When Time Began

8/9/2019 When Time Began

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WHEN TIME BEGAN

Pete Stewart


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Creation myths from around the world are in general agreement that atthe very beginning of things the created world was in a perfect state. Thisera, generally referred to as `The Golden Age', is described as a timewhen peace reigned on earth, a time of harmonious relations, bothbetween peoples and between people and their creator. The Egyptianscalled this time `Zep Tepi', the `First Time'; the Old Testament refers toit as the Garden of Eden.. At this time, so the story goes, Heaven andEarth were in perfect accord.

Forty years ago there were generally only two ways of regarding thisstory. You either believed it implicitly or else treated it as the product ofnostalgic fantasy. That was before the publication ofHamlet's Mill, a workwhich exploded the whole consensus of how to interpret creation myth,and which heralded a new era in the history of `Lost Wisdom'.i

Heaven and Earth, the authors proposed, were to be understoodrespectively as representing the circle of the ecliptic stars divided by theMilky Way, and the `square' of the equator divided by the two GreatCircles (the `colures') of the Equinoxes and Solstices. Their perfect

accord would then entail the most satisfying alignment of these twoelements;

`the exceptional virtue of the Golden Age was precisely that thecrossroads of ecliptic and equator coincided with the crossroads of theecliptic and galaxy'.ii

It is difficult to describe my response to first reading this suggestion over30 years ago. Along with William Sullivan iii I can say that it seemed`nothing short of revolutionary'. The results of my subsequent thirtyyears of considering its significance are contained in my book The

Architecture of the Spirit. iv

One consequence of this proposal regarding the Golden Age is that itshould be possible to say exactly when it occurred. As Hamlet's Millexplains:

`[The Milky way] was ... a reference point from which the precessioncould be imagined to have taken its start' v

The authors then go on to propose a date for this reference point:

'But in the Golden age, when the vernal equinox was in Gemini, theMilky Way had represented a visible equinoctial colure; rather a blurredone, to be true, but the celestial North and South were connected by


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this uninterrupted arch, the galactic avenue, embracing the 'threeworlds' of the gods, the living and the dead'.vi

Now the traditional reckoning for the date `when the vernal equinox wasin Gemini' gives 4,320bce,vii using the traditional measure for the lengthof the Precession of the Equinoxes of 25,920 years. (During the completecycle, one or other of the `four corners of the Earth', the Solstices andEquinoxes, will pass through the Milky Way every 6,840 years.)

The longer I spent with this material and the more familiar I became withits significance, the less satisfied I felt with the proposal that Hamlet's Millmade. The qualification they allow, that this `visible colure' is a `ratherblurred one', turns out to be fatal to their proposal. Fig 1 shows just how`blurred' this representation of the equinoctial colure was, and why thedate the authors ofHamlet's Mill's suggest for the `Golden Age' is far from

satisfactory, even according to their own criteria.viii

ecliptic pole

Milky Way

(Galaxy) Fig 1 The Celestial Pole and Milky

Way, 4,320bce

The diagram shows the relationship between the ecliptic pole (the tip ofthe axis of theearth's solar orbit, basically), the celestial pole (the tip of the earth'saxis) and the Milky Way at 4,320bce. The small circle at the top indicatesthe path of the pole during the cycle of the Precession of the Equinoxes.It is clear that the celestial pole (and hence the colures, whether solsticialor equinoctial) is as far from alignment with the Milky Way as it evergets.

In their book The Keeper of Genesis, Robert Beauval and Graham Hancock

make an alternative proposal. Speaking of the Egyptian `Zep Tepi', `TheFirst Time', they suggest a date around 10,500bce. The route by whichthey reach this proposal is quite different to that ofHamlet's Mill, but itdoes approximate to the era when the solsticial colure passed through theMilky Way. However, Keeper of Genesis makes it quite clear that this `First


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Time' was in fact only a `New Time', being constructed from the ruins ofa previous Time which had come to an end as the result of a cataclysmicflood.ix It is therefore not surprising that we are still adrift by a quarter ofa cycle from the perfect arrangement which I want to propose here.

A close look at Fig. 1 will make my proposal clear. The best possiblelocation for the situation that Hamlet's Mill describes, where the Milky way`represented a visible equinoctial colure' would involve the poles beinglocated in the Milky Way. In this situation, the equinoctial colure and theMilky Way would be in their best possible alignment.

So is there ever such a moment in the precessional cycle? Fig. 1 showsthat there is; at one stage on their circlings around the pole of theecliptic, the celestial poles do stand in the Milky Way. In order to reachthis stage, it is necessary to run the cycle back a full half of its length,

12,960 years from the time Hamlet's Mill proposes.When I ran the skyglobe software back till it showed the best possible lineof the equinoctial colure throughout the length of the Milky Way, thedate was 17,300bce. I have adjusted this date to be 17,280bce, sincethis is an interval of 8 x 2,1609 years from the year O. Fig. 2 shows thepolar stars at this era.


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Pole in the Milky Way. The vertical line represents the equinoctial colure, the horizontal that

sky at Spring Equinox, 17,280bce (viewed from the equator, South at the bottom). The centralThe central horizontal line is the equator. The diagonal line is the ecliptic. During this era the

If the authors ofHamlet 's Mill are right in their suggestion that such anarrangement marked the datum of a system for the measurement ofTime, a moment at which the precession of the equinoxes could beregarded as `beginning', then 17,280bce is the only truly satisfyingcandidate.x

At this time, the Spring Equinox was marked by the stars of the sting of

Scorpio. However, a representation of the midnight sky at this timereveals something quite unexpected.

Four of the stars here can be seen to form an immense, upright cross,filling half the sky.xi The two elements of this cross intersect at the very


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point of the crossroads of the ecliptic and


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earth, is the place where Sun Father erected his shadowless staff andfertilized the world.' xiv

Note that the terrestrial river here seems to equate with the `celestialriver' the Milky Way. If this is so then this `fertilization' of the earthtakes place not only at the equinox (the shadowless staff at the

equator) but at the intersection of this with the Milky Way, that is, themoment we have described as `The beginning of Time'.


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Krupp confirms this, saying that the event took place `When time began.There at a whirlpool entrance to the womb of the earth, Sun Fatherimpregnated the earth, and from that spot the Desana and theirneighbors emerged.'

If we allow the suggestion that Hamlet's Mill makes that Heavenrepresents the circle of the ecliptic stars, (defined by the arch of theMilky Way) and Earth represents the `Frame of Time' (defined by thesquare of the solstices and equinoxes), then the myth of their perfectharmony, as shown in the diagram Fig. 2, where the equinoctial colure(representing the `Frame of Time')xv is perfectly aligned with the MilkyWay, `the arch of the queen of heaven's hut', is a description of thestate of the celestial cycles as they were in the era of 17,280bce.

When I first formulated this proposal, I had not encountered ThomasBrophy's work, published in 2002 as The Origin Map, on the datingsystems embodied in the monuments of the Giza plateau. Indeed, thatwork had not been written. Nevertheless there is a direct correlationbetween his suggestion that the alignments at Giza are intended torecord the culmination of the Galactic Centre, as a means of establishinga `zero point' for measuring the Zodiac, and my suggestion that the eraof the Golden Age centred around l 7,280bce. Brophy has used complexcalculations to accommodate a number of variables to generate his starmaps for distant dates, far more sophisticated than those employed inskyglobe I suspect. He gives a date of .17,700bce for the vernal equinox

helical rising of the galactic centre, a point very close to ,my suggestedline for the equinoctial colure.

It is not insignificant that this also adds a further link between the eraaround 11,000bce, on which Keeper of Genesis and The Origin Mapconcentrate, and that of my Golden Age. However, observation of thenorthern culmination of the Galactic Centre, as Brophy claims is embodiedat Giza, is a far more sophisticated observation than that involved in thealignment of the equinoctial colure with the Milky Way.xvi

Perfect though it was, the Golden Age was bound to come to an end asthe precessional cycle took its toll. Not only do the myths agree on thenature of the `First Time' but they are also in general agreement as tohow it came to an end. It was as the result of some misdemeanour,usually, but not always,' on the part of the `first people'. The poet Milton,in Book 10 ofParadise Lost(as the authors ofHamlet's Mill point out)describes the establishment of the obliquity of the (planet) earth'saxis"xvii as a direct consequence of the `Fall'. In response to thedisobedience and pride of Adam and Eve, God decides to act:

`Some say he bid his angels turn askance

The pole of earth, twice ten degreesand more From the suns' axle, theywith labour pushed Oblique thecentric globe:


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Mill called `stone-age boulders', embedded in the glacier of mythology, but itis perhaps the most fundamental one. Whether this `common origin' wascontemporary with the celestial circumstance it describes, or the product oflater observation and speculation, is an open question, though a vital one.

Keeper of Genesis suggests that the Egyptian First Time' was a re-creationof wisdom inherited from an earlier epoch, and there is other evidence thatthe stars located in the area that marks `the beginning of the world' hadbeen observed for at least 4,000 years before `Zep Tepi' (see for instance,Fig. 5).

Fig. 5: The stars around theconstellation of Taurus as depictedon a wall of the caves at Lascaux. Sixdots on the bull's back are perfectlyplaced to represent the Pleiades. In

addition, four dots in the bull's head,with Aldebaran (alpha tauri) as theeye, are placed correctly to representthe Hyades, while off to the left threedots are located where they would beif they were the belt stars of Orion.xviii

Once we have taken the leap into the possibility that an interest, not to sayobsession, in astronomical matters could occupy our ancestors as long as20,000 years ago, and it seems to me that, since the stars were there then,making an almost unimaginably greater impact than they do in our light-

polluted times, and since humanity had had the opportunity to observethem for thousands of years by that time, there is little reason to argue thatsuch an interest could not arise, especially under conditions where no othermeans existed to enable nomadic peoples to navigate their journeys, oncewe have taken such a leap then, there is no better explanation for how thephenomenon of the precession could be observed than when this perfectalignment ceased to define the night sky.

Societies around the world (so called `primitive' ones especially, thoughtother, more `civilized' ones retain, usually unwittingly, similar ideas))organize their social and ritual life around what seems to be an

understanding of this perfect sky. I like to imagine the dilemma faced by thatindividual to whom it finally fell to `blow the whistle' on this concept, topoint to the fact (presumably they had inherited more than onegeneration's observations) that things were no longer as they had been. Itmust have been a dramatic moment, and presumably such authoritystructures as existed must have resisted its acknowledgement as long asthe could. But their concession was inevitable, for the process wasinexorable. The concept of social order could never be the same again.

Conclusion

What is clearly demonstrated by this material is that creation myth has tobe seen as wholly celestial in nature. It was observation of the night sky andthe modelling of Time on a cosmic scale that informed all humanity's earliest


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attempts to make sense of the universe and of ourselves. The mostprofound conception that resulted was the observation thatCelestial Harmony had once existed from the observation of the demise ofthis celestial harmony, and the concept of a cycle of perfect and thereforedoomed creations which replaced it, the human imagination built an idea

that was to provide the ground-plan for all its subsequent philosophicalspeculations. For if the created world was mortal, and subject to the


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destructions and recreations of the cycles of Time, there neverthelessexisted another realm, where the Golden Age persisted eternally, where allthe potential creations co-existed, from which they could be considered toemerge and to which they must all return. And if humanity shared its

mortality with the creation, then might there not also be a place in thissacred world, The Real World', where humanity, having completed its cycleof births and deaths, could also have an eternal existence?

i

From the devastating realisation that this perfect state had come to anend, these ancient observers, by an immense leap of the imagination,formed the vast notion of a cycle of creations, each one prey to the sameforces of decay, the ravages of Time, that felled each individual. But therewas more than this; there was also the existence of another realm, wherethe Golden Age persisted eternally, where the complete cycle of potential

creations co-existed, from which they could be considered to emerge andto which they must all return. And if humanity shared its mortality with thecreation, then might there not also be a place in this sacred world, `TheReal World', where humanity, having completed its cycle of births anddeaths, could also have an eternal existence?

I believe that our position today is similar to that of those observers whofirst conceived this awe-inspiring structure. All our previous certaintiesabout the nature of creation, even those we are only now discoveringwhich date back to these most ancient of sages, are being undermined byour own vastly increasing powers of observation. We can only hope that

from amongst us there will emerge those who can make the same order ofimaginative leap into a new formulation, a new architecture for the spirit.


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iNOTES

De Santillana, G., & Von Dechend, H., 1969 MIT. [henceforth HM]

ii HM, p. 63 The 'crossroads of the ecliptic and the equator' are by definition, the equinoxes of spring and autumn

iii Sullivan, William, The Secret of the Incas, NY, 1996,p. 10

iv Published in USA as The Spiritual Science of the Stars, Inner Traditions, Vermont

v HM, p. 245

vi HM, p. 258vii The traditional length of an Age of the world, based on one twelfth of25,920, the nominal length of the whole cycle

viii As HM points out, the Milky Way is a broad highway. For the Precessional cycle to move theEquinoxes from one bank to the other can be considered to take around a thousand yearsix Beauval, R., and Hancock, G., Keeper of Genesis, Heineman, 1996, p.213. My references are to theMandarin edition, 1997.

x At the Solstices during this era the Milky Way would run North/South at sunrise and sunset year during this era. Since

it passed through the poles, it would run North/South at some time on any night of the year.

xi Clockwise from top: Capella (Auriga), Aldebaran (Taurus) Sirius (Canus major), Pollux(Gemini)xii Freidel, D., Scheller, L., Parker, J., Maya Cosmos,N.Y., 1995.

xiii As above, fn. 6,plus Rigel (Orion) and Procyon (Canis Minor)

xiv Krupp, E. C.,Echoes of the Ancient Skies, OUP edition, 1994, p. 329. Photo copyright G Reichel Dolmatoff

xv The notions of both Heaven and Earth are, of course, far more subtle than this; nevertheless, this descriptionprovides the warp and weft into which a richer texture can be woven.

xvi Perhaps it is worth considering just what kind of experience the night sky offered at this era. The simplest way to

imagine this is by considering the sky at the Equator. Here, where the poles lie on the horizon, north and south, the

Milky Way rises in the east and passes over head as a complete arch, anchored at the north and south horizons, passing

through the meridian at midnight on the equinoxes, and at some other time every other night. At other latitudes one or

other of the poles rises higher in the sky and the 'anchoring' points of the Milky Way on the horizon move around the

horizon through the night, still retaining the north-south alignment at some time, and at midnight at the equinoxes.

These 'anchor' points are always east-west at the equinoctial sunrises; that is, one segment of the galaxy always rises

heliacally due east at the equinoxes. It would be possible to calibrate the horizon as a clock in which the midnight points

move around the horizon through the year; effectively only a half-year need be calibrated, assuming that it is the

galactic arch we are concerned with, not which arm of it lies south or north.

Egyptian sources make it clear that the culprits were 'The Children of Heaven'.

xvii The phenomenon of the Precession of the Equinoxes is a direct result of the obliquity of the earth's axis.xviii Dr Michael Rappenglueck, formerly of the University of Munich. This material was discussed on the forum at

http://www.grahamhancock.com/forum/SakrSl-p2.htm. Dr. Rappenglueck's website has not been updated recently.

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When Time Began