The meaning of the myth of Phaethon
There are a lot of myths, but one of them - about the sad fate of a disobedient son - deserves the closest attention. This is a myth about Phaeton. It is not very popular and gradually its contents are covered with the dust of oblivion. Astronomers have repeatedly tried to resurrect it, but the lack of any evidence of the existence of the planet Phaethon in the past did not allow them to provide arguments confirming that the myth is based on real facts. The reason for their failure should be sought in the same place where the reasons for the failures of philosophers lie - they all seek confirmation of their theories only in the areas they study. On the other hand, astronomers can be understood - it is hard to believe that they could find confirmation of their hypothesis in the legends of antiquity and in the Bible.
The myth tells that Phaethon, being the son of the Sun, harnessed his father's chariot, but could not direct it along his father's path and burned everything on the ground, being himself incinerated by lightning. The famous Frenchman Rene Descartes has a wonderful expression: "Determine the meaning of words, and you will save humanity from half of its delusions."
It is not difficult to understand the meaning of the myth, given that the sons of the Sun are the planets of the solar system, and the expression "harness the father's chariot" is analogous to the expression "begin to shine like the Sun". In general, the meaning of the myth is as follows: in ancient times, or maybe not so much, there was one more luminous point in the night sky - this point was Phaethon - one of the planets of the solar system. For some unknown reason, it began to glow like the Sun and disappeared. Its disappearance was accompanied by an increase in the temperature of the atmosphere of our planet - this is the only way to explain the expression "burn everything on Earth." The semantic content of the myth in no way contradicts modern scientific concepts: with the death of one of the terrestrial planets, this is quite possible.
The ancients had a legend, while astronomers, as already mentioned, have a hypothesis: in the past, together with other planets, the planet Phaethon revolved around the Sun, whose orbit ran between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Subsequently, it ceased to exist due to a collision with a large cosmic body or under the influence of some other forces. The planet cannot disappear without a trace and, according to the hypothesis, its debris is currently moving in the former orbit of Phaethon, forming the asteroid belt.
The connection between the Hebrew legend of the flood, the thesis about the frequency of the catastrophes of Plato and the hypothesis about the death of Phaethon
Comparing the Hebrew legend about the causes of the flood (and here), the Platonic version of the causes of the earthly catastrophe, the myth and the hypothesis about the planet Phaethon, it is easy to make sure that there is a certain connection between them. All of them, born at different historical times, speak of the same event. Let's try to figure out whether our assumptions have the right to life. Let's turn to the data of modern science.
1. Astronomers have always been puzzled by the huge unnatural gap in the distances between the two planets - Mars and Jupiter. According to the Titius-Bode rule, there should be a planet between Mars and Jupiter, but that does not exist, but there is a belt of asteroids - small cosmic bodies, in other words, shapeless blocks of various sizes, revolving around the Sun as a whole in a constant orbit, but precisely between Mars and Jupiter.
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2. The study of the magnetization of stone and iron meteorites (over a thousand samples) that fell to the ground made it possible to find in them similar features of magnetization, which indicates their common origin from one celestial body. At the same time, spectrographic studies have shown that almost all asteroids in the belt have the same reflective properties as meteorites that have fallen to the ground … In other words, scientific data indicate that both meteorites and asteroids are parts of a once-unified whole. What could be this single whole instead of the asteroid belt and move in orbit around the Sun? Only the planet.
3. American scientists S. Dole, K. Sagan and R. Isakman carried out calculations on the process of accumulation of planets on computers. Based on the data obtained, they concluded that with the existing structure of the solar system between Mars and Jupiter, there must be a planet with a mass exceeding 0.001 of the Earth's mass. Their calculated mass of the planet is small compared to the number of debris that form the asteroid belt. Astronomers today know about two thousand asteroids, among which the largest Ceres has a diameter of about 770 kilometers. If you collect all the asteroids into a single whole, then the planet obtained in this way should have a much larger size. The contradictions that we paid attention to were due tothat American scientists did not take into account and could not take into account one factor - they used the data of the available structure of the solar system, but there is every reason to believe that it was somewhat different. Most likely, the mass and dimensions of Phaeton exceeded the mass and dimensions of the Earth.
All that has been said means: it is most likely that at one time there was one more planet in the solar system. Phaethon was this planet.
General patterns of flood legends among different peoples
It has already been noted that practically all the peoples of the world have flood legends. Their most important feature is the almost complete, in detail, the coincidence of individual, most important elements of legends on all continents and in all regions. It remains only to regret that no one has done their comprehensive analysis, and we must pay tribute to J. J. Fraser, who performed a huge amount of work and brought them together. Only thanks to him we have the opportunity to get acquainted with them and analyze them.
1. In Micronesia, the inhabitants of the island of Palau told about the flood that once a man ascended to heaven, from where the gods gaze at the Earth with shining eyes-stars every night. A clever rogue stole one of these eyes and brought it to our planet. The gods became angry and warned people that they would send them a flood on the full moon and kept their word. Let's highlight the main thing from the legend:
- in the past, a star that had previously been there every night disappeared from the sky familiar to the inhabitants of the island;
- she subsequently ended up on our planet, that is, fell to Earth;
- the cause of the flood was the disappearance of the star;
- there was a gap between the time of the disappearance of the star and the time of the beginning of the flood: it did not begin immediately, but during the next full moon.
2. The Taumari, Aberi and Kataushi tribes, who lived along the Purus River in Central South America, said that once people heard an underground rumble and dull thunder. The sun and the moon began to take on red, blue, and yellow colors. A month later, thunder rumbled again, thick haze rose from the earth to the sky, thunderstorms and downpours broke out. The flood ended these unusual phenomena.
These two legends are separated by the ocean, but anyone can be convinced of the coincidence of their basic elements.
At the time when the inhabitants of the island of Palau discovered the disappearance of the star from its usual place, the South Americans heard an underground rumble. After a certain time after this event (during the next full moon and a month later) the flood began. Despite the huge distances between the observers, the flood began at the same time.
The mention of the color change by our luminaries seems unusual in the legends of South Americans. Is it possible for the Sun and Moon to change their color? It turns out - yes, it is possible. In 1950, the sky over Western Europe suddenly turned brown, but the sun was blue. When dusk fell on the earth, the moon was bright blue.
Blue luminaries against a brown sky are unusual, and scientists began to look for the reasons for such contrasts. The answer turned out to be simple: shortly before this, forest fires raged in Canada, which burned out a strip about 300 kilometers wide. Combustion products: particles of ash, water vapor and soot - rose to a height of about seven kilometers, all this mass was transported across the ocean and hung over Europe. Drawing parallels between the events of the past and the present, we can say that the reason for the change in the color of the Sun and the Moon in ancient times were fires and, judging by the underground rumble, volcanic eruptions.
3. According to the traditions of the tribes of Western Canada, the flood began in September. This means that the tribes of South Americans heard the underground rumble and dull peals of thunder for the first time in late July - early August. Consequently, at the end of July - beginning of August, a star disappeared from the sky, which the inhabitants of the island of Palau are talking about.
4. The inhabitants of the island of Tahiti have preserved the legends about the strongest, unprecedented hurricane that uprooted trees and carried them into the sky. The hurricane was followed by the flooding of the land with water.
The death of Phaethon and the flood
We took only a small part of all the legends, but they are quite enough to, by comparing with the previously said about Phaeton, to recreate the picture and sequence of events in the sky and on earth, the final part of which was the flood.
In late July - early August, the planet Phaethon began to glow like the Sun. Then she disappeared and never appeared again. After the outbreak and disappearance of the planet, people immediately heard an underground rumble and dull rumbles of thunder; saw the color change of the sun and moon.
One can only wonder how human memory, in spite of the difficulties and hardships of life, was able to preserve the features of the catastrophe that occurred for millennia. Only her grandeur and awareness of the importance of what she saw helped the legends survive to the present day. This is exactly how the legends report that events on Earth should develop when one of the planets closest to us disappears. The destruction of the planet will necessarily lead to a violation of the equilibrium state of the solar system, and this, in turn, should cause disturbances in the earth's crust and the planet's atmosphere. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricane winds and fires are the consequences of a cosmic catastrophe that are obligatory for the Earth.
So, according to legend, the first part of the catastrophe ended and only in this way it should have ended with the death of our closest neighbor Phaethon. The most important element of the legends, confirming their reliability, is the statement about the beginning of the second part of the catastrophe a month after the disappearance of the planet. The monthly interval in time is not only not invented by the ancients - it is one of the most important proofs that the myth of Phaethon is based on a real basis.
If Phaethon from a collision with a comet turned into a pile of shapeless boulders, then the version of the inhabitants of the island of Palau about the transfer of a star to Earth means nothing more than the fall on its surface of one of the fragments formed during the catastrophe. The movement of a cosmic body from Phaethon's orbit to the Earth during a month is in good agreement with modern concepts of the motion of cosmic bodies. The well-known Halley's comet on December 2, 1985 crossed the orbit of Mars, and on January 1, 1986 - the Earth's orbit, moving at a speed of 50 kilometers per second. In 1910, at a speed of 34 - 41 kilometers per second, she covered the same distance in 49 days.
A space body with a tremendous flight speed and large mass when falling to the ground could not but cause catastrophic consequences. And if we take into account that there were four such bodies - we will have the opportunity to be convinced of this, and one more exploded in the air - the unimaginable was happening on the planet. It was not for nothing that the ancients argued that the day turned into night and even the ground under their feet was not visible.
Plato said that the distinguishing feature of the flood in Europe was its absolute surprise: in just one night it destroyed the population and the achievements of civilization. On this terrible night, "an incredible flood broke out simultaneously with the earthquake."
The Czechoslovak geologist, Professor Z. Kukal, who denies the possibility of a flood, criticizes Plato's statement, arguing that earthquakes and floods are not related. However, he means the natural course of events and does not take into account the extraterrestrial origin of the disaster. At the same time, he is the only one who, without knowing it, noticed the most important and inevitable consequence of the fall of a cosmic body into the coastal waters of the ocean. When it falls into the ocean, a tsunami must necessarily occur - destructive waves that usually occur in the sea as a result of an earthquake. It is known from history that on November 1, 1755, after an earthquake, the epicenter of which was 200 kilometers from the Portuguese coast on the Azoro - Giblartar range, a huge wave covered the Lisbon coast in a matter of seconds and claimed about 60 thousand human lives.
Imagine how high and destructive the wave will be after a celestial body with cosmic speed falls into the coastal waters of the ocean. Its fall will cause a powerful earthquake and, incommensurate with the naturally occurring, tsunami. The inhabitants of the coastal regions of Europe had no chance of survival. All of the above - although inevitable, but just side effects of the "wrath of God." Falling into the ocean waters of a red-hot space body entailed the instant evaporation of a huge amount of water, which then suddenly fell on people's heads in the form of rain.
What happened after the flood? Discourse on the origins of religion and true knowledge
Plato only recorded the fact of the difficulties that post-Flood generations of people had to face, and explained the reasons for the almost complete loss of knowledge of their ancestors. What actually happened?
We rarely think about the dependence of the individual on society and take the environment for granted. The achievements of civilization are the work of many people, each of whom, left alone with nature, becomes helpless and defenseless. The year, during which the surface of the earth was covered with water, threw a man of antediluvian civilization to the level of an animal. He had nothing left: neither tools of labor, nor basic necessities. In order to at least somehow understand what situation people are in, you can try to hew a tree with a piece of sharpened stone or cut the carcass of a pet with it. Our reasoning about the possibility of making fire by rubbing wood against wood seems to be quite reasonable, especially when we are sitting by a burning fireplace. Try to make a fire this way, and everyone can seehow far our theoretical inventions are from reality. It is even impossible to imagine what kind of work it cost, and how many years of life were spent on the production of fire in conditions after the flood dampness.
Those who survived the flood were forced, at best, to huddle in caves, eat raw rhizomes and consider it happiness to dig their teeth into the corpse of a dead animal. Only later will there appear stone axes and knives, arrowheads and other objects of primitive life, which are now abundantly presented at the stands of local history museums.
People, overthrown by the elements and placed on a par with the representatives of the animal world by circumstances, brought only a physical body and memory into a new life. The body gave birth to offspring. And memory …
The Flood took with it the achievements of the previous civilization, but human memory, despite all the difficulties, preserved Knowledge. The most important was the understanding of the essence of the universe, which was revealed through the idea of the Creator as the Supreme Deity and God who is the arbiter of the destinies of mankind. It was the idea of the Creator that caused the ethnographers to see faith in the One God in the religion of the first people of modern society.
Religion did not arise from primitive beliefs, but, on the contrary, the degradation to savagery of the descendants of people who survived the flood and with this the decay of antediluvian ideas about the structure of the world, gave rise to primitive beliefs. What materialistic and religious philosophy is called the starting point of religion is in fact the final stage in the loss of ancient knowledge that has not been restored until now.
Many people know "The Egyptian Book of the Dead", the author of which is the Egyptologist E. A. Wallis Budge. It is a collection of Egyptian hymns and texts that the Egyptians placed on the walls of tombs and sarcophagi, coffins and tombstone obelisks. These historical monuments are evidence of the belief of the Egyptians of all classes, from the pharaohs to ordinary mortals, in the existence of the afterlife. But they carry information about the physics of elementary particles, hiding their secrets for the time being.
E. A. Wallis Budge, in the foreword and the introductory part of his book, while making a historical analysis of the origin of the texts, was faced with an as yet unexplained historical fact. In the pre-dynastic period, no one ever made any inscriptions on the graves, that is, the custom so widespread among the Egyptians of the dynastic era did not exist at that time. But this does not mean at all that the texts did not exist either. The texts were born long before Egyptian civilization, as Wallis Budge writes convincingly enough:
“There is no doubt that many of the spells found in the Heliopolis version, which was used during the 4th and 5th dynasties, have their roots in the most ancient pre-dynastic era and that they are as old or even older than the civilization of the first Egyptians who left after historical evidence, and their immediate predecessors.
… Their content as recorded by scribes around 3000 BC. e., and the errors encountered in them show that scribes dealt with texts that at that distant time were so ancient that many places were simply impossible to make out, besides, scribes copied a significant part of the texts without understanding their meaning.
By conventional standards, in the 5th millennium BC. e. the human community was represented by primitive man. Why did he, being the owner of the texts, not consider them religious, as later did his descendants? The answer is simple. The pre-dynastic Egyptians were not primitive and did not regard the texts as religious because they knew their true content.
Society has yet to realize: the first representatives of modern civilization did not believe in God in the form in which it is manifested now, and did not have religion as such. They knew - the word "god" means a purely physical phenomenon inherent in the universe and the planet inhabited by intelligent beings. This knowledge revealed the secrets of the universe and imposed certain duties on people, the essence of which was brought to us in an unusual form by religion, promising some heavenly life, and others - a place above the eternal fire in a cauldron of resin.
Any our attempt to look into the post-Flood life will allow us to see not only pictures of wild cave life. We will see that almost all ancient peoples, to the detriment of vital interests, paid great attention to the issues of the universe. Knowledge, or rather, fragments of Knowledge, has been brought to us by the consciousness of people who have gone through the purgatory of "God's wrath", who, with stories from the life of the past, have generated legends and myths among their descendants. But the most important thing has been conveyed to us by religion, perhaps only vaguely guessing how important it is to those living on Earth. And although these are just fragments of Knowledge, and although they cannot shine because of the layer of ignorance covering them after the flood generations, they still exist.
We have to, turning to the texts of ancient literary sources, and comparing them with modern scientific and religious concepts, try to remove the superficial layer from these remnants of Knowledge and look at the world through the eyes of a man of antediluvian civilization. However, after the flood, too, since we even distorted the foreseeable historical past beyond recognition.
