New life, the myth seems to be saying, comes from the death of the old—literally the dead body of the old god. In a sense, the image of Osiris-Horus is the same as that of the phoenix. Just as the immolation of the phoenix ends the previous world age, so the death of Osiris ends Zep Tepi and leads, ultimately, to the reign of the pharaohs.
But we know that all the principal players in the drama have stellar counterparts, so it is also worth considering the myth at a more literal, astronomical level:
The villain of the piece is Set, who murdered Osiris and ended the golden age.
Set is strongly identified with the constellation Taurus.
This therefore implies that Taurus must have been seen by the ancient Egyptians as a source of danger, chaos, and destruction.
RED PLANET, RED SPHINX
The Egyptian name of the Sphinx was Horakhti, “Horus of the Horizon,” the manifestation of the sun god at the moment of rising. We have shown in The Message of the Sphinx that the very same name, Horakhti, was applied to the constellation Leo.42 In addition, as the eminent Egyptologist Sir E. A. Wallis Budge points out, the name Horus—originally Heru—conveys the meaning “face”; thus the name of the Sphinx could mean “Face of the Horizon”—referring to the face of the solar disk.43
Inevitably some of the AOC researchers have made much of this to connect it to the Face on Mars—something for which there would be no justification were it not for a series of peculiar clues that seem to point in the opposite direction:
As Richard Hoagland was the first to realize, the city of Cairo, on the southern edge of which the Giza necropolis stands, got its present name in the tenth century a.d. from invading Arabs who inexplicably decided to call it El-Kahira, meaning “Mars.”44
The name the ancient Egyptians gave to the planet Mars was Hor Dshr—literally “Horus the Red.”45
In inscriptions found in certain tombs in upper Egypt, Mars is also referred to as “His name is Horakhti” and as “the eastern star.”46 Since the gaze of the Sphinx is oriented precisely due east, and since the Sphinx was likewise called Horakhti, as we have seen, we may just as well say that the name of the Sphinx is Mars.
Along with all the other planets, and the Sun itself, Mars appears to travel in an endless cycle through all twelve constellations of the zodiac. This means that it will, at intervals, be seen to pass through the constellation of Leo—to be “in” Leo or “housed” by Leo, in astrological parlance.
For a long period of its history the Sphinx was painted red.47
Since the Sphinx is a composite creature with the head of a man and a body of a lion, we also note in passing that ancient Hindu myths depict the planet Mars as Nr-Simha, the “Man-Lion.”48
What all these clues suggest to us, at the very least, is that the ancients must have seen a clear and direct association between the Red Planet and the Sphinx. Moreover, since the astronomy of the Sphinx is so precisely set to the rising of the constellation Leo at the spring equinox in the epoch 10,970 B.C. to 8810 B.C., we suspect that part of the message may be to consider events that could have visibly affected both the planet Mars and Earth during this epoch—that is, the astronomical Age of Leo. There is also a strong hint in the surrounding mythology to suggest that such events, whatever they may be, are likely to turn out to be connected in some way to Taurus, the Bull of the Sky—the constellation of Set the destroyer.
The classical Greeks, who sat at the feet of the ancient Egyptians and learned everything they knew from them, renamed Set as Typhon and depicted him as a terrifying supernatural monster whose
head touched the stars, his vast wings darkened the Sun, fire flashed from his eyes, and flaming rocks hurtled from his mouth. When he came rushing toward Olympus the gods fled in terror to Egypt.49
Likewise the Roman historian Pliny (A.D. 23–79) writes of a remote epoch during which “a terrible comet” given the name Typhon was seen by the people of Egypt:
It had a fiery appearance and was twisted like a coil and it was grim to behold. It was not really a star so much as what might be called a ball of fire.50
We wonder whether it is possible, in their architecture and in their myths, that what the ancients were trying to pass down to us might have included a package of lifesaving data:
Their recollections of the breathtaking returns to the inner solar system of a fiery and spectacular periodic comet
Specific information about this comet’s previous dangerously close approaches to Earth
Specific information about at least one cataclysmic approach the comet made to Mars that “flayed” the Red Planet of its skin
Specific information about if and when the threat will return to menace us, and perhaps even information about the the direction from which it will come (the direction of the constellation of Taurus?).
Today there is no fear of comets. Indeed, we hardly ever even stop to look at the skies. But to the ancients they were terrible instruments of doom and destruction “importing change of times and states”51 and shaking “pestilence and war” from their “horrid hair.”52 We will see in part 4 that this ancient reputation may be nothing less than the truth, and that comets may indeed be agents in the destruction and rebirth of worlds.
PART FOUR
The Darkness and the Light
18
The Moon in June
ON the evening on 25 June 1178, five friends were sitting out after dark on the outskirts of the English cathedral city of Canterbury, chatting and enjoying the summer air.1 The sky was cloudless and a bright new moon was rising with its horns tilted toward the east. Then suddenly:
The upper horn split in two. From the midpoint of the division a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out, over a considerable distance, fire, hot coals and sparks. Meanwhile the body of the Moon which was below writhed, as if it were in anxiety, and to put it in the words of those who reported it to me and saw it with their own eyes, the Moon throbbed like a wounded snake. Afterwards it resumed its proper state. This phenomenon was repeated a dozen times or more, the flame assuming various twisting shapes at random and then returning to normal. Then, after these transformations, the Moon from horn to horn, that is, along its whole length, took on a blackish appearance. The present writer was given this report by men who saw it with their own eyes and are prepared to stake their honour on an oath that they have made no addition or falsification in the above narrative.2
The writer is the twelfth-century monk Gervase of Canterbury, whose Chronicle is highly regarded as a work of history. Because of his renowned accuracy scholars generally agree that “Gervase’s record of the ‘Canterbury Event’ must be taken seriously.”3
Yet if it is a true report, then what is the strange phenomenon it describes?
In 1976 the American astronomer Jack Hartung offered an answer that most scientists now accept. He deduced that Gervase’s eyewitnesses saw the cataclysmic effects of a collision between the Moon and some large object flying through space—such as a comet or an asteroid. He further reasoned that if he was correct then there ought to be an impact crater of suitable shape and size at an appropriate lunar latitude. Reckoning on the basis of the Gervase report, Hartung calculated that such a geologically recent crater would be
at least 7 miles in diameter, possess bright rays extending from it at least 70 miles and lie between 30 degrees and 60 degrees north and 75 degrees and 105 degrees east.4
Named after an Italian heretic (burned at the stake in 1600 for professing the existence of inhabited planets other than Earth), the crater Giordano Bruno perfectly fits Hartung’s bill. It has a radius of 13 miles and the telltale bright rays of a recent cataclysmic impact.5 Moreover, although it lies almost 15 degrees into the dark side of the Moon, the astronomers Odile Calame and Derral Mulholland have demonstrated that the ejecta from the impact would have been hurled such distances that “the event would not only have been visible but sufficiently apocalyptic to have justified the description given in the Canterbury Chronicle.”6
Calame and Mulholland’s work provides additional confirmation that the Moon has indeed suffered a major impact at some time during the past millennium. In research conducted between 1973 and 1976 they used the 107-inch reflector telescope at the McDonald Observatory in West Texas to direct more than 2,000 laser beams at a series of mirrors left behind on the Moon by Apollo astronauts. The beams allowed extremely precise measurements to be made and revealed “a 15-meter oscillation of the lunar surface about its polar axis, with a period of about three years.”7 As the American cometary astronomer David Levy puts it, the Moon is behaving just “like a huge bell vibrating after it has been clanged.”8 Two leading British astronomers, Victor Clube of Oxford University and his colleague Bill Napier of the Royal Armagh Observatory, point out that such a mode of vibration “dies out over 20,000 years or so” and confirm that “the result can only be explained by a recent large impact, whose magnitude was about that required to form the Bruno crater.”9
The crater was made by an object estimated by scientists to have been around two kilometers in diameter, which exploded on impact with the energy of 100,000 megatons of TNT—that is, 100,000 million tons of TNT, roughly equivalent to ten times the explosive power of all the nuclear weapons presently stockpiled on earth (although, of course, without the radioactive fallout).10 By contrast, the atomic bomb that obliterated the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945 had a payload of 13 kilotons (13 thousand tons of TNT) and the largest individual nuclear weapons in existence today have yields rated at approximately 50 megatons.11
At 100,000 megatons, it is easy to see why some historians believe that the Canterbury Event could have wiped out human civilization on 25 June 1178 if it had occurred on Earth rather than on the Moon.12
TUNGUSKA
Eight hundred and thirty years later, on 30 June 1908, a much smaller object did hit Earth—with devastating consequences. This was the event that flattened more than 2,000 square kilometers of forest in the Siberian wilderness region of Tunguska. It was an airburst, not a land impact, involving the explosive fragmentation of a bolide with an estimated diameter of 70 meters at an altitude of about 6,000 meters.13
We described some aspects of the Tunguska Event in chapter 4. Its effects were dramatic. The bolide, descending as a huge fireball, was said to be brighter than the sun and was visible at a distance of more than 1,000 kilometers from the blast zone.14 It is estimated to have been traveling at a speed of 30 kilometers per second and was said by those who saw its passage to have emitted a series of intense thunderclaps. When it exploded it did so with a “stupendous bang” that could be heard more than 1,000 kilometers away.15
The firestorm rapidly fell from the atmosphere to the ground, but as soon as contact was made a raging “column of fire” leapt up again from ground to sky. Several eyewitness accounts indicate that this fiery pillar may have been as much as 1,500 meters wide and 20 kilometers high, and that it was visible to observers as far away as 400 kilometers.16
The whole northern sky appeared to be covered with fire [reported a farmer who had been at the Vanavara trading center just 60 kilometers from the blast zone]. I felt a great heat as if my shirt had caught fire. Afterward it became dark and at the same time I felt an explosion that threw me from the porch…. I lost consciousness.17
Another farmer, 200 kilometers from the blast zone recalled:
When I sat down to my breakfast beside my plough, I heard sudden bangs as if from gunfire. My horse fell to its knees. From the north side above the forest a flame shot up. Then I saw that the fir forest had been bent over by the wind and I thought of a hurricane.18
At a distance of 400 kilometers the tremors set off by the Tunguska explosion were so intense that the Trans-Siberian Railroad had to be halted for fear of derailment.19 There was also a devastating shock wave that mowed down the dense forests of the region, “snapping off meter-diameter trees like matchsticks”20 and convincing some villagers that “the end of the world was approaching.”21 The impact energy of the blast was in the range of 10 to 30 megatons of TNT—at least seven hundred times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.22 Little wonder, therefore, that as far away as Western Europe people reported “White Nights” for several evenings after the 30 June Tunguska explosion and were “able to read newspapers from the sky glow, even after midnight.”23
The entire event, it must be remembered, was caused by an object 70 meters in diameter—that is, with a “footprint” about the size of a city block—rather tiny by cosmic standards. Because the explosion took place in a remote part of the world little attention was paid to it; indeed, it was not until 1927 that the first scientific expedition reached the site.24 The expedition was led by the Soviet astronomer Leonard Kulik, who quickly realized from the extent of the devastation that if the same bolide had disintegrated in the skies above central Belgium “no creature would have been left alive in that country.”25 It is therefore sobering to recall that if the Tunguska object had collided with Earth just three hours later than it did—say at 10:00 in the morning instead of at 7:00 A.M.—it would not have laid waste an empty part of Siberia but would have exploded over the city of Moscow.26
At the very least we can say that such an accident would have changed the course of world history.
BOULDERS
The laser reflectors that Calame and Mulholland used in their research were not the only instruments that NASA’s Apollo astronauts left on the Moon. Seismometers were also positioned at a variety of locations on the lunar surface to gather evidence of cosmic bombardments and transmit the data back to Earth.
From 1969 to 1974 nothing sensational happened. Then, over five consecutive days from 22 through 26 June 1975, the seismometers all burst into life in unison to record a roller-coaster event. The Moon had run into a swarm of boulder-sized meteoroids weighing about a ton each.27 It received a sudden, unmerciful pounding—as many impacts in this five-day period as it had suffered in all of the previous five years.28
DEVASTATING EFFECTS
Along with the planets and their moons, vast quantities of rock, ice, and iron circulate within the solar system at breathtakingly high speeds, pursuing a tangled cat’s cradle of chaotic and constantly changing orbits. Again and again fragments of this cosmic rubble intersect the orbits of the inner planets, notably Mars and the Earth-Moon system—sometimes with effects so devastating that any form of civilization unfortunate enough to be caught up in such a collision would certainly be wiped out. The final word has yet to be said on the true life story of Mars, but we know for certain that there have been a number of cosmic impacts that have come very close to obliterating not just “civilization” on Earth but all of this planets animal and plant life.
IMPACTS AND CRUSTAL DISPLACEMENTS
Earth is thought to be 4.5 billion years old and has been a home to life—initially in the simplest forms—for perhaps 3.9 billion years. The oldest prokaryotic fossils date back about 3.7 billion years; the oldest eukaryotic fossils almost 2 billion years; and the oldest animal fossils about 800 million years.29 Sometime between 550 million years ago and 530 million years ago our planet was overtaken by an immense cataclysm of unknown origin. Writing in Science on 25 July 1997, a group of researchers at the California Institute of Technology report that one of the terrible consequences of this event was a slippage of Earth’s rigid outer crust around its inner layers.30 The end result was “a 90-degree change in the direction of Earths spin axis relative to the continents,” commented Dr. Joseph Kirschvink, professor of geobiology at Cal Tech:
Regions that were previously at the North and South Poles were relocated to the equator, and two antipodal points near the equator became the new poles…. The geophysical evidence that we’ve collected from rocks deposited before, during, and after this event demonstrates that all the major continents experienced a burst of motion during the same interval of time.31
The Cal Tech researchers insist that the event they are describing is to be distinguished entirely from
“plate tectonics,” an internal geological process of Earth that very slowly and gradually causes continental landmasses to drift apart or move together at a rate of no more than centimeters per year. What their evidence points to is a titanic rotation of the entire crust of Earth in one piece and at a cataclysmically fast rate. According to Kirschvink: “The rates … were really off the scale. On top of that everything [seems to have been] going the same direction.”
We noted in chapter 4 that there is evidence of a major one-piece slippage of the crust of the planet Mars. No evidence has yet been offered as to how or why such a slippage could have occurred. Nevertheless, as the astronomer Peter Schultz has demonstrated, “Typical mantled and layered polar deposits have been found 180 degrees apart at the equator, i.e., in positions antipodal to one another—as would be expected with former poles.”32
Two years before the publication of the Cal Tech article in Science, we reported in Fingerprints of the Gods on the recent work of Rand and Rose Flem-Ath in Canada, and the earlier work of Professor Charles Hapgood and Albert Einstein in the United States, which suggests that cataclysmic crustal displacements may have occurred on Earth, perhaps even as recently as the end of the last Ice Age.33 Despite Einsteins prestigious support, this theory was ridiculed by orthodox geologists when Hapgood first proposed it in the 1950s and received a further dose of scholarly abuse when the Flem-Aths promulgated it again in their 1995 book When The Sky Fell.34