Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Be Ye Wise As Serpents, Gentle As Doves...,


gurdjiefflegacy |  In 1888 the 16-year-old Gurdjieff witnessed a strange incident: he saw a little boy, weeping and making strange movements, struggling with all his might to break out of a circle drawn around him by other boys. Gurdjieff released the boy by erasing part of the circle and the child ran from his tormentors. The boy, Gurdjieff learned, was a Yezidi. He had heard only that Yezidis were "a sect living in Transcaucasia, mainly in the regions near Mount Ararat. They are sometimes called devil-worshippers." Astonished by the incident, Gurdjieff made a point of telling us that he felt compelled to think seriously about the Yezidis.(1) Inquiring of the adults he knew, he received contradictory opinions representative of the usual, prejudiced view of the Yezidis. But Gurdjieff remained unsatisfied. 

This story is embedded in the narrative of Meetings with Remarkable Men, like one of the monuments in Turkestan which Gurdjieff said helps people find their way through regions in which there are no roads or footpaths. In chapter five Gurdjieff placed another such marker, an echo of the earlier story. There, he and Pogossian set off to find the Sarmoung Brotherhood, even if they must travel, as Gurdjieff says, "on the devil's back." Enroute, far from any city, Pogossian throws a stone at one barking dog in a pack, and he and Gurdjieff are immediately surrounded by fifteen Kurdish sheepdogs. Like Yezidis, the two men cannot leave the circle of dogs until they are released by the shepherds who own the dogs.(2)
 
Where does this incident happen? If we set out Gurdjieff's journey with Pogossian on a map and, following Gurdjieff's instructions, draw a line from Alexandropol through Van, we see it passes through the Lalish Valley, location of the tomb and shrine of Sheikh Adi, the principal saint of the Yezidi religion. Extending the line further, it reaches Mosul, the major town in the region and a center of Yezidism.(3) By setting such markers, is Gurdjieff advising that we too should "think seriously" about the Yezidis? 

Gurdjieff has said that the teaching he brought is completely self-supporting and independent of other lines, was completely unknown up to the present time, and its origins predate and are the source of ancient Egyptian religion and of Christianity. Why then, has he as much as asked us to look into Yezidism? Some, swayed in a superficial sense by the subtitle of Ouspensky's book, Fragments of an Unknown Teaching, went hunting for the "missing link" in Gurdjieff's supposedly incomplete teaching. They tried to find this or that source from which he put it together, little realizing that it was they who were fragmentary, not the teaching. 

The questions become instead: what ideas do we encounter in a study of the Yezidis—and do these tell us anything? As we acquaint ourselves with the Yezidis and their beliefs, we may see that Gurdjieff has led us to materials for a deeper understanding of the nature of an esoteric teaching, of the implications of a teaching transmitted "orally," and of the reasons for his unlikely choice of Beelzebub as the hero of the First Series.

Will We Vanish From the Record Like the Watchers Did?



andrewcollins | Is civilisation the legacy of a race of human angels known as Watchers and Nephilim? Andrew Collins, author of FROM THE ASHES OF ANGELS, previews his history of angels and fallen angels and traces their origin back to an extraordinarily advanced culture that entered the Near East shortly after the end of the last Ice Age.

Angels are something we associate with beautiful Pre-Raphaelite and renaissance paintings, carved statues accompanying gothic architecture and supernatural beings who intervene in our lives at times of trouble. For the last 2000 years this has been the stereotypical image fostered by the Christian Church. But what are angels? Where do they come from, and what have they meant to the development of organised religion?

Many people see the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, as littered with accounts of angels appearing to righteous patriarchs and visionary prophets. Yet this is simply not so. There are the three angels who approach Abraham to announce the birth of a son named Izaac to his wife Sarah as he sits beneath a tree on the Plain of Mamre.

There are the two angels who visit Lot and his wife at Sodom prior to its destruction. There is the angel who wrestles all night with Jacob at a place named Penuel, or those which he sees moving up and down a ladder that stretches between heaven and earth. Yet other than these accounts, there are too few examples, and when angels do appear the narrative is often vague and unclear on what exactly is going on. For instance, in the case of both Abraham and Lot the angels in question are described simply as `men', who sit down to take food like any mortal person.

Influence of the Magi
It was not until post-exilic times - ie after the Jews returned from captivity in Babylon around 450 BC - that angels became an integral part of the Jewish religion. It was even later, around 200 BC, that they began appearing with frequency in Judaic religious literature. Works such as the Book of Daniel and the apocryphal Book of Tobit contain enigmatic accounts of angelic beings that have individual names, specific appearances and established hierarchies. These radiant figures were of non-Judaic origin. All the indications are that they were aliens, imports from a foreign kingdom, namely Persia.

The country we now today as Iran might not at first seem the most likely source for angels, but it is a fact that the exiled Jews were heavily exposed to its religious faiths after the Persian king Cyrus the Great took Babylon in 539 BC. These included not only Zoroastrianism, after the prophet Zoroaster or Zarathustra, but also the much older religion of the Magi, the elite priestly caste of Media in north-west Iran. They believed in a whole pantheon of supernatural beings called ahuras, or `shining ones', and daevas - ahuras who had fallen from grace because of their corruption of mankind.

Although eventually outlawed by Persia, the influence of the Magi ran deep within the beliefs, customs and rituals of Zoroastrianism. Moreover, there can be little doubt that Magianism, from which we get terms such as magus, magic and magician, helped to establish the belief among Jews not only of whole hierarchies of angels, but also of legions of fallen angels - a topic that gains its greatest inspiration from one work alone - the Book of Enoch.

The Book of Enoch
Compiled in stages somewhere between 165 BC and the start of the Christian era, this so-called pseudepigraphal (ie falsely attributed) work has as its main theme the story behind the fall of the angels. Yet not the fall of angels in general, but those which were originally known as 'Œrin ('Œr in singular), `those who watch', or simply `watchers' as the word is rendered in English translation.

The Book of Enoch tells the story of how 200 rebel angels, or Watchers, decided to transgress the heavenly laws and `descend' on to the plains and take wives from among mortal kind. The site given for this event is the summit of Hermon, a mythical location generally association with the snowy heights of Mount Hermon in the Ante-Lebanon range, north of modern-day Palestine (but see below for the most likely homeland of the Watchers).

The 200 rebels realise the implications of their transgressions, for they agree to swear an oath to the effect that their leader Shemyaza would take the blame if the whole ill-fated venture went terribly wrong.

After their descent to the lowlands, the Watchers indulge in earthly delights with their chosen `wives', and through these unions are born giant offspring named as Nephilim, or Nefilim, a Hebrew word meaning `those who have fallen', which is rendered in Greek translations as gigantes, or `giants'.

andrewcollins |   In both the book of Genesis (chapter six) and the book of Enoch, the rebel Watchers are said also to have come upon the Daughters of Men, i.e. mortal women, who gave birth to giant offspring called Nephilim. For this transgression against the laws of Heaven, the renegades were incarcerated and punished by those Watchers who had remained loyal to Heaven. The rebel Watchers' offspring, the Nephilim (a word meaning "those who fell), were either killed outright, or were afterwards destroyed in the flood of Noah. Some, however, the book of Numbers tells us, survived and went on to become the ancestors of giant races, such as the Anakim and Rapheim.

I wrote that the story of the Watchers is in fact the memory of a priestly or shamanic elite, a group of highly intelligent human individuals, that entered the Upper Euphrates region from another part of the ancient world sometime around the end of the last Ice Age, c. 11,000-10,000 BC. On their arrival in what became known as the land or kingdom of Eden (a term actually used in the Old Testament), they assumed control of the gradually emerging agrarian communities, who were tutored in a semi-rural life style centred around agriculture, metal working and the rearing of animal live stock. More disconcertingly, these people were made to venerate their superiors, i.e. the Watchers, as living gods, or immortals.

The precise same region of the Near East, now thought to be the biblical Garden of Eden, has long been held to be the cradle of civilization. Here a number of "firsts" occurred at the beginning of the Neolithic revolution, which began c. 10,000-9000 BC. It was in southeast Turkey, northern Syria and northern Iraq, for example, that the first domestication of wild grasses took place, the first fired pottery and baked statues were produced, the first copper and lead were smelted, the first stone buildings and standing stones were erected, the first beautification of the eyes took place among woman, the first drilled beads in ultra hard stone were produced, the first alcohol was brewed and distilled, etc., etc. In fact, many of the arts and sciences of Heaven that the Watchers are said to have revealed to mortal kind were all reported first in this region of the globe, known to archaeologists as Upper Mesopotamia, and to the people of the region as Kurdistan.

Sean Thomas acknowledges my help at the beginning of the The Genesis Secret, which follows exactly the same themes as From the Ashes of Angels (and my later book Gods of Eden, published in 1998), including the fact that the Watchers and founders of Eden were bird man, i.e. shamans that wore cloaks of feathers, and that local angel worshipping cults in Kurdistan, such as the Yezidi, Yaresan and Alevi, preserve some semblance of knowledge regarding the former existence of the Watchers or angels as the bringers of civilization. Their leader, they say was Azazel, known also as Melek Taus (or Melek Tawas), the "Peacock Angel". Azazel is a name given in the book of Enoch for one of the two leaders of the rebel Watchers (the other being Shemyaza).

It is an honour for my work to be acknowledged in this manner by Sean Thomas, especially as The Genesis Secret has become a bestseller (as was From the Ashes of Angels in 1996). I won't spoil the plot, so will not reveal Sean's conclusions, or indeed the climax of the book, although I must warn you that it is extremely gory in places!


The Book of Enoch


wikipedia |  The Book of Enoch (also 1 Enoch;[1] Ge'ez: መጽሐፈ ሄኖክ mätṣḥäfä henok) is an ancient Jewish religious work, ascribed by tradition to Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah, although modern scholars estimate the older sections (mainly in the Book of the Watchers) to date from about 300 BC, and the latest part (Book of Parables) probably to the first century BC.[2]

It is not part of the biblical canon as used by Jews, apart from Beta Israel. Most Christian denominations and traditions may accept the Books of Enoch as having some historical or theological interest, but they generally regard the Books of Enoch as non-canonical or non-inspired.[3] It is regarded as canonical by the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, but not by any other Christian groups.

It is wholly extant only in the Ge'ez language, with Aramaic fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls and a few Greek and Latin fragments. For this and other reasons, the traditional Ethiopian belief is that the original language of the work was Ge'ez, whereas non-Ethiopian scholars tend to assert that it was first written in either Aramaic or Hebrew; Ephraim Isaac suggests that the Book of Enoch, like the Book of Daniel, was composed partially in Aramaic and partially in Hebrew.[4]:6 No Hebrew version is known to have survived. It is asserted in the book itself that its author was Enoch, before the Biblical Flood.

Some of the authors of the New Testament were familiar with some of the content of the story.[5] A short section of 1 Enoch (1:9) is cited in the New Testament, Epistle of Jude, Jude 1:14–15, and is attributed there to "Enoch the Seventh from Adam" (1 En 60:8), although this section of 1 Enoch is a midrash on Deuteronomy 33. Several copies of the earlier sections of 1 Enoch were preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis


wikipedia |  The Younger Dryas is a climatic event from c. 12,900 to c. 11,700 calendar years ago (BP). It is named after an indicator genus, the alpine-tundra wildflower Dryas octopetala, as its leaves are occasionally abundant in the Late Glacial, often minerogenic-rich, like the lake sediments of Scandinavian lakes.

The Younger Dryas saw a sharp decline in temperature over most of the Northern Hemisphere, at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, immediately before the current, warmer Holocene. The Younger Dryas was the most recent and longest of several interruptions to the gradual warming of the Earth's climate since the severe Last Glacial Maximum, c. 27,000 to 24,000 calendar years BP. The change was relatively sudden, taking place in decades, and it resulted in a decline of 2 to 6 degrees Celsius and advances of glaciers and drier conditions, over much of the temperate northern hemisphere. It is thought to have been caused by a decline in the strength of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, which transports warm water from the Equator towards the North Pole, in turn thought to have been caused by an influx of fresh cold water from North America to the Atlantic.

The Younger Dryas was a period of climatic change, but the effects were complex and variable. In the Southern Hemisphere and some areas of the Northern Hemisphere, such as southeastern North America, there was a slight warming.[1]

The presence of a distinct cold period at the end of the Late Glacial interval has been known for a long time. Paleobotanical and lithostratigraphic studies of Swedish and Danish bog and lake sites, like in the Allerød clay pit in Denmark, first recognized and described the Younger Dryas.[2][3][4][5]

wikipedia |  The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis or Clovis comet hypothesis originally proposed that a large air burst or earth impact of one or more comets initiated the Younger Dryas cold period about 12,900 BP calibrated (10,900 14C uncalibrated) years ago.[1][2][3] The hypothesis has been contested by research showing that most of the conclusions cannot be repeated by other scientists, and criticized because of misinterpretation of data and the lack of confirmatory evidence.[4][5][6][7]

The current impact hypothesis states that the air burst(s) or impact(s) of a swarm of carbonaceous chondrites or comet fragments set areas of the North American continent on fire, causing the extinction of most of the megafauna in North America and the demise of the North American Clovis culture after the last glacial period.[8] The Younger Dryas ice age lasted for about 1,200 years before the climate warmed again. This swarm is hypothesized to have exploded above or possibly on the Laurentide Ice Sheet in the region of the Great Lakes, though no impact crater has yet been identified and no physical model by which such a swarm could form or explode in the air has been proposed. Nevertheless, the proponents suggest that it would be physically possible for such an air burst to have been similar to, but orders of magnitude larger than, the Tunguska event of 1908. The hypothesis proposed that animal and human life in North America not directly killed by the blast or the resulting coast-to-coast wildfires would have likely starved on the burned surface of the continent.

 

Monday, September 11, 2017

The Moon: A Natural Satellite Cannot Be a Hollow Object


disinfo |  Between 1969 and 1977, Apollo mission seismographic equipment registered up to 3,000 “moonquakes” each year of operation. Most of the vibrations were quite small and were caused by meteorite strikes or falling booster rockets. But many other quakes were detected deep inside the Moon. This internal creaking is believed to be caused by the gravitational pull of our planet as most moonquakes occur when the Moon is closest to the Earth.

An event occurred in 1958 in the Moon’s Alphonsus crater, which shook the idea that all internal moonquake activity was simply settling rocks. In November of that year, Soviet astronomer Nikolay A. Kozyrev of the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory startled the scientific world by photographing the first recorded gaseous eruption on the Moon near the crater’s peak. Kozyrev attributed this to escaping fluorescent gases. He also detected a reddish glow characteristic of carbon compounds, which “seemed to move and disappeared after an hour.”

Some scientists refused to accept Kozyrev’s findings until astronomers at the Lowell Observatory also saw reddish glows on the crests of ridges in the Aristarchus region in 1963. Days later, colored lights on the Moon lasting more than an hour were reported at two separate observatories.

Something was going on inside the volcanically dead Moon. And whatever it is, it occurs the same way at the same time. As the Moon moves closer to the Earth, seismic signals from different stations on the lunar surface detect identical vibrations. It is difficult to accept this movement as a natural phenomenon. For example, a broken artificial hull plate could shift exactly the same way each time the Moon passed near the Earth.

There is evidence to indicate the Moon may be hollow. Studies of Moon rocks indicate that the Moon’s interior differs from the Earth’s mantle in ways suggesting a very small, or even nonexistent, core. As far back as 1962, NASA scientist Dr. Gordon MacDonald stated, “If the astronomical data are reduced, it is found that the data require that the interior of the Moon be less dense than the outer parts. Indeed, it would seem that the Moon is more like a hollow than a homogeneous sphere.”

Apollo 14 astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, while scoffing at the possibility of a hollow moon, nevertheless admitted that since heavier materials were on the surface, it is quite possible that giant caverns exist within the Moon. MIT’s Dr. Sean C. Solomon wrote, “The Lunar Orbiter experiments vastly improved our knowledge of the Moon’s gravitational field … indicating the frightening possibility that the Moon might be hollow.”

Why frightening? The significance was stated by astronomer Carl Sagan way back in his 1966 work Intelligent Life in the Universe, “A natural satellite cannot be a hollow object.”

The most startling evidence that the Moon could be hollow came on November 20, 1969, when the Apollo 12 crew, after returning to their command ship, sent the lunar module (LM) ascent stage crashing back onto the Moon creating an artificial moonquake. The LM struck the surface about 40 miles from the Apollo 12 landing site where ultra-sensitive seismic equipment recorded something both unexpected and astounding—the Moon reverberated like a bell for more than an hour. The vibration wave took almost eight minutes to reach a peak, and then decreased in intensity. At a news conference that day, one of the co-directors of the seismic experiment, Maurice Ewing, told reporters that scientists were at a loss to explain the ringing. “As for the meaning of it, I’d rather not make an interpretation right now. But it is as though someone had struck a bell, say, in the belfry of a church a single blow and found that the reverberation from it continued for 30 minutes.”

It was later established that small vibrations had continued on the Moon for more than an hour. The phenomenon was repeated when the Apollo 13’s third stage was sent crashing onto the Moon by radio command, striking with the equivalent of 11 tons of TNT. According to NASA, this time the Moon “reacted like a gong.” Although seismic equipment was more than 108 miles from the crash site, recordings showed reverberations lasted for three hours and 20 minutes and traveled to a depth of 22 to 25 miles.

Subsequent studies of man-made crashes on the Moon yielded similar results. After one impact the Moon reverberated for four hours. This ringing coupled with the density problem on the Moon reinforces the idea of a hollow moon. Scientists hoped to record the impact of a meteor large enough to send shock waves to the Moon’s core and back and settle the issue. That opportunity came on May 13, 1972, when a large meteor stuck the Moon with the equivalent force of 200 tons of TNT. After sending shock waves deep into the interior of the Moon, scientists were baffled to find that none returned, confirming that there is something unusual about the Moon’s core, or lack thereof.

To Understand the Moon Do We Need to Study Venus?


nature |  Lunar-origin studies are in flux. No current impact model stands out as more compelling than the rest. Progress in several areas is needed to rule out some theories, support others or direct us to new ones.

First, a better understanding of what happened between the formation of the disk and the accumulation of the Moon from the disk is essential, because this phase established the Moon's properties. Did mixing homogenize the composition of the disk and the planet before the Moon formed? Were volatile elements lost from the disk, and, if so, did the pattern of loss vary with the disk's temperature? Canonical impacts produce a mostly liquid disk whereas in the high-angular-momentum impacts, the disks are initially largely vapour. Such disk-evolution models are technically challenging and will require a multidisciplinary approach incorporating both dynamics and chemistry.
Second, the likelihood that a resonance altered the Earth–Moon angular momentum needs to be assessed for a variety of physical states of the early Earth and Moon and using state-of-the-art models for the tidal interactions between them.

Finally, further isotopic comparisons of lunar and terrestrial materials would be extremely valuable. They should include highly refractory elements, such as calcium, to test the equilibration model. Finding that an element that could not have mixed in a vapour phase in 100 years is the same in the Moon and Earth but different in Mars would argue against equilibration; finding Earth–Moon isotopic differences in such a highly refractory element would support it.

Oxygen provides arguably the most important isotopic constraint on lunar formation. The distinct oxygen isotopic compositions of the Earth–Moon system, Mars and most meteorites reflect different initial compositional reservoirs in the inner Solar System. This simplifies the interpretation of oxygen compositions compared with elements such as silicon, whose isotopic abundances are affected by later planet-forming processes (such as crustal extraction). Increasing the precision of oxygen isotope measurements could potentially rule out some impact scenarios.

It remains troubling that all of the current impact models invoke a process after the impact to effectively erase a primary outcome of the event — either by changing the disk's composition through mixing for the canonical impact, or by changing Earth's spin rate for the high-angular-momentum narratives.

Sequences of events do occur in nature, and yet we strive to avoid such complexity in our models. We seek the simplest possible solution, as a matter of scientific aesthetics and because simple solutions are often more probable. As the number of steps increases, the likelihood of a particular sequence decreases. Current impact models are more complex and seem less probable than the original giant-impact concept.

A clue may lie in Venus. The assumption that the Moon-forming impactor had a composition very different from that of Earth is largely based on what we know about Mars. We do not know the isotopic composition of Venus, the planet most similar to Earth in both mass and distance from the Sun. If Venus's composition proves similar to that of Earth and the Moon, Mars would then seem to be an outlier, and an impactor composition akin to Earth's would be more probable, removing many objections to the canonical impact.

Determining the isotopic composition of Venus's key elements will probably require a mission to the planet. Such a tantalizing prospect reminds us how much there is still to learn in our Solar System backyard.

Sunday, September 10, 2017

Worlds in Collision


bibliotecapleyades |  The ancient civilization of Egypt was nearly destroyed in a cosmic catastrophe that endangered the entire planet, according to Velikovsky. Everywhere, huge resources were devoted to study of the skies. It's widely known that ancient civilizations in Asia, the Americas, Europe and the Middle East were highly advanced in astronomy.
 
While we accept this as a common feature of our past,
  • Why were so many people interested in the study of the movements of the planets?
  • Why is the alignment of astronomical instruments found in Babylon 2.5 degrees out from the present alignment of the Earth?
  • Why did calendars constructed between the middle of the second millennium BCE * and 800 BCE have 360 days and months of thirty days?
  • Why do even earlier calendars have days, months and years of different lengths again?
* Before the Common Era

Velikovsky's answer was that the Earth and Mars had been involved in repeated near collisions with a gigantic comet since our recorded history began. The events described in the Exodus and in Egyptian papyri are a vivid description of an age in chaos—plagues, turmoil and darkness, and the flight of the Hebrews from Egypt toward a "column of fire" in Sinai.

The Earth was momentarily slowed down and its axis slightly altered as the comet passed by. Electrostatic forces caused discharges to arc between the Earth and the comet turning the skies to fire and the forests to flame. The crust was rent, volcanoes erupted, earthquakes rocked and darkness enveloped the world—the time of the Exodus.
 
Seven hundred years later Isaiah, Joel and Amos described another series of upheavals; the Sun appeared to stand still in the sky. Although slightly dislodged from its axis and orbit again, the Earth fared better this second time.
 
These were, in fact, the last two acts of a cosmic drama; the earliest act of which we have records is called The Deluge.
All cosmological theories assumed that the planets have evolved in their places for billions of years... Venus was formerly a comet and joined the family of planets within the memory of mankind... We claim that the Earth's orbit changed more than once, and with it the length of the year; that the geographic position of the terrestrial axis and its astronomical direction changed repeatedly and that at a recent date the polar star was in the constellation of the Great Bear.
—Worlds in Collision, p. 361
Velikovsky believed that the origin of the comet that was responsible for changes in the Earth's orbit was in the proto-star we know as Jupiter. This idea outraged the scientific community. But his theories about the natures of Jupiter and Venus have not yet been proven wrong. He said that because Venus was younger than the other planets, its surface temperature would be much hotter and its atmosphere denser than astronomers believed; these predictions were proven correct.

He predicted Venus would be found to have orbital anomalies in relation to the other planets; Venus has since been found to rotate on its axis in reverse direction to the other planets, and its day is longer than its year. We now know that parts of the atmosphere of Venus rotate in 4 days (with winds of up to 400 km/h) while the planet itself rotates in 243 days. Both these rotations are retrograde.
 
One of Velikovsky's hypotheses for the slowing of the Earth's rotation which made the Sun appear to stand still was that the planet was engulfed in the extended atmosphere of the comet Venus. Some of the diurnal rotation of the Earth was imparted to this dust-cloud according to Velikovsky, which fits the eccentric characteristics of the Venusian atmosphere.

The comet spiraled past the Earth in an ever-decreasing path around the Sun before taking up its present orbit as the planet Venus. He further cites evidence to show that the Earth interacted with Mars on a number of occasions when writing was better developed than during the Venusian encounters, after Venus flipped Mars out of its orbit.

Saturday, September 09, 2017

What Destroyed Advanced Ancient Human Civilization? Open Thread IQ Test Continued...,


bibliotecapleyades |  As mentioned in the beginning of this book, I have been for many years interested in the work of George Gurdjieff. A series of articles written by William Patrick Patterson for Telos Magazine entitled “Gurdjieff in Egypt” and a subsequent video released by Patterson with the same title rekindled my interest in Gurdjieff’s work. In his second book, Meetings With Remarkable Men, Gurdjieff had stated that he once had seen a map of “pre-sand Egypt” in the possession of an Armenian monk. This map had stimulated Gurdjieff to go to Egypt and search for teachings about human origins in ancient wisdom schools.

Patterson had also been fascinated with Gurdjieff’s travels to Egypt and had done extensive investigations of his work. Patterson is convinced that Gurdjieff had seen an image of the Sphinx on the map of “pre-sand Egypt” and went to Egypt to investigate for himself. Of course, I contend that if the map was indeed of a “pre-sand Egypt”, it would have contained the pyramids as well as the Sphinx at ancient Giza before the current desert conditions. According to Patterson, Gurdjieff had stated that his teachings had come from a complete system of “Esoteric Christianity” that originated in ancient Egypt many thousands of years before the time of Jesus. I met Patterson at a talk he gave in Denver, Colorado in July of 1999. Both Patterson and I agreed that Gurdjieff might have come in contact with the indigenous tradition over 100 years ago, especially in his extended stay in Ethiopia. Gurdjieff adamantly maintained that the source of all modern esoteric systems had their origins in predynastic Egypt, essentially supporting our paradigms of ancient Khemit.

However, Patterson also mentioned other statements of Gurdjieff that stimulated further investigations on my part. Gurdjieff had stated in his writings and discussions that he had found inscriptions on the walls of the Temple of Horus in Edfu, which is in the south of Egypt, that mentioned the myth of Atlantis. In his articles Patterson mentioned a book by British Egyptologist E. A. Reymond, The Origins of the Egyptian Temple, in which translations of the texts of Edfu were given. Reymond called these inscriptions “The Building Texts” and claimed they were the myths of the origins of ancient temple buildings.

I found Reymond’s translations of the Edfu texts to be incoherent and poorly done and decided to discuss these texts with Abd’El Hakim in Egypt. On our tour in October of 1999, we went to the Temple of Horus at Edfu and found the inscriptions on the walls ourselves. It became apparent to us that the texts at Edfu were copies of much older texts, the temple having been built in the Ptolemaic period ca. 200 BC, and were discussing events that had taken place in ancient Khemit many thousands of years before the temple was built. Gurdjieff had stated that the texts spoke of an advanced people, whom Reymond referred to by the standard Orthodox translation of the term Neter, as “Gods” who had come from an island that had been destroyed by a flood and had brought their wisdom to the ancient Khemitians. However, Hakim’s interpretation was vastly different. I believe the texts are referring to the time of the ancient Ur Nil over 30,000 years ago when the vastness of the river had turned all of Northern Africa into a series of large islands.
As the Khemitians became united, they moved from island to island, erecting temples and pyramids and creating the ancient Khemitian civilization. Once again, this became a basis for the future myth of Atlantis. Hakim was definite that the texts were not referring to a more advanced non-Khemitian people coming from outside Africa, and teaching the Khemitians how to build in stone. I propose that the ancient people followed the river from the south and the west and formed the union of the 42 tribes in the Land of Osiris, Bu Wizzer, and other ancient sites in the south, such as Edfu and Abydos.
The texts are therefore describing the Khemitian’s ascension into higher consciousness, becoming “one” with the Neters, opening their senses and creating high civilization. The texts discuss how the “Neters arrived” from different islands, and began the process of erecting large--scale edifices in stone. We did not find any references to cataclysms, but even so, the ancient Khemitians may have “island hopped” until the 42 tribes united and coalesced into a coherent civilization.

There may have been an advanced island civilization in the Atlantic (or Antarctica, as has been claimed) that perished as a result of the great cataclysm proposed around 11,500 years ago. But it may also be that there were large islands in Northern Africa as a result of the ancient Ur Nil around this same time that were populated by an advanced civilization of ancient Khemitians. The Myth of Atlantis may have referred to the entire Global Maritime Culture that existed in many parts of the world prior to 10,000 years ago, much of which was almost completely destroyed by cataclysmic events. I believe ancient Khemit should be included in that mythology.

Ancient Khemitian priests may have entertained Greek travelers with stories of cataclysms destroying island civilization as an oral history of the Global Maritime Culture that once existed, knowing full well that ancient Khemit was part of that past glory, but not revealing the complete story to the “barbarian” Greeks.



Ancient Egypt - Open Thread IQ Test Continued...,


bibliotecapleyades |  To comprehend fully the secret information in the Bible, it is important to understand the extent of the subterranean tunnel system and associated chamber facilities existing below the surface of the Pyramid Plateau, for it was there that major elements of Mystery School teachings developed.
What happened under the sands thousands of years ago is not reflected in today's history books, and discoveries made in the last eight decades or so verify that point.

The Fayum Oasis district, just a few kilometers outside the boundary of the Memphis Nome, presents a site of unusual interest. It was in that lush, fertile valley that Pharaohs calling themselves the "masters of the royal hunts" fished and hunted with the boomerang (1), Lake Moeris once bordered the Fayum Oasis and on its shores was the famous Labyrinth, described by Herodotus as "an endless wonder to me".
The Labyrinth contained 1500 rooms and an equal number of underground chambers that the Greek historian was not permitted to inspect, according to Labyrinth priests, "the passages were baffling and intricate", designed to provide safety for the numerous scrolls they said were hidden in subterranean apartments.
That massive complex particularly impressed Herodotus and he spoke in awe of the structure:
There I saw twelve palaces regularly disposed, which had communication with each other, interspersed with terraces and arranged around twelve halls. It is hard to believe they are the work of man, The walls are covered with carved figures, and each court is exquisitely built of white marble and surrounded by a colonnade. Near the corner where the labyrinth ends, there is a pyramid, two hundred and forty feet in height, with great carved figures of animals on it and an underground passage by which it can be entered. I was told very credibly that underground chambers and passages connected this pyramid with the pyramids at Memphis.
The pyramids at Memphis were the pyramids at Giza, for Giza was originally called Memphis (see reference, "Giza formerly Memphis" on Nordan's map from Travels in Egypt and Nubia, 1757, on page 152 of previous chapter).

Many ancient writers supported Herodotus' record of underground passages connecting major pyramids, and their evidence casts doubt on the reliability of traditionally presented Egyptian history. Crantor (300 BC) stated that there were certain underground pillars in Egypt that contained a written stone record of pre-history , and they lined access ways connecting the pyramids.
In his celebrated study, On the Mysteries, particularly those of the Egyptians, Chaldeans and the Assyrians, Iamblichus, a fourth-century Syrian representative of the Alexandrian School of mystical and philosophical studies, recorded this information about an entranceway through the body of the Sphinx into the Great Pyramid (2):
This entrance, obstructed in our day by sands and rubbish, may still be traced between the forelegs of the crouched colossus. It was formerly closed by a bronze gate whose secret spring could be operated only by the Magi. It was guarded by public respect, and a sort of religious fear maintained its inviolability better than armed protection would have done. In the belly of the Sphinx were cut out galleries leading to the subterranean part of the Great Pyramid.

These galleries were so art-fully crisscrossed along their course to the Pyramid that, in setting forth into the passage without a guide throughout this network, one ceasingly and inevitably returned to the starting point.
It was recorded in ancient Sumerian cylinder seals that the secret abode of the Anunnaki was,
"an underground place... entered through a tunnel, its entrance hidden by sand and by what they call Huwana... his teeth as the teeth of a dragon, his face the face of a lion". 
That remarkable old text, unfortunately fragmented, added that "He [Huwana] is unable to move forward, nor is he able to move back", but they crept up on him from behind and the way to "the secret abode of the Anunnaki" was no longer blocked.
The Sumerian record provided a probable description of the lion-headed Sphinx at Giza, and if that great creature was built to guard or obliterate ancient stairways and lower passages leading to subterranean areas below and around it, then its symbolism was most appropriate.

Local 19th-century Arab lore maintained that existing under the Sphinx are secret chambers holding treasures or magical objects. That belief was bolstered by the writings of the first-century Roman historian Pliny, who wrote that deep below the Sphinx is concealed the "tomb of a ruler named Harmakhis that contains great treasure", and, strangely enough, the Sphinx itself was once called "The Great Sphinx Harmakhis who mounted guard since the time of the Followers of Horus".


Friday, September 08, 2017

Is the Moon the Creation of Intelligence?



bibliotecapleyades |Although people long ago began to wonder whether the "canals" on Mars were the creation of cosmic engineers, for some odd reason it has not occurred to look with the same eyes upon the peculiarities of the lunar landscape much closer at hand.
And all the arguments about the possibilities of intelligent life existing on other celestial bodies have been confined to the idea that other civilizations must necessarily live on the surface of a planet, and that the interior as a habitat is out of the question.

Abandoning the traditional paths of "common sense", we have plunged into what may at first sight seem to be unbridled and irresponsible fantasy. But the more minutely we go into all the information gathered by man about the Moon, the more we are convinced that there is not a single fact to rule out our supposition.
Not only that, but many things so far considered to be lunar enigmas are explainable in the light of this new hypothesis.

wikipedia |  In 1970, Michael Vasin and Alexander Shcherbakov, of what was then the Soviet Academy of Sciences, advanced an hypothesis that the Moon is a spaceship created by unknown beings.[2] The article was entitled "Is the Moon the Creation of Alien Intelligence?", and was published in Sputnik,[10] the Soviet equivalent of Reader's Digest.[1][14]

Their hypothesis relies heavily on the suggestion that large lunar craters, generally assumed to be formed from meteor impact, are generally too shallow and have flat or even convex bottoms. They hypothesized that small meteors are making a cup-shaped depression in the rocky surface of the moon while the larger meteors are drilling through a rocky layer and hitting an armoured hull underneath.[15]


The Vatican Secret Archives


telegraph |  This is the Tower of the Winds, built by Ottavinao Mascherino between 1578 and 1580, a place to which mere members of the public are never normally admitted. 

Here in the Hall of the Meridian, a room covered in frescoes depicting the four winds, is a tiny hole high up in one of the walls. 

At midday, the sun, shining through the hole, falls along a white marble line set into the floor. On either side of this meridian line are various astrological and astronomical symbols, once used to try to calculate the effect of the wind upon the stars. 

But this is not the real reason why this man with the shabby trousers, the oddly distinguished-looking grey hair and the abundance of irrelevant detail has come to the Vatican. 

No, the real reason for this lies elsewhere in the Tower of Winds, in rooms lined with miles and miles of dark wooden shelves – more than 50 miles of them in fact. 

Here, bound in cream vellum, are thousands upon thousands of volumes, some more than a foot thick. 

This is the Vatican secret archive, possibly the most mysterious collection of documents in the world.
Here you can find accounts of the trial of the Knights Templar held at Chinon in August 1308; a threatening note from 1246 in which Ghengis Khan’s grandson demands that Pope Innocent IV travel to Asia to ‘pay service and homage; a letter from Lucretia Borgia to Pope Alexander VI; Papal Bulls excommunicating Martin Luther; correspondence between the Court of Henry VIII and Clement VII; and an exchange of letters between Michelangelo and Paul III. 

There are also letters from Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, St Bernadette, Voltaire and Abraham Lincoln. 

And here too – depending on how much faith you have in the novels of Dan Brown – lies proof that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and continued their own earthly line. 

Once, Napoleon had the whole of the secret archive transported to Paris. 

It was brought back, albeit with some key documents missing, in 1817 and has remained in the Vatican ever since – a constant source of myth and fascination. 

But now the Vatican Secret Archive is secret no more. 

wikipedia |   The Vatican Secret Archives (Latin: Archivum Secretum Apostolicum Vaticanum; Italian: Archivio Segreto Vaticano) is the central repository in the Vatican City for all of the acts promulgated by the Holy See. The Pope, as Sovereign of Vatican City and having primal incumbency, owns the archives until his death or resignation, with ownership passing to his successor. The archives also contain the state papers, correspondence, papal account books,[1] and many other documents which the church has accumulated over the centuries. In the 17th century, under the orders of Pope Paul V, the Secret Archives were separated from the Vatican Library, where scholars had some very limited access to them, and remained closed to outsiders until 1881, when Pope Leo XIII opened them to researchers, more than a thousand of whom now examine some of its documents each year.[2]

The use of the word "secret" in the title "Vatican Secret Archives" does not denote the modern meaning of confidentiality. A fuller and perhaps better translation of the Latin may be the "private Vatican Apostolic archives". Its meaning is closer to that of the word "private", indicating that the archives are the Pope's personal property, not belonging to those of any particular department of the Roman Curia or the Holy See. The word "secret" was generally used in this sense as also reflected in phrases such as "secret servants", "secret cupbearer", "secret carver" or "secretary", much like an esteemed position of honour and regard comparable to a VIP.[3]

Parts of the Secret Archives remain truly secret, however: some materials are still prohibited for outside viewing, including everything dated after 1939.[4]


Thursday, September 07, 2017

Michelle Obama On the Front Line for Po Black Folks...,


WaPo |  Is this the woman that Michelle Obama sees when she looks in the mirror now, free of the White House and the media scrutiny of presidential politics? After more than a decade in public life, can she freely shed the sheath dress and pearls for a wide brim black hat and dookie braids?

She just did.

By allowing herself to be photographed alongside 15 other members of Beyoncé’s inner circle, Obama reclaimed her image from the annals of stodgy first lady portraits. And, she did it by embodying Beyoncé’s.

The image, in case you haven’t seen it, is part of a birthday tribute to the singer who posted portraits of black women — some famous, others not — dressed in one of her iconic looks from the “Formation” video.

Did Illegal Aliens or Their Offspring Make the "I Have a Dream" Speech?


Counterpunch |  Can’t empathize? Show this article to a friend; he or she likely can. One-third of Americans of working age have a criminal record. Obama smoked pot and snorted cocaineGeorge W. Bush had a DUI; Dick Cheney had two. Roughly 17% of all Americans (including children and other non-drivers) have a DUI conviction.

Let he who is without self-righteous BS Christian sanctimony cast the first deportation.

Trump and his fellow Republicans’ repugnant decision to expose DREAMers — who, by definition, have clean criminal records — to deportation is a classic example of the peril of the slippery slope. This is what happens when the Left goes to sleep because a Democrat is in the White House.

First Obama came to deport the children who knew no home other than the United States, but we said nothing because they had criminal records (even if they weren’t a big deal and/or referred to crimes that occurred ages ago). Then Trump came for the kids with no criminal record at all, but we said jack because they didn’t happen to have the right immigration documents.

By the time they come for U.S. citizens — you know the rest.  (They came for Black folks 50 years ago with the Replacement Negroe policies and programs)


Black Americans Got Left Out Of This New Deal Policy and Program


nakedcapitalism |  Hookworm, a disease of extreme poverty thought largely to have been eradicated in the United States, persists as a public health problem in some populations, according to a peer-reviewed paper, Human Intestinal Parasite Burden and Poor Sanitation in Rural Alabama, published yesterday in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

The disease affects 430 million people worldwide, largely in Africa and Asia, causing iron deficiency, impaired cognitive development, and stunting in children, and is considered a neglected tropical disease (NTD).

The study, the first of its kind in modern times, was carried out by the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in conjunction with Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise (ACRE), a nonprofit group seeking to address the root causes of poverty. In a survey of people living in Lowndes County, an area with a long history of racial discrimination and inequality, it found that 34% tested positive for genetic traces of Necator americanus.
As recently as the 1930s, the southern United States had a high prevalence of hookworm infections, which affected intellectual performance and caused lethargy, according to How a Worm Gave the South a Bad Name. Initial surveys of populations at that time found that as much as three-quarters of the populations of certain areas were infected.

“Hookworm is a 19th century disease that should by now have been addressed, yet we are still struggling with it in the United States in the 21st century,” said Catherine Flowers, ACRE’s founder, as quoted in The Guardian.

New Deal Eradication Efforts
During the New Deal, the federal government launched a public health initiative to control hookworm infections:
To control the disease, thousands of individuals were treated, decreasing prevalence to 39%. After these interventions, there were increases in school enrolment, attendance, and literacy, and those within the treated cohort had substantial gains in long-term incomes. However, because of posttreatment reinfection and widespread transmission, hookworm infection and disease continued to persist in the southern United States, especially in areas of extreme poverty. According to a study in the 1950s, rural Alabama still suffered from a high prevalence of hookworm infection in schoolchildren, with some counties having 60% infection. With improved sanitation and waste disposal infrastructure, in association with aggressive economic development in the southern United States, the prevalence of hookworm infection decreased (paper, p. 2, citations omitted).
The conditions that cause hookworm infections have not vanished, yet contemporary researchers have largely failed to investigate how prevalent they may remain:

Wednesday, September 06, 2017

The Culture Wars and Public Education


WaPo  |  The end of summer is an exciting time for millions of children, parents, teachers and administrators who embark on a new academic year. And yet the turbulent debates about race, civil rights, immigration, science and American identity — which have played out violently from the streets of Charlottesville to the corridors of the West Wing and across the country — will continue to rile American schools.

Just last year, a Morton, Ill. school board member protested the purchase of a science textbook that favored an "Old Earth" origin story. Conservative parents in suburban Chicago opposed a day-long seminar intended to foster discussion about the persistence of racial division in American life. And a Republican lawmaker in Arkansas proposed a ban on teaching the late Howard Zinn's popular left-leaning interpretation of American history, "A People's History of the United States," in public classrooms.

These curriculum controversies are not new. At their core is a debate over power and hierarchy in American society. Those individuals and viewpoints that are valued in school curriculums have a decided advantage when it comes to making claims of moral authority. If American children, for example, grow up learning that evolutionary biology is the key to understanding human origins, creationist Americans will have a much more difficult time getting a hearing for their views and will thus lack moral authority in the important realm of science. Yet while curriculum battles shape and are shaped by the nation's larger cultural wars, they also threaten to undermine a pillar of American democracy that should concern both sides: public education.

Early challenges to public schools came from economic and religious concerns. The Protestant elite who set up the common school system in the 19th century believed schools provided training and acculturation for the poor and working class. The working class decried the invasiveness of compulsory education, and in manufacturing towns like Beverly, Mass., voted to discontinue the high school in 1860. Catholics also saw schools as an attempt to indoctrinate children with Protestant beliefs. They began to build their own network of parochial schools — building institutions to challenge the cultural authority of Protestantism.

Growing Neglect of the Incubator or Citizens


theatlantic |  Public schools have always occupied prime space in the excitable American imagination. For decades, if not centuries, politicians have made hay of their supposed failures and extortions. In 2004, Rod Paige, then George W. Bush’s secretary of education, called the country’s leading teachers union a “terrorist organization.” In his first education speech as president, in 2009, Barack Obama lamented the fact that “despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world, we’ve let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us.”


President Donald Trump used the occasion of his inaugural address to bemoan the way “beautiful” students had been “deprived of all knowledge” by our nation’s cash-guzzling schools. Educators have since recoiled at the Trump administration’s budget proposal detailing more than $9 billion in education cuts, including to after-school programs that serve mostly poor children. These cuts came along with increased funding for school-privatization efforts such as vouchers. Our secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, has repeatedly signaled her support for school choice and privatization, as well as her scorn for public schools, describing them as a “dead end” and claiming that unionized teachers “care more about a system, one that was created in the 1800s, than they care about individual students.”

A System Designed to Regiment Large Groups of People


fee |  Hardly anyone disputes the contention that the modem public school is seriously flawed. Test scores continue to be poor while metal detectors are found in the more violent schools. Welfare-state liberals argue that schools in poor areas need more money to place them on an equal footing with their richer counterparts. Conservatives usually reply that the solution is a voucher system that would break the government monopoly on education by restoring choice and control to parents. But virtually all participants on both sides of the debate concede the nobility of the original reformers; in their view, the “good intentions” of such school champions as Horace Mann and John Dewey led to “unintended consequences.”

Such admiration is misplaced. As historian Michael Katz writes, “The crusade for educational reform led by Horace Mann . . . was not the simple, unambiguous good it had long been taken to be; the central aim of the movement was to establish more efficient mechanisms of social control, and its chief legacy was the principle that ‘education was something the better part of the community did to the others to make them orderly, moral, and tractable.’ ”1

Tuesday, September 05, 2017

I Don't Trust Vice Or Anonymous But This Seems Worth Pursuing


motherboard.vice |  It is an absolute certainty that, with sufficient thought, a new mechanism may someday be designed, capable of integrating thousands of talented individuals and existing organizations into a sort of parallel civic ecosystem.

What is the proper role, then, for the citizen who takes citizenship seriously, and counts it a duty to defend the rights not just of Americans but of those populations abroad who ultimately bear the brunt of our civic failings? For many, the answer is to continue the hard work of engaging within the system—voting, working for better candidates, donating time and money to the organizations that do what they can to prevent things from deteriorating even further. This is entirely appropriate. But even the reformers are likely to recognize, now, that this may not be sufficient in the face of the political conditions we face—and that the consequences of a morally failed American republic, continuing on its present course for even just another decade, would be irreparable. No competent observer of our current trajectory can today disregard this scenario, or others far worse.

That this problem is now widely recognized is the first of two reasons why a solution is now in reach.

Here we have the second reason why a solution is now within reach. The most important fact of the 21st century is that any individual can now collaborate with any other individual on the planet. This has happened with extraordinary suddenness, in historical terms; by the same accounting, it has also happened quite recently, and so remains largely unexplored. We cannot hope to know what this means as of yet, then, any more than someone who observed the advent of the printing press or gunpowder could have predicted, respectively, the Reformation or Europe's eventual seizure of much of the world. Nonetheless, the implications are becoming clearer as the years proceed; the internet itself has quickened the pace of our history, even as it makes the future more unpredictable.

pursuanceproject |  For the first time in history, any individual may now collaborate with any other individual. One may get a sense of the implications of this by considering how different human history would have been had early man possessed some psychic ability to find and communicate with anyone else across the world. We now have something very similar, and in some ways more powerful. 

It's easy to underestimate the significance of this in part because it's also easy to overestimate it and, worse, to romanticize it. The advent of the internet was immediately followed by triumphalist manifestos setting out the great and positive changes that were now afoot. That much of what was predicted didn't immediately come to pass has led some to challenge the entire premise of the internet as a potentially revolutionary force for good. 

Certainly the utopian predictions of the early ‘90s were off the mark; indeed the clearest picture we have today contains seeds of actual dystopia. Meanwhile, the trivial uses to which the internet is commonly put can make it difficult to take seriously as a transcendental factor in our civilization. But then gunpowder was originally used to make fireworks. And a technology that may be used to oppress may also be used to liberate. Again, gunpowder comes to mind. 

The way in which events have proceeded in our society since the advent of the internet tells us less about the internet than it does about our society. There are a few lessons we can glean, though. In the large, we know that mass connectivity does not automatically lead to mass enlightenment. We know that states will sometimes seek to use the internet to further their control over information, and that they will sometimes be successful in this. We know many things of this sort. But none of this tells us what the internet will ultimately mean for human civilization. That will be determined on the ground, in the years to follow.


When Zakharova Talks Men Of Culture Listen...,

mid.ru  |   White House spokesman John Kirby’s statement, made in Washington shortly after the attack, raised eyebrows even at home, not ...