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From the Vault: "Ancient" "Astronomy" - DIRT 165
284 Plays3 years ago
This week, Amber is finishing grad school applications and Anna had some vaccine booster side effects, so we bring you an excerpt from an episode of Dirt After Dark! Amber brings Anna (kicking and screaming) along on an exploration of some space weirdos who interpreted various bits and pieces of archaeology and ethnography to show that there's another mystery planet out there, and it's out to get us. And also bring us civilization? Anyway, it gets really weird, and we hope you enjoy the ride.
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Transcript
Introduction and Patreon Update
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hey, hi. Hello, everyone. It's me, Anna, a host of this podcast. A couple of things before we get to this week's episode. First, in the interest of transparency, this is an edited version of a bonus episode from Behind the Paywall. We weren't able to record this week. Amber's working on grad school applications and I got the vaccine booster a couple of days ago and it knocked me on my butt.
00:00:27
Speaker
Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled to be boosted and growing more powerful and alluring by the day, but woof. So rather than leave you without any episode this week, we bring you a portion of the episode of Dirt After Dark in which Amber treated me to some ancient astronomy. Heavy quotes around both.
00:00:48
Speaker
Finally, more shout out! Thank you, thank you, thank you to Joseph, Nico, Heidi, Ben, and Mary. Thanks to you, we are over 100 subscribers, and that means that the Patreon special gift is in the works. So if you are a subscriber and you want this token of our appreciation, please make sure that your address is up to date so we can get it to you.
00:01:10
Speaker
And if you want to join the Patreon, you will still get all of those benefits that come along with the tier that you choose. And we'd love to have you. So head over to patreon.com slash the dirt podcast to learn more. Okay, that's all on with the show.
Ancient Astronomy and Planet Nine
00:01:47
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Dirt After Dark, the monthly top tier episode of the dirt dedicated to all the bits too spicy to list on the menu. This month, as promised, Amber is ruining my good mood with some ancient astronomy that turns out is neither ancient nor astronomy. I'm going to do my best to take us on a cogent journey. It seems like the 8.7 kicks in at some point. Yeah, well. But listener beware, caveat, auditory.
00:02:15
Speaker
This could get a little windy. So take your dramamine, crack the windows, and keep your eyes fixed straight ahead. I don't want anybody for a moment. So let me start by saying that there is absolutely a possibility of another planet in our solar system beyond the eight canon planets and our we friend Pluto. There's a theorized planet nine that has never been observed to date, which is kind of a problem.
00:02:46
Speaker
theorized because of how the planet orbits behave. Sorry. This is all new to Anna. I was told not to scroll down in the script. It's theorized by people that know about space because it could be a way to explain this pattern of clustering among orbits of a handful of extreme trans-Neptunian objects.
00:03:15
Speaker
which are objects that exist in the furthest edges of our solar system, so the furthest edge of what is affected by the central sun. Are people who study that called etnographers? I can't, this is my house. I won't. So an etno is between 150 and 250 AU, so that's an astronomical unit,
00:03:40
Speaker
if you don't remember or you never knew, an astronomical unit is the distance from the Sun to Earth. Well, that's very self-centered of us. I mean, it's all we got. And so, we do, we don't, they do. I'm not an astronomer. But in looking at planets,
00:04:04
Speaker
Mass is determined by like earth masses. Like that's the unit. Well, it's like saying how many of these could fit into Belgium like The idea is exactly like that So for your reference so to 150 and 250 AU's that may seem like meaningless to you So for your reference Neptune is 30 AU's So Neptune is the furthest like true planet My very educated mother just served us
00:04:33
Speaker
nectarines. It used to be nice pies. See, I never had mnemonics. I just learned them, which is fine. Fine. But like, I probably could have saved some space. So planet nine has been theorized to be five to 10 earth masses, because that's how big it would need to be
00:04:55
Speaker
to have the gravitational effect on those etnos, but it's also been put forward since it's never been observed, and we're pretty good at looking into space, that their quirky orbits are really just the result of observational biases. Oh, okay, interesting. Because it's, because things are very far away. But just to like really hammer that home, we are want, because this is going to become relevant when we're talking about things coming from space. Okay.
00:05:24
Speaker
So we are one astronomical unit from the sun. Right. And those are between 150 and 250 astronomical units. And we don't know what's up with them. So like that's really far to be for us to like not have any idea what's happening. It's too far. OK. A light year is a little bit over 63,241 AU's. And a light year is how far a photon can travel in
00:05:51
Speaker
300 in a solar year earth solar year, right? So a year for a unit of light is a light year. Well, I'm just saying no, no It's like how far it can get you know, I know I and that's like and so what we're doing what when you when you look at the stars You are seeing photons that have made it from wherever they were emitted.
Proxima Centauri and Ancient Texts
00:06:10
Speaker
So Proxima Centauri Like three-quarters away through page one. Don't worry. There's not gonna be a lot of So Proxima Centauri
00:06:23
Speaker
is the closest star to us. It's in the constellation Centaurus. That's why Proxima Centauri, it's the closest one in Centaurus. Is Alpha Centauri also in it? Alpha Centauri is the brightest. But it's also in that constellation. It's also in that constellation. So there aren't really, I don't know of any other stars that are known by like being close.
00:06:51
Speaker
But stars are... You'd think our sun would be, but... Well, I mean, it's not a constellation. I know. Fair point. But that's how you identify stars. So stars are... So we talked about the 28 mansions in the... I'm pretty sure I left that in. Gosh, I hope so. Because it was really interesting. The 28 mansions in the Chinese star catalog. And so it's a way to
00:07:20
Speaker
break up the sky into 28 spaces. Through which celestial bodies progress. Specifically one. The moon. And so the way that stars are cataloged in modern astronomy is they are associated with their, unless there's like something wild happening with them, they may have like their own code, like attached to them. Space code. If they're like a pulsar or they're
00:07:48
Speaker
and a pulsar is something that behaves differently and like spits out beams, like at a pulse. It spits fire? No, it spits like radio signals. I'm making a rap joke. Okay, I'm talking about space here. So you have a constellation and the stars in that constellation are ordered by their brightness. Okay. So you have, that's why you have. That makes sense. Like alpha lyri,
00:08:17
Speaker
is the star Vega, because Vega is the brightest star in Lira. But we know Vega as Vega because it's bright. It's like the brightest star. So Sirius is Alpha Canis Majori. Okay, so the stars have their own names, but they're designated by their location and brightness. Lots of stars are named, and those stars, those names come from, gosh, I think it's maybe the Almagest? But it comes from Arabic. It comes from Islamic science.
00:08:46
Speaker
So the names came first and then? The stars with names had their names before they got their appellations within the constellation. But Proxima Centauri is the closest star to us. It is 4.26 light years away. So that is 4.26 times 63,241 to think of how many times
00:09:08
Speaker
further away from us as we are from the sun. 260,000. It's far. It's really far. So remember, 150 to 250 astronomical units, we don't know what's up. So this is farther than that. Getting that far, there isn't a whole lot we can know.
00:09:30
Speaker
Okay, I accept that. We made huge strides in the last 10, 15 years in terms of knowing about exoplanets and things, but we were going from knowing nothing. So going from like the realm of the theoretical, which some of that stuff has borne out. Sure. But there's such little that we know. If you've ever seen the movie Melancholia. Nope. Well, which I recommend if you'd like to witness the experience of major depression. I don't need to do that. I don't recommend if you have experienced major depression. Yeah, I don't. Nope, I'm good.
00:09:59
Speaker
you will be familiar with the basic premise of the New Bureau of Cataclysm. If you aren't, what happens sort of at the beginning, like in the first frames and then at the very end, is a planet with a long-ass period rolls into the solar system and crashes into Earth. So the period is the time it takes for it to make an orbit? Exactly. Okay.
00:10:21
Speaker
So the idea is that Nibiru is something that has an extremely long period that goes way, way out. Far! We wouldn't see, we wouldn't know it was there. But then it comes back! And so if you'll remember, listeners in ANA, Nibiru is an astronomical location in Mesopotamian astronomical texts. The Babylonian corpus of astronomical and astrological data called the Molappan,
00:10:49
Speaker
identifies Nibiru with Jupiter. And so for, so I put the word, so it's also known as like the throne of Marduk, which is really interesting that like Jupiter is Jupiter. And has been like the patriarchal god of the. Because it's like the brightest, it's the biggest one. Yeah, no, I get it. It's the brightest one. And so like, so it's interesting that. Dumb, dumb question. Does Jupiter have a particularly long period?
00:11:16
Speaker
No. Okay. No, Jupiter's just up there. Okay. But, but, um, Nibiru has also been other things. Okay. And also there's stuff that we don't understand because as Anna will see in this tablet and whatever reader real quick, um, this is the first tablet of the Molopin. And I put the word Molopin here for Anna to look at. It's...
00:11:37
Speaker
triangle, line, triangle, line, triangle, triangle. Don't do that. Okay. So, but this is just like a fun, a serological fact. So the whole open is the first, as we were talking about with the Enuma Eilish, I think we were talking about. No, a different one. But all of them, it's the first words of the text that are used. Right. And it's like Atrahasis is the first two texts of the Sumerian flood myth, and like the creation epic.
00:12:04
Speaker
So, Mull Oppen is the first of, I was just thinking, in this naming convention, Paddington Bear, the book, would be known as Mr. and Mrs. Brown, first met Paddington on a railway station. It would be known as Mr. and Mrs. Brown, like that would be the name of the book. So, Mull Oppen is actually Sumerian, and we know that it's
00:12:30
Speaker
easy to tell that it's Sumerian because it's in all caps, Mol Oppen, because it's two signs. Mol is the first sign. And what does that sign look like to you? It's three asterisks in a triangle. Well, by default in a triangle, because there's three of them. So Mol is the logogram that indicates a star. Looks like some stars. That's great. That's great. So you put it before you put it before the name of a star. Oppen,
00:13:00
Speaker
is a logogram that, because I've talked about this before, that logograms can, so you can use Sumerian words in Akkadian to either stand for, it can either be the word with the meaning or the sound of the word. Okay. Sort of like how hieroglyphs also have a... I don't know anything about hieroglyphs, so I can't speak to that. Alrighty. You can use it as, you can do it like a rebus.
00:13:27
Speaker
Okay. Or you can do it like... Like piecing symbols and sounds together. Yeah. Or... Like sometimes in a rebus the symbols mean you're like putting the sounds together to make a new word or sometimes you're using the symbols in the rebus to say like, you know, dog. You have a picture of an eye and a picture of a deer and you can say a deer, like idea. Yeah. So that's the mollopin. I didn't mention that in the episode, but there's a little bonus of like the mollopin is like a star catalog and
00:13:57
Speaker
And it's a tablet. The fur, it's several tablets. Okay. So this is just the first one of it. Okay. The one at the British museum and I'll include it in the show notes. Well, just out of curiosity, what's the scale? Cause I see a picture, but I don't have any sense of, I don't actually know like handheld. Yeah. They're usually handheld. So they're really, really the size of a phone or something. Yeah. Okay. Okay. That's summer. Yeah. Hard to read. Yeah. It is densely cuneiformed. So Nibiru,
00:14:25
Speaker
is usually a star. It's usually a star or it's like a planet or it's like a space of like transit. Like it's a space in the, it's a space in the sky that things can move across. And in the episode, I excerpted from that article, that paper that Meek wrote, quoting something from the omens, the omens that were used. And they're talking about like when Nibiru drags.
00:14:51
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Yeah. And like the gods will not accept supplications. Everything will be terrible. Is that something where like it's not like things aren't moving as quickly as you expect or the star itself? Yeah. Maybe because it's farther away and the speed isn't sure. Um, but so maybe it could be a specific celestial object or it could be a, it could be like a trans space. Okay.
00:15:17
Speaker
a relationship, a movement relationship. Okay. That's what I understand it. I understand. So Zachareia Sitchin, who we
Controversial Theories: Nibiru and Planet X
00:15:23
Speaker
remember. This guy. Doesn't know Sumerian. Does not read it. So you know, everyone listening now know more Sumerian. Zachareia Sitchin probably did. So he pitched it as the 12th planet, because you remember that when we talked about ancient aliens before and like ancient astronauts, that there's that one seal impression with the extra planets on it. Yeah, just like extra spheres. Yeah. I guess we got to hand it to him that he never said that it was going to crash into us.
00:15:47
Speaker
He didn't say that. He did not say that. What did he say? He did say that Anunnaki had come from it and given Sumerian civilization, so maybe we don't have to hand it to him. I don't completely remember. Is Anunnaki a person? No, the Anunnaki. Are they a race? Oh, boy. Yeah. Sorry. Is that a big question? We talked to space weirdos, definitely. OK. But if you talk to a seriologist, or probably Sumerians, the Anunnaki are sort of like a premier
00:16:16
Speaker
primordial like deity thing. Okay, they aren't cosmological. They aren't demons. They aren't demigods. They aren't really God proto being there. They're just primordial beings. Okay, that live in the underworld. But Zacharias. It was like, it's a race Zacharias. It's an thought that they were
00:16:38
Speaker
that they were the first sages that came. And this is like, this is a gaga and then they came to want us. And so fish people. So this has come up before. Don't worry, we've got time for, but they'll come back. Someone we absolutely do not have to hand it to is Nancy Leader. Nancy Leader is a lady from Wisconsin.
00:17:01
Speaker
who is extremely well known in this corner of the internet and has been for like 25 years. She cemented Nibiru's place as a planet that was hurtling toward us. So in 1995, she created a website called Zeta Talk.
00:17:17
Speaker
And in 1999, she published a book with an extremely funny character. Look at this little guy. I mean, so it looks like terrible things are happening, but this guy's partying. Yeah. So it's like a very like Polly Pocket ass, like color palette. Yeah. Oh, well, I never had Polly Pockets. Um, but they were this color. Okay. Sort of like a matte purple, like a matte purple and a teal. And so it's Zeta talk, direct answers from the Zeta reticuli people. Anna.
00:17:45
Speaker
Given what you've learned about astronomy at the beginning of this episode, what is zeta reticula? The least bright star in the constellation that I assume is called something like reticulus. Reticulum. Reticulum. That's very close. And zeta isn't the least bright. It is the alpha, beta, gamma, delta, zeta. Oh, I forgot my Greek alphabet. It's the big brightest star. No, it would be Omega.
00:18:05
Speaker
omega would be the least bright. Well not necessarily, it would be the 24th most bright. Some constellations are quite big. So it's a less, oh my god. So it's the 5th brightest star in the constellation Reticulum. So really I was about half right.
00:18:24
Speaker
I know what a retic- because a gladiator who fights with the net is called a retic- I only know this because of a reticulated python, which has a net pattern on it. All right, well we have- I learned that before I learned Latin. We have different frameworks of understanding the world. So this, so the- Tell me more about Nancy. Well, I'm going to tell you about the zeta reticulants first. Okay. So the zeta reticulants are often known as the grays. Yeah. They're like the sort of like,
00:18:49
Speaker
They're a gray version of the weed-smoking alien. Yeah, like the little green man. Yeah. So those very almond-shaped eyes, giant cranium, very triangular chin, very gumby body. Yeah. And so there are these waves crashing. There's lightning. You see a city that is getting flooded. And also simultaneously
00:19:12
Speaker
dumped on by a volcano. And then our little reticulum friend, what is he pointing at? He's standing in the foreground and pointing up at a planet that I assume is Nibiru. Just hurtling at us. OK. So Nancy wrote this book. I admit it. It's a refreshing change from MadRite's book. Yeah. She has all these direct answers because she has a telepathic link with them, which is described as what I'm going to open now and read to you.
00:19:42
Speaker
This is all from ZetaTalk online since 1995. But I know exactly what that website looks like. Is it Geocities? Yes. And so it has all of these just sort of prophecy kind of stuff, like short messages that she's transcribed from them. And the reason why she gets this, Nancy is frequently asked for the source of her information, which is ourselves. This has been explained
00:20:12
Speaker
They are speaking. Oh, I'm sorry. Okay. Okay. Which is ourselves, the Zeta reticulus. Sorry. Okay. This has been explained repeatedly and is well-documented on the Zeta talk website. Big ass to Nancy. Nancy is a contactee who was volunteered to be a communicator during these troubled times. This was, um, this was written in 2000. I was going to say which troubled times. Well, don't worry. You're going to hear all about them. She volunteered before birth, her spirit volunteering and hasn't had no problems during this incarnation with her mission.
00:20:42
Speaker
to enhance her ability to understand the concepts we are presenting, she allowed herself to be modified in her late 20s with a bit of our brain tissue, DNA compatible with hers, which allows her to better receive our telepathic communication. Oh, it's amazing that human compatible DNA results in a being that looks like an X-file. And that's actually, that's one of the species, that's one of the types that were in the X-files, but this is the one that like,
00:21:10
Speaker
people talk, I'm just, I'm just saying. Um, listeners, I remind you that Amber has, uh, if this hasn't come up before, Amber has a categorical knowledge of all episodes of the X-Files. It's amazing. The portion of her brain thus modified affects only telepathic communications. So Nancy is otherwise herself. Thus the source of her information is truly us, none other.
00:21:38
Speaker
So she's somebody who believes that she has been abducted. And modified. And now has a telepathic lead to these aliens.
00:21:57
Speaker
So this was written on, actually, do you want to read it? It's the one. Love to. Cowgirl, take me away. The term 12th planet is not scientifically exact, but relates to the historical and widely read book that Sitchin, Zachary Sitchin wrote, titled The 12th Planet. In this book, he explains that the ancient visitors from this traveling comet, comet? Yeah. Huh. Considered the moon to be a planet and counted the sun as the first. The first what?
00:22:28
Speaker
It's the first planet. That's how there's 12. That's how you ended up with 12. If you start with the Sun being one. Sun's not a planet. You know what? The periodic Earth cataclysms caused by the 12th planet have been in place for eons since the Earth was cold and without life. As this statement will raise questions in some minds, let us explain.
00:22:51
Speaker
The earth was cold as the sun had not yet lit. The pilot was out. He didn't make an insta come by.
00:23:01
Speaker
All this is a matter of astrophysics and not relevant to the discussion at hand. Sorry for asking. The 12th planet, or giant comet, assumed its orbit around the sun due to gravitational and motion. My cat has issues with this. Gravitational and motion issues, which were at play, coming out of what some earthlings refer to as the Big Bang. This was, in fact, only a little bang, a local affair, however.
00:23:31
Speaker
I've been. Okay, so the, I agree, Izzy. Summer 1995 is when Hale and Bop. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. First identified Comet Hale Bop. That would, that came closest in 97. But we'll get back to that. I remember that name being very funny to young me. Yeah. Hale Bop. Hale Bop.
00:24:03
Speaker
This is not common as you see fit. That's coming up later. Great. Great, great, great. So, because I'm about to make you so mad. So according to Zeta talk and like-minded netizens of the mid-90s, Planet X was on its way from the depths of space and as it approached Earth, it would start spraying us with magnetic particles. And one of the missives from the Zeta, the Zeta reticulants, they described it as a hose.
00:24:30
Speaker
of magnetic particles. A particle hose. Yeah. So those particles would affect our magnetic field. Magnets. How do they work? And so the size of planet acts. And it's coming from behind the sun. Oh, so we won't see it coming. We won't see it coming. So its size would impact our gravitational field and rotation until finally an event.
00:24:56
Speaker
And so they talk about like the after time and like surviving the event. And the event is that the earth would stop rotating and the magnetic pole would flip, which would create all of those things that the little dude was pointing at in the cover. Lightning, volcano, tidal wave. So Anna, you know a little bit of something about how the magnetic pole flipping causes
00:25:20
Speaker
earthquakes and tidal waves and extensions and causes me to write an article for sapiens, which you can check out at sapiens.org. Um, but, um, yeah, I don't know if you want to speak to that at all. Well, it's just like, what's like a magnetic pole shift. Yeah. So, um, it turns out that the magnetic poles, as we think of them, aren't anchored to where, you know, to, to the,
00:25:46
Speaker
top and bottom of our planet the way you think they might be. In fact, there have been magnetic pole shifts in the past and generally what happens and what's been sort of documented and how we understand it now, what's happened in the past is that the magnetic pole sort of wanderings, because they don't necessarily completely flip always, they might just sort of
00:26:12
Speaker
come on MORD and just toodle around a little bit. And generally what that means is that, yes, there are fluctuations in Earth's magnetic field, which is part of what protects us from solar and other cosmic radiation. And so in the case of the last one that happened, which was around 42,000 years ago,
00:26:32
Speaker
It is suggested that the sort of blip in our magnetic field that happened resulted in a lot more bombardment of the Earth with cosmic radiation and particularly solar radiation, meaning that areas around the Earth's equator became much harsher in terms of their climate. And so this may have affected
00:26:54
Speaker
and the survival of certain species and may have, you know, kind of caused a knock-on effect that caused the extinction of lots of species. But it's not, it's still not completely understood. So what I'm hearing is earthquakes, lightning, volcanoes, FEMA camps, the elite, adrenochrome, et cetera. Yeah, so thanks for sharing that. And I'll include Anna's article in the show notes. Thank you.
00:27:22
Speaker
As Planet X moves along, things will pick up. They'll pick back up. So do you want to read this next one? Sure. Zadatalk.com slash Polshuf. Polshuf T69. Nice, nice, nice, nice. Let me, okay. Wait, I thought it was going to hit us.
00:27:41
Speaker
No, this one isn't going to hit us. OK, it goes by. After the 12th planet passes, the Earth's rotation begins again. Oh, thank God. It begins again due to the factors that guide rotation of the planets in your solar system. Which, OK, so I don't know a ton about Newtonian physics. I'm assuming there's a string hanging off of the Earth and you yank it like you're starting a gyroscope. Could be. That could be one of the factors. But I don't know a ton about Newtonian physics. I will admit that. But I do know that.
00:28:11
Speaker
Angular momentum is something that would make it impossible for the earth to stop rotating and then start again. No, because I'm like, shall I continue? Just like the laws of physics do not permit. Well, as we understand them. I mean, who knows? I mean, we've got factors to consider.
00:28:31
Speaker
Many humans assume rotation to be simply leftover motion resulting from some past activity such as the Big Bang, but rotation is gut-
00:28:43
Speaker
But rotation is guided by gravitational and electromagnetic influences on the liquid cores of planets and moons. That is, in fact, correct. Parts of the core move away from or toward these influences, dragging the, well, okay, dragging the crust with it. And it's just like spraying, just like blasting us with...
00:29:06
Speaker
And as the turning motion brings those parts of the core back to where they don't want to be, motion is reinstituted and continued. For the Earth, frozen in place at the moment of passage, rotation begins again within a day after the 12th planet moves from its influential place between Earth and the Sun.
00:29:29
Speaker
Rotation restarts at first, slowly but then picking up speed until a day on planet Earth as much as it used to be. So she's acknowledging that a day is changing. Just as rotation, this is like the Scopes Monkey Trial, or actually it's like Inherit the Wind, the play where he's like, what if God meant the first day to be a billion years? Okay.
00:29:49
Speaker
great play. Just as rotation stops within a day, just so rotation returns within a day, much to the relief of the frantic survivors who fear the long day or night they have been experiencing will never end. There are like, so there are tons of there's tons of information about like what's going to happen. And really the through line of all of it is that
00:30:14
Speaker
the event. They look like a cross between end times apocalyptic and like age of Aquarius by bracing. And so when we think about cataclysmic events of an astronomical bent that are both could be the end of world, but could possibly be just the beginning of a new age,
00:30:35
Speaker
What does that make you think of? Sounds like the Maya calendar to me.
Maya Calendar and Sirius Mysteries
00:30:39
Speaker
Yeah, so do you wanna? It's so satisfying when I correctly pick up on what you're queuing me for when it's not in the script. It makes me feel, I know, I was like, oh, I didn't write it out. I was like, maybe she'll get it, maybe she'll get it. I got it.
00:30:53
Speaker
the Maya calendar? This is just a system of recording time that's cyclical. Like a calendar. Yeah, it's a calendar. And then at the end of the year or the designated period, whatever it is, you start over. But I guess the way that the Maya calendar was recorded originally, well, I don't know. It's been interpreted as it just stops. And so it was calculated by some people that the end of the Mayan calendar was
00:31:22
Speaker
It was going to end on the winter solstice in 2012. I have a great article here by an astronomer. I think he is an astronomer, actually. But I could be wrong. But I have it cited there. So John W. Hoops wrote an article entitled A Critical History of 2012 Mythology, which is
00:31:51
Speaker
Great, it's really good. So I'm gonna read a bit of it. And I think it does a really good job of sort of, I think a lot of our listeners probably know about like the Maya calendar and the Maya apocalypse and like the 2012 and just sort of like, but this is a really interesting look at how we got here. And so I recommend you read the article in full. Hoops writes.
00:32:16
Speaker
The 20-core phenomenon is the result of speculative academic hypotheses, some discarded long ago, and some not.
00:32:24
Speaker
Scholarship on the ancient Maya, academic and otherwise, has included many crackpots. Oh, never mind. Lord Kingsborough, who commissioned facsimiles of Mesoamerican codices and descriptions of Maya ruins in the 1830s, believed Mesoamericans were the lost tribes of Israel. It's the nose, isn't it? It's the Semitic cast to the features. Yeah, swarthy and the nose. Just like that phrase.
00:32:50
Speaker
Semitic cast to the features has been burned into my brain for like 14 years. Charles Bracioi de Boerboer, discoverer of the Popov and Bishop Landes Relation, found narratives of past destructions that led him to speculate about similarities between Maya culture and Plato's Atlantis, asserting direct connections with the lost continent.
00:33:14
Speaker
Waldeck illustrated Maya reliefs with classical and Egyptian embellishments. Desiree Charnet suggested that the Toltecs were Aryans who had migrated to Mexico from the Himalayas. Augustus Le Bonjour, the first excavator of Chusin Itza, identified the roots of Freemasonry through ancient Egypt and Atlantis to the Yucatan some 11,500 years ago.
00:33:42
Speaker
His work inspired Ignatius Donnelly to trace that there's so much before Ignatius Donnelly. Like on the shoulders of giants sat that idiot. So Donnelly traced not only the Maya but all civilizations to Atlantis and assigned catastrophism to a role in ancient history. The persistence today of discarded theories about the Maya reveals a separate esoteric tradition of scholarship
00:34:12
Speaker
that has accompanied academic Maya studies as much as astrology has accompanied astronomy. So, Anna, what do you remember about the subject of ancient astronauts? Racism. Cool. That's what I remember. That's what I got. I mean, I'm glad that you remembered the most important part. OK. Do you remember?
00:34:33
Speaker
I'm just so eager to please, and yet I have so little to contribute. Okay, so as we discussed last time, they came from Nibiru. Yes. I mentioned this earlier, this episode. Yeah, well, so these are... I understand that these are beings who came from Nibiru and influenced major civilizations. That gave us civilization and taught us how to do agriculture and stuff. It's their fault. You're not life in ruins.
00:35:01
Speaker
So, okay, we've got another origin point for our interstellar companions. So not Nibiru. Not Nibiru. Okay. This is interstellar. Oh, right. This time it's Sirius. Okay, so what planet is it? This is what the Smith song Girlfriend in a Coma is about. Girlfriend in a Coma, I know. I know it's Sirius.
00:35:29
Speaker
If you mention the Smiths, I'm going to do my Morrissey impression. Oh, no. So, OK. Have you ever heard? Do you know what Sirius is? The dog star. Sirius is the dog star. Woof, woof. But, Anna, have you ever heard of the 1976 book, The Sirius Mystery? Of course not. Great.
00:35:49
Speaker
Which is also kind of surprising. Like I don't know how, I mean, I'm so like deep into this. How could anyone not know? It's just sort of like, I don't know. Well, the serious mystery is by Robert Temple, a guai, a guai, guais and gals, a guy quite fixated on ethnographic reports from the late 1940s.
00:36:10
Speaker
by theโ Sorry, when's he kicking around? Oh, 1976. 1976, he publishes The Serious Mystery. He had been kicking around for a couple decades. Okay, and then ethnographic reports from the 40s. Okay. So the ethnographic reports came out in the 1940s by the French anthropologist Marcel Greal and Germaine Zieternan about the Dogon people of West Africa in what is today Mali and Burkina Faso.
00:36:32
Speaker
Real people. Yep. Real people who still exist. Yep. And so according to Greel and Deaterland, who studied the Dogon from 1931 until 1956, they were let in on ancestral knowledge linked to the Dogon's animist religion. So it turns out that
00:36:54
Speaker
that knowledge included a lot of astronomical facts that they couldn't have possibly accessed with the technology found in their traditional society. Like the Rings of Saturn,
00:37:07
Speaker
that they existed. Okay. Yeah. The Saturn has rings. Okay. This is, you know, in, this was 1948. And you, like, society. Granted, you cannot see the rings of Saturn. You can't see the rings of Africa. I bless the rings down in Africa. The existence of four moons orbiting Jupiter. Too small to see. Too small to see. Or too far away. They're not that small. They're, they're,
00:37:34
Speaker
To the naked eye. Too low magnitude to be seen. And two companions to the star, Sirius. Our little dog pals? Yeah, because Sirius is a star system. So these super secret mythologies were an extension of the mythos about their primordial ancestor spirits, the normal.
00:38:00
Speaker
a little more background on the namo from wikipedia okay um because i don't know a lot about this i just got whoa i know i know i know you're not supposed to scroll ahead anna it's not i'm not scrolling my eyes are just there then the word namos is derived from a dogan word meaning to make one drink much like you and me in this episode
00:38:23
Speaker
Namos are usually described as amphibious, hermaphroditic, fish-like creatures. Folk art depictions of namos show creatures with humanoid upper torsos, legs, feet, and a fish-like lower torso and tail. So, namos are also referred to as masters of the water.
00:38:51
Speaker
Well, my cat has exited to Narnia through the Tupperware drawer. I'm so sorry, continue. Namos are also referred to as masters of the water, the monitors, and the teachers. I mean, Dana, just let me, okay, no, give me your thoughts. No, I just, I just, since this was ethnographic information from the 1940s, it's just like,
00:39:15
Speaker
The namas, you can look at, I think they call them fetishes of like namas, like there are... No, I believe that this exists. I just am assuming that it was massively misinterpreted. Well. But, tell me. So the informant for Grillo and Diderla about this was an elderly man in the community. One guy.
00:39:37
Speaker
Yep, yep, how perceptive. Who according to Wikipedia, I'm quoting again, a shared that a belief that the Namos were inhabitants of a world circling the star serious. The Namos descended from the sky in a vessel accompanied by fire and thunder. And like I also saw like a great wind
00:40:03
Speaker
Okay. Sure. After arriving, the Namos created a reservoir of water and subsequently dived into the water. Oh, nice. Because they are infectious. Yeah, yeah. The Dogon legend states that the Namos required a watery environment in which to live. According to the myth related to Grille and Diderlin, quote, the Namo divided his body among men to feed them. That is why it is also said that the universe had drunk of his body. The Namo also made men drink.
00:40:31
Speaker
He gave all his life principles to human beings," end quote. So does that sound like anything? It's a little body and blood of Christy. Yeah. Yeah. But also, what's that sound like with amphibious beings showing up and giving them life's principles? Besides, like, lizard people? Exactly. Oh, OK. You want more than that now? Yeah. So Temple's book decided to figure out how the Dogon got this mythology.
00:40:59
Speaker
because obviously like they couldn't have come up with it. So like it's like doubly racist. It's racist and like weirdly infantile or like just like these people are too dumb to. But like they're too dumb to have been like picked by the space things that had to have come because people were too dumb to come up with it on. Like it's just like. It's a weird racist catch 22. It's like incepted itself.
00:41:26
Speaker
So he links the Dogon up to the Bronze Age civilizations of Mesopotamian Egypt and Berossus' story of Goanas, which if you remember Berossus was a story that it was just kind of like if like if
00:41:48
Speaker
If someone, if a drunk person told you Sumerian, like, Mesopotamian mythology, and when you were about eight, and then today you were like, this is what I remember. Yeah. Okay. And it's just like taking some things as literal that were clearly metaphorical. Kind of a wobbly filter. And so it was like, well, it was like, Juan has came and he was a fish person. And like looking at, like looking at the, um, the sages and like, okay, at the,
00:42:14
Speaker
you know, the guys with carps on their head. Oh, the, yeah, the, the upkalu. Yeah, the upkalu. Yeah. Great job. Thank you. Thank you. Um, the serious mystery, my magnum opus is one of the cornerstones of ancient aliens. Great. But the ethnographic reportage by Greel and Dederlem wasn't dismissed without discussion. So astronomer Ian Ridpath. Okay. That other guy wasn't an astronomer. This guy is an astronomer. Just,
00:42:43
Speaker
All right, sorry, Mr. or Dr. Hoop. Yeah. So Ian Ridpath tackled this from an astronomical perspective in an article for skeptical inquirer. I'm inclined to appreciate this. Yeah. So please indulge me as I read a rather long excerpt. Michelle. Thank you. Let's look more skeptically at the Dogon legend. Immediately, we encounter a surprise.
00:43:11
Speaker
The Doha maintained that Sirius has two companions, not one. These companions have male and female attributes, respectively. They also, they had a, in their report, they had a drawing that was like a reproduction of what their informant drew on the ground, like did like a diagram for them. And so it's- Again, this one guy. One dude. I can't remember his name. I apologize to that man.
00:43:41
Speaker
I mean, yeah, I was going to say, if he was an old man in 1940, whatever. It seems that they are not able to be interpreted literally as stars, but as fertility symbols. Nowhere is this better shown than in a Dogon sand diagram of the complete serious system, shown in the illustration read your own, its description, given in the caption from information by Grille and Diderlin, is clearly symbolic.
00:44:07
Speaker
Temple chooses to interpret it literally. On pages 23 and 25 of his book, he gives his own modified version of this diagram, retaining the symbol for Sirius. So he just made some stuff up? He modified the diagram. He retains the symbol for Sirius, one of the positions of Sirius B, and the surrounding oval, all else is omitted.
00:44:33
Speaker
He then interprets the surrounding oval meant to represent the egg of the world as the elliptical orbit of Sirius B around Sirius A, even though the symbol equated with Sirius B is drawn lying within the oval, not on it. This is Temple's basis for saying that the Daugan know that Sirius B orbits Sirius A in an ellipse. So, and so- Temple's re-imagining of an existing diagram is his basis for this thing that he
00:45:03
Speaker
is saying? Yeah. So, so I guess he could say that like, this is what they were getting at. Says Temple. Yeah. Okay. And so the Dogon are also supposed to know that Sirius B orbits every 50 years. So there's a 50 year period. Great. But what do they actually say? Griot and Dieter Lamb put it as follows quote,
00:45:26
Speaker
Do you want to do this in a French accent? The period of the orbit is counted double, that is 100 years, because the what? The siguis? Yeah. Okay. Siguis. Sigus. What? Qua? I think it's siguis. Okay, Dakar, are convenient pairs of twins, so as to insist on the basic principle of twinness,
00:45:51
Speaker
The seaweed ceremony referred to as a ceremony of the renovation of the world that is celebrated every 60 years, not 50. That's fine. That's fine. I mean, they have very simple people. And the twinness referred to here is an important doggone concept, which explains why they believe Sirius must have two companions. Does it? It definitely doesn't. All righty. So the Sirius star cluster is a very, it is the big
00:46:20
Speaker
the big, bright star. And then a, um, it's got friends. Yeah. Okay. That is like trapped by it. It's like a little yappy dog that's around a big friend. Yeah, it's the nugget. So the whole Dogan, and so I'm going back to, um, his article here. Okay. Dogan legend of Sirius and its companions is riddled with ambiguities, contradictions, and downright errors. At least if we try to interpret it literally.
00:46:45
Speaker
But what can we make of the Dogon statement that Sirius B is the smallest and heaviest star consisting of a heavy metal known as Sagala? Wait, sorry. The star is made out of a heavy metal named Sagala. I know, but is this real or made up because I've lost track? Nana, what are stars made out of? Oh, right. Heavy metals, obviously. Oh, no. Sirius B was certainly the smallest and heaviest star known in the 1920s when the super dense nature of the white dwarfs
00:47:16
Speaker
was becoming understood. The material of which white dwarfs are made is indeed compressed more densely than metal. Now, though, hundreds of white dwarfs are known, not to mention neutron stars, which are far smaller and denser. Any visiting spaceman would clearly have known about these as well as black holes.
00:47:36
Speaker
Perhaps one would forgive Robert Temple for believing that the Dogon had been visited by men from Sirius if their legend specifically stated so, but it does not. Nowhere in his 290 page book does Temple offer one specific statement from the Dogon.
00:47:52
Speaker
to substantiate his ancient astronaut's claim. Well, he didn't go, right? He's just... No, he's going off of what was published with 25 years ago. The best he does is on page 217, where he reports that Dogon say, quote, Poe Tolo, Sirius B, and Sirius were once where the sun is now. Okay.
00:48:13
Speaker
Of this ambiguous statement, Temple comments, quote, And with that, listeners, we'll wrap up
00:48:35
Speaker
this excerpt from the Dirt After Dark episode just as things, if you can believe it, take a turn for the even weirder. But we hope you enjoyed this offering, and we hope that you are staying safe out there, and we love you. Goodbye.
00:49:00
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV Traveling America, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, in the Archaeology Podcast Network. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.