ORIENTAL YEAR OF DRAGON 2024 & New Year ZODIAC ANIMALS
Oriental Year of the Dragon Ranks 5th in Great Mythical Animal Race
Animals of the Oriental Calendar, image below rt., are counted from l. of Zenith aka ‘midnight’: Rat, and count counterclockwise thru Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse to finish with Pig [at 1 o’clock].
Ancient Oriental Zodiac Tells of Mythical Animal Race & Origin of the World
In Oriental myth on the origin of the World, [China, Taiwan, parts of Japan & Indonesia] the Universe was dark and without form, before Earth and Heaven were separated, with only the mythical Egg of Creation hanging from the Tree of Life in the cold darkness. To bring life to the Universe, the Creator—the Great Jade Emperor—decided he would create the animals, but it meant he had to choose their order of rank. As he contemplated, the rat bit a crack in the Cosmic Egg and let the air in.
Immediately this happened, the Jade Emperor made his decision to call for all animals to meet at a Gathering Place for a race. He announced that he would designate the first twelve across the finish line as calendar signs in his Cosmic Zodiac and that the first twelve to arrive would be selected in order.
Cat & Rat Were Friends; Agreed to Help Each Other; But Rat Ratted…
The Cat & Rat were friends. So the Cat-who said he always slept late-asked the Rat to wake him, so they could get there early. Rat [conveniently] forgot, so when Cat arrived, the Race had already begun. Cat & Rat forever dislike each other. Elephant also dislikes Rat, as on the starting line, Rat squeezed into his trunk to distract him & Elephant ran away, sneezing, and missed the start.
Rat cheated by asking Ox 2carry him over water, but slid ahead of him at the end. Dragon selflessly helped rabbit in the water thus allowing him 2finish ahead of him. Rat 1st of 12 animals in order at finish line.
Order of Winners:Rat,Ox,Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake;Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, Pig
The animals all knew that Ox, Tiger, Dragon & Horse could outrun them, and were surprised to learn of Rat’s performance—until they heard how he cheated both Elephant & Ox. So, while Rat symbol holds [Zenith] first place, top pix, lower rt., he is shunned/disliked/killed by many animals in present world.
Because of Dragon’s kindness 2rabbit who was flailing in water til the great beast blew wind 2carry him ashore, all animals respect his [mythical] status as supreme, even tho in Chinese Zodiac he is in 5th place.
Dragon people make good friends because they listen attentively/sincerely to others.
Dragon’s Other Companions—Character & Characteristics of Zodiac Animals
Year of Rat: 2020, 2008, 1996, 1984, 1972, 1960, 1948, 1936, 1924. Rat people are popular.They like to invent things & are good at art. They like saving & collecting, but don’t like opening their wallet 4others.
Year of Ox: 2021, 2009, 1997, 1985, 1973, 1961, 1949, 1937, 1925. Oxen are dependable & calm. They are good listeners, but have very strong opinions/ideas.
Year of Tiger: 2022,2010, 1998, 1986, 1974, 1962, 1950, 1938, 1926. Tiger people are brave. They are independent & respected by others for their courageous acts & deep thoughts.
Year of Rabbit: 2023, 2011, 1999. 1987, 1975, 1963, 1951, 1939, 1927 People born this year are nice 2B around; they like to talk & are trusted by many. [Year of Dragon: above]
Yearof Snake: 2025, 2013, 2001, 1989, 1977, 1965, 1953, 1941, 1929 Snake people love good books, food, music & theatre. They have good luck w/money/gambling!
Five Elements—Qualities in Oriental Zodiac Denoting A Specific Year
In addition to twelve animal signs, each creature is symbolized by one of five elements: fire, earth, wood, water & metal. Specific years are denoted as “metal” or “water” years, e.g. 2023 Water Rabbit
Year of Horse: 2014, 2002, 1990, 1978, 1966, 1954, 1942, 1930 work hard, popular don’t surrender Year of Goat/Sheep: 2015, 2003, 1991,1979, 1967, 1955, 1943, 1931, 1919 artists, wise, ask questions; Year of Monkey: 2016, 2004, 1992, 1980, 1968, 1956, 1944, 1932 make ppl laugh, funny Year of Rooster: 2017, 2005, 1993, 1981, 1969 1957, 1945, 1933, many talents, works hard, punctual, reliability.
Fire Tiger symbol [above 3rd in Race] 2010, 1998, 1986, 1974, 1962, 1950, 1938, 1926 independent
Year of Dog: (2030), 2018, 2006, 1994, 1982, 1970, 1958, 1946, 1934, 1922 frank, funny, loyal
Year of Boar/Pig: (2031), 2019, 2007, 1995,1983,1971,1959,1947,1935,1923 happy but stubborn
Chart of Elements in Five-yearly Cycle of Sixty Zodiacal Years
Each of the Five Elements—Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water—is associated with personal traits and behavioural patterns, which add richer dimension to the personality in Tibetan/Korean astrology matrix. 12 zodiac signs overlaid with five elements complete a 60yr cycle, e.g. last Wood Dragon year=1964!
Above chart uses Dragon images, top of page, as example: Pink dragon:end Old year Dec.thru Feb; Green dragon:March thru May New Year, spring; Brown dragon 2nd row l. summer June thru Aug; top rt.Blue Dragon Sept/Oct/Nov all Dragons but spread over two Caucasian years+. Calendar mix, separated by Candlemas.
Essentially, all five elements follow the same pattern. So, for instance, someone born May 1980 is a Metal Monkey while another in January next year [1981] is also a Metal Monkey until calendar changes early February.
To bring it right up-to-date, a baby born this year after new moon February 9-10th, 2024 has a Wood Dragon twin born January next year 2025. Same applies e.g. mother b. May 1940 & son b. 1976 are both Dragons, but 1940 is Metal Dragon & 1976 is Fire Dragon.
No Bear took part in the Great Race, even though in China they are believed to have divine powers and are revered as sacred animals. Both Panda and Black Bear represent resurrection/eternal life, because of their habit of winter hibernation & re-emergence in spring.
In Chinese myth, Constellation of the Great Bear, is known as Dou. Its guardian star in the Northern sky is nearby Red Giant Arcturus in constellation Bootes, below pic rt. Ursa Major, w/tail curving2 Arcturus.
Ptolemy named Ursa Major & Ursa Minor Gk. Aρκτος μεγάλη (Arktos Megale) & Aρκτος μικρά (Arktos Mikra)(mega & micro). Arcturus follows the bear’s tail.
Many children worldwide have teddy bears —stuffed cuddly toy bear lookalikes—1902 nickname given when 26th U.S.President T.R. (Teddy) Roosevelt refused to shoot a captive American black bear tied to a tree.
Teddy Bears are immortalized in the children’s song ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ & other stories like Winnie-the-Pooh, Goldilocks & Three Bears. U.S. Forestry Service’s Smokey Bear is used as ‘cuddly’ Wildfire prevention icon.
As we prepare 4unprecedented step into a new quarter of a new Century [2024 is 25th year of 21st C Gregorian]; New Moon of Muharram 1446 Islam [July 7th 2024]; Tibetan Losar Feb.10th [Wood Dragon, 2151]; Chinese Guo Nian Feb.10th New Moon; Jan. 24th [full moon] Jewish 15th of Shevat aka New Year of the Trees 5785, we feel gratitude towards the Great Jade Emperor in his Eastern kingdoms for showing the animals [& us] the Way to win.
It seems appropriate, therefore, to share a little gratitude similarly to those of his helpers of our acquaintance in the Western hemisphere, such as Angels of our tribe created by Findhorn Foundation‘s Joy Drake in 1977 to show us our way forward.
As we draw on the wisdom of our Angels, it is a blessing to know that—at our inner core—we all have similar needs & desires: to be happy; to laugh at our struggles & to know that we are loved by someone somewhere-even when the Universe seems dark. And, remembering that laughter is the best medicine.
Many early saints who converted pagan inhabitants of North Britain to early Christianity had roots in Ireland, were influenced by Candida Casa in Whithorn, Galloway or, like Columba, by the Abbey of Iona. Surprisingly, in contrast, St. Patrick [patron saint of Ireland] was a Britonnic monk, taken captive and transported to Irish territory—where he escaped, preached widely, thus gaining the country’s idolatry.
Christianity had a foothold in early Rome—St. Valentine a prime example of a martyr killed before the end of Roman rule in Britannia, A.D.420. But military occupation of Britain-including forays into Scotia beyond Hadrian & Antonine Walls were conducted under the protection of legionaries’ beloved god Mithras. Derived from Assyrian-Greek Mithra worship, he was purely pagan himself; born under the Tree of Life already bearing arms; able to ride-& slaughter-the sacred Bull whose blood fertilized earth.
Legend tells that c.565, St Columba/Columcille, travelling with fellow Celtic monk Drostan aka Drust macCosgreig wound up in Old Deer in Buchan Aberdeenshire, where they founded a monastery, above. When Columba left, Drostan shed tears [Deira], giving the name to later Abbey built there. The Book of Deer,(Gael. Leabhar Dhèir) below pix top l. was written here:a Latin 10thC Gospel Book, with early12thC additions in Latin, Old Irish and Sc.Gaelic, it contains the earliest surviving Gaelic writing from Scotland; now in Cambridge Univ.Library [MS.ii.6.32].New archaeo discovery has unearthed original monastic cell
Top pix ‘beast’ Church of Clatt; salmon & dolphin; lower rt Rhynie Barflat & Picardy Stone at Dunnydeer, Insch, Aberdeenshire. See Pictish symbols below.
Early Saints’ Names and their Regional Variations
Adamnan, Abbot of Iona, d. A.D.704; Feast Jan.27th.Attended Council A.D.697 where he proposed Iona should come into line with Rome on Easter date. Also that women be spared from waging battle. Other forms:Aunan, Arnty, Ennan, Eunan, Ounan, St.Eunan (Teunin), Skeulan, Eonan, Ewen, Arnold, Ardeonaig, Ardeonan, Kilmaveonaig (Perthshire), Damsay (Orkney), ‘Adamnan’s Isle,’ Killennan (Argyll), Kirkennan (Kirkcudbright).
Adrian or Odran, Bishop & Martyr A.D.875, Oronsay (‘St. Oran’s Isle’), Killoran (Colonsay), Scour Ouran (St.Oran’s Hill), Inverness. Aidan, Bishop, A.D. 651. Inchaddon, Kilmadock (Perthshire). Andrew, Apostle, Patron of Scotland: St. Andrews (Fife), Kirkandrews (Roxburgh). Feast Nov.30th Angus, a disciple of St. Columba: Clach Aenais (‘Stone of Angus’), Balquhidder. Aseph, Bishop, A.D.590. Tobar Asheg (‘St. Asaph’s Well’), Loch Rannoch. Augustine(fromPopeGregoryI) Brit.St.A.D.596 instruction not2 destroy pagan sites; only [Pictish]stones within, as they shouldB ‘converted from dowership of demons to the true God’ -aka Class-I 6thC inscribed stones now in e.g. kirkyards Kintore, Bourtie, Clatt, Dyce, Huntly, Inverurie ABD
Book of Kells (Codex Cenannensis; Irish Gael. Leabhar Cheanannais); also known as the Book of Columba), an illuminated MS & Celtic Gospel book in Latin, contains four Gospels of the New Testament with texts and tables. Originally thought to have been written at Iona, it is now believed to have come from a Columban monastery in either Ireland or Scotland, and contributed to by both regions. Created c.A.D.800.
Bathan, Bishop, A.D.639 Abbey St. Bathan’s (Berwickshire), Bowden (Bothenden), Roxburgh. Baldred, Hermit, A.D.608 St. Baldred’s Cave, Cradle, and Well (Haddingtonshire). Barr or Finbar, Bishop, 6thC: Barra (‘St. Barr’s Isle’), Dunbar (Haddington), Barr (Ayrshire). Baya, Beya, or Vey, Virgin, c.9thC: Kilbag Head (Lewis), St. Vey’s Chapel (Cumbria). Bean, Bishop, A.D.1012: Kirkbean (Dumfries). Begha or Bez, Virgin, c.A.D.660: Kilbucho (Biggar), Kilbagie (Clackmannan). Berach, Abbot: Kilberry (Argyll). Berchan, Bishop: Kilbarchan (Renfrew). Blane, Bishop, A.D.590: Kilblane (Argyll), Dunblane (Perth), Blane (Bute).
Jan 12: Feast of Benedict, Bishop & Abbot A.D.628-89. Founded A.D.674 St Peter’s, Wearmouth, & sister monastery St Paul’s, Jarrow, in 682. Both foundations benefited from his trips2 continental Europe where he inspired2 bring back books, masons & other craftsmen, to work both monasteries
Feast Peter & Paul June 29th
Boisil, Prior of Old Melrose, A.D.664: St. Boswell’s (Roxburghshire). Brandon, Abbot, A.D. 577: Kilbrandon/Kilbrennan (Oban), Kilbirnie (Beith), Birnie(Elgin), Balbirnie (Fife). Bridget/Brigida or Bride, Virgin, A.D.523: Brydekirk (Annan), Kilbride(Arran, Argyll, Dumfries) Lhanbryde (Lhan: Brittonic/Welsh=church)(Moray). Brioc, Bishop, A.D.500: Inchbrayock (near Montrose), Kirkmabreck (Kirkcudbright). Buite or Boethius, Monk, A.D. 521:Carbuddo (Caer Buido, ‘Buite’s fort’), Kirkbuddo (Forfar), ‘Byth Market’ (Aberdeen).
Colmán of Lindisfarne (†676), Bishop A.D.661-4. Chief Bishop instrumental in dating of Easter at A.D.666 Synod of Whitby, after which he resigned. Withdrew to Iona w/his followers then founded monastery on Inis Bó Finne (Inishbofin) in his native Ireland c.667. Feast day February 18th. Patron Lindisfarne, Farne Is. N.umberland, pic.l.
Coivin or Kevin, Abbot, A.D.618: St. Coivin’s Chapel, Kilkivan, and ‘St. Kevin’s Bed’ (Argyll). Colluoc, Bishop, A.D.500: Portmahomack (Tain, Ross), Inchmahome (Lake of Menteith). Colmonel, A.D.610: Kilcalmonell (Argyll), Colmonell (Ayr). Columba or Colum Cille, Abbot, A.D.563: Kilmacolm (Greenock), Inchcolm (Fife), Colonsay (Argyll), Icolmkill (Iona), Kirkcolm (Wigtown). Congal, Abbot, A.D.602: Dercongal (near Dumfries). Comgan or Congan, Abbot, 8thC: Kilchoau (Argyll, Ross&Cromarty), St.Coan (Skye), Kilcowan (Wigtown). Comman, A.D.688: Kilchoran (Islay). Conan, Bishop, A.D.648: Kilconan (Perthshire), St. Conan’s Well (Argyll). Constantine, King & Martyr, A.D.811-820 pix 3. above Dupplin Cross Lat. Custatin filius Forcus =
Lat.trans=Constantine son of Fergus; viz important ogham inscription both edges & Xtian cross-side of Class-II Rodney’s Stone at Brodie Castle, Forres, MOR, rt., seat of Brodie family constructed 1567 moved frm. previous site kirkyard Dyke-Moy 1/2mE on bend R.Findhorn: in 1208-15 records as Logyn-Fithenach, link2 local placenames on John the Baptist, e.g.Ihons-logyfr. Pont’s 1590 Nairnshire map (q.v), Meads of St John & St John’s Pool.
Custatin: Kilclousland (Kintyre), St. Cousland Fair (Forfar), Chousland (Midlothian). King of Picts 811-820, buried St.Andrews crypt, guardianship St.A Cathedral Museum
Conval, c. A.D.612: St. Conall’s Chapel, Ferreness (Renfrew), Kirkconnel (Dumfries). Cormac, Abbot, A.D.6thC: Kilmacharmaig (Kintyre), Kirkcormac (Kirkcudbright). Cumine, Abbot, c. A.D.668: Kilchuimein (Scots Gael.= Fort Augustus) and also= St.Cumin’s Seat Cuthbert, Bishop, A.D. 687: Kirkcudbright (Cuthbert’s Church) Churches dedicated to St. Cuthbert throughout Scotland from Wick to Kirkcudbright [originally Northumbrian/Tyneside]. Cyricus, aka Grig, King & Martyr, A.D.880-889: Ceres (Fife), St. Cyrus and Ecclesgrig (Kincardine) King Grig built first Harbour of Aberdeen.
Dabius or Davius, Priest: Kildavie (Bute & Mull) Denis or Dionysius: Dennis Head (Orkney), Dennistoun (Glasgow). Devenic, Saint A.D.887: Banchory Devenick (Kincardine), St. Devenick’s Fair (Aberdeenshire). Donan, Martyr, A.D.616: Kildonan (Wigtown, Argyll, Ross, Sutherland & Bute), ‘Donan Fair’ ABD Eilean Donan (Ross & Cromarty). Draighen: Kirkmadrine (Wigtown). Drostan, Abbot, see Abbey of Deer, top, 6thC; Craigrostan (Ben Lomond), Drustie’s Well (Forfar), St. Drostan’s Croft (Inverness). Duthac, Bishop, A.D.1068: Kilduich, Arduthie, Kilduthie (Kincardine), Duthie Park, ABD.
Class-I inscribed Pictish symbols
Because Pictish pagan belief in sacred salmon & dolphin [l. ‘beast’] was strong, [pix.top lower rt.panel] early Saints like Fergus [Dyce], below, used Gk.acronym ICTHYS=[trans.Jesus Christ son of God], Lat.’piscis’=fish 2explain Xtianity 2converts.
Ebba, Abbess, A.D.683: St. Abb’s Head (Berwickshire). Englatius/Tanglan, Saint & Abbot, A.D.966: Tanglan’s Well & Ford (Aberdeenshire). Ernan, Abbot, A.D.640: Killearnan (Sutherland), Kinnernie, ABD. Ethernan, Bishop/Martyr Iona or Isle of May? A.D.669 mentioned in Annals of Ulster Itarnan et Corindu apud Pictores defuncti suntThos.Clancy trans. as ‘killed by Picts’ rather than simply ‘died among Picts’: hence martyr; ‘St. Ethernan’s Den’ (Aberdeenshire), ‘Tetheren’s Fair”(Forfar); Isle of May (Fife coast) believed to be site of his original burial, as his tomb was site of worship 4pilgrims until Reformation. His name in ogham inscribed on Rodney’s Stone at Brodie Castle above2rt, orig.frm nearby Dyke/Moy ABD.
Fergus, Bishop, 8thC: ‘Fergan Well’ (Banff), St. Fergus (ABD,pix l.) Dalrossie-Sc.Gael. dal Fhearghuis, ‘Field of Fergus’.
St. Fergus Chapel off Tyrebagger road at Recumbent stone circle [RSC] Dyce above Aberdeen [Dyce] Airport, contains magnifi- cent ‘teaching stone’, l., w/Class-II cross & rear marked in ogham in shape of fish, to appeal to Pictish converts whose Salmon was a sacred creature.
St.Fergus attended Rome council A.D.721 on behalf of Pictish king Nechtan 2make connection which marked way forward for Pictland as 1st Xtian nation in N.Britain
Fiacre, Abbot, AD. 760. St. Ficker’s Bay and St. Fittack’s Well (Kincardineshire). Fillan, Abbot, A.D.8thC: Strathfillan (Perthshire), Kilphillane (Wigtown), Kilellan(Inverness), Killallan (Renfrew), St. Fillan’s Cave (Fife), St. Fillain’s Well (Ayr).c.f. Fillan, Faolan, or Fuelan (‘the Stammerer’), A.D.6thC:’ St. Fillan’s, Dunfillan, and ‘St. Fillan’s Chair’ (Perthshire); Findchanus, Kilfinnichen and St. Finnichen’s Chair (Argyll); also c.f. Finan or Finian, Bishop, c.A.D.575: Kilfinan (Argyll and Wigtown), Glen Finan (Argyll), St. Finan Chapel and Finzean Fair at Finzean [pron. Fing’an] (Aberdeenshire).
Dardanus Stone or Corsedardar rt. 5ft/1.5m megalith/remnant Neolithic circle, Finzean/Feughside, Birse nr.Aboyne ABD access Cairnamount to Strachan/Finzean; broken 18thC, repaired 2 stand nr roadside war memorial. Banchory 5mi ENE; 1/2mi frm Finzean Long Cairn 33mx3m 26m wide W end/of several [Neolithic] longcairns/ burial mounds. Former boundary Kincardine. Finzean Fair 3rd Tues Lent feeing & circus event fair Migvie, Tarland ABD local tradition assoc.w/St Finnian of Moville
Findoc, Fyndoca, Virgin ? Killintag (Argyll); Findo Gask and St, Phink’s Chapel (Perthshire) Flannan: Flannan Islands (W of Lewis). Fumac: St.Fumac’s Well and Fair (Banff and Caithness).
Gervadius or Gernadius, A.D.934: ‘Gerardin’s Cave’ and Well (Elgin). Giles/Egidius, Abbot, A.D.714: St. Giles’ Cathedral (Edinburgh), St. Giles’ Fairs (Aberdeen, Dumfries, and Elgin). Glascianus or Glass, Bishop: Kinglassie and St. Glass’s Well (Fife), Kilmaglas (Argyll). Griselda: Ecclesiamagirdle, Pitkeathly (Perthshire). John, Apostle: Ihon’s Logy & Meads of St.John, E of R.Findhorn; Johnstone (Renfrew & Dumfries)
Custatin filius Forcus= [King] Constantine son of Fergus, king of Picts 811-820 (pix. top 2nd rt.Dupplin cross) held his court in Fortriu aka Forteviot (where Dupplin cross in museum; replica on hillside) & founded ancient Abbey/Cathedral of St.Andrew’s, Fife where he retired fr kingship-see Brodie His 9thC sarcophagus inSt.A Abbey church
St.Andrew, Greek born in Holy Land, patron saint of Scotland, whose flag shows how he was crucified=sideways—#saltire.
Saint Lucy (283–304)( Latin: Sancta Lucia) of Syracuse, Sicily was a Roman Christian martyr d.304 during Diocletian Persecution; patron saint of blind, eyes, sight [“lucid”= see or think “clearly”] feast of Light December 13th celebrated Sicily annually during Lent
Macceus or Mahew, c.A.D.460: Kilmahew (Dumbarton), Kirkmahoe (Dumfries). Machan, Bishop, c. 6thC: Ecclesmachan: ‘Church of Machan’ (Linlithgow). Machar, Mauritius or Mocumma, Bishop, 6thC: founded monastery, site of St. Machar’s Cathedral Old Aberdeen on bend of River Don: Machar parishes & Haugh (Old Aberdeen). Machalus or Mauchold, Bishop, A D.498: Kilmaichlie (Banffshire). Machutus/Malo, Bishop, A.D.565: Kirkmahoe (Dumfries), Lesmahagow (Lanarkshire), corruption of ‘Ecclesia St. Machuti’: [from which French town St. Malo (Brittany) derives its name.
Martinmas Feast-prior2 Nov.11 “Veteran’s /Remembrance Day”celebrated w/goose or chicken in Holland/Germany/Austria with lanterns [made of sugar beet, beetroot or turnip; now paper] children’s parade visit to homes like current Hallowe’en/Guy Fawkes; Germanic prelude to U.S. ‘Trick-or-treat’.
Ancient ‘feeing day’ marked end Harvest start of Winter in Europe/N.hemisphere. Saint cut off 1/2his cloak to give 2beggar.
Martin tried to avoid being canonized by hiding in goose pen; geese raised the alarm-hence goose feast! Cult spread to U.S. from France, Ireland via continental Europe & Wales where Cŵn Annwn, spectral Hounds who escort souls2 Otherworld engaged in a Wild Hunt led by Odin-Hallowe’en mix.
Mary, Virgin Mother: Gilmerton (Midlothian), Kilmarow, Kilmorie, Tobermory (Argyll), Kilry (Fife & Perth), Kilvarie (Perth), St. Mary’s Loch (Selkirk), St. Mary’s Holm (Orkney), Maryculter (Aberdeenshire). Medan or Middanus, Abbot?:St. Medan’s Knowe and ‘Maidie’s Well’ (Forfar). Maelrubha or Mulruy or Mury, Martyr, A.D.722: Loch Maree (Rossshire), Kilmaree, Kilarrow (Argyll), Amulree (Perthshire); Samareves Fair (Culsalmond, Aberdeenshire), St. Mariers, (Forres), Summaruff (St. Maruff, Fordyce/Banffshire/Aberdeenshire)
Magnus, Martyr, A.D.1116: St. Magnus Cathedral (Kirkwall, Orkney), St. Magnus Bay (Shetland). Margaret, Queen, A.D.1093: widow of Malcolm III Canmore St. Margaret’s (Edinburgh), St. Margaret’s Hope/bay), Queensferry (Orkney), St.Margaret’s School for Girls, (Albyn Place, Aberdeen) Marnan/Marnoch, Bishop, A.D.625. Kilmarnook (Ayrshire), Inchmarnook (Bute), Dalmarnock (Perth), Ardmarnook (Argyll), Aberchirder & Leochel, Lumphanan ABD Feast: Marnoch Fair 2nd Tues, March. Maura, Virgin: Kilmaurs (Ayrshire). Mayota/Mazota, Virgin, A.D.6thC: Drumoak/ Dalmoak (‘Field of Mayota’), and St. Maikie’s Well, ABD. Medana/Edana, Virgin, A.D.518: Kirkrnaiden or Maidenkirk; St. Medan’s Chapel & Cave (Wigtown), Pitmedden (Aberdeenshire) AA [Archangel] Michael: Kilmichael (Argyll), Kirkmichael (Perth, Dumfries, and Ayr). Moack/Moucus: Portmoak (Kinross), Drumoak (Aberdeenshire). Molios/Laserian, Abbot,A.D.639:Lamlash(Sc.Gael, lann Lais, Church of Lais) St.Molio’sBed (Arran) Molocus, Moluoc, or Lughaidh, Bishop, A.D.592:St. Molloch’s Fair, ‘Luoch Fair’ (Aberdeenshire), ‘St. Malogue’s. Fair’ (Perthshire), Kiimoluag, Kilmallow (Argyll). Modan, Abbot: Balmodhan (Ardchattan), and Kilmodan (Argyll). Monan, Bishop, A.D.571: St. Monans, Kilminning (Fife), St. Monon (Ross), Minnan Fair (Caithness); Feast Feb.4th Monoch or Monachus: ‘Sam Maneuke’s’ (St. Monk’s Day) and Auchmannoch (Ayr). Moroc, Bishop: Kilmorick and St. Muireach’s Well (Dunkeld), Kilmorack (Beauly). M’indus/Fintan Munnu, Abbot, A.D.635: Eileanmunde (M’s Island), and Kilmun Mund’s Church, (Argyll). Mungo or Kentigern, Bishop, A.D.603: St. Mungo’s (Dumfries), St. Mungo’s Isle (Inverness), St. Mungo’s Cathedral; Strathbungo (Glasgow), Balinungo (Fife)-see Thenog below. Murdoch, Bishop: Kilmorich (Argyll), Chapel Dockie (Forfar).
St. Nicholas of Myra A.D.270-343 Gk.Bishop Asia Minor [modern-day Demre,Turkey] patron saint in Europe of sailors, merchants, archers, repentant thieves, children, brewers, pawnbrokers, unmarried ppl, & students; his cult brought to New York/New Amsterdam by 1st Dutch settlers; known4 miracles & secret gifts to children. Festival: St.Nicholas Day December 6th, developed into Christmas reindeer cult w/gifts to children & focus of “12 days of Christmas” which begin Christmas Eve climb down chimney. In Pacific NW Indigenous Americans celebrate “rain season” when reindeer shed their antlers. Aberdeen South St.Nicholas church, Belmont St. known4 20thC gift-giving Rev. Chas. Edwin Forster, on whose d.1956, kirk converted in2 nightclub [rolling in his grave]; nearby kirks of E & W St.Nicholas guard main ABD cemetery; No N.St.Nicholas exists but Back Wynd tunnel leads2 pedestrian Geo.St.
Nathalan or Nachlan, Bishop, A.D.678:St. Nathalan’s Fair, Oldmeldrum & Nachlan’s Well (ABDshire). Ninian or Kingan, Bishop, A.D.432: Kilninian (Argyll) St. Ninian’s (Stirling), North Ronaldsay or Rinansay ‘Isle of Ringan'(Orkney), Kilrenny (Anstruther, Fife), St. Innian’s Well (Lanark), St. Ninian’s Chapel (Linlithgow), Ringan’s Dean (Roxburgh), Kilninian (Argyll), St.Ninian’s Den & Chapel (Kincardine).
Obert?:’St. Obert’s Eve,’ (Perth). Olaf/Olav or Ollow, King of Norway & Martyr, A.D.1030: Ollaberry=Olaf’s burgh(Shetland), St.Ole’s Fair (Lewis), St. Ollowe’s Bridge (Kirkwall, Orkney). Osborne? Ooseburn: ’till Osbern’ (Dumfries & Galloway). Oswald, King & Martyr, A.D.642: Kirkoswald (Maybole, Ayrshire) Kirkoswald, (Penrith, Lake District). Palladius, Bishop, A.D.430: Aberfeldy (Perthshire), Paldy’s Well (Fordoun), ‘Paldy Fair,’ (Kincardine), St. Palladius celebrated Inverurie & Kintore (Aberdeenshire). Patrick, Britonnic Bishop, captive taken to Ireland A.D.493: Patron saint of Ireland [Eire] celebrated U.S. St. Patrick/Paddy’s Day, March 17th; Kilpatrick (Dumbarton), Ardpatrick (Argyll), Dalpatrick (Lanark), Kirkpatrick (Dumfriesshire), Kilpatrick (Arran), Kilspindie (Perthshire).
Apostles St.Peter & St.Paul joint feast June 29th; early3rdC Peter celebrated as martyr crucified Rome upside down(1stC) by Nero symbol upside-down cross; founder Roman church; & iconic Pictish Peterkirks of 8thC King Nechtan. Paul, a Roman, could not be crucified; was beheaded by emperor Nero A.D.54-68 ‘reponsible 4Rome’s great Fire’
St. Peter, Apostle: Peterculter (Aberdeenshire), Kilfeather (Wigtown). Nechtan Peterkirks throughout Scotland, Northumbria & parts of Cumbria, Yorkshire & N.England Regulus or Rule, Bishop: ‘Trewell Fair’ (Aberdeenshire), St. Regulus’ Tower (see St. Andrews, pic above). Ronan, Bishop, A.D.737: Ronay (Skye & Lewis), Port Ronan (Iona), St. Ronan’s Well (Peebles), Kilmaron (Fife), Kilmarnock (Dumbarton), Kilinaronog (Argyll). Serf/Servanus, Bishop,6thC: St.Serf’s Isle (Loch Leven), St.Sear’s Well (Dumbarton), St.Serf’s Fair Perth (& Linlithgow), Dalserf (Lanarkshire), St.Sair’s Fair, Colpy, Culsalmond ABD, & Monkeigy, KeithHall ABD.
St. Stephen, patron saint of stonemasons, deacons, altar servers, bricklayers, casket makers, patron of Hungary, c.A.D.5-34, Hellenist Jew appointed after conversion by Apostles 2distribute food &aid 2poor; at address2 Jewish Sanhedrin council re his faith, called blasphemous & stoned d.A.D.34-1st Xtian martyr Gk.Stephanos=wreath/crown=reward/honor/fame ‘Feast of Stephen’ Europe=Boxing Day, Dec.26th. Jewish 8-day Festival of Light Hanukkah Dec.18th-26th
Suibhne & ‘Sweeney’, Abbots of Iona, A.D.657 and 772: Castle Sween (Argyll). Talarican/Talorcan Bishop, A.D.616: Kiltarlity (Inverness), Tarquin’s Well (Banff, Stirling) Talorcan kirk & belltower, Fordyce, Banff N.coast, now ABD. Ternan, Bishop, A.D.431 [viz St.Ernan above A.D.640] BanchoryTernan (Kincardine, now Aberdeenshire) Thenew or Thenog, A.D.514 (Mother of St.Mungo).St. Enoch’s formerly SanTheneuke’s Kirk, (Glasgow). Triduana or Tradwell, Virgin, 6thC: Kintradwell (Caithness), Tradlines (Kincardine), St. Tredwell’s Loch & Chapel (Orkney), ‘St. Trodlin’s Fair’ (Forfar). Vigean/Fechin, Abbot, A.D.664: St. Vigean’s (Forfar), Ecclefechan (Dumfries). Volocus/Wallach, Bishop, 5th? or 6thC: St. Wallach’s Baths, Wallakirk, patron of Glass nr. Huntly & St. Wallach’s Well (Aberdeenshire). Wynnin/Finian or Frigidian, Bishop, A.D.579: Kilwinning, Caerwinning & St. Wynnin’s Fair (Ayrshire), Inchinnan (Renfrew), Kirkgunzeon (Kirkcudbright), Lumphanan (Aberdeenshire), Lumphinnan (Fife). Yrchardus/Merchard, Bishop, 5th or 6thC: Merchard’s Seat, Well, and Churchyard (Invernessshire).
CANTICLE FOR A LOST NATION
Unlocking the Ancient Interlace woven into Cultural Myth
Neolithic Carved Stone Ball, found at Towie, Aberdeenshire 3000BC, in Museum of Scotland Edinburgh
For a nation proud of its heritage, its oral tradition and roots–supported by faithful descendants in all corners of the globe–we Brittonic Scots are remarkably careless with it. In part this stems from a history of being conquered. But suppressed belief and myth have a way of being treasured: a precious relic to be hidden from secular eyes.
Twenty-first century culture today celebrates fifth-century Brittonic peripatetic monk, Patrick who ‘brought the Church’ to Ireland. They wave shamrocks, hold parades and declare green themes in diverse locales through New York, L.A., Dublin and Hounslow. Rio de Janeiro and Boston, too.
A little background may be in order.
Britannia was an island of subdued people, glad to be abandoned in AD420 when the Romans walked out, left to themselves in a rich land with its own ancient culture.
Many great historical documents have been lost in intervening centuries of ‘acquisition’ or political manipulation by other races since Patrick’s time. He preached when sacred secret knowledge of the Dark Age was kept dark–maintained in recesses of the cultural mind, secrets rehearsed in saga and song–known in the historic Pictish era–to all.
Brittonic Patrick sent as a Slave to Ireland
Illuminated Chi Rho Gk. first letters of name of Christ in A.D. 8thC Celtic gospel Book of Kells, held Trinity College, Dublin
Ninth-century church annals, the Book of Armagh, includes a work by Patrick, his Confessio, in which he describes his life at a Roman villa in Britain, his capture by Irish raiders, and his seven years of slavery in Ireland.
Recovering his freedom, he returned to Roman Britain, recording that he was educated and ordained into the priesthood. He eventually succeeded in being sent as a missionary back to Ireland. He concentrated on the north and west of the country, achieving strong connections.
Patrick never claimed to have converted all of Ireland. But tradition has it that his mission began around A.D. 432. It was C.7th biographers Tirechán and Muirchú who credited him with converting ‘all the Irish to Christianity’ and won for him the status of national apostle.
Confused chronology in Patrick’s life came about when tradition merged the work of two monks—continental Palladius and (‘Irish’) Patrick of the Confessio.
There is not enough evidence to support traditional date, A.D.432, for the start of his mission, but a date of 492/493 is given for his death in Annals and biographies.
Little is known of the first impact of Christianity in Ireland. Traditions in the south and southeast refer to early saints who allegedly preceded St. Patrick, whose missions may have come through trading within the Roman Empire. The earliest date is A.D.431, when St. Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre in Gaul, with the approval of Pope Celestine I, proposed to send ‘Palladius to the Scots believing in Christ.’
After that, missionary history in Ireland is dominated by St. Patrick.
Caledonians Unsubjugated, Rome Withdraws
By A.D.368, just thirty years before Roman withdrawal from Britain, Ammianus Marcellinus describes tribes of the Priteni [Picts] split into two by the Mounth: northern Dicalydones and Verturiones in the south. To Roman authors, Priteni-Britanni were linguistically just another people of Prydein. By the post-Roman Dark Age, Caledonians had re-possessed their northern forests, the Fortriu people their rich lands of Perth and Fife.
Although Scots history is still untaught in schools, few deny knowing that Kenneth mac Alpin, c.AD843, united the kingdoms of Picts and Scots. Fewer seem aware that his dynasty–so bold and so desperate for fertile plains–carefully perpetuated the title of those he deposed, calling themselves Kings of Picts for another sixty years.
Alongside Pictish lands they annexed Pictish Law–a remarkable piece of diplomacy which survives in the basis of Scots law today.
Between the fifth and seventh centuries, the great forests of the Northeast were the domain of kings–Stocket, Kintore, Deer–a resource which ensured royal entertainment [the boar hunt] and feasts [deer and lesser animals] for warriors and entire communities, as well as wealth of timber and grain.
While none but the lordly burned wood in the fireplace of the great hall–most people cast peat for fuel–bounty of the forest—kindling—was available to all. This convention remains today in the understanding between tenant farmer and landowner/laird that while he may not cut down the laird’s trees, all windfall is his.
At least two royal strongholds survive.
These are not small domains like those confirmed in later medieval charters to royal burghs, but whole estates crowned by forests, nourished by rivers and centered round the ‘castle-hill’ [Brit.caer] of a noble family: in the south the Kingdom of Fife points to the king’s mound–Cinrimonaid, St.Andrews—made famous by Constantin king of Picts [789-820]; in the north the Kingdom of Forgue has its Place of Ferendracht–‘place’ in old Scots indicating a ‘peel’ or fortified mound of the heroic age.
There are others.
A.D.5th century pre-Christian Pictish carved stones in Aberdeenshire heartland Romans couldn’t sudue
In the North, earliest placenames give fairly good timelines, where the castle-hill [Brit/Pict. caer, castell] usually denotes early-historic occupation of the pre-Scotic Pictish period, like Kintore, Inverurie, with attendant royal chapels [Lat. capella, Welsh/Brit. eglys]-in the Northeast often seen in telltale ‘chapelton’ within ancient church boundaries, but separate from the later parish church. Compare rath/roth element at Rathmurriel, Rothney in Insch, which derive from 12th century settlements, like Flemings [Flinders] at Leslie.
Second early element Brit. eglys, easily identified south of the Mounth like Ecclesgreig in Mearns, ‘church of Giric’, is more elusive farther north, but does occur. There is one on the Banff coast–conveniently close to Pictish stronghold Dundarg–Strahanglis Point, ‘point of the valley of the church’.
Another clue to Pictish Christian foundations is the presence of a circular enclosed burial ground, like the one at Deskford within the precinct of the medieval laird’s Tower. At Fordyce on the North (Banff) Coast where remains of a Pictish tower dedicated to St. Talorcan stand, there is another. At Tullich-Aboyne one remains where the former church was dedicated to St. Nathalan, [d.679].
Language survival of Pictish Doric in Aberdeen
There are delightfully archaic, short, stubby single-syllable names in the language too, to satisfy our yearning for earliest beginnings.
It helps to remember that the parish system, discarded by modern mapmakers, transmits a clear layout of medieval churchlands, themselves descended from earlier chapels attached to Pictish strongholds.
By the seventh century, Pictish kings were fully Christian, educated from youth in the cultural milieu of a monastery. In the centuries before Gaelic became a court language, it was the language of the Northern Irish Scot [Americans have a convenient term for these Ulstermen: Scots-Irish]. More significantly, it was the language of Irish monastics, keepers of annals, copiers of sacred texts, educators of the nobility.
It is no accident that Iona came into prominence following the ministries of saints like Columba [d.597] and Adamnán [d.704].
The Church was common education for young nobles of ‘all four peoples’ of Britain, according to Northumbrian cleric Bede, writing at the end of the seventh century–Angles, Britons, Picts and Scots. By 690, there was a long tradition of wandering British monks, educated in the Irish church, returning to convert the peoples of their homeland.
Patrick, interestingly, is one of the few Britons who took the Christian message to Ireland [mid-fifth century].
Four apostles in simple illuminated manuscript endpages of Book of Deer, Aberdeenshire, c.f. Book of Kells below
British Ninian, d. c.432, founder of Whithorn in Galloway, is credited with inspiring several Pictish clerics of Northeast tradition. Drostan, Medan and Colm are sixth century saints, giving their names to foundations at Deer/Insch, Pitmedden/Fintray on Donside and St.Coombs in Banff.
Finnian and Brendan, both mid-sixth-century travelers, spread the word and their names to churches planted throughout Pictland; Brendan, known as the wanderer, did his conversions by sea; his name in Banffshire is Brandan or Brangan where his dedications run along the North Coast.
Ethernan patron of Rathen in Buchan died, according to Irish annals, in 669 ‘among the Picts’. He is patron of Kinnernie (Donside) and Banchory-Ternan (Deeside) [contra Brev.Ab where he is called St.Ternanus].
Illuminated apostles: 10thC Iona Book of Kells, now in Trinity College, Dublin shows Matthew as Man, Mark winged Lion, Luke the surgeon as winged Bull and John as Eagle
A contemporary Briton celebrated in southern Pictavia was St. Serf whose dedication at Culsalmond is rare north of the Mounth. St.Sair’s Fair was held here near Colpy until well after the Reformation. His other foundation was at Monkeigy [Keithhall], now Inverurie.
Marnan, 7thC patron of Aberchirder-Marnoch and Leochel, Lumphanan was celebrated long after his death with Marnoch Fair, held traditionally on second Tuesday in March.
Recent research suggests that portable crosses–roughly circular stones like pillows carved with a simple cross and pre-dating the eighth century [class II] Pictish cross slabs were the hallmark of these holy men. They reach far and wide.
Fish-shape ogham carved on rear of Pictish stone at St Fergus Chapel, Dyce-Aberdeen hidden in mortar for 12 centuries
Such compact Christian amulets surface in Aberdeenshire, temptingly close to early foundations. Cross-inscribed stones—with no other ornament—appear at Aboyne, Afforsk, Banchory, Barra, Botriphnie, Bourtie, Clatt, Crathes, Culsalmond, Deer, Dyce, Ellon, Fintray, Inverurie, Kinnernie, Logie-Coldstone, Logie-Elphinstone, Monymusk, Ruthven and Tullich.
A saint’s well where converts were baptized invariably lies close to these foundations. After the patron died, their relics—ranging from pillows of stone to crozier and bell—were treasured by the community.
A Fintray legend persists that St. Medan’s head was kept—wrapped in beaten silver—until melted down to make a communion cup for the (reformed) kirk. The head of the saint was kept at Banchory where t’Ernan’s bell, the ‘Ronnecht’ did not survive the Reformation; t’Ernan was patron of Findon, Arbuthnot and Slains.
One further legacy is the former pagan alphabet—ogham—carved in stone, reintroduced by early pilgrims as means of explaining Christian doctrine to the illiterate. Few remain in the north [Newton, top and Dyce, left] but their clear fish-tail shape had meaning to a populace venerating the salmon, carved locally on pre-Christian Pictish [class I] symbol stones. To new converts it simultaneously represented the fish symbol of Christ, Gk. Ikthos.
Renewed interest in Britain centers on outlying rural (pagan) carved stones & sacred Pictish strongholds/objects left by the Romans when they withdrew in A.D.420. Aberdeenshire heartland holds greatest treasures: Bronze Age beakers in museums; Roman pavements leading to C.5th Pictish carved stones of 12 sacred creatures & symbols; early-Xtian ‘Fite Kirks’ made of stone, when England was living in Dark Age straw huts.
The bard was asked who of the kings of Prydein
is most generous of all
‘And I declared boldly
That it was Owain’ The Gorhoffedd, 12thC heroic poem
The subject of royal lineage brings out the romantic in the scholar and the scholar in the romantic.
Lordship and kingship in a Pictish context has been given both treatments over centuries of scholarship, each with its version of history. Lately tolerance between disciplines allows students of literature, language and art history to communicate with archaeologists and pre-historians in a renewed attempt to investigate the rôle of royal centres in the Pictish kingdom.
After the Apocalypse, courtesy Mimenta Digital Arts
Apocalypse (Greek: ἀποκάλυψις apocálypsis, from ἀπό also καλύπτω meaning ‘un-covering’), translated from Greek, disclosure of knowledge, hidden from humanity in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception, i.e. lifting of the veil or revelation
As most of us already know, the Long Count Calendar of the Maya ended on December 21st, 2012. It signals the End of the Cycle of the Fifth Sun which began on 13 August 3114 BC.
The Maya chose to mark this event in their major cycle at a time when coincidentally the spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy comes into closest conjunction [including that of the planets, solar system and the Sun at winter solstice] with the Galactic Center/Dark Rift.*
The ancient Maya discovered a mathe-magical key that linked nearly every known astronomical cycle. With the number 260 and its component divisors (13 x 20, 5 x 52, etc.), they could interconnect all apparent time sequences of observable celestial cycles—solar, lunar, eclipse, Venus, Mars, Mercury, the cycle of precession. Their knowledge of the precession of the equinoxes has filtered into New Age consciousness as bringing round that cosmic date when the Sun and Earth entered the ‘Age of Aquarius’.
*The actual astronomical range for this annual ‘rendezvous with its ‘cosmic birth canal’ is more realistically 1960-2240, with closest range between from 1998-2016, but it has become popular to fix it around the close of 2012.
Separate from this now-famous calendar, the Mayan Sun-Venus Calendar happens to end on March 28th 2013. It marks the end of the current fifty-two-yearVenus cycle that began on April 10th 1961, and more crucial, it marks the start of the new 5000-year cycle of the Sixth Sun.
Daykeeper Hunbatz Men, modern Elder of the Guatemalan Maya, foresees no apocalypse
Some see the notorious ‘Shift’ as one of consciousness. Others as a ‘night of terror’ [Don Alejandro, below] or not to be feared [Hunbatz Men, pictured left, and below]; a further shifting in the polar and magnetic compass points; or physical earth shifts in the form of tsunamis, earth tremors and volcanic or solar activity.
Still others more spiritually determined, like Ken Carey [Bird Tribes, Starseed: Third Millennium] see humanity reach out to fellow beings, winged, rooted, ocean-going or star-seeking, and bring the shift into the personal domain.
“This field of human consciousness will soon know itself for what it is: even as we realize that each of us is like an individual leaf on a tree, or an individual cell in a body. Even after this happens I expect that in order to minimize any disorientation this event will bring, the Star Maker will only gradually reveal its conscious Presence within us, slowly allowing humankind to awaken to the realization that people are not only One, but that we have a rôle as the Star Maker’s physical organ of consciousness—an organ similar to a brain—but more clearly understood in our new capacity as the guidance system for this particular planetary garden.”
Ken Carey
During Consciousness-raising workshops in the GalacticHuman TMI Timeline and Starline programs, a remote viewing on 2020 and 2012, brought up an event associated more appropriate to 2013 than 2012, on an early January/February event:
Starting 1/3/2013 to 2/13/2013 “No communications, internet and/or electricity cut off-isolated from ? – communications will be ‘different’.”
Maya 13-moon cycle;
1/3/2013 13.0.0.0.13
0:Ahau/12 220
2/13/2013 13.0.0.2.14
1:Imix/1 1 day(1)=Kin(1); power doubled day.
1/3/2013 comes 13 days after 12/21/2012 (13.0.0.0.0) – 13 an important cycle (13 months x 20 glyphs = 260-day calendar)
1/3/2013 Long Count is a ‘mirror’, with emphasis on 13: 13.0.0.0.13
2/13 is 40th day later; 39 day difference (39 = 3×13)
2/12 is 0-Ahau/13-Cosmic; Kin 260 = end of the cycle; 2/13 is Kin 1 = begin
12/12/2012 12.19.19.17.11 (-9 days/kins, 9 Underworlds)
12/21/2012 13.0.0.0.0 (0 day)
1/3/2013 13.0.0.0.13 (+13 days/kins, 13 Heavens)
Long Count reading by Galactic Human Workshops
February 16th, 2013 is the 260th day of new Age [Maya], which completes the first Cycle of Creation (13 x 20 days). It is the seventh day of Tone Seven of the time-wave that started on the 24th December 2012.
2/16/2013 Long Count: 13.0.0.2.17
Near-Earth-Asteroid 2012 DA14 (discovered 2/13/2012) is forecast to come very close—within satellite orbit range—to the earth on 2/15/2013.
Blazar X-3 in constellation Cygnus emits light/energy in a jet
2/18/2013
Sun and Earth alignment with Cygnus X-3. Cygnus X-3 is considered a ‘blazar’, sucking energy from another star, one of the largest sources of X-rays and one of the few sources of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, also known to produce gamma ray bursts.
*from Serpent of Light: Beyond 2012 by Drunvalo Melchizedek
Valentine’s Day, 2013 thru Feb.19th, collision in Aquarius-Pisces, courtesy Astrotheme
‘Beginning of a new cycle and a new world —where entire heavens will be opened up to humans — free to explore our natural environment of space, time and dimension beyond the Earth.’
Guatemalan Mayan prophecy cycle to 2/19/2013, transmitted by Drunvalo Melchizedek
2/19/2013 Long Count: 13.0.0.3.0
According to Drunvalo Melchizedek, from previously secret knowledge held by the modern Maya, in 1959, after the Lhasa uprising, when the Chinese caused the Dalai Lama to flee to India from Tibet, the kundalini of the Earth—its crown chakra seated in Mount Kailash in Tibet—shifted with him. This ‘serpent of light’ has continued to move through the earth’s electromagnetic system for sixty years and is gradually coming to a focus—elders on both American continents agree—in the Andean plateaux: final resting place, and subject of much discussion.
When that happened, it triggered a meeting on the North American continent of Elders from all areas of Mexico, Belize and Guatemala, and a grand meeting of all Mayan tribes, because they had foreknowledge that the Serpent of Light was going to move. Elders have met annually since then and other groups have joined in increasing awareness and world consciousness:
The Phoenix Star Knowledge Conference held December 10-13, 2012 included Mayan daykeeper, Hunbatz Men’s deeply convincing shared knowledge on fearlessness and the sacred duties required of future humans.
Prophesies relating to the end of the Great Cycle have included information on the New Beginning. Other sources, research from Enoch scrolls through ‘lost’ Babylonian texts through ‘missing’ Biblical epistles, speak of knowledge of this time known to the Ancients [antediluvian implied] as one of joy. But unfortunately the old fear-inducing scenarios have, rightly or wrongly, continued into this new time.
Maya Elder Don Alejandro says: “On March 31, 2013 the sun will be hidden for a period of 60-70 hours and this is when we shall enter the period of the Fifth Sun.”
3/31/2013, 13-Ahau, 3 Wayeb has ‘strange stargate signs and portents’.
“According to the prophecies, in the year 2013 the first stage of higher understanding will begin. If we are willing to work with our subconscious, we will then be able to reclaim the information that has been impregnated in the deepest parts of our being. In this way, the ancient knowledge will rise again.”
Hunbatz Men, Daykeeper and Mayan Elder
Don Alejandro picks March 31st 2013 for 60-70 hours of darkness
Other possible interpretations include:
—something affecting communications/electronics—Coronal Mass Ejection or large solar flare—
—temporary or combined effect from asteroid 2012—DA14
—metaphysical/energetic event affecting some people—or a new intuitive?/level of communication
—an externalization of an internal personal shift
It is a milestone date.
According to Melchizedek, the Guatemalan Maya are convinced that their date for the ‘transition’-shift’s happening on February 19th, 2013 is correct. The Sun-Venus cycle closes March 28th*; Don Alejandro dreads March 31st. Hunbatz Men says we have nothing to fear. Some say the shift has passed.
And there are several crop circle-Mayan studies/theories, including those on the CropCircleConnector site to satisfy the hungriest Venusian-addict. Take your pick.
*Detailed Venus calendar calculations here.
To be sure, 2013 has waited behind the veil of 2012 for long enough. Now the serpent of light is squeezing out from below the dawn and, if we’re open to it, willing to give our intuitive consciousness the full rein of its supreme intelligence, along with the billion-year-old carbon-fuelled DNA in our cells—and with our right hemisphere—this serpent energy may trigger our solar-inspired cells to become more than the sum of our parts: perhaps even to fulfill the destiny our [Egyptian, Sumerian, Assyrian, Greek, Russian, Roman, dare I say Atlantean?] forefathers foretold: “to become as one with the gods”.
Archaic hieroglyph inscribed on circumference of newest dimensional crop circle at Cherhill, Wiltshire
“Miracles start to happen when another unseen world intersects with our own.”
—C. S. Lewis, 1947
The Fabric of Space
Ever since Einstein, mathematicians, sacred geometers, astrophysicists and scientists of all disciplines have struggled to explain the fabric of space.
Lisi's Theory of Everything (ToE)--note similarity to Jubilee Plantation form
“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”
— Albert Einstein
One of the latest in a long line of contenders (including charismatic Nassim Haramein, whose theory of ‘Resonance’ is constantly expanding) is the E8 Group. Garrett Lisi‘s E8 ‘Theory of Everything’ (subatomic) strives to explain –on the back of Einstein’s relativity, and assuming gravity as the dominant force — how all things fit together. It is a nice idea. But many quantum physicists and mathematicians disagree. “…[E8]’s biggest flaw is probably its starting point, because gravity is not a fundamental force, but an emergent one, as postulated by Dutch theoretical physicist Erik Verlinde.” David Deutsch, author of The Fabric of Reality: towards a Theory of Everything (1998) and The Beginning of Infinity (2011) says ‘one of the most valuable, significant and useful attributes of human thought is its ability to reveal and explain the fabric of reality.’
Cherhill 5D cube --'penteract'-- at Jubilee Plantation: connections made by physicists to E8 theory; or is it Max Planck's 'Divine Matrix'?
Milo Wolff’s Wave Structure of Matter, describes how waves in quantum space form all the matter of the Universe. His simple, elegant explanation of how matter forms at a point/node, answers some of the basic questions in physics, e.g. WHY gravity exists. Previously physics taught that particles were the “stuff,” and the rest is empty space. It seems the opposite may be true. Space now looks like a multidimensional fabric with nodes where particles of reality form and reform where waves cross, as they move through this fabric. Wave patterns, vibration and sound play a huge role in the illusion we call matter.
Deutsch disagrees with Stephen Hawking that the human race is ‘typical’ in the Universe, merely ‘chemical scum’ on the surface of a ‘typical’ planet. He thinks we are an exceptional species, our knowledge accelerating at a phenomenal rate. He agrees with Nobel prizewinning physicist Richard Feynmann that the ‘Multiverse’ is our quantum medium and we sentient beings are the most important entities in it. His work in the field of quantum computers makes him an optimist. Like Terence McKenna, he believes, all (human) knowledge is without boundaries, constantly evolving. McKenna said in 2000 before he died that humanity is headed for a world made out of Mind:
‘Mind instead of “stuff”…a hologrammatic disk, part bio, part machine, part think tank, part Mind’
Terence McKenna
Deutsch, working in 2011 to create the ultimate quantum computer environment, is making McKenna’s prophecy a reality.
Other physicists, Quantum or otherwise, converse in terms of the Multiverse. Sabine Hossenfelder and Rob Bryanton, author of Imagining the Tenth Dimension say we have only scratched the surface. In this realm of multiple dimensions and parallel universes, gravity seems to have taken a back seat to a simpler field of energy where waves interlock and form ‘nodes’ of matter. Just like crop circles do!
Sabine (Bee) is, like fellow physicist Bryanton, besotted with additional dimensions. They are true disciples of Max Planck, known as the ‘father of quantum physics’. He believed all reality was contained within a Matrix, which he called divine because it displayed a field of energy which appears intelligent. Planck shocked contemporaries in 1947 by confirming what the Ancients believed — on all continents — that the Universe is being run by a Divine Being with our interests at heart. He also said ‘Mind is the Matrix of all Matter.’
“All matter (from the birth of stars, to human DNA and everything in between) originates and exists by virtue of a Force. We must assume behind this force a conscious, intelligent Matrix.” Max Planck, 1947
Gregg Braden, a former aerospace computer systems designer, transitioned into his life’s work of trying to understand this matrix. He sees this ‘container of the Universe’ as the bridge between our imagination and reality, as well as being the mirror in our world for what we believe: a reciprocal process. ‘To unleash the power of this matrix in our lives we must understand how it works and speak the language that it recognizes.’
Perhaps the Jubilee crop circle is saying just that: getting us to read the code; opening our minds to interpreting symbols other than words on a page.
So, if Space has the underlying predetermined form of the ‘golden decagon’ which the Jubilee Plantation crop circle portrays — with specific lines absent so that it looks like a 5D cube (penteract) — its internal structure seems based on the Golden Mean/Ratio, Phi (Greek letter uppercase Φ, lowercase φ, or written mathematically ϕ); that magical balance of beauty, harmony and form that gives us shivers to contemplate.
Just as previous crop circles have given us clues, little coincidences, double entendreallusions to inside knowledge, names, nearby features, and particularly sacred form and meaning, this season’s finale seems filled with meaning. It is simultaneously seen in the physics community as ToE (above), to sacred geometers it is a 5D hypercube, and a spider web. (Native American mother arachnid warns us to be mindful of the web we weave in our lives; to focus on our choices). The crop circle’s perimeter webbing is indeed masterful — a tapestry of careful precision, photo below. Looks as if we’re being given some good advice.
A tesseract looks simple when conceived from fifth dimensional perspective, courtesy Rob Bryanton
Once again ET/our human-Oversoul reminds us we are part of something divine and, even more exciting, communally about to transition into — the Fifth Dimension.
Carl Sagan, in describing a Tesseract (4D cube), carefully talked us through an understanding of seeing the fourth dimension as ‘another form of measure at right angles to the ones we are familiar with’ or, more simply, to look at its shadow. Many of last year’s (2010) crop circles presented hypercubes and allusions to the fourth dimension. Now we are being presented with a progression into the fifth.
How does our imagination picture a further dimension at right angles to time?
In the fields of Wiltshire, harvest is almost over. Only a few acres remain to be cut and stored. Another season has come and gone.
Cherhill Pentaract, a hypercube in 5D, resolves into form once your eyes accustom you to the illusion of movement,
image courtesy Steve Alexander
But our dimensional brothers from another time-space-reality have been sending us messages nonetheless. They continue contact with our subliminal consciousness so that, if we allow the communication to root, it will add another notch to that strand of human DNA that is consistently expanding, upgrading, enlightening us to understand a newer, all-encompassing reality — one we’ve never encountered before.
The crop circle at Jubilee Plantation may be the last of the season. It is ostensibly a simple decagon surrounded by woven grain and etched in the center with slim lines of apparent intricacy — only one footprint wide on the ground — and probably the most important crop circle which has been imprinted this year. Like last season’s finale, when seen from above *as with all designs inspired by our Oversoul [*see Nazca lines], it serves to click an unbidden trigger in our synapses and unleash our dimensional observer: the one who sees multiple cubes rising and descending in the elevator of our mind.
The Pentaract is, in animation, a constantly imploding and exploding hypercube extruding itself from its own cone of squares like a rectangular telescope. In shadow in the field, its 2D shape is merely a mass of thin lines. But this field imprint is a masterpiece of dimensionality that only our human consciousness [in its expanded version] could devise to send back to us through time/space and via the elevator of understanding which we croppies hope we project in our willingness to receive, before the season is out.
Deutsch, an innovator like his gurus, Richard Feynmann and quantum cosmologist Leonard Susskind, likes to simplify. The beauty of a formation (in the field or in mathematical formulae) betrays for him a simple truth. Susskind believes we are having an intelligent conversation with the Universe. Physicist Deutsch, an Oxford don, appears to be honing that into sharp focus, by bringing ecology, natural selection, physics, mathematics and evolution into the conversation via computer technology. He points out the shocking fact that the earth’s natural ecosystem is almost incapable now of supporting human beings, certainly in any numbers. We have created our own life-support system of food, energy, transport, shelter and communications. He is fond of using his own territory of Oxfordshire as an example. Take away the farms and modern infrastructure and, in the woods and downs, little of the vegetation that is left now is edible. He, like Stephen Hawking (but for different reasons) advocates upgrading our planetary exploration capability and getting ‘out there’. His Beginning of Infinity is a great treatise on Life, the Universe and Everything, a book for our time where the answer is not 42: it is infinity.
The Significance of Venus
Woven 'fabric' of Jubilee plantation, image Frank Laumen. The August 15th crop circle is a masterpiece of wordplay, timing, sacred geometry and cultural prompting. Its decagon (double pentagram) appeared on the day planet Venus (pentagonal orbit) reached superior conjunction
This season’s shapes have constantly encouraged us to leave our myopic cultural concerns and look to the heavens. Earlier in the season, crop designs focused on orbits of the solar system’s inner planets, cometary ‘intruders’, reminding us of knowledge known to our ancestors but apparently ‘lost’ to modern civilization. Few knew, for instance, that the day of the Jubilee plantation appearance was astronomically significant (particularly to ancient skywatchers) as the moment Venus reached its farthest elongation from Earth in direct line on the other side of the sun from us — known as superior conjunction — when all three bodies line up, but when Venus becomes ‘invisible’. As the ancient Babylonians described her, Ishtar/Venus the dual-phased (Sumerian double countenanced Inanna) morning star of war and wrath now enters the Underworld, where she transitions from being goddess of war in the Eastern sky and emerges 60 days later as evening star in the West: Ishtar/Aphrodite, goddess of love. What a great pity our modern prosaic preoccupations with money and status no longer allow us to look at love and war with that cosmic perspective.
‘When beggars die there are no comets seen
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes’
Calphurnia, Julius Caesar II ii 30 Wm Shakespeare
Hurricane Irene making landfall on the East coast of the USA, August 28th, 2011
Much of the eastern United States is at present having to contemplate the power of the planet, in a frightening double dose of earthquake and hurricane. This electromagnetically-sealed planetary body is suddenly seen, not merely as the mothership that guides us through those remote reaches of interstellar space, but as herself a biosphere of living, moving, reacting interplay of elements: fire, water, air, earth. Suddenly what the Ancients believed takes on meaning few in formerly powerful Wall Street or choppy Chesapeake could have imagined.
Our place in the Universe is constantly changing and ancestral societies DID know more about this reality than we, shadow people of 21stC society, do. We wake up one morning and everything has changed. Power is for a moment seen, not in the symbolic dollar or in terrestrial exploitation to squeeze every last ounce of energy out of an exhausted source; but in a living, breathing rotating body in the heavens responding to electromagnetic pressures being thrust upon her.
To the Ancients (Maya, Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Chinese, Hindu, Aztec and Inca) Venus’s elongation was symbolic of (sacred) periodicity — an amazing calculable phenomenon which ties the two planets forever locked in celestial embrace as they orbit their parent Sun. There is no more potent symbolism seen in the heavens than the exact cyclical rhythm that Venus dances with Earth: Venus travels faster than Earth, orbiting the sun 2.6 times to Earth’s 1.6 orbits. This means that five Venus cycles of 548 days exactly equal eight Earth cycles of 365 days. Five Venus years equal eight Earth years. Exactly. The beauty of that synchronicity was not lost on formative societies. It was the stuff of which their gods were made. The Venus rotational cycle formed a perfect sacred pentagram. This is also contained in the Jubilee crop design.
Ninth Wave of Calendar of Consciousness for 2011: split into seven 'days' and six 'nights'. We entered the fifth 'night' August 18th
What is gradually surfacing — not through television or newspaper reportage, but through that McKenna/Deutsch miracle of quantum computing, the Internet — is that the Ancients knew a thing or two and we would be well-served to pay attention. The Thunderbolts Project, mentioned earlier in our Siderealview blog, a consortium of physicists, mythologists, astronomers, authors and plasma technicians, has now published intriguing proof that ancient mythology, cave and rock art and petroglyphs from Mesopotamia to Russia and Tibet, from North and South America to Northern Europe all described Earth’s volatile beginnings as a planet surrounded by other heavenly bodies — a little too close for comfort. That, before the Age of Reason and the vision of heavenly stability we see in our skies now — nine impeccable planets circling an orderly star — there was an Age of Chaos. And that these unruly planets gave their names to archaic deities: that the gods WERE planets; fiery dragons and thunderbolts were comets, the stuff of the stars.
Saturn/Kronos as Creator
Saturn appears regularly as the oldest god: before the Sun, Saturn ruled [Saturnia Regna = Golden Age].
Ancient belief systems from both Old World and New have often featured in our Siderealview. And, while we continue to extol the virtues of that bible of myth by Giorgio de Santillana and Herta von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill (1969-2002), an ‘Essay investigating Origins of Human Knowledge & its Transmission through Myth’, with its huge databank of archaeoastronomical research on which world myths are founded, the Inca pantheon — the Inca celestial myth has similarities to all world cultural branches — seems to have escaped their notice.
The mythology and chronology of the Maya is currently in vogue and getting a lot of attention. But it helps to look at pre-Columbian belief generally — Inca peoples in particular — as the picture painted there is one of pure untainted primitivism: something lost in other cultures where transmission has been heavily edited, influenced or interpreted.
Chandra telescope image of Saturn's rings emitting X-rays; below 1913 Birkeland lab experiment on electrical 'sun-like' behavior of Saturn
Roman naturalist Gaius Plinius Secundus (Pliny, AD23-79) wrote erudite work based on scientific observation:
“Heavenly fire is spit forth by the planet as crackling charcoal flies from a burning log.” He was speaking of ‘comet-Venus’ but he recorded interplanetary ‘thunderbolts’, in his time and in Roman history thrown by each of the three ‘upper planets’, Mars, Mercury and Saturn. He actually died during the eruption of Vesuvius, poor man.
Rome may have had its master observers whose documentation is beyond question, but such references are scanty in the Americas.
“The natives of this country say that in the beginning, before the world was created, there was one whom they called Viracocha. And he created the world dark and without the Sun, nor Moon, nor stars.”
Inca (preColumbian) creation myth
INCA EMPIRE: Quechua ‘TAWANTISUYU’
Tawantisuyu stretched from Ecuador in the north through the Andean kingdoms of Peru, west and south-central Bolivia, through northwest Argentina, Chile and southern Pacific coast; the European equivalent of a huge kingdom lying between the coast of Portugal and inland Caucasus.
Altar tablet from Coricancha temple to Viracocha in Cuzco before it was destroyed: 'gods' Sun (l), Moon (r) flank Viracocha's central gold disk with Mars, Venus and thunderbolt below
The language of Quechua survives. It straddles this last millennium, offering insight into their elusive yet strong belief in heavenly deities, rather than –as seen in vestigial effigies dedicated by the Maya to their gods– a religion dominated by statues. The only exception in worship of a planetary pantheon was their use of gold to simulate LIGHT. The Maya, on the other hand, had a fully functional ‘alphabet’ of symbols inherent in their multi-functional Tzolkin calendar and an amazing history, Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel which retold their history (and that of their ancestors, the Olmec) going back at least to 4200BC. Maya culture, while not totally continuous, has survived. The Inca belief system has not.
However, both cultures, along with all the oldest mythologies in the Old World, shared the belief that the original sky god (before the sun) was the equivalent of Greek Kronos (Father Time), Mesopotamian Shamash/Ninurta, Babylonian Sakkuth, Sumerian Anu, Etruscan Satres (from whom the Romans borrowed Saturnus) — the first planet/god who created order out of primeval chaos. This was Saturnia Regna, (trans. rule of Saturn), the ‘Golden Age’.
In the Chilam Balam, Saturn is the nameless one — known only as Oxlahun-ti-ku, (trans. the ‘Thirteen’, perhaps referring to his moons; Cuzcoan Viracocha) — one of two gods ruling the heavens. Venus was ‘born’ in 3147BC, when Longcount began. In the Inca creation legend, Viracocha is the Great God (Saturn, temple disk above), worshipped by the sun, moon and planets.
One last teaser: before we return to our preoccupation with culture, conformity and crisis. Where thunderbolts and lightning struck terror into the hearts of primitive peoples — not unlike the terror being felt in the eastern US states right now as Earth tears her hair and sheds her shackles — the power of light, plasma discharge, electricity and magnetic storm had a hold over our ancestors. They viewed the heavens as a place from where gods came to wield instruments of light not known on Earth. Similarly, light orbs (balls of light, ultrasonic/electric crackling) have been witnessed in association with crop circle formation.
So many eye-witness accounts now attest to the creation of authentic crop circles — sometimes literally in minutes — by means of hovering plasma balls of light, that their elusive nature was this year one of the serious discussions at the annual CircleChasers gathering July 27th at Alton Barnes. Perhaps the most genuine, enduring — and authenticated — footage capturing the orbs is that of Steve Alexander’s Milk Hill video (1990).
Thunderbolts, light orbs, gods in the sky. The seasonal finale seems also to signal symbolic change (N. hemisphere) from summer (Leo full moon August 13) to fall (Virgo new moon August 29) — always a deep psychological shift. It also marked Maya 5th ‘night'(of world chaos) August 18th-September 4th.
That elusive ‘signature’, shown top, next to the Jubilee crop circle harks back to several ‘dragon’ designs of earlier years. It may even be the meteorologist’s symbol for a ‘weather-feather’. But it surely connects us through age-old wisdom to ancient beasts of prophecy — dragon, serpent and crow. It now appears with intriguing regularity each season.
Jubilee plantation’s choice location may also signal reason for jubilation: transition to higher, more noble principles, unbelievably even entry into the fifth dimension.
Gods wielding Thunderbolts: not imaginary mythological tales but formative Earth's memory of her violent past
Plasma braids:
“Thunderbolt that steers the Universe”
Heraclitus, 5th Century B.C.
Our galaxy is not void.
For years we were taught traditional theory of our Universe as ‘space’, a vacuum, inert, orderly with few surprises. It was forever expanding outward from a point of primeval Big Bang, controlled and geared by gravity (the weakest celestial force), full of black holes, with anomalous behavior in comets, meteorites and exploding galaxies explained as the work of anti-matter, ‘dark’ matter or, as in nuclear physics, attributed to ‘unknown’ factors such as quarks, charm, CERN‘s conjectural Higgs-Boson particle or the existence of the ‘weak force’, anti-gravity or String Theory’s multiple dimensions. While physicists had trouble proving their theories (many of the ‘forces’ and particles were hypothetical and had theoreticians predicting ‘mass-less’ entities and the ‘graviton’) they are now swinging to a view of the operation of the Universe via another mode of Being:
As electrically-charged plasma.
Plasma is looked upon as the ‘fourth state of matter’, different from solid, liquid, gas. And as plasma is almost exclusively electromagnetic –a cluster of ionized particles– electrical theory is being unwrapped from the closet and given another airing.
NASA, JPL, CERN and the Los Alamos National Laboratory all give explanations for their switch from traditional space theory to a more generally accepted (and more familiar electromagnetically-driven) plasma physics, whose founding father, Swedish Nobel laureate Hannes Alfvén (1908-1995) coined the phrase ‘Plasma Universe’. Originally trained as an electrical power engineer, he researched and taught many years in the field. His plasma theories describe behavior of aurorae, Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts, effect of magnetic storms on Earth’s magnetic field, magnetic and electric fields in cosmic plasmas, the terrestrial magnetosphere and dynamics of plasmas within our galaxy.
Because of its unique behavior, (unlike solids, liquids, gas) plasma is seen as the dominant form of matter in the universe. It has been called the ‘fundamental state of matter.’
When a material is heated from solid to liquid to gas phase, and then even hotter, it starts to become ionized, i.e. one or more electrons of an atom become liberated. Plasma is essentially a collection of ionized particles and while in its simplest form it behaves according to basic electromagnetic laws, at its most complex it continues to astonish specialists in its ability to self-organize into cells with different electrical characteristics.
Plasma comes in many forms, all electromagnetically active
Plasmas are not routinely encountered on the Earth’s surface. Natural plasmas, however, do form lightning and aurora, with the cool, man-made version most commonly seen in fluorescent light bulbs. Solar corona and solar flares are good examples of hot plasma. Earth’s magnetosphere contains plasma generated by particles of solar wind interacting with Earth’s own electromagnetic field, liberating ions into the Ionosphere (upper atmosphere).
Aurora borealis, Aurora australis
Aurora on Jupiter, photo courtesy John T Clarke (U.Mich)
Aurora borealis/australis is the result of charged solar wind particles clashing with and becoming trapped within the Van Allen radiation belts, where they hit the ionosphere and fluoresce. Every planet with a magnetic field generates its own plasma, like that around Jupiter and its moon Io. Beyond the solar system, in interstellar space, ions and electrons proliferate everywhere.
Fire in the Sky
A plasma discharge (spontaneous flash of light) is familiar to students of electromagnetism. To our ancestors, however, who must have witnessed many such plasma discharges in the ancient skies and recorded these (frightening) occurrences, they were seen as battles of the gods, sky heroes and god-kings clashing with sky monsters, serpents, ‘smoke-stars’, fire-dragons which, against apparently insuperable odds, they succeeded in overcoming.
As comets enter the inner solar system, a plasma tail often develops (in addition to a non-charged tail of dust), like Shoemaker-Levy 9 (1993-4) and Hale-Bopp (1995, 1997). NASA’s most famous comet-rendezvous program, Deep Impact, confirmed cometary composition (‘dirty snowball’ plus ionized particle tails) in its hit on comet Tempel 1 in July 2005 and flyby of comet Hartley 2 November last year.
Several ancient cultures name fearful comets as ‘smoking stars’ and lightning, with its thunderbolt — often in the shape of axe, jagged staff or flashing sword — was seen as the divine weapon of gods and king-heroes wielded against ‘fiery dragons’ curled inside the earth (volcanoes?) which threatened the populace.
Castor and Pollux —Alpha and Beta Geminorum, the ‘heavenly’ or ‘thunder’ twins — were revered by the Aztec as the first ‘fire sticks’, from which Mankind learned to drill fire. And, interestingly, when the Peruvian Indians became Christian, they chose to call one of those twins Santiago because their missionaries taught them that Christ named James (Santiago) and John the ‘Sons of Thunder’.
In Mesopotamia 4,500 years earlier (4000 BC), Gemini* served as pointers to mark the beginning of the new year by setting with the first new moon of spring, just as Egyptian astronomy’s pointer Dog star Sirius, Sothis signaled annual flooding of the Nile. Classical Greece called them the Dioscuri, the ‘thunder boys’, sons of Zeus.
In the opinion of seminal scholar of world mythology Prof. J. Rendel Harris:
‘Great commentators of the Christian church had missed the meaning. In demythologizing the Bible, they threw out vast sections of primitive culture’s connection to the stars.’ (Boanerges 1913)
Authors Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend of (IMHO) one of the greatest compilations of world mythology, (Hamlet’s Mill 1969, 1977, 2002) call the Bible ‘that most unscientific of records.’
Viewing cosmology in an electromagnetic context, the Mill of the title begins to make sudden sense of millennia of myth. Hamlet is a translation of Finnish/Norse/Icelandic proto-hero Amlodhi whose staff (Yggdrasil, ‘world tree’) spun the mill of the maelstrom, the whirlpool of the cosmos, the vortex, axis mundi — the Earth’s magnetic polar shaft. The Finnish quern/mill Sampo (vault of heaven, from Sanskrit skambha, pillar, pole, axis) ground out Mankind’s deep origins: it was this mill which created ocean, earth, Man. In good times it ground out ‘peace and plenty’, in bad times, salt. And, according to the Finns whose mythology is alive in recitation, it grinds still. It lingers in Vedic tradition in a hymn —Atharva Veda— to the world pillar (skambha):
A great monster in the midst of creation strode in penance on the back of the sea. In it are set what gods there are, like branches of a tree roundabout the trunk. AV 10.7.38
From such fragments of antiquity embedded in folk memory indicating a preoccupation with earth’s magnetic axis, it is tempting to believe that a polar shift, such as predicted by some for our ‘End Times’, may have occurred at least once before.
There seem to have been other cosmic cataclysmic occurrences.
Heliospheric current generates its own electromagnetic field
In an electromagnetic context within interstellar space, plasma spontaneously generates filaments which, like magnetic poles, attract each other at long distances and repel each other at short range. These filaments often braid themselves into ‘ropes’ that act like power transmission lines through space, with virtually unlimited scope in the distances and speeds they can travel.
Following precise magnetic field lines, these braids and ropes are known as Birkeland currents, after Norwegian explorer and physicist Kristian Birkeland who predicted them in 1903 after years of study of aurora in the Arctic.
Space plasma moving through a magnetic field generates its own electric current, and conducts electricity better than metals. Professor Emeritus of the Swedish Alfvén Laboratory, Carl-Gunne Fälthammar wrote (1986):
“A reason why Birkeland currents are particularly interesting is that, in the plasma forced to carry them, they cause a number of physical processes to occur (waves, instabilities, fine structure formation). These in turn lead to consequences such as accelerated charged particles, both positive and negative, and element separation (like preferential ejection of oxygen ions). Both classes of phenomena should be of general astrophysical interest far beyond that of understanding the space environment of our own Earth.”
In the medium of space, strong radial magnetic fields can make a plasma pinch like the hourglass-shaped Ant nebula, left, produce characteristic filaments like the plasma ball (top), and particle beams, as in its dense plasma center.
Filaments leave a magnetic field signature that is recognizable in the observable universe. Astronomers have been aware of these electromagnetic fields, but have historically paid them little attention.
At a most basic level, magnetic fields are produced only by electricity. So with new eyes we observe our Universe as electrically charged, electrically based and electrically-operated.
If stories transmitted through myth in all ancient cultures are taken as genuine records of visual phenomena –plasma bursts in the heavens– we begin to see formative earth peoples experiencing life on a volatile planet among cataclysmic prehistoric events happening in their skies. Our recent past, by comparison, has been a peaceful one. We can imagine how such events must have instilled fear, but faith and belief that their leaders (god-kings in ancient Egypt, China, Babylon) could and did overcome such monsters is not in our makeup. By ignoring the heavens, we have become complacent: we are no longer skywatchers. Because our history relates few cosmic incidents, we are lulled into ignoring our unique connection to our star, its orbiting companions, the Milky Way galaxy which drives us and the great space of infinity beyond.
Yet this is a running theme through all primitive earth culture, myth and art. And while science is beginning to access the bigger picture, we may be seeing a greater whole just in time: as the predicted solar maximum (increased sunspot activity, below) has the potential to return us to such tempestuous celestial activity as our ancestors experienced. Fire in our skies… perhaps eliciting earth’s (volcanic) response…
Astronomers and astrophysicists are beginning to accept that every energetic object in the universe has a plasma associated with it. Plasmas are detected by trace electromagnetic radiation (light, x-rays, radio waves), or in some cases, by the interaction of their ions and electrons with other objects.
Scientists think solar wind has been turned sideways by pressure from interstellar wind from distant stars
Distilling plasma theory down to its simplest form, and with great leaps in astronomical technology (space vehicles like Cassini and Voyager, telescopes like Hubble and SOHO), we can view and photograph from earth beautiful plasma nebulae which, excited by light from nearby stars, display precisely the same formations and explosive patterns seen in electromagnetism produced in the laboratory. It is also synchronous that Voyager is only now hurtling toward interstellar space approximately 10.8 billion miles (17.4 billion kilometers) from the sun on the outer edge of the solar system. Voyager 1 has crossed into an area of deep space where the velocity of hot ionized gas, (plasma) emanating directly outward from the sun as solar wind has slowed to zero.
Voyager 2 confirmed the existence of Van Allen radiation belts surrounding Uranus and Neptune.
As with Earth, the outer planets are affected by solar storms, but Earth’s proximity to her star (93 million miles, 1AU) makes her more susceptible.
Van Allen radiation belts surround Earth's magnetosphere
Energetic particle fluxes (radiation) can increase and decrease dramatically as a consequence of geomagnetic storms, themselves triggered by magnetic field and plasma disturbances produced by the Sun. We moved out of an unusually extended solar minimum last year. It may be in our interest to be (cautiously) more aware of the possibility of increasing solar disturbances during this next eleven-year cycle which will crown at solar maximum, thought to occur 2012.
While solar disruption on the scale of 1859’s Carrington Event may not happen, with our present dependence on electronic media for almost all human activity, we would be wise to have backup systems available, should such a CME-derived blackout occur.
Nobody in living memory knows what to do should a pole reversal occur. Angelic assistance is preferable.
Westbury crop circle July 2010 'Van Allen radiation belts'?
As we know (or rather, as some of us on this weblog community are following), 2009/2010 crop circle seasons were significant in their display of designs and consciousness-triggers alerting us to astrophysical phenomena and Earth’s fragility in its electromagnetic cocoon. Solar flares, plasma ejections (coronal mass ejections, CMEs), sunspot activity have all featured in Wiltshire wheatfields and are on the increase –see blog entries February through October 2010— alongside dimensional and spiritual instruction to prepare us for what may be around the corner.
Earth’s Mythological Past
Meantime, interdisciplinary researchers have not been idle. Given such a wealth of new information from astronomers, mythologists (following the trail begun by Hamlet’s Mill authors) have been working alongside scientists to make sense of thousands of years of transmitted lore, art, ancestral wisdom and belief which attest to hugely violent episodes in our planet’s past related to the heavens. Mythological and cultural archetypes worldwide share language, symbols and a timeframe which suggest a less-than-tranquil formative period in Earth’s evolution than the one traditionally held by astronomers.
Under the umbrella of the Thunderbolts Project of Portland, OR, scientists, authors, mythologists and historians led by Wallace Thornhill, David Talbott and electrical engineer Prof. Donald E. Scott, are cooperating with plasma physicist Dr. Anthony Peratt to interpret petroglyph symbolism used by almost every ancient civilization to depict mythological heroes and events. Peratt has for 30 years run a laboratory using computer-generated electrical activity to predict plasma bursts in celestial forms. Together they are finding remarkable resonance between plasma forms in the lab, those produced in the cosmos, and the rock art of ancient man who drew what he saw in the sky.
On a spiritual and cosmic level, an ‘electric Universe’ — via our planetary umbilical cord to our star; its energetic tie to Galactic Center and through it the galaxy’s electromagnetic relationship with all other galaxies and the most distant stars — can be viewed as a purposeful whole, held together by plasma ropes, braids of light and power transmission lines which do indeed transmit information.
We are only just learning the language of the stars.
*According to pre-Hellenic myth, the Age of Gemini (approx 6000 BC) was considered the ‘Golden Age’, Saturnia regna when Saturn/Kronos ruled. Following the Precession of the Equinoxes, each celestial Age lasts around 2200 years. More detail on successive ages here. In Mongolian myth the Age of Gemini signaled a time when ‘heaven and earth separated’ and fire was born. In other words, before the ecliptic and celestial equator fell apart (and the equinoxes started to precess), there was no fire. It was ‘given by heaven’ in the Golden Age of the Twins. 8000 years on, we entered the Age of Aquarius on February 14, 2009.
On the Severn: July 18th Woolaston design of merging particle resonance speaks to the third eye
It isn’t easy — you know, like falling off a log — this new learning curve, but it is helping us to remember who we are. The Intelligence of our higher selves – the essence of the Universe which is willing us on through pictures in the corn, daily synchronicities, new people coming into our lives. It wants us to make this leap. This Change.
Nobody said it would be easy. But hey, it’s already worth the effort. There are several new sources encouraging us to think like spiritual beings in human bodies. Instead of — traditionally — the other way around. Since spring we’ve been treated to some revolutionary new thinking. Inkeeping with the concept that the Calendar of the Maya tells us of our speeding-up as time coalesces, groundbreaking ideas are coming through thick and fast to help us learn new mechanisms: teaching us how to work this quantum hyperdrive.
While branded a 'fake', this recent crop circle at Milk Hill nevertheless inspired human bonding
At one end of the spectrum of wayshowers is Dan Winter with his exquisite explanation of how ‘everything is fractal‘ and we better get with the program (of ‘right living’) soon, if we want to survive. At the other, Kiesha Crowther, ‘Little Grandmother’, is less urgent but nonetheless firm that 2010 is the year we’re supposed to ‘get it’: it’s time now for us to tune into Nature and remember more heart-resonant ways of being.
How a Torus looks in 2D
2010 is the year, according to the old grandfathers of indigenous American tribes, we’re supposed to ‘get it’. This summer, whether we like it or not, whether we’re ready of not, here it comes.
Everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because
the power of the world always works in circles, and
everything tries to be round.
Black Elk (1863 -1950)
It is perhaps this simple feeling of appreciating the earth and her bounty — of remembering how precious is our ancient land — that the crop circle phenomenon is increasingly kindling in our human breast. But there’s a lot more.
Bishopstone, Bucks: centre of the circle, July 21 2010
Last week, following a series of striking multi-dimensional optical designs — culminating in the Fosbury ‘hypercube’ — there was a brief hiatus in crop circle creation, while we gathered our wits, collectively shared ideas and inspiration and quite literally drew breath. The cubes featured in last week’s blog were too stunning, too beyond our normal vision not to be taken seriously. And they provoked much thoughtful discussion. Yes, a couple of simple circles hit the fields — in Buckinghamshire and Gloucestershire, the ‘home counties’ of England, approximately where the world expects the phenomenon to occur. But there were some big surprises. North, West and South Yorkshire aren’t usual haunts for crop designs. Yet, this year, there they were: July fields decked with grandeur at Castle Hill Huddersfield, Sutton Bank, Brighouse West Yorkshire and Westworth Castle South Yorkshire.
It’s possible that CC-consciousness is preparing itself to use more northerly fields for the rest of the season; England’s been rather hot, you see. The northern world is going through a climate hike and the CCs may have to find alternate accommodation for the rest of the summer, rather than accustomed locations in Wiltshire and the home counties.
There they’ve already started the harvest.
Getting combine harvesters out of their sheds in mid-July is early. It’s even quite rare. Not a single CC appearance at Avebury* yet this year and they’re already harvesting the crops.
Oooo, croppiedom sighs; where to next? What will the light source utilize?
It’s not as if England has been inundated with crop designs in July, (though Germany and Holland received four each within the same time period). They’ve certainly kept us on our tiptoes waiting. So it’s interesting that three days after a new circle in Gloucestershire (illustration top), the sacred landscape blessed us with another discovery — not croppiewise, but a reminder of how important our sacred heritage is.
A neolithic wooden posted henge was discovered off the A344, within half a mile (3000 feet) of Stonehenge. The discovery came within days of a similar discovery in an ongoing archaeoastronomical project by a team from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio working on an almost identical woodhenge found at Moorhead, near Cincinnati. Both wooden circles appear intentionally aligned to the exact position of solstitial sunrise on the morning of June 21st.
At dawn on June solstice the sun rises over Stonehenge's heelstone to shine through rings of stone 'doorways' into the central altar stone, photo courtesy National Geographic
The woodhenge at Stonehenge and the Moorhead circle have identical ‘openings’ where the rising sun could be seen to shine through a manmade gateway into the centre of the circle of wooden posts. At Stonehenge itself, dawn on June 21st is celebrated as the sun appears to rise over Stonehenge’s heelstone to shine through successive concentric ringed stone ‘doorways’ into the central altar stone. It penetrates Welsh bluestones, native trilithons and a carefully-arranged Sarcen stone circle to find this central space. So, it seems, did builders of woodhenges wish to see their manmade doorways usher in the solstitial sun. There are several woodhenges in Britain, not just in Wiltshire — at opposite ends of the country, in fact — one between Lands End and the Isles of Scilly, another in the waters off Norfolk and a third in the waters off Rattray Head, Aberdeenshire, to name but a few. Earlier researchers thought they were built as precursors to stone circles — testing the waters, if you like — but this new discovery is extremely detailed, showing two ‘celestial entrances’, an indicator of our ancestors’ supreme astronomical knowledge. So it’s back to the drawing board for the prehistorians.
Nevertheless, for 2010 Man watching such appearances as if on cue, our ancestral past again got our attention. The new woodhenge lies on a direct line between Stonehenge and Warminster, in the thick of well-known electromagnetic energy lines and crop circle ‘heaven’. It is worth remembering that the Wallbury serpent formation of June 12th this year was laid so that the serpent’s head directly faced June solstice sunrise.
The public began to see Wiltshire — and our sacred landscape — with new eyes. The national news even picked up the story and offered us a kindly look into our ancestral heritage, to a time when marking the land with pointers towards the sun and moon, distilling what was happening in the heavens around us, was commonplace, sacred, necessary. This little neolithic happening filled the gap for us in a week lacking in other significant crop circle news.
Then, with a sigh of relief, a new crop circle was greeted on July 25th at Wiltshire’s prehistoric Roundway.
Fourth dimensional sphere/Torus with interlocking Greek key/Maya pattern at Roundway, Wiltshire July 25th
Following on my last blog on consciousness (& CCs), I was blessed with some illuminating and thought-provokingcommentary (thanks, guys). Because of hyperdimensional CCs, we humans broke through some new dimensions ourselves and we jointly felt the next progression for a crop design might be the circle. That is, if our minds had already accepted the move triangle > pyramid > tetrahedron and we have been shown the square > cube > tesseract, then we should be able to visualize circle > sphere > torus. I would like to quote New Zealander Fitzy, as his allegory for the Torus is erudite:
Stanford Torus, a 1970s' view of the 21st century
We could see this as an intact form, differences in texture, colour, and area would all be obvious to us and they would blend into each other in a natural way. A Human would be a mixture of internal and external surfaces, alive and whole, and quite unlike how we see ourselves. Inside and Outside may have no significant meaning there.
Then on July 26th, an imprint appeared in East Field, Alton Barnes which had decipherers all clamoring to translate its ‘Hebraic’ script. It is reminiscent of an August 1991 script which appeared in the neighboring field at Alton Barnes (Milk Hill farm). It, too, had crop circle experts worldwide pooling their linguistic resources. At the time, Gerald Hawkins was alive and, as a skilled mathematician and logician with a head for numbers and letters, he deciphered the Milk Hill script as saying something like ‘oppose deceit’. If this new message refers to the present design at neighbouring Milk Hill, which appeared one day earlier (near the location of the 1991 design) and has been denounced as being ‘tampered with’, one awaits further translation with bated breath.
East Field, Alton Barnes July 26th. Compare this 'Hebraic' inscription with the August 1991 Milk Hill script
Hawkins used no specific human language, but as a mathematician, analyst and astronomer, accustomed to decoding obscure messages (he was, after all, original ‘decoder’ of Stonehenge — Stonehenge Decoded Doubleday, 1965) — he quickly noted repeat letters and, while his result was a Latin translation, it made sense. Others also translated the script with varying degrees of success. No confirmation has ever come through from ET on who was right. In addition to an elusive script, the 2010 East Field design incorporates what looks like a star map to a region of the heavens called the Tarantula nebula, 180,000 light years away in the Greater Magellanic Cloud. The star cluster is framed within a double-bladed axe in the formation’s centre. The Tarantula nebula — in constellation Dorado — also shines from a background of stardust clustered in this ancient shape: the double-bladed axe — ancient Assyrian Labrys, from which the Greek borrowed the word labyrinth — was one of Man’s oldest sacred tools.
Torus or inside-out tennis ball: Westbury design similar to its fellow of the previous day at Alton Barnes
Significantly the East Field inscription and axe blade is set within a torus — or a rendition of a splayed circle — which is comparable with another design that appeared one day later, July 27th, at Beggar’s Knoll, Westbury. This time there is no inscription, no axehead, but the torus appears to show several layers of circular perception or a dimension within a dimension.
Of interest to those of us following this progression, and because we’ve had much open discussion with ideas flowing on the most optical-illusory designs and those displaying ‘other’ dimensions, it calls to mind Bradley York Bartholomew‘s 2005 thoughts on Robert Boerman who, like Hawkins, decoded the 1991 script. Bartholomew quotes Boerman as giving meaning to another crop design — a double-helix, also at East Field, Alton Barnes in 1996 — which said essentially ‘there is divine intelligence within our DNA and that Intelligence is the Creator of Life’. +Bartholomew expanded on Boerman’s work and went as far as to say that the (divine) electomagnetic force within DNA connects to the electromagnetic force of the Earth and beyond. So that, in his words:
‘It is the force in the DNA that has put the message directly into the mind of the person attempting to interpret the crop circle. Whatever the message may be, there has been direct communication between the Circlemaker and the observer, because the same force that has created the circle can determine how it is interpreted. The Circlemaker is the networked intelligence that is in the DNA of us all.’
In addition, during discussion and commentary in last week’s blog on what we might ‘suggest’ to the circlemakers as a progression we wanted them to produce, Fitzy suggested the Torus and I said it was reminiscent of an incident in Lifetide (1979) by Lyall Watson where he witnessed a little five-year old Polynesian girl turn a tennis ball inside out with her mind, simply because she believed she could.
Judging by the ‘torus’/inside-out tennis ball appearances this week at East Field, Alton Barnes and at Beggar’s Knoll, Westbury, our DNA has certainly been communicating!
Our hyperdrive may be taking baby steps, but we’re getting there.
Tarantula nebula in southern constellation Dorado
If the circlemakers are showing us where they come from, we’ll certainly need our hyperdrive to reach them. The southern constellation Dorado is 180,000 light years distant.
East Field #1 star cluster on double axehead: Minoan & Assyrian 'labrys' double-axe symbolized power in the ancient world
Despite a flurry of bogus crop formations (East Field #2, July 29th, has been ‘tampered with’ but still shows authentic elements), none of us can deny that we are being shown a sequence, our braincells are being given a genuine shakedown and we are being encouraged to inject knowledge of our most ancient traditions (labrys was a female symbol of power in Minoan Crete and Turkish Anatolia 2000BC) into our present human consciousness, triggered by jolts from the future (symbols in the corn). If we lay aside human conflict, rivalry, ego, our minds are capable of much more — of reaching into other dimensions. They, it seems, are reaching out from those dimensions to us. It would be churlish, if not childish, of us not to accept their helping hand.
Postscriptum #1: On July 30th two crop designs of multi-dimensional communication appeared on either side of the M4 motorway at Wickham, Berkshire. On first glance they are reflections of each other, mirror images of a face (likened by some to Christ), but both use the format of the ancient oriental Abacus or counting board (number) to display what may turn out to be another ASCII code (numbers > letters) message, like the Wilton Windmill earlier in the season. Musical notation cannot be ruled out either because, like Hawkins’ sacred geometry (ancient Egypt’s ‘frozen music‘), they do look rather like guitar tabs for a 16-string instrument (!) or notes overlaid on two octaves. However we manage to interpret the code, as a complex multiple communiqué it will have our worldly braincells churning for the next few days at least!
p.p.s #2. +Bartholomew had a great deal more to say on ‘white powder gold’, a pure silicon-hydrogen compound found deposited in some crop circles, where ball lightning hits, in the resin of trees felled during the Tunguska Event in Russia in 1908 and where anomalous balls of light have been present. Time will tell whether white powder gold will become our next test substance for authenticity in crop circles. More intriguing, however, is the fact that Bartholomew says when ingested, white powder gold acts as a superconductor with a frequency tuned to the resonance of our DNA. It is capable of healing and has life-enhancing capabilities. That is, it can produce high levels of increased ‘joy’ or a permanent state of bliss.
More fodder for another blog!
*The Avebury-Trusloe appearance at Windmill Hill is being branded as fake (man-made) and witnesses to East Field #2 saw ‘plankers’, but also ‘balls of light’. Jury still out on that one.
Comet McNaught presently moving away from the Andromeda Spiral Galaxy, NGC-891, a near-twin of our own Milky Way galaxy
Throughout history the appearance of comets was seen in the mind of ancient Man as a sign of great change; a bad omen, sometimes heavenly intervention. Usually a bright comet was viewed as a ‘harbinger of doom’, a ‘messenger bringing bad luck’, or ‘death to tyrants and their evil’. But it was also seen – in the light of change – as a portent of unexpected gifts, a messenger from the gods, a shift in observation, in human awareness, a ‘quickening’. As signs in the heavens, comets were both feared and venerated.
The Romans recorded that a fiery comet was blamed for excess bloodshed in battle between Pompey and Julius Caesar in the days of the triumvirate. Shortly afterwards, another marked the Ides of March and Caesar’s assassination. Halley’s Comet was thought to have brought the Black Death in Europe. In the Andes, the Inca record a comet as foreshadowing the arrival of Francisco Pizarro. His armies conquered them and committed acts of brutality literally days after the comet disappeared.
Recent research suggests the Star of Bethlehem was either the cosmological conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in 7BC; or Halley’s comet (or a similar periodic comet)’s appearance in mid-April 5BC.
7000-year old Great Gallery 'Ghost Panel', Horseshoe Canyon Canyonlands National Park, Utah with Milky Way Galaxy backdrop
In North America indigenous Americans saw them as communication from Grandfather Great Spirit; their sudden bright appearance and disappearance marking the descent of special shaman or spirit messengers who joined their number on Earth.
The Chinese made a study of comets for centuries before written records were begun by Western society, but thought of comets as ‘vile stars’ or ‘long-tailed pheasants’ and yet they mapped and recorded their appearance and passage through the heavens.
In ancient cultures astronomy and astrology were inextricably linked – they were both sciences. And what went on in the heavens affected the lives of mere mortals on Earth.
Last week Jupiter and Uranus joined together (in astrological conjunction) in 0ºAries, the cusp degree of the fire sign of action, movement and drive. They are headed for a great opposition, three days after solstice, when a celestial Grand Cross will stand in Earth’s astrological chart.
In western astrology, Jupiter signifies growth and expansion and is considered fortunate, influencing belief, philosophy and social justice. Uranus implies change and excitement. It is eccentric and influences revolution, invention, and technology, such as spacecraft and the internet. Put these two planets together and you can expect fireworks: the change and excitement of Uranus will be amplified by the expansiveness of Jupiter. Growth and the philosophy of endless capacity (Jupiter) are subject to Uranian change with unexpected twists and turns.
Windmill Hill 6th August 2009, a month before comet C/2009 R1 was discovered
Uranus also breeds awareness that comes from a rapid awakening in our (Jovian) belief and faith. If you put the two together, and right now they are neck and neck, the biblical essence called ‘Quickening’ arises in humanity.
There have been pointers.
We’ve been given lots of ‘wayshowers’ by the ‘signs in the fields’.
Swallow, symbol of 'quickening', leading comet with coded tail, Alton Priors, June 2009
Last summer, the last few crop circles which graced the late harvest fields of Wiltshire and Oxfordshire included a stunning swallow with what might now be seen as a ‘comet tail’; it appeared in wheat in the South Field at Alton Priors on June 27th. On August 6th, 2009 another wheat crop received the imprint of a comet ‘panel’ of celestial objects breaching the solar wind or sun’s magnetosphere. This crop circle appeared at Windmill Hill, Wiltshire one month before Comet McNaught was discovered heading our way from the Oort Cloud.
Last crop circle of the 2009 season links to one of 2010's first designs
And the very last crop formation of last season appeared on August 29th at Waylands Smithy, Oxon in maize (corn): a spiral suggesting both comet and orbit.
So, it is interesting to see comets manifesting in one of the first designs of the 2010 season: at Stony Littleton near Bath in Somerset a wonderful double spiral appeared in a field of beans, in the forecourt of a 5000-year old neolithic chambered tomb, which might suggest two comets orbiting a central cross formation of planetary stations – the June-July Grand Cross perhaps?
Crop circles have in the past sent fairly regular messages which have been interpreted with delight by the astronomical, mathematical and scientific communities: invariably using the ‘Golden Mean’ or Fibonacci perfection, almost always encouraging us to look within or upwards to the heavens. Designs have traditionally been laid out with beautiful geometric precision, but the theme lately has been decidedly astral.
Should we expect the unexpected from Comet McNaught, a new body from the Oort Cloud just starting to appear in the east to the naked eye?
Stony Littleton near Bath, Somerset June 2010 formation in bean crop of comets circling opposing planets?
COMETS
The name Comet derives from Greek ‘long-haired’ because of the coma or tail which emanates from the head as the astral body enters the inner solar system on approach to the sun. Known to emanate from two areas in the far reaches of the outer solar system, the Kuiper Belt between Uranus and Neptune and the Oort Cloud beyond Pluto’s orbit, many have been witnessed and recorded for centuries, some making repeat visits. One of the most famous, Halley’s comet, recorded by astronomer-Royal Edmond Halley (1656-1742) in 1682 as having a recurring orbit with previous documented sightings in 1456, 1531 and 1607, last visited Earth in 1986 and will on its 76-year elliptical orbit, approach the sun again in 2062.
Shoemaker-Levy crashed in fragments into Jupiter in 1994 after its near-Earth flyby
In the meantime we’ve had Shoemaker-Levy in 1994 which circled Earth before splintering and crashing into the atmosphere of Jupiter on its return trip; Hyakutake in 1996 and Hale-Bopp in 1997, a spectacular comet with a double tail tracing a similar path through Perseus; along with comet 17P/Holmes and a previous McNaught in 2007. [Robert McNaught is a British-Australian astronomer who spends a lot of time focused on telescopic comet discovery from the Antipodean observatory at Siding Spring].
Comet Hale-Bopp in solar orbit in 1997, with dramatic double tail and coma
The nucleus of a comet is like a ball of rock mixed with dirty ‘ice’: frozen water, methane, ammonia. As the object gets close to the sun, frozen gases and dust start to heat and evaporate, creating a long tail of vaporized molecules, dust and debris emanating from the coma – the ‘hair’ – to flow behind it. Out beyond the solar system perimeter, the object is only a small unremarkable frozen nucleus, visible by telescope as reflected sunlight: a speck of ice and dust. But as it is pulled in on its saucer-shaped orbit towards the sun, it transforms.
Dust elements are blown by the solar wind to form the tail, and water and gas molecules heated by their approach to the great solar furnace – hydrogen, oxygen, carbon monoxide and dioxide – have one of their electrons torn off (ionized) by the action of sunlight and they too are pushed into the ion tail. The ‘coma’ can extend to many times the size of the original nucleus, creating spectacular night-sky objects visible first through binoculars and telescopes and then, as the comet gets close to Earth orbit, to the naked eye. Because the comet’s head is on orbit headed for the sun, the tail always points away from the sun, outward from the nucleus, driven by the solar wind.
Comet C/2009 R1 McNaught has a green coma and has regrown its tail; it may manifest more unexpected variations
Special effects can result when added molecules are present. In the case of C/2009 R1, its luminous green coma is a result of ultraviolet solar rays mingling with cyanogen gas.
Comet R1 McNaught was discovered on 09/09/09, but only started becoming visible in the northern hemisphere just before dawn in late May-early June 2010 on the eastern horizon. It should be a naked-eye object best seen this weekend and early next week when the new moon is at its thinnest crescent and the comet at close range to Earth. It lies a one-and-a-half ‘Cassiopeia’ lengths below that famous ‘W’ shape in the northern sky.
Path of C/2009 R1 Comet through constellations Andromeda, Perseus, Auriga and Gemini
Thereafter it will increase in brightness as it moves from the constellation Andromeda through Perseus and then into Auriga between mid-June and early July when it passes Earth on towards its closest brush with the sun, perihelion, on July 2nd.
While C/2009 R1 then becomes difficult to see in the north, it will be a bright addition to the dawn sky in the southern hemisphere in the early nights of July on the runup to July 11th, when something miraculous will occur.
To backtrack a little, New Age metaphysician, charismatic speaker and student of the Maya and indigenous peoples, Drunvalo Melchizedek took a journey in 2003 starting in the north and moving to the south Pacific with a group of people who represented every nation of the planet Earth.
He says:
We have to find the secret of how this leap in consciousness we are being asked to make is acquired: human consciousness combines conscious awareness of the Ancient world – the world of Nature – with the conscious awareness of the modern world. The two meshed together create a new shift upward in all consciousness. If we can at least try to reach that respect and atunement with Nature, with the divine essence of the planet, we can make it into this new level of consciousness.
Drunvalo and his group first held a ceremony of love and appreciation in 2003 at the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, said to be the north pole of the etheric web – or electromagnetic field around the Earth – offering gifts of peace and meditating on Man’s return to natural ways of living on Earth. Then, through Geomancy, (Arabic, ilm al-raml), various degrees of difficulty and many months, they finally succeeded in holding a similar ceremony on a small island in the South Pacific in 2008 at the closest point to the planet’s electromagnetic ‘south pole’, diametrically opposite the Great Pyramid and on the other side of the world within the Easter Island group. When the ceremony was over, Drunvalo says there came a series of ‘signs’ from the heavens and they knew as a group that their work of ‘birthing a new consciousness’ for the planet Earth was completed, although he says he knew it would take some considerable time for the rest of humanity to follow and to see similar ‘signs’ of awakening, quickening.
It just so happens that when Comet C/2009 R1 McNaught moves as a night sky object in early July into the southern hemisphere, something else will occur which may rock a few (astronomical as well as spiritual) socks. On July 11th, Comet McNaught will become difficult to see in both northern and southern hemispheres: in the north it is too close to the horizon – and getting very close to the sun – for practical observation as dawn breaks, another distraction; in the south it occurs during daylight hours.
On July 11th, however, the Cosmos has devised a little trick to make it visible. On that day the southern hemisphere – in particular the island of Mangaia near Easter Island (close to where Drunvalo Melchizedek and his group of meditators and earth-healers held ceremony in 2008) will experience a total solar eclipse and the sky will be dark for four minutes. During the occultation Comet McNaught will be the brightest object in the (daytime) sky! What a delightful coincidence: Easter Island residents not only got to help participate in healing the planet’s electromagnetosphere but they now get to see the heavenly response to their work.
Drunvalo, I suspect, along with the New Age community and astronomy buffs worldwide, will be pleased.
Sideways view: fledgling crop circle close to Old Sarum sacred precinct, Wiltshire
It’s not surprising the 2010 crop circle season started late – in spite of huge excitement and anticipation in croppiedom: England had a tough winter. Frosts and snow through March, freezing temperatures in April. This little beauty appeared on May 5th. Not quite as late as the season of 2006 when nothing happened until June 9th, but with so much expectancy, it will gladden a lot of hearts.
Crops like oil seed rape (canola), although planted last autumn, wait for the ground to warm up before starting into growth. Farmers suffered delays because of a late spring. But canola is a speedy plant once it gets going. It’s one of the brassica family (cabbage, radish) and when the sun shines, it responds. Yellow flowers now litter the patchwork plains and downs of Wiltshire and our first crop circle – a little avian fledgling by the looks of it – appeared late evening on 05/05.
It chose to manifest in a field adjacent to Old Sarum, one of the most well-known Iron age fortresses in this ancient sacred landscape. Sarum is the old Anglo-Saxon name for Salisbury, a fortified mound with huge surrounding bank and ditch like the Avebury stone circle; it stands on a busy intersection of a three-way prehistoric trade route between Stonehenge and the south coast, close to the barge access of the Water of Avon. This 1st Century BC fortification was a strategic ancestral stronghold of the powerful first Britons, venerated and preserved through successive cultures until the first cathedral of Old Sarum was built inside the circular structure in 1069. Before AD420 it housed a Roman garrison (as Sorviodunum = Sorvio’s fort or mound), became a Saxon fortress and finally the site of a Norman castle in the AD11th century. The present cathedral in nearby Salisbury was the second Norman cathedral of that name; and building began there in 1075 on the structure which stands today. The outline of its Old Sarum predecessor still appears in the grass within the great ditch (illustration).
Ghosts of last year's crop circle past shine through canola in East Field Alton Barnes
Much speculation preceded this little vanguard’s arrival, many expecting the first design to bend crop stalks in more popular precincts like Avebury, Milk Hill and the multi-decked fields of Alton Barnes. There, through strengthening canola stems, the shadows of last season’s pictograms show like ghost signs to a lost past.
Wiltshire Ley running through Stonehenge and Old Sarum
The location of this year’s first design does have great energetic significance, however. Old Sarum stands on one of the great electromagnetic Earth-energy lines – Wiltshire’s Leys – that run along relatively straight tracks between and among ancient sacred sites: the Sarum ley runs from a prehistoric earthmound north of Stonehenge, through Stonehenge itself to Old Sarum, to the cathedral in the present city of Salisbury and south through Clearbury Ring and Frankenbury Camp – all ancient sacred sites. The little crop circle with its bird-like design (or sacred geometric pattern of sevens and fives) hugs this energy line, choosing to appear in a crop of canola where the flowers were not yet quite open (to hover within the energy forcefield) rather than siting itself in the neighboring field where the crop is well advanced but standing outside the lines of force.
Electromagnetism may have a lot more to do with what’s going on than we realize. But it’s a difficult area to explain. Like particle and quantum theory, sacred geometry and musical tone ratios, or string theory: a little out of one’s normal range of conversation. Unless we take it one step at a time.
A little background might help. While string theory is usually the realm of quantum physicists, it is elaborated on most elegantly and simply by crop circle researcher Bert Janssen to explain some of the late ‘nineties and ‘noughties complex crop circles.
Put simply, lines of force act on other lines of force – waves in the bath, tones produced by strings of different length on a guitar or piano, light beams or an interaction of one electromagnetic field on another electromagnetic field. They all act similarly. When they do, they cause tiny nodes to appear where the waves/frequencies overlap to disturb or ‘interfere’ with each other. These interferences allow energy (‘particles’) to gather in the nodes, with subsequent result that they form patterns. While ‘superstring theory’ was developed by John Schwartz, Michael Green and Edward Witten for the subatomic world where (below atomic level everything is energy and) exotic, imaginary and invisible particles are found, we can relate it to the formation of crop circles where waves induced by electromagnetism are like musical sound waves or waves rippling on a beach: different locations, same theory.
Harmonic Convergence and Harmonic Concordance brought planets and galaxies into alignment
Earlier crop circles – before the watershed summer of 1987 – were fairly simple in manifestation and quantity. In August that year a cosmic moment of alignment occurred known as Harmonic Convergence, when the Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury and Venus stood in exact conjunction in early degrees of Virgo/cusp Leo while, according to astrologers and New Age pundits, they formed a Grand Trine with the other large planets: Jupiter in the last (anaretic) degree of Aries/cusp Taurus, Saturn and Uranus in Sagittarius/cusp Capricorn. This Grand Trine is seen by some as one of Fire, by others as an Earth Trine. To the 144,000 lightworkers and spiritual supporters who gathered to meditate at earth’s power centers in Mount Shasta, CA, Sedona, AZ, Glastonbury, Somerset, Findhorn, Scotland and Mount Fuji, Japan, this was seen as a combined Grand Trine of fire and earth, as a metaphysical turning point for the human race.
Another astrological event happened 16 years later, a cosmic moment called Harmonic Concordance in November 2003 when a Total Lunar Eclipse completed an astrologically-beneficial configuration of sun, moon and all the large planets known as a Grand Sextile or Star Tetrahedron.
The Solar System, with us in tow, and our home Galaxy became one
Between these two astrological dates a momentous happening in astrophysics brought the two sides of the coin together. During the summer of 1998, the plane of the solar system, with us on earth in its third orbit, moved into alignment with the plane of our own Milky Way Galaxy: the two planes – solar system of nine planets and the unimaginably huge spiral of stars that is our Galactic home – became one.
Since the first Galactic synchronization in the summer of 1987, with boosts in 1998, 2003 (and, some say, with the transit of Venus across the sun in 2004) the energy being beamed to earth has increased exponentially with each of the 25 years (since 1987 and) until 2012, one quarter of a century down the line. Harmonic Convergence was a watershed for crop circles, too. They started to resonate with us with increasing frequency and sophisticated design until in the final years of the ‘nineties we experienced ‘a shift’. They became our means of communication, even communion with Galactic Source. Not only does the earth continue to receive increased Galactic ‘waves’, but as we approach the final years of this Great Cycle, crop circles are increasing our excitement, anticipation of what’s in store for us Galactic children in the last years of our evolution as a race.
Long-term crop circle enthusiast, metaphysician and speaker, Freddy Silva noticed that
‘During the 1998 and 1999 seasons there was a mood swing, as if a new type of energy had lodged itself within the Earth. This energy reflected in crop circles seemed more agitated, some more disruptive to the body than usual. The veil between the the seen and the unseen felt thinner than ever. The new wave of crop circle designs fit neither the recognized hand of humans nor the will of the watchers.’
Many indigenous peoples – not just the Maya whose calendar now predominates in End Times thinking, but others like the Hopi, Inca, Apache and Modoc – work with calendars in order to predict moments of revelation, times of increased Galactic resonance, a coming together of Group Mind in us, the Gaia-earth-keepers. We are, after all, custodians of planet Earth. Those people tuned into earth changes are the first to note when such shifts occur. The Maya say God – – Hunab K’u – – is Movement and Measure which the crop circles appear to demonstrate.
Barbara and Gerry Clow in their 2004 book ‘Alchemy of Nine Dimensions’ liken the energy they feel within crop circles to ‘receiving the light’.
Barbara Clow is convinced we planetary inhabitants, either by visiting circles or seeing the signs, symbols, consciousness-triggers of their graphics, are affected in some way by them. She continues:
‘I know that many of us have been receiving these exquisite crop circle transmissions in our consciousness. When new symbols are transmitted from 8D Light, all the people on Earth are transmuted by them as Gaia herself rejuvenates.’
Crop circles designed by light tubes from upper dimensions
Her illustration shows how crop circles are made by tubes of light that are generated on fields of grain, most commonly in England. The eighth dimension (8D) is a form in the mind of God. The seventh dimension (7D) is sacred sound that can manifest form. The sixth dimension (6D) is the geometrical field that creates forms. The fifth dimension (5D) is unconditional love, an energy that comes when creation happens. The fourth dimension (4D) is where energy polarizes so that things can manifest. The third dimension (3D) is the field where the crop circle takes place.
Science fiction author and writer of the screenplay/movie ‘Day After Tomorrow’, Whitley Strieber describes Ms Clow’s book on crop circle transmissions as: ‘a message that matters tremendously to every single person on this earth. It is about nothing less than achieving relationship with a brilliant and spiritually-potent presence that has been offering itself to us for many years, and which has the capacity to transform us, starting with each one of us who is willing to open ourselves to it.’
We achieved Galactic synchronization in 1987, Galactic resonance in 1998, and Ms Clow believes we will be offered Galactic citizenship in 2012, provided we have proved by then that we are capable of reaching resonance with very high frequencies (light waves) and what she calls ‘multi-dimensional consciousness’.
Neale Donald Walsch has a final contribution to make to this new way of being: he says
‘The change goes deeper than the content of your mind, deeper than your thoughts. In fact, at the heart of the new consciousness lies the transcendence of thought, a newfound ability to rise above thought, to realize a dimension within yourself that is infinitely more vast than thought.’
As all is energy, in our own bodies, in our minds, in our combined consciousness – Galactic consciousness – we are preparing for an unprecedented change in the world we know. We are about to become part of a world we have only dreamed of.
To the new season of crop circles I say: ‘Let it begin.’
View from the Stars: whichever way you look at it, we are present in Sidereal time, Space is our growth medium, and stardust and water our constituent particles. When electromagnetically charged, our solar-powered circuitry is capable of Creating Anything We Choose.
Siderealview's Blog 
Recent Comments