The most prevalent religious system in the immediate Canaanite context was the worship of Baal. Amongst numerous sources we have the Old Testament and the sacred scripts of Ugarit. Baal religion revolved around the cycles of nature necessary for survival and prosperity in the ancient world, primarily growing crops or raising livestock, as well as the growth of human populations. For a variety of reasons human fertility was an important concern. Lack of fertility in times of stress was widespread. Egyptian texts support these curious phenomena.
Stress was the result of conflict and dissatisfaction between the sky Gods of the Cosmos. The Babylonian creation hymn, Enuma Elish, describes a great battle among the gods. However out of this battle between the Sky Gods order returned from chaos. The astral deities returned to their rightful place in the heavens and re-established the cycles of nature.
To the Babylonians the Cosmos was an ongoing struggle between order and chaos. Fertility, of humans, growth of crops and the abundant supply of productive weather fell under the influence of Baal. The ancients firmly believed that by their actions they could manipulate and control the gods. In other words, rather than the gods’ being sovereignty in control of people, people were in control of the gods. Furthermore, rather than the gods’ always initiating relationships with people, the people had to initiate relationships with the gods. This way of thinking no doubt related to the uncertainties of life in the ancient world.
BAALBEK TEMPLE PROSTITUTES – HOLY AND SACRED ACTS
In particular the Ugarit tablets are explicitly concerned with fertility, cast in terms of human sexuality. Worship of Baal involved imitative magic, the performance of rituals, including sacred prostitution. Sexual acts by both male and female temple prostitutes were understood to arouse Baal who then brought rain to make Mother Earth fertile when crops were abundant; Baal was praised and thanked for his abundant rain.
It is in this context that drought had such impact throughout the biblical traditions. Not only was lack of rain a threat to survival, it was also a sign that the gods of the Baal myth were unhappy. Which were understood to bring vitality to Baal in his struggle with the other Gods? It takes little imagination to see the connection between the human sexual act and rain watering the earth to produce fruit. The religion gives assurance of some stability in the physical world, assisted by humans.
Imagine your posturing self-assurance as you parade on the dockside at Port Melbourne, dressed in the finest fashions the colony of Port Phillip can offer. Your beautiful new bride is elegantly bubbling beside you whilst showing off the latest copy of high Paris couture. Yes, my boy, you have made it! The year is 1859.
You came to the Victorian goldfields a pauper and struck it rich. You look across the bay to Frankston, Mount Martha, Dromana and Tubbarrubba where shortly even more goldfields will be pegged out. This was an era like no other and rags to riches were common, with no conniving government tax collectors to strip you of your “Paul Hogan” fortune.
Now with ritzy wealth reflected in your grand finery, you are boarding the luxurious steam clipper Royal Charter to fast tack up Port Phillip Bay and head home to England. Doubtless the gentry will fawn over your new found colonial riches.
This sleek iron sailing ship is a modern technical marvel. She is the fastest steam clipper in the world and on this trip she will break the Melbourne to England record by touching down in 58 days. Built for the Australian run, she is 80 meters long and weighs 3000 tonnes. She is carrying 388 passengers and 112 crew. But what else? This is a ‘gold’ ship. She is bursting with over 70,000 ounces of gold ($98 million today), 48,000 newly minted sovereigns, and the personal gold wealth (uncalculated) of passengers who struck it rich on the Victorian goldfields.
As you steam by Perth on September 1, 1859 all the passengers are delighted by an incredible phenomena. It is the Aurora Australis, but one so bright it lights up the night as if it were day. The captain, Thomas Taylor, notes he has never seen an Aurora this close to the equator before.
Skies all over planet Earth erupted in red, green, and purple auroras so brilliant that newspapers could be read as easily as in daylight. On the other side of the world, a brilliant Aurora Borealis is seen as far south as the Caribbean and Hawaii. This was the largest geo-magnetic storm ever recorded (NASA). Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed. Telegraph pylons threw sparks and telegraph paper spontaneously caught fire. But this was only the first portent from the heavens.
Just two months earlier a massive earthquake had occurred in Erzurum, Turkey, of force 9 on the Mercalli scale. Over 16 thousand people had perished. Was there a strange connection between these two events? But even stranger coincidences were to follow.
ROYAL CHARTER STORM 1859
The rest of the ‘Royal Charter’s’ journey was pure bliss. The luxury cabins were a delight. The company boisterous and the sharing of ‘wealth laden’ future dreams enervating. As she beat down towards the English Channel all seemed well. But when she reached the north-western tip of Anglesey, on October 25, the barometer was dropping. The master, Captain Thomas Taylor, was advised to put into Holyhead harbor for shelter but he continued on to Liverpool.
During the night of October, the winds rose to Hurricane force 12 at over 160 kmh, in what became known as the ‘Royal Charter’ gale. Its direction changed from E to NNE, driving the ship towards the coast of Anglesey.
At 11 p.m. she anchored, but at 1.30 a.m. on October 26 the port anchor chain snapped, rapidly followed by the starboard. Despite cutting the masts to reduce the drag of the wind, the ‘Royal Charter’ was driven inshore, with the steam engines unable to make headway against the gale. The ship initially grounded on a sandbank, but in the early morning the rising tide drove her to the rocks.
Battered against the rocks by huge waves whipped up by winds of over 160 kilometers per hour, she quickly broke up. Most of the passengers and crew, a total of over 450 people, died. Many of them were killed by being dashed against the rocks by the waves rather than drowned. Others were drowned, weighed down by the belts of gold they were wearing around their bodies. The survivors, 21 passengers and 18 crew members, were all men, with no women or children saved.
As for the gold, many an Anglesey resident became rich overnight, and to this day salvage divers seek to recover some of the wealth with no success.
The “Royal Charter storm” was the worst of the entire nineteenth century with a total of 133 ships sunk during the storm. The death toll was around 800. What had caused this unprecedented megastorm? I believe we can look to another event that shows us precisely where our weather comes from.
CARRINGTON EVENT 1859 – THE SOLAR STORM
In the heavens, the solar superstorm of 1859, also known as the ‘Carrington Event’, was the most powerful solar storm in recorded history. Richard Carrington sketched its magnitude whilst observing the bright flashes of a solar flare on the surface of the sun.
This was the same event that caused the disruption of telegraphs, the extreme glow of the Aurora Australis, earthquakes in Turkey, and finally the massively destructive ‘Royal Charter’ mega-storm. Quite probably ‘synchrotron’ radiation poured down on Earth. Tempel’s observations came shortly thereafter, when he sketched an enormous Coronal Mass Ejection (CME), with its terrible body blooming out as far as the width of the sun itself, during a solar eclipse a few months later. The electromagnetic connection with the sun controls our weather, not puny mankind with his imagined impact.
FLU EPIDEMIC 1859
One more phenomena occurred that is painfully coincidental and baffles modern science. The world wide flu epidemic of 1859 was one of the worst ever, causing half a million deaths (Duffy. J – Louisiana University Press). Could solar flares and the CME’s synchrotron radiation stimulate viral growth?
Note: Whilst filming on the Jurassic coast in England, I spoke to one of these professionals involved in the last attempt in 2005. Expert salvage diver John Ledger gave me some souvenirs from his incredible memorabilia. A few lead balls of rifle buckshot, a broken plate and some Royal Charter ship’s rivets. These I have with me as I type this tragic tale – a sad legacy that has returned to Melbourne some 150 years later.
This lucky country doesn’t know what it’s like to live in constant terror! But in other eras few large towns were built near the vulnerable coast for fear of murderous, ravaging, brutalised pirates. Every old coastal town had its nest of armoury and fortifications ready to defend against marauding pirates and raiders.
The forts of Port Phillip’s Point Nepean and Sydney’s North Head are fine Victorian era samples. Earlier, the Vikings were but one of a veritable horde who through the ages have raped, pillaged and destroyed whenever driven by desperate or greedy circumstance! The Vikings pitilessly raided the English, Irish and Mediterranean coastlines in search of women and plunder.
But a reversion to piracy has relentlessly travelled down the ages whenever opportunities presented themselves! In the aftermath of the ancient Trojan war, the “father of history” Herodotus tells how Dionysius escaped to Sicily in the 5th century BC and became an invading pirate. The wandering “Peoples of the sea” famously ransacked the Egypt of Ramses II! Two thousand years later in 1551, Dragut Reis raided Malta and Gozo, taking the 5,000 inhabitants of these neighbouring islands, away into slavery.
In more recent times Sir Francis Drake, whilst allegedly serving Queen Elizabeth I, infamously sacked and looted Spanish towns in South America of their gold. A colluding Queen, desperate for money, amply rewarded him. In the 19th and 20th Century Indonesia’s Malacca straights has supported untold Arab Dhows in search of plunder from merchant shipping! And need we mentioned the brisk slave smuggling trade only stamped out by a powerful, aggressive and ruthless Royal Navy.
Victoria’s “Bush Rangers bay”, on Cape Schanck, was for a time the haven of just such a nest of minor pirates. Where there is a vacuum of power and tenacity on the part of governments surely piracy will flourish? Beware the coming new age of piracy!
In times of famine, drought and warfare, desperate people from ruined countries turn to piracy but only when a strong counterforce lacks the will to control them. I believe we are entering just such a time! The sea pirates of Somalia are only the beginning of a revival of powerfully equipped and brutalized men willing to risk all for large gains.
My father, an ex POW, once mentioned how he never realised starvation could turn peoples moral scruples upside down. Desperate men turn to piracy! Impossible you say in this era of protective superpowers. But is a sea change occurring? In our world superpowers are deteriorating. Powerful weapons, boats and reconnaissance planes are available to ruthless crime syndicates. The people smugglers are cleverly learning if a nation lacks the resolve to protect its sea lanes and borders then perhaps it is vulnerable to other opportunistic attacks. Like sly foxes they wait their moment to run in and seize an unprotected prey!
Our Australian defence forces, particularly our navy, has become pathetic in its equipment capabilities and resolve in recent years. Neglectful politicians have left a large proportion of our warships awaiting repair in slumbering dockyards. As the awesome power of America and it’s protective umbrella subsides opportunities for well equipped piracy suddenly become tempting.
Are we living in a fools paradise? Are we travelling back to a terrifying past of world chaos?
You’ve never heard of Sodom and Gomorrah? These were two cities of ancient Israel that God’s wrath devastated and buried under the murky salt of today’s Dead Sea. The citizen’s indulged in gambling, drinking and sexual excess. These ancient cities of around 3000 BC were hit with fire and brimstone. In their escape the biblical Lot’s wife was fossilised and turned into a pillar of salt simply because she disobeyed her husband. With her insatiable feminine curiosity she had merely turned to view the city’s annihilation. Are you Cynical? Did this actually occur?
Well today they have actually rediscovered these lost cities under the Dead Sea. But what if I said similar destructions had occurred in Australia? What if I told you that along the Murray near Mildura lies a certain Lake Victoria where the fossilized skeletons of fifteen thousand humans lie scattered? All this happening around the time scale of the unfortunate Sodom and Gomorrah. Where is the truth?
Lake Mungo and Lake Victoria Fossils and Skeletons, the Australian Sodom and Gomorrah
In the late 1990′s South Australian archaeologist Colin Pardoe investigated this colossal assemblage of skeletons scattered on the south eastern corner of Lake Victoria. They were unearthed when Lake Victoria was partially drained to repair lock 13 in the nearby river. It led him to claim it as a burial site for generations of Aboriginals and it pointed to a much larger ancient population than previously calculated. Was he right? Well it was certainly a sacred site for most aboriginal tribes pristinely practice and hand down sacred verbal mythological records where important geophysical dramas have occurred. Lake Victoria’s circular lake sand Lunette contains a geological high point that equates to the “blood of our ancestors”.
Aboriginal mythology is dominated by cosmological catastrophic events of the past. For instance the original inhabitants of southeast Australia, when interviewed during the 19th century, displayed a marked fear of the southern lights. To the Wotjobaluk, of central-western Victoria, as well as the Ngarigo, closer to Canberra, the aurora “signified” that, at some great distance, a number of blacks were being slaughtered, and that the Aurora colour is the blood rising up to the sky.”
Upon the Aurora’s appearance, the Kurnai, of the Gippsland region, would be “shouting such words as ‘Send it away; do not let it burn us up.’ Far from being overly imaginative fantasies arising from the red hue of the Aurora Australis, such visceral reactions rooted in traumatic memories of a time when the aurora “filled the whole space between the earth and the sky”, precipitating floods, collective madness and the final departure of the creator from the earth.
The latter, known as Mungan-ngaua or ‘our father,’ “long ago” lived on the earth”, but when the ancestors of the Kurnai provoked him, “he sent his fire, the Aurora Australis, which filled the whole space between the earth and the sky. Men went mad with fear, and speared each other, fathers killing their children, husbands their wives, and brethren each other. Then the sea rushed over the land and nearly all mankind was drowned.” Mungun left the earth, and ascended to the sky where he still remains.” The Mornington Peninsula’s own pioneer, Georgiana McCrae ,records a similar mythology amongst the Bunurong people of her day (1845)
My thoughts are these myths reflect a scientific truth. It may be the destruction of ancient tribes by mysterious forces such as Mungan’s fire, now judged to be a catastrophic Aurora Australis from a mass Coronal ejection by the Sun or alternatively the massive electrical discharge between a comet or meteor or hyper active period of a planet as it flays the Earth. Finally these legends are repeated at Wilcania on the Darling, at Lake Mungo and Lake Victoria. They were all the scene of ancient aboriginal destructions. Still doubtful? Well my latest film Lake Mungo and Lake Victoria, the Australian Sodom and Gomorrahproduces the hard scientific evidence from carbon dating, magnetic reversals and electro geological machining.
Let me introduce you to the remarkable French archaeologist Claude Schaeffer. He excavated Enkomi in Cyprus and Ugarit along the Syrian coastline. He also examined over forty other the Middle East sites. This was around the period from three thousand to six thousand years ago. What amazed him was that of six civilizations laid down, each was separated by a vast destruction layer up to thirty meters of ash. What could have caused this massive damage?
Certainly no conquering hoard would have left such fearful devastation. Conventional explanations would not work. A hundred forest fires could not lay down such a fearful evidence of destruction. Ugarit and Byblos, mere kilometres from Baalbek, had been ravaged by earthquake, fire, Tsunamis and inexplicable devastation numerous times. Ugarit was totally covered in debris and the coastline changed dramatically. The city was totally abandoned never to be rebuilt.
What agent could totally wipe out a civilization? Not only was one city was destroyed, but an entire network stretching from Troy to ancient Egypt.
Claude Schaeffer’s investigations in the Middle East found that each and everyone told the same story. The demise of a civilization followed by a clear cut gap that allowed no interplay or influence from the preceding one. And not just once but at least six times (even more he speculates in private correspondence) this massive destruction occurred. Across eras separated by two thousand years, from the close of the early Bronze age to the opening of the Iron Age.
Let us be clear these were not slow Darwinian events. This was sudden and dramatic destruction, flying totally in the face of Darwin, Hutton and Lyle’s theory of slow uniform changes on the face of the Earth. Schaeffer called these massive destruction areas “zones de tremblement”. He was bold enough, to assign catastrophic natural events as the premier agent in the rise and fall of civilizations.
“Having for the first time established in Stratigraphy Comparee. those successive crises during the IInd and IIIrd millennium from the Caucasus down to Egypt, I was tempted to look for the causes among which were earthquakes, tidal waves, climatic changes and other natural catastrophic agents”.
CLAUDE SCHAEFFER AND ANCIENT NATURAL DESTRUCTIONS
Claude Schaeffer believed that warfare and politics had little overall effect when compared to the chaotic whims of nature. These affairs of mankind were but mere trifles when compared to natures’ dramatic and deadly cataclysms.
“For with the new confirmations those crises could no longer be questioned by the great number of sceptical short-sighted archaeologists among which I live now in some sort of scientific isolation, so striking are the proofs and so accurate the dates established by the new discoveries. When their testimony will have been shown, those great crises will explain better than before, the historical development of the most ancient civilizations and its mechanism, and they will definitely take out of the hands of man the command of the great historical happenings we thought he possessed”.
Claude Schaeffer saw these events as the cause of race movements. It clearly explained the theme behind the collapse of nations. This was the cause of subsequent dark ages when mankind lost their ability to write and cooperate in complex societies. Observations of modern Volcanoes and earthquakes only offered a partial explanation. The ancient events were extraordinarily more numerous than recent history describes. According to classical sources, such as the historian Pliny, ancient Earthquakes were far more numerous.
During the Punic wars of 217BC between Rome and Carthage, fifty seven earthquakes were recorded in Rome in one year alone. Nowhere in the modern world is this concentration seen. Claude Schaeffer also noted the ancient volcanoes were incredibly powerful! He observed that a volcano on the island of Santorini had erupted in July 1956. “There, under our eyes, on a smaller scale, is happening what happened in earlier times on a gigantic scale”. He struggled to explain the cause for these amazing phenomena. But one man knew the answer.
Baalbek Lebanon and the Destruction of Baalbek Temple and the City of the Thundergods
Mankind has been repeatedly destroyed and reborn. Civilizations are everywhere buried under rubble. Ruins lie abandoned in the middle of deserts and rainforests. What happened? Modern scientific studies combined with research in archaeology and mythology is revealing dramatic new facts. The ascent and demise of nations is controlled by nature’s chaotic whims and does not lie under mankind’s own hand. Baalbek is an ancient site that reveals such shattering events altering the destiny of empires and nations.
As the eminent French archaeologist Claude Schaeffer concluded, these massive cataclysmic destructions are unknown in modern times. Will they occur again? Can we prevent them?
BAALBEK LEBANON DESTRUCTIONS
The citizens of Baalbek feared the sky god Jupiter but why? And who were the mysterious people the Dejanon who built Baalbek? Legend has it that they half demon half angel working under king Solomon. Yet this amazing citadel, built with massive one thousand ton blocks, has repeatedly succumbed to ruination. Was Jupiter, or Zeus as the Greeks knew him, responsible for the earthquakes that laid it waste on numerous occasions?
Lets investigate this amazing scenario.Our world is a hotbed of archaeological mystery. The ancient Syrian plains. The Central American plateaus home of the Maya and Aztecs. The Indian subcontinent and the jungles of Asia. Everywhere we find cities buried under rubble and sand or abandoned in the middle of deserts. You’ve got to ask yourself what happened to these civilizations. Why were they abandoned? Now some say tsunamis. Volcanoes such as Santorini or Krakatau.
Claude Schaeffer was the first to invoke massive continent wide earthquakes. Harvey Weiss, the eminent archaeologist working in Syria, blames sudden vicious climate change, that desertified and alternatively flooded wide areas in the Middle East. Even comets and meteors are mentioned. Certainly the massive Chixolub impact is blamed for the extinction of the Dinosaur in earlier times.
But what about only four thousand years ago. Did similar but smaller events devastate mankind? Can myths and legends also be tapped to guide us in finding out the causes of these interruptions in human affairs? Mankind’s legends such as the Trojan wars are often ignored by modern archaeologists. They hide bones of truth.
BAALBEK TEMPLE RUINS AND BURIAL
David Roberts, the English artist arrived here in 1854, after painting the ruins of Egypt and the Holy land. He was staggered by the mystery of these immense shattered ruins. The Bedouin tribesman who camped amongst the ruins also pondered over its mysteries. Ildrizzi, the Arab geographer, claims it was built by Giants under the legendary King Nimrod after the Deucalion flood. Other mythology talks about King Solomon, even Genies.
Apart from the ravage of earthquakes, Baalbek Lebanon has at random times suffered damage due to the deposition of rubble ,till and clay over its body. When Roberts reached Baalbek he portrayed a site partially obscured by rubble. In this regard it is like the Egyptian monuments, most of which were buried by sand. Witness here the gateway to the Temple of Bacchus which in Roberts’s day was buried some six meters up its ramparts. It was the German archaeologists under Wilhelm II who first revealed the depth of the damage. This was certainly not placed by the occupiers so what agent caused it to be dumped over and beyond the entire huge megalithic site.
In nearby Byblos, some seventy kilometres away we again see Phoenician sites buried under many meters of rubble. In fact a Tsunami in around 500 AD ravaged the whole of the Lebanese coastline, burying Beirut and other cities. This was accompanied by extremely destructive earthquakes. But this was merely the last of a devastating series that have ravaged this area. Certainly rubble and muck may have been washed down from the Lebanese mountain range that Baalbek nestles under. In the close of the early Bronze Age Harvey Weiss notes extreme flooding in the local Syrian rivers despite drought and winds that persisted for some three centuries. Erratic and chaotic weather conditions led to unusual flooding and earth deposits.
BAALBEK TEMPLE RUINS AND THE ROMANS
Today we see the Acropolis of Baalbek Lebanon in ruins. Many civilizations have had their influence here. Our only definitive knowledge is from the time of the Romans who rebuilt it around 100AD under the emperors Nero and Trajan. They consulted it as an oracle. In these days it had three temples dedicated to three deities. Baal king of the Gods we now recognize as the Roman god Jupiter. Secondly came Bacchus also known as Mercury, was worshipped with full Bacchalian rites. The third deity was the mysterious Athena, or as we now knows her Venus.
These citizens were petrified of Baal, for he was god of the dark cloud, king of the Gods. All these deities were sky gods or planets with real influence over the peoples’ daily lives. Eventually these sky gods took on human forms and personalities.
Baalbek’s history certainly reaches back beyond the Romans. The Phoenicians, Israelites and probably other conquerors played their part in the history of this mighty Acropolis. Delving back before these civilizations Baalbek was inhabited by a mysterious race of Megalith builders who employed massive blocks up to a thousand tons to construct Baalbek. Who could have moved and carved them? Were they the mythical race of giants under King Nimrod who have faded into obscurity? The remains of these huge base stones were used by later civilizations to rebuild Baalbek.
Recorded history from Roman times relates that Baalbek was devastated by earthquakes many times. One in 570 AD. Three more in crusader times around 1100 AD. A further one in 1759 AD when Baalbek Lebanon was abandoned by the Turkish garrison. The last earthquake was in 1870 AD when thee more massive columns collapsed. But these earthquakes of Roman and Crusader times were nothing compared to the continent wide earthquakes that had shattered the Middle East in earlier epics. What evidence do we have for this? For answers to this read on to the foundational work of Claude Schaeffer who investigated the layers of destruction from the early Bronze age around 5000 to the Iron Age of around 3000 years ago!
The Oronteus Finaeus map (Oronteus Fineus map) shows an ice free Antarctica.
As well as the Piri Reis map their exists another anomaly. The Oronteus Finaeus map, also spelled Oronteus Fineus map, was incredibly precise. It too shows an ice free Antartica with no ice-cap. It was drawn in the year 1532. There are also maps showing Greenland as two separated islands, as it was confirmed by a polar French expedition which found out that there is an ice cap quite thick joining what it is actually two islands.
Another amazing chart is the one drawn by the Turkish Hadji Ahmed, year 1559, in which he shows a land stripe, about 1600 Km wide, that joins Alaska and Siberia. Such a natural bridge has been then covered by the water due to the end of the glacial period, which rose up the sea level.
As we saw, many charts in the ancient times pictured, we might say, all the earth geography. They seem to be pieces of a very ancient world wide map, drawn by unknown people who were able to use technology that we consider to be a conquer of the very modern times. At a time when human beings were supposedly living in a primitive manner, someone “put on paper” the whole geography of the earth. And this common knowledge somehow fell into pieces, then gathered here and there by several people, who had lost though the knowledge, and just copied what they could find in libraries, bazaars, markets and about all kind of places.
Hapgood made a disclosure which amazingly lead further on this road: he found out a cartographic document copied by an older source carved on a rock column, China, year 1137. It showed the same high level of technology of the other western charts, the same grid method, the same use of spheroid trigonometry. It has so many common points with the western ones that it makes think more than reasonably, that there had to be a common source: could it be a lost civilization, maybe the same one which has been chased by thousands for years so far?
ORONTEUS FINEUS MAP OF ANTARCTICA SUMMARY
The Piri Re’is map is often exhibited in cases seeking to prove that civilization was once advanced and that, through some unknown event or events, we are only now gaining any understanding of this mysterious cultural decline. The earliest known civilization, the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, appear out of nowhere around 4,000 B.C. but have no nautical or maritime cultural heritage. They do, however, speak reverently of ancestral people who were like the “gods” and were known as the nefilim.
Here is a summary of some of the most unusual findings about the map: Scrutiny of the map shows that the makers knew the accurate circumference of the Earth to within 50 miles.
The coastline and island that are shown in Antarctica must have been navigated at some period prior to 4,000 B.C. when these areas were free of ice from the last Ice Age.Piri Reis own commentary indicates that some of his source maps were from the time of Alexander the Great (332 B.C.).
The Oronteus Finaeus Map of Antarctica redrawn on the modern equidistant azimuthal polar projection, compares with the modern map of Antarctica on the same projection (Christian Science Monitor).A comparison of the Oronteus Fineus Map with the map of the sub glacial land surfaces of Antarctica produced by survey teams or various nations during the International Geophysical Year (1958) seems to explain some of the apparent short-comings of the ice free Antartica Oronteus Finaeus Map, and at the same time throws some light on the question of the probable extent of glacial conditions when the original maps were drawn.
In 1959, however, in the Library of Congress, Hapgood noticed a presumably authentic map that instantly wiped out his doubts: a map of what was almost certainly Antarctica, done in 1531 by the French cartographer Oronce Fine, also known as Oronteus Finaeus. To even the most skeptical, the Oronteus Finaeus map is startling. Although it was printed in a book in 1531 – and was thus not subject to subsequent amendment – it is remarkably similar to today’s maps of Antarctica. Admittedly it is too close to the tip of South America, and it is incorrectly oriented, yet the proportions seem similar, the coastal mountains, found in the 1957 geophysical study are in roughly the right places and so are many bays and rivers. Furthermore, the shape of South America itself seems right, and the close resemblance between a modern, scientifically exact map of the Ross Sea and Finaeus’ unnamed gulf is striking.
What is different, however, is that the Oronteus Finaeus map does not seem to show the great shelves of ice that, today, surround the continent, nor the great glaciers that fringe the coastal regions. Instead there seem to be estuaries and inlets, suggesting great rivers. To Hapgood and his team, that meant that at some time in the past the Ross Sea and its coasts – scene of the November, 1979 air disaster on Mount Erebus – and some of the hinterland of Antarctica were free of ice. It also suggested to Hapgood that since the Antarctic was certainly ice-bound in 1531 – when Oronteus Finaeus made his map – Finaeus must have had access to very ancient maps indeed: maps made when Antarctica was largely free of the mile-thick ice cap that buries it today, and presumably has covered it for millennia.
There is, moreover, the perplexing problem of the Oronteus Finaeus map. Even if Piri Reis “Antarctica” turns out to be South America – drawn horizontally – or even Australia, the Finnaeus “Antarctica” is surely Antarctica and his map was also drawn in the 16th century: 1531. Where did Oronteus Finaeus get his far more detailed and accurate information? Was it the libraries of Alexandria now buried under the sea? And why does Finaeus also show Antarctica without an ice cap? Furthermore, the Hapgood team identified 50 geographical points on the Finaeus map, as re-projected, whose latitudes and longitudes were located quite accurately in latitude and longitude, some of them quite close to the pole. “The mathematical probability against this being accidental,” says Hapgood, “is astronomical”
So how did this happen to be recorded in not one but at least four maps? Either our “known” history of human beings on this planet is wrong, our ‘history’ of our planet’s development is wrong, there were highly developed civilizations on Earth that we are ignoring because it doesn’t fit into the established “norm” or the ancient maps that predated these and were used as reference were done by alien cartographers or someone – drawing our planet from the air.
Another titbit of proof is the Ross sea. Today huge glaciers feed into it, making it a floating ice shelf hundreds of feet thick. Yet this map and the Reis map show estuaries and rivers at the site. In 1949 coring was done to take samples of the ice and sediment at the bottom of the Ross Sea. They clearly showed several layers of stratification, meaning the area went through several environmental changes. Some of the sediments were of the type usually brought down to the sea by rivers. Tests done at the Carnegie Institute in Washington DC, which date radioactive elements found in sea water, dated the sediments at about 4000 BC, which would mean the area was ice free with flowing rivers up until that time – exactly what is recorded on the Reis and Oronteus Finaeus maps probably from the libraries of Alexandria.
To put it another away, Hapgood’s work simply cannot be lumped with the lunatic fringe Although unquestionably an amateur theoretician, he did do his homework and had it thoroughly checked by professionals. The U.S. Air Force SAC cartographers, for example, worked with him for two years and fully endorsed his conclusions about Antarctica.
From Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings by Charles Hapgood
The age of the Antarctic ice sheet is no more than six thousand years old
The validity of the Vostok Antarctic ice core methodology is disputed
Antarctica today is covered by an ice sheet up to 5 kilometres thick. It is the coldest place on Earth. It is amazingly the driest desert on earth with snow only falling around its wind blasted boundaries.
But it was not always so cold and remote. Geologist Molly Miller of Vanderbilt University discovered, in the Beardmore Glacier area of Antarctica, the remains of three ancient deciduous forests complete with fossils of fallen leafs scattered around the petrified tree stumps These trees are alive today but only grow in warm moist areas such as Queensland Antarctic also harbor’s bones of extinct marsupials and Dinosaurs with massive coal beds full of once flourishing flora and fauna.
When did this fabulous age exist and more importantly what caused the dramatic change? It must have been a sudden and dramatic change for there are no intermediate phases with changing vegetation patterns. And how did a five kilometre ice sheet develop inland in Antarctica where there is little snow or precipitation? These are impossible questions that modern geology struggles to answer. Did continental-drift bring Antarctica to the poles or was it a shift in the earth’s axes that not only caused the death of the tropical rain forests, but place a massive ice sheet on the continent?
And when did this occur? Classic geology would have you believe this ice sheet to of been in existence for millions of years. Two powerful facts totally contradict this. One is the existence of two ancient maps – the Antarctica Piri Reis map and the Antarctica Oronteus Finaeus map both hoary with antiquity. Incredibly they show Antarctica Ice free, these maps are reckoned to have their source in the two thousand year old libraries of ancient Alexandria. This would mean that Antarctica may have of been navigable in the not too distant past. Perhaps in the time of the Pharaohs?
Are these maps believable? Professor Charles Hapgood submitted them to the U.S. air force cartography section for evaluation. Lt Colonel Ohlmeyer replied that not only were they accurate but, ‘this indicates the coastline had been mapped before it was covered by the ice-cap. The ice-cap in this region is now about a mile thick .We have no idea how the data on this map can be reconciled with the supposed state of geographical knowledge of this era.’
We have a second line of evidence for a recent ice free Antarctica.The controversial ice core experiments? In Greenland and Antarctica are laboratories that bore through the ice to collect data on the layers of ice. In Antartica there is the Dome C and Vostok stations. In Greenland, the second of the world’s continental ice sheets, there is, for example the GISP 2 and GRIP Eventually they hit rock bottom where in the case of Greenland they hit plant remains. Each layer contains volcanic dust and certain isotopes such as Carbon14 and Oxygen18 that reveal data on the nature of the climate in distant eras.
For instance it is claimed they clearly show the profile of the medieval warming a thousand years ago when the temperatures of the earth exceeded those of today. But if each layer represents a year then Antarctica’s 140,000 layers are not millions of years old as conventional geology claims. But even more controversially Charles Ginthenal in his paper on ‘ice core evidence’ explained that summer melt and the deposition of thousands of layers during chaotic eras totally falsify the year per layer paradigm on which this theory is built. He contends that ocean core and bore hole results contradict the ice core data.
A further controversial contradiction lies in the accepted paradigm that one ice core layer equals one year of snow deposition. This is the basis of all ice core dating. Recently this has been hotly debated . Excavators of the” lost squadron ” in Greenland discovered when they dug deep into the ice to recover old world war two planes that the number of layers relative to the number of years equated to around ten times the theoretical annual number. The layers equated to melt lines separating storms not annual layers. This is a strong argument against equating layers to annual rings. Variance of the isotope Oxygen 18 from layer to layer could be the signature of a storm not an annular separation.
All getting a bit complex? But what it means is the ice sheet is not millions of years old and it also could have been laid down rapidly within a short number of years This could of happened as recently as six thousand years ago. Again at the time of the Pharaohs. The rapidity of the event is supported by the fossilization of the ancient tree forests that Molly Miller discovered.
Fossilization is a process that usually only occurs in catastrophic circumstances such as comet discharge, extreme mass coronal ejections or disturbed planetary motions resulting in magnetic field reversal. Could this scenario happen again in the future? In the film ‘Antarctica once a tropical paradise’ (full version available as DVD on this site or atMUNGOFLIX website) you can see the evidence in detail.
So what is Baalbek Lebanon all about? If the people of Baalbek feared Baal alias Jupiter could this sky god have driven their destiny? Both myth and legend go much further to support the malignant role of Jupiter and other planets in Mankind’s affairs. Remember Jupiter goes by many names. In ancient Phoenicia he is Baal of our Baalbek. In Israel he is Zedek. In Egypt Amon. In Iran he is Mazda. In Babylon Enlil. In India he is Shiva. In Greece the mighty Zeus king of the Gods. Jupiter in all cases is the supreme sky god. The supreme planet.
In all these cases he is blamed for hurling massive thunderbolts against the Earth and causing earthquakes. Could this of happened? Today Jupiter/Baal hurls thunderbolts at its moon Io. Thus interplanetary discharges do occur. In a near approach of Jupiter perhaps Earth too was subject to the sky god’s wrath?
The ancient Greek historian, Homer in the Odyssey, specifically blames Baal / Zeus / Jupiter for hurling thunderbolts and destroying Troy with earthquakes. Baal shattered the Earth. That is why the citizens of Baalbek feared and worshiped this Sky God. They trembled under his destruction and even offered human sacrifice to calm him.
In another ancient text from the Greek Hesiod, we find Baal / Zeus responsible for giving birth to the planets Mercury and Venus. Is this at all possible? Let us investigate. What do we know about Jupiter? Certainly next to the Sun it is the largest mass in the Solar System. But Jupiter’s’ most salient driver is its great red spot, four times the size of Earth. This constantly swirls as a giant vortex sucking up all clouds that are in its way. Moreover it spits them out. If Jupiter can absorb comets such as shoemaker levy 9 can it in its turn spit them out as it does the clouds on its surface? Remember the scientific principle “to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Hesiod claimed Jupiter gave birth to Venus and Mercury. Is Jupiter about to regurgitate Shoemaker Levy 9 as a new comet or indeed as Velikovsky claims a pre planet? Is it only a matter of time until mankind suffers another cosmic attack? Jupiter even now has captured a smaller comet. Will this in its turn disintegrate and be swallowed. In fact does Earth have the power like Jupiter to attract comets and have them impact on our surface. In the past we have had massive extinctions due to cosmic events. Do we live in a fool’s paradise that denies such bazaar possibilities even though our ancestors lived in fear of just such an event?
In the first century of the present era the Romans at one time counted fifty comets in their skies. This is unheard of today. Were the skies over Rome the end of a bloody era that only in recent centuries has become stabilized? Can there be bones of truth in this mythology? So here is our challenge. How do we explain these dreadful cataclysms that decimated mankind. Conventional science is a lost puppy. It rejects mythology. It clings to outmoded scientific concepts. It is bogged down in theory laden ideas. Come with us as we reveal the truth.
