>Path: news.iastate.edulpv7440.vincent.iastate.edu!btd >From: btd@iastate.edu (Benjamin T. Dehner) >Newsgroups: talk.origins >Subject: Re: Intro to the Saturn thesis >Date: 14 Oct 94 01:08:01 GMT >Organization: Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa >Lines: 266 >Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: pv7440.vincent.iastate.edu [posted for CLE by btd. And since he mailed this one to me on floppy, any typos aren't my fault this time:-)] An Antidote to Dave Talbott's "Saturn Thesis" Dave Talbott's postings on his "Saturn thesis" are based on the "BIG LIE" and collectively are a pathological example of the triumph of ignorance over commonsense and reason. There can be no question that his conclusions (which are mostly preconceived notions) are wrong because his methodology is thoroughly invalid and corrupt on at least six counts, as follows: 1. He does not present *independent*, preferably physical, evidence to support his interpretations of ancient texts and iconography. He totally ignores George Talbott's admonition in Kronos V:3, "The basis of any historical inference must be physical evidence" (p. 29). Ironically, just before Dave embarked on his Saturnian delusion, a book review in _TLS_ admonished "But it is not possible to understand the relation of myth to reality without some independent knowledge of the reality" (4-14-72), while later in "The Use of Myth..." Jerome Lettvin ventured "You can't even guess what is meant [in myth] unless you know what is meant" (_Tech. Rev._, 6/76). Talbott also equivocates on "historical" by consistently referring to "historical evidence" for events that were necessarily "prehistorical" because all historical evidence suggests the present cosmic order, e.g., all lunar calendars are consistent with the Moon's present orbit. [N.B.: Contrary to Cochrane and others, the Venus Tablets of Ammisaduqa are not valid evidence for orbit changes since the observations, as Peter Huber explained in _Scientists Confront Velikovsky_ (1977) and as Ellenberger recapped in "Ignotum per Ignotius," Aeon III:1, pp. 98-103. The key point is that the observations in the tablets are qualitatively the same as those from the late first millennium B.C.E., on a statistical basis, when the orbits of Venus and Earth had supposedly settled into the present regime. Also, the Dresden Codex is no evidence for orbit changes if, as Aveni argues in _Conversing with the Planets_ (1992), the Maya were trying to co-ordinate the movements of Venus and the Moon.] 2. He does not discuss alternatives and weigh the evidence for and against each one. He latched onto the "Saturn at the pole" notion at an early stage and never allowed any countervailing hypothesis to interfere with his Procrustean exercise of force-fitting the world's mythology into its framework. As I discovered in 1980 and as at least one reviewer noted, Talbott's book, _The Saturn Myth_ (1980) utterly fails to convince. 3. He insists on literal interpretations of texts, after redefining key terms (as noted in a previous post), to the exclusion of metaphor and many other modes of expression. For example, astrological omens, such as those in Morris Jastrow's often-cited "Sun and Saturn" contain text fragments that are *translated* as identities, i.e., "A=B," making a literal identification tempting to the naive and unsophisticated. However, the notion of "equation" and "identity" deserves a more sensitive treatment. As Harald Reiche told me, we must distinguish between substantive, functional, temporary, shorthand, and topographic "identities" because some languages do not express the verb "to be" explicitly, but leave the sense to be construed from context. Talbott and the "Saturnists" are completely immune to such nuance. Related to the literal interpretation of texts is the literal, or realistic, interpretation of symbols such as the "star in crescent" over which Tim Thompson recently took Cochrane to task; yet Talbott ignores Thompson as he consistently ignores all uncomfortable criticism. Also, if the Sun climbs a mountain between December and June, then there is no reason why the "world mountain" must have a concrete visual reference. 4. Many of his sources are classical and early modern Greek and Latin texts, heavily influenced by relatively recent astrological concepts and syncretistic composites that are far-removed from primordial origins that we are supposed to believe attest a radically different Solar System. 5. Contrary to the canons of logic, he believes that his model is true because it explains so much; indeed, practically everything. But this fallacy was explained by Wesley Salmon in "Confirmation" (_Sci. Amer._, 5/73) with Velikovsky as an example; yet Pensee (which Talbott published at the time) ignored it and he continues to ignore it. Because most sets of data can be explained by more than one model, and the polar configuration (p.c.) imagery is no exception, independent corroboration is necessary to validate a solution. Talbott has failed to provide this check (see Item 3, above). 6. He also ignores material that contradicts his version, such as (a) Roger Ashton's "The Bedrock of Myth," suppressed by Aeon after being accepted in late 1987, which accounts for the p.c. imagery without planets, (b) G.A. Wainwright's _The Sky-Religion of Egypt_ (1938) which discusses the religion of the Egyptians before Sun-worship, before dynastic times, before they entered the Nile Valley, and before the Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts, and Book of the Dead were written, when Horus personified the primitive idea of the Power of the Sky, (c) Henri Frankfort's _Kingship and the Gods_ (1948/1978) showing how distinctly different the institution was for Egyptians, Mesopotamians and Hebrews with each culture having a different relationship between king and the gods (contrary to expectation from the p.c.) and (d) Ernest McClain's _The Myth of Invariance_ (1976) in which the sacred number names of the Sumerian gods are shown to correspond to harmonic ratios of the octave. Curiously, Talbott's work ignores the Sumerian sacred number names which are different for each of the gods he claims was Saturn. Talbott dismisses Wainwright for no other reason than it contradicts his version while Frankfort is used only for Egyptian references. In short, Talbott's scholarship is on par with Cardona's, whose "Janus=Kronos/Saturn" (an equation accepted by all "Saturnists") was demolished by Bob Ingria 12 Apr (reposted 29 Sep 94). In light of his methodological failures, his rules for criticizing mythic themes are without force. His setting the terms for debate is analogous to a mental patient dictating the terms for therapy! Do not let Talbott's feigned erudition obscure the fact that he is just another in a long line of intellectual con men, such as Lyndon LaRouche, whose verbiage exceeds his grasp of reality. The "BIG LIE" is that the planets were the first gods. This is simply NOT true. Although it is true that the planets were recognized early and memorialized in myth (see Hertha von Dechend, _Hamlet's Mill_, 1969), this does not make them the first gods. Interestingly, the major constellations form two groups, the zodiacal through which Sun, Moon and planets move and the circumpolar, both of which are irrelevant to the p.c. Since the present constellations make no sense in the p.c., in which Earth was tilted 90 degrees with its north pole pointed at a nearby Saturn whose reflected light supposedly washed out the stars, they cannot have been identified until after the p.c. collapsed. For the zodiac, this means in the 4th millennium B.C.E. But most of Talbott's evidence is thousands of years younger than this. Even his Egyptian texts refer to the "Thigh of the Bull" which is the Big Dipper. The origin or religion almost certainly pre-dates the noting/study of planetary motions as Thorkild Jacobsen's _The Treasures of Darkness_ (1976) eminently makes clear. The planets were named after early gods and thereby became *visible manifestations* of their namesakes. With this distinction, the actions of *deities* do not necessarily refer to the movements of planets. As any good general semanticist knows in his bones, the map is not the territory and, similarly, the planet is not the god (only its visible manifestation). Also, since so much is borrowed from the Greek pantheon, it is wise to remember that the Greek gods were anthropomorphic, according to Hesiod. The main role of the planets was in astrology which replaced divination by examining sheep's livers. For the Sumerians (whose gods pre-dated those of the Greeks and were also anthropomorphic), e.g., Inanna *originated* as "mistress of the date clusters" and became associated with Venus later (a point not disputed by Wolfgang Heimpel, one of Cochrane's authorities). Ninurta, whose name means "Lord Plow" or "Lord Earth," was, among other roles, god of the rising Sun, war, hunting, and agriculture whose star was Antares and whose planet was Saturn; yet as far as Talbott is concerned, Ninurta was Saturn, period. Several major Sumerian gods had no planetary manifestation: An, Enlil, Ea, and Adad; but Talbott and the "Saturnists" do not accept this and insist An and Ea were also Saturn on the basis of superficial reasoning. But, the sacred number names of An, Ea, and Ninurta were 60, 40, and 50, respectively; so, they were not identical. Interestingly, Ea-Enki was the "Divine Patron of Music"--but one would never learn this from Talbott. Actually, according to Reiche and McClain (following Kramer), the Greek incarnation of the Sumerian-Babylonian Ea-Enki is Poseidon, not Kronos/Saturn. And one would look in vain for Poseidon in Talbott's _The Saturn Myth_. As an aside, the "harmony of the spheres" gains credence when McClain notes in _The Pythagorean Plato_ (1978) that the Hindu precessional period of 25,920 years has an analog in musical harmonic theory (p. 81). It does not take much looking to find data that somehow never got incorporated in Talbott's supposedly all-inclusive "Saturn thesis." They also believe Utu-Shamash (20) and Nannar-Sin (30) did not refer to Sun and Moon, respectively, but to aspects of Saturn which names were reassigned after the collapse of the p.c. This reminds me that Talbott was far too cavalier in accepting the passing of Saturn's constant crescent in favor of phases (as indicated in Grubaugh's forthcoming revised model of the p.c.) because with Saturn showing phases (like the Moon does) this eliminates an argument in favor of the p.c., namely, the constant crescent which they fancied distinguished Saturn in the p.c. from the Moon which ostensibly arrived on the scene after the collapse of the p.c. [AOBTW: The sacred number name for Inanna-Ishtar is 15.] There is no credible textual or physical evidence for the former alleged p.c. Everything they cite is amenable to conventional interpretaion. The miniscule *static* pear-shaped deviation from a spheroid in Earth's figure, which Talbott cites as a vestige of Earth's tidal distortion due to its proximity to Saturn and Jupiter in the p.c., is far too small and if it were an authentic remnant should be shrinking due to isostatic rebound, but it is not. This was pointed out to Talbott in 1989; but he ignored it. Talbott and the "Saturnists" never get into the mind-set of the ancients to see the cosmos on their terms (see below re: the _skambha_). Instead, they project modern concepts onto archaic texts. The p.c. hypothesis is as unnecessary as Grubaugh's physical model is impossible (both to assemble in the first place and to function as intended). Much valid ancient lore exists about the pole of the equator, the solar zenith, the world mountain, etc. But none of it requires the p.c. to be understood. The pole is a logical place from which the sky-god would reign or which would be sacred to him. The slowest moving planet, and therefore by inference the most remote, would reasonably be named after the sky-god, say, Kronos, and be his planetary manifestation. Because the ancients believed in the _shambha_, or frame of the cosmos, Saturn does not need to be at the pole physically to affect the pole, as von Dechend explains in _H. Mill_, Ch. XVII; but the "Saturnists" ignore this concept. Since a planet's name referred both to the body and its orbit, the outermost planet, our Saturn for the ancients, could be said to encompass the entire sky--because its orbit was so big, not its "orb," to borrow the "Saturnists"' affectation. It would also be associated with the Sun by an association of ideas, foreign to us, as Morris Jastrow was fond of saying, including the near commensurability of its almost 30 year sidereal period with the schematic 360-day solar year. Hence, Saturn was known as the "Sun of Night;" but this appellation does not mean that Saturn once appeared bigger than it does today, as Talbott naively believes. Talbott's p.c. explains nothing that does not already have an explanation. Indeed, given all the circular, resonant satellite orbits at Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, the Trojan asteriods at Mars and Jupiter, and the Kirkwood gaps in the asteroid belt (all of which take longer to form/assemble than the time since the p.c.'s collapse), nothing in the Solar System even remotely suggests its former existence, which in any case is a physical impossibility, as Ashton explained in Aeon I:3 and as Slabinski will show in Aeon III:6 (the next issue). For insight into our ancestors' two competing traditions, i.e., polar and solar, the interested reader is directed to Joscelyn Godwin, _ARKTOS: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival_ (1993). Regarding the obstinant persistence of a delusion such as the p.c., Godwin offers the following: "Perhaps it requires the obsessional type, with a one-track mind and an utter conviction of his own rightness, to pursue such studies through hundreds of sources in a dozen languages. But the great temptation to such a person is to become so enraptured by his own theory that he uses it as a Procrustena bed onto which all the world's myths, legends, and religions are to be accommodated" (p. 145). This certainly describes my personal experience with Talbott. Indeed, he can become so blinded by his delusion that he either overlooks or ignores the fact that to the ancients the most exalted place in the sky was *not* the pole of the equator (which is the focus of the p.c.), but the pole of the ecliptic (as von Dechend relates in _H. Mill_, Ch. IX). To the extent that the ancients viewed an alien sky, the best place to look is in the Earth's formerly intense interaction with proto-Encke and the Taurid meteor streams, as being developed by Victor Clube and his associates (Napier, Asher, Bailey, Steel, et al.) and such independent researchers as Bob Kobres (whose article on Phaethon's ride as a cometary near-collision will be in the February, not October, _The World & I_) and Moe Mandelkehr (whose book manuscript _The Answered Riddle: A Thesis on the Meaning of Myth_ also accounts for all the imagery suposedly explained by Talbott's p.c. but in terms of Earth's interaction with the Taurid Complex). Clube has discussed how the Greeks in the fourth century B.C.E., ending with Aristotle, rationalized the astronomical lore they had inherited but which did not match the sky they saw. Those discrepancies are all plausibly explained by Clube in terms of the depletion of the Taurid Complex with the subsequent fading of a formerly prominent zodiacal light (which is a good inspiration for a "world mountain," if a visual image was involved). In conclusion, the "Saturn thesis"/p.c. is a fantasy/delusion that should be given no credence. It is promoted by self-taught, amateur "mythologists" who have no understanding of, or respect for, the constraints of the laws of physics or the importance of physical evidence on Earth for cataclysms that affected Earth. There is no need to refute every one of Talbott's theses because his methodology is fatally flawed and the synchronous orbits his model requires are impossible _a priori_ for reasons that have been known since Lagrange and understood by every competent orbital dynamicist ever since. Grubaugh and Driscoll chase an illusion that can exist only in animations from the "Road Runner Academy of Physics." In all likelihood, Talbott will ignore this "antidote" as he has ignored my previous "David N. Talbott: Hoist, Clueless, & 'Nihilated," posted 14 Jul and reposted in Sep, as well as cogent criticism by Pib Burns. This does not concern me because my target audience is the "curious but perplexed" reader who honestly does not know what to make of Talbott's seemingly preposterous postings *and* is capable of weighing the evidence on both sides of the issue. And, anyway, I'll have my chance to confront Talbott in November at Portland where ignoring me will not be so easy. Leroy Ellenberger 11 Oct 94 ------------------------------------------------------------- Benjamin T. Dehner Dept. of Physics and Astronomy PGP public key btd@iastate.edu Iowa State University available on request Ames, IA 50011