Astrological Dating of the Cataclysmic Deluge

1
Graham Hancock states the following about his book, Magicians of the Gods: "The evidence revealed in this book shows beyond reasonable doubt that an advanced civilization that flourished during the Ice Age was destroyed in the global cataclysms between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago."

Graham states this is when the deluge probably occurred. This peaked my interest given Berossus (living around 3rd century BCE) is quoted in "The Old Testament in the Light of the Ancient East, Volume 1" on page 70 (can be found on Google Books) as saying, "When all the planets are in the zodiac sign of Capricorn there will be a deluge."

I found on Julian Calendar October 28-30, 11266 BCE all the planets were in Capricorn using the sidereal zodiac. This is only about 480 years off from 12,800 years ago! You can find the ephemeris page by going to the following link: http://www.astro.com/cgi/genchart.cgi?&lang=e&gm=a3

You can see the planetary alinements via the ephemeris look up feature by typing in "-11265" and looking for the month of October.
Michael Douglas Neely
Author of Life Cycles: Astrology and Its Connection to Nature

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/MichaelDouglasNeely
https://independent.academia.edu/MichaelNeely

2
I will try that with the Astrodienst ephemeris. I had been wondering how you find out where the planets were in very ancient history, and I thought the Astrodienst ephemeris only went back six thousand years.

Recently I have been trying to wrap my mind around the scale of human history. The earliest civilisations seem to be Sumerian and Indus Valley, which don't go back more than about four thousand years BC. Europeans were supposed to have come out of Africa two hundred thousand years ago, and Neanderthals were supposed to have been earlier emigrants. There were both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens interbreeding in Europe fifty thousand years ago, living in small family clans. I remember being told at school that if the age of the Earth is a 24 hour clock, then humans arrived here at a minute to midnight.

It would be nice to find ephemerides that go way back. But once you are talking about fifty thousand years ago, the scales of time are so huge that even the biggest cycles of planetary conjunctions, at just under a thousand years between them, probably wouldn't describe the massive changes.

3
Michael this has been my particular field of interest for about 5 years now.

Due to being unwell I cannot say much at present but I was not aware of that Berossus quote. Interesting.

Everything though that I have read suggests a cataclysm having taken place at the end of the Age of Virgo and the beginning of the Age of Leo. The date of the beginning of the Age of Leo is 10909 BC according to work done on the zodiac clock at Nabta Playa in the Sahara desert.

I have tied in the astrological dating to the Betelgeuse - Galactic Centre - Scheat - Benetnash/Labrum cross axis which would have been on the Great Year asc. at that time.

At 11266 the Great Year asc. would have been at 5 degrees Virgo, a little early perhaps.

However Michael this date has piqued my interest because of certain mysterious fixed star positions I have found in the Liber Hermetis and elsewhere. Too much to explain here.

However geological evidence points to a later date.

Like Fleur I am interested in the vast cycles of time and want to discover whatever I can through archaeastronomy allied to mythology and astrology.

I see cycles of time repeating themselves and another cataclysm on the horizon. In approaching the Age of Aquarius we are 12,000 years around the zodiac clock since the last cataclysm.It seems that every 12,000 years there is a cataclysmic event.

In particular see See Paul A la Violette "Earth under Fire" ( a scientist with an interest in mythology) Also "Cataclysm" written by 2 geologists Allan and Delair.

4
I don't think you can date this astrologically. I don't think you will find it archaeologically. Take a look at January 11, 1994: sun, moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Uranus, and Neptune in (tropical) Capricorn, with Saturn nearby in Aquarius and Jupiter in Scorpio. If there was some major geologic event then, I missed it.

A little climatology here, if I may.

The Pleistocene (last ice age) lasted until about 12,000 years ago, more or less, depending upon the location. This was not just one big continental ice sheet, but a lot of alpine glaciers were active, as well.

The Pleistocene was followed by a warmer period called the Holocene, which had a peak warm period from about 9000 to 5000 years ago, during which time we get into "civilization" and its histories.

As the glaciers melted, sea level rose to well above its current limits. Sometimes natural dams holding in melting glacier-fed lakes burst suddenly, leading to catastrophic flooding downstream.

If we go further back in geologic eras, we know about times when oceans were far more extensive or in different places than they are today. Probably all of us have seen fossil fish and shells from long-ago epochs, excavated from sedimentary rocks at high elevations. We could understand how pre-scientific peoples could only imagine a massive flood that would leave these fossils high and dry. They didn't know about tectonic uplift.

This kind of thing is on a different scale from what might be termed the "500-year flood" or the "100 year flood" that we witness today, when normal periodic fluctuations in precipitation-- sometimes coupled with over-grazing or deforestation-- led to flooding that is catastrophic to its victims, but isn't of a magnitude to wipe out an entire civilization. Such floods happened in riverine ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt, were known and dreaded.

When natural disasters happened in occupied areas, there was generally more of a footprint of a community's existence beyond a specific location. If they were a "civilization" they probably had trade and diplomatic relations, for example. Even "stone age" people in the Paleolithic had extensive trade networks, for example. Trade goods produced in one place but not others moved extensively as valued articles elsewhere. Today we even have DNA evidence: mitochondrial DNA "dating" back to the Pleistocene and post-Pleistocence period.

People have been mining comparative mythology for a couple of centuries at least to postulate a missing advanced civilization, or evidence for a catastrophic "Noah's Ark" flood, but there are far simpler and obvious ways to account for comparable myths: notably diffusion of ideas between cultures as they connect at their margins, and population migration, where ancestral migrants carried their ideas with them.

Sure, a comet or asteroid might wipe out our civilization. But NASA and other nations' space agencies will let us know about it before it happens.

On Graham Hancock: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Hancock

I googled him extensively, and couldn't find any credible scientific or archaeological reviews of his work. And this isn't because of academic professional jealousy. Every young academic hopes to make his/her mark on the discipline. It's because academics require evidence that holds up to serious scrutiny.

5
Fleur wrote:I had been wondering how you find out where the planets were in very ancient history, and I thought the Astrodienst ephemeris only went back six thousand years.
Fleur: Per an email I received from the webmaster at Astrodienst when I misunderstood how to use its ephemeris, the Astrodienst ephemeris works between 13000 BC and 15000 CE.
Michael Douglas Neely
Author of Life Cycles: Astrology and Its Connection to Nature

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/MichaelDouglasNeely
https://independent.academia.edu/MichaelNeely

6
Michael, it occurs to me that you and Hancock may be referring to an interval just after the end of the Pleistocene, called the "Younger Dryas climate event" that was a brief period of abrupt cooling, detected around the northern hemisphere, which ended around 11,500 years ago.

Climates tend not to vary in smooth lines, but to exhibit oscillations of various measures-- some more dramatic than others. The younger Dryas period is kind of interesting, because it seemed to have begun and ended abruptly. Over all, we can talk about the earth gradually warming after the Pleistocene, but with a lot of bumps and wiggles in temperature data trends.

The thing about Hancock's theory, as I understand it, is that: (a) there is no scientific agreement on the causes of the Younger Dryas climate event. This article is a bit technical, but basically it concludes that more research would be needed to definitively explain the causes. http://people.oregonstate.edu/~carlsand ... 013_YD.pdf It might be a comet impact, but then there isn't sufficient evidence to make a case for it that would be stronger than earlier explanations. (b) There is no scholarly agreement on the causes of post-Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions, either, although the comet theory is one of several in circulation. (c) There is no convincing evidence of an ancient super-people such that a comet could have wiped them out. (Think Occam's Razor here.)

From Antiquity through the Renaissance, European lore was full of stories of mythical people and mythical places. This doesn't mean all of them were believed to be literally true. We have yet to find the cyclops, the sirens, or the Amazons, for example. Their meanings were more apt to be metaphorical, didactic, or allegorical.

Consequently, an astrological dating of a probably non-existent event seems like a questionable pursuit. If all the planets lined up in Capricorn or some other sign at some point in the past-- given what we understand today about planetary meanings, you would have to explain how that would be consistent with a massive flood or comet impact, or whatever. Capricorn the sidereal sign (or constellation) says exactly....what?

Part of the problem is that if all of these planets do whatever they supposedly need to do to cause a massive natural disaster-- their impact at any given time should be global, with the possible exception of the moon, because it takes them one or more days to be in roughly a given degree. This is the problem with some natural disaster astrology today: people do an event chart, but it is apt to be comparable if not identical in other places that were not so affected. For example, a devastating earthquake hits Haiti, but leaves the adjacent Dominican Republic unscathed. Maybe you could try something like local space astrology or planetary lines for particular locations. But planets lining up in Capricorn are going to be there for everybody, whether their civilization gets destroyed or not.

The Berossus quote seems highly general. The earth experiences serious floods in terms of loss of life and property somewhere on the planet every year. If what it takes is planets lining up in Capricorn, you'd think we'd have a lot fewer major floods-- or that January 11, 1994 should have given us some really extraordinary floods.

7
Hi Waybread,

Berossus is just stating that a worldwide cataclysm of a flood with occur if all the planets are in Capricorn and a worldwide cataclysm of a fire will occur if all the planets are in Cancer. I assume Berossus is just talking about the visible planets and my results seem to point that he was referring to the sidereal zodiac.

Graham Hancock responds to most of his critics in his book, Magicians of the Gods, so he would definitely have an answer for everything you laid out. Graham is humble, so he does admit when what he says is speculation.

Given various personal experiences in my life, I shy away from giving mainstream science the benefit of the doubt. There is a lot of politics and corruption in science. I have seen and heard it firsthand.

I just found it fascinating that Berossus' and Graham's work were very close to a flood cataclysm by date. I don't think that is just coincidence.
Michael Douglas Neely
Author of Life Cycles: Astrology and Its Connection to Nature

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/MichaelDouglasNeely
https://independent.academia.edu/MichaelNeely

8
Michael, I am a retired academic, from a Ph. D.-granting research-intensive university. I was actually married to a climatologist for 20 years, where I learned a bunch from him and his friends and colleagues. Subsequently I continued to rub shoulders with scientists in my workplace, including some who did research on climate change, prior to my retirement.

The charge of "corrupt" science, so far as I can make out, is generally leveled by people who are not professional scientists. They might have a B. Sc. in some scientific field, from back-when; but they haven't spent their lives doing academic, government, or industry-funded scientific research. They are seldom up-to-date on science. (Philosophers of science are a special category but I don't think that you are among their ranks.)

Scientific research tends to be extremely rigorous, in ways that amateur scholars (journalists, independent M. A. historians, and so on) seldom match. The standards for demonstrating particular scientific conclusions are high. Where scientists speculate or theorize, they tend to distinguish speculation from the outcomes of results of experimentation, or risk a lot of criticism from their peers.

Where scientists publish more popular works on human nature (like Richard Dawkins, or E. O. Wilson) they generally are not doing actual science in their books, even though their opinions are informed by their scientific backgrounds.

Scientists are only human, even if they tend to be highly educated humans. They are not exempt from professional jealousies, snobbery, firmly held opinions, and so on. But the thing about professional-level science and its allied social sciences ((including here archaeology), is that science contains within it the methodology whereby particular truth-claims can be questioned, tested, probed, and confirmed or discarded. This is typically done via scholarly conference papers and academic journal articles, although on-line discussion groups today short-circuit the process slightly. The holy grail is duplicability. If you make a scientific claim, I should be able to walk in your methodological footsteps, and reproduce your results.

"Alternative" scholars tend not to operate with this level of rigour, and when professional scientists, archaeologists, linguists, cultural astronomers, or historians question their findings, it is all too easy for the alternative scholars to blame academic "corruption" or snobbery, when the real problems is that the alternative scholars haven't made a convincing case-- for open-minded experts in their field, who are in a position to dispute the purported astronomy, textual interpretations, Paleolithic artefacts, &c.

So far as Berossus is concerned, a classical studies scholar might want to do some critical analysis of his extant texts (and texts about him,) and then really look at his truth-claims.

Berossus is credited with bringing Mesopotamian astrology to Greece, but the trouble is, that Assyriologists and specialists in ancient Near Eastern languages who specialize/d in astrological texts have concluded that the ancient prognostications where not empirical, but were based upon their `a priori beliefs about their stellar gods and their attributes. (See, for example, Erica Reiner, Francesca Rochberg.) For example, because the Babylonian planet Mars (Nergal) was literally the war god (or his omens,) we would naturally expect bad things to happen when Mars was especially active. At a time when astrology was heavily steeped in pre-existing religious beliefs, we don't know whether Berossus meant his planetary alignment literally or allegorically. (Cf. the Thema Mundi.)

Then getting back to science, what really do we mean about a "great deluge"? The 500-year flood? A meteor, comet, or asteroid impact that causes massive tidal waves? If you look back into the early post-Pleistocene period, a couple of decades of serious change in climatological terms is an extremely rapid time frame, and you would have to peg this shift exactly to known findings from Greenland ice cores, deep peat bog samples, and other means of elucidating paelo-climates.

Astrologically being off by a mere couple of centuries is huge.

Then I don't know what you do about precession, but planets in sidereal Capricorn from a ca. 300 BCE perspective would be in different places from ones in the 21st century or 11-12,000 year ago. They wouldn't be in the sign of Capricorn as a Babylonian of the Hellenistic period would have understood it. If memory serves, the Babylonian astrologers did not understand precession.

I can't say that this reviewer is correct, but you might take this criticism into consideration.

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/revie ... f-the-gods

9
Waybread,

Seeing your posts and other posts by academics on this site is really eye-opening to me.

Academics really seem to lord their credentials over others. Sorry, but that does not work for me. Twenty years ago I healed myself from some serious chronic illnesses after mainstream medicine and scientific approaches failed me miserably. I went to people who academics would call witch doctors. But today at 48 years old I have never been healthier and I avoid doctors and all those drugs and worthless tests that mainstream medicine and science endorses.

I appreciate your posts, but we will just have to agree to disagree.

I see many informative posts on Skyscript's forums, but these forums really have a problem with egomaniacs and people being too invested in their academic and astrologic turf. It really cuts down on other people wanting to engage in the topic.
Michael Douglas Neely
Author of Life Cycles: Astrology and Its Connection to Nature

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/MichaelDouglasNeely
https://independent.academia.edu/MichaelNeely

10
I want to thank Michael for starting this thread. The Berossus quotation is highly significant and has been invaluable to me in my studies into the astrology of the cataclysm and the astrology of the Great Year. It has enabled me to take a giant step forward in dating the astrology of the cataclysm.

As far as I know, very few astrologers are interested in this subject.
However, as I have said before, the eminent Dr. Eric Morse wrote about the cataclysm in ?The Living Stars? and he also co authored a book with Bernard Eccles, entitled ?Dark Stars?.

11
Well, thanks a heap, Michael. Dunno what credentials I "lorded over" you other than my personal experience, but that's OK.

My arguments have zero to do with modern medicine. I suspect most of us have been failed by it at one time or another. On the other hand, a lot of lives have been saved by it. Aren't you comparing apples and oranges in using that argument against my discussions?

But here's the thing. In the world of facts or reasonable theories, whether someone else comes across as smug or arrogant is irrelevant to the research task at hand. Sure, someone might come across as unlikable, but once research becomes primarily personality-driven, rather than factually driven, there's little chance of meaningful progress. Perhaps we could both agree that the salient issue isn't personalities, but data and logical inferences from the data.

That's what I would hope you could focus on in my posts, which are fundamentally designed to be helpful, independently of the tone.

You will see a lot of tough debates on this forum that have no academic participants. Generally the credentials of note are astrological expertise.

12
There is more science to support the extra terrestrial cause of a cataclysm at the end of the last Ice age.

I watched a PBS America documentary the other day and found out about the work of James Kennett geologist and fellow glaciologists who have been painstakingly examining ice layers from Greenland.

They were looking for an explanation as to why so many large animals went extinct all of a sudden such as woolly mammoth, bison, giant sloth, sabre toothed tiger etc.

They dated the event to 12900 years ago. This is precisely the beginning of the Age of Leo, exactly the date at which the cataclysm is reported to have occurred, evidenced by worldwide oral traditions, mythology, the bible etc.

In a very precise layer of ice dated to 12900 years ago (these layers of ice are laid down much like tree rings) they found the presence of iridium which is not found on earth and even more importantly they found billions of nano diamonds of hexagonal shape, a shape of diamond which is not found on earth. They came to the inescapable conclusion that something of extraterrestrial origin hit the earth at that time causing mass extinction very suddenly.

This is James Kennett's website :-

http://www.geol.ucsb.edu/faculty/kennett/

Michael started this very interesting and extremely important thread by asking if we could date this cataclysmic event and the answer is "Yes". I may post about this later and the possibillity of another cataclysmic event at the end of the 22nd century.