In The Beginning
Saturn &
The Flood - Part II
VArchive.org
Hydrogen
& Oxygen
The
conflict between the larger planets resulted in long-stretched filaments
ejected by a disturbed Saturn to cross the Earth’s orbit. The hydrogen of the
planet combined with the oxygen of the terrestrial atmosphere in electrical
discharges and turned into water.
There are definite indications of a drastic
drop in the atmospheric oxygen at the time of the Deluge—for instance, the
survivors of the catastrophe are said in many sources to have been unable to
light fires.
The consumption of the oxygen in the air by
its conversion into water could not fail to have a marked effect upon all
that breathes. The animal life that survived needed to accomodate
itself to the changed conditions.
According to rabbinical sources, before the
Deluge man was vegetarian; but the post-diluvian
population did not continue the vegetarian habits of the “sinful” population
of the earth. The Talmud and the Midrashim narrate
that after the Deluge a carnivorous instinct was awakened in animal and man,
and everyone had the impulse to bite.
The fear of you and the dread of you shall be
upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the air. . . . Every
moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and as I gave you the green
plants, I will give you everything.
The prohibition against quenching the thirst
for blood is an ordinance said to have been introduced
immediately after the Deluge.
In a teleological program this result of the
Deluge does not seem appropriate for a catastrophe brought about to chastize the human race and the animals, to cleanse them
of their vices and make them better. Because of its non-program appearance
the carnivorous urge must have been not a mythological motif, but a result of
physiological changes. Most probably an anemia
connected with the diminution of oxygen in the air was responsible for the
new inclination.
The Origin Of The Oceans
It must have been at the very beginning of my
occupation with the problems later developed in my books and in not yet
published manuscripts, that I came upon the question
of the origin of salts in seas and oceans. The common salt is a substantial
ingredient of the oceanic content, or, said differently, the water of the
oceans and seas contains a substantial solution of NaCl,
or sodium chloride. Even though our blood and tissues abound in sodium
chloride, man and animals are not adapted to drink salty water, and life on
land could develop only thanks to the evaporation of the water from the
surface of seas and oceans, or to distillation—the evaporating water is free
from salts. Falling as rain or snow or dew, it feeds underground sources and
also glaciers, and through them the brooks and rivers and lakes, and is
delivered to our use usually through concrete tubes and metal pipes.
Of the salts of the seas sodium chloride is
by far the most abundant. The provenance of it is, however, a riddle. It was,
and still is, assumed that the salts in the oceans originated mainly through
importation from land, having been dissolved from rocks by flowing rivulets
and rivers, themselves fed by underground sources, and the same process
working on the rocks of the seabed. Terrestrial formations are rich in
sodium, and in eons of time, it is assumed, the sodium washed out of the
rocks supplied its content to the oceans; the seas evaporate and the
concentration of these salts grows. But the rocks are by far not so rich in
chlorine, and hence the problem—from where did chlorine come to contribute
its abundance to oceanic water? There is chlorine in source water, but
usually not in significant amounts. The proportion of salts in the rivers is
very different from their proportion in the seas. River water has many
carbonates (80 percent of the salts), fewer sulphates (13 percent) and still fewer chlorides (7 percent). Sea water has many
chlorides (89 percent), fewer sulphates (10 percent) and only a few
carbonates (0.2 percent). The comparison of these figures makes it clear that
rivers cannot be made responsible for most of the salts of the seas.
Therefore it is also obvious that there is no proper way of calculating the
age of the Earth by comparing the amount of salts in the seas with the annual
discharge by the rivers; the most that can be done in this respect is to
calculate the rich amount of carbonates in the rivers in their relation to
the relatively poor concentration to these salts in the seas; but then there
will be no explanation for the rich concentration of chlorides in the seas in
comparison with their poor concentration in the rivers.
A part of the salts could be traced to the
washing of lands and the floor of the seas; chlorine is known also to be
discharged by volcanoes, but to account for the chlorine locked in the seas,
volcanic eruptions, whether on land or under the surface of the seas, needed
to have taken place on an unimaginable scale—actually, it was figured out, on
an impossible scale. Thus it was acknowledged that the provenance of chlorine
in the salts of the seas is a problem unsolved.
Paleontological research makes
it rather apparent that marine animals in some early age were more closely
related to fresh-water fauna; in other words, the salinity of the oceans
increased markedly at some age in the past.
The most obvious and permanent effect of a
deluge of extraterrestrial origin on the Earth would be the increase in its
water volume and of the place occupied by the seas. Presently four-fifths of
the Earth are covered with water. A stupendous
addition of water to the Earth should have decreased, not increased its
salinity, if the water came down in a pure state. But if the Earth was
showered by torrents of hydrogen and water some other ingredients of the Saturnian atmosphere could also have swept across the
Earth’s orbit.
In the Buddhist book on “The World Cycles,”
the Visuddhi-Magga, where the
catastrophes that terminated the world ages are described, it is said:
But when a world cycle perishes by water . .
. there arises a cycle-destroying great cloud of
salt water. At first it rains with a very fine rain which gradually increases
to great torrents which fill one hundred thousand times ten million worlds,
and then the mountain peaks of the earth become flooded with saltish water, and hidden from view. And the water is buoyed
up on all sides by the wind, and rises upward from the earth until it engulfs
the heavens.
Volcanoes which were active during the
cataclysm of the Deluge and during other cosmic upheavals vomited sulphur,
chlorine, and carbonates, and contributed to the composition of the salts of
the oceans. Carbonates fell on Earth in large quantities in some of the
upheavals, certainly in the one which took place in the middle of the second
millennium before the present era, at the very end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt, an
upheaval described in detail in Worlds in Collision. But a major
portion of the chlorine in which the oceans are so rich must have come from
an extraterrestrial source.
My explanation of the origin of a large
portion of the salts of the seas suggests that Saturn is rich not only in
water but also in chlorine, either in the form of sodium chloride or in some
other combination, or even atomic free. The last solution, of atomic free
chlorine, appeared chemically and biologically somewhat difficult to
contemplate, because chlorine is a very active element, seeking ties with
other elements; biologically because it would be damaging to any plant life,
yet there are other indications which point to the possibility of plant life
on Saturn.
Saturn The God Of Seeds
Saturn was called “the god of seeds” or “of
sowing,” also “the lord of the fieldfruits.”
A Deluge destroying much faunal life must
have caused a dissemination of plants: in many places new forms of vegetation
must have sprouted from the rich soil fertilized by lava and mud; seeds were
carried from all parts of the globe and in many instances, because of the
change in climate, they were able to grow in new surroundings. The axis of
the earth was displaced, the orbit changed, the speed of rotation altered,
the conditions of irrigation became different, the composition of the
atmosphere was not the same—entirely new conditions of growth prevailed.
Ovid thus describes the exuberant growth of
vegetation following the Flood. “After the old moisture remaining from the
Flood had grown warm from the rays of the sun, the slime of the wet marshes
swelled with heat, and the fertile seeds of life, nourished in that
life-giving soil, as in a mother’s womb, grew, and in time took on some
special form.” “When, therefore, the earth, covered with mud from the recent
Flood, became heated up by the hot and genial rays of the sun, she brought
forth innumerable forms of life, in part of ancient shapes, and in part
creatures new and strange.”
The innumerable new forms of life in the
animal and plant kingdoms following the Deluge could have been solely a
result of multiple mutations. Although this seems a sufficient explanation of
why and how Saturn came to be credited with the work of dissemination and mutation,
the mention of another possibility should not be omitted.
If it is true that the Earth passed through
the gases exploded from Saturn, it should not be entirely excluded that germs
were carried together with meteorites and gases and thus reached the Earth.
The scholarly world in recent years has
occupied itself with the idea that microorganisms—living
cells or spores—can reach the Earth from interstellar spaces, carried along
by the pressure of light rays. The explosion of a planet is
a more likely method of carrying seeds and spores through interplanetary
spaces.
The new forms of life could be the result of
mutations, a subject I have discussed in Earth in Upheaval. But the
possibility that seeds were carried away from an exploding planet cannot be dismissed
either.
The Worship Of Saturn
Saturn, so active in the cosmic changes, was
regarded by all mankind as the supreme god. Seneca says that Epigenes, who studied astronomy among the Chaldeans, “estimates that the planet Saturn exerts the
greatest influence upon all the movements of celestial bodies.”
On becoming a nova, it ejected filaments in
all directions and the solar system became illuminated as if by a hundred
suns. It subsided rather quickly and retreated into far-away regions.
Peoples that remembered early tragedies
enacted in the sky by the heavenly bodies asserted that Jupiter drove Saturn
away from its place in the sky. Before Jupiter (Zeus) became the chief god,
Saturn (Kronos) occupied the celestial throne. In
all ancient religions the dominion passes from Saturn to Jupiter. In Greek
mythology, Kronos is presented as the father and
Zeus as his son who dethrones him. Kronos devours
some of his children. After this act Zeus overpowers his father, puts him in
chains, and drives him from his royal station in the sky. In Egyptian
folklore or religion the participants of the drama are said to be Osiris-Saturn, brother and husband of Isis-Jupiter.
The cult of Osiris
and the mysteries associated with it dominated the Egyptian religion as
nothing else. Every dead man or woman was entombed with observances honoring Osiris; the city of Abydos in the desert west of
the Nile and north-west of Thebes was sacred
to him; Sais in the
Delta used to commemorate the floating of Osiris’
body carried by the Nile into the Mediterranean.
What made Osiris so deeply ingrained in the
religious memory of the nation that his cult pervaded mythology and religion?
Osiris’ dominion,
before his murder by Seth, was remembered as a time of bliss. According to
the legend Seth, Osiris’ brother, killed and
dismembered him, whereupon Isis, Osiris’ wife, went
on peregrinations to collect his dispersed members. Having gathered them and
wrapped them together with swathings, she brought Osiris back to life. The memory of this event was a
matter of yearly jubilation among the Egyptians. Osiris
became lord of the netherworld, the land of the dead. A legend, a prominent
part of the Osiris cycle, tells that Isis gave birth to Horus,
whom she conceived from the already dead Osiris,
and that Horus grew up to avenge his father by engaging Seth in
mortal combat.
In Egyptology the meaning of these
occurrences stands as an unresolved mystery. The myth of Osiris
“is too remarkable and occurs in too many divergent forms not to contain a
considerable element of historic truth,” wrote Sir Alan Gardiner, the leading
scholar in these fields; but what historical truth is it? Could it be of “an
ancient king upon whose tragic death the entire legend hinged” ? wondered Gardiner.
But of such a king “not a trace has been found before the time of the Pyramid
texts,” and in these texts Osiris is spoken of
without end. There he appears as a dead god or king or judge of the dead. But
who was Osiris in his life? asked
Gardiner. At times “he is represented to us as the vegetation which perishes
in the flood-water mysteriously issuing from himself.
. . .” He is associated with brilliant light.
After a life of studying Egyptian history and
religion Gardiner confessed that he remained unaware of whom Osiris represented or memorialized: “The origin of Osiris remains from me an insoluble mystery.” Nor could
others in his field help him find an answer.
The Egyptologist John Wilson wrote that it is
an admission of failure that the chief cultural content of Egyptian civilization,
its religion, its mythological features again and
again narrated and alluded to in texts and represented in statues and temple reliefs, is not understood. The astral
meaning of Egyptian deities was not realized and the cosmic events their activities
represent were not thought of.
* * *
The prophet Ezekiel in the Babylonian exile
had a vision—the likeness of a man, but made of fire and amber who lifted him
by the lock of his hair and brought him to some darkened chamber where the
ancients of the house of Israel with censers in their hands were worshipping
idols portrayed upon the wall round about. Then the angel of the vision told
him: “Thou shalt see greater abominations that they
do"—and he brought the prophet to the door of the gate of the Lord’s
house—"and, behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz.” Next he showed
him also Jews in the inner court of the Lord’s house “with their back toward
the temple of the Lord and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped
the sun toward the east.”
The worship of the sun and the planets was
decried by Jeremiah, a contemporary of Ezekiel. But what was this weeping for
Tammuz?
Tammuz was a Babylonian god; one of the
months of the year, approximately coinciding with July, in the summer, was named
in his honor; and by this very name it is known in
the present-day Hebrew calendar. Tammuz was a god that died and was then
hidden in the underworld; his death was the reason for a fast, accompanied by
lamentations of the women of the land. His finding or his return
to life in resurrection were the motifs of the passion.
Tammuz was a god of vegetation, of the flood,
and of seeds: “The god Tammuz came from Armenia every year in his ark in
the overflowing river, blessing the alluvium with new growth.” In the month
of Tammuz he was “bound, and the liturgies speak of his having been drowned
among flowers which were thrown upon him as he sank beneath the waves of the Euphrates.” The drowning of Tammuz was an occasion for
wailing by women: “The flood has taken Tammuz, the
raging storm has brought him low.”
Of Tammuz it also is narrated that he was
associated with brilliant light, with descent into the
nether world, visited there by Ishtar, his spouse.
Tammuz’ death, his subsequent resurrection, or his discovery in the far
reaches, but no longer brilliant, were the themes of the cult that was not
just one of the mysteries, but the chief and paramount cult.
The Osirian
mysteries, the wailing for Tammuz, all refer to the transformation of Saturn
during and following the Deluge. Osiris was not a
king but the planet Saturn, Kronos of the Greeks,
Tammuz of the Babylonians. The Babylonians called Saturn “the Star of
Tammuz.” After the Deluge Saturn was invisible (the sky was covered for a
long time by clouds of volcanic dust) and the Egyptians cried for Osiris, and the Babylonians cried for Tammuz. Isis
(Jupiter at that time) went in search of her husband, and Ishtar
(also Jupiter at that early time) went to the netherworld to find her husband
Tammuz. For a time Saturn disappeared, driven away by Jupiter, and when it
reappeared it was no longer the same planet: it moved very slowly. The
disappearance of the planet Saturn in the “nether world” became the theme of
many religious observances, comprising liturgies, mystery plays,
lamentations, and fasts. When Osiris was seen again
in the sky, though greatly diminished, the people were frenzied by the return
of Osiris from death; nevertheless he became king
of the netherworld. In the Egyptian way of seeing the celestial drama, Isis
(Jupiter), the spouse of Osiris (Saturn) wrapped
him in swathings. Osiris
was known as “the swathed"—the way the dead came to be dressed for their
journey to the world of the dead, over which Osiris
reigns. Similar rites were celebrated in honor of
Adonis, who died and was resurrected after a stay in the netherland, in the mysteries of Orpheus.
Sir James G. Frazer, the collector of
folklore, came to regard Osiris as a vegetation god; likewise he saw in the Babylonian Tammuz, an equivalent of
the Egyptian Osiris, a vegetation god and, carried
away by this concept, wrote his The Golden Bough,
built around the idea of the vegetation god that dies and is resurrected the
following year.
A few peoples through consecutive planetary ages
kept fidelity to the ancient Saturn, or Kronos, or
Brahma, whose age was previous to that of Jupiter. Thus
the Scythians were called Umman-Manda by the Chaldeans—"People of Manda"—and Manda is the
name of Saturn. The Phoenicians regarded El-Saturn as their
chief deity; Eusebius informs us that El, a name used also in the Bible as a
name for God, was the name of Saturn. In Persia Saturn was
known as Kevan or Kaivan.
The different names for God in the Bible
reflect the process of going through the many ages in which one planet
superseded another and was again superseded by the next one in the celestial
war. El was the name of Saturn; Adonis of the Syrians, the bewailed deity,
was also, like Osiris, the planet Saturn; but in
the period of the contest between the two major planets, Jupiter and Saturn,
the apellative of the dual gods became Adonai, which means “my lords”; then, with the victory of
Jupiter, it came to be applied to him alone.
Seventeen
In the story of the Universal Deluge it is
said: “In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the
seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the
great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.” Five months
later, according to the Book of Genesis, on the seventeenth day of the
seventh month, the ark rested upon Ararat.
In Egyptian religious belief Osiris was drowned “on the seventeenth day of the month Athyr.” The fast for Tammuz, commemorating his descent
into the netherworld, began on the seventeenth of the month named for him.
Although the similarity of the Babylonian and Biblical versions of the story
of the Deluge was repeatedly stressed, the significance of the number
seventeen in the story of Tammuz in relation to the same number in the book
of Genesis was not emphasized, or even noticed.
The feast of Saturnalia began “always on the
17th of December” and with time, in imperial Rome, when it was celebrated for three
consecutive days, it began on the fifteenth and continued for two more days,
until the seventeenth.
The connection between the number seventeen
and the Deluge is thus not confined to the Biblical, Babylonian, and Egyptian
sources—we meet it also in Roman beliefs and practices. The significance of
the number seventeen in the mystery plays related to Osiris’
drowning and in the festivities of Saturnalia is an indication that these
memorials were related to the Deluge.
Festivals Of Light
The Deluge and the seven days of brilliant
light immediately preceding it were a universal experience, and they left
indelible memories. Many of the religious rites and observances of all creeds
go back to these events of the past in which the celestial gods Saturn and
Jupiter were the main participants. Among the most ancient of all such
observances were festivals of light of seven days’ duration, held in honor of Saturn. The “seven days of light” just before
the Deluge overwhelmed the Earth are recreated in these feasts.
Herodotos describes a
nocturnal light festival held each year at Sais in
commemoration of Osiris’ death and resurrection. It
was called the Feast of Lamps:
There is one night on which the inhabitants
all burn a multitude of lights in the open air round their houses. . . . These burn the whole night. . . . The Egyptians who are
absent from the festival observe the night of the sacrifice, no less than the
rest, by a general lighting of lamps; so that the illumination is not
confined to the city of Sais, but extends over the
whole of Egypt.
In Rome
the feast of light was named Saturnalia. According to tradition the
Saturnalia had been established in honor of Saturn
when, all of a sudden, after a lengthy and prosperous reign, “Saturn suddenly
disappeared.” Macrobius wrote that in celebrating
the Saturnalia the Romans used to honor the altars
of Saturn with lighted candles . . . sending round wax tapers during the
Saturnalia.” In his time the festival was celebrated for three consecutive
days but, Macrobius wrote,
And yet in fact among the men of old there
were some who supposed that the Saturnalia lasted for seven days . . . for Novius . . . says: ‘Long-awaited they come, the seven
days of Saturnalia’ ; and Mummius
too . . . says: ‘Of the many excellent institutions of our ancestors, this is
the best—that they made the seven days of the Saturnalia begin when the
weather is coldest.’
Hannukah and Christmas
are both feasts of light and, like the Saturnalia, both can be traced to the
days of the Universal Deluge. The Hebrew tradition that Hanukkah was
established to commemorate the “miracle with the oil” that was found undepleted and sufficed for seven days, is a poor
rationalization. A better ground for a re-establishment of a holiday, so
similar to the Saturnalia, in Judea, was in the fact that in the middle of
the second century before the present era Rome conquered Greece, and about
the same time in the rebellion of the Hashmanaim
(better known by the name of one of the sons, Judah Maccabi)
against Hellenistic rule, the people of Palestine were drawing near the Roman
world with its usages. It appears that the Romans fomented the revolt in the
Hellenized provinces at the time of their conquest of Greece. Thus
the feast of Hanukkah seems to be an adaptation of the Roman Saturnalia.
The observation of this festival was later
taken over by the festival of Christmas, which was originally observed for
seven days, from the 25th of December until the first of the New Year.
Saturn & Jupiter
The history of this pair, the ancient Kronos and Zeus, or Saturn and Jupiter, as reflected in many
traditions all around the world, tells a story that has nothing in it
resembling the sedate and uneventful circling of these bodies on their orbits
that modern astronomy asserts as a fact.
Saturn and Jupiter are very much like the
sun; were they not planets, they would be considered stars, like our sun.
Jupiter is nearly 330 times more massive than the Earth, and Saturn 80 times.
Both planets are covered with gases which are in constant motion, like the
gaseous atmosphere of the sun. The sun has nine satellites and numerous
asteroids and comets; Jupiter has at least fourteen satellites and several
asteroids and comets. Saturn has ten known satellites; and four or five
comets constitute the Saturnian family (though
these comets do not circle around Saturn itself, they are commonly regarded
as related to the orbit of Saturn).
Were Jupiter and Saturn free from the bonds
of the sun, they could be considered as stars or suns. Were two such stars
set in space close to one another, they would constitute a double-star
system, both stars circling around a common focus.
As told, the picture that emerges from
comparative folklore and mythology presents Saturn and Jupiter in vigorous
interactions. Suppose that these two bodies approached each other rather
closely at one time, causing violent perturbations and huge tidal effects in
each other’s atmospheres. Their mutual disturbance led to a stellar
explosion, or nova. As we have seen, a nova is thought to result from an instability in a star, generated by a sudden influx of
matter, usually derived from its companion in a binary system. If what we
call today Jupiter and Saturn are the products of such a sequence of events,
their appearance and respective masses must formerly have been quite
different.
A scenario such as this would explain the
prominence of Saturn prior to its cataclysmic disruption and dismemberment—it
must have been a larger body than it is now, possibly of the volume of
Jupiter. Interestingly, for certain reasons G. Kuiper
assumed that Saturn originally was of a mass equal to that of Jupiter. At
some point during a close approach to Jupiter, Saturn became unstable; and,
as a result of the influx of extraneous material, it exploded, flaring as a
nova which, after subsiding, left a remnant that the ancients still
recognized as Saturn, even though it was but a fraction of the celestial body
of earlier days. In Saturn’s explosion much of the matter absorbed earlier
was thrown off into space. Saturn was greatly reduced in size and removed to
a distant orbit—the binary system was broken up and Jupiter took over the
dominant position in the sky. The ancient Greeks saw this as Zeus, victorious
over his father, forcing him to release the children he earlier had swallowed
and banishing him to the outer reaches of the sky. In Egyptian eyes it was Horus-Jupiter assuming royal power, leaving Osiris to reign over the kingdom of the dead.
If the descriptions of Saturn as a “sun” mean
anything, Saturn must have been visible, in the time before its explosion, as
a large disk. If this was the case the increased distance between the Earth
and Saturn could have been the result of the removal of the Earth from its
place or of Saturn from its place, or both. Saturn could be removed only by
the planet Jupiter, the sole member of the planetary family more powerful
than Saturn. And indeed, the myth says that Saturn was removed by Jupiter.
The Rings Of Saturn
One instance of the Saturn myth can be
verified with the help of a small telescope: Saturn is in chains. Instead of
solving anything, this fact presents a new problem that demands a solution.
How did the ancient Greeks and Romans know that Saturn is encircled by rings?
It is strange that this question was not asked before. The existence of these
rings around Saturn became known in modern times only in the seventeenth
century, after the telescope was invented. They were first seen, but
misunderstood, by Galileo and understood by Huygens.
If the myth did not by mere chance invent
these rings, the Greeks must have seen them. The last case could be true if
the Greeks or some other oriental people possessed lenses adapted for the
observation of celestial bodies, or if the rings around Saturn were visible
to the naked eye at some time in the past—today they are not visible without
magnifying instruments. There are cases of exact observations by the Chaldeans which suggest the use of some accurate
technical means. These means could consist of a sort of astrolabe like that
of Tyche de Brahe who
made most accurate observations of celestial bodies without the help of a
telescope; also Copernicus, prior to Tyche de Brahe, made all his calculations of the movements of the
planets before the telescope was invented. But neither Tycho
de Brahe nor Copernicus saw the rings.
The statue of Saturn on the Roman capitol had
bands around its feet, and Macrobius in the fifth
century of our era, already ignorant of the meaning of these bands, asked:
“But why is the god Saturn in chains?”
In the Egyptian legend Isis (Jupiter) swathes
Osiris (Saturn). The Egyptian apellative
for Osiris was “the swathed.”
In the Zend-Avesta it is said that the
star Tistrya (Jupiter, later Venus) keeps Pairiko in twofold bonds. Saturn is encircled by two
groups of rings—one larger and one smaller, with a space in between. To see this a better telescope than that used by Galilei or that used by Huygens is needed; the twofold
structure of the girdle was first observed in 1675.
The rings of Saturn were known also to the aboriginees of America
before Columbus
discovered the land; this means also before the telescope was invented at the
beginning of the seventeenth century. An ancient engraved wooden panel from Mexico shows
the family of the planets: one of them is Saturn, easily recognizable by its
rings.
Nor were the Maoris of New Zealand ignorant
of them: “One of the great mysteries connected with Saturn is the still
unanswered question of how the ancient Maoris of New Zealand knew about her
rings—for there is evidence that they did have a Saturnian
ring legend long before the days of Galileo.”
In the myth it is said that Jupiter drove
Saturn away and that on this occasion Saturn was put in chains. If these
words mean what they say and are not a meaningless portion of the myth—in a
dream, at least, there are no meaningless parts—then the knowledge of the
ancients about the rings of Saturn could have been acquired because of better
visibility: in other words, at some time in the past Saturn and Earth appear
to have been closer to one another.
Originally I assumed that the rings of Saturn
may consist of water in the form of ice, but since the ancient lore all
around the world tells that it was Jupiter that put these rings around
Saturn, I considered that they might have some other components, too. Since
the 1960’s spectroscopic study of the Saturnian
rings has confirmed that they consist most probably of water in the form of
ice.
Saturns Golden Age
The age that man later called the Age of Kronos (Saturn) was remembered with nostalgia as an age
of bliss. References to the Age of Kronos in the
ancient lore are very numerous.
Hesiod tells of
A golden race of mortal men who lived in the
time of Kronos when he was reigning in heaven. And
they lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil:
miserable age rested not on them . . . The fruitful earth unforced bare them
fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace upon their
lands with many good things. . . .
Similarly writes Ovid in the sixth book of
his Metamorphoses:
In the beginning was the Golden Age, when men
of their own accord, without threat of punishment, without laws, maintained
good faith and did what was right. . . . The earth itself, without
compulsion, untouched by the hoe, unfurrowed by any
share, produced all things spontaneously. . . . It was a season of
everlasting spring.
Rabbinical sources recount that men lived
under very favorable conditions before the Deluge,
and that these contributed to their sinfulness: “They knew neither toil nor
care and as a consequence of their extraordinary prosperity they grew
insolent.”
The dominance of Saturn at some remote period
in the history of the life of the peoples on Earth was of such pronounced and
all-pervading character that the question arises whether the adventures of
the planet going through many exploits could by itself be the full cause of
the worship of the planet and the naming of the Golden Age “the Age of Kronos” (Saturn). Saturn exploded and caused the Earth to
go through the greatest of its historical catastrophes, and this was
completely sufficient to make of Saturn the supreme deity; but it appears
that the Age of Saturn is a name for the epoch before the Deluge;
after the Deluge Saturn, dismembered, almost ceased to exist as a planetary
body and when at length it was reconstituted it was fettered by rings, and
was far from being the dominant celestial body that would behoove
it as the supreme deity of the epoch. The “Age of Kronos”
is so glorious an age that it is hardly thinkable to connect it with the
period after the Deluge. The wailing for Adonis, Tammuz of the Babylonians,
or Osiris of the Egyptians, deplored the end of its
dominance, not the beginning of it.
Then why was Saturn the supreme deity by
whose name the great and glorious age before the Deluge was named?
Because it removed Uranus from its role of chief deity, and to the onlookers
on Earth, emasculated him? If the distances between the Earth and Saturn and
Uranus were then what they are now, then such occurrences could scarcely be
observable: Uranus is only faintly visible in the night sky over Mesopotamia in a most translucent night. Saturn is
clearly visible but is not, for an unaided eye, a spectacle in the sky; it
was more voluminous and more luminous before the Deluge, but if it moved on
an orbit not too different from the present one, and the Earth were moving
approximately in the same quarters where it moves today, then the surprise
still persists as to how a body on a 30-years-long orbit could make the
inhabitants of the Earth on its one-year-long orbit, regard it the supreme of
all celestial bodies in the sky.
The appellative “sun” employed for Saturn
could be explained by its unusual brightness when it exploded as a nova for a
short time, actually for seven days, before the beginning of the Deluge on
Earth. Assuming the length of the day in those times to have been not too
dissimilar from its present value, the velocity of the moving masses being on
the order of 100 kilometers a second or 8,600,000 kilometers in a 24-hour period, and the Earth and Saturn
being on the closest points on their reciprocal orbits, or in conjuction (which is another surmise), in seven days a
distance of ca. 60 million kilometers would be
covered. On present orbits the distance between Saturn and Earth varies from
1,279 million kilometers at superior conjunction to
1,578 million kilometers at opposition; the lesser
of these distances is ca. 21 times greater than that above calculated. This
means also that unless the velocity of the ejected water was an order of
magnitude greater than 100 km per second, the distance between Saturn and
Earth must have been substantially smaller than it is at present.
I have rather arbitrarily selected the figure
of 100 kilometers a second for the motion of the
exploded material; today the escape velocity, or the speed required for a
projectile on the surface of Saturn to leave the gravitational attraction of
the planet is but 35 kilometers a second. For
Jupiter the escape velocity is 59 kilometers a
second. Assuming that Saturn was of a mass equal to that of Jupiter, the same
figure would apply to it too. With 100 kilometers a
second we have almost double the velocity of escape. The arbitrariness of the
assumption of such velocity for our calculations is obvious. But if the set
of figures is not too far from what they actually were, the conclusion would
be that the distance of the Earth from Saturn was but a twentieth part of
what it is now; this would permit us to speculate whether the Earth could at
some early period have been a satellite of Saturn. The distance 60 million km
is commensurate with the distance of Mercury from the Sun, or 58 million km;
Jupiter’s satellites revolve at distances up to 24 million km from the
primary. Theoretically Saturn could have satellites as large as the Earth: the
Moon is only one-fortieth of the Earth in volume, whereas Saturn is 760 times
larger than our planet.
If such was ever the case, the “Age of
Saturn” and the very unusual conditions under which mankind lived in it, and
Saturn’s worship prior to the Deluge, would gain in meaning. The appellative
“sun” used for Saturn would be understood as resulting not only from the
great light it emitted for a short period when a nova, but also from its
long-standing role of a primary for the revolving Earth.
If there is truth in the surmise, and nothing
more it is than a surmise, that the Earth was once a satellite of Saturn, the
latter must have revolved closer to the sun in order that the Earth should
receive heat from it—Saturn exudes little heat—and if the age of Kronos was a golden age, then it is also proper to assume
that the conditions on the satellite Earth were not unfavorable
for life. The geological record documents extreme climates for the past of
the Earth—times when corals grew in the Arctic,
and times when the Earth, partly even on the equator, was fettered by ice.
Such climates require definitely abnormal conditions that could be created
only by varying positions of our planet as an astronomical body. Therefore
surmises as made in this section are not in conflict with geological and paleo-climatological records—yet it is not what could
have taken place, but what took place, or the historical record, that is the
proper goal for inquest. In the absence of direct indications we may only
deal with the problem of the Earth as a satellite of Saturn as with a
hypothetical construction, requiring further elucidation.
It is assumed by modern astronomy that the
ninth planet, Pluto, was once a satellite of Neptune,
which, having collided with Triton, another satellite of the planet, was
thrown out of the ring and became an independent planet; the satellite
Triton, however, as a consequence of the collision, reversed the direction of
its revolution and became a retrograde satellite. Another
instance of a postulated conversion of a planetary satellite into an
independent planet is discussed by Van Flandern and
Harrington in their paper “A Dynamical Investigation of the Conjecture that
Mercury is an Escaped Satellite of Venus,” Icarus
28 (1976), pp. 435-440.]. Thus the principle of a conversion of a
satellite into a planet in its own right is not a phenomenon that is
discussed here for the first time.
The Golden Age of Saturn or Kronos came to its end with the supreme god of that
period, the planet Saturn, was broken up. The Age of Kronos
was not the earliest age of which man retained some, however dim,
memories—but farther into the past the dimness amounts almost to darkness.
Rainbow
After the Deluge the hope grew into faith
that no such or similar destruction would again come to decimate mankind. The
story is told that the Lord made a covenant with Noah, and the following were
the terms of the covenant:
Then God said to Noah. . . . “I establish my
covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters
of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the
earth.”
As a visible sign of the obligation not to
repeat the catastrophe, a colorful rainbow appeared
for the first time after the Deluge—it was a new and till then unknown
atmospheric phenomenon. In this colored refraction
of sunlight in small and suspended drops of water the rescued believed to see
the divine promise not to repeat the flood:
And God said, “This is the sign of the
covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is
with you, for all future generations: I set my bow in the cloud, and it shall
be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring the clouds
over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant.
The covenant, according to the moral
conception of the Hebrews, was a reciprocal deed. It was kept only in its
promise not to bring a paramount flood upon the Earth: the Earth and man
continued to be shaped and reshaped in further catastrophes before the close
of the age of creation that is the theme of the Book of Genesis.
Mercury &
Memory
2005 - St.Clair
Foundation Online
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