Laird Scranton - China’s Cosmological Prehistory: The Sophisticated Science Encoded in Civilization’s Earliest Symbols

CHINAS

COSMOLOGICAL
PREHISTORY

Yet another important piece to Scrantons ongoing quest to prove that a near identical cosmology was common knowledge around the entire globe in ancient prehistory. Perhaps the single language posited in the Book of Genesis, the language that once united all mankind, was not mere fabrication and/or wishful thinking after all. It was cosmology as Scranton again demonstrates.

JOHN ANTHONY WEST,
AUTHOR OF SERPENT IN THE SKY:
THE HIGH WISDOM OF ANCIENT EGYPT

Laird Scrantons research into cosmological historical frameworks is profound, diligent, and meticulous. Not only does he unveil the underpinnings of significant lexicons and high science, but he reveals how they weave synchronicities and commonalities across unexpected demographics in a pioneering way. The sensational revelation is at the very least a common original source. In Chinas Cosmological Prehistory another awe-inspiring wealth of realization is brought to the forefront with an academic style and unique perspective. Undoubtedly, the importance of Scrantons continued work and research in this book and previous works will be revered by future generations of researchers.

E. A. JAMES SWAGGER,
AUTHOR OF THE NEWGRANGE SIRIUS MYSTERY:
LINKING PASSAGE GRAVE COSMOLOGY WITH DOGON SYMBOLOGY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The impulse to write this book has come largely as the result of the encouragement of others. In particular I want to thank John Anthony West for his ongoing interest, support, and belief in the work I do. I greatly appreciate the many opportunities and doors opened to me by Walter Cruttenden. I also want to thank Rhoda Lerman for her enthusiastic, generous, and always insightful support of my work. Likewise, this book would not have been possible without the proactive friendship and investigative efforts of Ed Nightingale, whose many insights into the secrets of the Giza Plateau catalyzed much of the research that spawned this book. I want to thank Argentinian filmmaker Pablo Cesar for his talent, enthusiasm, dedication, and steadfast belief in my work. I also owe a great debt of thanks to my dear wife Risa and our two remarkable offspring, Isaac and Hannah, who have always been my unwavering supporters. I also want to acknowledge the friends and family who often serve as sounding boards for the range of sometimes outrageous ideas I explore, including my brother David Scranton and longtime friends Will Newman, Sue Clark, Tom Herlihy, and Nilifur Clubwala. Finally, I owe a great debt to the late Walter Fairservis, the Vassar College professor of anthropology, whose courses I never actually took, but whose work laid an important foundation for several pivotal concepts developed in this book.

INTRODUCTION

This is the fourth in a series of books about the creation traditions (or cosmologies) of ancient cultures. The purpose of these books is to discuss the underlying foundations of ancient cosmology and language, and to explore the many commonalities that are evident among classic ancient creation traditions. The series began with The Science of the Dogon, a work that examines the intriguing system of myths and symbols of a modern-day African tribe from Mali called the Dogon and the many parallels it exhibits, both to the creation traditions of various ancient cultures and to modern cosmological science. These initial discussions continued in a second volume titled Sacred Symbols of the Dogon, in which I outlined an alternate approach to interpreting ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols and words, using Dogon cosmological terms and drawings as a reference. In the third and most recent book of the series, The Cosmological Origins of Myth and Symbol, I correlated aspects of the Dogon and Egyptian cosmologies to the very similar ancient Buddhist stupa tradition in India. I also compiled a list of attributes that are commonly shared by the Dogon, Egyptian, and Buddhist cosmologies, which proved to be predictive of what I found as I examined the outwardly similar creation tradition and hieroglyphic language of a little-known Tibetan and Chinese culture called the Na-khi (whose name is sometimes given as Na-xi).

The Dongba language of the Na-khi is the last known surviving hieroglyphic language in the world and is considered to have been a predecessor to the Chinese hieroglyphic language. It is also believed that this written language was primarily intended to express concepts of cosmology, since the set of glyphs it defines are not capable of expressing the full spectrum of ideas that relate to the daily life of the Na-khi. So both the cosmology and the associated hieroglyphic language of the Na-khi suggested that ancient creation traditions in China could be fundamentally similar to the ones I was already pursuing. I also knew that the earliest cosmological references in China date from around the same period as similar references in ancient Egypt, as does the approximate time frame for the emergence of written Chinese language. So since my intention has been to sustain a coherent cosmological and geographical progression for our studies, it made sense that China would become the focus of this latest book in my series.

From many different perspectives, China has long been an enigma to Western cultures, so it should come as no surprise that ancient Chinese religious traditions and practices often reflect similarly enigmatic aspects. Some of the mystery of these traditions may reflect tangible differences in mind-sets between Eastern and Western cultures; some of it may be the result of the long periods of relative isolation that have existed in China that have shielded some of these traditions from outside view. Some may be the result of modern political trends that work to de-emphasize ancestral religious traditions in China. However, it may also be possible that some of these mysteries of Eastern thought simply coincide with obscure aspects of the ancient esoteric tradition that I have been working to decipher.

In this current volume, my approach to exploring the ancient Chinese creation tradition will take a form similar to the method I employed when studying the Na-khi. It is my intention to revisit each of the points of the civilizing plan outlined in The Cosmological Origins of Myth and Symbol and discuss how they may or may not have applied to ancient China. I plan to consider how Chinese concepts of cosmology were expressed in various myths, symbols, words, and concepts. Through these discussions I hope to gain new insights about shared aspects of the Dogon, Egyptian, and Buddhist cosmologies and to test the limits of possible correspondence to ancient Chinese traditions. I intend to discuss important themes of ancient Chinese cosmology that may not have played a well-defined role in the traditions of the other cultures I have studied. It is also my purpose to consider Chinese perspectives on various themes of cosmology and language already introduced in prior volumes of this series.

In the case of ancient China, as we will explore together in the following pages, we may find that there is less direct evidence on which to base our observations than in other cultures I have studied. This circumstance arises largely because events that transpired in China in the era of 3000 BCE were often not reflected in surviving written texts until many centuries later. Consequently, we find less consensus of opinion among scholars as to the true nature of any particular aspect of cosmology in earliest China. Sarah Allan writes in