MYTHS ARE HISTORY
3. Demonstration
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3. Demonstration: On the Revaluation of Myth
by Applied Historical Astronomy |
The more that comparative world mythology is studied, the more glaringly apparent it becomes that all ancestral myth-making cultures believed our planet had survived multiple cosmic catastrophes involving other celestial objects in nearby space. Having concluded that the collective mythopoeic memory of every traditional culture sprang forth from actual major catastrophic events -- in particular, celestial and/or geophysical events — personally witnessed by the members of that culture — we may likewise conclude that it was the direct observation of precisely these spectacular events which lies behind the common origin of all the great cosmogonic mythologies of the world.
If this be the case — one can easily imagine that the ancient sages, shamans and priests must surely have lived in a frightened state of mind, on account of the events they or their close ancestors had witnessed. For, if we take their myths at face value, the sky they knew was not simply the fixed celestial heavens of regularly moving planets and stars we ourselves know all so well; — it was also the abode of a large number of transient phenomena and events (such as solar outbursts, large-scale auroral phenomena, comets, fireballs, bolides, meteor storms, eclipses, major planetary conjunctions, and even interplanetary lightning) — all of which were strikingly visible to the naked eye. Above all, it seems to have been the dynamic interplay between spectacular temporary events and the regular motions of the fixed celestial heavens that rendered the night-time and sometimes the daytime skies so captivating to all myth-making civilizations, and which became the primary backdrop for the development of mythology, religion, and science for all cultural groups that we know of. |
Although we observe planetary cycles and their relative periodicities as regularly stable and reliable today, to peoples in the past they did not always appear to be so; and the rather obsessive and desperate attentiveness to the stable regularity of earth and sky which was so common among all myth-making peoples’ cosmovisions may not be as easily dismissed as modern uniformitarian outlooks over the past few hundred years have tended to assume.
From the magi of Chaldea to the priests of Egypt, from the rishis of the Indus valley to the chiefs of the ancient American plains — all religious leaders of old seemed to have regarded the ancient skies very much the same. They all believed in an active cosmic dynamism, in an Earth migrating through the heavens’ progressively widening space, checked by the attractive and repulsive forces of the wandering stars — the planets. Our modern English word “planet” is, after all, derived from the Greek verb <Greek> (planao), meaning "wander." The conventional interpretation of this nomenclature is that planets, which visibly orbit, change their celestial positions in a way in which the so-called fixed stars seem not to. But the Greek verb planao did not only mean "wander." It also meant "stray," "err," and even "deceive," ... which suggests that the planets were actually observed deviating from orbital paths that had been previously observed in the past. Thus, perhaps — if we really want to move forward toward a more integrally coherent map of the mythological sky-scape — we must leave behind archaeoastronomy’s preoccupation with the uniformly fixed celestial heavens of today, and instead seriously reconsider the possibility that the imagery of legendary celestial voyages, cosmic battles and other action-filled motifs of mythology much more likely refer to temporary chaotic celestial events involving the planets. — After all, one of the most common difficulties regarding the general mythic unanimity we see worldwide, is the plain fact that the cosmovisions of our ancient forebears told stories that had nothing in them resembling the mostly stable and uneventful circling of the planets on their present day orbits. Moreover, all previous attempts to explain myth by projecting modern understandings of the presently-observed planets and stars backward into the ancient records have failed. There is not a single globally-recurring mythical theme that can be explained by reference to the more or less stable celestial order we know today. |
The plain truth is that what we now loosely term as the “astrology,” “astrolatry” or "astrotheology" of the ancients was not, back then, a matter of superstitious “divination.” — It was, rather, the obsessive tracking of planetary motions, and the ability to predict or forecast notable celestial conjunctions. The basic nature, complex exploits and vibratory influences of the planet-gods were carefully observed with great caution worldwide, and early on established what has been called the “primordial tradition” or “perennial philosophy” at the core of almost every known religion since. — Particularly dangerous or disastrous conjunctions between celestial bodies were remembered in myth and reenacted in ritual as the beautiful love-affairs and brutal warfares of the gods. The periodic (or “cyclic”) nature of these conjunctions, however, later became misinterpreted and confused as a pagan “reverence” for the seasonal or annual “cycles” of nature we are more familiar with today.
Until recently, our forebears’ compulsive observations of the heavens were virtually ignored in nearly all studies of human history, psychology and behavior. And yet — if ancient myths are indeed to be understood as the remains of preliterate astronomy, tantamount to a true oral history of cosmological events — such a glaring lack of due attention to the celestial realm may be precisely the stumbling block that modern peoples have always had in determining what exactly actually happened in the past. — If the landscape of myth was not located on Earth below but rather in the Heavens above, might it be more probable for us to consider our own planetary system as the site of a relatively recent episode of cataclysmic dissipation? Might our whole world — or perhaps even the entire Solar System itself — be littered with the debris of the planetary gods’ destructive violence? — Could this be what the ancient myths of our ancestors were actually trying to remind us to remember? — And if this be the case — if the shape and structure of our planetary system was indeed reconfigured recently enough to be recalled in the mythic traditions of the Bronze Age — what sort of physical evidence might we discover in our present-day explorations of the planets, moons, asteroids, comets and other heavenly bodies on high? |