In The Beginning
Jupiter Of The
Thunderbolt
VArchive.org
Overthrow
Of The Cities Of The Plain
The Book of Genesis portrays the age of the
patriarchs as a time of great upheavals in nature in which the geology of the
Jordan Valley underwent some drastic changes.
The focus of these events was in the place now occupied by the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea,
according to the Genesis account, was not yet in existence in the days of
Abraham. In its place there was a fertile plain, known as the plain of Sittim, with five populous cities: Sodom,
Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, and Zoar. When Lot arrived in the region he “lifted up his
eyes, and beheld all the plain of Jordan, that it was well-watered everywhere
. . . even as the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt.”
The nineteenth chapter of the Book of Genesis
tells of a catastrophe in which these cities were overwhelmed, overturned,
and swallowed by the earth:
The sun was risen
upon the earth when . . . the Lord rained upon Sodom
and upon Gomorrah
brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; And he overthrew those
cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that
which grew upon the ground. . . .
And Abraham got up early in the morning to
the place where he stood before the Lord; And he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah,
and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the
country went up as the smoke of a furnace.
The description of this upheaval has always
aroused wonder: “There is clearly something unnatural or extraordinary that
is recorded,” one commentator wrote.
The great rift of the Jordan and the Dead Sea
bear witness to a tremendous upheaval. “With the end of the Tertiary period,
in an event of extreme violence . . . the entire Syrian land, from its south
end to its north end, was torn apart and the ground in between sank into the
depths.” So wrote Professor M. Blanckenhorn, the
explorer of the region of the Dead Sea. In his later work he advanced the age of the rift to the
pluvial, or the beginning of the first glacial age. The origin of the Dead Sea occurred “in a great mountain movement, with
collapse and dislocation that took place at the beginning of the pluvial, in
the first glacial period. . . . In these titanic events conditions were
created for the existence of an inner sea.”
A period of dryness followed the first glacial, or pluvial period. In a new pluvial period, the
second glacial epoch, the lake reached its greatest dimensions: the Dead Sea
spread to the northern side of the present Sea of Galilee, engulfing it
together with the Jordan
Valley between. At the
time, as fossil snails show, the water was not yet saline.
The rift in which the Lake
of Galilee, the Jordan, and the Dead Sea
lie is the deepest depression on any continent. The surface of the Dead Sea
is close to 400 meters below the level of the Mediterranean,
and its deepest bottom is some 320 meters lower still. The shore falls
steeply from the Judean mountains on the west; on the eastern side of the
rift rise the Moabite mountains. The walls of the chasm show sharp broken
strata that remained horizontal, which proves that the breaking down was
instantaneous. The force which caused this slide movement
must have been stupendous. The ground of the rift around the Dead Sea is covered with coagulated lava masses, taking
the form of an immense herd of giant elephants with rough skin. These lava
eruptions from fissures are ascribed to the second interglacial period. To the south end of the Dead Sea towers a big cliff of salt
called Jebel Usdum (Mount
of Sodom). “It is absolutely impossible that the salt sediment of a sea
should precipitate in such a form.”
“Only the rupture of the ground could create this site, singular in
the entire world.”
The destruction of Sodom
and Gomorrah took place in historical times,
according to my scheme in a catastrophe which caused also the end of the Old
Kingdom in Egypt.
The geologists refer the upheaval which tore Syria in two to the end of the
Tertiary period—long before human history began.
Now the question is legitimate: how old is
the Dead Sea?
The Age Of The Dead Sea
There is a way of calculating the age of the Dead Sea. This interior lake contains concentrated
solutions of salts. These salts flow into the sea with the waters of its
tributaries. Thermal springs bring salt to the Sea of Galilee, and the Jordan carries them to the Dead
Sea, which has no outlet. From the surface of the Dead Sea, in the deep hot rift, the water evaporates,
leaving the salts behind. By calculating the amount of salts in the sea and
the amount that reaches it annually by way of the Jordan
and other streams, as well as from thermal springs on its shores, the
approximate age of the Dead Sea can be
determined. Such an attempt was partially made. The magnesium salts in the Jordan served
as a basis for the calculation. It was reckoned that the present annual rate
of influx of magnesium in the water of the Jordan
alone, when related to the concentration of magnesium in the Dead Sea, should give a figure of approximately 50,000
years as the age of the sea. The author of this estimate
admitted that even this figure is probably too high; the salinity of the Jordan
must have decreased with time, for the thermal sources carry more salt when
they are young and their temperature is high.
In the above calculation, it was estimated
that the Jordan carries
six million tons of water daily to the Dead Sea
and that it deposits 181 million tons of magnesium annually. However, on an
average day more than double that amount evaporates from the Dead Sea, and its surface does not fall, other sources
must be making up the difference.
The rivers Zerka (Callirhoe) and Arnon, which
flow into the sea from the east, carry salt solutions from many springs. The
shores of the Dead Sea abound in highly
concentrated thermal springs which contain rich amounts of magnesium. These
sources flow directly into the sea, bringing a richer influx of magnesium
than the Jordan.
In addition there are, on the shores of the Dead Sea,
abundant vestiges of thermal springs with rich sediments of salts that are
inactive at present. It is highly probable, too, that there are submarine
sources in the Dead Sea which may provide
magnesium, but they are indeterminable.
When these factors are taken into
consideration the age of the Dead Sea,
computed on the basis of its magnesium content, must be drastically reduced.
A computation that takes, as its basis, the
amount of sodium in the Jordan
points to a recent date for the origin of the Dead Sea.
The proportion of sodium to magnesium in the water of the Jordan is about 4:1; in the Dead
Sea it is 1:2. If the Jordan were the only source of the sodium
for the Dead Sea the age of the Dead Sea would be only about 6,000 years. But
the thermal sources on the western, eastern, and southern shores contain
sodium too; so may the submarine sources, which cannot be evaluated. It is
likely, therefore, that the sea has existed for only about four thousand
years. When again the fact is taken into account that the thermal sources are
usually more concentrated when they first break out and when they are at a higher
temperature, it may well be asked why the age of this sea should not be
reduced still more. It is probable that deeper levels of water have a greater
salt concentration.
Fifty thousand years as the age of the Dead
Sea was an unexpectedly low estimate: the rift in which the Dead
Sea is situated is considered to be the result of a catastrophe
at the beginning of the first glacial period. Now a simple
reckoning shows that the saline sea with the Jordan has not existed longer
than five thousand years.
The Great Rift & The Jordan
The story of the violent changes that
occurred in the Jordan Valley, the memory of which is connected with the
time of the patriarchs and in which Sodom and Gomorrah were overturned, does not mention that the Valley of Sittim, where
the cities were located, became an inner sea. Sulphur and brimstone fell from heaven, one
of the best cultivated areas was overturned, fire from beneath and fire from
above accomplished the desolation—all this is described; but not the
appearance of a sea. However, when the Israelites under Moses and Joshua
reached the area in their flight from Egypt, they found the lake there.
It seems to have appeared after a catastrophe later than the one that
destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.
But if there was no Dead Sea before the time
of the Exodus, whither did the Jordan flow, assuming it was
already in existence? The Jordan
might not have existed at all, or it could have flowed into the open sea, the
Mediterranean. It probably did not flow
along the Rift over the Arabah into the Aqaba Gulf of the Red Sea,
as no traces of marine life are found at the height of the watershed of Arabah. The barrier between the Dead Sea and the Aqaba
Gulf is about 500
meters high. The watershed between the Jordan River and the Kishon River which flows into the Mediterranean, at Mount Gilboa, is
500 meters above the ocean level. The topographical shape of the region of
the Beth Shan
Valley, stretching from the Jordan towards the Esdraelon Valley,
makes the flow of the Jordan
into the Mediterranean a far more acceptable conjecture than a presumed flow
of the Jordan over the
slopes of the mountain of Hor into the Red Sea. Of course, it can be regarded as certain that
the geography of the environs of the Red Sea and of the continents in general
was quite different before and after the catastrophe that resulted in the
formation of the Dead Sea.
The Great Rift, which begins in Syria between
the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, runs along the Jordan Valley, the Dead Sea, the
Arabah, the Aqaba gulf,
the Red Sea, and continues through the continent of Africa as far as
Zimbabwe, is generally regarded as the product of a grandiose revolution in
the shell of the Earth: for many thousands of kilometers
the Great Rift runs from Asia to Africa.
Prehistoric man witnessed the latest phases
of widespread tectonic movements which convulsed East Africa and provoked
great subsidences (of as much as 1500 feet or more)
in the early Quarternary strata, whereby was
occasioned the discharge of lava and erupted scoriae, modifying notably the
courses of the rivers and the circumstances in which the lakes rose or fell
in level, and even changing the outlines of these bodies of water.
Changes in the watercourses and lakes took
place along the entire length of the Rift. The deepest place in the Rift on
land is the valley of the Jordan
and the Dead Sea. It appears that the
catastrophe which originated the Dead Sea, caused also the origin of the Great Rift.
Beyond the Red Sea,
which stretches for several hundred kilometers and has
not a single affluent river, the aquatic life of the African lakes and rivers
belongs to the so-called Ethiopian zoogeographical region. According to Annandale “the explanation of the Ethiopian affinity of
the fish fauna of the Jordan
is that the Jordan formed
at one time merely part of a river system that ran down the Great
Rift Valley. The Jordan
was one branch of this huge river system, the chain of lakes in East Africa
represents the other; and together they opened into the Indian
Ocean.”
Whatever the structural changes of the earth
in the catastrophes before that which I describe here, there must have been
some time when the Jordan
streamed into the valley of Sittim (the name of the
plain before the Dead Sea originated) and continued into the Mediterranean,
most probably through the Jezreel Valley.
Legendary reminiscences from the patriarchal
age indicate that the Jordan
existed before the Dead Sea came into being.
It appears that the coming out of Paddan-aram to
Canaan required the passage of a river. Today the the
way from Palestine
to the north does not require the crossing of water. But if the Jordan did flow through the Esdraelon Valley into the Mediterranean,
it had to flow in a direction opposite to the one in which it flows today.
Does there exist any
reminiscence about the Jordan
changing the direction of its flow?
It is not the story in the book of Joshua
about the Jordan halting
its flow—there it is told that the water was stopped at Adama,
north of Jericho.
This indicates that the flow of the Jordan was already from north to south,
as today. The existence of the Dead Sea is also mentioned at the time the
Israelites approached Canaan, but it is
described as recent: it is called “the sea of the plain.”
The blocking of the Jordan
River by falling slices of the banks happened
a number of times. The stoppage referred to in the book of Joshua is
described as a temporary blocking of the Jordan River in a time of frequent
earthquakes, and not as a reversal of the flow.
But there are, in Scripture, references to
the reversal of the flow of the Jordan:
When Israel
went out of Egypt.
. . The sea saw and fled: Jordan
was driven back. The mountains skipped like rams, the little hills like
lambs. What ailed thee, o thou sea, that thou fleddest?
thou Jordan that thou was driven back? Tremble, thou
earth, at the presence of the Lord . . . Which turned the rock into a standing water, the flint into a fountain of waters.
Here the reversal of the flow of the Jordan is associated in time not only with the
Exodus and the catastrophe of the Sea
of Passage, but also
with the appearance of a new inner sea ("standing water” ).
A river that changed the direction of its
flow must have been regarded as a very remarkable phenomenon.
An inscription of Thutmose I reads: “Frontier northern, as far as that inverted water
which goeth down in going up.” In order to explain
this passage it was supposed that the Egyptians could not imagine that a
river flows otherwise that from south to north, as does the Nile, and they wondered
at a river flowing in another direction. The Euphrates flows from the
north-west to the south-east; the Oronotes north to
south for part of its course, afterwards turning west and emptying into the Mediterranean. The explanation is obviously inadequate.
There are many rivers in the world and they flow in all directions. The river
that reversed its direction is the Jordan.
Prior to the Exodus, the Jordan Valley
was on a higher level than the Mediterranean Sea.
With the rupture of the tectonic structure along the river and the dropping
of the Dead Sea chasm, many brooks in southern Palestine
which had been flowing to the south must have changed their direction and
started to flow towards Palestine, emptying
into the southern shore of the Dead Sea.
This occurrence served as a symbolic picture for the dispersed Children of
Israel, who also will return to their homeland: “Turn again our captivity as
the streams in the south.”
The plain of Siddim
became a sea. When Israel
“wandered into the wilderness in a solitary way [the Lord turned] rivers into
the wilderness, and the watersprings into dry
ground; and fruitful land into barrenness; [but elsewhere he turned] the
wilderness into standing water, and the dry ground into watersprings.”
The opening of the Great Rift, or its further
expansion, accompanied by the overturning of the plain and the origin of the Dead Sea, was a catastrophe that ended an era. In my
understanding the end of the Early Bronze Age or the Old Kingdom in Egypt
coincided with these events.
The End Of The Early Bronze Age
The Old Kingdom in Egypt, the period when the
pyramids were built, a great and splendid age, came to its end in a natural
disaster. “At the conclusion of the Sixth Dynasty . . . Egypt is suddently blotted out from our sight as if some great
catastrophe had overwhelmed it.” The second city of Troy came to an end at the same time the
Old Kingdom of Egypt fell; it was destroyed in a violent paroxysm of nature.
The Early Bronze Age was simultaneously terminated in all the countries of
the ancient East—a vast catastrophe spread ruin from Troy
to the Valley of the Nile. This fact has
been extensively documented by Claude F. A. Schaeffer, professor at College
de France, excavator of Ras Shamra
(Ugarit).
Schaeffer observed at Ras
Shamra on the Syrian coast clear signs of great
destruction that pointed to violent earthquakes and tidal waves, and other
signs of a natural disaster. Among the greatest of these took place at the
end of the Old Kingdom in Egypt.
At the occasion of his visit to Troy, then
under excavation by Carl Blegen, he became aware
that Troy,
too, had been repeatedly destroyed by natural catastrophes at the same times
when Ras Shamra was
destroyed. The distance from the Dardanelles near which the mound of Troy lies to Ras Shamra in Syria
is about 600 miles on a straight line. In modern annals of seismology no
earthquake is known to have occurred covering an area of such an extent. He
then compared the findings of these two places with signs of earthquakes in
numerous other localities of the ancient East. After painstaking work he came
to the conclusion that more than once in historical times the entire region
had been shaken by prodigious earthquakes. As to the destruction that ended
the Early Bronze Age, Schaeffer wrote:
There is not for us the slightest doubt that
the conflagration of Troy II corresponds to the catastrophe that made an end
to the habitations of the Early Bronze Age of Alaca
Huyuk, of Alisar, of
Tarsus, of Tepe Hissar
[in Asia Minor], and to the catastrophe that burned ancient Ugarit (II) in Syria, the city of Byblos
that flourished under the Old Kingdom of Egypt, the contemporaneous cities of
Palestine, and that was among the causes that terminated the Old Kingdom of
Egypt.
In the same catastrophe were destroyed the
civilizations of Mesopotamia and Cyprus. What caused “the
disappearance of so many cities and the upheaval of an entire civilization”?
“It was an all-encompassing catastrophe. Ethnic migrations were, no doubt,
the consequence of the manifestation of nature. The initial and real causes
must be looked for in some cataclysm over which man had no control.”
Everywhere it was simultaneous and sudden.
The shortcoming in Schaeffer’s work was in
not making the logical deduction that if catastrophes of such dimensions took
place in historical times, there must be references to them in ancient
literary sources. If a cataclysm terminated the Early Bronze Age, decimated
the population, but left also survivors, then some memory of the events must
have also found its way to be preserved in writing—if not by survivors,
turned to vagrancy and having to take care for the first necessities of life,
then by the descendants of the survivors.
In my scheme the end of the Early Bronze Age
or Old Kingdom in Egypt
is the time of the momentous events connected with the story of the patriarch
Abraham, and described in the Book of Genesis as the overturning of the
plain. The cause of the catastrophe could not have been entirely unknown to
the ancients. We must therefore become attentive also to other traditions
connected with these events.
Zedek
The time of the patriarch Abraham witnessed
unusual behavior by the planet Jupiter. The fact
that Jupiter displayed a burst of activity exactly in the time of Abraham
must not appear a coincidence: it was in the times of great global
catastrophes, when the world was threatened with destruction, that religious
reformers gained prominence and contemporaries looked to a divine man for
guidance.
Zedek was the name of
Jupiter, and we read that in the days of Abraham the planet underwent some
visible changes. Rabbinical sources relate that when Abraham was on an
expedition against Cherdlaomer, king of Elam, and
his allied kings—who had captured and despoiled Sodom, and taken Abraham’s
nephew Lot into captivity—the star Zedek
illuminated the night, thereby ensuring the expedition’s success.
“When he returned from his victory over Cherdlaomer and the kings who were allied with him,” the
book of Genesis relates, “the king of Sodom
came out to greet him. And Melchizedek, king of Salem, brought out bread and wine; he was
priest of the Most High.” Abraham ceded to Melchizedek the spoils of the war
he had obtained in Syria
from Cherdlaomer.
Ancient Salem
was a holy place, and Palestine
was a holy land from grey antiquity. Thus, in the documents of the Old
Kingdom in Egypt, Palestine is named
God’s Land (Toneter), or Divine (Holy) Land.
Abraham lived at the end of the Old Kingdom in Egypt;
and documents from that time already refer to Palestine as God’s Land. But in early
times, it was an astral god.
The meaning of the name Melchizedek is “Zedek is [My] King.” Zedek, as
said, is the name of the planet Jupiter, remaining so in the astronomy of the
Jews in later ages. In the Talmud Zedek refers to
Jupiter. Zedek also has the meaning of
“righteousness” or “justice.” It is beyond the scope of this work to find
which of the meanings—the name of the planet or a word in common
usage—preceded and which followed. It is conceivable that this planet was
worshipped in that remote time and that, in the days of the patriarch
Abraham, the cult of Jupiter was prominent in the Salem of the high priest Melchizedek.
Melchizedek, “priest of the most high,” was, it
follows, a worshipper of Jupiter.
The Change In Jupiters
Motion
In the Tractate Shabbat of the Babylonian
Talmud it is said that in order to teach Abraham the futility and
meaninglessness of astrology, the Lord let the planet Zedek,
or Jupiter, change its rising point from west to east:
“Go forth (i.e. cease) thy planet-(gazing),
for Israel
is free from planetary influence. What is thy calculation? Because Zedek (Jupiter) stands in the West? I will
turn it back and place it in the East.” And thus it is written, Who hath raised up Zedek from the East?
He hath summoned it for his sake (sc. for the sake of Abraham).
This statement of the rabbis contains some
contradictory ideas. Nevertheless, it may preserve certain elements of
ancient lore.
The Babylonians described Marduk,
or Jupiter, as having an eastward motion, different from the other planets:
“The earliest system from Babylon
has, however, East and West reversed, and assigns to its chief god Marduk, as god of the planet Jupiter, a definite easterly
direction; to Mercury, on the other hand, a westerly one.”
“The Ra-mythology [of Egypt] is that which describes [Ra’s ] course from west to east.” Ra, rising in the west,
was called “Harakhte, only god, king of the gods;
he riseth in the west.” However, some hymns were
addressed to “Ra when he riseth in the Eastern part
of heaven.”
Egyptian lore also knew of a “Horus of the West” and a “Horus
of the East.” Horus
was the planet Jupiter.
The expression found in Latin literature,
Jupiter Dianus, or two-faced, could be interpreted
as denoting two motions of Jupiter, and eastward and a westward. This
conforms to the same expression applied to the Sun where, as I endeavored to show, it denotes easterly and westerly
movements of the luminary.
The celestial mechanics of the implied
reversal of Jupiter’s apparent motion remains unsolved. Jupiter apparently
changed the place of its rising points without a similar and simultaneous
change by the Sun and all the planets and stars. It might seem that in order
for Jupiter alone to be subject to a change, a reversal of orbital motion is
required, an unlikely proposition from the point of view of celestial
mechanics.
Earlier we asked in relation to Saturn’s
great prominence, was not the Earth at some early period
a satellite of that planet; and we may ask again, with the ascendance of
Jupiter, was the Earth not in the domain of this successor to the celestial
throne? Theoretically, if the Earth were revolving around Jupiter, a reversal
of our planet’s north and south geographical poles would cause Jupiter to
appear to change the point of its rising.
The Worship Of Jupiter
“From Zeus let us begin; him do we mortals
never leave unnamed; full of Zeus are all the streets and all the
marketplaces of men; full is the sea and the heavens thereof . . . He it was
who first set up the signs in heaven . . . Wherefore him do we men ever
worship first and last.”
In these words Aratus
(fl. -310) pictured the place the planet-god Jupiter occupied in the thoughts
of men. Nobody today in the streets and marketplaces mentions the planet
Jupiter.
St. Augustine, seven centuries
after Aratus, asked:
But since they call Jupiter king of all, who
will not laugh to see his star so far surpassed in brilliancy by the star of
Venus? . . . They answer that it only appears so because it is higher up and
much farther away from the earth. If, therefore, its greater dignity has
deserved a higher place, why is Saturn higher in the heavens that Jupiter?
Marduk, the great god
of the Babylonians, was the planet Jupiter; so was Amon
of the Egyptians; Zeus of the Greeks was the same planet; Jupiter of the
Romans, as the name shows, was again the same planet. Why was this planet
chosen as the most exalted deity? In Greece it was called “all-highest,
mighty Zeus,” in Rome “Jupiter Optimus, Maximus”; in Babylon it was known as “the greatest of the
stars”; as Ahuramazda it was called by Darius “the
greatest of the gods”; In India Shiva was described as “the great ruler” and
considered the mightiest of all the gods; he was said to be
“as brilliant as the sun.” Everywhere Jupiter was regarded as the greatest
deity, greater than the sun, moon, and other planets.
Homer makes Zeus say that all the other gods
together could not pull him down, but he could pull them along with the
Earth. “That is how far I overwhelm you all, both gods and
men.” Commenting on this passage, Eustathius wrote
that according to some ancient authorities Homer meant the orbits of the
planets from which Jupiter could drive the rest of them, but they could not
drive it. This sentence of Homer is close to the truth.
Jupiter is greater and more powerful than Saturn, its rival, together with
Mars, Earth, Venus, and Mercury. Jupiter is more than a thousand times
greater than the Earth or Venus in volume, and six thousand times greater
than Mercury. But it appears that one could not guess this
from observation with the naked eye. Even through a very powerful telescope
Jupiter looks like an inch-large flat disc, surrounded by its four larger satellites.
The ancients knew something unknown to the
moderns when they asserted that Jupiter can overpower all other planets, the
Earth included.
Jupiter Of The Thunderbolt
Nobody who observes a thunderstorm would
arrive at the conclusion that the planet Jupiter sends the lightning.
Therefore it is singular that peoples of antiquity pictured the planet-god
Jupiter as wielding a thunderbolt—this is equally true of the Roman Jupiter,
the Greek Zeus, and the Babylonian Marduk.
Pliny wrote:
It is not generally known what has been
discovered by men who are the most eminent for their learning, in consequence
of their assiduous observations of the heavens, that the fires which fall
upon the earth, and receive the name of thunderbolts (fulminum
nomen habeant) proceed
from the three superior stars (siderum), but
principally from the one which is situated in the middle . . . and hence it
is commonly said, the thunderbolts are darted by Jupiter.
Pliny knew the origin of lightning in the
friction of clouds—he wrote that “by the dashing of two clouds, the lightning
may flash out.” He did not confuse lightning with the thunderbolt that is
discharged by the planets. He makes a distinction between “earthly bolts, not
from stars,” and “the bolts from the stars.” Pliny knew that the Earth is one
of the planets: “Human beings are distributed all around the earth and stand
with their feet pointing towards each other . . . Another marvel, that the
earth herself hangs suspended and does not fall and carry us with it.”
The planet-god Jupiter was frequently shown
with a thunderbolt in his hand. The electrical discharge coming from Jupiter
is described in many ancient texts. In the Orphic Hymn to Jupiter the Thunderer, he is described as he “who shak’st
with fiery light the World.” “From thee proceeds th’etherial
lightning’s blaze, flashing around intolerable rays.” “Horrid, untamed, thou rollest thy flames along. Rapid, etherial
bolt, descending fire, the earth . . . trembles.” The earth does not quake
when struck by regular lightnings. The bolt of
Jupiter falls from the azure sky, not veiled by clouds.
The electrical discharge from a planet is
described very clearly by Pliny: “heavenly fire is spit forth by the planet
as a crackling charcoal flies from a burning log.” “It is accompanied by a
very great disturbance of the air,” produced “by the birth-pangs, so to
speak, of the planet in travail.”
Also Seneca discerns between “the lesser
bolts” which seek “houses and undeserving homes” and the bolts of the planet
Jupiter “by which the threefold mass of mountains fell.”
In the Babylonian epic, the Enuma Elish, it
is told how Marduk, or the planet Jupiter, “raised
the thunderbolt, his mighty weapon. He mounted the chariot, the storm
unequalled for terror. . . . With overpowering brightness his head was
crowned.” He is also described as the planet-god “at whose battle heaven
quaked, at whose wrath the Deep is troubled . . . in the bright firmament his
course is supreme . . . with the evil wind his weapons blaze forth, with his
flame steep mountains are destroyed. . . .” A hymn to Marduk
tells that “by his warfare the heaven resounds; before his anger the deep is
shaken; before his sharp weapon the gods draw back.”
The Egyptian pharaoh Seti
described Amon as “a circling star which scatters
its seed in fire . . . like a flame of fire . . . irresistible in heaven and
in earth.”
Brihaspati, or the planet
Jupiter in Hindu astronomy, is invoked in the Rig Veda as one who “in destroying enemies cleaves apart their cities . .
. . Brihaspati strikes the enemy with his
thunderbolts.” Shiva is called “wielder of the thunderbolt.”
In Worlds in Collision the
overpowering of one planet by another in conjunctions was quoted from the
Hindu astronomical books; the electrical power which manifests itself in
conjunctions is called bala. Jupiter
as the strongest planet is a balin.
Where A Planetary Bolt Struck The Ground
We recognize in the change in Jupiter’s
motion the cause of great catastrophes in the solar system which affected also
the Earth in the age of the patriarchs, or at the close of the Old Kingdom. In that period Jupiter became the supreme
deity, having removed Saturn from its orbit. Classical historians, speaking
of the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, told of “fire from the sky.” Tacitus narrated that the catastrophe of Sodom
and Gomorrah
was caused by a thunderbolt—the plain was “consumed by lightning"—and he
added: “Personally I am quite prepared to grant that once-famous cities may
have been burnt by fire from heaven.” Also Josephus asserted that the cities
had been “consumed by thunderbolts.” Philo wrote that “lightnings
poured out of heaven,” destroying the cities.
Since the time of Abraham was the period of
Jupiter’s domination that followed Saturn’s and preceded that of Venus, we
are led to the surmise that the thunderbolts which destroyed the plain with
its cities originated from Jupiter, or from a magnetosphere or ionosphere
overcharged by the nearby presence of the giant planet. Even today discharges
leap between Jupiter and Io, one of its satellites. The charging of the
Earth’s atmosphere in the presence of Jupiter’s huge magnetosphere prepared
the way for a discharge: a planetary bolt struck the ground in the Valley of Sittim.
For a long time I thought that the
destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and other cities of the Plain
resulted from an interplanetary discharge caused by Jupiter: classical
historians speaking of this event told of “fire from the sky.” The period was
that of Jupiter’s era of domination that followed that of Saturn and preceded
that of Venus; and reference to the king and high priest Malki-zedek
("My King is Zedek,” Zedek
being the usual name of the planet Jupiter), in the days of the patriarch
Abraham and of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, seem to support my
interpretation of the agent of the catastrophe. This very catastrophe caused
the origin of the Dead Sea and also of the entire African Rift that extends
from north of the River Jordan all the way through two thirds of the length
of Africa. But, reading in 1960 of a
reference to Professor Agrest, a Russian astronomer
who thought that an atomic explosion had taken place, I saw some alluring
points in it. If, as Prof. Agrest seems to assume,
the three angels were extraterrestrial beings that followed Abraham from Mamre to Sodom and placed a time device in Sodom, the
warning to Lot and his family to leave the place and not to turn their faces
to the city they soon would flee, finds some parallels in the atomic age.
The observers of the first atomic explosion
at Alamogordo, New Mexico
were told, as was Lot and his family, not to look at the fission, but the
wife of Lot looked; she may have been
blinded—in the legend she turned into a pillar of salt.
At Alamogordo
the observers were impressed, actually overwhelmed, by the tremendous light
effect, even with their eyes closed. Next rose a pillar of smoke as if from a
furnace (Genesis XIX: 28): Abraham “looked toward Sodom
and Gomorrah,
and towards all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the
country went up as the smoke of the furnace.”
If the time of the event is asked to be
determined, I would strongly question the implication that extraterrestrial
visitors came to Earth as late as the end of the Old Kingdom of Egypt, for
this is the time to which the age of the Patriarch Abraham belongs—and on
this I would expand somewhere else.
Yet we are left with my original idea that
goes back to the early forties—that the agent of the destruction was a bolt
from Jupiter, or from the magnetosphere or ionosphere, overcharged by the
nearby presence of the giant planet.
The Origin Of Nitrate Deposits
The Dead Sea, for many centuries proclaimed
to be dead and capable of yielding nothing, is today one of the greatest
reservoirs of natural nitrate under exploitation in the world, competing with
the deposits of Chile.
The deposits of nitrate in Chile are
found in a narrow strip over 1400 miles in length, in the great desert in the
northern part of the country. The origin of the nitrates is a problem that
has not been solved.
This is a moot question on which no two
geologists agree . . . One [theory] is that in prehistoric times the entire
nitrate zone was a part of the Pacific Ocean,
and that through volcanic disturbances that portion of the sea was cut off
and the water evaporated by a very slow process. Fish skeletons found in the caliche furnish good proof of this assertion, as does the
fact that the Pacific coast is rising gradually. This theory is, however,
contradicted by the fact that no bromine exists there—a substance naturally
looked for in deposits thus formed.”
Another theory attributes the origin of the caliche to an electrical process. A passage of an
electric spark through the moist air produces a combination of nitrogen and
oxygen resulting in nitric acid. Electrical storms—a frequent occurrence in
the Andes—may have acted in this way and
formed great quantities of nitric acid. . . .
But thunderstorms occur in many other places
all over the world, near and far from the sea, and yet there are no deposits
of nitrates in these places.
“A later theory maintains that the deposits
are an accumulation of land drainage brought down through ages from the
highlands along the coast.” But how was it formed in the highlands of Chile?
“Others explain the formation as the work of microbes, or as the result of
the action of volcanoes discharging through their craters ammonia-charged
steam there condensed.” But deposits of nitrates are not formed in other volcanic
regions.
No explanation satisfied the chemists and
geologists, and therefore new ideas were constantly launched. In the
laboratory a very efficient method of building oxides of nitrates is applied:
“passing air through a powerful electric arc, in which the nitrogen and
oxygen of the air combine chemically to form oxides of nitrogen.”
Nature is a great laboratory too. The Dead Sea region was the scene of an interplanetary
electrical discharge when a powerful electrical spark leaped down from above
or sprang up from the earth.
A similar event created the Chilean deposits
of nitrates, and the recollections of the Incas of Peru preserved the memory
of this grandiose discharge. “Fire came down from heaven and destroyed a
great part of the people, while those who were taking to flight were turned
into stones.”
The Transmutation Of Oxygen Into Sulphur
In the building of saltpeter,
or potassium nitrate, the nitrogen of the air took a major part. How was the
oxygen of the atmosphere affected by the interplanetary discharges?
It has been observed since ancient times that
lightnings are attended by an odor
of sulphur. In the twelfth book of the Odyssey, Homer says:
“Zeus thundered and hurled his bolt upon the
ship, and she quivered from stem to stern, smitten by the bolt of Zeus, and
was filled with sulphurous smoke.”
Again, in the Iliad: “When beneath the
blast of father Zeus an oak falleth uprooted, and a
dread reek of brimstone ariseth therefrom,—then
verily courage no longer possesseth him that looketh thereon. . .”
And: “[Zeus] thundered horribly and let loose
the shimmering lightning and dashed it to the ground in front of the horses
of Diomedes, and a ghastly blaze of flaming sulphur
shot up, and the horses, terrified, both cringed away against the chariot.”
The same observation is put into a scientific
prose by Pliny: “Lightning and thunder are attended with a strong smell of
sulphur, and the light produced by them is of a sulphurous complexion.” The
second part of Pliny’s sentence is also correct: pioneer work on electrical
discharges in modern times was produced using globes of sulphur in rotation. Sulphur is one of the
best insulators and static electricity, when accumulated on it, discharges in
electrical sparks toward objects brought close to it.
Electrical discharges produced without the
help of sulphur are also accompanied by the smell of it. This odor was referred to by Benjamin Franklin who, comparing
lightning and electricity, wrote to the Royal Society in London that both phenomena are attended by
a sulphurous smell. This he mentioned among twelve other properties which
suggested that lightning is an electrical discharge. No importance was
attributed by him or by anyone else since to this sulphurous smell. The smell
of ozone is different from the smell of vaporized sulphur or sulphurous
compounds, and the supposition that the ancients were unable to distinguish
between the two disregards the fact that besides the smell of ozone a
sulphurous smell follows an electric discharge.
This suggests to me that sulphur is actually
produced from the air by the passage of an electrical discharge. The quantity
of sulphur must be detectable in a careful laboratory experiment.
Quite possibly the detection of sulphur
produced by a strong electrical discharge, by means other than smell, has
already been fulfilled. A very strong discharge of electricity passing
through the air formed solid sulphur. The bolt of electricity that fell upon
the plain of the Pentapolis was of a magnitude
sufficient to cause a transmutation of elements on a great scale. It rained
“brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven.” The overturned plain became
full of sulphurous deposits—"the whole land thereof is brimstone, and
salt [probably potash], and burning”—and when later in another great upheaval
the plain became covered by the Dead Sea, sulphurous springs continued to
flow into the valley of the Jordan and into the Dead Sea from submerged
strata and from the springs on the shores.
At the end of the eighth century and the beginning
of the seventh century before the present era, when every fifteen years Mars
was approaching dangerously close to the Earth, Isaiah prophesied “the day of
the Lord’s vengeance,” in which day “the streams [of Idumea]
shall be turned into pitch, and the dust thereof into brimstone, and the land
thereof shall become burning pitch.” A curse upon man and his land was that
“brimstone shall be scattered upon his habitation.” “Upon the wicked he shall
rain pitch, fire and brimstone, and a horrible tempest.” This eschatological
vision was alive with Ezekiel in the days of the Babylonian Exile. He spoke
about “an overflowing rain, and great hailstones [meteorites], fire and
brimstone.”
These stories of sulphur raining from the sky
and the fearful expectations built upon them could be taken as fictions of an
imaginative mind, were not the smell of sulphur an indication of its presence
in the air following the passage of a discharge, and were not also the
presence of sulphur deposits around the Dead Sea, thrust in deep below the
ocean level, a substantiation of the story of the cataclysm.
Is the atomic source of sulphur generated by
a discharge in oxygen, or does the nitrogen of the air participate also in
the building of sulphur? It seems more probable that two atoms of oxygen are
smashed into one atom of sulphur. If the atomic weight of sulphur obtained by
electrical discharge will be found to be more than 32 (that of sulphur is
32.06) it might be due to the presence of some atoms of oxygen of the atomic
weight 17. This heavy oxygen is the product of a nitrogen atom transmuted by
the bombardment of alpha particles. We must reckon with the possibility that
a proton from broken atoms of oxygen or ozone or nitrogen enters the new
combination, or that electrons which cause the perturbation are able by
themselves to change the atomic weight of the elements.
Jupiter, Gold & The Birth Of Athene
Pindar, speaking of the
island of Rhodes, says that Zeus “rained down on the city with golden flakes
of snow” at the time Athene was born from Zeus’
head, “shouting with a far-ringing cry, and all Heaven and Mother Earth
shuddered before her.” Homer also says that “upon them [the people of Rhodes] wondrous wealth was shed by the son of Cronus.” Strabo, after quoting
Homer, adds that other writers “say that gold rained on the island the time
when Athena was born from the head of Zeus, as Pindar
states.”
Gold-bearing gravel—with ingots in
it—originated from outside of the Earth and, if we should look upon the Greek
legend of Zeus and the golden rain in Rhodes as containing revealing
elements, then the ingots came from Jupiter. It could be meteoric gold, and
as to the origin the ancients could err; but the event happened in human
memory, actually during the Early Bronze Age, or at its end.
In 1866 a human skull was unearthed in the
interior of Bald Mountain near Altaville,
in Calaveras
County, California.
The skull of Bald
Mountain was reported
to have been found in the shaft of a gold mine, in a layer of auriferous
(gold-bearing) gravel, beneath four layers of lava, each separated from the
other by four layers of gravel. The skull did not differ in structure or
dimensions from the skull of modern man; however, it was fossilized. In the
gold-bearing gravel of Calaveras were also unearthed
fossilized bones of the mammoth, the great mastodon, the tapir, horse,
hippopotamus, rhinoceros and camel, all extinct animals in pre-Columbian
America. But geologically the layer in which it was found belongs to the
Tertiary, and therefore a great embarrassment was in store for the geologists
and evolutionists. They divide the strata according to the fossils found in
them and hold that in the Tertiary there could have been no human beings, for
it is an age before the advent of man. But we have seen in the case of the Dead Sea that the great upheavals ascribed to the end
of the Tertiary took place at a much later time, actually in the time of the
Patriarchs, which is the end of the Early Bronze Age period. The auriferous
gravels of California and of the Ural Mountains had their origin at this same time.
The rain of gold on Rhodes
is assigned by Pindar to the time when Athene was born from the head of Zeus. The expulsion of
the protoplanet Venus from the body of Jupiter
followed, by decades or by centuries, the contact of Saturn and Jupiter, and
the fantasy of the peoples regarded Venus as a child of Jupiter, conceived to
him by Saturn.
The ancient Persians called Venus Tishtrya, “a magnificent and glorious star which Ahura Mazda [i.e., Jupiter] has established as master and
overseer of all the stars.” Plutarch described the events in the following
terms: “Then Horomazes [Ahura
Mazda], having magnified himself to three times his size, removed himself as
far from the sun as the sun is distant from the earth . . . and one star, seirios [i.e., Tishtrya,
or Venus] he established above all others as a guardian and watcher.”
Essays
2005 - St.Clair
Foundation Online
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