The Truth of Myth

"Ahura Mazda warns Yima, the first king of men, of the approach of a dire winter, which is to destroy every living creature by covering the land with a thick sheet of ice, and advises Yima to build a Vara, or an enclosure, to preserve the seeds of every kind of animal and plant." -- Zend-Avesta, Fargard II

As a naive younger man, whenever I would read Plato I would almost always agree more with those around Socrates including and perhaps even especially the Sophists rather than Socrates himself, whereas on the other hand, the first time I read Aristotle, I considered him to be perhaps the most wise man whose words I'd ever read and for this reason I always considered myself an Aristotelian rather than a Platonist.

The idea of imaginary "Forms" is just not my cup of tea, whereas nature, physics, and metaphysics always appealed to me.

When Socrates said in Meno (Μένων), "there is no teaching, but only recollection," I didn't take him seriously, I didn't understand him (perhaps because I didn't take him seriously), and I thought he was a bit silly.

The first time I read the Timaeus (Τίμαιος) I was underwhelmed. I was hoping to find truth in it but didn't. The truth is I was blind to it.

It was March 23rd, 1994, strangely and exactly 2681 years after the last recorded catastrophe on March 23rd, 687 BC. Perhaps this is coincidence since there is currently a 1 in 365 chance of it.

But then I discovered the classicist Velikovsky who I consider to be the greatest genius of the 20th Century and who always reminds us of the wisdom of the ancients.

Velikovsky's claim of "mankind in amnesia" particularly struck a chord with me and the more I considered it the more I saw truth in it, all observation confims it, and the evidence mounts daily.

He pointed me back to Joshua, Homer, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Plato, Euripides, Hippolytus, Kepler, Galileo, Swift, and others who seemed to have bizarre wisdom unexplainable by mainstream logic. The words of Hippolytus and the views of Democritus perhaps being the the most prescient of all.

And it was along those lines I found this Whitehead quote from 1947, "Everything of importance has been said before, by someone who did not discover it."

But the most famous Whitehead quote is from 1929, "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."

And so it was I came back to Plato and the Timaeus and the wisdom of Solon.

Sometime after 600 BC, Solon travelled to Egypt and received the story of Atlantis which we all assume to be myth and Plato claims that if Solon had devoted his life to poetry he would've been the greatest of all the poets including Homer. However, his poems were lost with Critias which makes us recall the words of Pope, "they had no poet and they died."

Fortunately we have Plato.

Easily my favorite character in all of this is the Egyptian Neith priest identified by Plutarch as Sonchis of Sais. Why is he such an amazing figure? Because sometime shortly after 600 BC, he claims to have had access to 9000 years of human history.

So I went trying to find out everything I could about this Sonchis of Sais. And it turns out the Greeks after Plato did just the same thing.

According to Proclus, Crantor who was the first commentator on Plato actually travelled to Egypt looking for evidence to determine the question: myth or history?

He found it to be unadorned history.

Fastforward to the 17th century.

Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680) is considered to be the founder of Egyptology as a discipline because most so-called "scholars" are ignorant of world history and human experience. However, perhaps there is a grain of truth in their ignorance insofar as his research is some of the earliest which has survived the passing of time and the catastrophes of the past.

Kircher, like Solon, also went to Egypt, where he transcribed an Egyptian map directly from Egyptian sources which he published in his 1669 treatise Mundus Subterraneous.

But Kircher's map, unlike the documents of Sonchis and poems of Solon, has survived.



Now get ready to be blown away.

Remember our friend Velikovsky and catastrophic pole shift?



Atlantis is Antarctica and the Atlantean civilization there perished suddenly in "a single day and night of misfortune," ~11,609 years ago if Sonchis was correct, with a catastrophic pole shift and Deluge.

Meet Rand Flem-Ath, the most recent discoverer of Atlantis.

The Mystery of Baalbek

Could this be what Sonchis of Sais was referring to in Plato's Timaeus?

Are these the remains of Pelasgians who defeated the Atlanteans?

Did our ancestors have advanced technology?

Did the ancients surmise these stones lifted by Giants, Gigantes, Cyclopes, Titans, Nephilim, Rephaim, Anakim?



Sacred Sites: Baalbek, Lebanon.

The great mystery of the ruins of Baalbek, and indeed one of the greatest mysteries of the ancient world, concerns the massive foundation stones beneath the Roman Temple of Jupiter. The courtyard of the Jupiter temple is situated upon a platform, called the Grand Terrace, which consists of a huge outer wall and a filling of massive stones. The lower courses of the outer wall are formed of huge, finely crafted and precisely positioned blocks. They range in size from thirty to thirty three feet in length, fourteen feet in height and ten feet in depth, and weigh approximately 450 tons each. Nine of these blocks are visible on the north side of the temple, nine on the south, and six on the west (others may exist but archaeological excavations have thus far not dug beneath all the sections of the Grand Terrace). Above the six blocks on the western side are three even larger stones, called the Trilithon, whose weight exceeds 1000 tons each. These great stones vary in size between sixty-three and sixty-five feet in length, with a height of fourteen feet six inches and a depth of twelve feet.

Another even larger stone lies in a limestone quarry a quarter of a mile from the Baalbek complex. Weighing an estimated 1200 tons, it is sixty-nine feet by sixteen feet by thirteen feet ten inches, making it the single largest piece of stonework ever crafted in the world. Called the Hajar el Gouble, the Stone of the South, or the Hajar el Hibla, the Stone of the Pregnant Woman, it lays at a raised angle with the lowest part of its base still attached to the quarry rock as though it were almost ready to be cut free and transported to its presumed location next to the other stones of the Trilithon.

Why these stones are such an enigma to contemporary scientists, both engineers and archaeologists alike, is that their method of quarrying, transportation and precision placement is beyond the technological ability of any known ancient or modern builders. Various ‘scholars’, uncomfortable with the notion that ancient cultures might have developed knowledge superior to modern science, have decided that the massive Baalbek stones were laboriously dragged from the nearby quarries to the temple site. While carved images in the temples of Egypt and Mesopotamia do indeed give evidence of this method of block transportation - using ropes, wooden rollers and thousands of laborers - the dragged blocks are known to have been only 1/10th the size and weight of the Baalbek stones and to have been moved along flat surfaces with wide movement paths. The route to the site of Baalbek, however, is up hill, over rough and winding terrain, and there is no evidence whatsoever of a flat hauling surface having been created in ancient times.

Next there is the problem of how the mammoth blocks, once they were brought to the site, were lifted and precisely placed in position. It has been theorized that the stones were raised using a complex array of scaffolding, ramps and pulleys which was powered by large numbers of humans and animals working in unison. An historical example of this method has been suggested as the solution for the Baalbek enigma. The Renaissance architect Domenico Fontana, when erecting a 327-ton Egyptian obelisk in front of St Peter's Basilica in Rome, used 40 huge pulleys, which necessitated a combined force of 800 men and 140 horses. The area where this obelisk was erected, however, was a great open space that could easily accommodate all the lifting apparatus and the men and horses pulling on the ropes. No such space is available in the spatial context of how the Baalbek stones were placed. Hills slope away from where lifting apparatus would need to have been placed and no evidence has been found of a flat and structurally firm surface having been constructed (and then mysteriously removed after the lifting was done). Furthermore, not just one obelisk was erected but rather a series of giant stones were precisely put in place side-by-side. Due to the positioning of these stones, there is simply no conceivable place where a huge pulley apparatus could have been stationed.

Archaeologists, unable to resolve the mysteries of the transportation and lifting of the great blocks, rarely have the intellectual honesty to admit their ignorance of the matter and therefore focus their attention solely on redundant measurements and discussions regarding the verifiable Roman-era temples at the site. Architects and construction engineers, however, not having any preconceived ideas of ancient history to uphold, will frankly state that there are no known lifting technologies even in current times that could raise and position the Baalbek stones given the amount of working space. The massive stones of the Grand Terrace of Baalbek are simply beyond the engineering abilities of any recognized ancient or contemporary builders.

There are several other matters about the Baalbek stones that further confound archaeologists and conventional theories of prehistoric civilization. There are no legends or folk tales from Roman times that link the Romans with the mammoth stones. There are absolutely no records in any Roman or other literary sources concerning the construction methods or the dates and names of the benefactors, designers, architects, engineers and builders of the Grand Terrace. The megalithic stones of the Trilithon bear no structural or ornamental resemblance to any of the Roman-era constructions above them, such as the previously described Temples of Jupiter, Bacchus or Venus. The limestone rocks of the Trilithon show extensive evidence of wind and sand erosion that is absent from the Roman temples, indicating that the megalithic construction dates from a far earlier age.

Guess what it would require to lift one of those Trilithon stones?