© Lloyd

__VOL I, No. 27 DECEMBER 10, 1997

VELIKOVSKY'S COMET VENUS (11) By David Talbott

CONTENTS: RITES OF SACRIFICE
VENUS, THE GREAT COMET, AND THE WARS OF THE GODS
SWEEPING AWAY THE NIGHT
THE MYTH OF THE GREAT COMET

RITES OF SACRIFICE

Both the Aztecs and Maya are known to have practiced sacrifice on a horrendous scale, in intimate correspondence with the gods. To honor the gods and heroes of former times, the priests performed rites ordained by these divine ancestors, with a meticulous reverence for the way things happened in ancestral times (the age of the gods). Critical events in the gods' own lives provided the ritual drama, and in these biographical rituals, sacrifice was usually the central episode.

In the Mesoamerican world view, it was a sacrifice of cosmic proportions that preceded the dawning of the present world age. As noted by Carrasco, the role of cosmic sacrifice in regenerating the world "was at the basis of the extraordinary practice of bloodletting and sacrifice throughout Mesoamerica."

The present age was created out of the sacrifice of a large number of deities in Teotihuacan, or elsewhere, depending on the tradition. It was believed that this age would end in earthquakes and famine. What is clear is that cosmic order is achieved in the Aztec universe out of conflict, sacrifice, and the death of humans and gods.

In addition to the calendrically ordained sacrifices, there were many other occasions on which the gods themselves seemed to call for sacrifice. For minor challenges in the course of daily life, offerings of food or ornaments might be sufficient, but in times of greater common need, particularly when the kingdom was beset by drought, or hurricanes, or plagues of locusts, the gods called for human victims. It does not appear that scholars as a whole appreciate the reason for this, however.

It is through sacrifice "that two realms of time, the time of the gods and the time of humans, are linked together and renewed," states Carrasco. But why did sacrifice fulfill the divine requirement? And why at strategic calendar moments, or on occasions of distress? Again, it is imperative that one distinguish between the archetype and the symbol. Numerous contexts in which we observe the ritual response will suggest that a drought was not seen as a thing in itself, but a SYMBOL of the greater ordeal in more ancient times, the archetypal "drought" which gave meaning to the symbols. In the same way, every hurricane became a symbol of the irresistible cosmic wind that once overcame the world; or a plague of locusts referred back to the devastating chaos hordes which had overtaken the world in the great cometary disaster.

A symbol is a reflection of some aspect of a prior experience. As such it does not, on its own, disclose the full character of that experience. Thus the researcher, to gain any sense of the true reference, must draw upon patterns revealed through the CONJUNCTION of symbols. Under the conventional analysis, however, the regional drought or the regional hurricane is the worst thing the analyst can imagine, so there is no prior reference for the symbol, only the symbol itself. Students of the culture are left, therefore, with a madhouse of symbols and meaningless, unexplained, barbaric practices and superstitions. Here, the ritual sacrifice has no broader significance than an apparent "bargaining with the gods" because the researcher does not see a relationship between the sacrifice and the events (drought, plague, storm) "calling" for it.

And yet, the mythical context of sacrifice leaves no question as to a connection. When the creator-king Quetzalcoatl died, his heart was removed from him. The primeval "sacrifice," in the various traditions, occurred at a time of cosmic upheaval, of great wind and drought, of darkness, earthquake and flood, with the god's own heart — the smoking star — presiding over the regeneration of the world. Mythically speaking, the rites of sacrifice CAME INTO BEING through the critical events in the life, the death, and the transformation of the god-king.

Why, then, did a drought or plague call forth a sacrifice? Because the sacrificial rites replayed, on a microcosmic scale, the overarching celestial drama, honoring the gods through remembrance, not just repeating the divine ordeal, but repeating the RESOLUTION.

The followers of Quetzalcoatl, as noted by Carrasco, insisted that "all ceremonies and rites, building temples and altars ... imitated the ways of that holy man." That is what the Aztecs meant by the repeated statement that Quetzalcoatl was the exemplary king, the model upon which kingship arose. And more than one sacrificial rite served to mirror essential episodes in the god's life and death. Citing a native informant, Duran summarizes a commemorative ritual involving a mock king, a captured enemy warrior chosen for his beauty and physical perfection and dressed in the attire of the founding king himself.

For 40 days this human symbol of Quetzalcoatl was honored in feasts and celebration. "This living man was bought to represent the god for forty days, and he was served and revered as such," Duran writes. At the conclusion of his "reign," and with great ceremony, the assistants to the officiating priest laid the mock king on the sacrificial stone. Then the priest, with a crude stone knife, tore his heart from his body.

Removal of the heart was, in fact, the most common form of human sacrifice throughout Mesoamerica, a recurring pattern recalling a celestial power's own "sacrifice" in the age of the gods.

Interestingly, the officiating priests at the Templo Mayor bore the name quequetzalcoa, after Quetzalcoatl himself — suggesting that priest and sacrificial victim were, in their respective capacities, representing one and the same cosmic power.

In the common pattern of the sacrifice, when the priest tore the heart from the victim, he raised it, still steaming, before the sun — the sacred "steam" of the removed heart offering a poignant reminder of the COMET-LIKE, smoking "heart" of the great god himself. "The high priest then opened the chest and with amazing swiftness tore out the heart, ripping it out with his own hands. Thus steaming, the heart was lifted toward the sun, and the fumes were offered up to the sun." Or again, "they opened his chest and took out the heart, and holding it up, they presented it to the Sun until its steam had cooled." Then, as if to re-play the mythic flight of the heart-soul, the priest turned and flung the heart toward the image of the god.

The "steam" of the removed heart thus stood in symbolic correspondence with the "plumes" of the transformed heart-soul as plumed star, and with the "smoke" of the heart-soul as smoking star. In illustrations of these events, we see the Aztec priest raising the removed heart of the victim, with the "steam" rising before the sun. But elsewhere it is rather the PLUMES that rise from the heart, while still other contexts involve a SMOKING HEART. In a widespread ritual counterpart to human sacrifice, the celebrants formed a model of the heart from copal or pom, a resin derived from the copal tree, and set it burning as incense. The dark smoke rising from the ritual "heart" thus provided a vivid reminder of Quetzalcoatl's burning heart-soul, the smoking star Venus, which we have recognized as the GREAT COMET. A conjunction of three symbols — steaming heart, plumed heart and smoking heart — meaningless in themselves, derives a self-evident and spectacular significance when referred to the celestial prototype, the ascending, comet-like heart-soul removed from the ancient sun god Quetzalcoatl.

The relentless practice of human sacrifice in every well-documented Mesoamerican culture, a source of horror to the conquering Spaniards, can produce great ambivalence in the treatments by historians, archaeologists and ethnologists. But what is really missing is the sense of context. How did such a widespread practice come to rule an entire civilization? Seeing the role of collective apprehension will bring the dark and fearful motives into the light of day, for the ceaseless acts of "remembering" and bargaining with the gods do become intelligible when referred to a world-shattering catastrophe, symbolically recalled every time a priest raised the sacrificial knife.

In sacrifice the practitioners remembered and "nourished" the gods, and the two aspects of the practice seemed to go hand in hand, fueled by the memory of the all-devouring, smoking star. Why were the Aztecs so "deeply concerned about where and when Venus might appear to reverse their fortunes" (Aveni's words)? Why was sacrifice so frequently regulated by the rising of Venus? Sahagun tells us that "Captives were slain when it emerged that it might be nourished. They sprinkled blood toward it, flipping the middle finger from the thumb, they cast the blood as an offering."

Seen from one vantage point, there is only meaninglessness in these rampant practices, by which whole nations responded to uncertainties large and small. Seen from another, there is the long shadow of celestial terror, when planets moved out of control and affected the fate of mankind.

__ VOL II, No. 1 January 15, 1998

VELIKOVSKY'S COMET VENUS (12) By David Talbott

__VENUS, THE GREAT COMET, AND THE WARS OF THE GODS

A powerful conjunction of Venus symbolism and comet symbolism will be seen in the vast tribal wars and conquests that fed the rise of empires in Mesoamerica — a conjunction that will only grow in significance as we find the same nexus of symbols in other major cultures as well.

What is not sufficiently recognized by the experts is that, in mythical terms, the "first" sacrifice and "first" war occurred in the lives of the gods themselves. Ancient beliefs, symbols, and expectations concerning sacrifice and war were rooted in something REMEMBERED. Only the remembered, prototypal Great Comet will explain the recurring patterns of belief about comets in general, the planet Venus in particular, and the mythically-rooted "signs" heralding or calling for war and sacrifice.

Around the world, comets were seen as harbingers of devastating invasion, war, and conquest. A comet, according to the Chinese, could mean that "there are uprisings and war continues for several years." "When a comet travels into the Constellation Taurus, in the middle of the double month, blood is shed ... [and] dead bodies lie on the ground. Within three years the emperor dies and the country is in chaos."

The Roman poet Tibullus cites the comet as "the evil sign of war." Pliny, treating comets in his Natural History, tells us they bring war and commotion, while the Greek mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy associates them with foreign invasion. The third century Christian writer Origen saw the comet as heralding war and the collapse of dynasties. Centuries later (1011), Byrhtferth's Manual lists war as one of the disastrous effects of a comet's appearance."

The extraordinary power of the mythic tradition will explain why many of early history's most brutal wars had affixed to them the appearance of a comet, even in cases in which the actual arrival of a comet may be in doubt. A comet and shooting stars are said to have appeared before the battle of Pharsalus in central Greece, heralding Caesar's defeat of Pompey. Josephus mentions in his History of the Jews that a comet in the form of a "sword" hung over Jerusalem for a whole year, foretelling the destruction of the city in the reign of the Emperor Vespasian.

"The belief persisted into medieval and later ages," writes Theodor Gaster. "A comet heralded the Norman conquest of Britain in 1066. Disasters suffered by the Christians at the hands of the Turks in 1456 were popularly attributed to the appearance of a comet."

In 1456 a comet described as having a "fan-shaped tail like that of a peacock" is said to have stretched across half the sky. With the Turkish army at the gates of Belgrade, Pope Calixtus III feared a domino effect from a Mohammedan victory. Thus a Vatican historian wrote:

"A hairy and fiery star ... made [an] appearance for several days, [and] mathematicians declared that there would follow ... great calamity. Calixtus [ordered] prayers, beseeching God that if this meant impending evils for mankind, God would turn them all upon the Turks, the enemies of Christendom."

The Zulu of South Africa also say that a comet brings war. And the same portentous significance of the comet seems to have prevailed in the Americas. In 1835, the warrior-chief Osecola, leader of the Seminole tribe in Florida, "saw an appearance of Halley's Comet as an omen, and called on his people to launch a war against white settlers. The Seminoles overwhelmed the army garrison at Fort King and killed every last soldier. Osecola personally scalped the fort's commander, General Wiley Thompson."

In the light of the general tradition, the retrospective accounts of Mesoamerican chroniclers, remembering that a comet preceded the Spanish invasion, take on greater meaning for us. The motif is strikingly familiar in an Aztec poem:

"I foresaw, being a Mexican, that our rule began to be destroyed, I went forth weeping that it was to bow down and be destroyed. Let me not be angry that the grandeur of Mexico is to be destroyed. The smoking stars gather together against it."

One of the principles I intend to establish in this series of articles is that, in the earlier expressions of comet imagery, the fiery star did not just "herald" war; it was itself an agent of celestial upheaval, an active participant in the remembered WARS OF CELESTIAL POWERS, whose battles produced deep archetypal images subsequently reflected in ALL war. The flaming sphere of the comet was hurled into the midst of a great conflagration in the sky. In the original system of thought, every war on earth was an echo of the primeval disturbance, involving both celestial upheaval and the sacrifice of gods and heroes. Thus every local war needed not just rites of sacrifice, but a COMET to ratify a symbolic accord between current event and ancient memory.

Of course the peaceful celestial visitors of a later age would never achieve the violent and world-changing impact of the prototype, and over time this could only accentuate the distance between the archetype and the later symbols referring back to it.

Originally, the comet shook heaven and earth, summoning celestial armies and inspiring a clash of opposing forces in the sky. Latin poets seemed to have remembered the tradition well when, on the death of Caesar, they sought to portray a recurrence of the world-threatening tempest. When Caesar died, Virgil recounted, the sun "veiled his shining face and an evil age dreaded eternal night." Then "Germany heard the clash of armor fill the sky; the Alps quaked with unwonted shocks. Moreover a voice was heard of many among silent groves, crying aloud, and phantoms pallid in wonderful wise were seen when night was dim ... Never elsewhere did more lightnings fall from clear skies, or ghastly comets so often blaze."

The poet is here asking history to accommodate a more ancient tradition, in which the clash of armor, the cries of heaven, the appearance of "phantoms" (as in the Mexican counterpart), and the bursts of "lightning" all accompanied the appearance of the Great Comet and its flaming retinue, the chaos hordes.

As can be seen in the words of the poet Manilius, the memory of a destructive comet is inseparable from the idea of devastating WAR:

"Such are the disasters which the glowing comets oft proclaim. Death comes with these celestial torches, which threaten earth with the blaze of pyres unceasing, since heaven and nature's self are stricken and seem doomed to share men's tomb. Wars, too, the fires portend, and sudden insurrection, and arms uplifted in stealthy treachery."

When, in their wars with "barbarous Germany," the enemy made away with the Roman commander Varus, the poet was quick to assert a COMET'S presence. Then "did menacing lights burn in every quarter of the skies; nature herself waged war with fire marshaling her forces against us and threatening our destruction."

That the great wars of early civilizations had a ritual character and purpose is often stated, though the connection with REMEMBERED tumult in the sky is rarely confronted. One of the underlying attributes of ritual is its commemorative function — repeating the "exemplary" actions of gods and celestial heroes, with special emphasis on the catastrophic junctures in the biographies of the gods. The motive was announced repeatedly by warrior kings, who saw themselves as extending the "glory" of the ancestral gods, and repeating the devastation that the gods themselves had wrought upon the world. And the gods desired that their ancient deeds be remembered.

Remembering through re-enactment was thus the essential nature of ritual combat. It is significant, therefore, that the great wars of early nations, in their ritualistic aspect, involved a deliberate repetition of earthshaking noise and havoc, endlessly blended with the motives of sacrifice. In the general mythic tradition, sacrifice and war belong to one and the same cosmic sequence.

In Olmec times, according to Carrasco, "war was the place 'where the jaguars roar,' where 'feathered war bonnets heave about like foam in the waves.'" The original reference is not to a terrestrial engagement but to the contest of the gods, in which jaguar warriors (including Quetzalcoatl's jaguar form) engaged each other on the celestial battlefield. The great havoc of that conflagration meant nothing other than the cosmic night, the occasion of the god king's own death or sacrifice, when the god's heart-soul (Venus) was seen in the sky trailing fire and smoke, and the chaos-powers were set loose upon the world.

The model for both the ritual war and the closely related sacrificial rites was the life of the great initiate Quetzalcoatl, as noted by Carrasco. "Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl was born into a world of war. According to many primary sources the gods were periodically at war with one another during the mythic eras ... In the vivid creation story of the Historia de los Mexicanos por Sus Pinturas, the gods created the Chichimec people in order to gain sacrificial blood through human warfare and the ritual sacrifice of captive warriors." Ritual repetition honored and glorified the gods through REMEMBRANCE.

There is an interesting battlefield account by the Spanish soldier Bernal Díaz del Castillo, depicting a scene in the wake of a Spanish retreat near the Great Temple. A number of Spanish soldiers had been captured alive during the engagement, and the chronicler gazed back at the ensuing spectacle.

There was sounded the dismal drum of Huichilobos and many other shells and horns and things like trumpets and the sound of them was terrifying, and we all looked toward the lofty Pyramid where they were being sounded, and saw that our comrades whom they had captured when they defeated Cortés were being carried by force up the steps, and they were taking them to be sacrificed.

Sacrifice and war here merge as overlapping symbols, together with the "terrifying" sounds of a more ancient holocaust. Through sacrifice and war the divine ordeals were re-lived and the nation brought into more intimate correspondence with the gods. According to Duran, the Aztec priests periodically "approached the rulers, telling them that the gods were famished and wished to be REMEMBERED." The rulers then consulted among themselves regarding the hunger of the gods, and told their neighbors, the Tlaxcalans, to prepare for war — clearly a ritual occasion with agreed groundrules and calendar. "When the men were placed in formation and the troops set in order, the squadrons departed toward the plains of Tepepulco, where the armies met. The whole contest, the entire battle, was a struggle whose aim it was to capture prisoners for sacrifice."

At the risk of redundancy, we must emphasize again the crucial distinction between archetype and symbol. The challenge to the investigator is this: the gods demanded sacrifice and remembrance, but the prevailing theoretical frameworks cannot answer the most fundamental question. What is the nature of the events which the gods demanded mankind remember? It is the countless RE-ENACTMENTS that answer this question, and in these re-enactments, a collective finger is pointed directly at the planet Venus, the now-settled star of the Great Comet.

According to Floyd Lounsbury, one of the most respected authorities on Maya religion, the warrior kings synchronized their wars to the movements of Venus. The point is stated more than once by Linda Schele: the appearance of Venus "after superior conjunction, when Venus passes behind the sun and disappears from view, was often the occasion of war between Maya cites."

Thus the Maya kings "believed that Venus played a tremendous role in war, and it appears that they invoked its assistance," looking for the day "augured by Venus as appropriate for battle." But is this not the very role of the comet in the universal lexicon?

Archaeoastronomers have come to call the bloody wars sanctioned by Venus the "Star War events," a very fitting title. Citing studies by leading Maya experts, Carlson notes that 'the Maya conducted certain battles, raids or martial contests timed for significant stations in the Venus cycle, such as first appearances as Morning Star and Evening Star." Thus the Star War events were "Venus regulated."

What is there about the speck of light we call Venus that could account for this power over war and warriors? And is it only a coincidence that, as the herald of war, Venus here offers us one more convergence with the celebrated Great Comet? My intent in this series of articles will be not just to demonstrate the full alignment of cometary symbols with Venus symbols, but to expose that planet's original character AS the Great Comet. In truth, Venus was remembered around the world as the flaming tempest in the heavens — the very tempest to which all of the great warrior-kings looked back again and again.

__VOL II, No. 2 January 31, 1998

VELIKOVSKY'S COMET VENUS (13) By David Talbott

SWEEPING AWAY THE NIGHT

Discerning the relationship of archetype and symbol is particularly crucial when the symbol, in its familiar associations in daily life, cannot convey the extraordinary power of the archetype. By "archetype" we mean the original experience or idea giving meaning to a symbol. Without that relationship in view, the symbol can only appear random and absurd, because there is nothing standing behind it.

A recurring symbol among the Aztecs is that of the broom. In this case the symbol may seem so far removed from our subject as to have no place in this analysis. Yet since this very symbol does recur in ritual contexts of darkness and upheaval, it is only appropriate that we seek out the underlying idea.

The broom plays a part, for example, in the myth of Cihuacoatl, or "Woman Snake," the chief advisor to the Aztec ruler. Cihuacoatl stands in close but enigmatic association with both the horrifying serpentine goddess Coatlicue and the revered mother goddess Toci. But strangely, Cihuacoatl's relationships and symbols suggest two extremes, with no apparent bridge between them. In her most familiar role, she speaks for "domestic" responsibilities (she holds a broom and was remembered in the daily sweeping of the household shrine); but she was equally "at home" in her Terrible Aspect, the man-eating mistress of chaos.

We must remember what Mircea Eliade and other perceptive students of comparative religion have taught us about the motives of myth and ritual. Inherent in the idea of correspondence with the gods was the idea of sacred moments, sacred domains, and sacred gestures, distinguished from the insignificant and "profane" by their connection with the great events and deeds of the gods. The principle applied at all levels of activity, not just the publicly visible centers of collective ritual. Every household had its sacred aspect, as did the kingdom.

"Women had care of the household shrines, and the presentation of the little broom at birth signaled their sacred responsibility to keep the home zone well swept, and so free from potentially dangerous contamination," writes Inga Clendinnen, in her book AZTECS. In this single statement lies the key — the relationship of macrocosm and microcosm. "Dangerous contamination" operates at all levels and the words take their meaning from the myths of gods and heroes. The sacred domestic role of the broom is defined by a "broom's" role in an earlier cosmic drama the modern world has failed to understand.

It may be hard for many of us today to fully appreciate that the morning sweeping of the household shrine was a commemorative occasion, symbolically tied to the sweeping away of DARKNESS. Symbolically, the localized "disorder," the gathered dust and debris, referred back to the vastly greater disorder of the COSMIC night. And this elementary symbolic relationship is the bridge between microcosm and macrocosm — the "domestic" goddess, and the all-devouring, raging hag with disheveled hair, rushing across the sky when the world had fallen into chaos. With "broom" in hand, the raging goddess pursued the chaos hordes, "sweeping" away the celestial debris of the world-ending cataclysm.

Every household was an extension of the sacred order defined in ancestral times. In each household was thus kept the sacred fire, symbol of the animating light of heaven, ritually extinguished at the end of every 52-year world cycle, then re-ignited with the dawn of the new cycle. Every 52 years, the household re-lived a cosmic disaster. Then, on the following morning, as a symbol of the same events, the ritually-ordained sweeping occurred, to the sounds of a beating drum. This reverberating drumbeat meant nothing other than the voice of Ehecatl, the Dawn Bringer, avatar of Quetzalcoatl. In the words, of Jacques Soustelle, "The morning star shines with the brilliance of a gem and to greet it the wooden gongs beat on the temple-tops and the conchs wail." The dawn was thus an echo of the COSMIC morning when the world was "set in order" after the great cataclysm. Ritual sweeping repeated the ancient event of cosmic renewal, the defeat of the fiends of darkness. For these "fiends" WERE the celestial debris or cometary cloud descending upon the world, symbolized in later rites by the gathered dust in shrines and on pathways.

In ritual symbolism, matters of degree and scale cannot change original meanings. Goddess, broom, sweeping, drumbeat — the clearing of the cosmic night was remembered with each dawn of day. The holder of the household broom, therefore, fills the symbolic role of the goddess. And though broom and celestial conflagration may not seem compatible, the mythical memory does place them side by side. A hymn to the "broom"-goddess celebrates Cihuacoatl:

"plumed with eagle feathers, with the crest of eagles, painted with serpents blood with a broom in her hands ... goddess of drum beating ... She is our mother, a goddess of war, our mother a goddess of war, an example and a companion from the home of our ancestors ... She comes forth, she appears when war is waged, she protects us in war that we shall not be destroyed ... She comes adorned in the ancient manner with the eagle crest."

The hymn makes our point for us. The goddess provides the EXEMPLARY figure to explain the later rites. The symbols of disaster, of war, and of drum beating combine with those of the broom and of protection.

A goddess who "appears when war is waged" has a now-familiar sound. That is precisely the mythical role of the comet, as we have seen, and precisely the role of Venus in Mesoamerican astrology. It seems as if the commentators have failed to notice that a broom or whisk, be it constituted from straw or feathers, is a COMETARY symbol. (See our brief list supplementing the five major comet symbols noted earlier.) A bundle of straw is an old European symbol of the comet. As we will discover also in our discussion of the world-destroying hag, the famous flying broom of the European witch stands alongside the witch's disheveled, flaming hair and her serpent-dragon apotheosis as a cometary image. In China comets were remembered above all else as "brooms" sweeping away one kingdom (world age) and introducing a new order — the very function of the broom in Mesoamerican ritual.

In fact, the broom plays a symbolically crucial role in more than one Aztec rite. A major celebration of the mother goddess Toci fell on the sixteenth of September, which was also a special day in the calendar of world ages. The name of the feast was Ochpaniztli, which means "Sweeping of the Roads." The chronicler Duran calls it "the Feast of Sweeping." The feast, as reported by Duran, was marked by human sacrifice, terrible commotion and feigned skirmishes in which the goddess Toci herself participated. In the ritual celebration, the goddess was personified by a warrior who, donning the skin of a sacrificed female victim and ARMED WITH A BROOM, pursued a chaotic mob of warriors. At her descent (i.e., the descent of the impersonator), and in response to the moans of Toci, "the earth moved and quaked at that moment." (The images are reminiscent of the moans in the air when Caesar died, his soul to rise as a COMET above the quaking earth.)

Hearing this report Duran was highly incredulous:

"I tried to investigate this and attempted to laugh off and mock this absurd belief. But I was assured that this part, this area of the temple, trembled and shook at that moment. Imagination may have served them well in this case, and the devil, always present, undoubtedly aided the imagination."

Such is the power of archetypes. The integrated motifs are: commotion in the sky, moaning heavens, quaking earth, goddess with a "broom" pursuing the hordes of darkness.

In these rites, the sky-darkening armies themselves were personified by warriors "armed" with brooms and appareled with colored streamers and plumed ornaments. "A bloody fray then took place among them. With sticks and stones countless men came to the combat and fight, something awesome to see ... " In such manner was the havoc of the cosmic night re-enacted every year. The harsh sounds, the great din of clashing arms, the comet-like brooms and streamers of the unleashed mobs — themselves a dramatic personification of the swarming chaos powers in the sky — all accented by hurled stones and debris. Could one concoct a more vivid portrait of the cosmic upheaval terminating a former world age? A cometary disaster, involving vast "armies" or clouds and debris in the vicinity of earth, pitted against the PARENT OF COMETS, the dragon-like Venus "sweeping away" the cosmic night, provides us with a Velikovskian scenario par excellence.

Clendinnen has given us an intensely dramatic account of the "sweeping" festival and its key ritual components, noting again and again the role of darkness and terror, and emphasizing the paradox of the "domestic" goddess hurled into a fray with the best warriors of the city. "These men, who scorned to turn their back in battle, fled through the dark streets ... as Toci and her followers pursued them with brooms, the' domestic' female symbol par excellence, speaking of the tireless cleansing of the human zone, but now sodden with human blood." It was Toci herself, "in her paper regalia and her great bannered headdress" and her symbolic broom, who inaugurated the ritual slaying of captives. Then she confronted the warrior-mob again, "driving them ahead of her with war cries" and her broom, the hordes scattering as she chased them, until Toci was alone and victorious, having swept away the warriors of darkness — "triumphant as the pitiless mistress of war, insatiable eater of men."

The great sweeping festival, says Clendinnen, was "a brilliantly constructed horror event, in its abrupt changes of pace and its teasing of the imagination through the exploitation of darkness." Here we see "the image of the wom[a]n's broom dipped into human blood and so become a weapon of terror, before which warriors famed for their courage were driven like leaves." A paradox indeed! The broom wielded as a "weapon of terror."

But let us be clear on this: a broom on its own instills no fear. Only as a mirror of the COMETARY "broom," the terrifying "weapon" hurled against celestial armies of darkness, can the symbol make sense. And then the paradox dissolves before our eyes.

Duran tells us that on the day of the feast to Toci, the people swept their houses and pathways, guided by some ancient belief he is unable to illuminate. Significantly, community roads and highways were also swept on this day, according to Duran, particularly the road passing by the shrine to the goddess Toci. The feast itself, as we have noted, was called "The Sweeping of the Roads," and this too is a key, for it enables us to complete the circle with respect to the sweeping rites.

In Evon Vogt's book ZINACANTAN, the author gives a poetic tale from the Highlands of Chiapas concerning the planet Venus. It seems that the people remember Venus as a GIRL WITH A BROOM, for the folk tale "describes the Morning Star (Venus), who is believed to have been a Chamula girl transformed into a 'Sweeper of the Path' for the Sun."

It is the astronomical association, then — the connection with celestial sweeping, the clearing of the way for the new "sun" or world age — that finds the planet Venus in the very guise we should expect. Even in the wake of vast cultural evolution and fragmentation, the nations of Mesoamerica kept alive the ancient link of the Great Comet to the planet Venus, in the symbolic form of the girl and her broom.

__VOL II, No. 3 February 15, 1998

VELIKOVSKY'S COMET VENUS (14) By David Talbott

THE MYTH OF THE GREAT COMET

In these brief articles we have asked whether Immanuel Velikovsky's comet Venus finds support among Mesoamerican cultures. Our conclusion is that, to a stunning degree, the symbols or hieroglyphs of comets stand in an unexplained conjunction with the planet Venus in Mesoamerica. Not only the five most frequently-occurring hieroglyphs for the comet around the world, but virtually all of the variations on these symbols are attached to each other and to the planet Venus. On their own, the symbols do not provide any basis for the observed merging. But grant the proposed history of a COMET Venus, and all of the enigmas are removed in a single stroke.

In support of this conjunction, we have also cross-referenced the Mesoamerican traditions with more general traditions about comets in other cultures, and found an underlying consistency far too broad to be explained by chance.

Additionally, we have seen that the deepest fears of Mesoamerican culture turn out to be the specific fears which ancient astronomies associated SIMULTANEOUSLY with the arrival of a comet and the risings of Venus, as we should expect: the end of the world, death of kings, overwhelming wars, plague, pestilence, drought. Those who are familiar with our larger thesis will recognize that these fears are not random, but inseparably tied to a more fundamental story: that of the ancient god-king — the celestial "father" of kings — whose death or ordeal brought a former world age to a catastrophic end, and whose "heart-soul" took flight as a comet-like star. This prototypical, cometary heart-soul is nothing other than the planet Venus.

One discovers this equivalence of Venus- and comet-fears in all of the symbolic and ritual contexts by which Mesoamerican cultures expressed their deepest anxieties: we see it in calendars of world ages, in superstitions associated with unexpected disruptions of natural cycles (eclipses, etc.), in massive ritual sacrifice, in relentless war, and in a never-ending stream of commemorative festivals and rites. Repeatedly, the stargazers looked to VENUS as the cause or sign of the very disorder that world myth ascribes to the feared GREAT COMET.

It has long been assumed that the great civilizations of the past oriented themselves to a sky appearing almost exactly like our sky today. I have suggested, however, that an entirely new approach to ancient myth and religion is warranted. Early races were obsessed with a prior "age of the gods," a time unlike any period of human history to follow. It is the living memories of this epoch that reveal the true source of collective fear, as generation after generation anxiously followed the movements of PLANETS. Driven by fear and guilt, the starworshippers incessantly re-enacted the critical junctures in that prior age, when planets moved out of control. There is a reason why the myth of the comet Venus is so deeply entwined with a more general memory of planetary upheaval.

In truth, the evidence for an UNFAMILIAR sky is massive. But to appreciate even the first levels of that evidence one must break the trance of prior teaching and beliefs Evidence must be seen AS evidence, rather than as witness to the absurdity and contradictions of the star worshippers. When clearly-defined patterns of memory are impossible to explain under prevailing assumptions, those assumptions must be re-evaluated.

To comprehend the equation of comet symbols and Venus symbols, one need only ask what we should expect to find if Velikovsky's thesis was fundamentally correct. (I do not accept Velikovsky's Venus chronology or his detailed scenario.) If Venus formerly appeared as a world-threatening comet, but subsequently lost its cometary aspect, should we not find that later fears of comets attached themselves BOTH to the now-peaceful planet Venus and to the wisps of gas periodically coming into view? Wherever systematic, empirical astronomy kept alive the Great Comet's connection with Venus, we should EXPECT that the symbols of comets would pervade the culture's images of that planet. If the thesis is correct, it could not have been otherwise. So we can hardly be surprised to find that, in Mexico, the five universal glyphs of the comet are attached to the planet Venus! That a comet is the ONLY known astronomical reference for these symbols makes the point all the more emphatic.

In terms of our larger thesis, it should not surprise us either that the planet Venus was, in a hundred different ways, the regulator of the fate of kings and kingdoms in Mexico. (The Great Comet DID "determine" the fate of the king's celestial prototype; see earlier discussion of the Saturn theory.) A compelling logic will thus be seen in Venus' definitive mythical role — in regulating the cosmic cycles, ordaining festivals pointing backward to the age of the gods, sending the kingdom's strongest men to war, and sending the victims of war to the sacrificial stone. Given the full story of the Great Comet, we should expect nothing else. And even in the more tempered rituals of daily life, the keeping of the sacred fire, the morning sweeping of the shrine, and other rites too numerous to mention here, one discerns the ever-present memory of a world falling into confusion, but subsequently renewed to the drumbeat of the Dawn Bringer.

When Bob Forrest said that he could find "no direct historical reference" to the Venus-comet, I believe he spoke from conviction. But the language of the first civilizations was not "historical;" it was mythical, having its reference in events no longer occurring. Thus, no civilization could meet Forrest's test. There are no "direct historical references" to the age of the gods, because that age precedes earthbound, historical chronicles.

Did the underlying events implied by the myths and by the ritual acts of remembering actually occur? Given the nature of the language involved, the sheer scale of evidence is stunning; and one might wonder how the Mexican star worshippers were supposed to have told us something more about the remembered catastrophes, without a crash course in the language of modern science.

In taking up such issues, cross referencing is imperative. No approach that isolates each evidential fragment, "explaining" that fragment without explaining parallel evidence pointing to the same unusual conclusion, can diminish the case for a remembered Venus-comet. No self-respecting scholar will lack the imagination to conjure an "explanation" of a particular comet symbol attached to Venus: it is simply too easy to claim that an ancient tribe or race may have accidentally confused a comet tradition with a Venus tradition. But it is the CONSISTENCY of the comet images of Venus that makes the case, and in this sense Forrest's analysis breaks down completely with the very first instance cited. The comet Venus is a global myth, and the one credible explanation of the myth is that Venus DID look like a comet — that it did participate in literally earthshaking events, not that long ago. One only has to follow the evidence to know that this is so.