ARKTOS : The Polar Myth In Science, Symbolism & Nazi Survival
By Joscelyn Godwin
Copyright 1996, All Rights Reserved
Adventures Unlimited Press, Kempton, Illinois

COMMENTs By Rob Solàrion
Copyright 2007, All Rights Reserved

This original "word" document, if printed out on business letter-size paper, would be 43 pages long. Due to the nature of the subject matter, it would be difficult for anyone to read it all at once and fully absorb it. So read it carefully and deliberatively.

But if you feel that you still don't have enough time to read through all of it, then I suggest that you at least read the Preface and then scroll through the rest of it to read my comments, which generally refer back to the immediately preceding quoted text. This is deeply esoteric reading which a lot of people simply would not have "the eyes to see and the ears to hear" to understand. But obviously I consider it to be most important to our overall comprehension of the Crossovers of Planet X Nibiru.

Mr. Godwin's book is quite well researched and written. I highly recommend it as an addition to anyone's library!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

PART I: Prologue In Hyperborea
Chapter One: The Golden Age
Chapter Two: The Imperishable Sacred Land

PART II: The Northern Lights
Chapter Three: The Arctic Homeland
Chapter Four: The Aryan Myth
Chapter Five: The Thule Society
Chapter Six: The Black Order

PART III: The Hidden Lands
Chapter Seven: Agartha And The Polaires
Chapter Eight: Shambhala
Chapter Nine: The Hole At The Pole
Chapter Ten: Antarctica

PART IV: Arcadia Regained
Chapter Eleven: The Symbolic Pole
Chapter Twelve: Polar And Solar Traditions
Chapter Thirteen: The Spiritual Pole

PART V: The Tilt
Chapter Fourteen: The Catastrophists
Chapter Fifteen: The Uniformitarians
Chapter Sixteen: Composite Theories
Chapter Seventeen: Polar Wandering
Chapter Eighteen: The Restoration

PREFACE

Because of my interest in the Harmony of the Spheres, over the years I have read widely in that unclassifiable corner of literature sometimes described as "metaphysical", "esoteric", or "occult". In its earlier stages, my search was mainly for musical allusions and for understanding of their context. Later, when several themes forced themselves on me by sheer repetition from one text to another, I began to note them whenever I came across them, and the field of my research expanded commensurably.

One of these recurrent themes was the Pole. I came to it first because an interest in theories of the Harmony of the Spheres involved one in questions of cosmology, astronomy, and to a lesser extent astrology. Besides the more obvious themes that relate directly to the musical system, such as the twelve signs of the zodiac and the seven visible planets, I was struck by the repeated mention of some mystery concerning the poles, both those of the earth and of the heavens. Almost every major writer had something to say about it.

Once I started to concentrate on the polar theme, I quickly found that there was a school of thought which held that the earth's poles had shifted in the past, with significant results for whatever creatures were inhabiting it. Likewise, a group of authorities - more occult than scientific, in this instance - warned that the poles would shortly be shifting again. The investigation of this topic became the starting-point for the present book, and constitutes one of its major themes. The short first part (Chapters 1-2) outlines the situation that supposedly obtained before the poles shifted, which is closely allied to the mythology of a lost Golden Age.

One of the supposed results of a "non-shifted" pole, according to several sources, was that the Hyperborean or Arctic regions were formerly fit for human habitation. What manner of people lived there, and what has become of them?

[COMMENT: Recently I ran across another report about how in ancient times there were tropical coral reefs underneath the Arctic Ocean; and that when the North Pole shifted into its current position from its prior location in the North Atlantic Ocean, the mammoths of Siberia, tropical-type animals, were frozen so instantaneously and then buried permanently by ice and snow, when they are discovered and thawed today, remnants of undigested tropical plants still remain in their stomachs and their meat is fresh enough to be eaten. For additional details, see Chapter 2 of my book Planet X Nibiru : Slow-Motion Doomsday. RS]

Asking these questions led me into waters that became progressively deeper and more perilous, and I have tried to replicate my experience in the arrangement of Part Two, "The Northern Lights". Step by step, it moves from theories of the Arctic, Aryan or Nordic race to the point at which respectable science discarded the idea, leaving it to be picked up and used as a political weapon by the pseudo-scientists of the Third Reich.

One might have thought that the idea of the "Aryan Race" died with Hitler in 1945, having contributed to the unforgettable cruelties of the Nazis toward Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, and other "non-Aryan" individuals. But not only has it survived the fall of the Third Reich: it has continued to inspire a worldwide group of esotericists who combine an engagement in the spiritual path with an attitude to Nazism ranging from compliance to enthusiasm.

The reader will find that the people in question are far from being semiliterate inhabitants of the lunatic fringe. They are highly intelligent, cultivated, and familiar with the literature and techniques of esotericism (yoga, meditation, alchemy, etc.). However, they share, to a man, a certain combination of themes that are avidly cultivated in circles which my academic colleagues would shun like the plague. These include UFOs, extraterrestrials, the Hollow Earth, Hitler's survival, Nazi bases still existing in polar regions, and those "spiritual centers" called Agartha and Shambhala. Both the Arctic and the Antarctic loom large in this mythological mêlée, which is analyzed in Part Three (Chapters 7-10). Here I have tried above all to separate the sense from the nonsense, and to trace each rank growth to its roots. The reader may agree with me in suspecting that there is "something" behind all of this. Maybe he or she will know what it is: I do not, but I think that it is time to put up a warning sign saying "Watch this space."

The fourth part of the book (Chapter 11-13) is an attempt to come to terms with this material, using whatever tools the study of comparative religion and esoteric practice has provided. I believe that there are realities and truths that stand inviolate, whatever abuse is made of them for egotistic or political reasons. Christianity is one repository of such truths; the history of Christianity, an appalling example of such abuses. But it seems to me that there has been another spiritual stream in the West, parallel to Christianity, that I call the "Polar tradition". Having shown this at its worst in the Nazis, in Chapter Thirteen I give my impression of it at its highest, as exemplified by the mystical philosophers of medieval Persia.

[COMMENT: It will be interesting to note in the course of reading this book whether Godwin mentions modern Christmas trees, a pagan tradition predating Christianity. (And as it turned out, he didn't mention these trees.) These "paradise trees" were put up at the time of the Winter Solstice to commemorate The Cosmic Tree. (Is it only coincidental that the Mayan End-Time Date falls on the Winter Solstice?) The Catholic Church fought for centuries to end this "heathen" custom, but finally in the 1500s they gave up. At that point these pagan symbols became Christmas trees and glorified the birth of Lord Jesus Christ on December 25 (and this date itself was usurped from Mithraism, in which the God Mithras was born on December 25 - see below). Nowadays most people have no idea of the origin of their seasonal yuletide trees. And Santa Claus, like the gods of old, lives at the North Pole. RS]

Finally, and again in a spirit of "agnostic suspicion", this book returns to the theme of the polar shift, its history, mechanism, and causes. In presenting the mass of contradictory theories in Part Five (Chapters 14-18), I respect the examples of Charles Fort, the American collector of anomalies, who was content to document the facts that challenge "consensus reality"; and, more recently, Jacques Vallee, the writer on UFOs who emphasizes the seriousness of the phenomenon while discouraging emotional and premature conclusions. As in my profession, the teaching of undergraduates, my intention is to equip the reader for an informed and open-minded consideration of these ideas.

[COMMENT: Then there follow two paragraphs of the names of people to whom Godwin expresses his gratitude and appreciation. And since by now I have actually gotten into the book itself, let me add that it would be impossible for me to quote and comment upon each and every reference that Godwin presents for a Hyperborean "north land" at or above the Pole. His basic assumption is that at a cyclical time in the past, to be repeated in the future, our Earth was not tilted 23.5° on its axis but that our Equator was parallel to the Ecliptic, and that as a result the year lasted for exactly 360 days. In his Worlds In Collision, Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky also presented this same idea, with the postulation that the year changed from 360 to 365.25 days in the 8th Century BCE, a concept which I have discussed extensively in my books. (See below for more information about Dr. Velikovsky.) This situation brought about climatic conditions conducive to a "Golden Age" mentioned in ancient documents. It is quite clear to me, as someone who is well versed in this new science of "Polarology", that ultimately every source that Godwin cites and every conclusion that he draws refer to The Cosmic Tree, that is, Planet X Nibiru tethered to our North Pole by an electromagnetic beam. We have a "Golden Age" of the gods only during those "seasons" when Planet X is present and docked above Earth's North Pole as Hyperborea. Thus, I shall quote and comment on only those passages of this book which I consider to be especially significant. Godwin's book was published before I myself even had a website, let alone wrote two books on the subject. I would love to sit down and talk to Godwin about this entire "mystery"! RS]

Page 24

I well remember the impact of discovering these authors [Russian Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891) and Frenchman René Guénon (1886-1951), RS] and their many followers, and suspecting for the first time that the "scientific" view of history with which nearly every youngster is brainwashed might be completely wrong. To realize that we could be at the trough of a cycle, not riding the crest of an ever-rising wave, frees one from the existential anguish of our time, which clings to the broken reed of faith in human "progress" against the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Page 31

We cannot do justice in this summary to the wealth of evidence Warren [that is, the Reverend Dr. William F. Warren, President of Boston University and member of several learned societies, whose evidence was published in 1885, RS] summons up to support his theory [that the "Cradle" of the human race was situated at the North Pole, RS], nor to his persuasive and engaging argument. But while he believed that he had clinched the matter once and for all, he failed to consider the possibility that the myths and legends of many lands might not be simple records of material history. Later, in Chapter Thirteen, we will learn from Henry Corbin and the theosophers of Iran that a polar "homeland" does not even need to be on earth. The innumerable symbols that Warren takes as referring to his polar Paradise, such as Atlas's Pillar, the Spine of the Earth, the Churning-stick, the Trunk of the Cosmic Tree, the Lance of Alexander, the Irminsul Pillar, the Tower of Kronos, the Spindle of Necessity, and the Seven-runged Ladder of Mithraic initiation, do not require any human being to have set foot in the Arctic regions, but merely to have understood something of cosmology.

[COMMENT: That is a "loaded statement" if I ever saw one! And that is the value of reading a book like this "after the fact" of one's own research. Clearly all of these references to a pillar, a spindle, a churning-stick, and so forth denote the electromagnetic tethering beam connecting Planet X to our North Pole. To quote that old legend from the Siberian Irtysh River Valley: "There is a mill that grinds by itself, swings of itself, and scatters the dust a hundred versts away. And there is a golden pole with a golden cage on top which is also the Nail of the North." In this regard I should also mention that the 1900 book The Celestial Ship Of The North by Miss E. Valentia Straiton is one of the most popular pages at my SMD.com website. Literally hundreds, if not thousands, of people have downloaded it in PDF over the past few years. Merci beaucoup encore, Polo! If you have not read it yet, what are you waiting for?! RS]

Page 47

We come now to the mythology that has grown up around the Arctic homeland in the twentieth century, fed by the dual currents of esotericism and scientific theory. In order to distinguish this essentially racial concept from that of Hyperborea, the primordial center of humanity as defined in Chapter One, I will call it by the name of Thule.

Our voyage to the mythical land of Thule departs, appropriately enough, from Atlantis, queen of all the lost realms. For centuries, mainly on the authority of Plato, Atlantis was believed to have risen in the middle of what is now the Atlantic Ocean. It was Olaus Rudbeck, in the late seventeenth century, who first dissented from this common view, and identified the lost domain with his native Sweden. Rudbeck's assiduous reader Jean-Sylvan Bailly, after writing the history of ancient astronomy from which we quoted in Chapter Three, had a correspondence with Voltaire in which he persuaded himself, if not his correspondent, that Atlantis had indeed been in the far North, probably on the islands of Spitzbergen, Greenland, and Nova Zemlya. When the earth was younger, Bailly says, its interior heat was greater, and life in the Arctic may well have been more tolerable than elsewhere; besides, the earth's movement being less rapid near the poles, the atmosphere was probably less turbid, and so the legend of a perpetual spring may well have been true. Bailly's "Atlanteans" were thus the same as the "Hyperboreans" of classical legend, having originated in the "Garden of the Hesperides" near the Pole, and left evidence of their once happy climate in the fossil flora and fauna of the Arctic Circle.

[COMMENT: Atlantis, of course, was neither in the Atlantic Ocean nor in the far north. It was Antarctica. That does not necessarily rule out the presence of now sunken islands in the Atlantic, but they were not Atlantis per se. Before the North Pole moved to its current location in about 1588 BCE, Spitzbergen and Nova Zemlya would have been perfectly inhabitable. Greenland would have been about the same as now, but with the North Pole on the southern end, not the northern. And a Hyperborean is an inhabitant of Planet X Nibiru (Hyperborea), not the Lost Atlantis. Then on the pages that follow this comment, Godwin quotes extensively from a Sicilian occultist named Julius Evola, who wrote Rivolta contro il mondo moderno (Revolt against the modern world), 1951. RS]

Pages 58-60

"The memory of this Arctic seat is the patrimony of the traditions of many people, in the form either of real geographic allusions, or of symbols of its function and original significance, often transferred - as we shall see - to a super-historical significance, or else applied to other centers that may be considered as copies of the original one. ... Above all, one will notice the interplay of the Arctic theme with the Atlantic theme, of the mystery of the North with the mystery of the West, because the principal seat that succeeded the original and traditional pole was actually situated in the Atlantic. It is known that the astrophysical phenomenon of the inclination of the earth's axis caused a change of climate from one epoch to another. Moreover, as tradition tells, this inclination took place at a given moment, and in fact through the alignment of a physical and a metaphysical fact, as if a disorder in nature were reflecting a certain situation of a spiritual order. ... At any rate, it was only at a certain moment that ice and eternal night descended on the polar region. Then, with the enforced emigration from that seat, the first cycle closed and the second opened, initiating the second great era, the Atlantean Cycle ...

"From the spiritual point of view, just as from the anthropological one, two components have to be considered, one Boreal and the other Atlantean, out of the vast fund of traditions and institutions to which the primordial center gave place in turn. One refers directly to the light of the North, maintaining the original Uranian and 'polar' orientation as far as it can be approximated, the other hands down the transformation brought about by contact with the Southern powers. ...

"Especially during the period of the long icy winter, it was natural that in the northern races the experience of the Sun, of Light, and of Fire itself should have acted in a spiritually liberating sense. Hence natures which were Uranian-solar, Olympian, or filled with celestial fire would have developed much more from the sacral symbolism of these races than from others. Moreover, the rigor of the climate, the sterility of the soil, the necessity for hunting, and finally the need to emigrate across unknown seas and continents would naturally have moulded those who preserved inwardly that spiritual experience of the Sun, of the luminous sky, and of fire into the temperament of warriors, of conquerors, of navigators, so as to favor the synthesis between spirituality and virility of which characteristic traces are preserved in the Aryan races.

"Thus also in the esoteric domain, the antithesis of North and South is reflected in two types: the Hero and the Saint, the King and the Priest. ... In every historical epoch since the decline of the Boreal races, one can recognize the action of two antagonistic tendencies, repeating in one form or another the fundamental polarity of North and South. In every later civilization we have to recognize the dynamic product of the meeting or collision of these tendencies ... victory or defeat falling to one or the other of the spiritual poles, with more or less reference to the ethnic streams which originally knew the 'Northern Light' or else capitulated to the sorcery of the Mothers and the ecstatic abandon of the South."

[COMMENT: Clearly here the reference to "North" refers to the Hyperboreal ("beyond the north") Planet X Nibiru and that to the "South" as the "lower realms" on Earth. When Planet X Nibiru stands above our North Pole, there is a "Night Sun" in our sky, so those in the Northern Hemisphere never live in any sort of "total" darkness. On the other hand, those in the Southern Hemisphere would experience day and night as we ordinarily know it today, since Planet X as Hyperborea would be invisible to them. These regions were known as "the partially lighted zone" in Egyptian mythology. See Chapters 6-7 of my Planet X Nibiru : Slow-Motion Doomsday for additional details. As for Godwin's discussion of the history of Nazism, it is well presented and fascinating in its own arcane way, but it is completely irrelevant to this central idea that "something important" existed beyond the North in ancient times. Since the appearance of The Cosmic Tree is cyclical, returning once every 3,600 years or 1 Nibiruan "shar", these legends could easily refer to different epochs of The Cosmic Tree, not just to a single time when there was but a temporary Hyperboreal "Northland". The Nazi swastika (more details follow later) was usurped from Buddhism, which in turn had designed it to be a simplified representation of the Cosmic Millwheel, or cross within a circle. It is also symbolized by the Insignia of Enlil which can be seen here at my website (cosmictree.html). RS]

Pages 79-80

The displacement of the world's spiritual center from the Arctic, which up to now has been one of our constant themes, implies that it was moved to somewhere else. Miguel Serrano thought that it had gone to Antarctica, an idea that we will examine in due course. Others have suggested a location in Central Asia or South America. Wherever it is, the spiritual center is now hidden from the profane, though it remains "polar" in the operative sense of directing the world's development and the destiny of humanity.

Two names tend to crop up whenever the hidden center is mentioned: Agartha and Shambhala (I use the simplest of their many spellings).

[COMMENT: It is also spelled "Agharta" with the H in a different place. There is a man in New York City named James Greg Gavin, who is probably the world's primary authority on Agartha and the Hollow Earth these days. He has even claimed that he can organize tours to Agartha for those who are rich enough to afford this perilous journey, guided by an Agarthan citizen named Mikonos, who occasionally visits Gavin in New York City. Those who are interested can google for additional information. Shambhala has usually been thought of as being a place within the Himalaya Mountains in Tibet. This is not the first mention that I have encountered of a "hidden center" directing human destiny. I don't discount it, but no "concrete evidence" has ever been presented to verify its existence. RS]

They were named in the last chapter by Wilhelm Landig as two rival sources of occult power, the first good and idealistic, the second evil and materialistic. In saying this, Landig was unwisely relying on Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, who write as follows in The Morning of the Magician:

"According to the legend with which Haushofer no doubt became acquainted in 1905, and the version which René Guénon gave of it in his Le Roi du Monde, after the cataclysm of Gobi the lords and masters of this great center of civilization, the All-Knowing, the sons of Intelligences from Beyond, took up their abode in a vast underground encampment under the Himalayas. There, in the heart of these caves, they divided into two groups, one following the 'Right Hand Way', and the other the 'Left Hand Way'. The first of these had its center at Agarthi, a place of meditation, a hidden city of Goodness, a temple of non-participation in the things of this world. The second went to Schamballah [sic], a city of violence and power whose forces command the elements and the masses of humanity, and hasten the arrival of the human race at the 'turning-point of time'. The Wise Men, leaders of the peoples of the world, would be able to conclude a pact with Schamballah, which would be sealed with solemn oaths and sacrifices."

One would like to be able to pinpoint the original source of this scenario of Agartha-Shambhala rivalry, but it does not seem possible. Pauwels and Bergier say that Haushofer "no doubt" became acquainted with it - which means that they are guessing - in 1905, from a Vril Society for which there is no evidence before World War I. That leaves René Guénon as the implied source. Yet there is not a word in Le Roi du Monde about any of this: the name of Shambhala does not appear there (in any spelling), nor do the Gobi cataclysm, the caves beneath the Himalayas, or the schism in the underground world.

No matter: the myth was launched, and would be repeated by most of the French authors of the genre, even ones with a pretension to scholarship. Here is a baroque version from Jean-Claude Frère's Nazisme et sociétés secrètes (1974). After the cataclysm that made Hyperborea uninhabitable, perhaps 6000 years ago, the inhabitants migrated to the region now covered by the Gobi Desert and there founded a new seat: Agartha. People flocked from all directions to this "center of the world", which enjoyed 2000 years of brilliant civilization. Then another catastrophe occurred, its cause unknown: the surface of the regions was devastated, but Agatha survived underground. Thither the great initiates traveled - Frère mentions Pythagoras, Apollonius of Tyana, and Jesus - to receive orders from the Masters of the World. The Aryan people migrated in two directions: one went north and west, hoping to return to their Hyperborean homeland and to conquer their lost territories. A second group went south, to the Himalayas, and there founded another secret center in underground caverns.

[COMMENT: In 2001 in Madrid, Maria Marin and Fabrizio Torricelli published a book titled Shambhala: La Tierra de los Sabios (Shambhala: Land of the Sages), in which they discuss the visit of Apollonius of Tyana to "Shambhala" in the Himalaya Mountains. Maria resides in Vienna at present and is a delightful lady and scholar. RS]

Jean-Claude Frère concludes his tale thus:

"The sons of the Outer Intelligences are said to have split into two groups, one following the 'Right-hand Path' under the 'Wheel of the Golden Sun', the other the 'Left-hand Path' under the 'Wheel of the Black Sun'. The first group preserved the center of Agartha, that undefined place of contemplation, of the Good, and of the Vril force. The second supposedly created a new place of initiation at Shambhala, the city of violence in command of the elements and of human masses, hastening the arrival of the 'charnel-house of time'."

This, Frère says, is the doctrine that the early Nazis learned between 1920 and 1925; and he points to their power over the German masses as typical of Shambhala's methods.

Pages 83-85

Did the Asgartha [another alternate spelling, similar to the Nordic word "Asgard" for the "Heaven" atop The Cosmic Tree, RS] myth of [French free-thinker Louis] Jacolliot [1837-1890, RS] really come from a secret Indian tradition? One would readily dismiss it, were it not for the testimony of Saint-Yves d'Alveydre (1842-1909), whose theories on prehistoric earth changes we will meet in Chapter Sixteen. ...

Saint-Yves could not get close enough to Agartha through his [Sanskrit language] teacher, but he possessed other means of access: he had mastered the art of disengaging his astral body, and in this way was able to visit Agartha for himself. The detailed report on what he found there became the crowning volume of his series of politico-hermetic "Missions": Mission des Souverains, Mission des Ouvriers, Mission des Juifs, and now Mission de l'Inde (The Mission of India). Printed at his own expense, like all his works, it was dated 1886 and styled "Third Edition": a common deception aimed at making a new book look like a best-seller.

No sooner were the sheets off the press than Saint-Yves became nervous: had he gone too far? Later writers would claim that his Indian informants had threatened him with death if he published the secrets of Agartha. In the event, the entire edition was destroyed before publication, with the exception of two copies, one kept by Saint-Yves himself and the other secreted by the printer.

Mission de l'Inde, to put it bluntly, takes the lid off Agartha. We learn that it is a hidden land somewhere in the East, below the surface of the earth, where a population of millions is ruled by a "Sovereign Pontiff" of Ethiopian race, styled the Brahmatma. This almost superhuman figure is assisted by two colleagues, the "Mahatma" and the "Mahanga" (who had not appeared in Jacolliot). His realm, Saint-Yves explains, was transferred underground and concealed from the surface-dwellers at the start of the Kali-Yuga [present Hindu Iron Age, RS], which he dates around 3200 BCE. Agartha has long enjoyed the benefits of a technology advanced far beyond our own: gas lighting, air travel, and the like. Its government is the ideal one of "Synarchy" which the surface races have lost since the schism that broke the Universal Empire in the fourth millennium BCE, and which Moses, Jesus, and Saint-Yves strove to reinstate. Now and then Agartha sends emissaries to the upper world, of which it has perfect knowledge. Not only the latest discoveries of modern man, but the whole wisdom of the ages is enshrined in its libraries, engraved on stone in Vattanian characters. Among its secrets are those of the relationship of soul to body, and of the means to keep departed souls in communication with incarnate ones. When our world adopts Synarchical government, the time will be ripe for Agartha to reveal itself and to shower its spiritual and temporal benefits on us. To further this, Saint-Yves includes in the book open letters to the Queen of England, the Emperor of Russia, and the Pope, inviting them to use their power to hasten the event. There is much more in the book of an extremely bizarre nature, rather as if Bacon's New Atlantic had been rewritten by Jules Verne and C.W. Leadbeater.

Perhaps the oddest thing is Saint-Yves' own stance. Far from presenting himself as an authorized spokesman for Agartha, he admits that he is a spy. Dedicating the book to the Sovereign Pontiff and signing it with his own name in Vattanian characters (just as [his language teacher] Hajj had written out for him), he expatriates on how astounded this great dignitary will be to read the work, wondering how human eyes could have penetrated the innermost sanctuaries of his realm. Saint-Yves explains that he is a spontaneous initiate, bound by oath of secrecy to no one, and that the Brahmatma, once over his shock, will admit the wisdom of what he has dared to reveal.

[COMMENT: I love that expression "spontaneous initiate"! That is what I consider myself to be, and I think that many readers of my material will also be pleased to think of themselves in that same way. RS]

Hints about Agartha and the Brahmatma were leaked in Saint-Yves' own poems as well as in Papus' writings and letters. The small coterie of French esotericists who held Saint-Yves in awe thus had some inkling of it before the posthumous publication of Mission de l'Inde in 1910. As for the question of Saint-Yves' sources, besides Jacolliot there is an obvious resemblance to the novel of Bulwer Lytton, The Coming Race (1871), which tells of a subterranean realm of highly developed beings who possess the mysterious "Vril force" and will one day emerge from their caverns and dominate us - no doubt for our own good. Saint-Yves was close to Bulwer Lytton's son, the Earl of Lytton, a former Ambassdor to France and Viceroy of India who translated Saint-Yves's Poème de la Reine (1892) and presented it to Queen Victoria. But a work like Mission de l'Inde cannot be explained away by literary influences alone. I believe that Saint-Yves did "see" what he described, and that he did not consider himself, to the slightest degree, to be writing fiction or deriving anything from anyone else. The proof is in his utter seriousness of character, and in the publications and correspondence of the rest of his life, which take Agartha and its Brahmatma for unquestionable realities. But it is quite another matter to accept his Agartha in all the actuality and physicality that he attributed to it.

[COMMENT: The Coming Race is a most fascinating book. If you can find it online in an e-book format (PDF file probably), you'll certainly enjoy it. As for the following excerpts from Godwin's book, I am transcribing Chapters 11-13 mostly in their entireties as they contain numerous ideas that are related to my own work, including my research concerning Apollonius of Tyana. RS]

CHAPTER ELEVEN (Pages 141-153)

The Symbolic Pole

The more one learns about the myths, legends, and religions of the human race, the more imperative is the demand that one somehow make sense of them as a whole. Their competing voices, their incompatible dogmas, call for the stern hand of a moderator who will bring meaning and unity to the whole assembly.

[COMMENT: And we simply cannot understand the whole, unless we incorporate into that whole (1) Planet X Nibiru, (2) its Crossover and (3) its stationary cyclical position above our North Pole as The Cosmic Tree or Sacred Mountain or Heaven. RS]

The first tentative efforts of this kind were those of the medieval mythographers, as they tried to make something of the literary and archeological débris of classical civilization. One landmark is Boccaccio's Genealogy of the Gods, a marvel of erudition for its time (the second half of the fourteenth century). Following the interpretive procedure of the Christian Fathers, for whom paganism had no spiritual value save a certain ethical uprightness, Boccaccio used moral edification as his key. The heathen gods and goddesses, demigods and heroes, appeared to him as allegories of the virtues and vices; their myths, as improving tales of the sort we know from Aesop's Fables - and the Decameron.

Once an interpretive decision has been made, it can be fitted with more or less tailoring to any situation. But so simple-minded an interpretation as Boccaccio's could not survive the discovery in the fifteenth century of the works of Plato, Plotinus, Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, the Chaldean Oracles, and the Kabbalah. Texts like these, so obviously the fruit of profound thought and genuine spiritual experience, called for a deeper response. Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and the other Platonists who enjoyed the protection of the Medici of Florence worked under the assumption that these works, while not Christian, nevertheless embodied the wisdom of a prima theologia: a "primordial theology" that had been revealed by God to the pagan nations as well as to the Jews, and which was true in its own terms and its own time. The Renaissance Platonists made the important leap of accepting spiritual instruction from sources outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, though to do so was to run severe political risks.

The Florentine enterprise, as Emanuela Kretzulesco-Quaranta has shown in her beautiful study of The Dream of Poliphilo, Les Jardins du Songe (The Gardens of the Dream), 1986, was soon driven underground. It was too inimical to the ambitions of the Borgias, who were coming increasingly to dominate the Roman church and to claim for it temporal as well as spiritual power. Later, the atmosphere engendered by the Counter-Reformation made open enquiry into ancient paganism impossible in the Catholic countries. In the Protestant ones, historical curiosity as to how a primordial theology might have been revealed to different people at different times was checked by a biblical fundamentalism that set the Creation of the world circa 4000 BCE, and the universal Deluge about 1650 years later. As a result, scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not make much advance on the model of the Florentines. Not being Platonists by inclination, most of them were more inclined to interpret the pagan pantheon as deified human beings than as divine hypostases. Saturn, Jupiter, Osiris, and others, when they were not actually condemned as demons, because kings who had reigned shortly after the Deluge, and their myths were read as memories of historical facts.

Florentine Platonism, with its respect for the feminine principle, for Nature, and for a spiritual quest fired by erotic love that owed nothing to the biblical Christ, disappeared from the circles of free discussion, to surface only in the disguise of symbolic works of literature and art. The Dream of Poliphilo (also called the Hypnerotomachia, or "Strife of Love in a Dream") was one of the first of these secret manifestos; the pagan allegories of Botticelli, more familiar to most readers, are another.

During this period, however, there took place a twofold expansion of the European imagination. The first aspect was geographical, associated with the names of the great navigators from Vasco da Gama to Drake. The more the world was discovered, the more imperative became the need to understand why these Asians, Africans, and Americans were not Christian, and what destiny God had envisaged for them. If one were to be a better missionary to them than the Spaniards in the New World, it would be advisable first to find out what they already believed, and why. Thus the learned Jesuits, around 1600, began their tremendous work of studying the myths and religions of the people they intended to convert.

The second great expansion was cosmological, the work of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. Their new cosmologies swept aside the tidy system of nesting spheres, turned by the hand of God, that had served so well since the time of Aristotle. Breaking the bounds of the Ptolemaic cosmos required a new imagining of space, while the infinite vistas revealed and demanded a new scale of time. Isaac Newton himself, largely responsible for the consecration of the former, was incapable of the latter. But all efforts at universal explanation had to be revised in the face of the new knowledge, and this was one of the foremost tasks that the philosophers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment set themselves.

The first attempt at a universal theory of comparative religion held that all traditions and myths derive ultimately from sun-worship. Perhaps credit should go first to Macrobius, who in his Saturnalia, in the fourth century CE, explained that all the gods of the pantheon were but aspects of the Sun, and all the goddesses aspects of the Moon. But it was long before anyone could dare to say the same of the Christian god, and interpret the life of Christ, along with the myths of Jason and Hercules, as a personification of the sun's annual journey through the twelve signs of the zodiac. The ground-breaking work in this regard was the Origine de tous les cultes (Origin of all religions), 3 vols., 1795, of Charles François Dupuis, whose publication was possible because of the atmosphere of freedom and skepticism following on the French Revolution. Since Dupuis' time, the solar myth theory of religious origins has had many adherents who have restated it in the light of ever-increasing knowledge and sophistication.

The second universal theory was the phallic one: it says that most mythology and religion can be traced to what Richard Payne Knight called "the worship of the generative powers", in his pioneering work of 1785, A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus.

[COMMENT: I have this book in my library. It is a large, fairly thick book with a Preface and explanatory footnotes. It is a reproduction of the original in that Old English script is used for the original text. It contains a wealth of diverse information. And here let me say that what is thought of as ancient "phallic worship" may have indeed been meant to symbolize the phallic resemblance of a "head" atop a "shaft", that is, a Winged Disk atop a Cosmic Treetrunk. RS]

This was not so shocking to most nineteenth-century minds that it could not possibly enjoy the wide dispersion of the solar model. Not long after Dupuis, J.A. Dulaure published Des divinités génératrices, ou du culte du phallus (Of the generative divinities, or the cult of the phallus), 1805. Dulaure reckoned that the phallic theme had come out of the original solar worship at the epoch when the spring equinox was in the sign of the virile Bull. Phallicism is mentioned discreetly in Godfrey Higgins' Anacalypsis (1836), but only later in the century were such writers as Thomas Inman and Hargrave Jennings able to write more openly about "lingam" and "yoni" worship, either concealing their theories under deceptive titles (Jennings: The Rosicrucians: Their Rites and Mysteries, 1870; Inman: Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names, 2 vols., 1872), or else cultivating the collectors of erudite pornography with the limited editions of the "Phallic Series", in the 1880s and 1890s. The phallicists were soon to see themselves triumphantly vindicated by Siegmund Freud, whose discoveries in the psychology of the unconscious seemed to justify their readings.

The third example of mythic explanation is directly relevant to the present work, and for its most exhaustive treatment I turn to The Night of the Gods (2 vols., 1893, 1897), by John O'Neill. This treats the myths, symbols, and legends of the whole world as referring to the revolution of the heavens around the celestial pole. O'Neill was a retired British civil servant and diplomat, and enough of an Orientalist to write a Japanese language textbook. His theme is that "the Most High, the deity symbolically worshipped on High Places, was the God of the Polestar, who was seated at the Highest celestial spot of the Cosmos, the North Pole of the heavens".

[COMMENT: Read that and all of what follows in the context that Planet X Nibiru, cyclically every Nibiruan "shar" of 3,600 Earth Years, becomes tethered for 900 Earth Years (one Nibiruan "season") by an electromagnetic beam from their South Pole to our North Pole. From Earth we would be looking at their Southern Hemisphere, with their South Pole in the center. Their planet would rotate on his axis along the same vertical plane on which the Earth rotates on its axis. This celestial rotation would resemble a "millwheel" effect, especially if there are distinctive surface markings on the planet resembling many of the ancient drawings of this "object" or "Night Sun". It would be "the home of the gods" because it is the Planet of the Nibiruan Overlords, ruled at present by Emperor Anu and Empress Antu. These "myths" do not make any sense unless they are interpreted in this manner. RS]

Starting from this point, O'Neill finds that his archetype is capable of absorbing and explaining all the myths, legends, and folkloric practices that have to do with trees, spears, stakes, rods, and of course poles: all of these symbolize the axis that joins (or separates) earth and heaven. Primordially, as he reads the myths, earth and heaven were not apart: their sundering was the first act of creation. The mutilation of Kronos by Zeus is one account of this separation, whilst the phallus, far from being a primary symbol, is just another emblem of the axial pillar that was erected after the event. One might adapt to O'Neill's theory the quip uttered in mockery of the phallic symbolists and Freudians: that anything longer than it is wide is an axial symbol.

[COMMENT: This idea of a "sundering" of Heaven and Earth refers to the fact that after arriving (crossing over) and tethering itself for 900 years, then Planet X Nibiru undocks or detethers from our North Pole and continues on the rest of its orbit for another 2,700 years, during most of which time it is not visible to us. Those on Earth alive at the time of such a "sundering" would consider it to be a most "ominous" or "fateful" event, in that their "gods" would seem to have abandoned them. These ideas are discussed at length in my books Osiris, Isis & Planet X : Chasing The Centuries and Planet X Nibiru : Slow-Motion Doomsday. The mutilation of Kronos by Zeus could well be a quite ancient remembrance, similar to the dismembering of Osiris, a legend denoting the implosion of red-giant Sirius B, catapulting Planet X Nibiru from the Sirian System into our own about 500,000 years ago. RS]

O'Neill's ingenuity goes far beyond this. He writes, for example, of sacred stones that fall from the sky, which are often found to be of magnetic iron. Three of his many examples are the Stone of the Great Mother at Pessinus in Phrygia, the Stone of Emesa, which the Emperor Heliogabalus brought to Rome, and the stone set in the corner of the Ka'aba at Mecca. Their celestial origin shows that such meteorites come from the Most High God, whose seat in the Pole star; also they point to the north when suspended or floated.

[COMMENT: This inference that the Most High God was suspended or floating at the Pole Star has no other explanation than that of The Cosmic Tree, The North Mountain! And the "navel of the earth" mentioned below refers to our North Pole itself, where the "Pole" between Heaven and Earth touches the Earth, like a cosmic umbilical cord. Recall again that old Siberian legend from the Irtysh River Valley: "There is a mill that grinds by itself, swings of itself, and scatters the dust a hundred versts away. And there is a golden pole with a golden cage on top which is also the Nail of the North." RS]

And at the terrestrial North Pole, does not legend tell that there is a whole mountain of lodestone? This mountain, at the navel of the earth, is the prototype of all sacred rocks and navel-stones, like the Omphalos at Delphi, and the precedent for practices such as the navel-contemplation of the Hesychast monks, which led them to behold a dazzling light. All cities and other locations regarded as umbilical - and O'Neill names Cuzco, the Mississippi mounds, Jerusalem, Babylon, Athens, Delphi, Paphos, Samarcand, and Boston - "may very well be offshoots from a lost primeval cosmic conception ... of the northern terrestrial navel or nave, which turned on the cosmic axle-tree."

[COMMENT: "Cosmic Axle-Tree" is an excellent way to describe it! RS]

The Pole is the supreme Arcanum or "secret", for Arx is the celestial pole, from which (in a reversal of the conventional etymology) O'Neill derives the Latin word for summit, high hill, and citadel. All arks, sacred chests, and boxes then become repositories of the secret of the polar sanctum - of Arcadia.

"Arkas, son of Kallistô by Zeus (who changed son and mother into the Great and Little Bears) was also placed in the heavens as Arktouros and, by another legend, as Arktophylax. Arkas ... was the father of the Arkades or Arcadians, who claimed to be the first men. Hermês, born on Mount Kullenê (Cyllene) in Arcadia - that is on the hollow (kula) or the rolling (kuliô) mountain of the heavens - was the Arcadian ... and the caduceus of Mercury was therefore called the Arcadian rod."

[COMMENT: The caduceus of Mercury (additional discussion follows later) was another symbolic representation of The Cosmic Tree. And the Greek Arcadians claimed that their earliest ancestors lived at a time before the Earth had a "Moon", and in this case the word "moon" refers to the fact that they lived before the last tethering of Planet X as "Hyperborea" beyond our North Pole. See my Osiris, Isis & Planet X for additional details. RS]

The god who rules the universe from the celestial pole is above and beyond the contrarieties of his progeny and creation. The Chinese Taoists know him in the symbol of the Tai-Ki, the "Great First", which divides into the dual powers of Yang and Yin. From this model, O'Neill develops a polar interpretation for all trinities and triple figures; one such is the fleur-de-lys, which aptly enough is habitually drawn at the north point of the compass. Gods who come in pairs fall into place as symbols of the dual powers beneath the One, while all symbols of justice, balance, and harmony are related to the same complex.

In arithmology, the axial model serves O'Neill wonderfully well: all fours and their multiples (including twelves) are symbols of the directions of space around the Pole, while all sevens refer to the twice-seven stars of the Great and the Little Bears (arktoi). Domes and rounded hats (especially winged ones like Mercury's) are emblems of the celestial vault, while all wheels, swastikas, and other spinning and rotating objects and persons show the cosmic machinery in motion.

[COMMENT: As I mentioned above, these round spinning objects refer to Planet X's Southern Hemisphere when viewed from Earth. And here for the record, I should add that never in all of my own research have I come across any other discussion of this work by John O'Neill, so I am pleased to discover this. RS]

John O'Neill's study falls short in one glaring respect: his avoidance of the issue of solar symbolism. One of his weakest chapters, admittedly from the second volume that was assembled from his notes after his sudden death, is that in which he seeks to explain the solar worship of Egypt as a late substitute for their original cosmic religion. The sign for the sun, a circle with a dot at its center, becomes instead the symbol of "the Universe-heavens and its omphalos" ["omphalos" is Greek for navel, RS]. When something does not fit his theory, O'Neill, who has a ready Irish wit and a command of picturesque language, becomes sarcastic and contemptuous.

Perhaps it requires the obsessional type, with a one-track mind and an utter conviction of his own rightness, to pursue such studies through hundreds of sources in a dozen languages. But the great temptation to such a person is to become so enraptured by his own theory that he uses it as a Procrustean bed onto which all the world's myths, legends, and religions are to be accommodated. The situation is exacerbated if his theory has come to him not by simple thinking but through some illuminative or mystical experience.

For all his monomania, O'Neill has brought into focus a most valuable and neglected element of ancient mythology. Earth observers of the phenomenal world must have regarded the nightly circling of the starry sky around the polar point to be one of the most awe-inspiring evidences of divinity - second only to the daily journey of the sun across the sky. The polar model requires the solar for completion, as the night needs the day. The phallic model, too, has something to offer in the way of explanation, as does the corresponding symbolism of the Great Mother. Nor can one discount the interpretations of Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough, based on fertility symbolism and the succession of sacred kingship. Memories of deified men and women must also have entered into the making of myths, as have the letter and number combinations studied by kabbalists and arithmologists. Nothing, in short, is unworthy of notice when it comes to the Sisyphean task of understanding mythology, except the raucous claim to exclusivity and a monopoly of the truth.

[COMMENT: These ancient people were not marveling merely at the stars circling Polaris. They were marveling at the sight of Planet X Nibiru tethered to our Earth beyond the north, with the Great Bear nestled in the "branches" of The Cosmic Tree! RS]

The Swastika

How does the celestial pole appear to the watcher in the night? For inhabitants of the Northern Hemisphere during the last 6,000 years, the most prominent constellation in the north part of the sky has been Arktos, otherwise known as the Great Bear, the Plough, the Big Dipper, and Charlie's Wain. Everyone knows the shape of these seven stars. Each night they are seen to swing counter-clockwise around the polar point, which is currently close to the star Polaris. Naturally the whole circle can only be inferred, as the sun's rising obscures the daytime motion of the stars.

Nearby there is another seven-star group of remarkably similar shape, but reversed: the Little Bear. This also swings around Polaris, which is the last star of its tail. In between the two Bears is Draco, who may be imagined as the dragon or serpent guarding the Apples of the Hesperides which grow on the axial tree. ...

[COMMENT: Other designations for The Cosmic Tree are The Lofty Apple Tree Of The Summit, The Garden Of The Hesperides and The Dragon's Seat. See the illustrations for my book Slow-Motion Doomsday, as well as the previously mentioned manuscript by Miss E. Valentia Straiton titled The Celestial Ship Of The North, available for downloading at my website. This idea of a "Dragon's Seat" indicates that since the inhabitants of Planet X are "dragon" or "saurian" in nature, and since the Constellation of the Dragon surrounded Hyperborea, it is their "seat" or stationary position whilst visiting Earth, their "home away from home"! RS]

As one follows the round-dances of the Bears, night after night, one notices that they do not always start in the same place. In winter, the Great Bear appears low in the northeast; in summer, high in the northwestern sky and the other way up. With the rest of the stars, they are all making a secondary circle, also counter-clockwise, that takes a year before it brings them back to their starting-points. As modern people, we know that it is not the stars that are moving, but the earth; we may also understand that these twin counter-clockwise motions are the reflections of the earth's daily rotation and its annual revolution around the sun. (The earth's motions are counter-clockwise when the earth is viewed from above the North Pole, but clockwise from the viewpoint of observers in the Northern Hemisphere looking up at the sky.)

If one wanted to record in graphic form the nightly or yearly cycle of the Great and Little Bears, it would be enough to show them in four positions, corresponding to the four directions of space and the four seasons (see diagram). These diagrams are so strangely suggestive of the swastika in all its varieties, that it is not surprising that the latter has been used as a symbol of the Pole and of motion around it.

[COMMENT: Godwin then provides two illustrations to demonstrate this swastika-like resemblance of the Great Bear in the North to the swastika per se. They are convincing enough. However, if the Southern Hemisphere of Planet X itself, which can be observed from Earth, contains swastika-like lines (which turn like a millwheel!), then the swastika would more logically refer to the appearance of Planet X than to the mere rotation of a constellation around Polaris. It is difficult indeed for me to believe that such a "great significance" would have been placed on a common group of stars, just as it is impossible to me to believe the ultimate conclusion of Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend in their 1969 book Hamlet's Mill that the "cosmic millwheel" refers to Precession of the Equinoxes, which takes an observational period of 25,920 years to fully chart! RS]

Anthropological studies have shown that the swastika is a well-nigh universal symbol, being found from the Bronze Age onwards throughout the Old and New Worlds. To judge from its usage as a decorative mark on household objects of every kind, its meaning was simply "good luck", as later acknowledged by its Sanskrit name: su (equivalent of Greek eu, "good"), asti (like Greek estô, "be"), ka (a suffix); compare the Sanskrit-Tibetan word Swasti, "May It Be Auspicious", used at the beginnings of texts. Only in Buddhism and, to a much slighter degree, in Christianity, has it been used as a sacred symbol; it appears notably on the soles of the Buddha's feet, and in the Catacombs of Rome.

The swastika dropped out of use in the fine and decorative arts of Europe from the Middle Ages onwards. It has no place in the iconography of alchemy, Rosicrucianism, or Freemasonry. It began to reappear as the result of nineteenth-century scholarship in two fields: comparative ethnology, and Oriental religion. The first discovered that the swastika, despite its wide distribution, was conspicuously absent from Egypt, Chaldea, Assyria, and Phoenicia.

[COMMENT: The comparable symbol in the Middle East was a circle with a cross inside it, or perhaps the Egyptian "ankh", both of which signified the Winged Disk atop a Cosmic Tree. RS]

This led many scholars to identify it as an Aryan sun-symbol, and its presence as the indication of the Aryan migrations or influences that they were so keen to trace. The orientalists discovered the symbolic and ritualistic use of the swastika by the Buddhists, the Jains, and the magician-priests (Tao shih) of Taoism. Reports were published of an order of Tao-sse, called "Doctors of Reason" or followers of the "Mystic Cross", which was the swastika, in pre-Buddhist China and India. ...

In the early years of the twentieth century, the swastika was familiar through the English-speaking world from its appearance on the covers of Rudyard Kipling's books. He later had it removed, for obvious reasons, but it remains in the illustration to his Just So Story, "The Crab that Played with the Sea", where he calls it "a magic mark". So innocent were the "good luck" associations of the swastika that during World War I, it was used as the emblem of the British War Savings Scheme, appearing on coupons and stamps.

Much has been written about the symbolic significance of so-called right- and left-handed swastikas, especially in the light of the Nazis' adoption of the form. To avoid ambiguity, I use "left" and "right" to refer only to the direction taken by the arms outward from the center. André Brissaud, the most reliable of the French writers on the Nazis and the Occult, says that the left-handed swastika turns in the direction of the earth's rotation: hence it symbolizes the solar wheel, the benefic fire of heaven, expansion, creation, evolution, fertility, and is the "Wheel of the Golden Sun". The right-handed swastika, on the other hand, is the "Wheel of the Black Sun" representing the earth fire recreated by man and the quest for political hegemony in opposition to the Fire of Heaven. Miguel Serrano writes that the left-handed, clockwise-turning swastika symbolized the ancient exodus of the Aryan Race from the North Pole, while the right-handed, counter-clockwise one of the Nazis stands for the return of the race to its esoteric center at the South Pole. The Hopi Indians have an equally ingenious myth: they tell of how their clans originally issued forth from the central omphalos of the Americas, Tuwanasavi. As Nigel Pennick relates the story, half of the clans turned to the right. "This transformed the cross of energies into a great swastika rotating anti-clockwise to indicate the Earth. These clans possessed high knowledge and in turning right were claiming the land for their people in accordance with the plan of the Creator." The others turn to the left. "These clans were less well developed. They did not posses complete rituals; instead they greeted the sun in prayer, lit fires at their shrines for the four elements and directions and supported the other clans. By turning left they made a swastika rotating clockwise with the sun, symbolizing their faithfulness with the Creator."

[COMMENT: This is all very interesting and unusual information, but suffice to to say that the swastika was originally designed as a symbol of the Cosmic Millwheel. How its significances evolved through time and culture are a bit beside the point of this treatise. RS]

Whatever the validity of these theories, the ancient decorative swastikas show no preference whatsoever for one type over the other. The place where the left-right distinction is supposed to be most significant is Tibet, where both Nicholas Roerich and Anagarika Govinda observed that the swastika of the ancient Bön-Po religion points to the left, the Buddhist one to the right. Now it is true that the Bön-Pos perform ritual circumambulations counter-clockwise, the Buddhists clockwise, but almost all the Buddhist iconography collected by Thomas Wilson shows left-handed swastikas, just like the ones on the Bön-Pos' ritual scepter, their equivalent of the Buddhist vajra. One can only say that the swastika should perhaps be left-handed if (as in Bön-Po) it denotes polar revolution, and right-handed if (as in Buddhism) it symbolizes the course of the sun. But the root of the problem is probably the inherent ambiguity of the symbol itself, which makes the left-handed swastika appears to be rotating to the right, and vice versa.

The Caduceus

If the swastika is the prime symbol of the Pole in its aspect as center of the celestial or terrestrial circle, then the caduceus is the prime symbol, in the West, of the World Axis that joins the two. Together, the symbols of center and axis contain the basis for an entire body of metaphysical teaching.

[COMMENT: The Caduceus is used as a modern medical symbol: two serpents intertwined around a pole with a bird on top. The bird represents the Hyperboreal Winged Disk atop the "pole" or Cosmic Axle-Tree. The intertwined serpents symbolize the "saurian" nature of the inhabitants of Planet X Nibiru. Godwin implies that the swastika could replace the "bird" atop the Axle-Tree. RS]

The symbol of the World-Axis embodies the archetypal experience of Up and Down, felt most concretely in our physical bodies. Before we were born, most of us were carried upside-down in our mothers' wombs, and emerged into this world head first. Many myths represent the human soul as looking down from the heavens to earth, before diving through the spheres into incarnation. As invariably happens, the great events and formations of Nature mirror metaphysical truths. Another example: humans are unusual among mammals for their upright stance, which makes each of us a miniature of the Axis. The quadrupeds have all four feet on the earth (the foursquare place, made from the four elements), the axes of their spines are horizontal, and their heads look down or along its surface. Unlike the animals, whose development proceeds in parallel with that of the earth, the human being has the possibility of making deliberate progress upwards, from earth towards heaven. Our two feet base us in the world of duality, but the domes of our skulls replicate the single vault of the sky. Thus the yogi's ascent to samadhi through the seventh chakra (Sahasrara, the "thousand-petalled lotus" at the crown of the head) is identical to the Hermetic adept's penetration beyond the vault of heaven into the eighth sphere.

The human being, like the World-Axis, is a link between heaven and earth, and human life can be lived at every intervening degree, from the virtually animal to the virtually divine. Through the subtle body course the dual currents known and studied in Yoga as Ida and Pingala, which also travel in serpentine vortices around the macrocosmic axis. One current is negative, the other positive. We have encountered the same pattern in the body of the earth itself, with Arctic and Antarctic as the opposite ends of an axis of polarity. But it would be silly to leap too soon to the conclusion that one current or pole is good and the other evil. Although in a sense this is true, it all depends on one's standpoint. ...

The Will Of Heaven

... All swastikas, crosses within circles, omphaloi, sacred stones and cities here find their highest significance: they are symbols of the Center, on whatever plane, wherever the Will of Heaven is felt as the Unmoved Mover. Likewise, all towers, cones, lances, obelisks, and other symbols of the World-Axis do not merely figure forth the space between the North Pole and the Pole Star, however many light-years that may be: they symbolize the total evolution of the universe, proceeding in cycles that defy the imagination towards the culminating point of perfection and reabsorption in the One. As Matgioï says:

"Let us then greet confidently the plans of the Will of Heaven, as yet unknown, but logical and intelligible; and let us be fearless about the course and the end, inevitably happy ones, of the Destinies of the Universe."

[COMMENT: To repeat, all of the symbols mentioned above ultimately refer to The Winged Disk atop The Cosmic Axle-Tree. RS]

CHAPTER TWELVE (Pages 154-166)

Solar And Polar Traditions

... Writing of another significant change in the Great Bear's name [René] Guénon says that it was formerly called the Boar, a word whose roots he associates with the "Boreal" pole and with the sky gods Varuna and Ouranos [references to deposed and exiled Nibiruan ex-Emperor Anu, RS]. He says that our entire cycle of Kalpa is called the "Cycle of the White Boar", and that the polar "sacred land", the seat of the primordial spiritual center of this Manvantara, is also called the "Land of the Boar". Guénon attributes the change of animal to the usurpation of the Brahmins (priestly caste), whose sign was the Boar, by the Kshatriyas (warrior caste), whose sign was the She-Boar. In Greek mythology, this is figured in the Calydonian hunt of the White Boar: the beast is killed by Atalanta, who had been raised by a bear. This, he says, shows that the revolt took place in Atlantis, or among descendants of the Atlantean tradition: an early symptom of the spiritual decline that is the mark of the Hindu conception of time-cycles, as explained in Chapter Two. We can therefore glean a more or less complete picture from Guénon's hints of a time of transition from Hyperborean to Atlantean influence; from the polar to solar tradition; and from priestly authority to aristocratic power.

The Beginning of the Zodiac

... When did this first occur? The general consensus seems to place it in Mesopotamia, during the "Geminian Age" (sixth and fifth millennia BCE). Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend come to this tentative conclusion in Hamlet's Mill (1969), a heroic attempt at universal mythography whose keystone is the early discovery and widespread knowledge of the precession of the equinoxes. They describe this earliest period as a Golden Age; a "Time Zero", whose special characteristic was that the ecliptic points in Gemini and Sagittarius also marked the ends of the Milky Way. Therefore the exceptional virtue of the Golden Age was precisely that the crossroads of ecliptic and equator coincided with the crossroads of ecliptic and Galaxy. This was also the Age of Saturn, presumably because at that time, Saturn's thirty-year orbit was the longest-known astronomical cycle. ...

[COMMENT: As I have discussed in my previous treatise The Return & Crossover Of Planet X, the Galactic Center lies along the Milky Way in the Constellation of Sagittarius, so I personally would consider that the Milky Way "begins and ends" at the Galactic Center. We are precisely aligned with the Galactic Center in early January about the time of Earth's perihelion around the Sun. And although Sirius is located in Canis Major, not in Gemini, it is due-south of Gemini and directly opposite the Galactic Center from the vantage point of Earth. Right now, Jupiter is rapidly moving into a 2007 Winter Solstice alignment with the Galactic Center. This will be a crucial moment in our anticipation of the Crossover of Planet X. RS]

This primordial zodiac, as [Julius] Schwabe points out [in his 1951 book titled Archetyp und Tierkreis (Archetype and Zodiac)] puts Heaven in the North and the Underworld in the South. His book is rich in consequences to be drawn from this. I would comment that it shows a more "polar" than "solar" way of thinking, with its privileged placement of the North. However, it involves a contradiction that must have troubled those in search of a system that would unite heaven and earth. For while the sun is at its midsummer culmination in Leo, the "autumnal" constellation of Scorpio is rising in the East, and the "spring" one of Taurus is setting in the West. The heavenly directions appear to be the reverse of the earthly ones - which is only to be expected, since the diurnal movement of the zodiac is from East to West, whereas the annual movement of the sun through the signs is from West to East. ...

[COMMENT: The previous statement is a bit confusing, but I won't bother to elaborate. Let me add here, though, that earlier in this book, Godwin wrote that originally there were only 10, not 12, Constellations of the Zodiac. That is true. What we now refer to as Aries and Pisces used to be one Constellation called "Jason & The Argonauts" by the Greeks, and Libra used to be combined with Scorpius, as the "claws" of the Scorpion. RS]

Mithras

The Mithraic mystery religion is a remarkable instance of the Polar tradition's revival in Hellenistic times. Appearing shortly before the time of Christ, Mithraism spread throughout the Roman Empire in the wake of conquering armies, and before it disappeared in the fourth or fifth century CE, bequeathed much of its symbolism and ethos to Christianity - not, perhaps, to the benefit of the latter.

[COMMENT: The reader can google for a lot more information about Mithraism than can be found in this brief discussion. Regarding the Mithraic influences on Christianity, I ran across the following at a website: "Roman Mithras was perhaps the greatest rival to early Christianity for many reasons. As well as being a popular pagan religion practised by the Roman Army, Mithraism had many similarities to Christianity. Mithras was born of a virgin, remained celibate, his worship involving baptism, the partaking of bread marked with a cross and wine as sacrificial blood, held Sundays sacred and Mithras was born on 25th of December. Mithraists called themselves 'brother' and were led by a priest called 'father' (Pater). The symbol of the father were a staff, a hooked sword, a ring and hat. These similarities frightened the early Christian leaders - that almost 500 years before arrival of Christ all of the Christian mysteries were already known. To combat this, Christian writers said that the Devil knew of the coming of Christ in advance and had imitated them before they existed in order to denigrate them. As Christianity gained strength and became the formal religion of the Roman Empire, the 'Cult of Mithras' was one of the first pagan cults to come under attack in the fifth century; Temples of Mithras, like most other pagan Temples, were destroyed and Churches built on them." Mithraism was considered to be a "male religion", and it was very popular with members of the Roman military. Male adherents would meet in secret locations, such as caves, to practice their rituals unobserved by females. RS]

The origins of Mithraism and the nature of Mithras have troubled scholars for a hundred years. The great Theosophical scholar G.R.S. Mead already sensed that Mithras was not simply the Sun, but a supra-cosmic divinity, as shown in Mithras' birth out of a rock: Mead shows that this is not the rock of earth, but the firmament of heaven, "which was thought of as solid or rigid by the ancients".

[COMMENT: Clearly this is a reference to Planet X Nibiru atop The Cosmic Tree, that is, "Heaven". The word "Mithras" itself, often spelled "Mithra" or "Mitra", was another named for Nibiruan Prince Ishkur, their "God of War" known later as Ares and Mars. RS]

The recent work of David Ulansey (The Origin of the Mithraic Mysteries, 1989), confirms Mead's intuition by associating the foundation of Mithraism with the rediscovery of the precession of the equinoxes [see Chapter Fifteen for an explanation] by Hipparchus in the second century BCE: an event that brought with it the awesome realization that even the axis of the universe was not fixed. Ulansey cannot believe that precession could have been discovered earlier, an anathema to classicists though commonly accepted by historians of science. If there is any truth in his theory, we must assume that the questions which caused such anguish in 4000 or 2000 BCE had long been forgotten, probably during the "dark age" consequent on the Santorini eruption in the fifteenth century BCE.

[COMMENT: Exactly which "dark age" Godwin is referring to is not specified; but if he is referring to the so-called "dark age" of Greece following the Trojan War and preceding the Olympiad period, that "dark age" is erased by Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky's historical reconstruction, with which I fully agree. See Chapter 18 of my Osiris, Isis & Planet X for complete details. The Trojan War immediately preceded the Olympiad period and did not occur about 400 years earlier, to be followed by a 400-year-long "dark age". RS]

The precessional movement, which in the geostatic cosmology of Antiquity was ascribed to the stars, required a supra-cosmic divinity to move it, and according to Ulansey it was the Persian god Mithra who adapted to this role. Already in Zoroastrianism, Mithra dwelt "above Harâ, the lofty, gleaming [mountain] round which circles many [a star], where there is neither night nor darkness". Thereupon all his attributes fall into place more or less tidily. The primary icon of Mithraism is the Tauroctony or bull-slaying scene, which he is stabbing with a knife; lower down are a scorpion, a snake, a raven, a cup, a lion, and a dog (or some of these).

[COMMENT: The "Farnese Bull" which is now housed in the Naples National Archeological Museum was originally placed in the Baths of Caracalla. See Illustration 24 of my Apollonius Of Tyana & The Shroud Of Turin. This fine sculpture also depicts the slaying of the bull by Mithras. The sculptors were Cappadocian brothers named "Nestorus" and "Tauriscus", which are probably references to Apollonius and his brother Hestiaeus. Emperor Caracalla was one of the great admirers of Apollonius, as a result of the interest shown in Apollonius by his mother, Roman Empress Julia Domna, wife of Emperor Septimius Severus. RS]

The bull is of course Taurus, the other creatures or attributes correspond to the constellations nearby (Scopio, Hydra, Corvus, Crater, Leo, Canis minor), while Mithras himself is the pseudo-Persian hero Perseus, visible directly above the Bull. By killing the celestial Bull, Mithras asserts his power over the entire cosmos, and enables the next sign, that of Aries the Ram, to become home to the Sun at the spring equinox, as was the case during the two millennia BCE. Ironically enough, by the time that Mithraism was fully established, the equinoctial point was already moving out of Aries and into Pisces: an event celebrated by such words as "Worthy is the Lamb that was slain" (Apocalypse 5.12) and "Behold, I shall make you fishers of men" (Matthew 4.19).

[COMMENT: For the record, the Ages of Aries began at the time of the last Crossover of Planet X in 1588 BCE; the subsequent Age of Pisces, in 140 CE. This current Age of Pisces will end after about another 720 years. See my companion essay Crossover & The Drifting Zodiac for complete mathematical details. RS]

Two powerful symbolic figures associated with the Mithraic monuments are Phanes and Aeon. Phanes is the first-born god of light in the Orphic cosmogony, who broke out of the two halves of the cosmic egg that subsequently became heaven and earth. The well-known relief sculpture in Modena shows him as a beautiful young god with wings and a serpent entwined around him, standing in the circle of the zodiac and holding a staff. In a previous work (Mystery Religions of the Ancient World, 1981), I suggested a Platonically-influenced interpretation of the Modena Phanes as the power that infuses the visible cosmos with the archetypal ideas. He could equally well be seen as a theophany of the god who directs the universal order from beyond the Pole Star, holding the axis-staff, with the serpent round his body denoting the path of the stars - and of the initiate.

[COMMENT: The serpent does not denote "the path of the stars" but the reptilian or saurian nature of the inhabitants of Planet X Nibiru. RS]

Aeon is shown in ancient iconography with a male human body, wings, and a lion's head, similarly wound round with a serpent. Mead quotes the following definition of Aeon from Macrobius:

"He who made all things and governs all things, joined together by means of the surrounding Heaven the power and nature of Water and Earth, heavy and downward, flowing down into the Depth, and that of Fire and Spirit, light and rushing upward to the measureless Height. It is this mightiest power of Heaven that hath bound together these two unequal powers."

Far from being a god of time, Mead says, Aeon is "the Paradigm thereof - Eternity". Without going into the many arguments and sources gathered by Mead in support of this, I point out that this binding of opposites, this spanning of heaven and earth, and this combination of the winged power of movement with the serpentine power of ascent, make Aeon a perfect figuration of our axial divinity. As for the lion's head, which makes the Aeon statues so numinous and awesome to look upon, it is a reminder of what was said in the previous chapter about the negative aspect of the upward path: it is a destruction and a devouring, as the person is assimilated to the god. Howard Jackson writes, in his study of the lion-headed figure, of how it is sometimes called "Ahriman" - who would seem to be the power of evil if one follows too slavishly the dualism of Persia. This, he says, is not so: "The leontocephaline, as the distillation of celestial power, cannot, then, have been an irredeemably oppressive force but, as it embodies souls, so it might aid - by initiation and not by compulsion - in freeing them from the embodiment."

[COMMENT: In my analysis of "Names Of The Gods" (see Chapter 12 of my Osiris, Isis & Planet X) I have equated Ahriman with Satan, as embodied by Nibiruan Prince Enki. Thus, Ahriman equals Poseidon in Greek, Seth in Egyptian, Agni or Shiva in Sanskrit, Ogon in Slavonic and Manannán in Celtic. Why the "Aeon" would be associated thus with Prince Enki, I do not know. RS]

The polar cult also survived in classical times in popular religion and magic. The Greek magical papyri contain many spells addressed to the Great Bear, for example:

"Bear, Bear, you who rule the heaven, the stars, and the whole world; you who make the axis turn and control the whole cosmic system by force and compulsion, I appeal to you, imploring and supplicating that you may do the [thing I desire], because I call upon you with your holy names at which your deity rejoices, names which you are not able to ignore ... "

In the next quotation, the seven Greek vowels (aeêiouô) are sounded to represent the seven stars of the Bear: another ambiguous legacy of the polar-solar transition, for the more typical use of the vowels in Antiquity was as symbols of the seven planets.

"Thôzopithê, Bear, greatest goddess, ruling heaven, reigning over the pole of the stars, highest, beautiful-shining goddess, incorruptible element, composite of the all, all-illuminating, bond of the universe aeêiouô, you who stand on the pole, you whom the lord god appointed to turn the holy pole with a strong hand."

There is evidently some uncertainly in the spells as to whether the Bear is the Supreme God of the cosmos, or whether the She-Bear is a goddess subordinate to him. But this probably did not concern the magician, any more than the average Christian worried about whether the cosmos was turned by the Father or the Logos. ...

[COMMENT: Clearly what is being referenced here is that the Great Bear would be the closest Constellation to The Winged Disk atop The Cosmic Tree. The Little Bear would be occulted by the planet. Planet X Nibiru stands atop the pole of heaven, which it turns like a millwheel, "scattering the dust a hundred versts away". This "object" has also been compared to a heifer, another female animal. The rainbow-like electromagnetic tethering beam could indeed seem like a "bond" of Heaven and Earth, a "bond" of the Universe. And if I recall correctly, there is a Mayan legend that the "object" which appears from the Galactic Center and travels along the Black Road to land atop The Sacred Tree, rests in the branches of the Great Bear. RS]

CHAPTER THIRTEEN (Pages 167-178)

The Spiritual Pole

It is in Medieval Iran that we find the fullest literature on the spiritual Pole and the experience of mystical ascent to it. The Iranian Sufis drew not only on Islam, but on the Mazdean, Manichean, Hermetic, Gnostic, and Platonic traditions that all flourished on the hospitable soil of Persia. (One recalls that the Athenian Academy, founded by Plato, took refuge there after its suppression in 529 CE.) In the intellectual ferment of the Islamic Middle Ages, these were blended in a "theosophy": a science of divine knowledge that was at once mysticism and the highest form of practical philosophy. It is thanks to the work of Henry Corbin, the French scholar who made this literature available to Westerners, that I am able here to give a slight impression of it. ...

Again, in the Iranian visions there may be a cable let down from the cosmic pole. Hermes, according to Suhrawardi's Book of Elucidations, climbed this cable of light, and found himself with both heaven and earth beneath his feet. This means that he had gone beyond the eight spheres described in his Poimandres, beyond the furthest objects visible to the bodily eye - the fixed stars - to the realm that medieval cosmology imagined to surround the entire visible cosmos, where God and the angelic hierarchies have their dwelling.

This cable or column of light is also Homer's Golden Chain of Jupiter that holds the worlds together, Plato's Spindle of Necessity on which all the worlds are threaded and spun, and the Taoists' Celestial Ray that René Guénon has shown us transfixing the levels of existence. There are further symbols for it in Sufism. The nomadic imagination sees it in the central pole of the tent of Heaven, surrounded by four subsidiary posts that are the pillars of the Earth. While simple souls may conceive of heaven or earth as actually resting on four pillars - and even on elephants and a turtle, if they are Hindus - these pillars symbolize the locations in space of the two solstices and the two equinoxes, together forming a cross within the circular orbit of the earth and their ruling angels.

[COMMENT: Regarding "the central pole of the tent of Heaven" and the "four pillars", I refer the reader to the cover design of my book Slow-Motion Doomsday. RS]

The Pole is also a mountain, called Mount Qaf, whose ascent, like Dante's climbing of the Mountain of Purgatory, represents the pilgrim's progress through spiritual states. We know by now that it is not necessary to think of this as a physical mountain in the Arctic Ocean. Geographically speaking, the mountain of ascent is wherever the pilgrim begins his journey to the "Orient", and its symbol could be the local zenith of every place on earth.

[COMMENT: Perhaps, but The Cosmic Tree was also known as The Sacred Mountain, Mount Olympus, Mount Meru and Mount Zion. It was not a "physical" mountain per se, but still it was the location of a heavenly object visible from the northern surface of the Earth. RS]

For the more settled peoples of the Middle East, Mount Qaf was symbolized very adequately by the Babylonian ziggurats, tall towers with a spiral path of ascent, at the top of which is a platform for the observation of the heavens. The aspiration of the builders of the Tower of Babel, in nearby Iraq, to raise a tower "with its top in the heavens" (Genesis 11.4) was not so stupid, nor so arrogant, as Yahweh and his followers thought. The same desire to imitate the axial mountain of the Pole emerges in Chinese pagodas, in the piled-up towers of Hindu temples, and in the spires of Christian churches. Wherever inspired architecture has placed the image of the polar mountain, there the esoteric pilgrim can read the invitation to a spiritual ascent. And where it has not, nature offers the same invitation in the clear air of mountaintops, or in the contemplation of the stars themselves. ...

Among those people who turned to the Pole Star for their prayers, Corbin names the Mandeans, the Sabeans of Harran, the Manicheans, and the Buddhists of Central Asia. The Brethren of Purity of Basra, an isolated community of pious scholars who inherited some of the Sabean practices, held a monthly ritual in which "a cosmic text was read under the starry heavens facing the polar star". All in all, the sacred character of the celestial Pole and its attendants seems to have filtered down into the religions of many peoples of Central and Western Asia, but to the "Oriental theosophers" of Iran and their modern spokesman, Henry Corbin, goes the eternal credit of having explored and mapped this place of theophanies and spiritual transmutations. ...

[COMMENT: The rest of this chapter delves into such extraneous but nevertheless interesting ideas as the Hollow Earth, Dante's Purgatory and Nazism, none of which is directly pertinent to the discussion at hand. RS]

Pages 181-184

The early Greek philosophers agreed in recognizing the earth's tilt as an irregular condition: not as something fixed since the beginning of all things, but as having occurred at some definite point in prehistoric time. Most of them assumed the earth to be flat, or shaped like a shallow drum. Empedocles (circa 493-433 BCE) possibly believed that the northern end of the disk had risen as the result of the sun's influence on its air, and that the south had consequently fallen. Leucippus (flourished circa 440-430 BCE) proposed that the apparent tilt of the zodiacal belt was caused by the sinking of the frozen northern parts of his drum-shaped earth. Democritus (born circa 460) thought, on the contrary, that the fertile south had become heavier and outweighed the barren north, tilting the earth like the bar of a balance.

The most authoritative voice in this chorus of pre-Socratic philosophers is that of Anaxagoras (circa 500-428). He visualized the situation not from space looking down on a flat earth, but from the earth's pole looking up at the stars, as we have described it above; thus his observation is valid irrespective of the shape of the earth. Anaxagoras says: "In the beginning the stars moved in the sky as in a revolving dome, so that the celestial pole which is always visible was vertically overhead; but subsequently the pole took its inclined position." At about the same time, in the second half of the fifth century BCE, Oinopides of Chios identified the ecliptic as the sun's oblique path. Eratosthenes, two centuries later, became the first to measure it.

These philosophers were evidently catastrophists. Blissfully innocent of any concept of gravitation, they thought it sufficient for one end of the earth simply to become overweight and sink. Plato's own ideas might seem just as naive if as little of his writing had been preserved as has been of the pre-Socratics'; but here we are more fortunate. Plato's dialogue The Statesman develops the idea of a periodic reversal of the rotation of the world, possibly meaning the entire cosmic machinery rather than just our earth. The Stranger tells the young Socrates an "old story" about the alteration in rising and setting of the sun and the other planets. "The story tell us that on this famous occasion [during the quarrel between Atreus and Thyestes] these all set where they now rise and rose where they now set. Afterwards, however, when he had testified by this miracle to the justice of Atreus's claims, Zeus restored all these heavenly bodies to their present system of motion." He goes on, a little later, "All these stories originate from the same event in cosmic history." Then follows the explanation given in Chapter One, of how the world's governance is alternately under God's power and under its own, and the description of the state of humanity in the first Age, that of Cronus.

[COMMENT: Elsewhere in my writings as well as at my website, I have discussed Polar Axial Displacement in great detail, which will not be repeated here, except to emphasize that there is overwhelming evidence of such shifting from all over the world. It goes without saying that following a shift of the Earth's Polar Axis, the Sun would rise in a different "east" position, and the overhead stellar patterns would change for every location on the planet. These ancient Greeks lived much more closely in time to the last Golden Age (1587-687 BCE) than we do, so their "theories" were obviously the result of analyzing ancient legends and myths that had been handed down from generation to generation and were still fairly fresh in their cultural memory. As for the idea that "the world's governance is alternately under God's power and under its own", this refers to the fact that for 900 years at the beginning of each Nibiruan "shar" of 3,600 Earth Years, Planet X Nibiru (or one of its gigantic motherships) is stationary above our North Pole as The Cosmic Tree, The Sacred Tree, The Sacred Mountain, Mount Olympus, Mount Meru, Mount Zion and, as Godwin noted earlier, Mount Qaf. For that 900-year period Earth is indeed under the governance of the gods; for the remaining 2,700 years, as now, we are on our own. This again reminds me of a stanza from the epic poem of the Finnish creation myth Kalevala: "May the days pass quickly o'er us. One day passes, comes another, and again shall I be needed. Men will look for me and miss me, to construct another 'Sampo' (Cosmic Tree) and another harp to help me make another Moon for gleaming and another Sun for shining. When my Sun and Moon are absent, in the air no joy remaineth." RS]

At the appointed close of that era [Plato writes], " ... the gods of the provinces, who had ruled under the greatest god, knew at once what was happening and relinquished the oversight of their regions. A shudder passed through the world at the reversing of its rotation, checked as it was between the old control and the new impulse which had turned end into beginning for it and beginning into end. This shock set up a great quaking which caused - in this crisis of the world just as in the former one - destruction of living creatures of all kinds. Then, after the interval needed for its recovery, it gained relief at last from its clamors and confusion, and attaining quiet after great upheaval it returned to its ordered course and continued in it, having control and government of itself and of all within it ... "

Where did the Greek philosophers get such ideas? Probably from the scientifically more advanced cultures of Chaldea and Egypt. Herodotus (484-before 420 BCE), the "Father of History", writes one of the most famous passages on our subject, whose almost verbatim resemblance to Plato's suggests a common source. Herodotus had been told by the hierophants of Egypt about the sequence of their kings, which covered 341 generations. This he estimated as a duration of 11,340 years, " ... in all which time (they said) they had had no king who was a god in human form, nor had there been any such thing either before or after those years among the rest of the kings of Egypt. Four times in this period (so they told me) the sun rose contrary to his wont; twice he rose where he now sets, and twice he set where now he rises; yet Egypt at those times underwent no change, neither in the produce of the river and the land, nor in the matter of sickness and death."

[COMMENT: Since, as I have proposed, the Great Pyramid of Egypt marks the northern point of the Polar Pivotal Axis, the four directions would rotate around the Great Pyramid, which would always be located exactly 30° above any current Equator and 60° south of any North Pole. Thus, the climate and geography of Egypt would vary little from one Polar Cycle to another; only the Sun would rise and set in different directions with respect to the Pyramids and Sphinx. RS]

Plato describes the event as if seen from outside, the earth changing its direction of rotations; Herodotus, as seen from the surface, where the sun's behavior indicates what has happened. Both are explicit about the double nature of the phenomenon. In the account given by the priests to Herodotus, the whole process occurred twice, while Plato's Stranger presents it as an ever-recurrent cycle. ...

Thomas Burnet (1635?-1715), in is Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681), agrees with the "doctrine of the Ancients" according to which, in his words:

"The Poles of the World did once change their situation, and were at first in another posture from what they are in now, till that inclination happen'd ... the Earth chang'd its posture at the Deluge, and thereby made these seeming changes in the Heavens; its Poles before pointed to the Poles of the Ecliptick, which now point to the Poles of the Aequator, and its Axis is become parallel with that Axis ... And I am apt to think, that those changes in the course of the Stars, which the Ancients sometimes speak of, and especially the Aegyptians, if they did not proceed from defects in their Calendar, had no other Physical account than this. And as they say the Poles of the World were in another situation at first, so at first they say, there was no variety of seasons in the Year, as in their Golden Age."

[COMMENT: One of Godwin's central ideas is that at some time in the past, when the planes of the Equator and the Ecliptic were synchronized, the North Pole pointed "due-north" and was not tilted 23.5° "off-north" as it is now. This tilt is what causes our seasonal changes in the non-Equatorial regions of the planet. However, if the Poles were due-north and south, then every day would always be the same length and there would be no seasonal variations anywhere on Earth, resulting in the sort of "Golden Age" described in antiquity. I, of course, completely disagree with that idea; but since Godwin presents no other explanation for this Polar Axial Displacement, he can draw no other conclusion. RS]

Pages 189-190

Cometary Cataclysms

The theory of the earth's encounter with a comet in probably the most persistent of all the catastrophic agents suggested over the years. Ignatius Donnelly, Minnesota congressman who wrote noteworthy books on Atlantis and on the Bacon-Shakespeare mystery, devoted his Ragnarok The Age of Fire and Gravel (1882) to this theme.

[COMMENT: For much more about Donnelly's theory of Ragnarok, see Chapter 9 of my Slow-Motion Doomsday. RS]

Donnelly's comet caused the end of the Golden Age, laid down the accumulations of gravel known as the Drift, and plunged the earth into an Ice Age. But as Donnelly rejects the tilt of the axis as either cause or result of this, his work does not concern us here. The same theory was also proposed in The Mysterious Comet (1923) by William Comyns Beaumont: a highly articulate and educated man with the strangest of historical ideas. The whole of the Bible, he believed, tells of events that actually took place not in the Middle East but in Britain, whose once flourishing civilization was destroyed by a comet that landed just outside Edinburgh (the "Jerusalem" of the Bible). Thereupon much of the land sank (which explains the Atlantis myth), and lost its semi-tropical climate, while the year changed from 360 to its present 365.25 days.

Neither of these authors was acknowledged by Immanuel Velikovsky, though his polymathic reading must have brought him into contact with their works. One of the unspoken intentions of Velikovsky's books seems to have been to prove the veracity of the Hebrew Bible, but without bringing on himself the stigma of the religious zealot, much less the psychic visionary.

[COMMENT: Without going into detail, let me simply state that I beg to differ. Proving the veracity of the Hebrew Bible was not Dr. Velikovsky's unspoken intention. RS]

The crucial premise of his Worlds In Collision (1950) is that in the second millennium BCE, the earth encountered a "comet" extruded from Jupiter. The near-collision that ensued might, according to Velikovsky, have caused the earth to slow down or even stop its rotation, and its axis to be tilted out of position. Several centuries later, the earth had a near-miss with Mars that likewise disturbed its axial tilt, but restored it again to its previous position.

[COMMENT: As I have discussed in my books, my disagreement with Dr. Velikovsky is that these events were not caused first by a cometary Venus and later by Mars, but by the arrival and departure of Planet X Nibiru, that is, the establishment and later the dissolution of The Cosmic Tree. Dr. Velikovsky himself addressed the "problem" of The Cosmic Tree by proposing in a 1970s article in the Journal KRONOS that the Planet Saturn used to be stationary above our North Pole. Since Dr. Velikovsky's death in 1979, this "Saturn Theory" has been developed further by a man named David Talbott, who produced a video about it, titled Remembering The End Of The World. These "Saturnists" are still active today, and the reader can google David Talbott or visit Kronia.com for additional information. Suffice it to say here, to repeat once again, the stationary object above our North Pole was not the Planet Saturn, but the Planet X Nibiru! RS]

One of Velikovsky's primary exhibits in support of the Venus catastrophe is the account in Joshua 10.13, which tells of how at the Battle of Gibeon, in response to Joshua's prayer, "the sun stood still and the moon halted until a nation had taken vengeance on its enemies, as indeed it is written in the Book of Jashar [another, lost Book of Joshua]. The sun stayed in mid-heaven and made no haste to set for almost a whole day." This had already been the object of a celebrated interpretation on the part of Galileo, in his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615). Biblical fundamentalists, such as Charles Totten, had achieved marvels of ingenuity in their struggles to reconcile it with scientific knowledge. Worlds In Collision pretended to place it, at last, on a scientific basis: the sun had "stood still" because the earth had temporarily ceased to rotate.

When Carl Sagan tried to quantify the results of Velikovsky's suggestion, he found that the earth's rotation could have stopped "unnoticeably" in a little over an hour, but that stopping and starting again in a single day would have imparted an average temperature increase of 100° K (comparable to the difference between the freezing and boiling points of water). "The deceleration might be tolerable, if gradual enough," writes Sagan, "but not the heat." Sagan also points out what any careful reader of Velikovsky will have noticed: that he is very vague and difficult to follow when he comes to the exact mechanics of the earth's braking. This raises extremely grave problems of physics, not least of which is the absence of any magnetic record of the event in the earth's rocks. Velkovsky himself says: "Whether there was a complete reversal of the cardinal points as a result of the cosmic catastrophe of the days of the Exodus, or only a substantial shift, is a problem not solved here." Yet nothing cries out more urgently for solution and reconciliation with the principles of celestial dynamics. Consequently, even Velikovsky's best friends, the contributors to the short-lived magazine Pensée, have had difficulty in answering the physical problems posed by his theories.

[COMMENT: Following Dr. Velikovsky's death, the Velikovskian School broke apart into various factions; and yes, a few of them, such as researcher and writer C. Leroy Ellenberger, have become some of his harshest and most outspoken critics. Regarding the polar-shift hypothesis of Carl Sagan mentioned above, I must admit that I have never read that before. Whether there is any merit to it, I cannot speculate. Carl Sagan was one of the most vociferous establishment enemies of Dr. Velikovsky, along with Stephen Jay Gould. Their academic disagreement has become popularly known as "The Velikovsky Affair" about which books have been written. RS]

Page 212

The French occultist Papus (1865-1916, born Gérard Encausse) was for a time an admirer of Madame [Helena P.] Blavatsky [from whom Godwin quotes extensively, RS] and a member of her society. But by the time The Secret Doctrine was available to him, he had become disillusioned with Theosophy. Consequently, when he wrote the first of his encyclopedic works, Traité élémentaire des sciences occultes (Elementary treatise on the occult sciences), he took little notice of any theories she might have put about. Papus turned instead to Louis Michel de Figanières, one of a number of seers with whom this highly intelligent man became infatuated, and whose moonstruck theories were outlined in Chapter Fourteen. Papus writes:

"If the equator and the ecliptic were to coincide, the earth would be in a state of physical harmony, from the point of view of seasons and climates, of which it would know nothing. Since this harmony does not exist, the terrestrial poles oscillate periodically; and it is from this oscillation that the subtle transformations derive that are felt by the continents and engraved on the memories of mankind in the form of geological cataclysms and deluges. Each terrestrial pole, according to secret tradition and not to current science, may occupy eight successive positions with regard to the equator. This is the law of eight terrestrial poles, which we are content to name, without going any further. Whence comes this inclination of the ecliptic with regard to the equator. All the initiations are unanimous in this regard: it comes from the MOON."

We saw in Chapter Fourteen how Michel de Figanières' visions had given him the idea of a moon reluctant to take its place with the other masses that made up the primitive earth. But what are these "eight terrestrial poles" of which no one else appears to have spoken?

[COMMENT: Well, well, well! I certainly hope that some of you readers can appreciate my surprise upon seeing this. I have long advocated that there is a North Polar Belt surrounding the Great Pyramid of Egypt (and a corresponding South Polar Belt), so that the Pyramid is always 30° above any Equator and 60° below any North Pole. These various Polar Zones match precisely the locations of Ice Age evidence from past epochs. In my work I have used a series of six North and South Poles, mainly for clarity of diagramming on a globe, but indeed there may be eight pairs of Poles. With eight Polar Alignments, during any Polar Configuration, either a side or a corner of the Great Pyramid would be directly aligned with the North Pole. Of course, there is no way at all to "prove" this until after it occurs again, predictably before 21 December 2012, and we can measure the exact distance from the old North Pole to the new one, which I suggest will be located around Lake Baikal in southern Siberia. The reader can see these various Polar Zones and Polar Alignments at my website: smd.com/polarzones.html and smd.com/polaralignments.html. RS]

Page 215

While the people mentioned in the previous three chapters have been eager to propound their various theories of the earth's shifting axis, very few of them have been willing to give a physical explanation of how this happened. This is probably because most of them were without scientific training, and were either unaware of the physical problems posed by their theories, or else indifferent to that level of discourse. It is quite another matter with our final group of authorities. In this chapter we turn largely to the scientists, to see how they have handled our subject over the past hundred and fifty years.

[COMMENT: Godwin then reviews several of these scientific theories, but a true explanation remains lacking. Finally he concludes as follows here. RS]

Page 222

I have given only a small sampling of recent scientific theory. But the reader who has persisted through it may have noticed a certain similarity between these competing theories of the scientists, on the one hand, and those of the "illuminates" on the other. Within each group there is little consensus, and the scientists are each enclosed in their intellectual bubbles, as surely as poor Fourier or Mackey were. Each has a pet theory, backed up with a chart of figures obtained at great trouble and expense, which he or she proposes apparently without any sense of how it fits into a general world-view. The largest questions of cosmology are subjects for agnosticism. Just occasionally, one comes across a bold and sweeping theory like Williams' or Dodd's, which literally turns the world upside-down; but even these have not become received wisdom in the sense, for example, that continental drift has.

One has to conclude that the geological or cosmological theories about polar wandering and axial shift are no more proven than those of the illuminates, or of the humanists whose suppositions are based on ancient texts. All are in quest of the theory that "saves the appearances", whether these be the readings of paleomagnetism or the myths of the earliest civilizations. No two theories agree with one another, and most of them are mutually incompatible.

Should one, then, throw the whole idea overboard and join the majority of the human race in agnosticism or indifference? Only if one is unmoved by the persistence of this archetype in the collective imagination. The myth of a pole shift has haunted the Western mind from its beginnings, surfacing sporadically like an underground stream, only to sink out of sight again for a few hundred years. Over the past two centuries it has fascinated a small group of illuminates and cranks, and an equally small group of scientists, while mischievously eluding the firm grasp of any one of them. This book does not pretend to succeed where so many experts have failed; but if the archetype has not yet been hunted down, at least I think that we have surrounded it, and that the reader has been given a fair chance to decide whether or not to believe in its existence.

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The early chapters of this book presented the twin myths of a Golden Age in the more or less distant past, in which the earth's axis was perfectly vertical, and of its current 23.5° inclination as coeval with the fall of humanity into its present condition. We have also reviewed theories of historical cycles, which hold that now, at the end of the twentieth century, we are nearing a crucial juncture. In closing, we turn to the prophecies and predictions concerning an imminent restoration of the pole to its original position, with all its consequences for good and ill.

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That destiny, however, does not necessarily include the continuation of life as we know it. We scareely need the illuminates telling us that we are reaching the end of the Piscean Age, the end of the Kali Yuga, and the end of Adamic humanity, to be aware that the present time is unique. Whether the "overall tone of human thought and feeling" is better or worse than in past ages, I would not like to say; but the overall tone of global life has never been worse. It is hard to imagine a more poetically just way for much-abused Earth to reassert its right over us than to execute a sudden, or even a gradual return to its Golden Age position. That would certainly put us in our place! But such an event is past planning for. In one sense, it is much too large to worry about; yet in another sense, even that would be but a twist on the spiral path that leads every creature eventually to Arcadia.

POSTSCRIPT COMMENT

Amen! All of Godwin's concluding remarks are worth pondering, but the fact remains that he did not mention the existence of Planet X Nibiru in his references. Perhaps he didn't realize that it might have had some bearing upon the subject. His book was published in 1996, and it was only in that year that I myself made the connection between Dr. Velikovsky's "Saturn Theory", The Cosmic Tree and Planet X Nibiru. My theory is unique, and in the grander scheme of overall research still quite new, and, of course, most revolutionary. But I stand by every word of it until I am proven wrong by the Cosmos itself. Even Zecharia Sitchin's books are recent over the past 29 years. Pieces of this puzzle slowly but surely fall into place like clockwork.

If it were not Planet X Nibiru (or one of its gigantic, perhaps even moon-sized motherships) tethered to our North Pole (the Rainbow Bridge to Heaven), then what was it? Saturn? A "mystical land" like "Hyperborea" that really did exist at some point in our distant past, only to disappear, never to be seen again? These and a myriad of possibilities have already been thoroughly explored by others, as Godwin demonstrates, but none of them so cleanly and precisely explains this "phenomenon" as does the periodic visit by Planet X Nibiru.