Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization (11 page)
Authors: J. Douglas Kenyon
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Gnostic Dementia, #Fringe Science, #Alternative History, #Amazon.com, #Retail, #Archaeology, #Ancient Aliens, #History
THE LIGHTNING-SCARRED GOD
The possibility that human memories could explain some of the great surprises of the space age does
not
come as a surprise to Talbott. As an example, he describes the ancient Scarface Motif.
A theme that occurs in many cultures is that of the warrior-god who, at a time of upheaval, receives a gaping wound or scar on his forehead, face, or thigh. At first sight, this is hardly surprising, because warriors and wounds
do
go together. However, this is not the story just of
a warrior,
but of the celestial
archetype
of warriors—the god whom human warriors celebrated as their inspiration on the battlefield. In early astronomies, this warrior archetype is identified with a specific planet—Mars.
It was said of the Greek Mars, named Ares, that this celestial warrior received a deep gash, as in his encounter with Diomedes; then the god lets loose the howl of a thousand warriors and rushes to Zeus to bemoan his gaping wound. An alternative Greek name for Mars was Heracles, and this god too suffered a harsh wound, in his thigh.
The Blackfoot Indians do not appear to have preserved any astronomical associations with their legendary warrior Scarface. Nor do the Aztecs appear to have remembered any planetary connection for their famous scarred god Tlaloc. But Talbott insists that a comparative approach can demonstrate the common roots of such mythical themes.
Is it possible, then, that the “wounding” of Mars refers to an actual event? “I remember looking at one of the first Mariner photographs of Mars,” Talbott recalls. “It displayed a stupendous chasm cutting across the face of the planet. Even from a considerable distance, the chasm looked like a scar.” Astronomers christened it Valles Marineris—its size was such that it would swallow a thousand Grand Canyons and more. “At that moment I realized that of all the planets and moons in our solar system, Mars alone bore the likeness of the warrior-god’s wound.”
This comparative method can also account for numerous details that the experts have missed. Most dramatic is the connection between the Scarface theme and the lightning of the gods. Talbott gives as an example the god Enceladus, struck down by a thunderbolt of Zeus. The god was remembered as “the lightning-scarred god.” Enceladus appears to be a counterpart of the monster Typhon, the “thunderstruck” god. Both can be identified as the terrible aspect of the celestial warrior, according to Talbott, for it was in his “man-slaying” rampage that Ares received his wound.
Talbott was the first to connect the highly visible scarring of the Aztec Tlaloc to lightning. “That’s entirely due to the fact that the experts have not looked at the worldwide theme,” he tells us. Tlaloc was, in fact, directly linked to lightning, and it was through lightning that he dispatched souls to the Aztec heaven. In Aztec mythology there is a special afterlife world reserved for people who are killed by lightning. It is ruled by Tlaloc and is called Tlalocan.
“Could something as massive as Valles Marineris have been carved by interplanetary lightning?” Talbott wondered. As it turned out, he had the opportunity to pose that very question to Wallace Thornhill.
THE LIGHTNING-SCARRED PLANET
Thornhill and Talbott met nearly a decade after the first images of Valles Marineris were returned. Talbott summarized his investigation of the lightning-scarred god theme. “Could Valles Marineris have been caused by a thunderbolt?” he asked.
Thornhill replied, “It couldn’t have been anything else.”
At four thousand kilometers long, seven hundred kilometers across in places, and up to six kilometers deep, it’s comparable to scaling up the Grand Canyon to stretch from New York to Los Angeles. Approximately two million cubic kilometers of the Martian surface was removed with no comparable debris field apparent.
“Valles Marineris was created within minutes by a giant electric arc sweeping across the surface of Mars,” Thornhill claims. “The rock and soil were lifted into space. Some of it fell back around the planet to create the great, strewn fields of boulders seen by both Viking Landers and Pathfinder.”
He points to the steep, scalloped walls of the canyon and the central ridges as typical of plasma machining. The side gullies often terminate in circular alcoves and are left hanging with no debris apron in the main channel. They tend to join at right angles. Smaller channels and crater chains run parallel to the main channels. “The arc probably began in the east in the region of chaotic terrain,” Thornhill speculates. “It then swept westward, forming the great parallel canyons. It finally terminated in the huge rilles of Noctis Labyrinthus.”
Thornhill has published a CD entitled
The Electric Universe,
which describes these and other electrical phenomena on an astronomical scale. He cites the research of Talbott that demonstrates that ancient peoples witnessed an age when these now quiescent energies were dominant.
All the planets associated with the deities of myth are covered with scars that are best explained as plasma-discharge features. The craters, volcanoes, and canyons, when examined in detail, show essential differences from terrestrial counterparts. Yet those anomalous features
do
correspond with the features of lightning scars. Talbott’s prediction that the reconstructed themes of myth should be verified in massive physical evidence on the planets gains support with every image returned by space probes.
Valles Marineris bears the most striking correspondence with the mythical warrior-god’s wound. This mighty chasm represents the confluence of two worldviews: the dramatic, historical worldview of mythology and the objective, physical worldview of science. If Talbott and Thornhill are correct, the accepted understanding of both myth and science must be rebuilt on a new foundation that will support both the historical past and the electrical future.
PART
THREE
EXPLORING THE GREATER ANTIQUITY OF CIVILIZATION
10
The Enigma of India’s Origins
The Dating of New Discoveries in the Gulf of Cambay Upsets the Orthodox Scenario for the Dawn of Civilization
David Lewis
W
ith three quarters of the planet covered by water, it’s been said we know more about the surface of Venus than about that which lies beneath the sea. Yet this may be changing. The discovery of what may be a lost city off the coast of western Cuba startled the archeological world in the spring of 2001. Reports from Havana spoke of massive stone blocks stacked at a depth of 2,100 feet in perpendicular and circular formations, some resembling pyramids. Researchers in a miniature submarine described the area as an urban development, with structures that may once have been roads and bridges.
Because a prediluvian “lost city” does not fit into the accepted paradigm of prehistory, the halls of orthodoxy remain silent on the matter—at least for now. And while those halls still stand, other recent discoveries have begun to seriously erode their foundations. Finding the ruins of an ancient, submerged civilization raises more questions than it answers and causes more problems than it solves. How did the land and its structures sink? What could have prompted such a large-scale cataclysm? When did civilization on Earth actually begin? What do we
really
know about the ancient past and human origins? And how does the establishment of science, so fixed in its doctrines, grapple with the potential demise of its most cherished presumptions?
If the lost city of the Caribbean wasn’t enough, about the same time an equally startling discovery occurred twenty-five miles off the coast of Gujurat, India. The discovery took place in that part of the Arabian Sea known as the Gulf of Cambay. India’s National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) turned up some amazing sonar images from the gulf’s depths while scanning for pollution levels. Using equipment that penetrates the sea floor, marine experts discovered a pattern of distinct, man-made formations across a five-mile stretch of seabed.
According to reports published worldwide, NIOT’s sonar-imaging technology detected what appeared to be the stone pillars and collapsed walls of at least two cities. The site was described as part of an ancient river valley civilization not unlike the River Saraswati of the
Rig Veda,
thought to be mythical but—according to recent independent findings by Indian scientists—has been proved to have flowed to Gujurat. Divers at the Gulf of Cambay site later retrieved from depths of 120 feet two thousand man-made artifacts, including pottery, jewelry, sculpture, human bones, and evidence of writing, according to
The Times of London
.
- Inscribed pottery from the Gulf of Cambay.
- Artifact from the Gulf of Cambay. Small asymmetrical cylindrical object with hollowed middle.
(P
HOTOGRAPH BY
S
ANTHA
F
AIIA
) - Artifact from the Gulf of Cambay. Possible carving of a deer or other animal appears symmetrically on both sides of object.
(P
HOTOGRAPH BY
S
ANTHA
F
AIIA
) - Group of four objects from the Gulf of Cambay.
(P
HOTOGRAPH BY
S
ANTHA
F
AIIA
) - Artifact from the Gulf of Cambay. Stone slab suggested by NIOT to be engraved with archaic script or other deliberate marking or ymbols.
(
PHOTOGRAPH BY
S
ANTHA
F
AIIA
)
“Underwater structures that have been found along the Gulf of Cambay, Gujarat, indicate an ancient township that could date back anywhere before or during the Harappan civilization,” Science and Technology Minister Murli Manohar Joshi told the world at a press conference in May 2001.
Joshi’s initial guess was that the five-mile-long site was four thousand to six thousand years old and had been submerged by an extremely powerful earthquake. But in January 2002, carbon dating revealed that an artifact from the site was astonishingly ancient, between 8,500 and 9,500 years old (the oldest known civilization in the world by thousands of years). This was a time when, according to orthodox archeological standards, India should have been peopled with primitive hunter-gatherers and a few settlements, not the inhabitants of a lost civilization.
The author and underwater researcher Graham Hancock described buildings at the site as being hundreds of feet in length, with drains running along the streets. “If the case is made [for the age of the underwater cities], then it means that the foundations are out of the bottom of archeology,” Hancock said.
The scope and sophistication of the site dismantles the specific belief that civilization began five thousand years ago in Sumeria, according to Hancock, even as the alternative scholarship movement, of which he is a central figure, in general challenges orthodox views about human origins. In the orthodox (Darwinist) view, life, and then human beings, emerged extremely slowly from highly improbable accidental causes over a period of time necessitated by laws of probability.
The theoretical four-billion-year age of the planet was determined
not
by scientific or geologic evidence, according to the science writer Richard Milton (author of
Facts of Life: Shattering the Myth of Darwinism
), but by estimating how long it
should
have taken for accidental life to have occurred, given the extreme
improbability
of life having occurred at all through random, material causes.
Civilization followed, according to the scenario, after the theoretical “out-of-Africa” migration (about 100,000 years ago), fairly recently in prehistory. Evidence of extremely ancient civilizations, or of severe cataclysmic disruptions (those resembling mythical events that may have shaped the ancient world), throws a wrench into the conventional machinery. Discoveries that reveal civilizations having existed several thousand years earlier than previously thought are greeted with disbelief, consternation, silence. Evidence, then, of modern man having lived, say, 250,000 years ago in South America is considered preposterous and heretical, although the evidence for it exists.
Other views, modern and ancient, portray life as having emerged by more mysterious means, not by a series of astronomically improbable accidents, not through a biblical creationist scenario, but by virtue of some other unknown agency. This other, unknown agency, an all-pervasive life force more in keeping with
The Tao of Physics
than
Origin of Species,
is such as that evidenced in Eastern healing disciplines and codified impressionistically in the world’s mythologies.
In this latter view, the idea that prehistoric civilizations existed needs not be rejected due to a presumption that life evolved from material causes alone over an arbitrary time line necessitated by improbability. Tradition in India has always held, in fact, that Indian culture predates all understanding, being virtually timeless, stretching into the mists of antiquity from whence sprang the gods and myth—the non-space/non-time reality of modern theoretical physics.
As we shall see, certain
mythical
traditions maintain that the landmass of ancient India greatly exceeded its present size, and even that it stretched from Australia to Madagascar, perhaps as an archipelago. As with the archeological discovery of Troy, once thought to be a myth, it must be recognized that at least some of India’s supposedly mythical traditions are rooted in historical fact. This leads to the idea of an “Asian Atlantis,” which may seem fantastic, but early geologists believed such a continent existed. The notion may again be gaining credence after the discoveries in the Gulf of Cambay and given NIOT’s intention to investigate other submerged archeological sites off Mahabalipuram and Poompuhar in Tamil Nadu.
Current conceptions of Western scholars conflict with traditional Indian beliefs about such things, but that wasn’t always the case. In the mid to late nineteenth century, when scientific ideas about human origins had begun to take shape in Europe, early geologists and archeologists accepted the idea of a biblical flood, lost continents (for which they found much evidence), and a landmass in the Indian Ocean—the great Southern Continent of the British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace.
Even today, mainstream science believes such landmasses as Gondwanaland and Pangaea existed, although they are relegated to the extremely ancient epochs of 180 to 200 million years ago, in keeping with beliefs about the age of the planet necessitated by an admittedly improbable evolutionary process. And consider the South Asian traditions that mimic the findings of the early geologists, those who say an inhabited continent existed across what are now the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, and the Bay of Bengal. These traditions live to this day in the lore of southern India, Sri Lanka, and the islands of the Andaman Sea.
“In a former age,” an ancient Sri Lankan text states, “the citadel of Rawana (Lord of Lanka), 25 palaces and 400,000 streets were swallowed by the sea.”
The submerged landmass, according to one ancient account, rested between Tuticoreen on the southwest Indian coast and Manaar in Sri Lanka. This submerged landmass was not a landmass of the size envisioned by the early geologists, but—if it actually existed—a submerged portion of the Indian subcontinent just the same.
Another cultural tradition, cited in Allan and Delair’s
Cataclysm! Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic Catastrophe in 9500
B
.
C
.
, that of the Selungs of the Mergui Archipelago off southern Burma, also speaks of a sunken landmass: “. . . formerly [the] country was of continental dimensions, but the daughter of an evil spirit threw many rocks into the sea . . . the waters rose and swallowed up the land. . . . Everything alive perished, except what was able to save itself on one island that remained above the waters.”
One of the Tamil epics of southern India, the
Silappadhikaram,
frequently mentions a vast tract of land called Kumara Nadu, also known as Kumari Kandam, stretching far beyond India’s present-day coasts. Ancient south Indian commentators wrote in detail of a prehistoric “Tamil Sangham,” a spiritual academy situated in that ancient land. They wrote also of the submersion of two rivers, the Kumari and the Pahroli, in the middle of the continent, and of a country dotted with mountain ranges, animals, vegetation, and forty-nine provinces. This Pandya kingdom, according to tradition, reigned from 30,000
B.C.E.
to 16,500
B.C.E.
At least one branch of modern-day south Indian mystics claims a direct lineage from those extraordinarily ancient times, when their spiritual progenitors were said to have achieved extremely long lives through yogic techniques.
And India’s epic poem the
Mahabharata,
dated by non-Westernized Indian scholars to five thousand years before Christ, contains references to its hero, Rama, gazing from India’s present-day west coast into a vast landmass now occupied by the Arabian Sea, an account supported by the recent underwater discoveries. Less celebrated Indian texts even mention advanced technology, in the form of aircraft used to transport the society’s elite and wage war.
The writings describe these aircraft in detail and at great length, puzzling scholars and historians. The great Indian epics, what’s more, vividly describe militaristic devastation that can be equated only with nuclear war. Was there, at one time, not just an ancient civilization in India, but an
advanced
ancient civilization?
Flying machines . . . lost continents . . . are these mythical tales of mythical lands or do these ancient references provide us with a historical record long forgotten and then dismissed by Western science as fantasy?
To answer that question, we must look at the history of scholarship as it pertains to India. Since the nineteenth century, Western scholars have dismissed the historical significance of the cultural traditions of ancient peoples, those of southern Asia included. With a decidedly ethnocentric bias, the experts reinterpreted history as it was taught in the East. Having found, for example, that root words of India’s ancient Sanskrit turn up almost universally in the world’s major languages, Western scholars devised an ethnocentric scheme to explain the phenomenon—one that modern Indian intellectuals have come to accept.