"Are all these legends a confused account of great events on a planetary scale which were beheld in terror simultaneously by men scattered everywhere over the world?" Anonymous Editor, Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology

"But when the planets in evil mixture to disorder wander,   
What plagues and what portents, what mutiny,   
What raging of the sea, shaking of earth,
Commotion in the winds!"
William Shakespeare

Modern scholars generally define myth as a form of sacred history which attempts to describe the origin of the world and various cultural institutions. If, as seems to be the case, myth also preserves clues for reconstructing the recent history of our solar system, its study becomes all the more important. Comparative mythology highlights striking cross-cultural similarities which strongly suggest the core of most if not all ancient mythology has planetary origins. This begs the question: How is it that planets which appear as mere tiny specks in the night sky could have held such a profound fascination for our ancestors?

"All the stories, characters, and adventures narrated by mythology concentrate on the active powers among the stars, who are the planets."
Giorlgio de Santilla, Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill

According to the prevailing dogma, the Nebular Hypothesis, planets and stars accreted from the dust cloud after the Big Bang billions of years ago. In this dubious model it is assumed that these bodies have occupied more-or-less steady and unchanging orbits ever since. Anyone who challenges this ideological assumption is quickly reminded of the 'fact' that the only forces at work are gravity and inertia. Any contrary viewpoint thus requires 'mysterious' forces. But these mysterious forces, as it turns out, are not so mysterious after all.

When the role of plasma and electromagnetism is acknowledged, this broader perspective allows us to view mythology with less comtempt. Is so much ancient myth merely the work of ignorant, superstitious savages, or do our ancestors have something far more profound to tell us? Did they view skies very different from what we see today, and witness catastrophic events and spectacular discharge phenomena? (The Thunderbolts of the Gods.) Phenomena that make today's auroras and natural disasters look trivial by comparison!

"...A 'derivation' of the sword from a 'root' or archetype in lightning is universal and world wide."
Ananada Coormaraswamy

So many bizarre mythological details don't make any sense in the real world, such as flying and fire-breathing dragons, differing planetary orbits and configurations, and countless others. It is easy to dismiss them as the product of creative imagination, but this attitude runs up against an insuperable difficulty — these seemingly impossible motifs can be found the world over. It is very difficult to understand how creative imagination could explain such consistent and recurring motifs, as a number of leading anthropologists, classicists, historians, and mythologists have acknowledged. It is therefore important to recognise the patterns and key points of agreement across cultures.

"...The extreme preoccupation of most early societies with celestial imagery...appears to be part of a world wide phenomenon."
Mark Bailey, astronomer, Armagh Observatory

Before the Electric Universe merged with David Talbott's recreation of mythic themes, Talbott noted that today's world does not answer to the ancient world. The video below from 1996, Remembering the End of The World, explores the Saturn model before plasma and electromagnetism provided an explanation for the celestial mechanics.

Remembering The End of The World

The broader perspective offered post merger in Symbols of an Alien Sky includes an electrified cosmic environment and high energy electrical events. Both videos enjoy Talbott's captivating narration.

Symbols of an Alien Sky

In Remembering the End of The World (at around 45 minutes), Talbott reflects on the role of Saturn as the backdrop to the cosmic drama. One part of his summary goes something like this: A worldwide tradition says that before a king ever ruled on Earth, a prototype of kings arose in heaven — the father of kings or universal monarch. This was the model of the good king. For example, the Hindu Brahma, the Aztec Quetzacoatl, and the Egyptian Ra. In the epic era known as the golden age, this good king brought about abundance. The Chinese called it the age of Perfect Virtue, the Iranians called it the age of the Brilliant Yima, The Danish, Peace of Frodi, and so on. It was paradise on Earth, or the Purple Dawn. The Garden of Eden. It is impossible to overstate the power of this memory among different cultures. Saturn was the founding king of the Golden Age, and most cultures pay tribute to it with their original Sabbath or Saturn day (Saturday).

Even today our language retains the age old cultural ambivalence toward this most ancient god. The word Saturnian expresses the splendour and munificence of the Golden Age, while the word Saturnine (morose, gloomy) reflects the melancholy of Paradise Lost.

Interestingly, after the death of Her Royal Majesty Queen Elizabeth II on 8th September 2022, in a speech before the House, former UK prime minister Boris Johnson paid tribute to her 'unvarying Polestar Radiance'. Twitter link (from 1:15).

Another artist's impression of the Polar Configuration, offset.

Ancient Babylonians were careful to distinguish Shamash, their ancient Sun god, from our current Sun, identifying it with the distant planet Saturn. This led Velikovsky to consider the possibility that Saturn once loomed much larger in the sky ... perhaps as a sunlike body over satellite Earth!

The Popol Vuh, considered the 'Mayan Bible', also attests to this:

"Like a man was the sun when it showed itself … It showed itself when it was born and remained fixed in the sky like a mirror. Certainly it was not the same sun which we see, it is said in their old tales."
D Goetz & S. Morley, Popul Vuh (Norman 1972)

Sol, Helios, and Kronos were actually names for the first or old Sun. Many cultures were careful to differentiate it as the Best Sun, Superior Sun, or Exemplary Sun, which ruled from the axis of the sky around which the heavens turned.

"Helios and Kronos were one and the same God."
Franz Boll, Classicist

As bizarre as the above may sound to the uninitiated, the Saturn theory actually suffers from an embarrassment of riches. Early descriptions of the 'Sun' and various planets from Mesopotamia and elsewhere describe them as occupying positions not possible within current astronomical thinking.

For the Egyptians, Atum was was the primeval sun, who ruled from the center and summit of the sky.

"The great god lives, fixed in the middle of the sky."
Egyptian Coffin texts.

As part of the evolution of what is known as the Polar Configuration, Venus assumed a radiant appearance. Streams of luminous plasma formed a flower like pattern across the face of the ancient sun-god. Artists impressions, above right and top right. With the white background, the Mespotamian Shamash from Wikipedia, is pictured right. The 'cosmic wheel' and many other identical symbols are common across numerous ancient cultures. The cosmic wheel is occasionally dismissed as a crude representation of our current sun, although this approach fails to account for the bodies depicted in front of it, among numerous other anomalies.

The planet Venus also plays an important role in ancient mythology. Converging images include the Babylonian 'torch' and 'bearded star', the Mexican 'smoking star', the Peruvian 'long-haired' star, the Egyptian Great Star 'scattering its flame in fire', and further widespread imagery from around the globe - that of Venus as a flaming serpent or dragon in the sky.

Venus very often has a dual aspect - both beautiful and destructive. In Greek mythology, for example, both Aphrodite (with flowing golden hair) and Medusa (with serpents for hair) are associated with the planet Venus.

Venus has also been called both the Morning and Evening Star, and Lucifer, the Bringer of Light or Shining One, from the Latin lux 'light' and ferre 'to bear or bring'. If Venus arrived in our solar system as a comet, or if it fell out of alignment with some previous planetary configuration, perhaps this might begin to explain the fallen angel legends. Originally thought to be a twin of the Earth, of course, Venus turns out to have a very hot and gaseous atmosphere rich in hyrdocarbons, as Immanuel Velikovsky successfully predicted. This is not the first controversy to fall in his favour.

"How you have fallen from heaven,
O morning star, son of the dawn!
You have been cast down to the earth,
you who once laid low the nations!"
Isaiah 14:12, Old Testament

"Quomodo cecidisti de caelo,
Lucifer, fili aurorae?
Deiectus es in terram,
qui deiciebas gentes."
From the latin Vulgate

Venus is also the only planet to rotate counter-clockwise in our solar system. Because the Sun played an important role in older religions, it was considered bad luck to go against its clockwise motion, and anti-clockwise rotations were sometimes referred to as widdershins from the old German weddersinnes, literally 'against the way'.

The comet theory also has it that Venus took some time to settle into its current planetary orbit. In a number of old traditions anti-clockwise rotations are not unusual. Eastern Orthodox Christians generally circle a church in this direction, and in Judaism a bride may circle her groom seven times counter-clockwise before marriage. There are similar traditions in a number of Eastern religions. Could these be vestiges of Venus adoration?

In Hindu mythology, similarities between Kali and Venus jump out. Kali also displays a dual nature, both beautiful and destructive, sexual and violent, motherly but malevolent, much like Aphrodite and Medusa in Greek mythology.

In Mesoamerica, Quetzacoatl, the feathered serpent deity, was identified as Venus, and typically depicted as green in colour. The Quetzal bird of South America enjoys beautiful green plumage.

"He set himself on fire ... and when the ashes were extinguished, then arose his heart, the quetzal bird itself: they saw it. And so he knew they had entered the sky...The old ones used to say that he was transformed into the dawn star."
Anales de Cuauhtitlan 11

The planet Mars, of course, is associated with war, and the month of March is named after it. He was the fearless warrior who wielded thunderbolts, and he is venerated by many differing cultures across the globe, where the themes vary little.

Consider the following parallels:

'Scarface' was the name of a legendary Blackfoot Indian warrior, also called 'Star Boy'. The Pawnee warrior, Morning Star, can also be identified as the planet Mars. Greek mythology describes various heroes and rogues being struck down by a thunderbolt. For example, when Ares, the planet Mars, was wounded in battle, he roared with the din of a thousand warriors and rushed to Zeus to show off his scars. Hindu myths also speak of a deep scar on the head of the warrior Indra, their god of the cosmic thunderbolt.

Pictured right is the Aztec god Xipe, sporting a scarred face.

"The space between two planets lights up and is set aflame by both planets and produces a train of fire."
Seneca, Roman naturalist

Video link:

Symbols of an Alien Sky Episode 2 - The Lightning-Scarred Planet Mars

The moon is mysterious. Relevant to this particular page is the fact that the further you go back in time the fewer mentions of it there are to be found, although numerous accounts speak of a sky 'before the moon arrived'. The Proselenes of Arcadia, for example, claimed to have been around before there was a 'moon in the heavens' and, on the other side of the earth, the ancient Tiwinaku culture of Bolivia refer to a time when there was no 'moon in the sky', claiming it arrived around 12,000 years ago. Zulu legends also have it that our Moon was a spaceship moved here by reptilian beings. See conspiracy theories below for a mythological perspective on dragon and serpent symbology.

"As far as science is concerned, the Moon should not be there! It's too large, too light, and its density reveals no substantial iron core. It's older than the Earth, apparently, with no natural explanation for the extra exposure (baking) the lunar material has received from the Sun. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, it rang like a 'bell' for hours when NASA decided to drop its launch rockets near pre-placed seismic registers in order to test the depth and make other calculations about its crust."
ScienceDaily.com

If the moon arrived relatively recently, is it such a stretch to contemplate other planets in our solar sytem shifting on their orbits?

Pictured right is a thunderstorm on Saturn that has remained fixed since 2004, much to the further puzzlement of the scientific community. Meteorologists do not fully understand terrestial lightning, let alone the 'surprise' of lightning on other planets, and Saturn produces stupendous displays!

The spiraling shape of dragons and serpents in mythology are strikingly similar to plasma instabilities in the laboratory and in space, a fact which reminds us of the metamorphosing and life-like qualities of plasma phenomena. It should be little surprise, then, that we see similar configurations of electrified plasma in megalightning on Saturn today.

Sprites in the upper atmosphere of Earth.

Thunderbolt imagery is widespread the world over, but few scholars and scientists ever pause to wonder about this ancient fascination. After all, most contemporary researcher’s routinely assume the old sky was essentially identical to what we see now. As today so before, is their default.

However, if the planets shifted on their orbits within human memory, perhaps huge sparks jumped between them in order to establish electrical equilibium. Were any such electrical interactions the thunderbolts witnessed by the ancients, and handed down via 'myth and legend'? Again, this notion is anathema to the gradualist paradigm.

Planetary Gods?

Is it not possible that the names of the gods were derived from the planets, and not the planets from the gods? Were the planets the gods, in other words, if they occupied different orbits much closer to the earth in past ages? This euhemeristic approach would begin to explain the commonalities across languages and cultures. There is no doubting that the ancients had a fascination with the heavens. Furthermore, there are so many key points of agreement when it comes to the personalities ascribed to the planets of our solar system, as described above. Again, can over-wrought imagination alone account for these remarkable concordances?

Please note that it is not the purpose of this web site to promote nor denigrate any views in respect of an intelligence behind the universe. That's a separate philosophical debate, and one beyond the scope of this subject matter which falls under the broad heading of comparative mythology.

"The peoples of ancient Mesoamerica keenly observed the sky and used the calendar to predict solar and lunar eclipses, the cylce of the planet venus, the apparent movements of the constellations and other celestial events. To them, these occurences were not the mechanical movements of innate celestial bodies but constituted the activities of gods, the actual recapitulation of mythical events from the time of creation."
Kaule Taube, Aztec and Maya myths, P14.

"With one voice, every culture declared that great gods once ruled the world, before they departed for remote regions. Let the world's first astronomers point the way for us. They knew that what the myths called Gods were planets, and aspects of planets. Planets appeared close to the earth in heaven spanning configuration. Memories of that celestial splendour still surround us, even if humanity later forgot much more than it remembered."
David Talbott, comparative mythologist

Another view of Venus within the Polar Configuration, above.

The early Greek philosophers can be said to provide a bridge between the old world of 'superstition' and the new world of 'rationalism'. Both Plato and Aristotle acknowledged that the gods were originally astronomical bodies, and Aristotle was proud to state it as known.

"A tradition has been handed down by the ancient thinkers of very early times ... to the effect that these heavenly bodies are Gods ... the rest of the tradition has been added later in a mythological form to influence the vulgar..."
Aristotle (384 - 322 BC)

Plato (427 - 347 B.C.) also taught that the myth of Phaeton describes real events in nature:
[it] "really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth."

Conspiracy theories abound in respect of many of the archetypal symbols mentioned above, and it is often claimed that certain groups secretly worship Saturn (which they associate with 'Satanism'), or Venus (Lucifer or the Morning Star in western tradition). As we have seen above, these symbols pervade so much religion and more. Caution is obviously recommended as many of the symbols under discussion are ingrained in our culture and subconscious, and are often misunderstood. At best, when touched upon they are generally considered an artifact of the human mind.

"The ultimate origin of neary all folktales and myths must remain a mystery."
Stith Thompson

Saturn is associated with the number six. It's the sixth planet from the Sun, and it is also associated with the black cube, mentioned above. A cube has six sides, of course. The hexagon pattern seen on Saturn, below left, surprised many. Again, caution is urged before jumping to negative conclusions. Consider that humans are made from carbon, for example, and that carbon atoms comprise six irons, six electrons, and six neutrons. Six doesn't have to be an evil number, but anything can be inverted.

(Numerology is an interesting but speculative subject matter. For example: 3x6=18. 1+8=9. Nine is considered a universal number. Nikola Tesla, of course, was obsessed with the numbers 3, 6, and 9, which also add up to 18, and then 9. And so on. He is supposed to have said that 3, 6, and 9 were the key to the universe.)

The warrior or hero figure slaying or banishing the dragon or serpent symbol is a universal archetypal. England has St George and the Dragon, who they share with Georgia, and Catalonia in Spain, among others; while Ireland has St Patrick who rids the country of snakes; and in Norse and Scandinavian mythology, Fáfnir (the mythical dragon) was slain by Sigurd. The theme is widespread. See also Ninurta chasing Anzû with his thunderbolts, pictured above.

The famous conspiracy theorist, David Icke, has taken a strong interest in Reptilian symbology, and has even gone so far as to claim the world is secretly ruled by reptilian hybrids. I would again suggest, however, that the surprising popularity of this idea owes more to the power of the archetype than the veracity of his theory. Mind you, in relation to the Purple Dawn discussed above, it is known that plants and reptiles thrive in red/purple light. Some might like to read into this.

Regardless, the term conspiracy theory is much over-used today, with many now considering it a badge of honour. On the increasingly woeful Wikipedia, for example, emerging paradigms like the Electric Universe are now routinely dismissed as pseudoscientific or conspiratorial rather than being discussed in any reasonable way. See here for the ancient alien hypothesis.

"Heavenly fire is spit forth from by the planet as crackling charcoal flies from a burning log." Pliny, Roman naturlist

Hancock has popularised the idea of a fallen civilisation in prehistory, arguing that the pyramids and a number of other structures evidence advanced ancient cultures. Given that Wikipedia dismiss his ideas as pseudoscientific, they are certainly worthy of consideration. More recently, he has suggested that a cataclysm (most likely a comet in his estimation) struck the earth around 12,000 years ago, ie., roughly the time of the Younger Dryas, and that this was responsible for the collapse of the former civilisation. His ideas are reminiscent of Atlantean myths, in other words. The recent discovery of Göbekli Tepe in what is now Turkey — dated circa 9,000 BCE — has certainly thrown conventional archaeology a curveball. At the very least it demands of us to question standard timelines in terms of human history and development. Hancock, understandably, has been quick to highlight this.

David Talbott, by contrast to Hancock, argues that a dramatic shift in planetary orbits lead to the earth shattering events testified in so much myth and legend, and catalyzed a shift in human consciousness. This lead to the mythmaking epoch, when huge structures arose as acts of remembrance. In short, Talbott sees the idea of a lost civilisation as more symbolic — the golden age.

Perhaps these differing views are not mutually exclusive. There is certainly some overlap. Hancock has worked with geologist Robert Schoch, for example, who has spoken at an EU conference. Schoch recognises that a lot of ancient rock art is plasma related. Either way, as things stand, neither the views of Talbott nor Hancock are acceptable to popular science and archaeology, as per their dismissal on Wikipedia, a web resource which few now take seriously, anyway.

Conclusion

Many mysteries remain from the mythmaking epoch, but these begin to unravel when we accept the likelihood of differing planetary configurations within human memory. Prior to this epoch, there was no mention of time or planets. The Gods were the planets, and this was the lost age of innocence — the Garden of Eden. Many cultures talk of this golden age. After it fell apart, surivivors developed an obsession with the planets, and observed their every move with meticulous accuracy as if warning us of potential future catastrophes. Vast temples emerged as part of this obsession. We have forgotten more than we can remember, but the themes and symbols remain and are consistent. Modern doomsday anxieties, of which there have been many, attest to these deep rooted fears. They may also be expressed as an irrational need not to know.

"Contents of an archetypal character are manifestations of processes in the collective unconcious. In the last analysis, therefore, it is impossible to say what they refer to."
Carl Jung

While psychologists acknowledge the role of archetypes, there has been little interest in discovering their origins. Their importance is recognised, while any hope of understanding how they came about has long since been abandoned. They just are. Does the work of David Talbott, Dwardu Cardona, and Ev Cochrane on mythic themes finally shed light on the derivation of archetypal symbols and, if so, will any psychologists, anthropologists, or whoever, be brave enough to take up the gauntlet and dare to discuss the possibility in conservative academic circles?

“The inertia of the human mind and its resistance to innovation are most clearly demonstrated not, as one might expect, by the ignorant mass—which is easily swayed once its imagination is caught—but by professionals with a vested interest in tradition and in the monopoly of learning.  Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole, laboriously constructed intellectual edifice might collapse.  The academic backwoodsmen have been the curse of genius from Aristarchus to Darwin and Freud; they stretch, a solid and hostile phalanx of pedantic mediocrities, across the centuries.” 
Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers [New York, 1959], p. 427.