World mythology has interested me since childhood. In the ’60’s when I was exploring libraries, the classical Greek, Roman, and some mythic imagery from Egypt and the Fertile Crescent could be found. Encyclopedia Britannica, as well as books printed by Harvard University Press or Cambridge University in England, would promise captivating photographs of often obscure tablets or murals or bas reliefs.
I wondered how a similarity of story or image could find its ways through the world and world myths. “The Silk or Spice trade routes” was a common answer given by the honored tomes of academia; that and conquest, which fostered an integration of culture and oral traditions into other cultures was to be expected. Fair enough, but …
One challenge I had in accepting that line of thought was the supposed timelines. They were often preposterous. Certainly, as a 9 or 10 year old, I knew nothing about geology. However, living in New England were the mountains are old and worn down, I understood that rock takes a long time to erode. Also, as an avid child of the woods and nature, I and my friends would occasionally come across stones or stone structures that were not placed by farmers clearing land in the last three hundred years, nor by Native Americans building deer catch-pens.
One could sense the ancient-ness of these small cavern-like structures. They were made by someone long, long ago, and whoever made them understood how to levitate stone or was very strong. New England has many such “sites”. Also, when my parents were excavating land in New Hampshire near Lake Winnipesaukee to build a family cottage, some of the stones that were revealed were squared on the edges. These huge stones ended up being used to hold back the hill behind the house, but you can still see the squared edges on some of these ancient mute stones.
A gut sense coupled with a strong never-questioned intuitive tendency made me shake my head at dates in the Encyclopedia Britannica or books from Harvard Press. They just didn’t jive with the actual evidence. As I ran my hands on stones in the woods of Massachusetts or New Hampshire, or crawled inside one of the cavern-type enclosures, or wondered about why a massive stone would be fitted to another with such precision, the antiquity of the energy that emanated from the stone would, sometimes, almost make me dizzy. Once in a while, a scene or an understanding would arise in my intuitive-mind. It was never of Neaderthal or crude people, or of rudimentary knowledge supposedly practiced in those far-away times. The information was always other-than anything common to us, but – at the same time – ties to the Earth and her powers. Fast-forward to the decades of work by David Talbott.
Over the last 30 or 40 years, a few people have been so inspired by the myths and mythic imagery of the world as to compile it and put it before the public eye. Joseph Campbell is a giant in the field of world myths, and his interest was largely that of archetypes of the psyche that he intuited they conveyed. The students of Campbell still bow to the magnitude of his work and his achievement, rightly so. But, David Talbott took a slightly different tack.
Talbott was inspired by Immanuel Velikovsky in college decades ago. Velikovsky, doing research the old pre- computer way in libraries, aggregated volumes of similarities in the myths of the world including those of MesoAmerica and of remote islands or isolated indigenous populations. He began to hear similarities also of an archetypal nature, but these were of world catastrophic events, or descriptions of the sky and the gods that – aside from name changes due to language and culture – were essentially the same. Velikovsky sought a root to this substantial body of world evidence. His few books were impuned by academia of the time (middle 1900’s), yet his thesis is sound. (I have thus far read most of Worlds in Collision).
Talbott picked up the baton and furthered the research. The case for a vastly different sky overhead of the people of Earth in ancient ancient times is, in my mind, well made by Talbott and Velikovsky. There are details such as timelines which I think are vastly older than either suggest, but this does not derail the overall premise or invalidate the hypothesis. The body of myths and imagery of the world, on every habitable continent, speaks for itself. Talbott seeks what is behind or possibly before the archetypes of Campbell. Doing so, Talbott using logic, a forensics approach, and I think a some intuition, presents a credible conclusion regarding what humanity must have witnessed in the sky and the planets above us, as well as the devastation rendered when those planets electrically convulsed each other.
I highly recommend the series of video shorts: Discourses on an Alien Sky for people new to the subject or curious to find out more. For those familiar, the Discourses give some new details in Talbott’s ever refining hypothesis. If the Discourses, sparks your interest, the feature length documentary Symbols of an Alien Sky was the precursor to the Discourses. But, if interest is truly sparked, subscribe to the Thunderbolts Project channel on YouTube. Watch the tutorial, Thunderbolts of the Gods, to learn about the electrical properties of the solar system.