History & Science in Myth

What is myth? And what is history?
Has myth always been synonymous with the fancy of imaginative story-tellers?

According to common sense one would think that myth and legend make up the body of human experience that was passed down from antiquity through the timeless tradition of story-tellers. Modern scholarship does not however consider myth as historical evidence. References to human experience prior to the invention of writing around 5,000 years ago are entirely omitted from what is considered history.

So folk tales and myths are technically not considered to be the accurate history of pre-literate mankind. So what are these myths then, if they are not to be trusted as historical evidence?

Though we're jumping from the bank straight into the rapids here, a seminal work on ancient mythology, Hamlet's Mill, has this to say on the origins and nature of mythology;

"Although a modern reader does not expect a text on celestial mechanics to read like a lullaby, he insists on his capacity to understand mythical 'images' instantly, because he can respect as 'scientific' only page-long approximation formulas, and the like.

He does not think of the possibility that equally relevant knowledge might once have been expressed in everyday language. He never suspects such a possibility, although the visible accomplishments of ancient cultures - to mention only the pyramids or metallurgy - should be a cogent reason for concluding that serious and intelligent men were at work behind the stage, men who were bound to have been used to a technical language ..."


One of the Seven Wonders of World, the 110 ft. Colossus of Rhodes. Completed in 282 BC, brought down by an earthquake in 226 BC.

... the author goes on to note the antiquity of these 'everyday' myths;

"When the Greeks came upon the scene the dust of centuries had already settled upon the remains of this great world-wide archaic construction. Yet something of it survived in traditional rites, in myths and fairy tales no longer understood ... These are tantalizing fragments of a lost whole. They make one think of those 'mist landscapes' of which Chinese painters are masters, which show here a rock, here a gable, there the tip of a tree, and leave the rest to imagination. Even when the code shall have yielded, when the techniques shall be known, we cannot expect to gauge the thought of these remote ancestors of ours, wrapped as it is in its symbols, since the creating ordering minds that devised the symbols have vanished forever."[1]

Vanished forever. We will perhaps never know where myths come from. They are older than writing, and thus older than conventional scholars admit civilization to have been around.

Sonchis, the elderly Egyptian priest that mocked Solon's ignorance of ancient matters, did seem certain about the meaning behind myths and legends. He clearly explained what lay behind the story of Phaethon, son of Helios, when he lost control of the solar chariot and burnt up all that was upon the earth:

"... that story, as it is told, has a fashion of a legend, but the truth of it lies in the occurrence of a shifting of the bodies in the heavens which move around the earth ..."



Let's return to the divisive relationship between myth and history. As mentioned, the body of knowledge carried through the oral traditions of the ancients is not considered historical evidence. Yet there are many examples of myths that were once dismissed as 'unhistorical' which were later proved to have been entirely accurate.

One well-known case concerns the famous Troy of Homer's Iliad, the origins of which were from an oral tradition. Scholars were convinced until recently that Troy was a mythical city, a figment of Homer's imagination. In 1871, however, the German explorer Heinrich Schliemann proved orthodox opinion wrong when he followed the geographical clues contained in the Illiad and discovered Troy in western Turkey near the Dardanelles - exactly where Homer had said it was located.

Another myth shattered by Schliemann, the Greek scholar Kalokairinos and the British archeologist Sir Arthur Evans, was concerning the great 'Minoan' civilization that was said to have existed on Crete:

This myth too, was dismissed as unhistorical by orthodox opinion but was vindicated when the explorers excavated the remains of a highly advanced culture now firmly identified as that of the 'Minoans'. Similarly, in the Indian subcontinent, the unearthing of the great civilization of the Indus Valley has led us to accept that the 'mythical' cities of Moenjodaro and Harappa existed as they were depicted in the ancient Sanskrit scriptures of the Rig-Veda.[2]

If cities and civilizations that were once considered 'mythical' have emerged from the mists of obscurity to become historical facts, then a great deal more of what was considered 'unhistorical', or 'simply myth', deserves the consideration of open minds - and renewed investigation by the scholars with access to the relevant source material.

This is a premise I will maintain as we explore the anomalies and 'unhistorical' enigmas the ancients left for us in their myths. Not having access to source material myself, I will have to rely on the research of a variety of authors that have published works on the subject in the last forty years.

Sonchis explains that the truth of the story has the 'fashion of a legend'. In other words, the 'shifting of the bodies in the heavens' was fashioned into a legend and remembered as such by the Athenians. Graham Hancock writes:

The author of Hamlet's Mill proposes that there is even more to the 'truth of the story' in mythology - that indeed it carries within it references to "celestial events and do so, furthermore, in the refined technical language of an archaic but 'immensely sophisticated' astronomical and mathematical science: 'This language ignores local beliefs and cults. It concentrates on numbers, motions, measures, overall frames, schemas - on the structure of numbers, on geometry.'"[3]

'... universality is in itself a test when coupled with firm design. When something found, say, in China, turns up also in Babylonian astrological texts, then it must be assumed to be relevant if it reveals a complex of uncommon images which nobody could claim to have risen independently by spontaneous generation ... Likewise, when one finds numbers like 108, or 9 x 13 reappearing under several multiples in the Vedas, in the temples of Angkor, in Babylon, in Heraclitus' dark utterances, and also in the Norse Valhalla, it is not accident ..."[1]

Two famous examples of this concentration on "numbers, on geometry" are the Great Pyramid in Giza, Egypt and the Pyramid of the Sun, in Teotihuacan, Mexico, which both incorporate the value of pi in their structures. Graham Hancock explains in his bestseller, Fingerprints of the Gods:

"The transcendental number known as pi is fundamental to advanced mathematics. With a value slightly in excess of 3.14 it is the ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumference.

Where the Great Pyramid is concerned, the ratio between the original height and the perimeter is the same as the ratio between the radius and the circumference of a circle, i.e., 2pi. The Pyramid of the Sun has a 4pi relationship between the original height and the perimeter.

Since it is almost inconceivable that such precise mathematical correlation could have come about by chance, we are obliged to conclude that the builders of the Great Pyramid were indeed conversant with pi and that they deliberately incorporated its value into the dimensions of the monument.

The orthodox view is that Archimedes in the third century B.C.E. was the first man to calculate pi correctly at 3.14.

Moreover, the very fact that both structures incorporate pi relationships (when none of the other pyramids on either side of the Atlantic does) strongly suggests not only the existence of advanced mathematical knowledge in antiquity but some sort of common underlying purpose."[3]



An acknowledged expert on ancient measurement, whose conclusions relate mainly to Egypt, Livio Catullo Stecchini, and American professor of the History of Science, has the following to say:

"The basic idea of the Great Pyramid was that it should be a representation of the northern hemisphere of the earth, a hemisphere projected on flat-surfaces as is done on map-making ... The Great Pyramid was a projection of four triangular surfaces. The apex represented the pole and the perimeter the equator. This is the reason why the perimeter is in relation to 2pi to the height. The Great Pyramid represents the northern hemisphere in a scale of 1:43,200."

Why that scale should have been chosen in particular is another mystery with fascinating answers, which in turn pose more fascinating questions. Graham Hancock has again gone into these matters in some depth:

"... In other words, during all the centuries of darkness experienced by Western civilization when knowledge of our planet's dimensions was lost to us, all we ever needed to do to rediscover that knowledge was to measure the height and base perimeter of the Great Pyramid and multiply by 43,200!"

This is not a random number (such as, say, 43,000 or 44,000, or 50,500, or 38,800) it's a specific number. The numbers 432, 4,320, 43,200, 432,000 and 4,320,000 subtly (almost subliminally) crop up in mythological accounts and sacred architecture throughout the world. This key to measuring the planet's dimensions (43,200) appears to have been left for us for a specific reason. Is it coincidence, accident?

"It is surely remarkable enough that the Great Pyramid should be able to function as an accurate scale model of the northern hemisphere of planet earth. But it is even more remarkable that the scale involved should incorporate numbers relating precisely to one of the key planetary mechanisms of the earth. This is the fixed and apparently eternal precession of its axis of rotation around the pole of the ecliptic, a phenomenon which causes the vernal point to migrate around the band of the zodiac at the rate of one degree every 72 years, and 30 degrees (one complete zodiacal constellation) every 2,160 years. Precession through two zodiacal constellations, or 60 degrees along the ecliptic, takes 4,320 years."

The precession of the equinoxes is what lets us identify what astrological 'age' we are in. At this point in the late '90's, we are passing out of the 'Age of Pisces' and into the 'Age of Aquarius'.

"The constant repetition of these precessional numbers in ancient myths could, perhaps, be coincidence. Viewed in isolation, the appearance of the precessional number 43,200 in the pyramid/earth ratio might also be a coincidence (although the odds against this are astronomical). But when we find precessional numbers in both these very different media - the ancient myths and the ancient monument - it really does strain credulity to suppose that coincidence is all that is involved here."

500 doors and 40 there are,
I ween, in Valhalla's walls;
800 fighters through each door fare,
When to war with the Wolf they go.



"Moreover, just as the Teutonic myth of Valhalla's walls leads us to the precessional number 432,000 by inviting us to calculate the warriors who 'go to war with the Wolf' (500 plus 40 multiplied by 800), so the Great Pyramid leads us to the precessional number 43,200 by demonstrating through the pi relationship that it might be a scale model part of the earth and then inviting us to calculate that scale."[3]

What else is there left to say but that there is more going on in mythology and the traces of the ancients than we have been prepared to admit? One thing that does come to mind is that the message the ancients worked so hard to pass down to us is possibly of great importance.
If we cannot doubt their technical skill, mathematical genius, their intelligence and their seriousness, can we doubt their level of civilization? Contemporary Egyptologists, archeologists and historians still do, stifling further opportunities for the advancement and dissemination of potentially important knowledge.

To date, a cyclical history of global catastrophes, the precession of the equinoxes and important mathematical clues have been identified in the enigmatic myths and architecture of the ancients. What else there is to discover will no doubt be as vital to our working knowledge of this planet and the 'heavens' around us as it was to the ancient civilizations that endeavored to preserve and bring it down to us today - and to those that may follow in times to come.

CONTINUE

[Apocalypse Aerie] [The Einstein Connection] [Ancient Maps] [Earth Crust Displacement] [Myths of Catastrophism] [History & Science in Myth] [Egypt; The Call of the Sphinx] [India; A Cradle for Civilization] [America; Fear of the Dark] [World Ocean; Path to Atlantis] [Precession; Warning of the Ancients] [Epilogue & Links]
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[1] Santillana, Giorgio de and von Dechend, Hertha, Hamlet's Mill, David R. Godline, Boston, 1992.
[2] Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock, Keeper of Genesis, Mandarin, 1996.
[3] Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods, Mandarin, 1995.