2012 - Science Or Superstition?/Segment/4

The World Age Doctrine

09:27

The Precession of the Equinoxes

Narr: None of the ancient cultures that were able to calculate cycles of time with such incredible precision had the powerful telescopes and computers that are available to modern-day astronomers. Instead, they used naked eye observations of the stars above over multiple lifetimes to record and chart changes in the heavens - and eventually, to plot full cycles of time.

GH: The precession of the equinoxes is the astronomical process that underlies the Mayan calendar - and all ancient systems of cyclical time.

Perhaps I should just say a word about what the precession of the equinoxes is. Precession fundamentally is an observation of the heavens and an observation that at certain seasons of the year - particular markers, the equinoxes and the solstices - that if you look at the background of stars behind the Sun, you'll find that that background is very slowly changing, and it's changing at the rate of one degree every 72 years.

The view of mainstream astronomers as to why this is happening is - they hypothesise, they have not proved - that there is a cyclical wobble on the axis of the Earth, rather like the wobble of a top that has been spinning fast but it's spin has begun to decay, and the poles of the top begin to make a great circle. And this is what they believe is happening with the earth.

Now because the Earth is the viewing platform from which we observe the stars, changes in orientation of that viewing platform will cause changes in the observed appearance of positions of the stars in the sky at particular times of the year. And because it's a circular wobble, the whole thing is a cycle that in fact unfolds over a vast span of time - 25,920 years - takes you back from the starting position of the "clock" back fully around the clock to the same position again, so that the constellation that is rising behind the Sun today in our time and for a period of 2,160 years - which we're just entering into the Age of Aquarius, when the constellation of Aquarius has the Sun, it will be 25,920 years before that constellation again rises behind the Sun [on the vernal equinox]. [Talk]

JMJ: Ancient astrology - in the western world - recognises that there is this 'great cycle' caused by the wobble of the Earth on its axis, and one complete wobble is 26,000 years. In the Greco-Hellenistic period there were astrological ideas about how the Sun shifts through the twelve signs of the Zodiac. So you can divide the 26,000 year period into twelve periods, or ages, or chapters. And this is a fairly profound idea; it's referred to as the world age doctrine. We can notice that in the Old Testament period there was an obsession with the Age of Aries and symbolism around the lamb. And at the dawn of the Christian period there became an obsession with the fish symbolism that would indicate our shift into the Age of Pisces. Now, in the western astrological tradition we are about to move out of the sign of Pisces, so there's great talk about the shifting of the Age. Right now we're basically at the cusp of the Age of Aquarius. So this astrological doctrine has to do with our changing angular orientation to the larger cosmos. [Talk]

The Binary Star Theory

Narr: The belief of many ancient cultures around the world that the precession of the equinoxes maps out changes in human consciousness has led some researchers to believe that the ancients may have understood the causes and effects of precession in a markedly different way than the generally accepted wobble theory presented by modern scientists.

Walter Cruttenden, of the Binary Research Institute, looked back to the mythology of many of these cultures and posits a very different understanding of precession.

WC: Our research has focused on why are so many ancient cultures fascinated with this obtuse thing called precession of the equinox, when it takes one a full lifetime just to notice the stars have moved one degree? [Talk]

WC: There are 200+ myths that talk about this movement of the stars causing some change in the history of the Earth. And it just seemed that if it is only what modern scholars say it is, a simple wobbling of the Earth, that it shouldn't be related to any change in history or consciousness. And so we really dug into the Vedic teachings about precession, which give us a whole different meaning.

We believe that the Earth, moving with the Sun and the whole solar system going around another star is the cause of why we see this precession of the twelve constellations of the Zodiac. [Talk]

Narr: Cruttenden's Binary Research Institute proposes that our Solar System is in fact part of a binary star system, where our Sun is locked in a never-ending cosmic tango around a second sun, each revolving around the other in repeating elliptical orbits lasting 24,000 years.

WC: We know that all orbits conform to Kepler's laws - they move in great ellipses rather than circles. That means the bodies speed up when the two masses get closer to each other, when the gravitation is stronger, and they slow down when they get farther away from each other.

So if precession is the observable of a solar system in motion around another star, it too, would have to obey Kepler's laws - it would speed up and slow down. Now, we have really good scientific data for the last hundred years going back to the great Simon Newcomb, the number one astronomer in the U.S. in the year 1900. He kept precises records of precession and noticed that it's speeding up every year - exponentially. So he actually added a constant to the precession equation - Newcomb's constant, we call it nowadays. And even since then, the precession has sped up above the constant rate.

But we've taken the Vedic view that it's caused by an orbit that is 24,000 years, and therefore, if precession actually measures 26,000 years, we must be in the slow part of the orbit - far from the other star right now. We plotted on a curve what the precession rate would be over this last 100 years and we came out with the exact curve that we see historically, and from that we are able to predict that the precession rate will continue to accelerate year after year until we reach periapsis. [Talk]

Narr: Periapsisis the point in thier elliptical orbits where our Sun and its twin are closest together, marking a golden age here on Earth. For now, however, Cruttenden's theory remains a controversial attempt to explain the universal beliefs in cycles of time being dictated by our progression through the signs of the Zodiac that comprise the precession of the equinoxes.

GH: Regardless of what causes the process, the fact is that the process occurs. And it is just possible to become aware of it in one or two human lifetimes. But it seems that passed down to us from deep antiquity - and the Maya were one of the vehicles or channels to pass this knowledge down - was the knowledge of the precession of the equinoxes, and a very accurate knowledge of the rate at which it unfolds. I would say a knowledge at a scientific level of accuracy, and this is encoded and expressed in ancient myths all around the world, and is specifically encoded and expressed in the Mayan calendar. So, if there was a golden age in the past, then the ancient system of ideas would suggest that a full cycle of precession, a full cycle of almost 26,000 years would bring us back to that golden age again. They always saw a correspondence between sky and ground, so that what happens on Earth is connected to what happens in the heavens, and yes, what goes around, comes around and we are going through a great cycle of time and we find ourselves placed in a particular position on that cycle of time which, in the Mayan system, is very near the end of a whole age of the world, and the beginning of the next. [Talk]

AFA: I think what's interesting is that this 26,000 year period can get neatly broken down in to periods about 2000 years long - in fact, make it 2,200 to be exact - which mark the passage of the place of the Sun in the vernal equinox through successive constellations in the Zodiac. 2,200 x 12 is about equal to the cycle of precession. This has led many people to assume, with little evidence, that world ages - which are a Judeo-Christian phenomenon - connote division of the cycle of the precession of the equinoxes. [Talk]

AFA: So, we all have heard of the Age of Aquarius - that doesn't happen until 2700 AD - be that as it may, the Sun is "about to" enter Aquarius in some hundreds of years. And according to the Judeo-Christian myth, this is a world-changing phenomenon. So one could say that the ages of Man are star-fixed, according to this philosophy. That's the connection - if it be one - between precession and cycles of renovation. [Talk]

JMJ: The modern astronomical understanding of precession is pretty straighforward. It's kind of a mechanical understanding of how it works and how it effects the position of the Sun on the equinox or the solstice, it shifts through the Zodiac signs, and so on. I think that there is a literal way to interpret what precession is. But there's also a metaphorical or symbolic understanding that gets more into how human beings are affected, perhaps how the planet is affected by the precessional changes. We might envision that over this great 26,000 year period there are "seasons" - the same way that the year cycle has seasons. So there's "summer-fall-winter-spring" and think there's an insight into this larger cycle and how it actually affect earth phenomenon, including life on Earth. [Talk]

WC: Cultures all around the world believed this "Great Year," this cycle, this one aeon, was broken into seasons just like our yearly motion - spring, summer, fall, and winter. The easiest ones to understand are the Greek terms: the iron, bronze, silver, and golden age - that's sort of equivalent to summer in terms of consciousness and then we go back down again. Each of these ages has different characteristics. The Vedic teachers would tell us that we're just coming out of the Kali Yuga and very early into the Dwapara Yuga, which is equivalent of [moving from] Iron to Bronze and we're beginning to realize that we are no longer just physical bodies on a hard, physical Earth, that we are energy and everything is made of energy, and consciousness keeps growing, we use more and more of our consciousness, we live longer and longer, things become seemingly transparent to us - not because matter changes, but because we just "see" the potential and possibility in everything. [Talk]

RB: If you have a culture that observed the sky - for whatever reason, religious or scientific - they are bound to notice over two or three generations that the position of the Sun has changed. So the awareness of precession is almost certainly known by all ancient cultures - they saw it. Now, ok, they could work out the cycle - let's say they could - but they did not know how the the stars changed because it's not only their position that changed but the tilt. So Orion would tilt, and then re-tilt back. But again, it was observable and they could work out the rate and they found that it was also 26,000 years. And it appears to me that there came a moment when they thought they understood what they called the cosmic law. And then they followed it with their monuments, their alignments, their temples, their rituals. [Talk]

JMJ: In addition to the simple knowledge of precession among the ancients, there seems to be a very, very, deep insight into how precession is related to changes on this planet that goes beyond what modern science is willing to acknowledge. [Talk]

GH: When a people like [the Maya], who have created a calendar system of mind-boggling complexity and accuracy, tell us that some great change is going to take place in our time, and that it is a change from which humanity will emerge utterly different, we need to take them seriously. We can't just dismiss that as the ravings of some primitive tribal culture. There is a tendency to do that in modern society because we regard every culture before our own as primitive. We have to listen to what they have to say.

One thought that has often occurred to me, since the Maya were such avid stargazers and were founding their star observations on a tradition that went back way before them - we just don't know how far back, that they may perhaps have known something that we don't know. When the Maya speak directly and specifically of a cataclysmic end, a gigantic flood, an overthrow of the world as we know it now, I don't think we should rule out the possibility that they may be speaking of real physical events which caused them to want to draw particular attention to this date in our calendar - 21 December, 2012. [Talk]

AFA: There were floods and hurricanes in the Maya area, and the idea of a watery ending to the world, pictured on page 74 of the Dresden Codex - last page! - water gushing out of the mouth of the sky! These were real experiences. And you have it in the Enuma Elish, which is the Sumerian creation myth. It is in world mythology because the world is destroyed and is recreated. And we take these marvelous stories - the destruction and recreation of the world - and then we bring them into a macroscopic focus by imagining it's the whole world that's going to end. And yes, my friends, it will end - there's no question, there will be an end of the world. Study these creation myths and you'll see that they are there for a good reason. People did experience the destruction of their world and they did rebuild it. It happened before, and it'll happen again, unless... the way to avoid it in New Orleans is to build better flood gates. And so, you see, it's participatory, isn't it? You can make it happen, but you have to work for it, you can't just lay back and do nothing, you've got to be a participant in your cosmology. [Talk]

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2012 - Science Or Superstition?/Segment/5