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Cosmic Events
and the Mayan Legacy
With
anxious expectations about 2012 still lingering in many minds, it helps to get a clear view of the fact that our history is
punctuated by events on a galactic scale. In the language of insurance these are "one in 10,000-year events," hence
happenings on the scale of the Biblical Flood or worse, as was said of the recent flooding in Australia.
The Gathering Evidence
For this we are by no means unprepared, indeed the hazards
of climate change are etched into the very fabric of human history. In the larger view of natural history, we are living in
an Interglacial epoch, since the ending of the last Ice Age. For much of the earlier time, the sea-level rose steadily, at
first by some 1.5 meters per century, and then more slowly from about 12,000 to 9,000 years ago.[1]
The loss to human settlement was considerable, principally salt-marshes, teeming with shell-fish, crabs and bird-life,
and still today the land with the highest yield in edible protein. The archaeology of these lost domains is marked by arrow-heads
and harpoon-heads, fish-hooks and sinkers, in the pattern called microlithic.
From this
technology emerged the stone needles of the earliest acupuncture, with nets and rope.
The advantage
at stake is still well-known in the ranges of human adaptation, in high-protein diets, and a lithe, athletic body-profile
marked by the Golden Ratio of the Pythagoreans.[2] Other traces of considerable intellectual
achievement are the Art of the Rope, and the related tradition
of the Sacred Thread or Thread of Life.
This passed through the lore of the woodlands to curious
tales of trade-winds and "reaction wood" adapted to them, but that is a story for another occasion.
The entire process from the end of the last Ice Age was accompanied by waves of migration into the Americas. Late in the
day, unexpectedly, the ice returned to briefly close the Pacific land-bridge, and a whole population was riven. This saga
we can trace in blood-lines: some headed back south into China; others headed North into the Canadian Arctic, or took to the
sea and reached New Zealand.[3]
There followed the Golden Age of Pacific exploration, with a curious trace in the tuning of pan-pipes, linking
South-East Asia and South America.[4]
Today we have the Oriental Republic of Bolivia, and the tradition
of its founder, Simon Bolivar. This was interestingly intersected by the adventureof Alexander von Humboldt, founding the science of plant geography.[5]
The principle pattern of re-adaptation is clearly marked in the lore of hunting, in two great cycles
in Africa and Eurasia distinguished by mythographer Joseph Campbell.[6] The Euarasian lore of The Bear is today rather better understood, and winds on
through the hunting-lodges and star-charts into the lore of astronomy,
European hospitality, and the craft of chirugeons,
ancestral to surgery.
Patterns of
Response
It would be naïve to think that the ancient salt-marshes were lost without pain, and that all following was easy adaptation.
Indeed, there is substantial evidence of very severe pressure on the hinterland, and massive sheet-erosion leading to the
desertification of the Sahara. People
crowded into the Nile valley, and were then conquered by their rear-guard under Aegyptus of Lybia, so that the Egypt of history
is not the Nile of remote antiquity.
A comparable process likely rendered the Gobi desert in
Central Asia uninhabitable. Certainly there followed long waves of migration westward out of Mongolia,
leaving an intricate tracery of languages called Turkic. This pattern was noted by Baron Bunsen, and placed in the wider context of his monumental
work Egypt's Place in World History. Here the fruit was a remarkable new depth of symbiosis, between the riders of the
steppe and their horses, symbolized by the Centaur.
In Greek myth the Centaur Cheiron taught
the arts of healing to Asclepius, the legendary patron of physicians. Allowing that Cheiron stands behind the cheirugeons
of later times, we have the craft of surgery from the hardened margin of the ancient realms of The Bear. At the same time, we can now trace microlithic technologies reaching
east to China, so that civilization arose from a dialogue or dialectic on a world scale. Yet we still struggle to understand
this, given the cultural distances between industry and agriculture, the sciences and arts.
The Big Picture
Appreciating this difficulty
one can better evaluate current perspectives on galactic events and the hazards facing humanity. Paul LaViolette in his research
and book Earth Under Fire places a galactic event 12,900 years ago, and in the wake a mass extinction of animals.[7] Here he misses the wider ecological context, which shows clearly sea-levels
rising from millennia before, and the hunt intensifying in adaptive response.
Soberly, after
LaViolette's galactic event the sea-rise slowed down! To his credit, he grasps the logic of this, in the intricate (non-linear)
dynamic known as temperature inversion (Joule-Thompson effect), which shielded the land surface from cosmic heat. In tradition
such effects are known as Divine Providence, easing our way into the future, but not miraculously solving all our problems.
LaViolette also has evidence for a recent burst of cosmic warming, with the sense that we are dealing
with 10,000 year events. Soberly, this implies large-scale temperature inversion and a tempering of global warming! It is in this light that we come to the really interesting depths
of the matter. LaViolette cherry-picks a handful of myths to sketch a case for cosmic catastrophy, as Velikovsky did before
him. I have worked very differently, for several decades now, systematically scanning world heritage to piece together the
strands of medical lore for what is
now called Integrative Medicine.[8]
In the grey dawn
of the Iron Age, on an horizon carefully traced by Sir Isaac Newton, the astronomers of Ancient Egypt looked back to LaViolette's
event some 10,000 years before, and placed it as The First Time, in astrologicalassociation with Orion.[9]
Significantly,
Egypt here re-connected the lore of Nile, and Newton thought this civilized in a higher sense of the word. Allowing that the
world was then already globalized there is good reason to suppose that what followed in the Mayan astrology was a count-down
to The Second Time, which is now upon us.
Pondering Futures
Looking on from Newton, it helps to place
here the simple, devastating implication of Einstein's General Relativity: on the cosmic scale of gravity, the universe
is very nearly empty of mass (Ricci-flat). "There's nothing to it," as the saying goes. It is then remarkable indeed that a soft, almost imperceptible
pattering of dust from the heart of our galaxy could, by the subtle means of temperature inversion, avert a catastrophe threatening
life
on Earth.
It is also true, of course, that electric charge and magnetism are much
stronger forces than gravity, so that cosmic events may very likely involve what we call polarities. Cosmic rays take this
a good deal deeper through the parity of matter and anti-matter. In the way of science, it is at least clear that we will soon get an unusually clear view
of the source at the heart of our galaxy, as it is illuminated
by light from another cosmic event.[10]
Now at least the time-scale of these events can be more accurately determined.
We know that the centre of our galaxy lies about 27,000 light-years
away; curiously, the antiquity of the First Time is close to half that, and the period involved matches near enough the Precession
of the Equinoxes, also known as the Great Year, a subject that fascinated Joseph Campbell.[11]
One can draw together these strands of evidence with the supposition or hypothesis that this precession takes the form of
a Berry's phase, due to
gravitomagnetic interaction[12] with the majestically slow pulse from the heart of the galaxy.
Here the physics gets seriously difficult and a bit controversial. What we can now see close-up
is that the warming precedes the main event and the
temperature-inversion. It is now apparent that the imminent event
is due to a cloud of dust being drawn into the vortex at the heart of the galaxy.
Astronomers
expect it will soon be ripped apart, and about half of it thrown outward again.
One can be reasonably sure that in the approach to this event, shear
stress builds in the dust, with a ripple of shock-waves reaching outward. Now in the electromagnetic registers, shock-waves
take the form of longitudinal auto waves or solitons, governed not by the metric of Einstein but by that of Polyakov, so the
normal speed of light does not apply!
In the intricacies of time we still have much to learn
in these matters.
Downside Risk
Through the inevitable heat and dust of ongoing controversy, climate-watchers
can look forward to the possibility of renewed large-scale temperature-inversion of 2013. If this seems reason enough to drop
our guard, it is just here that we could be hit by a nasty surprise.
Looking back
at the record of antiquity it is clear enough that sea-rise and desertification are slow, relentless processes, and that the
acute, catastrophic risk in climate is opposite, from sharp, sudden cold conditions.
Such were the mini-Dryas Ice Age, the loss of the Pacific land-bridge, and then two catastrophies of the Bronze
Age. The second of these saw the Sarasvati River of fond Vedic memory dry up, followed by the sharp decline of the Indus
Valley cities. The devastating plague known as the Black Death,
which ravaged Europe in the fourteenth century came with sudden cold and wet conditions.
The Celts speak here of the sky falling on your
head, like mist trapping travelers in the hills. This happened again in the Potato Famine, with the fields water-logged and
skies grey with cloud, as cholera swept in from the camps of the California
Gold Rush, where many escaped.
This year in Africa we have seen vegetables blighted by black mold, with a genuine emergency in Uganda. It is wise, then,
to take our Providences as a spur to further provision against cold and wind, floods and damp.
In this light there remains a curious twist in the tale. Berry's phase is the atomic analogue of thewhispering-gallery modes of sound waves. These
were evidently known in ancient times, for they are built into the designs of ancient palaces such as the Taj Mahal, serving
internal communication and security. We hear in the Indian Epic Mahabharata of such a magic palace built for Lord Krishna by Maya, the weaver of illusions.
Maya is otherwise not well known in Indian lore, and indeed much later philosophy is pitched against
the very idea of illusion. Yet following the trail of those pan-pipes, this could have been the Mayans. Certainly the pieces of the game Majong are known in both Mayan and
Chinese. The diversity of human cultures is itself a Providence, which we should respect above all in matters of fundamental
interest and common concern.
REFERENCES
[1] J. Ki-Zerbo, Methodology and African Prehistory (abridged ed., Paris: UNESCO,
1989). [2] Theodore Andrea Cook, The
Curves of Life (New York: Dover, 1979). [3] A.W.F. Edwards, Studying human evolution by computer, New Scientist 19 (May 1966), pp. 438-40; reprinted
in Mark Ridley (ed.), Evolution. (Oxford, 1997) pp. 209-213. [4] Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology (revised ed., Penguin, 1976), pp. 209-10;
citing A.L. Kroeber, Anthropology (New York: Harcourt,Brace & Co., 1923), pp. 226-7. [5] Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative (London: Penguin Classics, 1995).
[6] Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology (revised ed., Penguin, 1976).
[7] [8] Orwin O'Dowd, The Integrative Mind (Preprint)http://vixra.org/abs/1110.0046 [9] Joseph Campbell, Oriental
Mythology (Penguin, 1976), pp. 117-8. [10] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/science-environment-16178112 [11] Graham Hancock and
Santha Faiia, Heaven's Mirror (London: Penguin Group,
1989). [12] A. Camacho, Coupling gravetomagnetism-spin and Berry's phase (Preprint),
arXiv:gr-qc/0206005v1 |
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