Paul A. LaViolette - Earth Under Fire: Humanitys Survival of the Ice Age

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my father and mother, Fred and Irene, for the long hours they spent helping me edit this manuscript. I would also like to thank my sister Mary, Larry Svart, Carol Camelot, and others for their editorial assistance. Finally, I would like to thank Professor George Lendaris, Loyd and Rona Murray, Marion and John Franc, Tom Abshier, and Ellen Barr, whose support along the way I valued greatly.

But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.

SECOND EPISTLE OF SAINT PETER (3:10)

ONE

CIPHER IN THE SKY

It is impossible to reflect on the changed state of the American continent without the deepest astonishment. Formerly, it must have swarmed with great monsters; now we find mere pigmies, compared with the antecedent allied races.... The greater number, if not all, of these extinct quadrupeds lived at a period and were the contemporaries of the existing sea-shells. Since they lived, no very great change in the form of the land can have taken place. What, then, has exterminated so many species and whole genera? The mind at first is irresistibly hurried into the belief of some great catastrophe; but thus to destroy animals, both large and small, in Southern Patagonia, in Brazil, on the Cordillera of Peru, in North America, and up to the Bering Straits, we must shake the entire framework of the globe.

CHARLES DARWIN

Message from the Past

Almost every culture preserves myths describing humanitys endurance of terrible past events involving major loss of life on a global scale. Stories tell of endless days of darkness; of murky forms in space occluding the stars, the moon, and even the sun; of temperatures high enough to ignite wooded hills; of vast deluges covering all but a few mountain peaks.

Nothing in our modern experience comes close to matching these stories of global disaster. So, understandably, many have considered these ancient legends to be wildly imaginative tales. But could there really be much truth to them? If so, what could have caused these catastrophes and what evidence is there that they occurred? As we shall discover in the pages that follow, there are indications that our prehistoric ancestors actually did endure a series of traumatic natural catastrophes, the most recent of which was one of the worst disasters to afflict the human race. Modern findings indicate that these catastrophes were triggered by intense volleys of cosmic ray particles originating from the core of our Galaxy.

Although astronomers and geologists have accumulated a large amount of data relevant to this galactic cosmic ray phenomenon, for a long time they had misinterpreted this evidence and, hence, remained unaware of the phenomenons past occurrence. In fact, we would still be overlooking these catastrophes were it not for a warning message prepared thousands of years ago. Although we may not have been aware of it, we have viewed portions of this ancient message many times while looking up at the clear night sky, where it lies emblazoned across the heavens, encoded in the symbolic figures of ancient star constellations.

Brief acknowledgments that the constellations were designed to communicate such a message are to be found here and there in the literature. For example, the mythologist Oral Scott writes:

It has been suggested that perhaps a patriarch of the ancient world, wishing to preserve for posterity an imperishable record of some great event or crisis, chose this means of doing so, and by his arrangement of the star groups, wrote into the sky a message that would endure forever.

Of all the known constellations, the twelve situated along the ecliptic, the path followed by the Sun and planets, form the heart of this ancient message. These, of course, are the constellations associated with the lore of astrology. Esoteric tradition teaches that astrology conveys a highly advanced science formulated in very ancient times. Astrologers have long presumed that this science concerns primarily how the positions of the planets in the signs influence human personality and life events. Yet there appears to be another side to astrology that only now, aided by the advancement of science, are we in a position to fully understand. Regardless of whether one believes that planetary energies shape human personality at birth or influence our daily lives, many may be surprised to learn that astrologys symbols convey a highly sophisticated astronomical and geological message, one that informs us and future generations about one of the most horrible disasters to afflict the human racethe occurrence of an explosion of our Galaxys core. Moreover, it warns us that this tragedy could repeat.

Ancient sages crafted their lore of astrology so that it expressed this Galactic warning through easily graspable personality archetypes and universal symbols. They may have decided to hide this message in metaphor to ensure that it would be faithfully communicated over hundreds of generations, even though its meaning might not be understood by its conveyors, for to fully comprehend the various facets of the phenomenon it presents, one must have some understanding of modern physics, astronomy, and nonlinear chemical kinetics. If there once lived people who had this kind of knowledge, the transmittal of such technically advanced information would have required the uninterrupted functioning of a system of higher education together with an adequate number of students and teachers having a high degree of aptitude and interest in these subjects.

Nevertheless, as history has shown, civilizations rise and fall, successive advanced cultures often being separated from one another by long dark ages of intellectual regression. In the course of even one such hiatus, much of the technical advancement of the previous cycle of civilization could be lost. Consequently, a technically advanced body of knowledge probably would not survive for very many generations. Moreover, one such dark age was probably already in progress at the time the zodiac message was formulated, since related legends describe the occurrence of global catastrophes that devastated populations worldwide and precipitated a complete collapse of civilization.

By encrypting these ideas into a system of star constellations and myths, these ancient patriarchs could ensure that the content of their astrological cipher would be conveyed undistorted through the millennia. The lore of astrology, as well as the myths about its zodiacal characters, is easily understood by the average person and is amenable to being transmitted by word of mouth. Thus incorporated into a cultures oral tradition, intervening generations could accurately reproduce the technical text encoded within, even though they would be unaware of its substance. Then, one day, when civilization had again attained a sufficiently high level of advancement, the cipher might be understood, its riddle solved, and its message finally unmasked.

A body of knowledge properly encoded in the form of a cipher could potentially bridge any language barrier that would arise between generations far removed in time. In the aftermath of a devastating global catastrophe, former languages would have been forgotten and new ones formed. Some legends specifically refer to such a linguistic divergence. For example, the story of Babel found in the Book of Genesis relates that the survivors of the Flood, Noahs descendants, became widely scattered over the face of the earth. Where they once spoke a common language, they soon came to speak different languages not easily understood by one another.