by Freddy Silva
The area is scarred with three thousand troughs, half of them longer than 1300 feet, one hundred longer than 5250 feet. In total they cover an elongated elliptical area of 63,500 square miles. The longitudinal axes of the craters run parallel, indicating the descending meteorites must have been traveling in the same direction and, given the shape of the craters’ thrust walls along the southeast, suggests the space rocks arrived from the northwest. Since the craters are both elliptical and circular, the indication is of a descending body that disintegrated and exploded, leaving two different sets of impressions along with a mess of overlapping craters.20 The sand around the crater rims also displays evidence of excessive heat caused by the impacts.
LIDAR image of oval impact craters called the Carolina Bays. North Carolina
Naturally the consequences were immediate, even on the opposite coast of North America where more than one billion fish were found petrified on the former seabed off the coast of California around the period of impact.
It seems Enoch’s description of “seven burning mountains” was a tad understated, it was nothing short of a swarm.
EARTH’S DANCE WITH DEATH
The Mahabharata paints the offending meteorite that generated the global flood in graphic terms as a horrific one-eyed bird with one wing in the night sky, screaming and vomiting blood. According to various world accounts the Earth was subsequently covered in a thick, chocking dust, accompanied by rough winds, and fireballs that crashed with hissing sounds. Darkness covered the land. Survivors used torches to light their way at midday. Mountains collapsed onto the plains. It was said to have appeared during the Indian month of Kartitika, the middle of October to early November, and obscured the normal view of the Pleiades. There is only one known culprit who arrives like clockwork from this sector of the sky at the same time each year: the Taurid meteor shower.
The Taurids are named after their radiant point in Taurus, the constellation standing between the Pleiades and Orion, from where they are seen to emerge in the sky. Due to the gravitational perturbations of planets, Jupiter in particular, the Taurids have spread out over time to become two separate showers: the Southern Taurids, active from approximately September 10 to November 20, are the remains of Comet Encke, while the Northern Taurids, active from approximately October 20 to December 10, originate from an asteroid. Still, the Taurids are believed to be remnants of an even larger body that disintegrated within the last twenty or thirty thousand years, otherwise the asteroids would have spread around the inner planetary system and no longer be recognizable as a stream.21 Even so it is still the largest stream in the inner solar system. It takes two weeks for the Earth to pass through it — a timeframe that coincides with the period allocated to ceremonies performed by people such as the Hopi. Every late October to mid-November the Earth plays a dangerous game of dodgems while we stare up at the night sky, marvelling at a spectacle we believe to be benign but in reality comes with a history of devastation that would make a Hollywood special effects team blush.
And now for the second instalment of this uplifting story. Because the Taurids’ twenty-million mile wide trail of debris follows an orbital path, the Earth replays this game once more every June, except this time the stakes are a higher, because cross sections of the stream approach from the Earth's daytime side and cannot be visually observed.
The Taurid stream has a cycle of activity that peaks roughly every 2,500 to 3,000 years, when its core passes nearer to Earth and produces either more intense showers or total annihilation. It’s pure luck. Sometimes Earth wins, but, on occasion, it loses. On June 25, 1178, a monk at Canterbury Cathedral witnessed a fragment of the Taurids colliding with the Moon, creating what would become known as the Girodano Bruno crater. The impact sent out a tail of debris tall enough to be seen for several nights. The date coincides with a series of notable meteorite impacts on Earth catalogued by Chinese astronomers of the period, some impacting New Zealand to form the Tapaniu craters on the South Island. The event was recorded by the Waitaha, who describe the catastrophic forest fires that led to a mass extinction of bird species.
The most recent Taurid event took place in June 30, 1908, when a fireball streaked across the northern hemisphere and exploded over Tungusta, Siberia. A Russian scientific paper published an analysis of results of micro-samples recovered from the peat bog near the epicenter and revealed the origin to be meteoric.22
Since the end of the Younger Dryas, the Earth has been on the receiving end of dozens of such minor hits, reminders of the importance of monitoring the sky and, if necessary, developing inconveniently long calendars and hard-wiring the warning into standing megaliths or the walls of massive temples.
Why were the ancients afraid of comets? Because they had reason to be.
Hopi Snake Clan member enters kiva. Arizona.
18. ORION THE UBIQUITOUS
"The Watchers could take on human form when they wanted to.” — Book of Enoch
Yucatan. January.
Uxmal is another of my ‘second homes’. The centrepiece of this temple city is its distinctive curved Pyramid of the Magician, erected in a single night, so the legend goes. Like other organic temples it grew over time, adapting to the changing skies, becoming five pyramids in one. Its grandiose staircase is lined with the inescapable effigies of Cha’ac, God of Rain. An enclosure skirts the base, built in a style more common to Saqqara or Angkor than Yucatan. Out of the blue, my good colleague Miguel Angel Vergara tells me, “There’s a phrase associated with this temple, a mantra used to connect with and open the records embedded inside: Nak-He-Nah-Tun, it means Pyramid of Precious Stone of the Children of the Turtle. The Children of the Turtle is humans.”
“The phrase sounds remarkably like Akh-en-Aten,” I remarked.
Now, what would the name of an Egyptian pharaoh be doing in Yucatan describing the function of a pyramid, I wonder? Miguel looked surprised too, he’d never even heard of Akhenaten. And there’s a lot of Egypt in the Yucatan, for example, the Maya supreme god Ahau is the nickname given to the Shining Ones, Followers of Horus; like Osiris, both K’uKuulKaan and Quetzalcoatl are depicted in blue-green (as is Siva, for that matter), while both Egyptian and Maya dynasties trace their lineage beyond the Oldest Dryas. The Maya words hom (ball court), and ik (air) are Egyptian — hem (little ball), ikh (suspend in air) — as are the words for canoe, reed, well, house and snake.
Watching the low-angle light from the setting Sun pick out the detail of the Pyramid of the Magician is one of life’s great pleasures. The other is watching the shape of Orion dominate the sky above it at night, as though the two were made for each other; at this latitude its belt stars rise above it like a flagpole. The Maya look upon Orion as the First Father Hunhunahpo, a grain god who figuratively dies and resurrects — like Osiris — and they placed great importance on three specific stars in this constellation: Saiph, Alnitak, and the great blue giant Rigel. Together they represent the Three Stones of the Hearth, the very foundation of Maya cosmology and its associated temple culture. Directly in the center of this equilateral triangle lies Nebula M42. The Maya call it K’ak, the very flame of creation.
This hearth is physically represented by three standing stones in the center of an altar in Uxmal’s quadrangle, the enclosure of the wisdom keepers — or at least they did until the Spanish removed them during their purge of un-Christian idolatry. Yet the relationship was so integral to Maya belief that the triangular three-stone hearth remained a feature in all traditional homes. The center of the Orion triangle is referred to as Heart of the Sky, the same term given by the Hopi to the katcina Sótuknang.
If you’ve been paying careful attention throughout this adventure you will have noticed I’ve been dropping subtle hints here and there about Orion, the most obvious being the Giza pyramids that mirror its belt starts, with Osiris as the constellation’s earthly representative. There are other examples: Teotihuacan’s three main pyramids echo the belt of Orion when its main avenue, the Way of the Soul,
aligned to the constellation’s apogee on the winter solstice c.10,400 BC. Teotihuacan is one of the homes of Quetzalcoatl, Osiris’ doppelganger in Mexico. The K'iche' Maya linked Orion with a certain Jun Rakán, or huracán, a strong wind that is said to have accompanied Quetzalcoatl during the deluge.1
To the people of Tonga, Orion was the most important of constellations. They called it Toloa, and referenced it terrestrially with the colossal megalith Ha’amonga a Maui, along with a group of large mounds, now heavily eroded, although the place name still survives.2 Perhaps this is what the Olmec had in mind when they referred the homeland of the antediluvian gods as Tollan, the Place of Reeds, the very same description offered in Egypt.
While there is no doubt the gods lived on missing lands such as Atitlán, Mu’ul, Hiva Oa, Ta Neterw, Apsû, Bhogavati, iw titi and Te Pitaka, my travels and research have led me to entertain the idea that their point of origin, the ultimate missing land, might lay elsewhere. It may not even be terrestrial at all.
Let’s see where this thought takes us.
THE ORION CONNECTION
The word Orion, of course, is a recent variant on an ancient name. Its earliest linguistic root comes from the Anunaki sage Ur-annu (a variant of U-annu), whose name translates as ‘light of heaven’ and ‘Red Man of Anu’, a probable reference to his hair color. Babylonian star catalogues list the constellation as Sipa.Zi.An.Na, another relationship to the Anunaki because it literally means True Shepherd of Anu.
The Greeks later transliterated Ur-annu into Oarion (boundary), suggesting the constellation marks some unspecified periphery, a frontier into another realm perhaps. Its Arabic name Al Jabr provides a further layer of interpretation: ‘giant’ and ‘broken bones’, a nod to Osiris, the hero who is figuratively dismembered during his initiation into the Otherworld.
Orion takes on related symbolism and purpose across multiple cultures. In India he is Praja-pati, master of created beings, which no doubt influenced the Celtic view of the constellation as the source of divine kingship, while in Scandinavian lore, Orion’s Belt becomes the staff of Frigge, the goddess responsible for making the Earth fertile. Collectively, Orion appears to represent a place of high office as well as a source of life.
One of the oldest people to adopt Orion as a talisman were the Anasazi, or as they were originally called, Hisat-Sinom, a rather revealing name because it breaks into two parts: hisat (people of remote times) and sinom (people or man), and it suggests a link to the Watcher and Red Ant person Anu-Sinom. If so, the name is describing 'people belonging to the remote time of Anu-Sinom'. As the tribe began to disappear, their traditions were blended into the Hopi worldview, including the belief in the influence of stars on the development of human psyche during its carnal entrapment. Such a sky-ground correspondence was taken to its pinnacle when the Hopi came to choose the locations for their terrestrial universe in a remote corner of Arizona desert — the First, Second and Third Mesas. These three natural sandstone tables, rising hundreds of feet above a parched plain, once resembled islands twelve thousand years ago when northern Arizona, like ancient Egypt, was blessed with abundant rainfall. The alignment of the mesas bears an uncanny resemblance to the pattern formed by the belt stars of Orion, with additional centers such as Betatakin, Canyon de Chelly, Homol’ovi and Wupatki completing the body.3 The Lakota or Sioux claim to have created a similar relationship with their sacred sites in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
The Hopi village of Walpi stands on one of three mesas that appear to mirror the belt stars of Orion. Arizona.
The relationship is reproduced on a personal level. Leading up to the Hopi winter solstice ceremony of Soyal, the elders retire to a kiva in early November to observe the passing in the night sky of Hotòmqam, the brightest star on the belt of Orion, through an opening in the roof. As we saw in the previous chapter, once all three stars are framed by the opening, with the center star above the fireplace, the ritual of Wúwutcim commences in accordance with the pattern first laid down on Earth.4 The ritual serves a number of purposes. On one level it marks the rite of passage of the initiate and involves a symbolic death and rebirth, as practiced in the Mysteries of Osiris and other figuratively resurrected heroes throughout the ancient world.5 On a secondary level it serves to convey and commit to memory the knowledge of past events, and to honor the people from whom the rituals originated. The Hopi ceremony recounts the Emergence legend, when the creator god Taiowa encouraged his Watcher emissary Masau’u to make the long journey from the old world to establish the current world with the ancestors of the Hopi-Anasazi. The important thing to bear in mind is that the story is communicated inside the kiva the moment the central star of Orion’s Belt passes directly over the fire pit. Like other ancient Mysteries schools teachings, the rest of the ceremony remains a closely guarded secret: “On the fourth day of the proceedings, visitors are barred from the pueblo and all trails are closed. This is a night of mystery and terror. People are forced to remain indoors and forbidden even to glance outside... Concurrently, in the kivas underground, a most esoteric and awe-inspiring ritual is being performed which no white observer has ever glimpsed.”6
In yet another relationship between two ancient cultures on opposite sides of the planet, when Osiris ascends to Sahu (Orion) he becomes an example for others to emulate, he is now an intermediary between sky and ground. The same relationship appears in Arizona. A Hopi katsina by the name Sohu is described as an intermediary god between Orion and Earth. He is portrayed wearing a row of three dots on his chest representing the belt of Orion, which in turn is reflected in the alignment of the Three Mesas. The Hopi word for mesa is tuukvi; its derivative tuukwavi means bead or necklace. In turn, the cognates of the Egyptian word sahu are sa-t (beads), and saa-t (wisdom).7
By this point the word coincidence becomes redundant.
TRAVEL BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
There exist a number of curious overlaps between astral and physical travel to and from Orion, to the point where the lines between the two become blurred. One incidence is illustrated in Egypt. A foreman working in Saqqara in the 19th century came face-to-face one dawn with a jackal beside the ruined pyramid of Unas. “It was as if the animal were taunting his human observer... and inviting the puzzled man to chase him. Slowly the jackal sauntered towards the north face of the pyramid, stopping for a moment before disappearing into a hole. The bemused Arab decided to follow his lead. After slipping through the narrow hole, he found himself crawling into the dark bowels of the pyramid. Soon he emerged into a chamber and, lifting his light, saw that the walls were covered from top to bottom with hieroglyphic inscriptions. These were carved with exquisite craftsmanship into the solid limestone and painted over with turquoise and gold.”8
The inscriptions would become known as the Pyramid Texts. They describe in minute detail the path taken by the initiate, while still alive, into the Otherworld, and the return to his or her living body. Allegedly carved around 2320 BC, they portray a thorough and scientific understanding of another level of reality that would seem above and beyond the capability of people in this supposedly unsophisticated age. The Egyptologist Raymond Faulkner succinctly described their importance: “They disclose to us a vanished world of thought and speech, the last of the unnumbered aeons through which prehistoric man has passed, till finally he... enters this historic age.”9
Section of the Pyramid Texts inside the pyramid of Unas. Saqqara,Egypt.
How old is this vanished world? Writing in 1934 Wallis Budge, former Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities in London, made a valid observation that the Pyramid Texts appear to have been brought back into use around the time of Unas, because the high number of unknown words used and the awkward sentence construction suggests the texts were cobbled together from older sources, so much so that the engravers etching the hieroglyphs onto the chamber walls did not fully comprehend what the original scribes had written, as though the material had been handed down from a remote age and the workers in the twenty-third century BC
were having difficulty translating it into the language of the day.
One of the many enigmas of the Pyramid Texts concerns the aspiration of the candidate — often a pharaoh, although the practice was open to anyone of moral integrity — to be reborn as “this Great Star, the Companion of Orion, who traverses the sky with Orion... you ascend from the east of the sky being renewed in your due season, and rejuvenated in your due time.”10 They describe the means by which the gods enable the ascent of the individual into their abode using a special throne made from the metal bja — not a far cry from the flood hero Yim and his flight-capable jeweled glass throne, or the ‘cloud’ that air-lifted Enoch to the domain of the Anu. Other references are made to “a ladder for you to ascend to the sky,” and the Hnw-bark, a celestial canoe that propels the individual across the heavens.11 The texts depict the work of a graceful poet if not an erudite astro-physicist and, like Enoch, the original writer may have been improvising while attempting to describe something beyond his level of comprehension, hence a symbolism and syntax that, at times, appears obtuse to us.
Osiris boards the solar boat as Sahu-Orion.
Since the central theme of the Pyramid Texts deals with the spiritual resurrection of the individual, it may be that the ancient source of these instructions is none other that the transformation of Osiris, a mortal being who becomes as a bright star, a god, and subsequently takes on the form of Sahu, whereupon the god-man is described in the manner in which Orion appears to the eye: “his leg is long and his stride extended.” Strangely enough the same attribute is shared by the Indian antediluvian god Vishnu who, like Osiris, is also depicted with blue-green skin.12 Perhaps there is more to this than mere allegory, because one of the Seven Sages of India, Visvamitra, is described in both the Ramayana and the Mahabaratha to have transferred a king of ancient India named Trianku to the sky in bodily form “where he now shines as the constellation Orion.”13 Aboriginal tribes in Northern Australia certainly believe in a material connection because they identify the Watchers as Nurrumbunguttias, and claim they physically arrived on Earth from Orion.14 The association stems back to the Watchers before the great flood, because the term used to describe their first offspring, nephilim, derives from nephilâ, the Aramaic for Orion. Furthermore, when Shemyaza, the leader of the renegade Watchers, was finally apprehended by the Anu lords, he was tied and bound before being made to hang upside down for all eternity in Orion.