© Lloyd

__VOL II, No. 9 May 31, 1998

ON THE USE OF HISTORICAL EVIDENCE David Talbott

YOU'RE SUGGESTING THAT EARLY MAN WITNESSED SPECTACULAR EVENTS IN THE SKY. BUT SKEPTICS WOULD CLAIM THAT ANCIENT RECORDS ARE A HOPELESSLY ELUSIVE SOURCE FOR "PROVING" SUCH A CLAIM.

Of course they would, and the response should not surprise us. The most common objection to the "Saturn theory" is that it rests on the words of storytellers who understood nothing about the world in which they lived.

But we need to re-think these familiar responses. One reason ancient memories seem so absurd is that they speak for things that clearly do not exist — today. Our thinking is governed by an incredible amount of inertia, and only the rarest of investigators has ever asked, "Do we really know what ancient star-worshippers saw in the sky? Can we really be certain that the natural world our ancestors experienced several thousand years ago is a mirror of our world today?"

SKEPTICS MIGHT SAY THAT YOU CAN "PROVE ANYTHING" BY RESORT TO MYTH.

Well, you certainly do hear that statement a lot, and the statement is obviously not intended to be taken literally. The skeptic is saying that all sorts of strange and exotic ideas have been proposed on the basis of myth, and he is saying you could argue for anything under the sun if all you have to do is select a few myths for support.

The answer to this perfectly natural objection is to adopt investigative ground-rules which exclude all selective use of historical testimony. In the approach I've proposed, the entire inquiry rests on well-established patterns of memory, patterns that have survived thousands of years of tribal mixing and still shine through despite the inherent tendency toward distortion over time. The value of limiting admissible evidence to RECURRING themes is that this approach will expose the substratum of human memory. And that is when the great surprises come: with astonishing consistency the substratum speaks for an alien sky.

Additionally, this approach will place the highest emphasis on the oldest sources, those situated closest in time to the original experience, where there is the least opportunity for distortion. It is in the oldest sources that you find the most poignant and literal expressions of the universal themes, with minimal dilution of the celestial images involved.

AND YOU BELIEVE YOU CAN "PROVE" YOUR CASE ON THE BASIS OF MYTHICAL AND HISTORICAL EVIDENCE?

The "proof" begins with certain well-established celestial forms repeated in myths and pictographs and ritual reenactments around the world. Not one of these primary forms, when placed under the microscope, will reveal any relationship to things experienced today. There are "sun"-wheels, to be sure, but on examination they have nothing in common with the body we call sun. We find images of "stars" in great abundance, but they do not behave like any stars in our sky. One finds as well a distinctive crescent-form, recorded by all ancient cultures, but why do the particulars NEVER correspond to the crescent moon?

The researcher's first impression will be of confusion - one astronomically absurd image after another. A star in the center of the "sun." A crescent holding in its hollow a central star. A crescent on the great sphere of the "sun". A sun standing motionless at the center of heaven. A "sun" occupying the summit of the world axis. A celestial column rising along the polar axis to support a great crescent "moon". A star with a spiraling tail. A star carrying inside itself an unexplained dark or reddish sphere. The theoretical problem is that, from one ancient nation to another, there is far more consistency to these "astronomical absurdities" than is rationally conceivable if they arose from imagination somehow driven to DENY natural experience.

And that's the dilemma in a nutshell: random, irrational ideas could never produce global, coherent patterns at any level of detail; but there are demonstrable global patterns, and in greater detail than any comparative mythologist has previously recognized; therefore, the images cannot be random in the sense typically assumed.

In truth, the dilemma has no answer until one finds a new vantage point for interpreting the coherent substratum of myth. But finding that vantage point will require us to stop projecting our own sky onto that of prehistoric man. The good news is that nothing else is necessary in order to open the door to discovery.

NEVERTHELESS, YOUR DEPENDENCE ON MYTHICAL IMAGES WILL SURELY INSPIRE SKEPTICISM.

Of course! On the face of it, myth is the most incoherent, confused and least credible source of information in the world!

In common perception myth has, for centuries, meant fiction. And myth, in one obvious sense, IS fiction. It is make believe. It should be obvious we're not suggesting that things occurred in the manner implied by mythical language itself. We don't need to be told that fiery serpents and dragons, or heaven-sustaining giants, or ships in the sky, or witches on brooms do not exist in the sense understood by the myth-makers. The questions we're asking are: where did the myths come from? What are the celestial references? In what human experiences did the most powerful themes of myth originate?

Nothing is more obvious than the myth-maker's relentless tendency to interpret events: monstrous creatures in the sky, celestial cities and kingdoms, sky pillars, rivers or fountains of life, celestial kings, heroes, and warriors, mother goddesses and divine princesses, heaven-embracing trees, crescent-horned bulls and crescent-ships, demons of chaos - there is no limit to the role of human imagination, whatever may have inspired these ideas. Ultimately, there is only one question here: is it even conceivable that the general patterns could have arisen without an external reference to prompt the ideas? What we are claiming is that these themes arose from a natural environment more dramatic and terrifying than anything known in modern times.

Since there's virtually no limit to the field of evidence, there are logical ground-rules for determining if the references are alien to our sky. Why not apply these reasonable ground-rules and see where they lead?

The first step toward understanding the myth-making epoch is to distinguish between the unusual and the imaginative. The events are unusual, while the interpretations are imaginative. I'm not asking you to agree that a shining temple or city of living "gods" once stood in the center of the sky; or believe that a great hero of flesh and blood once arose to rid the world of the chaos-monsters; or that this very same hero once consorted with a "mother goddess". I WILL ask you, however, to consider whether these unexplained and global themes may have roots in uncommon natural events. In our skepticism about such global themes we forgot the elementary distinction between event and interpretation, then tossed out the entire body of evidence.

A new approach will simply let the dominant patterns of myth speak for themselves, suggesting the concrete forms behind the imaginative interpretations. If it can be seen that the diverse mythical images, in their earliest uses, point to the SAME underlying forms, it becomes rationally impossible to deny the presence of those forms. And in the same way, once the concrete forms have been identified, the concrete sequences of events will provide additional acid tests.

WHAT, THEN, IS THE HEART OF YOUR ARGUMENT?

For several years now I've been asking those with an interest in the subject to see if they can find a global mythical theme explicable by reference to known natural phenomena. I do not believe it will ever happen. Despite appearances at a superficial level (where the translators of various texts ASSUME a reference to the sun or moon, or some other readily accessible phenomenon), there is, in truth, no theme of myth answering, in its earliest expressions, to the world we know.

Now if this assessment is correct, we're left with only two options theoretically. Either we must imagine that the ancients populated their mythical world with forms and events never experienced, denying natural experience at every turn (something no theorist has ever claimed); or we must assume that the world formerly presented to the mythmakers a range of sights and sounds unlike anything known in modern times.

That's why I've urged an analytical approach concentrating on the universal themes of myth. Nothing will boost the researcher's confidence more than discovering, first, that there are authentic but unexplained patterns; then discovering that the patterns are all inseparably connected, as if joined to a single taproot.

Just consider, for example, the collective memory repeated in myths the world over — of a former "age of the gods". It began with a period frequently termed the "Golden Age", but was punctuated by a collapse of the original order, sweeping catastrophe, wars of the gods and eventually a departure of these visible powers. Yes, there are a hundred variations on the theme, and countless contradictions in the localized versions, but at root we have the idea that the great gods were overwhelmed in a deadly catastrophe, wandered off, or flew away to become distant stars.

We've never really reckoned with this collective memory — of a time when man himself lived close to the "gods". The general theme is both universal and remarkably persistent. From the dawn of history onward, that theme never gave way to a contrary idea — UNTIL the contradiction between the memory and the experienced world became so great that men stopped believing in the gods!

By concentrating on the themes that have survived for thousands of years, in all major cultures, the investigative approach itself prevents you from slipping into subjective interpretation, or dwelling on aspects of myth that are clearly evolutionary and localized.

AND HOW DO THE PLANETS FIGURE INTO THIS?

In the most direct way. The great celestial powers first celebrated by man were planets and aspects of planets, all playing concrete roles that can be demonstrated through systematic analysis.

When I started my own investigation in 1972 it was obvious that most mainstream scholars do not admit any meaningful relationship of early gods and later planets. It soon became clear why this is so. The gods are far more dominant, more active, and more violent than could possibly be explained, or illuminated in any way by the present fireflies of light we call planets. We know that the early priest astronomers upheld cosmic traditions dating back to the dawn of civilization. And when the first stargazers of ancient Mesopotamia, China, and Mesoamerica began recording the movements of settled (or nearly settled) planets, they insisted with one voice that these distant bodies once dominated the world as "the gods". The incredible discrepancy between the biographies of these gods and the present little specks in the sky presents a fascinating and unexplained global anomaly.

I'm suggesting, in other words, that we pay serious attention to the profound shift in ancient ideas about gods and planets, a shift occurring some time in the first millennium B.C. Gradually, the "capriciousness" of the gods gave way to fixed and repeated cycles of planets. Whatever you may think of our reconstruction, it cannot be denied that the dramatic change in human perception IS consistent with the claimed transition — a shift from the active and dramatic presence of the gods to the remote, uniform and predictable planetary system we observe today. Until the establishment of stable cycles or patterns, of course, observational, mathematically-based planetary astronomy would be impossible.

Now obviously, the unshakable opinion of astronomers is that the solar system of our ancestors looked very much like it does today. Yet surprisingly, though celestial "sun" and "star" symbols are everywhere, one searches in vain for evidence of PRESENT planetary movements. What we find is thus what we should EXPECT to find if the planetary system changed dramatically within human memory.

David Talbott

__VOL IV, No 6 March 31, 2000

PATTERNS OF HUMAN MEMORY By Michel Tavir, Dave Talbott

Michel Tavir wrote: Human remembrance, forgetfulness and the good old days: every single person living in coastal Western Europe "knows" that the weather has changed in the past few decades. Every single person "knows" that when they were children, there was always snow at Christmas. Well, sort of. Meteorological records tell us another story: two white Xmas's in the past 50 years or so. Memory and the use humans make of it are very fascinating things indeed.

Dave Talbott Replied: Gotta disagree with you here concerning the meaning of the "exemplary" epoch, since I believe you are referring to my comments on the Golden Age. Comparative analysis will show that the memory of the Golden Age is much more than a recollection of "the good old days". It is a global idea with very specific content: passage from timelessness to time; rule of the universal sovereign as first king "on earth", a superior, motionless sun in the sky; identification of this "sun" with the first king; paradisal garden divided by four rivers of life; identity of the garden with the turning "wheel" of the sun; identification of the "hub" or "nave" of the wheel with the mother goddess; identification of the "axle" of the wheel with the unborn warrior-hero; placement of a crescent on this same wheel; location of paradise on the summit of a mountain reaching to the center of the sky; identity of the original sovereign with Saturn; identification of the goddess with Venus; identification of the warrior-hero with Mars; violent collapse of the paradisal condition; exile or displacement of the original sovereign; subsequent wars of the gods; subsequent regeneration of the world — to name only the most elementary components of the idea.

All of this relates to the matter of memory "and the use humans make of it", which I do see as the key, though not quite in the sense I think you are implying :-).

When investigating events witnessed around the world, the patterns of human memory enable us to draw conclusions of a far more specific and dependable sort than could be obtained through physical evidence or physical theory in the absence of human testimony. Initially, almost no one will realize this. But to discover that this is indeed true, it is only necessary to follow the appropriate ground-rules. The ground-rules are designed to expose the substratum of memory beneath all of the regional fragments, enabling one to speak for the substratum with the highest level of confidence.

Quite frankly, this has been the most difficult point for a few of our readers to grasp, and we continue to hear references to "Saturnist's subjective interpretation of myth" and the like (c.f., Lynn Rose's and Peter James' comments at the recent SIS conference). But the purpose of pattern identification is to REMOVE all subjective interpretation, to assure that the reconstruction rests on cross-cultural points of agreement, where the patterns cannot be disputed. For example, no one can dispute that ancient words translated as "the sun" were words for Saturn in ancient astronomies. That's all we need to know, and the fact that one critic or another can guess at an alternative "explanation" to the one offered by the Saturn model is utterly irrelevant to the validity or non-validity of the Saturn model. All anomalies have prompted proposed "explanations" and that includes hundreds of recurring themes. If we had to separate out every theme and base a defense of the Saturn model on our ability to prove our interpretation WITH RESPECT TO THAT THEME ALONE, we would indeed be in trouble!

The only issue logically is the predictive power of the Saturn model in relation to the substructure as a whole. Taken as a whole, the global patterns do not just suggest certain external events, they REQUIRE them. To see that this is so, however, one must consider the patterns with sufficient specificity and completeness, eliminating all selective perception. Considered in isolation from the larger patterns, all we can expect is a madhouse of guesses and interpretations. But when it comes to the full substratum, no fundamentally false "explanation" could possibly work. This truth, however, will be recognized only AFTER enough of the substratum has become sufficiently clear to the researcher to eliminate any doubt concerning the underlying coherence of the patterns

Once one is willing to consider ALL verifiable patterns, it will become clear that they are all connected to each other, that they are entirely consistent with each other, and that, from top to bottom, they explicitly and flagrantly contradict all patterns in our sky today. Had the planetary forms not appeared in the ancient sky, such detailed and coherent patterns simply could not be there.

[The comment which follows is not directed at Michel, who has shown a sincere interest in these issues]

When I think about, I'd have to say that we Saturnists have been remarkably tolerant of the more extreme abuses of logic and common sense by certain critics :-) At the SIS conference, AFTER Ev had presented numerous illustrations of global imagery showing Venus smack in the center of the ancient and universal "sun" pictograph, Peter James stood up and drew a picture of a circle with rays, telling the audience that children naturally draw the Sun that way, end of mystery. Did he not HEAR Ev's presentation? :-) Did he not SEE the pictures Ev showed? :-) Did he not wonder why Venus was drawn as a SPHERE in the center of the depicted "sun"? Or why the streamers of Venus were shown reaching across the entire face of the larger body? Did he not wonder why the images are identical to ancient pictures of "Saturn's wheel"? Or wonder if there is any connection between such images and the ancient language of Saturn as "sun"?

Peter James is a scholar commanding great respect. But after viewing his SIS comments, I am prompted to ask: If a critic will not even engage the first scratches on the surface in our presentation of acknowledged patterns, are we not permitted to doubt the sincerity of his interest?

Michel wrote: Sacrifice is a fairly vast notion. I wonder whether sacrifice of animals (found in its "purest" form in clan initiation rituals) and human sacrifice (found in its uttermost form in holy wars — but aren't all wars "holy"?) can be equated. Some hints as to the mythical significance of the former (initiation consisting in the intake of the clan's animal's spirit by sacrificing it) might be found, if I remember well, in Carlos Castaneda's later books.

Dave replied: Sacrifice does indeed take many different ritual forms, and these collective practices certainly do reflect memories of planetary upheaval. But they also draw our attention to a deeper human tendency, and this tendency, I believe, must be confronted as a pre-condition to any healing deserving of the name. If we peel away the respective ritual forms of sacrifice, we will eventually confront a root idea more fundamental than any collective practice. By the "sacrifice principle" I mean the idea that something (be it yours or mine, a thing, a possession, or life itself) must be given up in order for ME to gain an advantage. How did this idea arise? There is nothing inherent in planetary catastrophe to make ritual sacrifice "logical", unless an underlying premise had already been accepted. (I do realize that more needs to be said to make the point clear.)

Michel: "The principle of sacrifice involves an obstruction of human awareness, a barrier to the innate sense of the unity of life". this does not seem — repeat seem — to apply to the cannibalistic sacrifice of war prisoners among pre-Portuguese Brazilian Indians — where prisoners received the best and most honourable treatment before they were sacrificed and eaten (hearts first). I would associate this kind of sacrifice with the type of animal sacrifice mentioned above, whereas animal sacrifice in the ancient religions of the Mediterranean (including Judaism) resembles Amerindian human sacrifices, for instance.

But keep in mind that the "honorable treatment" you refer to above cannot be separated from the honor being paid to the sacrifice principle itself. The distinctions you make between ritual practices are surely valid, but all forms of sacrifice do express an underlying, uniquely human conflict, or a contradiction in human motivation and perception, if you will. Rather than address the point here, which would unfairly imply that I'm directing the comments toward something you have said, Michel I will post some further notes on the sacrifice principle separately.

Michel: Not sure I can formulate where the line should be drawn, if a line has to be drawn, that is. Cruelty, maybe? The birth and the success of Christianity reflecting times when people felt pretty sure that the planetary gods had stopped "acting" (or had forgotten that they had been acting) and that they no longer had to be appeased with sacrifices? Nonetheless, the abolition of ritualistic sacrifice didn't keep cruelty away from Christianity, until very recently at least. Incidentally, it seems that ancient Greece, as opposed to most of the cultures and time periods we can turn our eyes to, shunned the practice of cruelty towards fellow humans (not that it was unheard of: the gods of the Pantheon made a generous use of it).

Dave: I would suggest that when thinking philosophically, no "lines" be drawn in response to the sacrifice principle, since the distinctions between different expressions of the principle are only matters of degree and of variations in the form of projection involved. But an acknowledgment of the sacrifice principle and its effects is, I believe, essential both to constructive self-inquiry and to cultural healing. The value of penetrating to the taproot principle is that, once we discover that the idea is contradicted by another principle we know to be true and do not wish to violate, then only one correction is necessary. On the other hand, if we do not confront the taproot, we will tend to treat some forms of the error as advantageous, some as harmless, and some as unforgivable. And that pretty well encompasses the human condition in all its variations.

Michel: "Guilt" is a concept extremely peculiar to Judaism and Christianity. As such, I believe, its "bandwidth" is too narrow to be useful when considering events on a planetary scale over such a time range as implied since the Saturn configuration.

Dave: I do not believe that it is correct to limit the influence of "guilt"-concepts to Judaic-Christian influences. If there is no sense of SOMEBODY'S guilt, there can be no sense of "deserved punishment", and wherever actions or events are seen as deserved punishment, some idea of guilt (either "mine" or "yours") must be present. In fact many instances could be given from around the world in which the "guilty" party is a god. Much of Egyptian and Mesopotamian magic can be seen as early variations on the theme of "casting out the devil". Accordingly, various rites were designed to continue indefinitely the "punishment" of a guilty god or goddess, the male or female form of the chaos monster (witch-burning being the most familiar instance). This is only one variation on the scapegoat principle and that, too, is a form of sacrifice and certainly does involve the projection of guilt.

All of this requires something more than a natural event. It requires that human imagination see events in a particular way. I simply do not believe that any experience of "guilt" is possible apart from a prior attraction to the sacrifice principle. (But again, I realize that what I mean by the "sacrifice principle" needs further explanation, and I'll try to get to that.)

Dave

__VOL IV, 7 April 15, 2000

MEMORIES AND SYMBOLS OF PLANETARY UPHEAVAL By David Talbott

[Editor's Note: The following paragraphs are excerpted from the Introduction of the forthcoming volume, WHEN SATURN WAS KING; co-authors David Talbott and Ev Cochrane]

OF PLANETS AND GODS

It seems that a great gulf stands between the textbook profile of the planets and the descriptions given by the first sky-worshippers. It is known that ancient cultures of both the New World and the Old honored the planets with much pomp and zeal, including human sacrifices on a horrifying scale. And when the priestly astronomers invoked these points of light, they summoned memories of heaven-shattering catastrophe. What was it about these planetary specks that so preoccupied our ancestors, or prompted such pervasive fears? From ancient Babylon to China, from the Mediterranean to the Americas, planets loomed as the dominating powers of the universe. Among the Greeks and Romans we meet planets with remarkably well-defined personalities — old Saturn, the ancient ruler of the heavens; Mars, the impetuous warrior thundering in the sky; Venus, the temperamental goddess with the long-flowing hair, and Jupiter, presiding over the renewal of a world which had fallen into chaos. But the "personalities" of these planets are rooted in much earlier traditions, tracing to the origins of astronomy.

In ancient literature the planetary gods are a quarrelsome lot — and often violent. Wars of the gods not only disturb the heavens but threaten to destroy humankind. The planets wield weapons of thunder and fire and stone. Their behavior is not only capricious and unpredictable, but dangerous to human health! What a stark contrast to the placid solar system portrayed in our astronomy textbooks. For centuries now, science has regarded stable and predictable planetary motions as a bedrock principle, to which no credible challenge is conceivable. Yet ancient testimony IS a challenge to modern theory insofar as the testimony is both consistent and worldwide. There is a point at which ancient accounts, by their agreement, WILL weaken one's faith in established doctrines.

In these volumes we present global evidence for an alien sky, recorded in pictures and words and ritual reenactments. It was apparently only a few thousand years ago that several planets moved extremely close to the Earth, appearing as massive spheres above us. This was a time of celestial splendor and chaos, of human wonder and overwhelming fear, the measure of which cannot be gauged by anything presently witnessed in the heavens.

But now, having lived for millennia beneath a tranquil sky, we are deceived by appearances. It is easy to fall into a trance, easy to assume that natural processes observed today can be projected backwards indefinitely. Indeed, all well-known theorists in the sciences assume without question that observed cycles of the Sun and Moon and planets are virtually identical to the cycles witnessed by our early ancestors. A mere guess has become a dogma — not even a theoretical issue for official science.

But have you ever wondered why ancient races insisted, with one voice, that the Sun and stars and planets do not move on their original paths? That was Plato's message more than 2300 years ago. It was also the message of the philosophers Democritus, Zeno, and Anaxagoras. The historian Diodorus of Sicily noted this belief among the Chaldeans. The Babylonian priest-astronomer Berossus said it too: the planets now move on different courses. The same statement is made in the Persian BUNDAHIS, the Hindu PURANAS, and the Chinese BAMBOO BOOKS.

But these are only the more familiar voices amid a chorus of ancient witnesses. For the truth is that every culture on earth recalled a prior time of celestial discord, when the sky collapsed violently. To this disruption of the heavens the Greeks gave the name SYNODOS, a word meaning, in its original contexts, "a collision of planets" and "the destruction of the world."

PLANETARY UPHEAVAL AND HUMAN MEMORY

For many years the leading scientific theorists assumed that evolutionary principles have worked by slow and imperceptible degrees to produce an upward movement over great spans of time — the formation of galaxies, suns and planets, the evolution of a habitable earth, the first appearance of life, arrival of Homo sapiens, emergence of civilization, and the final victory of rational science over myth and superstition.

But recently much of this scientific confidence has given way to uncertainty. With the arrival of the space age, we turned our attention — and highly sophisticated technology — to our neighboring planets, and the remote landscapes revealed the unmistakable signature of large-scale violence. We have seen close-up photos of the torn and disfigured surface of Mars, its every square mile littered with freshly-strewn rubble. We have mapped the surface of Venus, a super-heated cauldron now said to have been "turned inside out" by a global catastrophe of unknown origin. And we have observed the devastated moons of Jupiter and Saturn, testifying to celestial encounters more dramatic and unusual than any astronomers had anticipated.

Who could deny that earlier theoretical frameworks, predicated on nearly imperceptible linear evolution over many millions of years, are being eroded by an avalanche of new data and new theories? The new theme is evolution by catastrophe, and here the Earth is not the safe place we once imagined. Cometary disasters, global floods or tidal waves, tropical climates giving way to ice ages, sudden extermination of species — once the province of science fiction, the new speculations have given rise to the field of "catastrophics" — the study of EARTH-CHANGING catastrophe.

But when did the hypothesized disasters occur? Just twenty years ago the familiar theories, such as the dinosaur-exterminating asteroid claimed by the Alvarez team, placed the catastrophes in a very distant past, many millions of years before the arrival of Homo sapiens — not something we should be particularly concerned about More recently, however, the look of catastrophics has changed dramatically, as one theorist after another has invoked global upheaval within the span of human history. These theorists include the noted astronomer Fred Hoyle, the British astrophysicist Victor Clube and astronomer William Napier, astronomer Tom Van Flandern (former head of the Naval Observatory), archaeologist Mike Baillie, geologist Robert Schoch, geologist C. Warren Hunt, and many others as well.

Given the present scientific and scholarly interest in recent catastrophe it is no longer possible for the scientific mainstream to ignore human testimony on these matters. Memories of catastrophe pervade the ancient cultures, and a great wealth of evidence suggests that the eye-witnesses did not invent these stories: they used all of the means available to them to record extraordinary experiences. But historians have not understood the ancient words and symbols because they only listened superficially, then looked to our familiar heavens and found no correspondence. Nothing in the archaic language made sense to them.

ARCHETYPE AND SYMBOL

Our investigation will concentrate on the patterns of human memory. Mythology, we will seek to show, means things remembered, however clouded by the language of magic and superstition. Since the investigation rests on cross-cultural comparison, a crucial level of evidence will be the archetypes, those deep structures of thought evident in the earliest writing systems and ritual practices, patterns so powerful as to find continuing — even global — cultural expression across thousands of years.

It was the distinguished psychoanalyst Carl Jung who first used the term ARCHETYPES in connection with the origins of myth and symbol, suggesting universal patterns too often ignored in prior studies of myth. An archetype is a model or first form, a prototype. In connection with world mythology, it means the original idea or structure of thought — whether it is the root idea behind the "goddess" image, the model of a "good king" or "hero," or the ideal form of a sacred temple or city. To recognize the archetypes in the ancient world is to open up a new and crucial field of investigation.

A considerable debt is also owed to the distinguished student of comparative religion, the late Mircea Eliade of the University of Chicago, author of numerous books on the subject and editor in chief of the Encyclopedia of Religion. Perhaps Eliade has done more than any other scholar to show that world mythology rests upon a coherent substratum. It is not the mere collection of disconnected fragments traditionally assumed within the western world.

So too, the late Joseph Campbell has probably done the most to awaken popular interest in myth. Following a comparative approach, Campbell brought to light a large number of global themes — the "hero with a thousand faces," the "angry goddess," the "world mountain," renewal through sacrifice, and dozens of other motifs.

Each of these impressive researchers came to discern certain unified layers of myth, layers never anticipated by mainstream scholars laboring under traditional cynicism about myth. 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 layers of coherence.

It is vital that the reader keep in mind, however, that by "archetype" we do not mean the unconscious structures of thought to which Jung referred, so much as the original patterns of conscious human experience, to which numerous unconscious ideas and tendencies may indeed trace. It can now be stated with assurance that any one of the acknowledged archetypes, if explored in its full context, will open the door to incredible discovery. But it is also clear that the pioneers of comparative study could not account for the content of myth in terms of any verifiable human experience. And they stopped short of asking the most important question of all: if the natural references of the myths are missing, is it possible that they were present in a former time? Campbell, for example, recognized the worldwide doomsday theme — the idea of a prior age collapsing violently. But he did not relate the memory to anything that may have actually occurred in our world to inspire the universal memory. We, on the other hand, will take a firm stand on behalf of concrete experience. When widely dispersed memories point to an underlying natural event, those memories constitute evidence deserving rigorous study.

When we speak of the archetypes as the "substratum of human memory" we refer to the underlying patterns shared by far-flung cultures. In a comparative approach these themes will appear as "points of agreement" shining through despite wildly divergent interpretations, fragmentation, dilution, and localization of myth over time. Were it not for the integrity of the original human experience, these patterns as a whole COULD NOT BE THERE.

The mythmakers are telling us we've forgotten what they considered most worthy of remembrance. We've forgotten the age of the gods. By assuming that the sky has remained unchanged over the millennia, we failed to discern the underlying agreement in their testimony. The only appropriate answer to that error is to hear the witnesses without prejudice and to invite the mythic nightmares into the light of day.

Dave Talbott