What Is This?

The typical reaction of church members when first exposed to Joseph Smith’s use of cosmological imagery is one of disbelief. “You mean there is more to the gospel of Jesus Christ than I have been taught?” is a typical reaction. This is mostly due to the fact that their previous gospel education or belief system did not include this aspect of gospel study. It was one of the first concepts lost in the widespread apostasy after the death of Christ’s apostles, so other Christian denominations know nothing of it. Nephi, in the Book of Mormon, wrote at length about how the “plain and precious” parts of the gospel were suppressed in the apostasy. Along with all that is taught publicly, there is more to the Restored Gospel than meets the eye.

This information cannot harm you, nor detract from your testimony. There is no need to fear it. Rather, it can only expand and complement your present grasp of the gospel, as well as markedly strengthen your conviction that you are a member of the one true church of Jesus Christ, restored by a prophet in these latter days.

The Restoration saw the reinstatement of these concepts, along with the other vital concepts you have learned in your time as a latter-day saint. They are explained in the teachings of Joseph Smith, and they are employed in his revelations, including the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price. In addition, this very same information allows us to understand the otherwise arcane and odd symbolic imagery used by all the prophets and in our modern temples.

This information is not taught to investigators. We leave that task to our capable and inspired missionaries, who are called to carry the basic gospel principles to the world under the direction of church leaders. They teach the vital essentials that most Christians can understand, enough to convince them of the validity of the Restoration if they choose to listen. Of course, sincere inquiry confirms these truths via the Spirit to all who ask with a sincere heart and real intent.

However once one has obtained a conviction of the Restoration and a testimony of the prophet Joseph Smith and the church he founded through personal revelation, this information becomes the next step forward in one’s ongoing efforts to master gospel principles and concepts.

You will not find this instruction in church manuals, nor will you hear it in General Conference talks. It is not taught in Sunday School nor from our pulpits on Sundays. The information presented in those venues is for investigators and newly confirmed members. It’s also vital for longtime members to review regularly. Those are the first principles. This is additional information we are meant to search out for ourselves as part of our eternal progression.

Yet this additional information should be approached the same way as the basics taught by missionaries and in church, with diligence and earnest prayer to confirm its validity and value to our understanding of the “fullness” of the Restored Gospel.

This fullness, this ancient knowledge, includes a rich set of metaphors—graphics and word images—that were used anciently by prophets, down through time. Mastering the use and meaning of these metaphors and this imagery requires time and effort. It simply cannot be done in one sitting or with a brief explanation. It requires considerable study and practice, as with any new skill.

It’s missing entirely from our cultural and religious training and tradition. Therefore, church members must begin with the basics, including the ancient history of the heavens, as taught by the prophets, and how things seen there by our ancestors, at the very dawn of time, spawned this cryptic set of metaphors and icons. One simply must master the history of this imagery and how it was used in ancient cultures worldwide, not just by the prophets, to understand its implementation in sacred texts.

To the newcomer, it all seems odd and unfamiliar. Yet it is the key to all prophetic and temple imagery, including prophecy and the sometimes bizarre imagery used by the prophets—things like horses, wheels, eyes, mountains, candlesticks, beasts, etc.

 It’s much like learning a new language. You must start with a few words, and then work and study to build your vocabulary. But once mastered, anyone can read and understand the scriptures and temple rituals. (Yes, temple icons and rituals can be “read,” just like scripture!)

Why should we settle for less? After all, this was a restoration of “all things,” including that which was lost in the apostasy.

Unlike the interpretations proffered by our Christian cousins, where a verse from this vision and another from that vision are cited and then cobbled together to create a strained interpretation, this is a simple and systematic way of reading and understanding prophecy and temple imagery that anyone can understand, given the proper training. Other ministers and scholars use a distorted, piecemeal and disjointed method of interpretation, “cherry picking” scripture. That is a methodology foreign to the prophets, the apostles and the Savior’s way of teaching.

One need not be a prophet to understand prophecy. A little training and study, using Joseph Smith’s guidance and direction, suffice to help anyone read and understand the most puzzling of prophetic utterances. The meaning literally leaps off the pages of scripture, once mastered. What is more, the imagery and ritual in our temple endowment, which has little meaning to our untrained eyes and ears, becomes part of the rich tapestry that constitutes gospel imagery and iconography, meanings and understandings that are virtually invisible without this training.

So, this is your invitation to move forward in your gospel knowledge and instruction, opening the meaning of scriptural and temple imagery to your mind, strengthening your existing testimony and adding to your conviction of the Restoration, the prophet Joseph Smith and the church he founded.

Prophecy for Dummies

In my quest to popularize the advancing science of comparative mythology and plasma physics as they relate to the Restored Gospel, it occurred to me that the popular “… for Dummies” series, relating to everything from auto repair to brain surgery, might be helpful. A nuts-and-bolts approach to prophetic interpretation that employed an analogy about learning to read might help others better understand my approach. The following is the result. – A.E.L.

While we’re definitely not dummies, we all previously thought that one needed a prophetic calling or a PhD in order to interpret prophecy.

But I have found that not to be the case. Anyone who has learned to read—dummies like me and you—can also learn to understand prophecy.

This is done by simply following the clues throughout history, like Hansel and Gretel followed the breadcrumb trail through the forest, tracing the images or metaphors of prophecy to their source in Earth’s ancient heavens. Then, moving forward in time from antiquity to the present, one can map out their use as the prophets consistently employed them in various epochs and in a variety of cultures.

So, reading prophecy is not all that difficult. It’s learning how to understand it that’s a bit hard. That’s because we’ve never been properly schooled in prophetic imagery, a skill once known to all the prophets that has been lost to us over the eons.

And even though Joseph Smith clearly learned that skill, properly employed it and sought to reinstate its imagery in the minds of Latter-day Saints as part of the Restoration, the membership failed to grasp his meaning. (See “The Keys To Prophecy, #1-#12" and “What Joseph Knew.”)

Yes, reading the imagery of prophecy is an acquired skill, just like riding a bike or reading. In fact, the best analogy for learning to read prophecy comes from your own experience as you first began to read.

Think back to when you couldn’t read, before you learned your ABCs. Do you recall what the printed letters on a page looked like? I can. It looked like so much meaningless gobbledygook. There was no way you or I could make sense of it no matter how long we stared at it. Flipping the pages was futile. Trying to find meaning in it was pointless.

Well, that pretty much describes the situation where prophecy is concerned. You can understand the words, but the message is strange gibberish. Try as you might to find meaning in it or make sense of it, you cannot. Instead, your head begins to hurt. Reading various prophecies only further complicates the matter. It all seems to deal in that same bizarre imagery. Even reading books on the subject by supposed ‘authorities’ on prophecy leaves you no closer to understanding the stuff. And there are whole chunks of prophecy that the 'experts' all seem to avoid. Soon you despair, thinking that making sense of prophecy is going to be nearly impossible.

To teach you how to read, the teacher first started with the alphabet and letter recognition. Each letter had a name—A was “aee,” B was “bee,” and so on. And you learned to recognize them and identify them by name. Once you mastered the alphabet, you took your first step toward reading. But you still could not read.

The same is true of prophecy. To understand it, your teacher must take you back to the basics—stars, planets and plasmas. Why stars, planets and plasmas? Well, that’s where the language of prophecy came from. Earth’s ancient heavens were once alive with planets (the ancients called them stars, not planets) and electrified, glowing, lifelike plasma phenomenon. These impressive elements riveted the attention of ancient peoples the world over and sparked an explosion of imagination and imagery in all cultures.

Just like the letters of the alphabet, what the ancients saw in those long ago skies became the building blocks of all religious tradition and culture.

As analyzed elsewhere (See "A New Heaven and a New Earth," “The Saturn Myths and the Restored Gospel,” “The Saturn Epic: In The Beginning,” “The Saturn Epic: Mythmaking,” "The Polar Configuration and Joseph Smith," “Prophets and Plasmas” and “The Electric Universe”), with a little effort you’ll discover the reasons for believing that Earth’s ancient skies were vastly different than our own today. You’ll learn of the objects and images our ancestors saw in the astronomical theater, and we’ll give names to those planets and plasmas. This will be the prophetic equivalent of learning your ABCs.

The next thing our reading teacher did was to show us that each letter had one or more sounds. That further complicated things, but we were told that it would all become clear if we just persevered. So, we went down the now familiar alphabet assigning sounds to each of them. We learned, for example, that the letter C could have an “sss” sound as in “see,” or a “kay” sound as in “cat.” This was further complication and confusion for our struggling young minds.

Unlike today, where planets are little more than bright, distant stars in the sky, these planets and plasmas were very close.They were overwhelming and imposing because they were close to the Earth. They actually appeared larger than the moon does today. Brilliantly lit, dynamic and magnificent in ancient skies, these planets and plasmas were reverenced as gods or primeval powers.

And ancient onlookers assigned distinctive characteristics or personalities to these nearby planets and plasmas, based on their appearance, movements and changes. They were considered gods, supernatural powers that ruled the heavens, their sole habitat. The “theater of the gods,” then, was the ancient firmament overhead. In the cultures of antiquity, these planets and plasmas became human-like or animal-like gods who acted out their epoch stories on that grandiose stage.

Their identities included names, though those names varied from culture to culture. Even within a single culture, the same astral object acquired numerous names as it moved and changed over time. To modern eyes, this riotous nomenclature of ancient gods offers only confusion. To the ancients it made perfect sense since each name identified a unique aspect of their planet or plasma gods.

But the identities and attributes of those gods were strikingly similar in every cultural tradition because the look and behavior of those planets and plasmas was consistently interpreted the same way from culture to culture. This was due to the fact that the appearance and actions of these gods or powers suggested the same characteristics, natures or personalities in the minds of the ancients the world over.

For this reason, the ancients wrote and spoke of them as if they were living beings or creatures, and they so illustrated them in their sacred art. For example, Saturn (the largest of the planets seen in earthly skies) was the “father god” or “creator,” Venus came to be seen as the original “queen of heaven” or “mother goddess” and Mars became her “son,” the “hero” and the “warrior,” among many other designations. And the plasmas that were seen stretching between the planets took on a large number of identities: a connecting sky pillar, celestial tree, world mountain, astral river and ladder, stairway or path to heaven. Such commonalities allow us to identify each of the primary actors by their role in Earth’s ancient heavens and the traditions of mankind, no matter what name they went by in the various ancient cultures.

Returning once again to our reading analogy, we recall that our teacher introduced the notion that stringing several letters together produced a readable word. To read it, we used the sounds we had learned for each letter, and we were encouraged to “sound out” the more difficult words phonetically. And so we began to haltingly read our first words. “Look, Jane. See Dick run. Run, Dick, run.”

This was a bit of a tricky process. Sounding out each letter and then stringing those sounds together didn’t always produce a recognizable word. We soon learned that there were more complex rules that governed the way some groups of letters sounded. The u-g-h in “laugh” or “tough” made an “fff” sound, even though when those three stood alone they said “Ugh!” Still more complexity to master.

The corollary in learning to read prophecy is the realization that prophetic interpretation assigned a number of roles or characteristics to each of the congregate powers in the sky. For example, Venus was not only the mother goddess, she later became Mars’ crown of light, the “hand” of god, the wife of Saturn and ultimately a raging, angry goddess. One plasma conduit, stretching between Mars and Venus, was described as a dragon, beast or monster because it writhed, undulated and twisted like a snake.

And the complexity of these cosmic forms only grows and multiplies as we survey the literature and traditions of ancient cultures. These original forms, prototypes or archetypes became the basis for nearly innumerable traditional and religious narratives, and their perceived behaviors became the stuff of sacred rituals in all ancient cultures.

Mastering the use of these archetypes by understanding their astral origins allows any reader to interpret them wherever they are found: in religious ritual, in narratives such as scripture, in hieroglyphics, monumental architecture, petroglyphs or sacred symbols.

In our reading analogy, we eventually discovered that words could be grouped into sentences to complete a thought. And several sentences comprised a paragraph, a tidy group of thoughts that, when grouped together, made a summary or conveyed a concept.

In prophecy, we learn that a few simple symbols can convey whole narratives. In some cases, only one ideogram or hieroglyph invokes whole paragraphs of text.

Conversely, we learn that scriptural or religious metaphors have symbolic equivalents. This was a two-headed coin. On one side we have the symbol, and on the other we have its metaphoric equivalent. This allowed the ancients, most of whom could neither read nor write, to depict, read or relate a whole story with just a few symbols or a single ritual.

In reading, with practice came proficiency. After years of work, we mastered reading sufficient to extract meaning from any text. We were finally readers.

So, too, with deciphering prophecy. With some dedicated time and effort, we can train ourselves to read prophecy as easily as we read the morning paper.

But that was not all there was to reading. We soon learned that there were other languages. Some even used ideograms instead of an alphabet. That is, just when we think we’ve mastered it all, we discover that there are new horizons to explore.

So it is with prophetic language. Once we master the basics—the archetypes—once we learn the imagery those basics gave rise to, we can “read” any prophetic metaphor or arcane symbol as easily as we read the letters on a written page.

Of course when we reach that level, we discover to our amazement that what we have learned is only the tip of the iceberg. We quickly find that the imagery or language of prophecy is also the key to the vision of all the prophets, not just prophecy per se. And that includes the teachings of the prophet Joseph Smith. We realize, too, that it is the key to temple symbolism and ritual, both in ancient cultures and in the modern church.

We should have guessed that learning to interpret prophecy, like learning to read, would ultimately reveal sweeping vistas of knowledge and understanding beyond anything we could have imagined at the outset of our quest.

I guess we’re not dummies after all.

©Anthony E. Larson, 2009

Proof that the Church Is True

Abstract: LDS temple tradition provides the strongest argument for the claim that Mormonism is the only true religion. Though we do not see it as such, our temple tradition has the virtue of providing physical evidence, empirically verifiable, that the church is a restoration of the ancient order, held sacred by all ancient cultures. Its existence in Mormon sacred tradition is long established, irrefutable fact, and its links to the past are becoming more verifiable every day, due to remarkable new research into ancient history, cosmology, comparative mythology and plasma physics. As such, it is the sole element in Mormonism that comes the closest to verifiable, demonstrable proof of Joseph Smith’s claims to divine revelation.

Revelation is the cornerstone of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Its founder, Joseph Smith, claimed to be a latter-day prophet of God. This claim of divine guidance thrust him into the 19th century limelight and continues today to energize the religion he founded, as well as providing fodder for attacks against it.

Our religion, popularly called Mormonism, purports to be a restoration, through the ministry of angelic and divine visitors to men, of the original church founded by Jesus Christ during his ministry. It is said to be the modern equivalent of that ‘primitive’ church, which was governed by apostles and prophets after Christ’s death and resurrection.

As verification of these bold claims, most Mormons point to internal ‘evidence.’ Some point to the Book of Mormon as evidence of Joseph Smith’s gift of translation via divine revelation. Some point to the restoration of the authentic priesthood by ministering angels at the inception of this dispensation. Still others point to the same organization in the modern church as that which existed in the primitive church, established by Christ himself.

For Mormons, our belief in these things comes from a personal verification by the Holy Spirit. We call it a “testimony.” We believe that all who seek it are entitled to this revelatory confirmation. It is, in our view, a more certain test than mere knowledge.

Nevertheless, in an effort to provide ‘evidence’ to support those claims to outsiders and to ourselves, many of us look for confirmation of our beliefs beyond that of a personal witness. We seek for corroboration, or as some would put it “proof,” in disciplines outside the church, in the scholarly and scientific world.

Hence, we see the interest among many Saints in the geography of the Book of Mormon, for example. Attempting to locate the present physical location of pre-Colombian Book of Mormon sites—external evidence—is a way of substantiating the claims that the book makes. Others among us look for documentary evidence that would support the church’s claims for the Egyptian papyri, which Joseph Smith also claimed to translate.

But anything approaching empirical truth is hard to come by when dealing with things metaphysical. These claims still rest almost wholly upon personal revelation. There is no empirical test for their validity. Belief cannot be verified with test tubes or telescopes. Things of the spirit that come via revelation simply do not lend themselves to physical investigation or empiricism.

It is at this point where our evidentiary efforts hit a dead end. It seems we are meant to accept these things on the strength of our faith, born of the personal witness we each acquire via revelation through our own diligent inquiry of God, rather than to any outside evidence.

Do not despair, however.

Ironically, there is an element, unique to Mormonism, which we overlook in our rush to assert to the world our authenticity as the one true church.

That overlooked element is the incorporation in our religion of temple use and practices, something other Christian denominations consider “pagan” and of little value. In fact, they see our use of temples as worthy of nothing except derision, ridicule and scorn. Yet it is in our temple tradition—in its purpose, its iconography and its ritual—that we find the best evidence for the validity of our claims.

How so, you ask? Let’s examine the potential for validation in this fascinating feature, exclusive to Mormonism.

From the outset, no other Christian denomination—from Catholicism to Protestantism, including the more recent Adventist and Millennialist movements—saw the need or value of a temple. Mormonism was and is still entirely unique to Christianity in that regard. To sectarians and religionists, Christianity had no need for a temple. In their eyes, temples—unlike chapels, synagogues and mosques—were solely a feature of pagan religions, certainly not a proper feature of Christ’s true church, established in the meridian of time.

In contrast, Joseph Smith established our temple tradition in Mormonism nearly 200 years ago, saying it was vital to the true religion. This point of departure is critical. Either he was right about temples and the rest of Christianity was wrong, or he was completely misguided and the orthodox view was the correct one.

Our temple use has changed little since then. Because the rites and rituals practiced within those sanctified walls are perceived to be sacrosanct, they’ve been kept inviolate, perfectly preserved word for word in their original state. While certain elements within our rites may have been eliminated, as some historians maintain, the basic rites themselves retain their original form. It cannot be argued, therefore, that discoveries of ancient beliefs and practices in recent times have influenced our temple rituals. They have not been significantly altered or added upon since their inception nearly two centuries ago.

Thus, it can be properly claimed that our temple tradition, as still practiced today, came solely through revelation to Joseph Smith, just as every other aspect of our religion, and not through modern discovery.

And mainstream Christianity is perfectly happy to allow that claim to stand, thinking it to their advantage. In their minds, our use of temples and our belief in odd doctrine gives them leverage to demonstrate to the world that Mormonism is a fraud, a “cult” rife with “pagan” practices perpetrated on foolish and gullible people by Joseph Smith and perpetuated up to the present day by designing men with questionable motives.

In order for Latter-day Saints to comprehend the full value of their temple tradition as a certain claim to divine revelation, they must first see temples for what they truly are: instructive institutions dedicated to rehearsing the past as well as the commonly acknowledged concept that they are sites for making sacred covenants. That is, most see LDS temple tradition as things revealed—hallowed knowledge and ritual having no connection to anything temporal or historical. But, nothing could be further from the truth.

It is this author’s claim that our temple rituals, what we call an endowment, find their origin in the same source as the sacred rites and rituals of all antique cultures: the ancient heavens—whether the ancient ritual takes the form of a dance around a bonfire by Native Americans, ceremonies in an Egyptian temple or pyramid, sacrificial rites on a Mayan pyramid, Inca rituals at Machu Picchu, strange Druidic or Celtic rituals in a henge, mysterious rites in a Hopi kiva, worship in a Buddhist or Hindu temple, ceremonies in a Hebrew, Babylonian, Greek or Roman temple or any other sacred practice in all reverenced precincts the world over.

Furthermore, our temple endowment rehearses the primary elements of all prophetic visions, what this author calls the “One Story.” That story tells of the ascension into heaven of the prophet or holy man via a stairway, path, road, ladder or mountain, which is based in cosmological imagery as well. As he progresses, the holy man encounters various “guardians” or “angels” to whom he must give certain secret signs and words in order to pass. Ultimately, the visionary reaches the celestial realms, where he sees God, the City of God or the Throne of God, elements that also have their origins in cosmological events. Thus, beginning to end, our temple endowment is a symbolic rehearsal of ancient cosmological events, the only exceptions being the sacred covenants or promises made in the endowment.

And there is much more. Antique temple ceremonies included rites of washing, anointing, coronation, resurrection and marriage, among many others—all elements also found in LDS temple rites.

In fact, upon close inspection, nearly every element of LDS temple ritual can be found in one form or another in ancient temple practices. As Dr. Hugh Nibley amply demonstrated with his many books, whole volumes could be dedicated to these similarities. (Detailed comparative analysis of cosmological events to ancient beliefs, traditions and practices and their relationship to LDS theology, scriptural interpretation and temple tradition is offered elsewhere in this author’s presentations. It will not be cited here and now. So voluminous, all encompassing and sweeping are these concepts that this forum is woefully inadequate for their proper delineation. Readers are encouraged to search out the information this author has provided, based in remarkable new research into ancient history, cosmology, comparative mythology, archeoastronomy, geology, archeology, anthropology and plasma physics, that has already been provided in his books, papers and occasional lectures, as well as forthcoming material to be made public as time and means permit.)

The vital element that Nibley failed to explore, and other LDS scholars presently fail to see, is the absolute connection between the temple traditions of all mankind and events in Earth’s ancient skies. When scholars do venture to connect temple practices to cosmology, their interpretation is restricted to explaining those traditions, rites and rituals in terms of the heavens we see overhead today, when in reality they actually relate to the “old heavens and the old earth,” as the ancients and modern revelation assert, of the Patriarchal Age, before and immediately after Noah’s Flood.

Such misplaced and misguided analysis on the part of modern LDS scholars leads to pronounced distortions of the scriptural, cultural and traditional record, leaving us with confusion and contradictions that cannot be reconciled, though many have attempted to do so.

In contrast, those contradictions and confusions vanish when looking at the evidence with this new, cosmological paradigm. Not only that, it throws open the door to discovery of the scriptures, prophetic and temple symbolism and metaphor in a way that anyone can understand. No advanced degrees are necessary—a development that every Latter-day Saint should applaud and embrace for their own edification, enlightenment and satisfaction.

Once those fabulous and magnificent sky pageants that played out in Earth’s heavens in the millennium from Adam to Abraham are properly understood, then the origin and meaning of temple rituals and tradition of all past cultures, as well as our own temple tradition, becomes crystal clear. It becomes obvious that ancient traditions and practices recall and celebrate astral elements unseen in modern skies.

When we acknowledge the astounding fact that LDS temple tradition reflects that same, ancient cosmological tradition, in all its principle elements and meanings, through rituals, furnishings and iconography, we discover that our temples are full of information from the past, powerful evidence that Joseph Smith tapped into the only source capable of relaying that information to him nearly two centuries ago: divine revelation. It therefore comes closer to providing proof of Mormonism’s claims than any other element of our religion.

It cannot be claimed that any of this knowledge was available anywhere else in the world. Least of all was it available to a young man living on the American frontier in the 19th century, since it is only now beginning to come to the fore as the result of research done by a few, avant guard scholars, researchers and scientists. Only now, with the formidable body of information coming to light in the last half century of research and discovery, can we begin to see the relevance of LDS temple tradition to the common roots of all ancient worship in past cosmological events.

That is not to say that cosmology is all there is to Mormonism or to its temple tradition. Not by any means. The same revelatory power that gave us a proper cosmological, temple tradition unique in modern Christianity also provided insights into the teachings of Jesus Christ that were either missing from the scriptural record or had been lost through apostasy. That is, the accuracy of our temple tradition lends great credibility to the rest of Mormonism’s claims. To put it another way, the conformity of the LDS temple tradition to its ancient counterparts comes closer to providing proof to the world of Mormonism’s validity than anything else we Latter-day Saints have to offer.

Joseph Smith’s was truly a dispensation of truth lost to the world until a prophet of God once more restored it in these latter days.

It's Not Easy Being Green

At the risk of being ridiculed or scoffed at for being too open, let me briefly pull back the author/researcher curtain to let you see the inner mulling and musing of the mind behind all these “peculiar” notions.

To put it simply, I’m at the end of my rope. And I have been for some time.

Kermit the Frog sings a woeful little tune that best characterizes my predicament. “It’s not easy being green,” he chants, plaintively. I know how that feels when your fellow church members perceive you as the purveyor of odd knowledge, someone saying something different than what they’re accustomed to hearing.

Like the Whos in Whoville, I cry out, “I am here. I am here! I am here!!” But, no one hears. No one sees.

You see, to the majority of church members, I’m invisible … and so is my research. I believe I have stumbled across a most valuable truth, one that was once fairly common knowledge among early church members, one that was taught by Joseph Smith and preserved in our temples. That’s what I work to share with my fellow Saints. But, therein lies the rub. Very few care to hear it.

Actually, I feel more like Horton than the Whos. I know what I know to be true. But most Mormons don’t believe me because of their preconceptions. They prefer to reject me and my “strange notions,” dismissing me as a kook or a fraud rather than examining the issues more closely. Strangely, others see me as a threat, worthy only of their disdain and reprehension. They seek to suppress my ideas.

Just so you know, here’s my song. It’s a little longer than Kermit’s, but it rhymes just about as well. It sounds like this …

About 30 years ago, I came across a book that changed my whole view of the Restored Gospel. The concepts presented in that book set me on a path that led me first to the comprehension of past planetary catastrophes, then to prophecy, to the language of the prophets, to obscure statements by Joseph Smith, to a completely revised understanding of ancient planetary history, to an interpretation of religious symbolism worldwide and finally to a thoroughgoing grasp of latter-day temple symbolism and ritual (not necessarily in that order).

If that sounds to you like a lot of ground to cover, it is. It took me into heady intellectual country — Hugh Nibley kind of stuff — a place I never dreamed I might venture. But true to my quest, I soldiered on, invigorated by the soul-expanding concepts that periodically washed over my mind and heart like emotional and intellectual tidal waves.

It took years of study, research and a willingness to follow the clues—no matter how unlikely or unpopular they seemed to be. But, it was worth every moment because this study, which began with a burning desire to understand the scriptures, has opened doors to knowledge and understanding that I never expected find, least of all to open. Just when I think this line of inquiry has yielded all there is to learn, it inevitably shows me more.

As a result, my testimony of Joseph Smith and the Restored Gospel has expanded beyond anything I thought humanly possible. My understanding of gospel principles is more profound, by many orders of magnitude, than I had ever imagined. And perhaps most importantly, I can ‘read’ the temple experience as though it were a book or a familiar and treasured story.

What about you? When you read prophecy, is the imagery and message crystal clear? Or is it confusing and bewildering? When you contrast present scientific views with the scriptural record, do you start scratching your head? When you attend the temple, is the intent and the meaning of each ritual and all its symbolism as plain as a child’s primer? When you try to make sense of these things, does your head start to hurt and your brain begin to reel? As I did at first, do you simply avoid contemplating all these things because it all seems too much like an exercise in futility?

Given those nagging misgivings and because most of these things are a mystery to most Saints, you’d think that they’d be anxious to get a few pointers. But, just the opposite is true. In my experience, any effort to draw attention to these gospel blind spots is met with suspicion and disbelief. Rather than ask questions, they begin to avoid me, ignore me, criticize me or pretend I’m not even in the same church.

So, it’s not easy being seen. In fact, it’s a lot of hard work. I’ve labored for over 30 years in an effort to gain a foothold on the LDS imagination. I’ve written books, prepared and given daylong lectures with a slideshow, produced a documentary, several video clips with 3D animation, created a web page advertising my ideas and a blog that contains the results of years of research and study. None of that was easy. It cost me precious personal time and considerable resources. Yet after all that, I don’t seem to be getting significant traction among my fellow Saints.

So, here’s the question at the heart of the matter: How does an average Latter-day Saint like myself with a vital message make his voice heard in the church? Since I’m not a General Authority, how do I make an impression on others? What can I do to make enough of an impression that most Mormons will inquire further? After trying every initiative I can think of to put this information in front of church members, what more can I do that I’ve not already tried? I’m flat out of initiatives.

So, that’s my sad song. Like Kermit, it’s not easy being green.

So, what do you think? How can I put this message before the membership? What approach can I take that I have not taken already? Which among you cares to lend a supportive hand? Who can point me down the path to access? Any ideas?

© Anthony E. Larson, 2009

Easter

Most Christians vaguely grasp the connections between Easter and Passover. What most do not understand are the deep roots both holidays have in paganism and Saturnian symbolism. However, such knowledge serves to explain much of the tradition and ritual surrounding this Christian holiday.

A Christian holiday

Easter celebrates the death and resurrection of the Savior in the meridian of time. Mormons, like the rest of Christianity, see the holiday as a time to remember and reverence that most sacred and remarkable event in all of history.

The entire philosophy of Christianity hinges on the resurrection. Without it, Christianity — and by inference, Mormonism as well — is just another religious philosophy among many. With the resurrection comes the promise that all will rise from the grave, Christ being the first fruits. This concept is at the heart of our religion.

The Passover connection

Easter’s connection with the Passover stems from the fact that the Savior’s crucifixion and resurrection in Jerusalem took place during the annual Jewish Passover celebration, a juxtaposition that was not lost on the Savior since he clearly chose the time and the place of his own expiation.

Seen from the catastrophist’s point of view, the Passover was a celebration of Israelite deliverance — not just from Egyptian bondage, but the entire planet from planetary catastrophe. Passover was the moment of closest approach between Earth and the comet Venus, hence the term “pass over.” It was the culmination of a series of plagues that afflicted not only Egypt, but also the entire world, according to Velikovsky.

So, too, in Christian eyes, Easter is a celebration of the deliverance of the human race from the bonds of death.

Both Easter and Passover involve the consumption of a ritual meal in remembrance of their deliverance. The Jewish Seder reflects the Lord’s directive that the Israelites eat roast lamb, unleavened bread and bitter herbs. (Exodus 12:8-10.) They do so to remember how they were saved from the plague that took so many Egyptians during the Exodus. The Christian sacrament reflects Christ’s instruction that they partake of bread and wine to remember him and the deliverance from death he has provided. (Luke 22:19, 20.)

A note, in passing

Incidentally, it may be noteworthy, in passing, that there may have been a very practical purpose for the consumption of the Passover meal. If, as Velikovsky suggests, Earth’s atmosphere was supercharged with elements from the tail of the passing comet Venus, then eating bread without yeast and bitter herbs may have served to offset the debilitating physical effects on the human body of those pollutants. If, as this author suggests, the compounds that turned the water red in Egypt were acidic, causing sickness and death in animals and humans, then the basic, alkaline nature of bitter herbs would serve to chemically offset the elevated levels of acid in the body (acidosis).

Additionally, it is well known that certain types of yeast (Candida albicans, for example) in the gut can release toxins that can severely debilitate the immune system. Other types of yeast produce compounds that can cause humans to hallucinate. In this instance, the instructions to eat bread without yeast (unleavened) may have been designed to help the Israelites better cope physically with the temporarily hostile environment created by the extraterrestrial pollutants — eminently practical advice given through revelation from God to Moses. The idea of food as medicine is one that modern science has recently come to recognize, a philosophy that has been at the heart of herbal use and practices since time immemorial.

Eating is a religious experience?

Such ritual meals as Seder, the Eucharist and the Sacrament are also practiced in most pagan cultures. They range, on one end of the spectrum, from consumption of simple foods to cannibalism on the other extreme.

Most animal sacrifice did not consist of cremation, as most moderns believe. Rather, it was, in most cases, a ritual method of cooking and preparing the animal for eating. Our modern, seemingly innocuous and strictly culinary practice of barbequing actually has its roots in cultural traditions of sacrifice. So remember, next time you throw something on the ‘barbie,’ you are practicing the time-honored, ritualistic tradition of sacrifice with its roots deep in antiquity.

Recidivist Israelites, too, adopted pagan eating rituals. "The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead their dough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto other gods, that they may provoke me to anger." (Jeremiah 7:18.)

Note the similarity between the elements of this ritual and the Christian sacrament. They consumed bread and drink in honor of the goddess. It was a ritual meal. These backsliding Israelites prepared cakes and drink to honor their pagan gods, just as we take bread and water today. Such similarities are not coincidental. Christ, on the eve of his crucifixion, obviously turned to a well-established, ancient practice in the Hebrew culture as the basis for his new eating ritual, the Sacrament.

Hot cross buns

Just such a ritual meal is connected with the Christian’s celebration of Easter. Hot cross buns are a lesser, but well established part of this holiday that, doubtlessly, have their origins in pagan antiquity. These loaves were originally marked with horns, the crescent symbol for ancient Saturn, or the cross, the cruciform symbol for the Queen of Heaven, Astarte or Venus. The ancient Greeks also consumed these types of buns in their celebrations of Artemis, Goddess of the hunt (known as Diana to the Romans). And the Egyptians ate a similar cake in their worship of the Goddess Isis. Later, Saxons ate buns that were marked with a cross in honor of Eastre (Astarte). These customs of creating a ceremonial bread or loaf, marking it with the symbol of the goddess, then eating it as part of a festival in honor of that same goddess is an echo of the Israelite practice of making cakes to their Queen of Heaven.

Such universal practices beg the question, where did the human race get the idea that eating something was a sacred practice? The idea that eating should be part of religious ritual may have begun in Earth’s ancient heavens when one planet ‘consumed’ other, smaller satellites. In a later monograph, we will discuss more about sacrificial rituals around the world and the events and beliefs that may have inspired the practice.

A Christian or pagan holiday?

Returning to our Easter theme, it seems rather ironic that this ostensibly Christian holiday is burdened with much of the celebration and ceremony that once attached itself to the ancient cults that worshipped astral goddesses.

We discover, for instance, that the very name of the holiday has its roots in idolatry. Easter is a corruption of the name of the goddess who leant her name to the holiday, Aster or Astarte, as the Greeks knew her. Her Syro-Phoenician counterpart was the goddess Ashtoreth. The Babylonians called her Ishtar and the Romans called her Venus. She was also the great mother goddess of the Saxon people in Northern Europe, who knew her as Eastre, from whence we get the name Easter today.

The Saturn connection

Surely these ancient goddesses from a variety of ancient cultures all had their origins in the planet Venus that once stood near the Earth in the Polar Configuration because they all share common attributes, history, and iconography. Talbott wrote:

Wherever you find the Universal Monarch (Saturn) you will find close at hand the ancient mother goddess — the goddess whom the Sumerians called Inanna, the Queen of Heaven, and the Babylonians Ishtar, and the Egyptians Isis, Hathor, and Sekhmet, each with numerous counterparts in their own and in other lands, and virtually all of them viewed symbolically as daughter or spouse of the creator-king, and the mother of another, equally prominent figure.

The Mother Goddess is the planet Venus, the luminous, central orb seen squarely in the center of Saturn and from which radiating streams of material course outward. (Thoth, Vol. 2, No. 8.)

So, we see that the true origins of this most Christian of holidays actually owes its existence to events that transpired in Earth ancient heavens.

The Easter egg

Originally, the egg, now a cultural symbol of Easter, was closely related to the eye symbol — both symbols of this mother goddess, this goddess of fertility anciently. Mythical traditions say that she was born as/or in a celestial egg. Indeed, in the Polar Configuration, Venus’ transformation into the prototypical star — the archetype of all radiant star symbols — began when it took on an ovoid shape, thus forever connecting the goddess with the egg.


It is for this reason that the favored decoration for Easter eggs anciently was a star. Indeed, the very name of this goddess in several cultures, as well as our own, came to mean ‘star.’

Yet, in our culture, stars and the eggs have no discernable relationship. Like so much in mythology, the connection seems absurd to the modern mind. Yet, in ancient myth and tradition they are intimately connected. Only the theory of the Polar Configuration satisfactorily explains their symbolic ligature. Indeed, it not only explains it; it demands it. The star and the egg were two primary aspects or phases in the development of ancient Venus while in the Polar Configuration at the dawn of time.

Dyed eggs, originally colored to match the turquoise color of ancient Venus, were part of the rituals enacted in the Babylonian mystery religions. The variety of colors we see today was a natural, artistic elaboration of the original idea. Such colorfully dyed and decorated eggs were considered sacred because of their symbolic representation of the ancient goddess/planet Venus. They played an integral part of the religious ceremonies in Egypt and the Orient. Dyed eggs were hung in Egyptian temples. The egg was regarded as the emblem of regenerative life proceeding from the mouth of the great Egyptian god Atum because the actual planet Venus so presented itself in the Polar Configuration. Venus (Hathor) was centered on Saturn (Atum), assumed an egg shape that seemed to house the child, Mars (Horus) and then appeared to give birth to Mars.

The Easter rabbit

In addition to the egg symbol, the Norse goddess of fertility, Ostara, whose name was clearly a derivative of Aster or Astarte, was connected to the hare. This connection was a later one, unique to the Norse culture, which probably stems from the well-known fecundity of rabbits.

Three other seemingly disconnected traditions of Easter further connect the holiday to pagan practices and ultimately to the Polar Configuration: the woman’s Easter bonnet and special holiday dress as well as the Easter parade.

Easter bonnets and finery

Festivals that celebrated the ancient star goddess, Venus, were ideal occasions for women, who sought to emulate the goddess, to adorn themselves as the goddess herself. The bonnet worn today is a distant replication of the hat, hair dress or crown worn by the goddess in heaven.


Older, more customary variants of the bonnet draped a veil across the face, also a feature of the ancient sky goddess. LDS temple-goers will recognize the validity of this tradition and its connection to temple ritual and furnishings. The dress, usually white, was designed with symbolic significance relevant to the ancient appearance of Venus and her role as a fertility goddess. Thus, anything that enhanced the gender specific attributes of a woman was employed to demonstrate her procreative role. Indeed, the more elaborate, yet accurate, the duplication of the symbols/appearance — because the symbols of the goddess were representations of what she looked like in Earth’s ancient heavens — the greater the identification of the individual with the mother goddess, imitating her essential aspects. Thus, a practice that had deep religious significance in antiquity has come to be a mere fashion statement today. Such is the dilution of the original concepts and practices over time. Yet, the themes persist in our cultural traditions, outliving, by far, the knowledge and understanding they were meant to convey.

The Easter parade

Parading up and down the streets, carrying an effigy of the god or goddess upon their shoulders, the ancients moved from one strategically sited temple location to another to re-enact the mythical movements of their deity in the heavens anciently. In many cultures — especially the Egyptian — these portable shrines were set in replicas of boats, carried on long, stout poles that could be borne by several carriers. It is the image of the god or goddess, sitting in a celestial boat, that we commonly see in ancient Egyptian art. It is for this reason that we apply the term “float” to our modern version of these icons that move along city streets in modern parades. They were originally boats; so calling them floats is natural.

Additionally, it is the reason the term “ark” was applied to the most sacred object in Judaism, the Ark of the Covenant. It was applied to the conveyance that bore tablets containing the Ten Commandments and other artifacts of the Exodus.
Thus, the Easter parade is a modern counterpart of this ancient practice. Once again, our culture maintains the practices or traditions instigated in Earth’s ancient skies with no concept or grasp of their origins or original meanings.

Christian hypocrisy

Ironically, modern Christians, who seem so determined to avoid any suggestion of paganism or cultism in their religions, who vociferously denounce the paganism of Christmas and Mormons as cultists, have enthusiastically embraced the paganism of Easter.

Latter-day Saints, too, fail to recognize the astral traditions in our culture and religion, yet it should not be so. Joseph Smith and the prophets that succeeded him sought to connect us to our ancient past and the traditions handed down through cultural transmission. Sadly, we Saints discarded our understanding of these things in favor of the Christianized customs and practices of the American culture. Yet, like our Christian cousins, our traditions, our temples and our scriptures are filled with the evidence from the past of their true cosmological nature.

© Anthony E. Larson, 2002

The Two Gospels

Once the symbolic nature of the scriptures is understood, as well as its origins and its implementation, an entirely new perspective of the gospel emerges. Knowledge of the events and conditions that lead to the religious symbolism of all ancient cultures allows us to see that gospel symbolism and the symbolism of idolatry both have their roots in the same ancient history. That is, the symbolism found in all ancient religions — false and true — shares the same origins.

It also allows us to make a clear distinction between the symbolism of the gospel and the truths of the gospel — hence the title of this article. One gospel is symbolic; the other is literal. The trick is recognizing which is which.

The gospel of symbolism

The symbolism of the gospel is typified by the New Testament book, Revelation. Nearly everything John wrote of was described in traditional, symbolic terms. In fact, it becomes clear that little about future events is ever revealed literally. With only a few notable exceptions, revelation given to prophets seldom explains the future in literal terms. Symbolism is the device used almost exclusively to depict future events. (It is not within the scope of this article to attempt an explanation as to why this is so. Whether symbolism is injected into the message by the prophet, who then transmits it to the people, or whether it comes from a divine source, the reader may judge for himself. Still, the question is worth asking, rhetorically. Why would revelation from an eternal source contain symbolism born in this creation only?)

This symbolic gospel can be an invaluable vehicle for communicating, but both the giver and the receiver must have a clear understanding of its use. Otherwise, the receiver is left with a multitude of confusing images and metaphors that seem meaningless and muddled — the fevered inventions of manic minds. The Savior’s use of parables is a mild form of this symbolic or metaphorical method. Those who were “enlightened” got the full meaning of his story, while the remainder simply heard a prosaic homily.

Clearly, the symbolic gospel is a kind of Gnosticism — a system of metaphors and symbols that both the giver and the receiver must know (hence the Greek term for knowing, gnosis) to properly interpret the story or lesson. Gnostic writings are cluttered with symbolism that is still largely incomprehensible to modern scholars and religionists.

Latter-day Saints fail to recognize that even modern revelation has this element of Gnosticism. Yet, they seem perfectly willing to embrace the gnostic elements of temple worship. This may be a reflection of the intellectual dichotomy the Saints exhibit, or it may be due to simple ignorance and indifference.

This universal use of symbolism is the reason the traditions of other religions — indeed, all the myths and legends of antiquity — seem so extravagant to the modern mind. We have not been schooled in their symbolic traditions. The modern, rationalist philosophy has no place for ancient symbolism. The rationalist — whether an agnostic or a believer — sees ancient symbolism as so much nonsense. Thus, any religion based in ancient symbolism holds no meaning for him or her.

Common traditions, common symbols

The common origin of ancient symbolic religious systems may explain many strange similarities between religions that are usually explained away by the process of diffusion (the migration of ideas, beliefs and practices from one culture to another). The fundamental ideas behind common beliefs and traditions originated in the same ancient heavenly events. It also explains why all ancient religions possess a cosmology in one form or another.

All ancient religious traditions, no matter the religion or culture, share a common origin in ancient heavenly events. Yet, each culture created unique stories, gods, and rituals based on those events. At first glance, the symbolic traditions of one culture appear to have nothing to do with those of another. Yet, upon closer inspection and considering those ancient celestial events, we find that they all share a remarkable degree of coincidence. Those ancient traditions all tell of gods and demons: super-human beings who ruled the heavens, whose actions determined the fate of mankind; they describe a cataclysmic creation and the near destruction of the world. Their traditions are intricately interwoven with astronomical interests: stars, suns, and planets. These religions are filled with concerns for the movement and order of the heavens: the solstice, the equinox, precession, the rising of certain constellations and planets, etc. Seen from this perspective, the disciplines of Comparative Mythology and Comparative Religion are very nearly the same discipline.

This pervasive use of symbolism also explains a small curiosity. When Joseph Smith inquired of the Lord about the meanings of certain passages in Revelation, he was given a more extensive explanation of the symbols themselves — more symbolism, in other words — not their origin or their meaning. Most Saints have the impression that the revelation gave literal explanations for the symbols, but a careful reading will demonstrate that this is not the case. Rather, he was given all the shades of meaning that have been attributed to the symbols from hoary antiquity, attributions typical of the elaboration and exposition of all such symbols that have been going on since the beginning of time. (See Doctrine and Covenants, 77, “. . . explanation of the Revelation of St. John.”)

The gospel of literalism

The truths of the literal gospel are typified by latter-day revelation. (For example, see Doctrine and Covenants 138, “. . . a vision of the redemption of the dead.”) This literal gospel invariably transmits information about the nature of our relationship with God, the pre-existence, the afterlife, the eternities and the purpose of mortality. There is nothing symbolic about it, except perhaps for the language used in a vain attempt to explain the ineffable.

Thus, what we call the gospel is really a combination of two primary elements: symbolism from ancient tradition and literalism from eternal truths. If we can discriminate between the two, there is little concern about misinterpretation. However, if we perceive the two as one, then misunderstanding is inevitable. It is this kind of confusion — mistaking imagery for reality — that has caused some of the most heated debate among Latter-day Saints in this dispensation. More apostasy and more bitter acrimony can be traced to this cause than almost any other.

Take the second coming, for example. The literal gospel teaches us that the Savior will come again to the Earth to usher in an age of peace and prosperity called the Millennium. It gives no details about the actual event, except to suggest that he will simply descend from heaven as he ascended. (See Acts 1:11.) The symbolic gospel describes his coming as if it were to be a staged media event, as the return of a conquering hero: Christ comes with fire in his eyes, wearing many crowns, riding a white horse, with a sword in his mouth, his clothing dipped in blood, and accompanied by concourses of angels. (See Revelation 19:11-15.)

The literal gospel teaches truths; the symbolic gospel employs elaborate imagery to make an entirely different point. In this case, as with so very many other doctrinal issues, this view of the scriptures helps avoid misinterpretations.

© Anthony E. Larson, 2003

"The World That Then Was ..."

Other than the actual creation itself, the most notable catastrophe in Earth’s early history that also brought the Patriarchal Age to an end, was Noah’s Flood. This was the benchmark, the dividing line between two great epochs in Earth’s history. Before the Flood, the world was an astonishingly different place; after the Flood, it became the “lone and dreary” world we know today.

We learn this from the scriptures. Peter’s understanding of the change that brought an end to the most remarkable epoch in Earth’s history — the age of the Patriarchs or the Golden Age — coincides with a radical change in the Earth and its heavens. He wrote that the “old world” disappeared, saying that God

… spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly; … Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:

But the heavens and the earth which are now, by the same word are kept in store. (2 Peter 2:5, 3:6, 7.)

Thus, in the Apostle Peter’s view, the change in the Earth, wrought by the Deluge, was so dramatic that he deemed it proper to say that “the old world” had “perished,” implying that “the heavens and the earth which are now” are entirely different from those that existed prior to the Flood.

This event, this remarkably dramatic and profound change, is central to an understanding of Earth’s early history. Thus, knowing how it came about and what happened to create it are vital to our understanding of the scriptures, history and the gospel.

The division

Also critical to our view of this epoch is the enigmatic secondary change that took place soon after the Deluge: the division of the Earth in the days of Noah’s grandson. “And unto Eber were born two sons: the name of one was Peleg; for in his days was the earth divided.” (Genesis 10:25.)

But to fully understand those changes, one must see them in the proper context. Only with the understanding that the Saturn myths and the Polar Configuration give us can we begin to grasp the true impact of the Old Testament narrative.

As catastrophists and mythologists labor to understand the true history of our planet, a startling and amazing view of Earth’s early history begins to emerge — one that explains the most enigmatic and baffling parts of scripture. While there are still many gaps in the narrative, leaving considerable room for further revision and adjustment, an overall picture begins to emerge that supports scriptural history and helps Latter-day Saints better understand the gospel.

In the very beginning

As elucidated elsewhere, it is most likely that Jupiter and Saturn were part of a binary sun system. Binaries are the most common arrangement known to astronomers, far more common than the single star system we inhabit today.

That parental binary also had several smaller bodies in tow, Earth being one of them. Indeed, most of the planets we know today as part of our present solar system were probably part of that original binary system. It also would have appeared as what astronomers today call a “brown dwarf” star with a relatively dim corona or photosphere. Earth and its companion planets would have orbited beneath that corona, creating a truly unique set of conditions unlike anything we see or can even properly imagine.

It was in this state that most of Earth’s pre-history took place, before Adam came to inhabit the planet. It is likely that the record in stones and bones, buried in the Earth, represent this earliest epoch. The flora and fauna of Earth’s prehistoric period are truly bizarre and foreign to our world and, likely, could not have survived the world as we know it today. It seems reasonable to assume that conditions on our planet were vastly different than those we know today, given the forms of plant and animal life that proliferated in those prehistoric days. What is likely is that the flora and fauna we see around us today represent radical adaptations of those early forms.

Celestial car crash

The real story of our world begins when our present sun, Sol, and our parent, Jupiter/Saturn binary had a close encounter with another star. It was most certainly not a head-on collision, since if the angle of incidence were that radical, none of the orbs involved would have survived intact. Rather, one sun overtook the other, much as the space shuttle docks with other satellites or the space station today. Hence, the capture of the Jupiter/Saturn binary by Sol was a rather lengthy process rather than a sudden event, thus lacking any of the catastrophic manifestations associated with later events.

But the contact was not without profound consequences. The interaction between the two primaries may have created an exchange of charge or electrical potential that gradually snuffed out the brown dwarf binary while it boosted the output of Sol. Such an exchange would explain why early traditions make no mention of the sun that is so prominent in our heavens, while they recall, at the same time, the dominant first god/planet, Saturn, emerging from the “waters” of “creation” as the photosphere fog of the binary faded, allowing earthlings to actually see Saturn for the first time. Indeed, this take on the events of the creation found in Genesis fully and understandingly explains those circumstances as no other theory can.

The original binary system remained largely intact while it began to orbit Sol. Somewhere in this period of relative calm, shortly before or after the capture began, Adam was placed on the Earth. This is so because the earliest recollections of mankind, recorded in cultural traditions the world over, including the Old Testament, remember an emerging heaven and earth that correspond to the Polar Configuration, as proposed by Talbott. It is that same configuration illustrated by Joseph Smith for Philo Dibble.

At this point in the process, Saturn and/or Jupiter became a dying star. The fire went out and the star’s photosphere or corona slowly dissipated, allowing Earth’s newest inhabitants to gradually see Earth’s companion planets, the orbs that seemed to hover above their world, in the heavens. What early mankind then saw was the nested group of planets (Saturn, Venus and Mars) slowly appearing or emerging from what seemed to be a heavenly haze or fog, sometimes referred to as “waters.”

The real creation

It is worthy of note that what is recorded in Genesis as the creation may not have been the real creation at all, but the recollection of an event that all mankind witnessed and remembered as the “creation.” This may be so because virtually all ancient cultures remembered and recorded this creation, indicating that there were many eyewitnesses to this event — an impossibility if man were placed on the Earth only after this supposed creation. The Genesis account is, likely, only one of many such recollections.

As explained elsewhere, the most meaningful explanation yet offered of the creation events, as described in the Bible, is provided by the emergence of the Earth/Mars/Venus/Saturn/Jupiter system from its original status as an independent brown dwarf, binary star system to a satellite system of Sol in a linear, polar configuration. Ancient cultures the world over, which had already descended several generations from Adam, watched and recorded those unfolding heavenly events and then recorded them as the creation.

The late emergence of the biblical creation account is even more likely when we consider that Moses is traditionally regarded as the author of Genesis. While he certainly could have received the story via revelation, what is more likely is that his account was derived from even earlier accounts (much as Joseph Smith received the Book of Mormon) that reported the same things all other ancient accounts reported about this creation event.

The original heavenly order of things

Saturn occluded Jupiter from the earthlings’ point of view, so Jupiter did not yet step onto the celestial stage or into their iconographic belief system. But, Venus and Mars were clearly visible, appearing in a nested arrangement within Saturn’s limb. Much less imposing, but certainly visible, were seven small satellites or moons that orbited Saturn. These seven appeared much smaller than Venus or Mars. All these planets and moons were the original Titans, as remembered by the Greeks, planetary powers that stood imposingly above the Earth.

At this juncture, it is worthy of note that from these seven small satellites come all the traditions, practices and icons that employ the sacred number seven — seven days of the week, seven gates, seven cities, etc. Perhaps more importantly for scriptorians, these are the archetypes for the seven angels of John’s Revelation.

A solar system within the solar system

Assuming a new orbit about Sol, its new primary, the Jupiter/Saturn mini-solar system with its unusual configuration of satellites became increasingly unstable. It was just a matter of time before the same forces that caused its capture also dismantled it. That dismantling, like its original capture, was a process rather than an event. And because it was a process, mankind watched it unfold over many generations, from Adam to Noah.

The gradual dismemberment of the old binary covered a rather lengthy period of time. The same forces that brought Sol and the old binary system together now began to dismantle the Polar Configuration. The motions of Earth, Mars and Venus became more and more erratic. As they did so, a multitude of celestial phantasmagorias played out in Earth’s heavens, giving rise to the elements described above, and many more.

Myth making in the heavens

It is in the elucidation of this part of the planetary saga that Talbott has made the greatest strides. His work has shown how very many images from antiquity — iconographic and metaphoric — have their origins in the heavenly epic seen by ancient peoples the world over as the planets began their sky dance and metamorphoses. This has been the area where this author has concentrated his explanatory efforts concerning the connection between those ancient planetary powers and the gospel and the scriptures are concerned. Nearly everything his author has written has dealt with the archetypes that originated in this period of the Polar Configuration. Each of the planets became an actor in this, as yet, poorly understood drama that played itself out across earthly heavens — poorly understood because of the distortion and elaboration of traditions (myths and legends) over the millennia, because modern science can accept only what it can see and test (empiricism) and because recent generations have no familiar point of reference since nothing even remotely like those events has transpired in our time.

The roles they played

Each of the planets, which stood majestically above the Earth in that epoch, looked and behaved differently due to their position in that configuration. As a result, each was assigned a different role, attributes and character by ancient observers.
Saturn was not as active, so he remained in the background — ever present, ruling the skies, the king of heaven, the architect of all creation, the great center. He was Cronus (Kronos), the timekeeper because all else turned around him while he remained motionless in the heavens.

Venus became the archetype for female goddesses in all cultures. She was the prototypical star from which all modern star symbols are derived, a thing of beauty and wonder in the heavens. She was god’s (Saturn’s) daughter and/or wife, his invigorating power and his glory. If the goddess is female — whatever the culture — she was probably invented to depict some aspect or act of Venus. And because Venus was the most active element in the planetary saga, she has the most incarnations in myth and legend. At some point in the celestial drama, she moved away from her previous location, centered on Saturn. Hence, she (Athena) was said to have been born from the head of Zeus.

Mars had his own career. He became the archetype for all ancient hero gods. He was a warrior, a villain, a fool, a giant, a dwarf, etc. He was also the son of Saturn, because he was seen to leave or be born from within Venus, god’s wife/sister/daughter. Being the most proximate of the planets to Earth, Mars soon became the most terrifying when periodic instabilities in the Polar Configuration brought Earth and Mars close together. Mars was seen to descend toward the Earth, along the common planetary axis. As he did so, he grew from a child to a youth and then to an adult. He then receded, moving away from the Earth. This, in effect, reversed the previous process in that he once again became a child and returned to his former place in the center of Venus, the "womb" of heaven.

Elements other than planets

During these events, a flux tube of electrified plasma and elements from the atmospheres of both planets erupted into an apparent connection between the two, Earth and Mars, that changed its appearance from time to time. On one occasion, it was an awe-inspiring pillar of light, standing majestically between heaven and earth with Mars sitting atop its pyramidal shape. At other times, it became an interplanetary vortex, the mother of all twisters that oscillated in Earth’s heavens, churning up Earth’s polar landscape and all beneath it, leaving behind it the polar ice cap and the permafrost layer known today as tundra. It was the archetype of all sacred mountains (Olympus) atop which sat the temple of heaven (Saturn), god’s habitation. It was a pillar, a mountain, a ladder, a stream of water or wind, and the great celestial tree after which our Christmas trees are modeled.

Of course, there is much, much more to the story. Whole books could and will be written as ongoing research reveals more and more about each of the gods, goddesses, icons, appearances and elements that went to make up the history of the Polar Configuration.

The great change

What happened next in the history of this configuration of planets is presently the least understood part of the entire epic. For that reason, any analysis will necessarily be flawed and therefore subject to revision. Nevertheless, it is worth risking a few missteps to connect the entire story to ancient traditions — especially scriptural accounts — and the modern epic so that we may better understand our catastrophic, planetary heritage. Moreover, this segment of the planetary history supplied its own share of unique images, still more grist for the myth mill.

Over time, the same forces that brought Jupiter/Saturn into an orbit around Sol and that held Earth, Mars and Venus in the relatively short-lived, linear configuration, eventually dismembered the old binary system, allowing all the bodies in that defunct group to assume their own, individual orbits around Sol. This process is recorded in Genesis as the Great Flood and the dividing of the earth in the days of Peleg.

The end and the beginning

That final process of dismemberment began, likely, with the event known to students of the Bible as Noah’s Flood or the Great Deluge. It began with a nova-like explosion of the old binary, Jupiter/Saturn. Perhaps it was the final stage of the old stars’ death throws. In any case, the flare-up first threw out light, then copious amounts of water in the form of ice. According to Hebrew tradition, Noah and his contemporaries saw seven days of light followed by copious amounts of rain that rapidly inundated the world.

The Genesis account of Noah’s miraculous escape from the Deluge is not the only such story. Accounts from ancient cultures the world over tell of the Great Flood. Each account also tells of survivors. Thus, it may be that the Old Testament perspective that Noah and his family were the exclusive survivors may be misleading. From the Hebrew perspective, they were the sole survivors. However, from a worldwide perspective, they were only some of many. This view is supported by evidence that people from many cultures the world over saw the subsequent celestial events.

A new heaven and a new earth

In any case, when the heavens cleared, the survivors and their descendents saw a changed sky. Saturn, they thought, was dying because, rather than the featureless, shining white orb that once dominated the heavens, it had become a dark body with clearly delineated features. It now had clearly visible variegated stripes girding it, much as it does today, giving religious significance to the funerary practice of wrapping the corpse in the mummification process and a wide variety of other mythic themes.

What is more, the dying god (Osiris) now appeared to wander away from his exalted station at the center of heaven — something he had never done before, from the ancients’ perspective. This was not the simple meandering about the center axis as Mars and Venus had done previously. At this juncture, the highest god, the center, god’s house, the celestial city itself began to move — almost imperceptibly at first, then in ever increasing circles. This new movement in the sky was actually mostly due to Earth’s own erratic motions as it left its location at the common axis of planets to eventually assume a new orbit around Jupiter. This movement now revealed Jupiter (Zeus), which up to this point had been occluded by Saturn (Cronus) — hence the traditions that Zeus was Cronus’ offspring.

The seven small satellites that played a very minor role in the early part of the epoch now played a pivotal role that gave rise to numerous sacrificial traditions and rituals as they appeared to fall into Saturn (Cronus/Kronos), who was seen by the ancients to consume his “children” in flames. For example, from this event comes the pagan tradition, recorded in the Old Testament, practiced by those who worshipped Moloch (Cronus/Saturn), of burning children as sacrifices to the planetary gods, a particularly repugnant practice denounced by Israelite prophets.

Celestial battles

As Jupiter emerged from behind Saturn, a battle appeared to commence between them, with Jupiter (Zeus) throwing interplanetary lightning bolts. Thus, Jupiter seemed to come out of nowhere to evict Saturn from his throne, the center place of heaven.

Saturn, Venus and Mars left their former positions along the central axis of the polar configuration — as did the Earth as well. That arrangement ended as Saturn left the congregation of planets to assume its own orbit around Sol. Judging by ancient religious traditions, it vanished into the starry heavens (for today’s familiar stars were now visible to mankind for the first time) in the vicinity of the constellation of Orion to become the dead god, Osiris, of the Egyptians.

Instead of peace, beauty and an inspiring display in the heavens as before, there was now chaos and mayhem as the gods began to do battle with one another. Lightning bolts leaping across millions of miles of space became the weapons the gods launched at one another. The most menacing, evil icons from ancient lore emerge in Earth’s skies in this brief period of chaos. Swarms of debris became demons of destruction and darkness. Images of many-headed serpents and menacing goddesses, witches, wolves, incredible dragons and fantastic beasts, found in all the ancient religions of mankind, have there origins in greatly distorted plasma streams, debris, gases and electromagnetic phenomena that now stretched between planets as they moved in highly erratic ways.

A new god replaces the old

Jupiter now dominated Earth’s skies, appearing to stand where vanished Saturn once stood. For a time, it ruled over a chaotic heaven where Mars and Venus appeared to metamorphose wildly as these orbs did battle with one another. This period gave rise to the universal story told about the struggle between a god of light and the demons of darkness or hell led by a dragon or monster. These were the chaos hoards, evil fiends that threatened to destroy all creation as the earth trembled, heaven thundered and the skies repeatedly darkened. Jupiter was not the benign monarch, as Saturn had been. He is darker, more ruthless and war-like. Yet he battles to keep at bay the powers of darkness that seemingly threaten all creation. Indeed, he is the archetype for the angry, vengeful god of the Old Testament.

The fall

Earth, too, succumbed to the forces that wrenched the polar configuration apart. It fell into an orbit around Sol similar to that which it follows today. This dramatic change, from the perspective of earth-bound observers, sent Earth’s former neighboring planets and the seat of god or heaven itself off into the “wilderness” of distant space to become mere pinpoints of light — planeta, or “wanderers” in the heavens. Earth was then said to have “fallen” from its formerly exalted status and position near heaven or the throne of god. Indeed, the “division” of the Earth that is said in the scriptures (Genesis 10:25, D&C 133:24.) to have occurred in the days of Peleg, one of Noah’s grandsons, was this very event, thereby establishing a sequence of events: the Flood first, followed by the “division” two generations later.

The Earth was divided

There are two elements to the “division” of the Earth, providing two equally credible explanations for that scriptural statement: one is the separation of the Earth from its “celestial” counterparts, the other is the dividing of Earth’s continents by the oceans.

The ancients considered the ground they stood upon to be an intimately connected part of the collection of orbs they saw in the sky above them. Hence, in their view, when those orbs departed the sky it made good sense to say that the Earth had been divided — another way of saying it had fallen. Additionally, with the demise of the Polar Configuration, which held Earth’s oceans in tremendous tides at the poles, water rushed to the equator due to centrifugal force, raising the water levels around the globe’s girth to unprecedented levels. Include in that the tremendous volume of additional water the Flood event added to Earth’s store. Thus oceanic water levels rose dramatically worldwide in the wake of the Flood, inundating many land bridges that once connected continents, effectively changing the topography of the entire earth and creating another, new “division” of the landmasses.

Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end

The above events are remembered in the Old Testament as Noah’s Flood and the division of the Earth in the days of Peleg, while other ancient cultures characterized it as the end of one world and the beginning of another.

The profound effects of the Earth’s “fall” cannot be overemphasized. Ancient prophets sought to impress this fact upon future generations, making this motif a part of the description of Adam’s transgression, as we read in the scriptures.

The appearance of the firmament above the Earth had changed radically, as had the environment on the Earth. As if to inform us as well as Noah, the Lord swears to maintain the new order as long as the Earth exists by listing the burdensome new conditions that had not existed before, “seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night …” (Genesis 8:22.) All these new conditions were imposed on mankind due to the Earth’s “fall” to its new position in the solar system.

Abbreviated life spans

Nowhere is this altered environment that came with Earth’s fall more evident than in the life span or longevity of human beings. We learn from the genealogy of Adam (Genesis, chapter 5) that the normal life span before the Flood reached many hundreds of years — almost a thousand in Methuselah’s case. But compare that to the normal life span immediately after the Flood and in the following generations as recorded in the genealogy of Abraham (Genesis, chapter 11). The life span of those born after the Flood was dramatically foreshortened to almost half of pre-Flood lengths. Furthermore, within eight generations it was down to a little over a hundred in Abraham’s case, a fraction of pre-Flood life expectancy.

No wonder the human race associated the "fall" with death. Lifespans had been drastically truncated.

Scholars and scriptorians have always been puzzled by the seemingly inordinate life expectancy of the Patriarchs and its sudden foreshortening after the Flood. Some dismissed it as a distortion of the truth. Some accepted it on faith, but still could not explain it. Only the catastrophist view of Earth history gives any meaning to the longevity rates recorded in Genesis and the records and traditions of other ancient cultures. Even accepting the likely fact that “years” before the flood were not the same time length as those we know today (since planetary close encounters have clearly altered the length of the solar year since those ancient times), the dramatic decrease of longevity immediately after the Flood and the declining life expectancy rates thereafter serve as indicators that some dramatic change was afoot in Earth’s environment to cause those declines.

Radical environmental change

What changed to bring about foreshortened life spans? There can be little doubt, from a catastrophist point of view, that the electromagnetic environment in the Jupiter/Saturn binary system was far more hospitable to life than the sterile, hostile, one-sun system we inherited. It is like comparing life in an incubator, where everything necessary to promote life is present in abundance, to survival in an inhospitable world that oscillated between cold and heat, dark and light, where life became a struggle for survival. When the salubrious electromagnetic environment of early Earth collapsed, life expectancy naturally dropped dramatically.

A more stable, but still destructive epoch

What is more, Earth’s new orbit opened the door to a new, prolonged epoch of instability. Earth and its inhabitants were not yet out of the woods — not by a long shot. While the Earth, Jupiter and Saturn apparently settled quickly into somewhat stable orbits very nearly like their present paths around the Sun, Venus and Mars entered into elongated, elliptical orbits much different from those they follow today. Those eccentric orbits, which crossed Earth’s orbit, determined that Venus and Mars would periodically pass in close proximity to one another and the Earth, generating new catastrophes in the process. This was the historical epoch with which Velikovsky concerned himself.

Beginning after the flood with the Tower of Babel incident and continuing on down to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, this new period of instability and danger also included later biblical events such as the Exodus, Joshua’s Long Day, Jonah’s ministry to Nineveh and the day fire from heaven consumed Elijah’s sacrifice on Mt. Carmel. In the biblical narrative, the last catastrophic episode that saw Earth menaced by another planet was in approximately 701 B.C. when the Assyrian army of Sennacherib besieged Jerusalem. “And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the Lord went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand: and when they (the Jews in Jerusalem) arose early in the morning, behold, they (the Assyrians soldiers) were all dead corpses.” (2 Kings 19:35.)

Beyond the Bible

Every emerging culture from that prolonged epoch, whether Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Chinese or Inca, left records of those events from their own perspective. Each culture — even city-states within cultures — gave different names to the same planets/gods. Thus, the same story or a similar story is told in separate cultures, using different names, deeds and settings; yet modern scholars fail to see the commonalities. For example, there can be little doubt that Homer’s epic story of the battle of Troy recorded a catastrophic event that was also reported by Old Testament prophets; or that the Exodus even was chronicled by those outside Egypt who experienced those phenomena. The trick, as Velikovsky discovered, is to correlate the two because each saw those events from vastly different perspectives.

So, it may not be prudent to assume that since Venus was said to be Aphrodite, she was not Athena as well. She was both. She was also Hera, Medussa, Pandora, Isis, Hathor, Astarte and a multitude of other goddesses — all in different guises and settings to tell some aspect of the ancient planet’s story anthropomorphically.

What historians see as transmissions or “borrowings” of knowledge and cultural traditions — one culture to another — are largely parallel accounts from different cultures of the same events, gods and conditions in antiquity. In addition, each story or cultural tradition may or may not indicate a new event or a new god or goddess. It may simply be a re-telling of the same story from a new perspective. To further complicate things, characters, events and conditions are swapped around to create even more elaborate story lines, as in modern works of fiction or modern holidays. It is a time-tested tradition, even in temple or festival rituals where dramatic rehearsals of the acts of the gods were rehearsed.

Like witnesses to an auto accident, each one tells the story differently. The task is to recreate the actual event from the various perspectives. In this case, we are trying to sort out the accounts of a multitude of planetary encounters, told by a variety of cultures, where the actors and the settings change more frequently than ever imagined. So, each mythical account has elements of truth, but none is a fully accurate retelling of what happened or who participated. Each myth, each legend, each tradition must be carefully blended with its counterparts to create a whole that tells the real story. This is a work in progress that has only just begun.

Symbolic masking and overlays

In addition to that, these periodic, catastrophic encounters between Earth and its formerly two closest neighbors in the polar configuration, Venus and Mars, generated a new symbolism and iconography, which was superimposed on the old symbolism of the Polar Configuration. This “masking” of earlier catastrophic events by later ones makes it doubly difficult to discern the symbolism of the older events and the original configuration because of similarities — all catastrophes are natural events, born of similar physical phenomena. Thus, the mythical and ritual symbolism of later events copies or mimics that of earlier catastrophes.

Cultures not destroyed in any given catastrophe tended to focus their traditions on those most recent events. Hence, various cultures reverenced gods and icons that emerged in that catastrophe, yet they also drew on older, traditional imagery with which to adorn their new gods.

Thus, the masking of older events and symbols by more recent ones and the dramatically different perspective of events recorded by divergent cultures all has a multiplying effect on early traditions, icons and motifs, causing even more variations on ancient mythic themes. Hence, any attempt to unravel the interwoven threads of cultural and religious traditions creates bewilderment and perplexity. There is such a multitude of symbolic stories and traditions — myths, in other words — that it frustrates any systematic study of these remnants of history. Anyone who attempts to sort out the cacophony and confusion of ancient mythology can be easily overwhelmed.

Skepticism buries history

As if that were not enough, add the confusion of myth, legend and religion to the disbelief and skepticism of later generations who saw nothing but peace and stability in the solar system, and you have a formula for complete dismissal of the message our ancient forebears struggled to preserve and communicate in stone, story and ritual.

These close passes ended in the 6th century B.C., leaving a tradition of planetary catastrophe that upcoming generations had difficulty understanding or even accepting. Millennia later, mankind is almost totally ignorant of Earth’s catastrophic past. Most records of those events have long since vanished. Those few records that survived, like the scriptures, have been savaged by translators who knew nothing of ancient planetary catastrophes and subsequently mistranslated references to catastrophes. Moreover, a spirit of skepticism and unbelief has taken hold of mankind that tends to dismiss anything the least bit fantastic as invention rather than fact. Hence, those few records that have survived, sacred and profane, have been almost completely stripped of their real meaning, whitewashed by ignorance and bias. Oral traditions, myths and legends have been relegated to obscurity by generations of scientists and scholars that obstinately deny that anything extraordinary has happened in our solar system — certainly nothing like the account given above.

While much information regarding the true nature of Earth’s catastrophic past still remains in the religious traditions, customs, records, architecture, rites and rituals of all cultures — carefully preserved due to its “sacred” nature — such data carries no real credibility today, even in the minds of religious believers who completely fail to examine the evidence with anything but “spiritual” eyes.

Where the Saints stand

Mormons are no exception to this rule. The founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, spent copious amounts of his precious time trying to restore and revive information about and belief in those ancient events and conditions. His notes on Egyptian texts and his use of universal, symbolically correct archetypical symbols in modern temples as well as rites and rituals true to ancient forms are moot evidence of this. Why did he spend his invaluable time doing that rather than some other, more overtly good works? Because this knowledge is vital to one’s understanding of the gospel, the scriptures, the temple and one’s religion.

Latter-day Saints who ignore that information — the vast majority of the church membership, as it turns out — do so at their own peril.

© Anthony E. Larson, 2003