Sep 28, 2004

One of the most profound archetypes of the early cultures is also among the most enigmatic.

Every culture recalled the ancient combat between a great warrior and a monster whose attack threatened to destroy the world. Pictured above is the lion-headed beast Anzu remembered by the Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians - a fierce monster defeated (in various tales) by the Sumerian Ningirsu or the Babylonian Ninurta or Nergal.

The warrior confronting Anzu in the above picture is the god Ninurta, wielding in each hand a weapon identified as a "thunderbolt". As for explanations, historians can only offer contradictory guesses.

How did the story of a heaven-altering contest find its way into so many cultures?

In the ritual of the Babylonian Akitu Festival, the enemy is the dragon Tiamat, subdued by the god Marduk. For the Egyptians it was the dragon Apep, defeated by Ra or his agent Horus. For the Greeks it was the fiery serpents Typhon or Python, vanquished respectively by Zeus and Apollo. Hindu accounts similarly recalled the attack of the sky-darkening serpent Vritra, felled by Indra. But these are only a few of hundreds of such accounts preserved around the world.

The story typically begins with the monster's arrival, an event signifying universal catastrophe. A legendary warrior sets out to engage the monster in direct combat. The battle rages amid earthquake, fire, wind, and falling stone, and it appears that all will be lost. Then the hero's magical weapon, fashioned by gods or divine assistants, flies between the combatants, turning the tide of battle and vanquishing the monster.

From this primeval encounter, the warrior earned his title as "hero". He defeated chaos and saved the world from catastrophe. But how did the divine weapon accomplish this feat?

The storytellers' own words and symbols, when traced to root meanings, make clear that the hero's weapon was no ordinary sword, arrow, or club. It was a thunderbolt - and not the familiar lightning of a regional storm, but a bolt of cosmic dimensions.

Though this original identity may not be apparent in many of the later versions of the story, it can be established reliably through cross-cultural comparison, with close attention to the memory's more archaic forms. When the great civilizations of the ancient world arose, the monster, the hero, and the cosmic thunderbolt already dominated human consciousness.

For the proponents of the Electric Universe, the role of the thunderbolt in the more ancient accounts is a vital clue, one to which we shall return frequently in these pages. Why does the divine thunderbolt not look like the lightning known to us today?

As we intend to show, the unusual forms of this weapon can serve as a bridge between plasma science and historical inquiry. The forms of the divine thunderbolt were not accidental. To an astonishing extent they mimic the configurations taken by intense electric discharge in the plasma laboratory.

And now, thanks to modern telescopes, we see similar forms in remote space, a fact that can only reinforce the power of the ancient message.

Oct 04, 2004

A thunderstorm can be a terrifying event.

The lightning flash and thunderclap may indeed awaken a primal fear, and a cursory acquaintance with mythology may elicit a newfound empathy for the mythmakers of antiquity. In the presence of a thunderstorm, was it not natural for our ancestors to envisage lightning-beasts roaring in the heavens or celestial armies hurling lightning-spears across the sky?

Unfortunately our common suppositions have prevented investigators from examining the underlying patterns of "lightning" symbolism. Cross-cultural comparison reveals numerous global images of "lightning" in ancient times, but these are a far cry from the phenomenon familiar to us today. Ancient descriptions suggest that the "lightning of the gods" - the cosmic thunderbolt - altered the order of the heavens and changed planetary history.

To describe the cosmic thunderbolt, ancient chroniclers employed a wide range of natural and man-made symbols, and the images go well beyond those that would seem appropriate for lightning.

• The legendary bolt was a serpent

• It was a sword or arrow

• It was a blossoming flower

• It grew horns or wings

• It was a whirlwind

• It was a comet

Terrestrial lightning was but one of many hieroglyphs used to describe this celebrated weapon of gods and heroes.

The breadth of images will, in fact, appear quite meaningless until we find a new vantage point, one permitting us to discern the archetype, the original form that preceded the symbols and gave them their mythological context. Analysis will show that the weapon was electrical: the ancient interpretation as a thunderbolt was highly appropriate, as were the alternative mythic interpretations, all rooted in the same human experience.

The montage above shows three Greek images of the god Zeus launching his weapon, whose most elementary form was that of simple missile with a corkscrew configuration upon it.

But numerous illustrations of the weapon show it sending forth leaf-like sepals, then "flowering" into a lotus-form. The petals of the lotus-thunderbolt are also elaborated as horns or wings, a fact that appears absurd today, until we discover the underlying structure. The patterns are, in fact, surprisingly consistent.

One example of the evolving form is seen in the picture of Zeus confronting the feared monster Typhon. Below this picture we present, as a starting point, three of the more elementary forms of the Greek thunderbolt, representing the foundation upon which all of the more elaborate images were built.

In next TPODs, we'll examine the cosmic thunderbolt in detail, with an emphasis on cross cultural comparison.

Clearly, the subject was not a bolt of lightning such as we observe in the sky today. It was a plasmoid, a configuration typically formed at the "z- pinch" of interacting electrical currents. In intensely energetic plasma discharges, a plasmoid can evolve violently, through a series of metamorphoses, or quasi-stable phases, and many of these forms have now been well documented through several decades of laboratory research.

The literary and artistic images of Zeus' thunderbolt capture some of the most prominent phases of intense plasma discharge.

Oct 07, 2004

It is fascinating to follow the historic evolution of the cosmic thunderbolt, as the divine weapon of the gods passed into the sword, spear, arrow, or club of the most famous heroes of later times.

Of course mythologists will not normally think of the arrow of Apollo, the sword of Perseus, or the club of Heracles as electric in nature. One reason for this is that, as the early gods of the thunderbolt evolved over the centuries, the chroniclers gradually reduced them to human dimensions. A celestial warrior bearing the thunderbolt in battle later lost his cosmic attributes to become a great man, the best of heroes, the esteemed ancestor of the tribe or nation telling the story.

In such cases the original identity of the magical weapon had already slipped into the background, though only rarely could it be hidden entirely. Often, what we get is just a shadow of the cosmic missile so vividly described in early Near Eastern narratives of primeval order and chaos.

As a bridge between the more archaic world and the fragmented and diluted myths of later times, Greek accounts offer many clues pointing to the evolution of the symbolism. The Homeric Hymn to Pythian Apollo describes the hero’s confrontation with the chaos serpent Python, whom the chroniclers identified alternately as a form of the dragon Typhon or as the nurse of Typhon.

The Homeric and other accounts refer to the invincible "arrow" launched by Apollo, causing the monster to shudder violently and to give up its life in a torrent of blood.

The ambiguity as to the setting of the mythic accounts is emphasized in the two paintings above, depicting Apollo’s defeat of Python. The upper painting by Eugène Delacroix has preserved many touches of the original celestial context, while the lower by J. M. W, Turner is much more terrestrial in its setting.

Did the "arrow" of Apollo really mean the cosmic thunderbolt, the weapon that so often, in the earlier Near Eastern accounts, took the form of an arrow? The most respected experts on Greek mythology and symbolism assure us that arrows or swords wielded by the revered gods of Greece cannot be separated from the language of the thunderbolt. The connection is apparent in the Greek keraunós, "thunderbolt," most commonly used for Zeus’ weapon and said to stem from a Proto-Indo-European root "ker." 

The same root appears to lie behind the Sanskrit "áru", ’arrow’ and the Gothic haírus, ’sword.’ This should not surprise us, since the most familiar representations of the "eagle" of Zeus (as, of course, the eagle of the Latin Jupiter) depict the god’s lightning as arrows held in the talons of the bird - a representation well preserved into modern times by the symbol of the eagle and its lightning-arrows on the U.S. one dollar bill.

The same association holds true for the sword of Apollo. The god’s epithet was chrysáoros or chrysáor - meaning "of the Golden Sword" (áor). According to the distinguished authority, W. H. Roscher, the Golden Sword is a Greek hieroglyph for the thunderbolt. Indeed Zeus himself, the most famous wielder of the thunderbolt, was Chrysaoreús or Chrysaórios, "He of the Golden Sword".

In much the same way, the poet Pindar speaks of Zeus "whose spear is lightning", while Aristophanes invokes lighting as "the immortal fiery spear of Zeus". In the words of the poet Nonnus, Zeus is,

"the javelin-thrower of the thunderbolt".

 

"The spear he shook [in the battle with Typhon] was lightning."

 

"Do thou in battle lift thy lightning-flash, Olympus’ luminous spear".

The question is worth pursuing, therefore: have historians and mythologists missed the true identity of the far-famed hero and his weapon?

Oct 12, 2004

 

To uncover the secret of the thunder-weapon in world mythology we must trace the theme back to its early expressions in ancient Mesopotamia.

When the Babylonians, the world’s first astronomers, looked back to the age of the gods, they spoke incessantly of disaster. In their Akitu festival, a prototype of ancient New Year’s celebrations, the astronomer priests recounted the events of a former time, when the dragon Tiamat assaulted the world and it appeared that heaven itself would fall into chaos. (See the above image of the seven-headed dragon, Tiamat, taken from a Babylonian cylinder seal.)

The "resplendent dragon" spawned a horde of dark powers with "irresistible weapons" - "monster serpents, sharp-toothed, with fang unsparing", their bodies filled with poison for blood.

"Fierce dragons she has draped with terror, crowned with flame and made like gods", the storytellers recounted, "so that whoever looks upon them shall perish with fear".

This was not a disaster on a local scale, but a universal disaster - a catastrophe so great that the gods themselves were immobilized by fear, and even Anu, the sovereign of the sky, fled the scene in terror.

The protagonist in this narrative is the god Marduk. When all else had failed, it was Marduk who rose to confront Tiamat and her companions. The god took possession of his "matchless weapons" and,

"In front of him he set the lightning,
With a blazing flame he filled his body"

Mounted on his storm-chariot and turbaned with a "fearsome halo," Marduk set his course toward the raging Tiamat. In the encounter that followed,

"Tiamat opened her mouth to consume him,
He drove in the Evil Wind that she close not her lips.
As the fierce winds charged her belly,
Her body was distended and her mouth was wide open.
He released the arrow, it tore her belly,
It cut through her insides, splitting the heart".

Cuneiform specialists confirm that the arrow of Marduk was the thunderbolt, a weapon frequently displayed throughout the ancient Near East and beyond.

We have already noted that the Sumerian warrior Ninurta defeated the monster Anzu with his thunderbolt, just as the Greek Zeus subdued Typhon with the thunderbolt. But the early traditions of earthshaking battles in the heavens were not limited to any particular culture. At the temple of Ra in Heliopolis the priests ritually trod underfoot images of the great dragon Apep to represent his defeat at the hands of the supreme god.

At the temple of Edfu, a series of reliefs depict the warrior Horus and his followers vanquishing Apep or his counterpart Set, cutting to pieces the monster’s companions, the "fiends of darkness". According to W. M. Muller, the spear or harpoon of Horus was a metaphor for the thunderbolt.

"Lightning is the spear of Horus, and thunder the voice of his wounded antagonist, roaring in his pain", Muller reports.

The Hebrews, too, preserved an enduring memory of Yahweh’s battle against a dragon of the deep, marked by lightning on a cosmic scale.

"The voice of thy thunder was in the heaven: the lightnings lightened the world: the earth trembled and shook".

Here the adversary was alternately named Rahab, Leviathan, Tannin, or Behemoth - dragon-like forms representing both the waters of chaos and the rebellion of the "evil land" vanquished by Yahweh in primeval times.

The battle is echoed in Job 26:

"The pillars of heaven shook and were astounded at his roar. By his power he stilled the sea, and by his understanding he smote Rahab".

It is also well established that the Hebrew accounts reflect a connection to early Canaanite traditions in which the thunderbolt-wielding god Baal defeated the monster Lotan.

Comparison of the cross-cultural traditions suggests a human memory reaching far beyond any tribal or regional influence. Yet similarities abound, and unexplained similarities are the key to discovery.

• What ancient event provoked the human memory of a dragon attacking the world?

• Who was the warrior-god who confronted the monster?

• And what was the invincible "thunderbolt" that defeated the beast?

The questions can be answered if we allow the ancient witnesses to speak - and to mean what they say.
 

Oct 14, 2004

Ancient stories of cosmic battles, pitting a celestial warrior against a serpent, dragon, or other monster, were integral to the birth of civilization.

From one early culture to another, sacred monuments and rites, religious texts, and cosmic symbols harked back to the age of the gods, to earthshaking upheaval, and celestial combat.

One fact is frequently overlooked, however. The context and setting of the later stories progressively changed as the gods were brought down to earth. Over time, the poets and historians placed the stories on a landscape familiar to them. In the course of Egyptian history, for example, the creator Ra and his regent Horus, whose original domain was undeniably celestial, came to be remembered as terrestrial kings.

In later time, when Greek and Roman poets, philosophers, and naturalists sought to gather knowledge from far flung cultures, Egyptian priests would relate to them many stories of the gods, declaring that the events had occurred in their own city in the time of the ancestors.

By following this evolutionary tendency across the centuries, the researcher can observe how the cosmic thunderbolt, a centerpiece in innumerable tales of celestial combat, emerged as the magical weapon of a legendary hero. It became the sword, spear, hammer or club of a warrior who continued to battle chaos monsters, but no longer in the heavens.

As a result of localization, the diminished hero typically reveals an enigmatic mix of god and man, as in the well known accounts of the Sumerian and Babylonian hero Gilgamesh. Once reduced to human dimensions, the hero could no longer hold onto his original weapon, a weapon claimed to have shaken and forever changed both heaven and earth.

Localization of the celestial dramas recorded in earliest times had a huge impact on Greek imagination. The best indication of the evolutionary process is Greek epic literature, including the most popular tale of all, Homer’s Iliad.

Here the greatest of Greek heroes, the ideal warrior, is Achilles. The hero’s tale provided the fulcrum upon which the poet integrated different tribal memories, bringing together dozens of tribal heroes upon the battlefields of a legendary, and entirely mythological Trojan War. But the original themes, though subdued, are still present.

In the illustration above, from a Greek drinking vessel, we observe Achilles confronting the serpent-guardian of a Trojan fountain. What is the relationship of this image to the archaic contests between warrior gods and chaos serpents?

Achilles’ father was the mythic king Peleus and his mother the "sea" goddess Thetis, daughter of Oceanus, for whose affections both Zeus and Poseidon had contended. Bathed by his mother in the river Styx, the river that "joins the earth and Hades", he was tutored by the Centaur Chiron. His armor was fashioned by the god Hephaestus, the very god who fashioned the thunderbolts of Zeus.

The actual terrestrial city of Troy is the modern Hissarlik in Turkey, the site of a fortified palace from the Bronze Age onward. Neither this palace, nor anything uncovered by archaeologists in the region could have inspired the city of which the poets spoke! In the cultures of the Near East and Mediterranean, hundreds of historic kings left unmistakable proof of their lives and their cultural influence.

But of the countless kings, warriors, princesses and seers in the Iliad, not one finds historic validity. The reason for this is that the claimed events did not occur on earth. The original subject was a cosmic drama, whose episodes progressively masqueraded as terrestrial history.

The similarities shared by mythic heroes are vast, directing our attention to ancient themes that can only appear incomprehensible to the modern world. One overarching theme is that of the hero’s magical, and typically invincible weapon.

More than once the poets spoke of Achilles’ spear as forked, or possessing a "double tongue", as when Aeschilos, in his Nereids, writes,

"The shaft, the shaft, with its double tongue, will come".

Practically speaking, a forked spear-point would have doomed an ancient warrior. But the image was not rooted in practical considerations. It comes directly from the well documented form of the thunderbolt wielded by Zeus.

Of Achilles’ spear, the poet Lesches of Lesbos (author of the Little Iliad), wrote:

"The ring of gold flashed lightning round, and o’er it the forked blade".

It is only to be expected that modern readers would see in these words a simple poetic simile. But is there something more? The answer must come through cross cultural comparison, for the warrior bearing the thunderbolt in battle was indeed a global theme.
 

Oct 21, 2004

Of all the ancient heroes, none achieved greater popularity than the Greek Heracles, (Roman Hercules), son of Zeus.

The sculpture on the left above depicts Hercules’ defeat of the serpent-monster Achelous, and the archaic Greek vase painting on the right portrays the hero’s defeat of the three-headed monster Geryon.

We have already noted that, across the centuries, former celestial gods were brought down to earth through storytelling, presenting an enigma for the chroniclers. How would later poets and historians describe the thunderbolt with which, in the more archaic tales, the warrior-god vanquished heaven-spanning serpents, dragons, or chaos monsters?

In some cases the electrical character of the weapon simply disappeared.

But in an astonishing number of instances, the lightning connection was preserved either through metaphor, or etymologies. Just as the spear of Achilles retained the connection to the thunderbolt of Zeus (it "flashed lightning round"), the poet Hesiod describes Heracles leaping into battle "like the lightning of his father Zeus".

The hero’s connection to the "thunderbolts of the gods" was no accident, a fact confirmed by cross-cultural comparison. In the Grail cycle of myths, lightning receives the name Lanceor, or "Golden Lance", an archaic name of Lancelot. Lightning is also linked to the sword Excalibur, which Geoffrey of Monmouth called Caliburn, from the Welsh Caledvwich, Irish Caladbolg: old names for the "lightning".

The most famous Celtic hero, Cúchulainn, victor over chaos powers, held a weapon granted him by the lightning-god Bolga, "the inventor of the missile spear".

The words Gaé Bolga signify Bolga’s spear, an acknowledged "lightning weapon" forged by the divine smith (like the thunderbolt of Zeus) in the Otherworld. So too, the warrior Fergus, when wielding his sword In Caladbolg, could single-handedly slay hundreds on the battle field. The sword’s name means "a two-handed lightning sword".

Again and again, Germanic tribes placed the thunderbolt in the hands of their celebrated heroes. Here, according to H. Bächtold-Stäubli, the forms of the thunderbolt ranged from "the rough stone and the club of primitive times through hammer, axe, and spear to the golden sword wielded by the Hero". (We take up the most famous Germanic thundergod Thor in pictures to follow.)

Gertrude Jobes, a diligent investigator of symbolic themes, affirms that, among the Altaic Tatars, lightning was the "arrow of a mighty hero". A common Slavic name for the weapon of the celestial warrior Perun is strela, "arrow". The Finnish warrior-hero Jumala, is said to have "wielded thunderbolts in the shape of jagged lightning-spears".

For the Hindus, it was the great warrior Indra who defeated the dragon Vritra with his thunderbolt.

Among the Tibetans and Mongols lightning was the arrow of a dragon-riding god, and thunder was the voice of the dragon. In the same way, the warrior Raiden, in Japanese myth, wielded "fire-arrows" - identified as the thunderbolt - in his battle against the chaos power, Raiju, the "Thunder-beast".

Numerous equations of hero’s weapon and thunderbolts occur in the Americas as well.

Iroquois account tells of a warrior Hé-no, whose name means "thunder".

"A monstrous serpent dwelt under the village, and made his annual repast upon the bodies of the dead which were buried by its side. He went forth once a year, and poisoned the waters of the Niagara, and also of the Cayuga creek, whereby the pestilence was created. Hé-no discharged upon the monster a terrific thunderbolt which inflicted a mortal wound."

Similarly, the Navaho say that long ago the arrows that defeated the devouring powers of chaos were the lightning.

The Pawnee and their neighbors recall the great warrior, named Black Lightning Arrow.

Thus, Von del Chamberain, who ranks among the most informed authorities on Plains Indian mythology, tells us that "the flint- tipped arrows of the Indian correspond to the lightning arrows shot to earth by higher powers".