2. The Atsronomical-Galactic Meaning of ”Earth“, ”The Flat Earth“, and the “our Corners of the Earth”
Indeed, within
ancient myths it would seem that terms such as “Earth” are
operative on a number of discrete but related levels. For example,
while “Earth” may indeed refer at the most prosaic level to the
planet we are standing on, it also has a
meaning in relation to the total system of the
galaxy:
In the most general sense, the “earth” was the ideal plane laid through the ecliptic. The “dry earth,” in a more specific sense, was the ideal plane going through the celestial equator. The equator thus divided two halves of the zodiac which ran on the ecliptic, 23 ½ ° inclined to the equator, one half being “ry land” (the northern band of the zodiac, reaching from the vernal to the autumnal equinox), the other representing the “waters below” the equinoctial plane (the southern arc of the zodiac, reaching from the autumnal equinox, via the winter solstice, to the vernal equinox. The terms “ernal equinox,” “Winter solstice,” etc are used intentionally because myth deals with time, periods of time which correspond to angular measures, and not with tracts in space.194
This way of viewing
the “earth” is a component in a total system is part of that “open
systems paradigm” we first encountered in The Giza Death Star195 and is a very
modern view, so modern, in fact, that it lies on the cusp of some
of the most advanced ideas in systems theory.
Thus, the “flat
earth” is not a reference to some presumed primitive view of the
ancients who looked at our own planet like a dinner plate or a
pancake, but to the celestial, galactic equator:
The mythical earth is, in fact, a place, but this place is not our “earth” at all, neither our globe, nor a presupposed homocentrical earth. “Earth” is the implied plane through the four points of the year, marked by the equinoxes and solstices, in other words the ecliptic. And this is why the earth is very frequently said to be quadrangular. The four “corners, ” that is, the zodiacal constellations rising helically at both the equinoxes and solstices... are the “points” which determine an “earth.” Every world-age has its own “earth.” It is for this very reason that “ends of the world” are said to take place. A new “earth” rises, when another set of zodiacal constellations brought in by the Precession determines the year points.196
There is yet another
way to understand the “four corners” of the earth, and that is as
the vertices of a spherically circumscribed and embedded
tetrahedron. Note then that the “four corners of the earth” has
essentially two simultaneously functioning meanings: (1) as a
reference to the Platonic solid of an embedded tetrahedron in a
sphere, the “four corners” being its four vertices, and (2) as an
astrological-astronomical reference to the constellations rising at
the solstices and equinoxes. It is as if the ancient myths were
trying to tell us that these two meanings might be related in a
fundamental physical way that we do not understand. Perhaps,
however, the clue might lie in the other strange characteristic of
ancient mythological cosmology that De Santillana and Von Dechind
have already pointed out: the ancients’ view of the active agents
of their universe — in this case, the globe of the earth, and then
the wider “galactic earth” — as being non-local in nature.
Another possible clue
into an underlying sophisticated — and lost — paleophysics behind
this non-local view of active agents is afforded by Plato and
Aristotle. For the former, in addition to the “four elements” that
make up every physical object in the world, there is a “fifth”
element which, aptly enough, Plato called the “aether” which
“contains the four earthly elements but is wholly removed from
them.”197 Similarly,
Aristotle changed this to a kind of ”crystalline heavenly
‘matter.’”198 The view is not
unique to the Greeks. The Egyptians certainly had their version of
this strange transmutative materia
prima, as did the Mesopotamians, the Hindus, the Chinese...
almost every culture on earth had some version of it. For our
purposes, it might provide a basis for the non-local character of
the active agents of ancient cosmology. We shall eventually return
to this point, but for the moment, we must note one more strange
“galactic context” of an ancient motif.