of evidence. These highly novel expressions are, in fact, the distinguishing characteristics of the first civilizations.

BUT WHY SHOULD WE BELIEVE THE SKY HAS CHANGED SO DRASTICALLY?

The best I can ask for is a willingness to consider an argument. I could show you, for example, that certain celestial images preoccupied ancient man to the point of an obsession. A great cosmic wheel in the sky. The pyramid of the sun. The eye of heaven. Also the ship of heaven, a spiraling serpent, the raging goddess, and four luminous "winds" of the sky. The problem for conventional perspectives is that these images are far, far removed from anything we see in the heavens today. But that is only the beginning of the theoretical challenge. As soon as you realize that far-flung cultures, though employing different symbols, tell a unified story, all of the previous "explanations" of myth collapse.

Of course the point will not be proven in a few sentences, and not in a few pages. But the more you learn on this subject, the more compelling the collective memory becomes.

SO YOU ARE CHALLENGING THE IDEA THAT THINGS HAVE NOT REALLY CHANGED THAT MUCH WITHIN THE SOLAR SYSTEM.

Yes, we are challenging an intellectual system as a whole. What is at stake here are the pillars of the modern world view. How could it be that the sky has completely changed in a few thousand years? Our textbooks do not talk about such a thing. When instructing us on the history of the solar system, the evolution of our planet, the birth of man, the origins of civilization, no one speaks of an unstable solar system, of interplanetary upheaval, or of wholesale changes in the celestial order.

When the popular astronomer Carl Sagan presented his impressive exposition on the nature of things, called Cosmos, he didn't ask if we may have misunderstood our past. Rather, Sagan's expressed view — the official view of science for many years — fits comfortably within the textbooks on astronomy, geology, biology, anthropology, and ancient history.

When we launched the U.S. Space program in the late 50s, then devoted billions of dollars to exploring neighboring planets, no one thought to ask if the planets might have followed different courses in earlier times, whether recent disturbances of the planetary system might have left their tell-tale marks on these remote bodies. So when our cameras and measuring devices reached the planets Mars and Venus, and the Voyager probes provided spectacular glimpses of Jupiter and Saturn — well, we were left with a hundred enigmas and unanswered questions.

And yes, there's a certain irony to this. The prevailing view of myth proclaims that, through science, man escaped the bonds of superstition and make believe. But now, in the twentieth century — the age of science and reason — it is myth and symbol that will provide the lost key to the past, the key to a new understanding of the solar system and of human origins. At the heart of this claim is a bedrock principle: the myth-making age arose from the human urge to REMEMBER; hence, the patterns of myth are the patterns of human memory. And if it can be rigorously demonstrated from cross cultural comparison that numerous DIFFERENT words and symbols and mythical themes actually point to the SAME HIGHLY UNUSUAL EVENTS, then the patterns of memory will carry more weight than science has ever considered.

HOW DO YOU DISTINGUISH THESE IDEAS ABOUT "PLANETARY" MYTH FROM THE IDEAS OF OTHER RESEARCHERS SUCH AS JOSEPH CAMPBELL, CARL JUNG AND MIRCEA ELIADE?

Each of these impressive scholars came to discern certain unified layers of myth, layers our traditional cynicism about myth never anticipated. Perhaps the greatest contribution of these pioneers is their acknowledgment that the common view — seeing myth as random absurdity — will not suffice to explain the subject.

I think the late Joseph Campbell has done the most to awaken popular interest in myth, and he is one of my own favorites too. Following a comparative approach, Campbell brought to light quite a number of global themes. He noted, for example, the myths of the central sun, the world mountain, the flowering of creation through sacrifice, the birth of the hero, the terrible goddess, and so on.

Any one of these themes, when explored in its full context, could open the door to incredible discovery. But Campbell, like so many others, stopped short of asking the most important question of all: if the celestial references of the myths are absent today, is it possible that they were present in a former time?

WHAT IS THE REAL MESSAGE OF MYTH, IN YOUR VIEW?

The mythmakers are telling us we've forgotten the very thing they regarded as most vital — in fact, the source of all meaning to the first star-worshippers. We've forgotten the age of the gods. We've assumed that as long as man has journeyed on our planet the world looked and behaved almost exactly as it does today. And that is the fundamental error of modern perception.

The answer to that error is to re-envision the past. With the help of the ancient chroniclers, it's time to bring the forgotten dramas — both the beauty, and the nightmare scenarios — into the light of day.