6. Saturn and Jupiter
Interestingly enough,
Scandinavian tradition records that Saturn (Greek Kronos) was involved in dismembering the body of
the deity Mimer, yet another mythological allusion, from a wholly
different quarter than that of Sumer or Egypt, with their
“dismembering” of Tiamat or Osiris, indicating that Saturn,
perhaps, or one of its satellites, may have also been involved in
this ancient war.538 Similarly, Marduk,
as a sun-god, is associated not only with Ra and the Sun, but also
with the planet Jupiter. We have already observed that De
Santillana and Von Dechind note the peculiar association of Saturn
with Mars.
But while there is
abundant evidence that Mars might have once been a water bearing
planet and, as the Martian ruins attest, home to intelligent life,
the picture is not so easy when it comes to the two gas giants of
the solar system. Clearly neither could be the home to any
intelligent life as we know it.
However, Richard C.
Hoagland has recently pointed out the peculiarly artificial characteristics of Saturn’s little moon,
Iapetus, in a brilliant, and breathtaking paper posted on his
website, entitled “Moon with a View.”539 We shall have more
to say on this matter in a subsequent chapter. But for now we
merely note the following: external planetary
evidence from Saturn’s moon Iapetus would appear to corroborate in
loose fashion the mythological association of Mars, Earth, and
Saturn in an ancient interplanetary war that destroyed a
citilization based in part on those worlds.
In this regard it is
intriguing that Rux finds an association of the Egyptian god Thoth
with the ringed planet.540 Moreover, one
version of the Book of the Dead, the Ra papyrus in the Leiden
Museum, even has Thoth ordering the Deluge.541 The
association of Thoth with the Deluge has been noted
elsewhere,542 but now Thoth
clearly enters the picture as one of the main players not only in
events subsequent to the Deluge, as much esoteric tradition
maintains, but in events leading up to it. He becomes a part of the
conceptual matrix along with Ra, Marduk, Ninurta, Nergal, the Sun,
the Earth, Mars, Saturn, the war, and its associated technologies.
And as if all of this were not enough to consider, even rabbinical
tradition associates Mars with the serpent of Paradise.543
In the face of all
these diverse and yet intricately interlocking details, it is
perhaps not surprising, then, that the Hopi Indian nation of North
America has a tradition that the world in and on which they live is
their fourth world. Their third world,
to which they fled after their second world was destroyed, was not
only colored red, but lay in the astronomical “east”. After their
arrival here, on their fourth world, the former red world was now
referred to as being in the west. As Rux observes,
This, along with the description of a world destroyed by spinning off its axis and perishing in a Flood, make for a good argument that Earth was abandoned for Mars, then was returned to when Mars itself was later destroyed - or perhaps that the Hopi Second World was that shattered planet (mythically referred to in Babylon as Tiamat) which is now the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.544
Perhaps the reference
to a world “spinning off its axis and perishing in a Flood” is not
to be interpreted in the standard sense of most catastrophists as a
world knocked off its axis of rotation, but of a world knocked off
its axis of revolution around another
planet. If so, then the Hopi tradition provides yet another
mythological confirmation of Van Flandern’s multiple Exploded
Planet Hypothesis, where the first event destroyed a large, ancient
water-bearing planet, freeing its satellite (Mars), and concussing
it with a massive shock wave of debris and water in a planetary
Deluge and destruction by fire.
In any case, one
thing should now be apparent, and that is that the standard models
of interpretation of these myths - be they catastrophist or Jungian
— simply cannot account for the presence of artificial structures
on our nearby planetary neighbors nor for the many mythological
connections between the Earth and Mars, connections those very
artifacts attest to, much less can it account for the fact that one
entire moon, Iapetus of Saturn, exhibits all the characteristics of
being itself a gigantic artificial artifact and satellite. But the
cosmic war hypothesis can do so, and moreover, is corroborated by
their existence in a detailed correspondence between mythological
motifs and external evidences that the other methods of
mythological interpretation simply fail to account for. The
actuarial probability that all these correspondences are merely
coincidental would be astronomical.
However, important
questions and tasks remain, for a broad chronological framework has
yet to be extrapolated, and more importantly, the moral character
of the combatants, and the enduring legacy of the war itself, have
yet to be considered in detail....