Text
by Harrison Koehli
from Sott Website
Prophecy, Prediction, and Portents of Things to Come
27 October 2011
Note:
This is the first in a series of articles on the track record of the Cs (Cassiopaeans), those sometimes sarcastic and always insightful perhaps-future-intelligences and subject of the Cassiopaean Experiment.
We aim to present those instances of statements that have proven themselves to be accurate, to greater or lesser degrees, as a result of subsequent events, research and discoveries.
“Speak My Will, Make Yourself a Prophet!”
© Chandra
Cassiopeia A, a supernova remnant, is approximately 300 years ‘old’
and has the distinction of being the strongest radio source
that is observable outside our solar system.
At any given point in time there seems to be at least one charlatan running around predicting the imminent end of the world.
In 2011, radio evangelist Harold Camping predicted the world’s faithful would be ‘Raptured’ on 21 May 2011. Of course, the date turned out to be a total dud, prompting Camping to ‘revise’ his prediction to October 21. Needless to say, at the time of writing we weren’t holding our breath, and with good reason.
We might have passed out and missed another apocalyptic non-event!
But is there such a thing as valid prophecy or prediction of future events? The results of the Cassiopaean Experiment suggest that there is indeed such a thing, and more (e.g., remote access to unconventional knowledge, whether obscure or just previously unheard of).
But the Cs have presented a very unique take on the subject of prediction. It is intimately tied with their cosmology and their view on ‘time’. According to the Cs, our universe is a ‘free will’ universe and time is not a strictly linear ‘one-off’ phenomenon. That means the future is open.
More on that below.
Most predictions are based on a pretty simplistic, and probably completely false, view of reality. According to this mechanistic idea, the universe was originally set in motion at some imaginary ‘beginning’ point in time by some equally imaginary ‘first cause’.
Religions have called this first cause ‘God’ while scientists have deemed it the ‘Big Bang’. Once the machine has been set in motion, it obeys physical laws and plays itself out like clockwork.
Theoretically, with enough data, every event in this mechanistic chain of cause and effect can be predicted. So when some prophet gives a prediction of a future event, he or she is basically operating on the assumption that because ‘God’ or some other divine being is omniscient and can see how everything will play itself out (and assuming this being actually exists, and that it is not simply pulling a cosmic practical joke on its subject), it’s got to be right.
But things aren’t that simple.
As we see in the cases of Harold Camping and countless others, their predictions are, more often than not, completely wrong. In such cases, the rationalization machine goes into overdrive and various explanations are given to account for the contradiction of a truth-telling God whose prophetic pronouncements have proven to be profoundly problematic. Usually, God simply changed his mind.
Because even if the world follows mechanistic laws, God is the great supernatural exception.
He’s completely separate from our lowly physical world and can intervene at will and change the game whenever he chooses. Of course, most scientists reject God, or any other supernatural element, from their equations. According to them, Camping along with everyone else making such predictions are simply delusional crackpots or charlatans. (When was the last time you heard a prophet say, “Well, I may be completely off my rocker, but…”?)
But what about cases where predictions turn out to be true? What about the phenomena of prophetic dreams and premonitions?
Even if we’ve experienced such a thing in our lives, or know someone who has, we lack a coherent explanation that accounts for all the data, and if we’ve resolved not to believe in such things, we simply write them off as coincidence and forget all about them. This is where the Cs’ presentation is so interesting. According to them, we do not live in a strictly material, deterministic universe, nor is ‘God’ separate from Nature.
As always, the devil is in the details. Unlike mechanistic scientists who reject the reality of free will, the Cs wholly endorse it. Indeed, it’s an essential part of our reality.
But what does this mean? Basically, we all make choices.
And one choice, made during certain conditions, can change the course of the future.
The constellation Cassiopeia
This means that time is not some static line, like a film reel playing itself out to its predetermined end.
Rather, at any given moment, based on the collective choices of the units of consciousness making up the whole, the future can go one way or another. If people act in predictable, habitual ways and little ‘new’ choices enter the game, sure, the future can probably be predicted.
But when an important choice affecting other future choices is made, it’s as if we have entered a new timeline, one that previously existed only as a nebulous probability – one among billions of such probabilities.
In this sense, we do exist on one ‘line of time’. It’s the reality we experience as our lives: the events and interactions that make up the sum total of our experience. But it’s merely one of many possible realities that we occupy based on our collective choices.
A prediction that may have been true at one point in ‘time’, following a choice that is significant to one degree or another on the part of one or more individuals, may not hold true beyond that point. What the Cs are basically saying is that predictions that turn out to be wrong aren’t necessarily wrong because the people were lying or delusional (although many undoubtedly are).
Future events can be foreseen, but there are certain laws and conditions that need to be taken into account.
In volume five of her series, The Wave or Adventures with Cassiopaea, Laura described it like this:
My guess is that the real world of third density/dimensions, is a collapsed wave function reality.
It is like the branch of a tree. At certain nodal points, there are other branches that have the possibility of “getting all the juice” and becoming the dominant branch, and what determines which it is depends on many factors.
But, once one bud begins to dominate, the others become smaller and smaller and fall away eventually for lack of “juice.” There is only one “real” reality. The others are only ghost or potential realities. Like a tree, with gazillions of branches, each individual’s reality grows in this way. At certain points, there are alternate realities.
But, depending upon choice, attention, and other factors, those realities that are undesirable can be “pruned” or deprived of sap so that they wither and fall away.
At the same time, each individual being their own “branch,” has a slightly different reality from every other individual, and some responsibility for the way their branch grows. But it is all from the same tree, and thus has a more or less single reality. If their choices are “diseased,” their branch will grow in a way that causes it to be pruned, or wither, or face some interference even from other branches, perhaps.
So, in a certain sense, at the nodal point, many possibilities may exist, just as several buds may put out on the end of a branch, but not all of them will continue the process of branching, and at such points, we have some freedom to choose, individually or collectively, depending on the nature of the branch.
Then there’s this, from the Cs session on 26 November 1994:
Q: (T) One last question. How do I know you are telling me the truth?
A: Open. For you to decide. Listen: Now would be a good “time” for you folks to begin to reexamine some of the extremely popular “Earth Changes” prophecies. Why, you ask. Because, remember, you are third-density beings, so real prophecies are being presented to you in terms you will understand, i.e., physical realm, i.e., Earth Changes. This “may” be symbolism. Would most students of the subject understand if prophecies were told directly in fourth-density terms?
Q: (L) Is this comparable to my idea about dream symbolism? For example, the dream I had about the curling cloud, which I saw in a distance and knew it was death-dealing and I interpreted it to be a tornado, but it was, in fact, a dream of the Challenger disaster. I understood it to be a tornado, but in fact, what I saw was what I got: a death-dealing force in the sky, a vortex, in the distance. I guess my dream was a fourth-density representation but I tried to interpret it in terms I was familiar with. Is this what you mean?
A: Close. But it is easy for most to get bogged down by interpreting prophecies in literal terms.
Q: (L) In terms of these Earth Changes, Edgar Cayce is one of the most famous prognosticators of recent note. A large number of the prophecies he made seemingly were erroneous in terms of their fulfillment. For example, he prophesied that Atlantis would rise in 1969, but it did not, though certain structures were discovered off the coast of Bimini, which are thought by many to be remnants of Atlantis. These did, apparently, emerge from the sand at that time.
A: Example of one form of symbolism.
Q: (L) Well, in terms of this symbolism, could it be that [when you tell us things about our reality], you read events from third-density into sixth-density terms and then transmit them back into third; and while the ideation can be correct, the exact specifics, in third-density terms, can be slightly askew due to our perceptions? Is that what we are dealing with here?A: 99.9 per cent would not understand that concept. Most are always looking for literal translations of data. Analogy is: novice, who attends art gallery, looks at abstract painting and says, “I don’t get it.”
Q: (L) Well, let’s not denigrate literal translations or at least attempts to get things into literal terms. I like realistic artwork. I am a realist in my art preferences. I want trees to look like trees and people to have only two arms and legs. Therefore, I also like some literalness in my prognostications.
A: Some is okay, but, beware or else “California falls into the ocean” will always be interpreted as California falling into the ocean.
Q: (General uproar)
(F) Wait a minute, what was the question?
(L) I just said I liked literalness in my prophecies.
(F) Oh, I know what they are saying. People believe that California is just going to go splat! And that Phoenix is going to be on the seacoast; never mind that it’s at 1,800 feet elevation, it’s just going to drop down to sea level; or the sea level is going to rise; but it’s not going to affect Virginia Beach even though that’s at sea level! I mean … somehow Phoenix is just going to drop down and none of the buildings are going to be damaged, even though its going to fall 1,800 feet …
(T) Slowly. It’s going to settle!
(F) Slowly? It would have to be so slowly it’s unbelievable how slowly it would have to be!
(T) It’s been settling for the last five million years, we’ve got a ways to go in the next year and a half!
(F) Right! That’s my point!
(T) In other words, when people like Scallion and Sun Bear and others who say California is going to fall into the ocean, they are not saying that the whole state, right along the border is going to fall into the ocean, they are using the term “California” to indicate that the ocean ledge along the fault line has a probability of breaking off and sinking on the water side, because it is a major fracture. We understand that that is not literal. Are you telling us that there is more involved here as far as the way we are hearing what these predictions say?
A: Yes.
Q: (T) So, when we talk about California falling into the ocean, we are not talking about the whole state literally falling into the ocean?
A: In any case, even if it does, how long will it take to do this?
Q: (LM) It could take three minutes or three hundred years.
(T) Yes. That is “open” as you would say.
A: Yes. But most of your prophets think it is not open.
Q: (T) Okay. So they are thinking in the terms that one minute California will be there and a minute and a half later it will be all gone. Is this what you are saying?
A: Or similar.
Q: (T) So, when we are talking: “California will fall into the ocean,” which is just the analogy we are using, we are talking about the possibility that several seismic events along the fault line, which no one really knows the extent of …
A: Or it all may be symbolic of something else.
Q: (L) Such as? Symbolic of what?
A: Up to you to examine and learn.
Q: (L) Now, wait a minute here! That’s like sending us out to translate a book in Latin without even giving us a Latin dictionary.
A: No it is not. We asked you to consider a reexamination.
Q: (L) You have told us that there is a cluster of comets connected in some interactive way with our solar system, and that this cluster of comets comes into the plane of the ecliptic every 3,600 years. Is this correct?
A: Yes. But, this time it is riding realm border wave to 4th level, where all realities are different.
Q: (L) Okay, so the cluster of comets is riding the realm border wave. Does this mean that when it comes into the solar system, that its effect on the solar system, or the planets within the solar system,
(J) or us
(L) may or may not be mitigated [made less severe] by the fact of this transition? Is this a mitigating factor?
A: Will be mitigated.
Q: (L) Does this mean that all of this running around and hopping and jumping to go here and go there and do this and do that is …
A: That is strictly 3rd-level thinking.
Q: (L) Now, if that is third level thinking, and if a lot of these things are symbolic, I am assuming they are symbolic of movement or changes in energy.
A: Yes.
Q: (L) And, if these changes in energy occur, does this mean that the population of the planet are, perhaps – in groups or special masses of groups – are they defined as the energies that are changing in these descriptions of events and happenings of great cataclysm? Is it like a cataclysm of the soul on an individual and or collective basis?
A: Close.
Q: (L) When the energy changes to fourth density, and you have already told us that people who are moving to fourth density when the transition occurs, that they will move into fourth density, go through some kind of rejuvenation process, grow new teeth, or whatever; what happens to those people who are not moving to fourth density, and who are totally unaware of it? Are they taken along on the Wave by, in other words, piggybacked by, the ones who are aware and already changing in frequency, or are they going to be somewhere else doing something else?
A: Step by step.
Q: (T) In other words, we are looking at the fact that what’s coming this time is a Wave that’s going to allow the human race to move to fourth density?
A: And the planet and your entire sector of space-time.
The Wave by *LaPurr
Q: (T) Is that what this whole plan is about, then, if I may be so bold as to include all of us here in this? We could be beings who have come here into human form, to anchor the frequency. Is this what we are anchoring it for, for this Wave; so that when it comes, enough of us will be ready, the frequency will be set, so that the change in the planet can take place as it has been planned?A: Yes.
Q: (T) Okay, when the people are talking about the Earth Changes, when they talk in literal terms about the survivors, and those who are not going to survive, and the destruction and so forth and so on, in third, fourth, and fifth-level reality, we are not talking about the destruction of the planet on fourth-level physical terms, or the loss of ninety per cent of the population on the fourth level because they died, but because they are going to move to fourth level?
A: Whoa! You are getting “warm”.
Q: (T) Okay. So, we are anchoring this. So, when they talk about ninety per cent of the population not surviving, it is not that they are going to die, but that they are going to transform. We are going to go up a level. This is what the whole light thing is all about?
A: Or another possibility is that the physical cataclysms will occur only for those “left behind” on the remaining 3rd-level-density Earth.
So, not only do we have to take into account the source of the prediction (whether it be delusion, genuine ‘psychic’ ability, or communication with a ‘higher’ intelligence) and the fact that prediction may be accurate at the time but not after possible future events affecting its outcome, we also have to consider that such things are often presented in symbolic language.
And there may be something to the whole ‘Rapture’ concept after all, but as is usually the case, the truth probably bears little resemblance to the religious gloss.
And, like any avid reader of science fiction knows, one author’s personal ‘fantasy’ may turn out to be strikingly close to reality, either now or in the future.
Coincidence, or something else entirely?
Razing Arizona
With all that in mind, let’s take a look at a series of predictions given at one of the earliest sessions, 16 July 1994, on the day that Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9’s fragments collided with Jupiter in a spectacular display that stunned scientists and observers the world over.
Q: (L) What are you here for tonight?
A: Prophecy.
The Wallow Fires in Arizona this year
Q: (L) What prophecies?A: Tornadoes Florida – several.
Q: Where else?
A: Also Texas and Alabama.
Q: (L) When?
A: Sun is in Libra. {…}
Q: (L) What else is going to happen?
A: Seattle buried; Japan buckles; Missouri shakes; California crumbles; Arizona burns.
First of all, there is a possible time reference: “Sun is in Libra.”
On the surface, this could be seen to mean that these events are predicted to occur when the Sun is visible on the backdrop of the constellation of Libra, which is 31 October to 22 November (or 24 September to October 23 in astrological terms). Since this is near the end of hurricane season, perhaps this is a prediction of a time of intense cyclonic storms?
However, keeping in mind the discussion of symbolism above, it could also relate to the Sun being ‘on the scales’ or in ‘balance’, perhaps with the brown dwarf that is hypothesized to be our Sun’s companion (stay tuned for that installment!).
On 11 July 1998, the Cs said:
Q: (A) I want to continue questions from the previous session. First, about this companion star: where is it now, which part of the zodiac?
A: Libra Constellation.
Part of the town of Joplin, Missouri
was obliterated this year in the most devastating tornado in US history
So this series of predictions seems to be tied to the Sun’s hypothesized companion star and they were possibly given as indicators of its approach.
Interestingly, 2011 saw several of these events come to pass. While Texas saw some minor tornado activity on 24 October 2010, as did Florida on 31 March 2011, the Southern U.S. (including Florida, Texas and Alabama, in addition to several other states) was pummeled in late April 2011 in what was called “one of the largest tornado outbreaks in history”:
a series of over 300 tornadoes, 15 of which were classified as EF4 or EF5 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, killing over 300 people (EF5 being the highest on the scale).
Alabama was hit hardest, with 254 fatalities.
This was followed the month after with a series of 158 tornadoes afflicting the Midwestern U.S. and resulting in almost the same number of fatalities. The major, multi-vortex EF5 tornado, which leveled the town of Joplin, Missouri, stood out as one of the major U.S. natural disasters of recent years. All in all, after only five months, 2011 was deemed the deadliest year for tornadoes in recorded history.
Then, in late May/June, Arizona burned when the Wallow Fire consumed over 500,000 acres in Eastern Arizona, making it the largest forest fire in Arizona’s history.
By the time the fire made the record books, over 10,000 people had been displaced and the fire was only six percent contained, with full containment “nowhere in sight.” (A possible meteor sighting occurred on 31 May, perhaps explaining how this gigantic blaze erupted, although officials suspect a campfire was to blame.)
And while the fires were just getting started, Missouri shook with a 4.2 magnitude earthquake on 7 June.
Big One in Japan
And of course, Japan ‘buckled’ on 11 March 2011 when a magnitude 9.0 earthquake (upgraded from an original estimate of 8.9) killed just under 16,000 people. It was one of the five largest earthquakes in seismic record-keeping history, causing 10-metre-high tsunami waves and resulting in the total meltdown of three nuclear reactors at Fukushima.
This quake seems to have been predicted by the Cs in another session as well, and in more detail.
Here’s what the Cs had to say on 5 October 1994:
Q: (L) We would also like to have more information on Earth Changes. Is the Japanese earthquake that just happened as you predicted last week, the last of the Japanese problem? {An entire session had been lost due to tape malfunction. It consisted in part of a prediction of an almost immediate Japanese earthquake, which did occur exactly as predicted.}
A: No.
Q: (L) Can you give us more on that?
A: There will be activity about 8.9: 67 miles off Osaka coast; 9.7: central Tokyo.
Q: (L) Are all of these going to happen within this year?
A: No. Within 16 years.
The Japanese quake occurred 16 years and 5 months after this prediction, although its location was not 67 miles off the coast of Osaka.
However, in 1994, and up until the quake in 2011, a magnitude of 8.9 or 9.0 was unprecedented for Japan.
The Cs expanded on their predictions for Japan on 21 January 1995:
Q: (T) So this [Japanese earthquake on 17 January 1995] was not the quake that you predicted – the 8.9 – this was a 7.2, but it was miles distance from Osaka almost right on the money, but this was not the quake that you predicted?
(J) There’s going to be another one coming?
A: Yes 14 more this sequence. {…}
Q: (T) This is one in a sequence of earthquakes that are going to culminate in the 8.9?
A whole swathe of Japan
was wiped off the map this year too.
A: 9 pt 6.Q: (T) In Osaka, near Osaka?
A: Tokyo.
Q: Okay, that’s the one you talked about, then a 9.6, that’s going to be the culmination of the quakes in this [sequence]. This is only the third or fourth in a sequential series and the 8.9 that’s going to hit them hasn’t happened yet.
A: 7th.
Q: (T) This is the seventh earthquake?
A: Yes.
Q: (T) 7.2 was the seventh earthquake, there’s going to be fourteen of them, is that what you said before?
A: Yes.
Q: (J) So there’s seven more coming? (T) So the fourteenth one will be the big one, in Tokyo?
A: 13th.
Q: (T) Okay, the thirteenth is going to be the 9.6 and I think the other prediction was 9.8, they’re close. That’ll be the thirteenth. What will be the 8.9, which one of those will be the Osaka 8.9?
A: Within next 4 [in the sequence?].
Q: (T) What will the fourteenth be?
A: Small.
If we only consider the quakes that caused a significant number of deaths (>1) since that time, and if the quake referred to above was the seventh in a series of fourteen, then there is a perfect match with the prediction so far:
17 January 1995 (6.8 – 6,434 deaths)
23 October 2004 (6.9 – 40 deaths)
16 July 2007 (6.6 – 11 deaths)
14 June 2008 (6.9 – 12 deaths)
11 March 2011 (9.0 – 15,826 deaths)
?
predicted 9.6 in central Tokyo
? (small)
Additionally, the physical stress of the actual earthquake was not the only thing to ‘buckle’ Japan. The Fukushima meltdowns and subsequent fallout continue to threaten the health of the region’s inhabitants, and residents are confused and furious.
Another possible hit occurred in April 2011 when an 8.2-lb gold nugget was discovered in California, prompting some to predict a new Gold Rush in the region.
On 3 December 1994, the Cs had included this nugget in a string of predictions and markers of future events:
A: Gold is discovered in California after one of the quakes.
Of course, this doesn’t necessarily need to refer to a California quake, and the fact that it was discovered in the aftermath of the Japanese quake is suggestive.
But speaking of California, possibly in reference to “California crumbles” in the 1994 session, the Cs also had this to say in the 21 January 1995 session about a possible catastrophic quake in California:
Q: (T) OK, so when this all happens is there going to be an effect on California of all of this, on the West Coast of this country?
A: Yes.
Q: (T) Not just California. Is Los Angeles going to be hit with any of these big earthquakes as the plate on the other side moves?
A: Yes.
Q: (T) What magnitude?
A: 8.9
Q: (T) Where will that happen?
A: San Gabriel Mountains.
Q: (T) Is that outside of Los Angeles? San Andreas Fault line?
A: Yes.
Q: (T) Will this be very destructive to Los Angeles?
A: What do you think?
Q: (T) In the destruction of this area, is this going to increase the job potential on the East Coast, in order to then, this is really serious stuff here, because this is going to affect the economy the way it shifts…
A: Yes.
Q: (T) So it…
A: Mass exodus from California. {The Cs had also said this on 3 December 1994: “Expect gradual destruction of California economy as people begin mass exodus.”}
© AP Photo/Monterey Herald, Orville Myers
A section of the southbound lane of Highway 1slides down the hillside on Wednesday,
16 March 2011 in Big Sur, California
Q: (T) Those dumb people out there looked at that Osaka stuff and said, “Oh, you know, that might happen to us.” OH, boy, the brain finally fired up out there. (J) They’ve been in denial about that out there…(D) Will that bring an influx of people to Florida?
A: Yes. 15 quakes.
Q: (D) And then they’re going to move.
(T) Fifteen quakes in the California area?
A: In near future.
Q: (T) Are we talking strictly the West Coast here?
A: California.
Q: (T) Are there going to be earthquakes elsewhere in the United States?
A: Yes.
Q: (T) Fifteen in the near future in California alone…
(D) This is the beginning of the destruction of the state of California, there’ll be separation from the North American continent.
(T) Well, they said don’t take that literally, or it will fall off, it’s symbolic…
A: Open.
Q: (T) So look at it symbolically.
(D) Okay.
(J) Where are the other quakes going to be?
A: Hundreds [in addition to those in California].
Given the Cs’ use of symbolic language as well as their comments on a ‘mass exodus’, perhaps the ‘California crumbles’ remark is referring to the general state of California’s economy.
As the Business Insider reported in October 2010,
“the economy of the state [of California] is in shambles.”
Unemployment had risen from around 5% in 2006 and 2007 to over 12%. Poverty rates are the highest in over a decade, the health care system is about to collapse, and five out of six businesses are out of business.
While there are fewer Californians leaving the state than in past recessions (500,000 between 2004 and 2010 compared to 1,500,000 between 1991 and 1998), California’s domestic immigration is still in the negative. And the record number of businesses relocating out of state in 2010, which has only accelerated in 2011, has been called an ‘exodus’ in the media, with headlines like ‘CA Business Exodus Accelerates‘ and ‘The California Exodus‘.
204 companies left in 2010, making for an average of 3.9 per week. By 16 June 2011, that average was already at 5.4 per week.
Given the timing of the events in question, perhaps this little news item is symbolic in and of itself?
It is the most scenic highway in America, but a big chunk of California’s Highway 1 has fallen into the sea after a landslide. Stunned drivers watched as a forty-foot section tumbled into the Pacific below after several days of rain.
The landslide, at 5pm on Wednesday [16 March 2011], happened 12 miles from Carmel. A two-mile stretch is now closed for repairs which are expected to take several days.
A sign of things to come? Needless to say, the Cs repeatedly stressed that the near future would be a time of extreme weather and Earth Changes, which is now playing itself out with frightening accuracy.
After the extremes of 2010, 2011 has only upped the ante in turns of natural disasters.
With record numbers and intensity of floods, cyclonic storms, snowfall, meteor sightings and sun-grazing comets, it looks like Mother Nature is just getting warmed up.
Riding the Wave
Space and Weather Science Gone Wild
07 November 2011
© MODIS – NASA Terra satellite
Millions of people were left without power
as a snowstorm dropped as much as 32 inches (81 centimeters)
on some parts of the northeastern United States in late October 2011.
We started this series with a pretty ‘out-there’ topic: prophecy.
But the Cassiopaean Experiment, while pretty ‘out-there’ to begin with (at least from the mainstream perspective), also deals with more ‘down-to-earth’ subject matter. Issues relating to more conventionally understood and practiced science (albeit with often unconventional interpretations) make up a large portion of the received data.
It’s been my experience that people tend to forget that scientists are ‘human’ too, or more precisely, scientists can be just as willfully blind, self-serving, conformist, fearful and mendacious as anyone else.
Some of them are even unabashed con men who falsify their data, or intellectual prostitutes who will produce the results they are paid to, whether they believe them or not. Just because it’s been peer-reviewed, or written by a person with a string of letters after their name, doesn’t mean it’s true, or even remotely so. And if history tells us anything, it’s that the history of science is a long history of wrong or incomplete ideas.
So it’s best to be skeptical whenever scientists speak in terms of absolutes with certainty, whenever they put the lid on testing alternate hypotheses. Chances are, they’re simply deceiving themselves, and you.
Science is a work in progress.
The theories that are taken for granted as being true may very well turn out to be completely bogus following the intervention of new discoveries and innovations. Sadly, space and weather science are two areas where innovation not only rarely occurs, it is actively hindered by scientists and politicians with vested interests in keeping old, inadequate theories at the forefront of popular and academic belief systems.
Like many of the examples that will follow in subsequent installments of this series, the ones below are just a sample of ideas that at first glance may look just plain wrong.
But new discoveries have been proving many outdated preconceptions to be just that.
Hide the Decline, CYA
One of the biggest myths of recent years in weather science is that of ‘global warming’, specifically anthropogenic (manmade) global warming.
What this means is that a certain cause (or ‘forcing’) leads to a change in global temperature, causing positive feedback to make it get even hotter. The idea is that as manmade carbon dioxide (a so-called ‘greenhouse gas’) emissions have increased over the last hundred or so years, so has the temperature of the earth’s oceans and atmosphere.
The observed correlation is taken as causation, and thanks to the propagandizing efforts of people like Al Gore, the idea has taken hold, despite the fact that the whole façade is built on bad science.
Here’s what the Cs had to say in April 2007:
Q: What percentage of what we’re seeing today as global warming is coming from manmade compared to cosmic [causes]?
A: 4 percent.
Q: (J) There ya go. So let’s buy a Hummer. [laughter] (H) And are the people that are selling us the global warming … are they aware that this is all … all fake?
A: Some.
In September 2008, Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski published an op-ed piece for The New Zealand Centre for Political Research, ‘Sun Warms and Cools the Earth‘, in which he quoted Tom Segalstad, author of a review of carbon cycle research.
Here’s what Jaworowski wrote:
To fit these data into a global carbon cycle, IPCC assumed a speculative lifetime for man-made CO2 in the atmosphere as 50 to 200 years, ignoring observational evidence from 37 studies (based on natural and nuclear bomb carbon-14, Suess effect, radon-222, solubility data and carbon-13/carbon-12 mass balance) documenting that the real lifetime is about 5 years.
With CO2 atmospheric lifetime of about 5 years, the maximum amount of man-made CO2 remaining now in the atmosphere is only 4%, and not 36% (see review in (Segalstad, 1998)).
Here’s Segalstad in his own words:
Water vapor is the most important “greenhouse gas”. Man’s contribution to atmospheric CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels is small, maximum 4% found by carbon isotope mass balance calculations.
The “Greenhouse Effect” of this contribution is small and well within natural climatic variability. The amount of fossil fuel carbon is minute compared to the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere. The atmospheric CO2 lifetime is about 5 years. The ocean will be able to absorb the larger part of the CO2 that Man can produce through burning of fossil fuels.
The IPCC CO2 global warming model is not supported by the scientific data. Based on geochemical knowledge there should be no reason to fear a climatic catastrophe because of Man’s release of the life-governing CO2 gas.
The global climate is primarily governed by the enormous heat energy stored in the oceans and the latent heat of melting of the ice caps, not by the small amount of heat that can be absorbed in atmospheric CO2; hence legislation of “CO2 taxes” to be paid by the public cannot influence the sea level and the global climate.
© Artizons.com
What the promoters of manmade global warming ignore is the fact that the correlation between CO2 levels and global warming is just that: a correlation.
But CO2 levels have been on the rise for tens of thousands of years, long before humans started releasing ‘greenhouse gases’ as a result of industrialization. In fact, there is an observable ‘lag’ in the data. CO2 levels follow temperature variations by around 800 years, not the opposite.
The implication is obvious: global warming is a natural phenomenon of climate variation, probably driven by some other factor, perhaps varying solar activity. And CO2 levels may well be a result of the true cause of global warming, not the cause.
But overestimating the effect of manmade CO2 is not the only problem presented by the data. Has the earth even been warming at all in recent decades? Despite the repeated news headlines of ‘warmest day/year on record’, the answer is no, not really.
First of all, many weather-reporting stations that are used to come up with global averages are placed near heat-generating sources, causing them to give results that do not reflect actual temperatures. As cities develop, more heat-generating sources are produced, resulting in higher temperature readings at these sites. But these readings of local variations do not reflect the global climate.
As meteorologist Roy Spencer writes in his book The Great Global Warming Blunder (2010),
“One recent estimate is that as much as 50 percent of the warming measured over land in the last thirty years could be spurious, due to various indirect effects of economic growth contaminating the thermometer data.”
(p. 12-13)
Then there’s the fact that the more precise orbiting satellite data (measured since 1979, and only since around 2000 has NASA’s Aqua satellite been calibrated to account for periodic changes in observation time) has shown no significant warming for the last 18 years.
Dr. Spencer writes that there has been no cooling since 2001, after the “particularly warm El Niño year” of 1998 (p. 6). More precisely, they have shown normal fluctuations of heating and cooling.
As Spencer writes,
“While we can probably say with high confidence that the climate has warmed in the last 50 to 100 years, it is more difficult to say by exactly how much, still more difficult to say whether it is unprecedented or not, and impossible to say what any of this means for future temperatures.”
(pp. 13-14)
And, of course, November 2009’s ‘Climategate‘ controversy showed just how far some scientists were willing to knowingly distort and falsify data in order to fit their preconceived notions and keep their research grants coming.
Internal emails from scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Hadley Climate Research Unit revealed that the ‘scientists’ had knowingly excluded data from reports and graphs that would have shown an actual decline in global temperatures and the observed warming trend in recent decades and other periods of history, in order to give the false impression of continuous warming where there was none.
By obscuring the historical evidence of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, climate scientists were able to give the impression that our current climate fluctuations were not business as usual.
In fact, despite the imprecision of all methods for indirectly measuring temperature in the past (the only surefire way is direct temperature readings, which are only available for the last 100 years or so), all the data shows exactly that: natural fluctuations, periods of cold, periods of warm, with quick up-swings and down-swings in between.
In other words, they cherry-picked their data, just like they cherry-picked the reporting stations that gave them the data they needed to fit the facts around their beliefs. The graph below shows how the number of stations reporting average temperatures dropped dramatically in 1990.
Coincidentally, this is when the graph shows a remarkable increase in temperature. The connection is hard to miss.
For whatever reason (we can hazard a guess), the scientists responsible for hyping global warming eliminated many stations reporting lower temperatures in 1990. In all likelihood, if they had continued to use that data, there would be no warming.
In fact, there might even be evidence of cooling.
What everyone seems to be ignoring is the fact that this is a natural cyclic phenomenon.
Earth temperatures do rise. But they don’t just keep going, like a house with a broken thermostat. They’re always followed by cooling.
In other words: Ice Age.
Ice Age II
Here’s what the Cs had to say about ice ages on 22 February 1997:
A: [R]emember this: a change in the speed of the [earth’s] rotation may not be reported while it is imperceptible except by instrumentation. Equator is slightly “wider” than the polar zones. But, this discrepancy is decreasing slowly currently. One change to occur in 21st Century is sudden glacial rebound, over Eurasia first, then North America. Ice ages develop much, much, much faster than thought.
Then there’s this from 18 March 2000:
Q: You also made a remark once that ice ages occur much, much faster than people ever thought…
A: Yes. {…} and faster when in response to global “warming.”
Q: When you put “warming” in quotes, you obviously mean warming in more than just an ordinary sense? Is that correct?
A: And/or not really “warm.”
And this, from 9 May 1998:
Q: Why was the sea level several hundred feet lower [in the past]? Because there was ice somewhere or because there was not as much water on the earth at that time?
A: Ice.
Q: Was the ice piled up at the poles? The ice sheet of the ice age?
A: Yes.
Q: So, Atlantis existed during the ice age? [Atlantis being a designation for an alleged technologically advanced society living during Paleolithic times.]
A: Largely, yes. And the world’s climate was scarcely any colder away from the ice sheets than it is today.
Q: Well, how could that be? What caused these glaciers?
A: Global warming.
Q: How does global warming cause glaciers?
A: Increases precipitation dramatically. Then moves the belt of great precipitation much farther north. This causes rapid buildup of ice sheets, followed by increasingly rapid and intense glacial rebound.
Recent years have seen exactly that,
despite claims of continued ‘global warming’.
The ozone hole is cooling the Antarctic’s stratosphere, causing increased precipitation in the subtropics and moving the westerly jet stream closer to the south, pulling storm tracks with it.
Glaciers are growing on California’s Mt. Shasta, Italy’s Mount Canin and Mount Montasio, in India, Antarctica, Greenland, the Arctic, New Zealand, Argentina, Alaska, the Himalayas, Bolivia, and elsewhere.
In 2006, the BBC reported that,
“Global warming could be causing some glaciers to grow, a new study claims. Researchers at Newcastle University looked at temperature trends in the western Himalaya over the past century. They found warmer winters and cooler summers, combined with more snow and rainfall, could be causing some mountain glaciers to increase in size.”
In other words, the water cycle rebounds between periods of extended heating/evaporation and melting of ice caps, and then mass precipitation and buildup of ice at the poles, like a great global thermostat that resets when certain upper and lower limits are reached.
(After all, the polar regions are consistently too cold for anything but snow to fall, so increased precipitation would lead to a buildup of ice and snow, not the opposite – Spencer, p. 62)
What the Cs are describing is essentially a negative feedback system.
Rather than out-of-control warming, the earth’s climate system has in-built mechanisms to bring rising and falling temperatures back into equilibrium. Of course, this flies in the face of global warming propaganda, but anyone looking honestly at the data can see that this is exactly how our climate has operated.
Consider also the record low atmospheric temperatures, rising ocean temperatures (probably caused by underwater volcanism) leading to massive evaporation and precipitation as evidenced in the number of extreme floods and record-breaking snowfalls in recent years, and the fact that the last ice age ended about 11,500 years ago.
In the 1970s, CLIMAP (Climate: Long-range Investigation Mapping and Prediction) discovered an ice age cycle of 11,500 years. In other words, we’re right on time for another. In fact, we’re overdue. And when the next ice age comes, it’s going to come fast, just as the Cs proposed:
According to ice core researcher Jørgen Peder Steffensen:
“Our new, extremely detailed data from the examination of the ice cores shows that in the transition from the ice age to our current warm, interglacial period, the climate shift is so sudden that it is as if a button was pressed.”
This discovery suggests that our current climate could undergo a similar rapid change, shifting back into ice age mode in just one year.
But would the earth experience a ‘runaway cooling’ akin to that which those who picture an ever-heating earth because of ‘global warming’ imagine? Not likely. Global warming is founded on the basis of multiple successive positive feedback mechanisms (i.e. temperatures rise and rise without any negative feedback to bring them back down).
If the earth climate system in fact contains built-in negative feedback mechanisms (as Spencer argues in his book), the same isn’t true.
Instead of doubling upon doubling,
“it’s like halving a number, then halving it again, and then again. You slowly approach zero, but never quite reach it. As a result, there can be no climate catastrophe with net strongly negative feedbacks – only with net strongly positive feedbacks.”
(Spencer, p. 63)
In other words, yes, we have ice ages, but climate (or the total heat content of the earth), as always, fluctuates between its naturally defined upper and lower limits. What we do not know are the exact mechanisms by which this happens.
As for the idea that underwater volcanism contributes to the water cycle of ice ages, the Cs said the following on 18 February 1995:
A: {…} Volcanic eruption under arctic ice in 1996.
Q: (T) Cool!
(L) That ought to be a real zinger.
(T) That will bring us some floods then!
A: No. Weather causing increased evaporation …
An undersea volcano erupts near the Pacific island of Tongatapu in 2009.
Approximately 90% of the world’s millions of volcanoes lie under the oceans.
According to Dr. Spencer, quoted above,
“it has recently been demonstrated that if the oceans warm for any reason, global land areas can warm even more. This makes the oceans a potential key player in long-term climate change.”
(pp. 11-12)
Increased volcanism is just one possible example of ‘forcing’, leading to a change in temperature.
If we want to know what happens after that, we need to know what kind of feedback mechanisms are involved. If cloud cover is one such mechanism, as Spencer argues, the scenario could look something like this: Warmer oceans and land temperatures lead to increased evaporation, thus increased water vapor, cloud cover and precipitation.
And more low-lying cloud cover means more negative feedback (cooling) because of the increased reflection of solar radiation. And, of course, increased precipitation over the poles could plunge earth into another ice age in its efforts to re-balance.
In 2006 it was reported that German-American researchers,
“discovered more hydrothermal activity at the Gakkel Ridge in the Arctic Ocean than anyone ever imagined.”
Expecting a ‘hydrothermally dead ridge’, the researchers were surprised to discover high levels of volcanic activity in this Arctic region.
Then, in 2008 geophysicist Robert Sohn discovered volcanic explosions,
“at depths previously thought impossible.”
He even said,
“This kind of implosive seismicity is rare anywhere on Earth.”
At the times that all of this data was received from the Cs, many would have found it unlikely and even outlandish, but science is proving them correct on many points.
We wonder what other discoveries lie just around the corner?
Global Warming Spin, Rinse and Cycle
But what exactly are the root causes of the climate changes earth has been experiencing? The Cs have also identified possible contributing factors.
From 23 July 1994:
Q: (L) What is causing the earth changes?
A: Electromagnetic wave changes.
Q: (L) Can you be more specific?
A: Gap in surge heliographic field.
On 22 February 1997, they also had this to say:
Q: (L) Is the weather being controlled or changed or in any way affected by HAARP?
A: Climate is being influenced by three factors, and soon a fourth.
Q: (L) All right, I’ll take the bait; give me the three factors, and also the fourth!
A: 1) Wave approach.
2) Chloroflorocarbon increase in atmosphere, thus affecting ozone layer.
3) Change in the planet’s axis rotation orientation.
4) Artificial tampering by 3rd and 4th density STS forces in a number of different ways. …
Q: (L) All right, were those given in the order in which they are occurring, the fourth being the one that’s coming later?
A: Maybe, but remember this: a change in the speed of the rotation may not be reported while it is imperceptible except by instrumentation. Equator is slightly “wider” than the polar zones. But, this discrepancy is decreasing slowly currently. {…}
Q: (T) Is the Earth expanding? That’s just putting it bluntly, but, is the Earth expanding, how did you put that?
(Ark) Yes, that’s the theory: the idea is that the continents move away because the Earth is expanding, and this is much faster than you know, than geologists were thinking.
A: Continental “drift” is caused by the continual, though variable, propelling of gases from the interior to the surface, mainly at points of magnetic significance.
Q: (J) What causes the change in the axis?
A: By slowdown of rotation. Earth alternately heats up and cools down in interior.
Q: (L) Why does it do that? What’s the cause of this?
A: Part of cycle related to energy exerted upon surface by the frequency resonance vibrational profile of humans and others.
Of the four causes listed above, numbers 2 and 3 (as well as the reference to the “surge heliographic field” in the previous session) most readily offer themselves up for some sort of scientific verification.
The chlorofluorocarbon effect on the ozone layer has been recognized at least since the 1970s.
But as far as I can tell, the influence of changes in the rotation of the earth on climate hasn’t received nearly as much scientific investigation. Recently, however, the subject made the news, suggesting one possible way in which it may have such an influence.
In August 2010, Physics Central published an interesting piece about new research suggesting a link between the Sun’s output, cosmic rays, earth’s rotation and weather:
One of the team members, Vincent Courtillot of the Institute of Geophysics of Paris, says they examined the length of day – as defined by the speed of the earth’s rotation in a reference frame fixed with respect to the stars – using a series of daily values over a 40-year period. They claim that up to 30 percent of changes could be directly related to the 11-year sunspot cycle.
Of course, 30 percent of that change only amounts to a few tenths of a millisecond, so you’d never actually notice it, but what’s more compelling (read ‘very highly controversial’) is the potential for cosmic rays to have such a profound effect.
Courtillot and his colleagues have been among those championing a radical theory that cosmic rays can impact the formation of clouds and in turn, play a major part in climate changes.
But how could cosmic rays possibly change the speed of our planet’s rotation?
Here’s how Courtillot explained it to me in an email:
“The causal chain is the following: the changes in Earth rotation are simply reflecting the changes in angular momentum of the Earth’s atmosphere, more precisely the integral of zonal winds. And it has been suggested that cosmic rays influence cloud condensation nuclei formation.
If you change the cloud cover by say 10-percent, you change the amount of energy reflected by cloud tops by 8 Watts per square meter, which is very significant in the Earth’s radiative budget.
So this is the suggested link: cosmic rays affect cloud cover, which affects the atmosphere’s energy budget, which may alter the wind speeds and organization, which changes the Earth’s angular momentum hence (length of day).”
It may sound like a reach (and relationships don’t prove causation), but other physicists have claimed that the sun’s magnetic field could potentially beat back cosmic rays and slow the rate at which they reach Earth.
So when solar activity decreases there’s less to deflect the cosmic rays and they can again reach Earth in greater numbers, potentially leading to a substantial enough change in winds to effect Earth’s angular momentum.
In other words, changing weather patterns may be (at least in part) a result of cosmic ray-seeded clouds, which cause a need to conserve angular momentum, thus leading to an almost imperceptible slowing of the earth’s rotation.
And according to Dr. Spencer, cloud cover is perhaps the main driver in climate fluctuation within the earth system. But while suggestive of some possible causative mechanisms, the cosmic-ray theory of climate change is based more on speculation than observable evidence.
What is most interesting is the idea of possible factors affecting earth’s angular momentum and the effects they might have on earth processes affecting climate, as well as the role of the Sun in all of these phenomena.
In fact, the Sun appears to be the prime mover of global weather and climate.
Note the last sentence in the above quotation. The author is essentially describing a ‘gap’ in the Sun’s ‘surge’ of charged particles sent out through the solar system. (In the 1994 Cs session, ‘heliographic field’ could essentially mean the Sun’s measurable field of electromagnetism.)
But the mechanisms for how this actually affects earth weather are best found elsewhere. According to Piers Corbyn, meteorologist, astrophysicist and head of WeatherAction.com, who has made a name for himself with his revolutionary and highly accurate techniques predicting weather patterns based on solar activity, cosmic rays actually play a miniscule role.
Corbyn’s method involves observing how charged particles interact with earth’s upper atmosphere and the jet stream, and the moon’s influence on these particles, matching these observations with historical records to discern patterns.
According to Corbyn:
The latest advances in Sun-Earth relations show not only the primacy of magnetic-particle links between the sun and the earth but that these are modulated by lunar effects to give the observed 60 year cycle in both world and USA temperatures.
This means that the world will continue general cooling at least to 2030. Neither the 60 year cycle, nor the 22 year cycle nor any fluctuations in world temperatures over the last 100 years, thousand years or million years can be explained by changes in CO2. [If cosmic rays were the main driver, the cycle would follow the 11-year solar cycle, since cosmic rays follow the Sun’s cycle.]
Furthermore, advances in understanding of Sun-Earth magnetic and particle activity are being applied to successfully predict dangerous weather and climate change events months and years ahead; whereas all predictions of the CO2-centred theory have failed and will continue to fail, and anti-CO2 taxes and measures will never stop a single extreme weather event.
The UN’s Climate Change committee (the IPCC) have still failed to respond to requests from an international group of scientists to provide data evidence for the CO2 theory.
Dr. Roy Spencer has also identified a 60-year cycle called the ‘Pacific Decadal Oscillation‘, a fluctuation between 30-year ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ phases based on,
“two different average circulation states that the ocean-atmosphere system seems to have a difficult time choosing between.”
(If James McCanney is correct about the Sun-Earth connection and its influence on the jet streams and atmospheric phenomena, the PDO could conceivably be an effect driven by solar influences.)
Spencer, too, is critical of the consensus view that CO2 drives global warming, seeing instead cycles within cycles based on changing cloud cover.
Based on observations of these cycles, he writes,
“And now, as of late 2008, it looks like we might have entered into a new, negative (cooling) phase of the PDO. Only time will tell whether this pattern persists.”
See his graph of global temperatures, culled from NOAA satellite data, here.
Notice the sinusoidal pattern of the graph, indicating that earth is currently swinging into a 30-year trend of cooling.
Incidentally,
The last time the PDO changed phase was in 1977, an event that some have called the “great Climate Shift of 1977.” This event brought an end to the slight global cooling trend that started in the 1940s… which was then replaced with a warming trend from the late 1970s through the 1990s.
After the Great Climate Shift, Alaska warmed immediately and then remained warm. Temperatures in the Arctic started rising … Arctic sea ice cover was observed to start shrinking in the 1980s by our new satellite measurements…
Contrary to what you may have heard in news reports, the recent warming in the Arctic is probably not unprecedented. It was just as warm in the late 1930s and early 1940s when the PDO was also in its positive, warm phase…
Most of the all-time high temperature records in the United States were set in the 1930s.
(Spencer, p. 19)
Of course, there is a whole lot more to these issues than the information presented above.
After researching all these related subjects over the years, a picture is starting to emerge.
The Earth Changes we are experiencing are a natural phenomenon, and human activity has little to nothing to do with them (at least not in the ways popularly imagined). Something strange, but not unprecedented, is happening throughout our solar system.
It has to do with cosmic influences and their effects on and through our Sun and, as a result, our weather.
History Is Bunk
25 November 2011
Hale-Bopp over Stonehenge
Update:We covered a list of prophecies in the first part of this series.
The idea of California ‘falling into the sea’ was mentioned. Just a few days ago, another chunk of it did just that. Specifically, part of the Paseo del Mar road in San Pedro fell into the Pacific Ocean after a landslide on 21 November.
We don’t think this particular landslide is what the Cs were referring to, just thought the timing was interesting in light of bringing it up here!
Just as new discoveries in science can overturn a previously held ‘consensus’ in a heartbeat (often to the consternation or willful disbelief of those promoting the consensus), new historical data can turn our ideas of what we think happened in our history on their head.
We often take for granted that event X occurred in year Y, forgetting that either or both of those variables may be completely false. The event may turn out to have been a fiction, created by scribes and leaders of the time (or years later) for purposes of political propaganda.
Dating methods may be inaccurate or possess possible confounding factors, mucking up the accepted timeline.
Or, when new documents or scientific data are discovered, the event may turn out to bear little resemblance to our previous ideas of how it happened. New actors emerge with new motivations, necessitating a revision of the history books and the way we see the events and personages of our near and distant past.
Then there are the problems inherent in the study of prehistory, before the advent of ‘history’ as we know it. There, we only have scarce clues to rely on, all built on sciences which are themselves built on certain assumptions about the way things work.
Archaeology, paleoanthropology, population and molecular genetics, climate science, geology… all of these contribute to a story of the past that historians create for us. When we consider the relatively young age of many of these sciences, the amount of information that we have amassed in that short amount of time is pretty staggering.
But it’s important to keep in mind that history too is a work in progress; new theories and advancements in science can prompt a radical revision of old ideas.
Prehistory occupies a good portion of the Cs transcripts. While archaeologists and anthropologists can piece together broad outlines of migrations, genetic mixing, human behaviors, population bottlenecks, etc., this was a period from which no written records appear to have survived. As such, it’s hard to verify specific historical details and much of what the Cs say about these times remains interesting conjecture.
But while much of it is unverifiable, it also provides opportunities to test the material as new discoveries come to light: fossil finds, climate studies, evidence for catastrophes and extinctions, and more.
The Caveman Who Wasn’t There
Cave paintings in Lascaux,
southwestern France
On 15 April 2000, the following exchange took place on early hominids:
Q: (L) Well, for a period of time it seems that they [Neanderthals] continued to exist on the planet alongside the new model, Cro-Magnon or whatever.
A: Some did.
Q: (L) For how long did Neanderthal exist side by side with the ‘new model’?
A: 233 years.
Q: (L) I thought that Neanderthal was here for a long, long, long time; and if modern man arrived on the planet, as you say, seventy to eighty thousand years ago, wasn’t Neanderthal already here then?
A: Time references have been miscalculated.
For a long time, this remark seemed somewhat unbelievable.
After all, according to the experts, Neanderthals existed for almost 200,000 years, finally becoming extinct around 27 to 28,000 years ago. For example, one of the historically latest Neanderthal fossil finds, found in the Zafarraya cave in southern Spain, has been dated to 30,000 years ago (Ian Tattersall and Jeffrey Schwartz, Extinct Humans [New York: Nevraumont, 2001], pp. 176, 219).
In contrast, the earliest anatomically and behaviorally modern human remains have been radiometrically dated to about 35 to 40,000 years ago, making for an overlap of several thousand years (Paul Mellars, The Neanderthal Legacy [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996], pp. 2, 392).
This time period coincides with the so-called ‘Paleolithic Revolution’, during which what we consider to be fully ‘modern’ human behavior exploded onto the scene, as evidenced in the stunning cave art of the Aurignacian period.
However, in May 2011, direct dating of an important Neanderthal fossil threw a monkey wrench into this ‘accepted’ chronology.
Science News reported that Dr. Ron Pinhasi and his colleagues,
“dated a Neanderthal fossil discovered in a significant cave site in Russia in the northern Caucasus, and found it to be 10,000 years older than previous research had suggested.”
The article continues:
This new evidence throws into doubt the theory that Neanderthals and modern humans interacted for thousands of years. Instead, the researchers believe any co-existence between Neanderthals and modern humans is likely to have been much more restricted, perhaps a few hundred years. It could even mean that in some areas Neanderthals had become extinct before anatomically modern humans moved out of Africa.
The fossil was dated to 39,700 years old.
As the article put it:
“This finding challenges previous claims that late Neanderthals survived until 30,000 years ago in the northern Caucasus, meaning that late Neanderthals and modern humans were not likely to experience any significant period of co-existence.”
The authors allege that previous dating processes,
“have ‘systemically underestimated’ the true age of Late Middle Paleolithic and Early Upper Paleolithic deposits, artifacts and fossils by up to several thousand years,” citing sample contamination as one of the main reasons for these errors.
Dr. Pinhasi said:
“It now seems much clearer that Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans did not co-exist in the Caucasus, and it is possible that this scenario is also true for most regions of Europe.”
Any interbreeding (leading to the observable Neanderthal DNA in some humans) most likely occurred very early, possibly in the Middle East during this short time period, according to Pinhasi.
Regarding time references being miscalculated, we’ll get to that in more detail in another installment.
Parenthetical Humanoids
As mentioned in the first installment, the legend of ‘Atlantis‘ comes up repeatedly.
With its origins in the writings of Plato, Atlantis, according to the Cs, represents an ‘advanced’ civilization during the Paleolithic period (i.e. 300,000 to 10,000 years ago), keeping in mind that ‘advanced’ may not necessarily match with our preconceptions about technology and civilization.
While several researchers have collected a lot of research suggesting the existence of such a global civilization in that time period (e.g., Klaus Dona, as well as Christopher Knight and Alan Butler, in recent years), we won’t deal with it here at the moment.
However, in one discussion on the topic, on 31 May 1997, the following exchange took place:
Q: As I understand it, Atlantis was already quite a developed civilization at that time [80,000 years ago]. Is that correct?
A: Yes, but regions change with waves of immigration, or conquest… witness your own lands. […] Atlantis was merely a home base of an advanced civilization of 3 races of humans occupying different sections of a huge Island empire, which, in itself, underwent 3 incarnations over a 100,000-year period as you would measure it.
Q: The 3 races were the Celts [i.e. Indo-Europeans]… and who were the second and third?
A: Or Kantekkians.
Q: Are the Kantekkians different from the Celts?
A: Only in the sense of long term racial and genetic blending.
Q: So, Atlantis had the Kantekkians/Celts and who else?
A: Race you would call “Native Americans,” and a third, no longer existing race, somewhat resembling Australian or Guinean aborigines, only lighter in complexion. [These were the ‘Paranthas’, mentioned earlier in the session.]
Q: Was this third group destroyed by the other two?
A: One of the 3 cataclysms. […]
Q: So, the Paranthas were the antecedents of the Abos of Australia?
A: Yes, and compare to now existing peoples of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Australia, and New Guinea for similarities, bearing in mind genetic mixing and dilution.
Q: Were the Vedas written by the Paranthas or written by the Celts?
A: Descendants of Parantha, as per “Divine guidance.”
© Flickr user 710928003
DNA recovered from a 40,000 year old pinkie bone
found in Russia’s Denisova cave links a newly-described extinct line
of Neanderthal-like human ancestors to Melanesian populations of the South Pacific.
On 31 October 2011, Live Science published an article on the so-called ‘Denisovans’, titled ‘Asian Ancestors Had Sex with Mysterious Human Cousins‘.
The only known fossils of this branch of extinct humans were discovered in 2008 in a cave in Siberia, which include a single tooth and finger bone (and possibly a toe bone, which is currently being studied).
Based on genetic tests, the results of which were only published in 2010, the Denisovans’ DNA differs from modern humans’ by 385 base pairs (Neanderthals differ by 202 and chimps by 1,462) and share a common ancestor with Neanderthals.
Their DNA can be found in Melanesians and Australian Aborigines today.
From the Live Science article:
Neanderthals weren’t the only ancient cousins that humans frequently mated with, according to a new study which finds that East Asian populations share genes with a mysterious archaic hominin species that lived in Siberia 40,000 years ago…
The Denisovans likely split off from the Neanderthal branch of the hominin family tree about 300,000 years ago, but little else is known about their appearance, behavior or dress. But just as researchers have learned that ancient humans and Neanderthals mated, they’ve also found genetic echoes of the Denisovans in modern residents of Pacific islands, including New Guinea and the Philippines. […]
While Oceanians have about a 5 percent fraction of Denisovan-related ancestry, Southeast Asians have around 1 percent, the researchers report today (Oct. 31) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In comparison, genes from modern non-African humans have about a 2.5 percent fraction of Neanderthal ancestry.
It’s hard to tell when the Denisovan and human interbreeding occurred, Jakobsson said, but since Europeans don’t have Denisovan ancestry, it’s likely the mating occurred around 23,000 to 45,000 years ago, after Southeast Asians and European populations diverged.
Jakobsson and his colleagues are working on further studies on early human genetics and the steps that led to the modern human genome. The more digging scientists do, the more complex the genetic picture becomes, he said.
Notably, bits of genes are almost all that are left behind of some ancient populations, including the Denisovans, he said.
As for possible Indian connections, paleoanthropologist John Hawks is skeptical, but writes the following:
As a case in point, HLA-A*11 is very common in Papua New Guinea, but it is also very common in north India and in China.
These two areas otherwise show no significant evidence of Denisova ancestry. We might conclude that the HLA-A gene just has an unusually high level of introgression into Asian populations, not typical of the genome as a whole. That’s certainly possible.
But without finding any substantial number of derived mutations in the HLA-A*11 variant in the Denisova genome and in living Asians, it is hard to rule out that the sharing of HLA-A*11 in all these populations is just coincidence.
In other words, it’s a complex issue and too soon to tell for sure if certain genetic similarities (in this case, a single gene) between the Denisova-descended Southeast Asians and continental Indians are mere coincidence or the result of some Denisovan heritage.
Perhaps the Cs offered a clue to this subject when they said:
“bearing in mind genetic mixing and dilution.”
Native American Immigrant Song
Moving forward a bit in history, the next possible hit concerns one branch of Native Americans.
According to current theories, the first migration of Paleoindians into North America occurred during the last ice age at least 12,000 years ago or earlier – there is still debate about when the first migrations occurred. For example, the Clovis people, believed by many archaeologists to be the first North American inhabitants, were wiped out along with the North American megafauna around the time of the Younger Dryas cold period.
They first show up in the archaeological record about 13,500 to 13,000 years ago (with radiocarbon dates of 11,500 years). But there is much evidence for pre-Clovis cultures.
See the list of sites at Wikipedia, some of which date back 30,000 to 60,000 years.
Recently, in March 2011, it was reported that archaeologists discovered a cache of finds in Texas that were up to 2,500 years older than the earliest evidence for the Clovis peoples.
As Dr. Lee Nordt, one of the authors of the study, said:
“This find really rewrites history, so to speak, and changes our collective thought on the early colonization of North, Central and South America […] What sets this study apart is that we were able to show using geological methods that the buried artifacts dating to pre-Clovis times were in their original state. This demonstrates unequivocally that the peopling of the Americas occurred much earlier than previously thought.”
But the Clovis and pre-Clovis people weren’t the only ones to come to inhabit North America.
According to Wikipedia,
“The Na-Dené people entered North America starting around 8000 BCE, reaching the Pacific Northwest by 5000 BCE, and from there migrating along the Pacific Coast and into the interior. Linguists, anthropologists and archeologists believe their ancestors comprised a separate migration into North America, later than the first Paleo-Indians.”
The languages of the Na-Dené, spoken by groups in Alaska and Canada as well as down the west coast/southwest US (e.g. Navaho and Apache), share similarities with the Yeniseian languages of central Asia (all of which except Ket are now extinct).
The distance between these two groups is the largest of any accepted language family. This has led in part to the Sino-Caucasian (Dene-Caucasian) language hypothesis.
One part of that hypothesis, specifically the connection just mentioned, has recently gained mainstream acceptance, including a conference dedicated to the topic in 2008.
This picture comes from Horseshoe Canyon, otherwise known as Barrier Canyon in Utah.
This seven-foot-high painting stands out among the others because of its size.
It is part of the Great Gallery in Horseshoe Canyon,
standing nearly life size next to a series of other images.
Archeologists have struggled to interpret the strange figures
that are depicted on the Great Gallery.
With that said, here’s what the Cs had to say on 7 October 1994:
Q: (L) What is the source of the Native American Indians?
A: Asia.
Q: (L) Across the Bering Strait?
A: No. Rescued. Transferred.
Q: (L) By whom?
A: Grays.
Q: (L) What were they rescued out of?
A: Cataclysm.
Q: (L) When did that cataclysm occur?
A: 7200 years ago approx.
Q: (L) What was the nature of that cataclysm?
A: Comets.
Now, check out this below diagram.
According to lexicostatistical analysis, the time depth from Yeniseian back to its branching off from Dene-Caucasian (from which comes Na-Dene), is just over 7000 years:
While we haven’t been able to find any evidence indicating a comet encounter in the Yenisei basin at the time indicated (incidentally, this is where the famous Tunguska airburst occurred in 1908), catastrophe has been a prime mover in mass migrations (no pun intended) throughout history, and the unusually large distance between these two language groups is puzzling and suggests something out of the ordinary to account for the branching of these groups.
So while the ‘transfer’ idea is at this point mere speculation, it remains ‘interesting’ nonetheless.
Keep the 7,200-year figure in mind as we proceed.
Bright Omen, Dark Age
Speaking of comets, the subject of cometary bombardment, both in history and our future, is another that comes up a lot in the Cassiopaean Experiment, and we’ll probably be discussing it frequently along the way.
While largely ignored by mainstream academia and media, the phenomenon has great implications for our understanding of history, the rise and fall of empires, and our future, as new research has been showing in recent years.
Moving along to more recent history, these remarks from the session on 12 September 1998 ended up proving to be quite the hit:
Q: (L) I have discovered that three of the supernovas of antiquity which have been discovered and time-estimated by the remnants, occurred in or near Cassiopeia at very interesting points in history.
A: Yes…
Q: (L) Well, one of these periods in history was around 1054. This is a very interesting time. It just so happens that there are no European records of this supernova, which was recorded by the Chinese, Japanese, and perhaps even the Koreans. Yet, there are no European records. What happened to the European records?
A: Europe was in a “recovery mode” at the “time.”
Q: (L) Recovery from what?
A: Loss of civilized structure due to overhead cometary explosion in 564 AD.
Q: (L) What effect did this have on the civilized structure? Was it a direct effect in terms of material, or did it have effects on people causing them to behave in an uncivilized and barbaric way?
A: Well, the burning fragmentary shower ignited much of the land areas in what you now refer to as Western Europe. This had the results you can imagine, causing the resulting societal breakdown you now refer to as “The Dark Ages.”
Q: (L) Well, it damn sure was dark. There is almost a thousand years that nobody knows anything about!
A: Check Irish or Celtic, and French or Gallic records of the era for clues. There were temporary “islands of survival,” lasting just long enough for the written word to eke out.
Woodcut showing destructive influence of a comet,
dated to the fourth century AD,
from Stanilaus Lubienietski’s Theatrum Cometicum (Amsterdam, 1668)
A year after this session, on 17 August 1999, the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau published an article by Robert S. Boyd entitled ‘Comets may have caused Earth’s great empires to fall‘, which said:
“Recent scientific discoveries are shedding new light on why great empires such as Egypt, Babylon and Rome fell apart, giving way to the periodic “dark ages” that punctuate human history. At least five times during the last 6,000 years, major environmental calamities undermined civilizations around the world.”
Comparing the events to the fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy, which impacted Jupiter with megatons of explosive energy, the researchers say such impacts in earth’s history produced dust clouds that dimmed the Sun, cooled the earth and caused massive crop failure, hunger, disease and death, as plague and famine spread through Italy, China and the Middle East.
The previous order disintegrated, leading to the paucity of historical, artistic and cultural remnants for such periods.
The last such global crisis occurred between AD 530 and 540 – at the beginning of the Dark Ages in Europe – when Earth was pummeled by a swarm of cosmic debris. […]
Dendrochronologist Mike Baillie established with analysis of tree ring data that in 540 AD, in different parts of the world, the climate changed. Temperatures dropped enough to hinder the growth of trees as widely dispersed as northern Europe, Siberia, western North America, and southern South America.
A search of historical records and mythical stories pointed to a disastrous visitation from the sky during the same period, it is claimed. There was one reference [Roger of Wendover] to a “comet in Gaul so vast that the whole sky seemed on fire” in 540-41.
According to legend, King Arthur died around this time, and Celtic myths associated with Arthur hinted at bright sky Gods and bolts of fire.
In the 530s, an unusual meteor shower was recorded by both Mediterranean and Chinese observers.
Meteors are caused by the fine dust from comets burning up in the atmosphere. Furthermore, a team of astronomers from Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland published research in 1990 which said the Earth would have been at risk from cometary bombardment between the years 400 and 600 AD.
Interestingly, it was a ‘Celtic record’ that gave Baillie the confirmation he needed:
the dendrochronological record based on Irish oaks – a continuous 7400-year-long record of tree ring growth drawn from Irish trees – as well as records in the form of myth and legend from the time in question.
Additionally, the Irish Annals refer to two ‘bread failures’ during this small time window (famines are also recorded in China, as well as the Justinian plague that spread from Egypt through Europe). (See Baillie, From Exodus to Arthur [Batsford, 1999], p. 78)
Here are some of Baillie’s conclusions, from his book The Celtic Gods (Tempus, 2005), co-authored with Patrick McCafferty:
It is possible that many stories about the exploits of saints may simply be Christianized versions of older pagan tales, with Patrick and Columcille replacing Lugh; but there is another option worth considering: perhaps some of these deeds… actually took place during the lifetime of the saints, in the sixth century.
This is probably an appropriate point in this book to remind the reader of the similarity between the Irish word for saint (niamh) and the word for the sky or heaven (neamh).
It should be pointed out that, in 540, not only do we have lots of churches founded in Ireland [“foundation sites had traditionally been identified by objects falling from the skies”] by saints who sound remarkably like pagan Celtic Comet gods, but throughout Europe, churches are being established by saints such as St David, St Michael and St George, better known for their skills at vanquishing dragons [a common cometary symbol].
Furthermore… the entire body of Arthurian legend also takes place at this same time. […]
Altogether, when one considers the expansion of the church, together with the quasi-mythical activities of saints, kings and magicians, and the problems faced by Irish oak trees, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the skies were indeed busy at this time. (p. 172)
The myths of the Celts are riddled with sky and comet imagery. Not only do we find characters described like comets (and mistakenly seen as sun gods by earlier scholars), but the times of year when the earth passed through the Taurid meteor stream.
There are even indications that the ages at which some of the principal characters engage in the main events of their lives reflect the return times of comets coming close to earth.
We are convinced that events in the skies do indeed appear in the myths. (p. 175)
Just a Little Bit of History Repeating
Perhaps relating to the figure of 7,200 years mentioned above, the Cs had this to say on 30 September 1994:
Q: (L) Is there any regular periodicity or cycle to this comet business?
A: Yes.
Q: (L) What is the period?
A: 3600 years roughly.
And this on 5 October 1994:
Q: (L) Now, this cluster of comets, when was the last time it came into the solar system?
A: 3582 yrs ago?
Q: (L) What is the cycle?
A: 3600 yrs.
Q: (L) So, when is this cluster expected to hit the plane of the ecliptic again?
A: 12 to 18 years.
If we keep in mind what we have learned from Baillie – that comet bombardments are very likely to be one of the main causes behind the collapse of empires throughout history – we can use this to look for possible markers for this event.
Most recently, the following information was published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in early 2009, and reported by the Associated Press in an article titled ‘Natural disasters doomed early Peruvian civilization 3,600 years ago‘:
Nature turned against one of America’s early civilizations 3,600 years ago, when researchers say earthquakes and floods, followed by blowing sand, drove away residents of an area that is now in Peru.
“This maritime farming community had been successful for over 2,000 years, they had no incentive to change, and then all of a sudden, boom, they just got the props knocked out from under them,” anthropologist Mike Moseley of the University of Florida said in a statement.
Not so coincidentally, this matches with another date Baillie has focused on as a possible cometary catastrophe with global effects: 1628 BC.
This date appears in ice core data, tree rings across Europe and the Americas, in Babylonian and Chinese records (both of which record possible evidence of a dust veil dimming the skies and cooling the earth), and even one enigmatic reference to catastrophe in the Irish Annals, although the far removal in time between the event and the written record make it difficult to nail down with any certainty (Baillie, 1999, p. 77).
This event may also coincide with the fall of the Xia dynasty in China, when a comet was recorded in Chinese records.
McCafferty and Baillie (2005, p. 34) write:
c.1600 BC – Chinese record of two suns in the sky [a common description of comets in ancient records], one to the east and one to the west, just before the overthrow of King Chieh and the demise of his Hsia dynasty.
Chieh is reported to have said,
“When that (the second) sun dies, you and I, we’ll all perish.”
View of Santorini from the air
Baillie argues 1628 BC for the true date of the eruption of Santorini, which brought down the Bronze Age Minoan civilization that had thrived for over a millennium and probably coincided with either the beginning or the end of the Second Intermediate period in Egypt (the period of so-called ‘Hyksos’ rule).
This was a controversial position to take when it was first proposed in the late 1980s, because it called for a revision of Egyptian chronology, pointing out some of the problems of history mentioned at the beginning of this article. Egyptian chronology is largely dependent on Biblical chronology, which has largely been discredited in recent years.
Archaeology, in turn, has largely relied on this ‘established’ chronology to calibrate itself.
There are no firmly established anchors or markers with which to calibrate ancient history. Those that are commonly used are actually vague astronomical references that can refer to several different dates, or are too fragmentary to provide any solid date.
As archaeologist and historian Colin Renfrew put it in his introduction to Peter James’ book Centuries of Darkness (Rutgers, 1993):
The first step… is to recognize the depths of our ignorance. To realize how the existing ‘chronologies’ in different parts of the Mediterranean are bolstered up by circular arguments, where specialists in one area believe that those in other areas must know what they are talking about, and blindly use dating systems which are no better than their own.
(p. xv)
In short, nothing is certain that far back in time, yet the dates we all learn in school and university are taken for granted, even by the professionals.
However, most mainstream historians have accepted the date for Santorini in recent years based on the more robust nature of the scientific evidence, as opposed to the imprecise ‘Biblical-chronological’ methods.
Santorini could be one such anchor to help calibrate the timeline, but it remains to be seen how far historians will go in their revision of the accepted chronology. Also, historians are increasingly acknowledging climatic factors in explaining the periods of economic affluence and depressions discernible in the historical records for this time.
On this subject, historian Thomas L. Thompson writes, with typical academic understatement:
Each successive period – Early Bronze IV, Middle Bronze II/Late Bronze I, Iron I, and the early ‘Persian’ period – finds its fate in economic collapse and a dramatic Malthusian culling of the population. It is these periods that most require historical explanation, for these depressions are departures from the expected.
(The Mythic Past [Perseus, 1999], p. 135)
For reference, here are the accepted dates for these periods mentioned by Thompson:
Early Bronze IV (2100 BC)
Middle Bronze II/Late Bronze I (1550 BC)
Iron I (1150 BC)
Note that the 1550 BC figure falls within the period under contention in regards to the date of Santorini and its conflict with the previously accepted chronology. (On a related note, a recent radiocarbon analysis of the beginning of the Egyptian New Kingdom pushed it back as many as twenty years, to 1570 BC.)
With those dates in mind, here are the dates Baillie has identified as comet-induced global climate catastrophes based on tree-ring data (as well ice core data, historical and archaeological records):
2345 BC, 1628 BC, and 1159 BC.
Fascinating, huh?
John Martin’s
‘Pandemonium’
The Bronze Age Collapse (ca. 1150 BC) saw the demise of the Mycenean kingdoms, the Hittite empire in Anatolia and Syria, the Egyptian empire in Syria and Canaan, and the mass destruction of scores of cities in the Middle East.
Baillie writes (1999):
Sometimes near or in the twelfth century BC, allowing for flexibility in archaeological and ancient historical evidence, the whole fabric of ancient society appears to have crumbled.
Some have suggested that in most of Britain there was upland abandonment, particularly severe in Scotland, followed by an upsurge in the construction of defensive sites. Around the Mediterranean there was an endless list of movements and collapses. Most interesting was the demise of the Mycenaean civilization in Greece with the ensuing four-century ‘Greek Dark Age’ which descended on the Mediterranean region.
Here was an extremely dramatic decline where people had already argued for some sort of environmental ‘event’ involving a prolonged and highly regionalized drought.
(p. 71)
The 1159 downturn in climate is commonly dated to the beginning of the end of the Twentieth Dynasty, the reign of Ramesses III:
a time of drought, famine, political corruption, expensive wars and civil unrest.
As Wikipedia puts it,
“Something in the air prevented much sunlight from reaching the ground [HK: How is that for cosmic symbolism?] and also arrested global tree growth for almost two full decades until 1140 BC. One proposed cause is the Hekla 3 eruption of the Hekla volcano in Iceland but the dating of this remains disputed.”
Or comet dust/debris, perchance?
Historian John Van Seters, writing in 1966, before the impact of climate and catastrophe figured much into the analysis of these periods of history, had this to say on the earlier MB II/LB I transition:
The end of the Middle Bronze Age is clear and undisputed. Here the break is not a cultural one, for there is definite continuity in architecture, pottery, and art.
The division is characterized by widespread destruction of a number of sites in southern Palestine and by the appearance of new pottery styles in addition to older forms.
The destructions can best be understood as the activity of the Eighteenth Dynasty pharaohs and the date for the end of Middle Bronze would be about 1550 B.C.
(The Hyksos [Wipf and Stock, 2010], p. 9)
Van Seters argues that this period coincides with the end of Hyksos rule/Second Intermediate Period, not the beginning, possibly giving us an anchor (1628 BC) with which to solidify an accurate chronology of the time, although Egyptian chronology is a mess when you actually dig into it.
The Egyptian New Kingdom, which sprung up after the Hyksos fell, lasted 479 years according to historians, from 1550-1069 BC. (Incidentally, this is also the length of time traditionally given for the ‘Israelite Exodus’.) Perhaps not so coincidentally, the time between the two climatic downturns identified by Baillie is 469 years: 1628-1159 BC.
This is also close to the time calculated between the falls of the Xia and Shang dynasties in China (anywhere from 496 to 554 years, depending on who you ask). Baillie devotes an appendix to this issue, and argues that the dates for the dynasties would be better matched to the periods mentioned, although this too is a contentious issue.
As for the EB IV/MB I transition (2100 BC), this period saw the beginning of the first ‘dark age’ or Intermediate Period in Egyptian history, for which relatively little evidence survives. Here’s what Van Seters has to say about it:
The coming of the MB I people into Transjordan does not, as in Palestine, represent an invasion and sudden destruction of the previous EB III civilization. It is instead an immigration and settling, for the most part, on previously uninhabited sites…
The first phase of the new immigration is often known as EB IV because it is contemporaneous with the last of the EB peoples of Palestine and Transjordan… The mixture of ceramic styles of EB IV and MB I cannot be easily distinguished stratigraphically in Transjordan … The decline of [EB IV/]MB I in Transjordan and the Negev is catastrophic…
In fact there is a general absence of sedentary life for several hundred years. Likewise in Palestine, MB I was very likely followed by a gap in settlement, but of a much shorter duration.
(p. 13)
Summing up, the evidence for a cometary catastrophe ca. 1600 BC is fairly strong, at least according to Baillie. If the Cs are right about a 3,600-year cycle, we’re overdue another encounter.
Even if they’re wrong about the cycle, the scientific record is showing that such encounters are anything but extraordinary.
As the article quoted above stated,
“At least five times during the last 6,000 years, major environmental calamities undermined civilizations around the world.”
Those aren’t very good odds…
Hell on Earth, the nightmare depicted by Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel
in his mid-16th-century ‘The Triumph of Death’ reflects the social upheaval and terror
that followed the plague that devastated medieval Europe.
Was there a cosmic connection?
