David Talbott, an American mythologist, developed a method for comparing the myths of far-flung cultures. ‘… according to Talbott, there are hundreds of common themes in world mythology in which different words and different symbols point to the same remembered events. The more peculiar the points of convergence, the more unreasonable it is to dismiss them.’
‘When allowed to speak for themselves, these universal memories tell a coherent and detailed story, Talbott claims. … what the ancients worshipped and feared as powerful gods were planets positioned extremely close to Earth. … Their instabilities and unpredictable movements gave rise to … the wars of the gods. In these dramatic stories, the gods pounded each other with cosmic lightning while fire and stone descended on Earth. If the gods were planets, then the thunderbolt of the gods were nothing less than interplanetary lightning discharges.’ (Mel & Amy Acheson in Thunderbolts of the gods in Forbidden history, edited by Douglas Kenyon)
‘Hebrew tradition has remembered well the lightning of the gods. Psalm 77 proclaims ”The voice of thy thunder was in the heaven: lightnings lightened the world: the Earth trembled and shook.” From India, the Mahabharatha and Ramayana relate that lightning of the gods filled the heavens like a rain of fiery arrows. From ancient Egypt, Babylon, Scandinavia, China, and the Americas, myths and legends describe the conflagrations attributed to thunderbolts from the gods.’
‘These stories of cosmic battles provide much of the content of the myths we know today … But Talbott reminds us that if there is anything to these global memories, the physical evidence should be massive. … a call for objective investigation of the surface features of planets and moons.’ (Mel & Amy Acheson, above).
Steve Parsons in The perils of planetary amnesia (see previous post) states that Talbott has shown ‘… the way that Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and Venus were intimately tied to human experience during primordial times. These planets traveled very close to Earth, actually assuming a stable and symmetrical, colinear configuration immediately prior to the myth-making epoch. The “Age of the Gods” … harkens both to the stable/peaceful period and to the violent/dramatic period when the colinear configuration destabilised and collapsed completely.’
What caused this destabilisation, the war in the heavens, and the withdrawal of the planets to safer distances?
RAJA ARASA RATNAM 