Velikovsky's Comet Venus-8
by David Talbott
VENUS AND COSMIC UPHEAVAL
Across Mesoamerica Venus was celebrated as the radiant heart
and soul of the great cultural hero whom the Aztecs called
Quetzalcoatl. Yet enigmatically, the appearances of the
star after periods of absence stirred extraordinary fear.
The noted archaeoastronomer, Anthony Aveni, observes:
Evidently, the reappearance of
Venus in different
quarters after a prolonged absence carried various evil
connotations for the people of Yucatan....Obviously, they
were deeply concerned about where and when Venus might
appear to reverse their fortunes.
Expressions of this fear will be found at all levels of the
culture. There is the general association with death, as
noted by Thompson and others, but also the more specific
association with the death of kings. Thus the Mayan date
name of Venus, Hun Ahau was a day of "death" and "darkness."
But more specifically, the same day among the Aztecs
signified the death of Quetzalcoatl and the transformation
of his "heart-soul" into Venus.
"There seems to be no doubt that unlucky days were
associated with the heliacal rise of Venus (its first
appearance as morning star, after a period of absence), each
to be regarded with appropriate ritual," Aveni writes.
The fear engendered by the heliacal rising of Venus was
noted centuries ago by one of the earliest European
chroniclers, Sahagun:
And when it (Venus) newly
emerged, much fear came over
them; all were frightened. Everywhere the outlets and
openings of [houses] were closed up. It was said that
perchance [the light] might bring a cause of sickness,
something evil when it came to emerge.
In response to the new and bright appearance of Venus, kings
called for sacrifices of captives to please the gods, for it
seems that the planet's appearance could invite great
calamities—from the outbreak of war to famine and flood.
Could this be a key to understanding the mysteries of Venus-
portents? As will become clear, the perils of Venus
are the perils of the COMET in the global lexicon.
We have already noted that, throughout the ancient world,
the comet portended the death of great kings. But
interestingly, the heliacal rising of Venus conveyed the
same celestial message, as reported by Brundage.
It is curious that the Mesoamerican peoples thought of
the morning star so consistently as malign. He was to
them, whether they were Aztec or Mayan, the very father
of calamity. The dates of his heliacal rising were
forecast so that the dooms ahead could be adequately read
and prepared for...Significantly, his malice could also
be directed at rulers, for if he arose on the trecana
opened by one-reed, then great lords sickened and died.
Thus, the Anales de Quahtitlan, a chronicle from the Mexican
highlands (colonial times), describes the perils of the
"piercing rays" of Venus. On the day One Reed, (the day of
Quetzalcoatl's birth, and the day of the same god-king's
death), the rising of Venus is deadly: "It shoots the
kings," the texts say. Notice here that an underlying
logic is at work, running from the specific to the general,
from the archetype to the symbol. Quetzalcoatl died at a
critical moment in cosmic history, a moment signified by
both the end and the beginning of the time-reckoning cycle,
mythically the end of one world age and the beginning of
another. In the calendar system and in the sacred rites,
the cyclical principle established by the life and death of
Quetzalcoatl is both repeated and generalized: as above, so
below; as before, so again. Hence, kings will die on the
day One Reed, the day that Quetzalcoatl's heart-soul
departed to become the planet Venus.
What, then, is the significance of the fact that the
symbolism of Venus replicates so precisely the global
symbolism of the comet? The new appearance of Venus as
morning star is a moment of great peril for the kingdom (the
"world"), as is the appearance of the comet. It harkens
back to the death of the god-king, as does the comet. It is
the heart-soul of the god-king rising in the sky, as is the
comet. Is this, then, just another "coincidence" to add to
all of the others previously noted? The further one
descends into the various cultural levels at which the fear
was expressed, the more clear becomes the equation: the
fear of Venus' rising was, in every way, identical to the
fear instilled by the arrival of a COMET.
VENUS AND THE END OF THE WORLD
Immanuel Velikovsky, in developing the theme of cometary
disaster, noticed that one ancient culture after another
spoke of former catastrophes so devastating that the "world"
came to an end. This collective memory, in turn, seems to
have given rise to the general notion of recurring cycles,
or world ages. While Velikovsky noticed surprising
parallels among far-flung nations, including the Babylonians,
Greeks, Hebrews, Chinese, and Polynesians, he
was particularly fascinated with the Mexican ideas:
An old tradition, and a very persistent one, of world
ages that went down in cosmic catastrophes was found in
the Americas among the Incas, the Aztecs, and the Mayas.
A major part of stone inscriptions found in Yucatan refer
to world catastrophes. "The most ancient of these
fragments [katuns, or calendar stones of Yucatan] refer,
in general, to great catastrophes which, at intervals and
repeatedly, convulsed the American continent, and of
which all nations of this continent have preserved a more
or less distinct memory." Codices of Mexico and Indian
authors who composed the annals of their past give a
prominent place to the tradition of world catastrophes
that decimated humankind and changed the face of the earth.
In the chronicles of the Mexican kingdom it is said: "The
ancients knew that before the present sky and earth were
formed, man was already created and life had manifested
itself four times."
To Velikovsky, this language sounded remarkably close to
that of the Greeks and other ancient peoples, who similarly
recounted the passing of former ages and destruction by
water, fire, wind or flood. For some nations, he said, the
transition from one age to another meant a new "sun" in the sky.
An oft-repeated occurrence in the traditions of the world
ages is the advent of a new sun in the sky at the
beginnings of every age. The word "sun" is substituted
for the word "age" in the cosmogonic traditions of many
peoples all over the world.
The Mayas counted their ages by the names of their
consecutive suns. These were called Water Sun,
Earthquake Sun, Hurricane Sun, Fire Sun. "These suns
mark the epochs to which are attributed the various
catastrophes the world has suffered."
"The nations of Culhua or
Mexico," Humboldt quoted
Gómara, the Spanish writer of the sixteenth century,
"believe according to their hieroglyphic paintings, that,
previous to the sun which now enlightens them, four had
already been successively extinguished. These four suns
are as many ages, in which our species has been
annihilated by inundations, by earthquakes, by a general
conflagration, and by the effect of destroying tempests."
...Symbols of the successive suns are painted on the pre-
Columbian literary documents of Mexico.
"Cinco soles que son edades,"
or "five suns that are
epochs," wrote Gómara in his description of the conquest
of Mexico.
To Velikovsky, the idea of
former "world ages" or "suns"
belonged to a collective memory of upheaval and world-
changing shifts in the order of the solar system. The earth
was disturbed in its rotation, its axis tilted, the path of
its revolution around the sun changed, and vast nations were
devastated. Then, from the ensuing chaos, the world was
born anew under an altered celestial order.
CALENDAR
Sacred astronomy throughout
Mesoamerica was particularly
conscious of the heliacal rising of Venus, the planet's
first annual pre-dawn appearance (beginning its phase of
greatest brilliance due to its proximity to the Earth).
According to Aveni, this first appearance as Morning Star
"was probably the most important single event in Maya
astronomy."
One of the extraordinary
"coincidences" of Venus' present
behavior is the resonance of its observed cycle with our
year of 365 1/4 days. Like clockwork, due to the
synchronous movements of Venus and Earth we noted earlier,
Venus first appears as morning star on the same calendar day
every eight years, and during that span of time it rises
heliacally a total of five times.
This synchronous relationship
of Earth and Venus is
reflected in the Mesoamerican calendar rites. Many
centuries ago, a sacred calendar system was perfected within
a cultural environment that is not yet clear to
archaeoastronomers. The original system is unknown. What
we do know is that at the time of the Spanish invasion, all
of the primary Mesoamerican cultures shared a common
calendar structure, an outgrowth of the unidentified
"original system," in which the Venus-cycle played a crucial
role, but not one that appears fully comprehensible to the
scholars seeking to understand it.
The calendar combined two
time-keeping systems: one based on
the familiar solar year, which was divided into 18 "months"
of 20 days, to which five "unlucky" days were added at the
end of the year, rounding out a 365-day year. In their
veintena festivals, the Aztecs celebrated the end of each
20-day cycle of the solar year, making sacrifices and
offerings to the gods in the hope that the sun and stars
would continue their orderly movement across the heavens.
The other calendar was based
on a 260-day cycle whose
original meaning is still being debated. Enigmatically,
this ritual calendar appears to have no self-evident logic
in terms of the natural cycles one would expect to find
reflected in calendar phases. And yet, for ritual reasons,
the sacred 260-day calendar dominated the solar calendar.
This, Robert and Peter Markman tell us, was "a sacred
calendar tied directly to no single cycle observable in the
world of nature." Rather, "it embodied and celebrated the
essence of cyclicity abstracted from its occurrence in
natural phenomena. This was the calendar used for prophecy
and divination since in its workings it allowed man his
closest approach to the world of spirit." How, then, did
it connect mankind with the world of the gods?
The 260-day ritual calendar
combined two different
sequences, one a series of 20 days-signs, the other a
sequence of 13 day-numbers, so that there were a total of
260 combinations of the two sequences to complete a sacred
calendrical period. Since each day and each number had its
own gods and associations, every day in the 260-day cycle
had a different ritual significance. The Markmans write—
Understanding calendrical lore
allowed a special group of
priests to understand the implications of the signs of
the calendar and to divine the future... These periods
could determine the augury of each of the days, since the
essence of the day (kin among the Maya) was itself the
prophecy (also kin).
Possibly, the authors say,
there was a connection of the
260-day cycle with Venus: "The interval between the
appearance of Venus as morning and evening star is close to
260 days."
The mystery is heightened by
another fact that rarely
receives attention: in the Maya calendrical ritual the
listed movements of Venus do not accord with the planet's
observed movements today. The synodical revolution of Venus
divides into four periods:
1) after inferior conjunction
Venus appears as Morning Star
for an average of 263 days;
2) during superior conjunction
the planet disappears for an
average of 50 days;
3) the planet reappears as
Evening Star for an average of 263 days;
4) Venus then disappears again
for 8 days during inferior conjunction;
after which it reappears as Morning Star, to complete the synodical
period.
But these are not the values
in the Maya Venus cycles, which
seem to follow an unfamiliar logic of their own. The
considerable discrepancy is emphasized by Aveni—
They assigned an eight day
period to the disappearance at
inferior conjunction, which is close to that observed
today. But, peculiarly, their manuscripts recorded a
disappearance interval of 90 days at superior
conjunction, nearly double the true value. Furthermore,
they assigned unequal values to the intervals as morning
and evening star: 250 and 236 days, respectively. In
fact, the true intervals are equivalent at approximately
263 days. Since we know that the Maya were careful and
exacting timekeepers, there may have been ritualistic
reasons for these changes which overrode the
observations.
It seems as if another anomaly
rears its head: the ancient
Mesoamerican astronomers, so admired for their accurate
record keeping of Venus' motions, do not have Venus moving
on its present course. Yet Aveni assures us that the Maya
developed the observational precision and reasoning power to
predict eclipses and to determine "the length of the Venus
year and the lunar month to accuracies of less than a day in
several centuries." Thus, the calendar discrepancy, to say
the least, should draw one's attention!
In considering this mystery,
we well to remember
Velikovsky's admonition on the subject of recurring
anomalies—the true key to discovery. It is a fact that the
recorded anomalous motions of Venus in the ritual calendar-
a calendar originating in an undefined period preceding any
of the known cultural variants—has a significant and more
ancient Near Eastern parallel. As Velikovksy himself
observed almost 45 years ago, the Babylonian astronomers, in
the famous Venus tablets of Ammizaduga, recorded extensive
observations of Venus' movements. Like their Mesoamerican
counterparts, these founders of astronomy were revered for
their observational skills and mathematical accuracy.
Nevertheless, the Ammizaduga records of Venus' appearances
and disappearances are filled with "errors" suggesting that
(in the minds of the stargazers, at least) Venus did not
move on its present visual path.
And speaking of recurring
anomalies, the seemingly
preposterous 90-day disappearance of Venus at superior
conjunction may prove to be more of a headache for orthodox
archaeoastronomers than they have bargained for. In the
"erroneous" Babylonian records of Venus, one encounters a
90-day disappearance as well! Aveni reports—
It is curious that the
Babylonians also counted a three-
month disappearance interval, indicating that the planet
would move approximately one-fourth of the way around its
cycle in the tropical year.
While an anomalous variance in
the movement of Venus may
frustrate mainstream investigators, for anyone believing
that Velikovsky's comet participated in Earth-disturbing
events as recently as a few thousand years ago, the
troublesome records of Venus' motions are more likely to
bring a bemused smile. Following the great cometary
catastrophe recorded in the myths, nothing would seem more
reasonable to the Velikovskian researcher than a
transitional period-perhaps millennia—in which Venus did
not move on its present path as seen from the earth.
The larger issue, of course,
is that posed by the very
existence of the sacred 260-day calendar. How could it be
that a calendar with no firm basis in an observed natural
cycle could have had such a broad cultural influence? Even
as late as 1940, the ethnologist J.S. Lincoln was able to
confirm that the Ixil peoples of northwest Guatemala
continued to use this calendar. Ethnologist J.A.
Remington, living among the Quiché and Cakchiquel peoples of
the Guatemala highlands, found that the 260-day cycle was
still practiced for purposes of forecasting, with this
"unnatural" calendar still dominating the time-keeping
rituals.
When it comes to ancient
calendars, one of the possibilities
that should be considered—but never is considered—is that
of a shifting length of the year. Velikovsky argued, for
example, that in former times a calendar of 360 days
prevailed throughout much of the ancient world, and that the
five added days (called "nothing days" by the Aztecs) came
only after a disruption of the earth's motions. Though I
have some doubt about this, there is no reason in the world
to exclude such possibilities in advance of serious
consideration.
But whether or not calendar
changes are indicated, one can
be certain that the 260-day ritual calendar bore an
extremely significant relationship to the myth of collapsing
world ages, as we shall see.
|