In the 20th of September, first, Western electronic media, and then Russian-language news resources, picked up another ufological sensation in the style of "ufologists have discovered …". Moreover, they discovered not another artifact in Martian photographs, not another giant UFO in near-solar orbit, but neither more nor less the fact of the arrival of a giant alien ship to Earth at the beginning of the eighteenth century, immortalized on an engraving of that time.
The source of the sensation was the treatise "Liber De Coloribus Coeli, Accedit Oratio Inauguralis De Deo Mathematicorum Principe" by Johann Caspar Funk, published in the German city of Ulm in Latin in 1716 (its digital copy is available for viewing on the Internet). According to Western media reports, the attention of a blogger named Reed Moore was drawn to an engraving on the title page of the publication.
Indeed, the picture is impressive: from thunderclouds surrounded by lightning, a typical disc-shaped aircraft approaches the earth (for some reason, however, with the image of the sun on its surface). The archetype of the "flying saucer" that has developed in modern man immediately prompts the thought of aliens. Moreover, the followers of this idea did not hesitate to even develop the topic further, suggesting that the entire book by Johann Funk is devoted to the description of this grandiose event - the observation of a classic UFO, “before the appearance of which huge black clouds appeared in the sky, lightning flashed, the heavens burned, and then the heavens a huge flying saucer opened up and appeared, engulfed in flames and lightning. " Well, it remains only to translate this precious testimony of the past from Latin and be impressed by the details from the lips of a contemporary.
But is this really the case? Wouldn't such an approach to the interpretation of such historical monuments be too superficial? As it turned out, in order to understand this riddle of 1716, one does not even need to know Latin. A well-known St. Petersburg ufologist Mikhail Gershtein offered an elegant solution at the forum of the Association "Ecology of the Unknown". To do this, you just need to be careful.
Firstly, this picture can be interpreted not as an intrusion from the heavens of a certain disk, but as a shield covering a bird sitting on a rock from lightning strikes. Secondly, you need to pay attention to the inscriptions on the image, which contain a direct clue to the solution. Near the disc / shield is written: "Ps: 84.v.12", which is a reference to the 12th verse of the 84th psalm in the Psalter - one of the books of the Old Testament. Accordingly, we take the Bible (in this case, the Bible of Martin Luther, who translated it into German) and look at the corresponding lines: “Denn Gott der Herr ist Sonne und Schild; der Herr gibt Gnade und Ehre. Er wird kein Gutes mangeln lassen den Frommen. " Translated into Russian it will sound like this: “For the Lord God is the sun and the shield. The Lord gives grace and glory; He does not deprive them of good things that walk in integrity”(cf. Psalm 83, verse 12 - in the Russian translation for the Orthodox Church, a different, Greek numbering of the psalms is used). The Latin inscription placed around the image of the bird can be translated as "merciful protector."
Psalm 84 from the Bible by Martin Luther
12th verse and its translation in Russian
Promotional video:
Thus, the motto encoded in this engraving refers to the biblical phrase "For the Lord God is the sun and the shield." And in the picture we just see a shield with the image of the sun, protecting from lightning. That is, all this is nothing more than an allegorical illustration of lines from the Bible about the protection of God. And, unfortunately, it doesn't even smell of any newcomers here, which, however, does not prevent the connoisseurs of Latin from translating this treatise. But what if…
Author: Victor Gaiduchik
