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Some might think of Von Daniken as a bit of a crack-pot, and I can't help but not take everything too seriously when every other ancient picture of 'a being' with pointy things on it's head is an alien with antennae, but how else can such imagery be interpreted. There are also plenty of further images on the internet to back up the belief. Daniken also talks briefly about the pyramids of Egypt which I am personally interested in and echoes some of what Sitchin later said in his book The End of Days (see below). There is a review here of the book. This is an interesting extract (although widely quoted with no further, easy to find information): "In the Bodleiean Library, Oxford, England, is a manuscript by the Coptic Scribe, Abu’l Hassen Ma'sudi, catalogued as the Akbar-Ezzeman, M.S. And in it we read:----'Surid, a king of Egypt, before the flood (of Noah's time) had two pyramids built. He ordered his priests to deposit inside of them all the wisdom and knowledge of the scientists then available. In the Great pyramid they also placed information about the heavenly spheres and figures that represented the stars and planets, their positions, and cycles. But also the foundations of mathematics and geometry. He did this so that they would be preserved forever for those descendants who could read the signs." For me, this sounds like Freemasonry. p.83 Von Daniken "asked several philologists where the word god comes from" and as I have read before, he was told "that in the very earliest writings the singular 'god' did not exist. The first mythological traditions spoke exclusively in the plural of 'the gods', and this primordial concept was roughly translatable as 'those circling in the clouds'. Von Daniken takes this to mean "temporary visitors from other stars", but as I have read elsewhere, I take it to mean the planets. p.88 I had not before heard about the Codex Fresdensis, the Paris Codex or the Madrid Codex, also known as Tro-Cortesianus. "The date for the start of [the Mayan] chronology was a day in the year 3113 BC... [this] has no connection with the actual history of the Maya, but has a purely 'symbolic' value... A great deal has been written about the Maya calendar. One fact is that it operated with cycles of years that were only supposed to have repeated themselves every 374,000 years." p.109 Referring to a large stone Aztec calendar, Von Daniken says that "The calendar relates that in the dim past jaguars came and destroyed the prehistoric animals, after which storms carried men away. In the third age there was rain of fire and a global flood. Oh yes, and the present age, called '4 Olin', is going to be wiped out by an earthquake." There is a bit more on this in part three of this web page.
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I thought I had read one of Sitchin's other books... but it was in fact Gods of the New Millennium by Alan F. Alford as his book is also about Nibiru or as he calls it, Planet X. 'Orbital Considerations for Planet X' is an interesting paper that refers to both authors.
Notes: p.61 "Celestially, "the great planet" will appear in the constellation of the Ram..." p.117 "If in the third millennium B.C.E. god fought god using armies of men, in the second millennium B.C.E. men fought men "in the name of god." p.220, p.222 and p.223 seem to me to conflict themselves for p.220 states "But then, in 556 B.C.E, there occurred an extraordinary solar eclipse "not in an expected time." [because it was the unexpected arrival of Nibiru]", p.222 states "Still, it is an astronomically historic fact that on a day equal to May 19, 556 B.C.E., a major total solar eclipse did occur." and p.223 states "It was in 556 B.C.E. that the prophesied darkness at Noon came." Solar Eclipses are and were predictable, therefore to say one occurred at an unexpected time is wrong if it was expected, and on the other hand a coincidence that Nibiru returned at the same time, to also cause an eclipse? p.229 "The prophet's opening statement is usually translated "visions of God." The term Elohim, which is plural, has been traditionally translated as "God" in the singular, even when the Bible itself clearly treats it in the plural, as in "And Elohim said let us fashion the Adam in our image and after our likeness" (Genesis 1: 26." This is is also pointed out in The Secret History of the World by Jonathan Black (see below) in which Black states this is because "Gods" means the planets, but Sitchin goes on to state the Gods are the Anunnaki (from Nibiru). p.232 Sitchin states "The Departure [of the Anunnaki] was related to the Return of Nibiru - the gods left Earth when Nibiru came." but he also points out that "(a) the gods grew angry with the people, (b) the gods "flew away like birds," and (c) they ascended to "heaven". So again, which is it, or did this period of unrest just coincide with the return of Nibiru. Sitchin paints an interesting picture of the "gods" of Nibiru coming to Earth for its gold because it was required for the atmosphere back on Nibiru (to make it habitable for them?) and that the Cydonia complex on Mars was a way-station, a stop-off point on their way back. p.281 It was sort of inevitable that the story would lead to the point of time when Jesus was born. Sitchin mentions some parts of Jesus', such as the last supper that are discussed in The Jesus Dynasty by James D. Tabor (see below).
To begin with, this book is hard to digest,
and this is from someone who has read a book on a similar topic, but
stick at it and what the author has to say seems to fall into place -
even if you don't accept what it is he is saying. |
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This book documents the evolution of human consciousness and the balance between spiritualism and materialism.
Notes: "Humans breath on average 25,920 times per day, which is the number of years in a great Platonic year (i.e. the number of years it takes for the sun to complete a full cycle of the zodiac). The average or 'ideal' human life - seventy-two - also has the same number of days in it." p.43 Kidneys - testosterone p.48 "Conventionally minded Christians may wish to stop reading now." The author then goes on to explain that because of science all the Gods of the past have been forced out of the picture and thus we are left with "an extreme and radical monotheism" which is what "today's church preaches". "Christian churches... all over the world have been built on... certain sites... [that] have been regarded as portals for the spirits, cracks in the normal fabric of the space-time continuum." Great Scott! p.94 "Idealism [according to] philosophy holds that the cosmic mind and the thoughts or Thought-Beings emanating from it (ideas) are the higher reality. Physical objects, on the other hand, are mere shadows or reflections of this higher reality." p.105 "Because of the encasing, bony skull and the enmeshing of the organs of spiritual perception, humans, were now shut off not only from the gods ranged above them, but also from each other. A shadow was falling over human relations. It became possible for one centre of consciousness to believe itself cut off from another. "In the same way that we would be overwhelmed by the spirit worlds if they were not filtered out, if there were no filter on empathy we would feel everyone's pain as our own..." p.108 Enoch knew that just as thought processes weaken health, language weakens memory. p.115 Before language, everything that happened was meant to happen - people could not question. p.127 By this point the author leads me to think about suppression. In the past some key examples were the suppression of witches, the native Americans, but now I think how even such groups as the Taliban are trying to be suppressed. p.130 Spiritual - "the ability to see, hear and communicate with the [spirit world]. p.134 "...consciousness and memory are not stored in the brain alone..." p.157 "[Jung] concluded that these psychological complexes [such as believing in disembodied spirits] were autonomous in the sense of being independent of the human brain altogether... The reader should beware of taking the same step... [this is] important because a momentary lapse of concentration in this regard you might... begin to walk down the road that leads straight to the lunatic asylum." p.160 "Marriages [in the past] were usually within a tribe or extended family. Supernatural powers were connected with blood, and marriage between people of the same blood strengthened powers, something which used to be a part of the tradition of the gypsies, for example. Marriage of individuals from different tribes could involve an exchange of powers and knowledge." Similar beliefs hold true today but often it's seen to be genetic makeup, such as if a father has a particular skill then so must his son, and the phrase 'it's in his blood' is still widely used. p.164 "In the fourth century BC the historian Diodorus of Sicily described a spherical sun temple in the north, dedicated to Apollo. Today scholars believe he was describing Stonehenge or, more likely, Callanish in the far north of Scotland." p.174 see also The Bible Code as the author brings this topic to the table. "In esoteric circles language which is imbued by initiates with layers of meaning is sometimes called the Green Language" is Lojban close to this? "One possibility... perhaps we all speak the Green Language all the time? [just subconsciously]." p.175 Sigmund Freud and Akhenaten's ideas of monotheism. Akhenaten was brought up inside the temple precincts of Egypt and grew up with a sense of cosmic mission. He had been born with a chromosomal defect that gave him a strange, hermaphroditic, even unearthly appearance: womanly thighs and an elongated face that might be read as ethereal, even spiritual. This defect can also lead to symptoms of mental instability - mania, delusions, paranoia. Some combination of these factors may have contributed to his actions, which threatened to disrupt the whole progress of human evolution. The start of his reign coincided with the beginning of a Sothic cycle. He proceeded to really shake things up - he declared that all other gods did not really exist and that Aten was the one, true and only God. - we all know the Egyptians had many gods so this was monotheism in something very like the modern sense (the worship of the other gods was forbidden). Their temples were effaced and shut down, and their popular festivals declared superstitions. This to me sounds all too familiar! Like today's monotheism, Akhenten's was materialistic. Is this not the underlying reason, to lead people a stray from their spiritual path? "To deny the experience of spirits" Eventually things collapsed - his daughter died, then his mother and then all record of his wife disappears. Then he was killed. All traces of his name were removed and his position on the throne was quickly taken over by the boy pharaoh Tutankhamen. "Some commentators have seen Akhenaten as a prophetic, even saintly figure. It is significant though, that as we know from Manetho, the Egyptians remembered his reign as a Sethian event. Seth is, of course, Satan, the great spirit of materialism, who always works to destroy true spiritualism." p.180 This seems somewhat contradictory: "The mission of Solomon was to lead humankind down into a darkening, more material world, keeping the flame of spirituality alive. It was the same mission that Freemasonry would take up in the seventeenth century at the dawn of the modern age of materialism." p.192 "If we see in the Athenians a gift for free, individual though, we see in Sparta the development of individual will, competitive edge and admiration, to the point of hero-worship, of strong men." p.193 "The star-like spirits of the dead ascended though the gate of Capricorn and up through the spheres, before descending back into the material world through the gate of Cancer." More on this at www.skyscript.co.uk/cap_myth.html .194 "In the secret tradition Socrates was a reincarnation of the great spirit who have previously lived in the body of Silenus... the aim of philosophy is to teach one how to die" p.201 "In The Principles of Human Knowledge Bishop Berkeley... advocated a version of idealism according to which matter has no existence independent of perception." p.205 "Julius Caesar eradicated the Druids because of their teaching of the Sun Mysteries - that the Sun god was soon to return to earth. Similarly Augustus banned astrology not because he disbelieved in it, but because he was anxious about what astrologers could see written in the sky." Caesar wanted power and control and therefore refused other gods, he wanted to be seen as god. p.209 "The cosmic plan had been that human spirits should attain individuality, should be able to think freely, to exercise free will and to choose who to love... Human thought and will was then no longer wholly controlled by gods, angels and spirits... However there were dangers in this... not only might humanity become altogether cut off from the spirit world, there was a danger, too, that humans would become completely cut off from on another." This rings true in my mind with the family unit and meal times which are no longer spent together at a dinning table but spent watching TV.
p.219 "The New Testament is full of occult
and esoteric teaching, some of it explicitly stated. The problem is that
we have been educated to be blind to it." |
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Notes: p.12 I found it interesting that while the three ships were embarking on a voyage of new discovery, none were equipped for such a voyage. Even though they were supported by Rome they weren't travelling to spread the "word of God", and they weren't equipped for an invasion either. p.16 "And there is some reason to suspect that he may have had, who knows how, some idea of the wind patterns across the Atlantic, for he did select routes both out and back that were so accurate in making use of prevailing air currents that sailing ships use them to this day." I read about the winds that carry vessels westward, known in ancient times, in Thor Heyerdahl's book I last read. p.17 "...the standard historians' line that the European conquest of America was driven by "God, Gold, and glory" would seem to be pretty much on the mark." p.22 "Just why Colon chose to sail to the Canaries is not quite clear. It is true that they were the westernmost possessions of Castile - but they were 700 miles to the south and represented a considerable deviation for a fleet that would presumably have been aiming due west. It may have been, as some have suggested, that he had picked up somewhere (perhaps during his time in the Madeiras) an idea that he would find easterly winds at that latitude, and if so, that was no doubt the most important single decision in his entire navigational career, for that is exactly what happened... Or it may have been pure dumb luck, as others have suggested, inspired by an idea that his ultimate destination was on the same latitude..." Basically, I've determined the voyage to (rediscover) America ventured westward on the same longitude as the Great Pyramid of Egypt and many other such sites around the world... that and Rome knew America was there because they had maps (and other documents) which they'd swiped from the Library of Alexandria before they torched the place. p.48 "There was no doubt that they did know how far it was to their destination, for Fernando assures us that his father "had often told them they must not expect to strike land until they had sailed seven hundred and fifty leagues west of the Canaries." p.54 Yeah, so it turns out that he wasn't Christopher Columbus (as you seem to get taught in school), but more likely Christobal Colom in Portugal, or Cristobal Colon in Spain. p.55 I like the Spanish word querencia, "which implies not merely a 'love of home,'... but a deep, quiet sense of inner well-being that comes from knowing a particular place of the earth... It is that place where, whenever you return to it, your soul releases an inner sigh of recognition and relaxation." I realise I have such a place.
p.69 "The landfall island itself, as we may surmise from archaeological scholarship, would have been first inhabited sometime around A.D. 900... the landmass that is today known as North America, to which the Bahamian islands are geologically and biologically related, was discovered and temporarily settled by Europeans at least as early as A.D. 1000. There is now no question whatsoever that Norse explorers, presumably sailing from their colonies in Greenland, came upon Baffin Island, Labrador, and Newfoundland, all parts of North America, in the eleventh century..." p.81 "From these elemental patterns in Europe's tapestry of nature - ignorance and fear, separation and hostility, dominance and exploitation - a discernible image emerges: of a world more mechanistic than organic, more artificial than intrinsic, more corporeal than numinous, from which intimacy, sacredness, and reverence have all but vanished (it would be the achievement of the next five centuries to eliminate them entirely) and in which something colder, duller, and more lifeless presides instead..." p.141 Like the natives of Britain In The Year Zero (see below), "[the native Americans] marry as many wives as they please; and son cohabits with mother, brother with sister, male cousin with female, and any man with the first woman he meets." p.151 "It is said, by Las Casas among others, that what perplexed the Tainos of Espanola most about the strange white people from the large ships was not their violence, not even their greed, nor in fact their peculiar attitudes toward property, but rather their coldness, their hardness, their lack of love." p.173 I found it strange that "the ancients and the Holy Church were wrong about the single Island of the Earth and this was some kind of orbis alterius that the theologians had proved was impossible" not that they were wrong but that this sentence contradicts the earlier statement about the Church knowing, and possibly having ancient maps showing that there was an 'America'. p.177 "There is a recurrent theme among the myths of many of the Indians of the Americas that might be described as one not of Paradise Lost but of Paradise Now: in effect, of peoples having ascended from a dark Other World, a world of sorrow and evil, into the present Edenic garden, peoples not fallen but risen, not damned but blessed, not inherently sinful but inherently salubrious. Such a belief might change a culture's view of the world around it quite substantially." With this in mind, what is it that we, the Europeans, are trying to achieve with 'our world', our constant strive for improvement? p.190 "Seneca... predicted in Medea that 'the years will come, in the succession of the ages, when the Ocean will loose the chains of things, and a huge land lie revealed". p.200-1 "...he lost interest entirely in the gentle Tainos... he conquered and ruled [them] by force, killing fellow beings with no more compassion than a butcher for his beasts." p.206 "Can it be an accident that this was almost exactly the configuration of the Western Hemisphere represented on the first printed map of the New World, by Giovanni Matteo Contarini in 1506, just four years later; on the Johannes Ruysch map of 1507; and quite similar to the Piri Re'is map of 1513 that was labeled as having been based on a chart taken by the Turks...?" What was the whole purpose of the voyages? Find other lands (secretly known?) unknown? Just to see what's there? Find a route to India (hence the native Americans became know as Indians because that's what they were thought to be? Gold? Colonisation? I question these in my History section. p.242 Of this latter purpose, it is interesting to note that on the voyage in 1606/7 that resulted in the founding of the first permanent English settlement in North America, Jamestown, in the new Colony of Virginia, "there were no farmers, no botanists, none with a special knowledge of what was then called 'natural history', [nor even any] goldsmiths, and there were no women, although a century of European colonization attempts had demonstrated by then how crucial they were to successful settlement." p.249 A little bit off topic - witchcraft "[Witchcraft] was in essence, the name given by the established authorities to the various surviving forms of paganism, animism, and goddess-worship that still played a large part in certain European belief-systems, particularly in rural areas, stemming from roots deep in fertility cults and nature-worship from the past that the Church had never been able to suppress." p.256-7 Learning about the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre was pretty horrific. p.258 "America in a phrase... the land of exploitation." p.269 "Whatever the differences between English and Spanish forms of conquest, they were alike in their desire to emplace their own foreign populations, establish political and ideological hegemony, settle and control large stretches pf land, effect military control - and achieve spiritual regeneration in the process." A method I believe that was inherited by the Romans 1000 years earlier. p.272-3 "Time and again it is reported that the colonists were 'not so provident... as to put corne in the fround for their winters bread' or 'not compelled (since in themselves unwilling) to sowe Corne for their own bellies, nor to put a Roote, Herbe, &c. for their owne partiular good in their Gardens, or elsewhere." Time and again it is said that they succumed to unaccountable 'idleness and bestiall sloth,' 'laziness,' and 'unwillingness,' and 'had they not been forced... they would all have starved.' This is not all that surprising though when you learn of the types of people who we are dealing with - not farmers or even people that know manual labour of any kind - are they not the same types of people that live today off benefits, who have no self-motivation when it comes to providing for themselves but instead expect to be provided for? Sadly, today these people can survive living this way. "...the alienation from nature [was] already ingrained in European culture - and more so in settlers from distinctly urbanized societies such as southeastern England and southern Spain - might well create a psychological impotence, a withdrawal, a kind of mental fetal-positioning, that would read to the world as idleness and laziness." p.283 Regarding using/abusing the land for monetary gain "the only way to maintain income with falling prices was to move farther and farther out into Powhatan country and plant larger and larger fields, felling trees and clearing lands wherever they could, regardless of local populations or environments... in Virginia it proved all the more voracious because the tin topsoils of the tidewater coast (not enriched by glacial mineral deposits, as northern soils are) were exhausted in a half-dozen years and [tobacco] plantations were abandoned and left to erosion... such farming ensured that the minimum number of people would have the maximum impact on the soul and forest, none of it beneficial. Even today [these regions] show the disastrous effect... It is perhaps fitting that the first colony of what was to become the United States was saved by, and built entirely around, a product of human and environmental debilitation." p.284 Reading about the 'slaves' that formed the servants of Jamestown and their 'freedom grants' gave me a sense of deja-vou after reading about the same treatment by the Romans throughout Europe. p.286 "In its attitude to the land, and the creatures thereof, a culture reveals the truest part of its soul." p.287 It's sad that for the original colonisers "The world was all before them, but somehow they saw it not." The author suspects "that this remarkable blindness, this separateness, is part of that same mental blockading, the psychological distancing, that psychological distancing and numbing, that descended on the Jamestown settlers... not knowing how to assimilate the American wilderness..." p.289 "To this terror of the wild the European mind opposed the serenity of the garden: nature tamed, nature subdued, nature, as it were, denatured. The mission to impose control - and its aesthetic analogue, order - on elements of the natural world was seen as the very duty, the very purpose, of civilization and above all its Christian form." p.291 "...within a just a century [the Europeans] did more to alter the environment of North America, in some places and for many populations quite irretrievably, than the many millions of the American branch had done in fifteen centuries or more. It took a special kind of mind to see that impact as beneficial, as "progress," indeed as "civilisation." But the European (and the American successor) possessed just such a mind: those English who clear-cut their way through ancient primordial forests actually spoke of 'making land.'"
In summary, the Europeans could have learned
a lot from the Native Americans, and had they done so, the world would
have turned out to be an amazing place. |
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For one, Britain was called Albion. It was "peopled by warring, primitive, illiterate tribes" known as Chavs! "Greek writers referred to Albion as a mysterious place, a land of spirits, of evil and danger." Cheap cider, happy slappings and knife crime! I found this book to be an interesting and also saddening insight into the Roman invasion of Britain but it made for a nice companion to The Roman World (see below).
Notes: "The British men also shaved the rest of their body which in Year Zero was quite profusely hairy. The average height of an ancient Briton at that time was approximately 5ft 6 in, while the women were remarkably small, measuring on average two or three inches below 5ft." p.18 "It revealed to Caesar that at least some of the British - as well as the intellectual Druid priests - could read and write and had even acquired a knowledge of Latin, the mother tongue of the Romans. It suggested to Caesar that Britain must have had a scholarly culture equal if not superior to what they had discovered during the conquest of Gaul decades earlier." p.20 "Modern Britain claims a 'democratic' form of government, but in reality Britain's alleged democratic process is an oligarchy in which the people are governed by a small group of people of a particular political party." p.23 "For centuries before Year Zero, the British Isles had been a natural place in which the tribes and peoples of Europe would settle." Not much it would seem, has changed since then, although maybe we (those that think they are British) have become less tolerant. p.24 As for sex, for the men it was a free-for-all and thus "most girls produces their first child by the age of 14 and would then become pregnant usually once a year" even including by their father or brother. It's explained later in the book that the constant wars between tribes helped to keep population numbers in check but later when the Romans took over and peace time hit the nation the population began to boom. Further more, wife sharing and homosexuality were also common place as noted by Caesar. p.87 "The Druids were considered both the priestly class and the wise men of the tribe who carried on the traditions of those early Magi who had planned the stone circles of Britain, such as Stonehenge." Who were these "early Magi", are they who the Druids gained their early knowledge from and were the Magi originally from Egypt or even Atlantis? Read more about my ideas on my History page. "The Druids continued the megalithic (stone worship) folk practices of ancient Neolithic (Stone Age) people certainly until the Year Zero and beyond. "And yet the rites and teachings of Druidism seemed to have much in common with the religions of India, especially the similarities between the functions and the positions in society of the Druids and their Indian counterparts, the Brahmins, the wise men of the Hindu religion. Both Druid and Brahmin were heirs to a common tradition of learning and culture. "Both the Hindus and the Druids worshipped sacred trees..." p.89 "In the centuries around 4,000BC, Europe was covered with oak forests, and primitive hunter-gatherers saw the oak as a symbol of plenty, a tree from which they would collect acorns as an integral part of their staple diet... "Oak was also respected as the tree that supplied excellent hard wood for burning, as well as being used to build timber dwellings... so believe [the oak] might never die if not cut down." But it was cut down, and thus are landscapes are virtually void of them. p.90 "Most hamlets and villages in pre-history Britain were selected and built around a tree which immediately took on a sacred status. It was usually called the tree of life, standing as a talisman in the centre of the community. Sometimes raiding parties would attack a small commune solely with the intent of cutting down the sacred tree..." Maybe once all the oaks were gone a standing stone was erected instead. p.91 And the obvious symbolic reference to the oak (and standing stones)... "the ultimate phallic symbol". "Tacitus (55-120AD)... wrote of the greatest shrines of the classical world being revered features, such as trees or rocks, and usually situated in rural and often extremely remote areas in forests and mountains." p.93 "Though the Druids preached the doctrine of transmigration of the soul, it was not accepted by the mass of the British people who, in Year Zero, still held firm in the belief that there was a future life after death, a form of the 'Continuance Theory" which for centuries held sway in primitive and more modern tribes. The Britons believed in [what we would term Heaven]." p.94 "To Rome, the Druids represented an intellectual and challenging opposition. The Romans were materialistic, the Druids spiritual. "Romans looked upon women as bearers of children and objects of pleasure to e used and abused as men saw fit, while the Druids respected women, including them in both their political and religious life." p.97 In some hamlets and villages, there were also human images carved out of stone and huge boulders and these, too, were venerated as local gods. Indeed, some societies worshipped large stones and boulders on which nothing had been carved at all. Sometimes, large stones became objects of worship locally, perhaps because of something as banal as the sun shining on them in some unusual way..." or perhaps because the were the counterpart to the sacred oak. p.98 "The idea of erecting altars to various gods had been imported into Britain... on the majority of these altars the solar symbol - the six-spoked solar wheel - was carved." It is widely accepted that numerous ancient Celtic crosses are carved on what were standing stones. p.101-4 The authors talk about the religion(s) of pre-Roman-invaded Britain and the religion of the invaders but I failed to fully understand which the author was talking about. "When Caesar visited Britain during his two invasions, he recorded that the tribesmen of Britain worshipped [what he called] Mercury, Apollo, Mars and, first and foremost, Jupiter, the sun-god, just as the people of Gaul did at that time. It was only after Rome's successful invasion of Britain in AD43 that the truth of the facts of pagan religion and the multitude of different gods gradually emerged." That makes sense although it is Caesar that is describing them as gods and not necessarily how the natives saw these 'influences' (gods/spirits). The confusion for me comes from reading that "Religious buildings were constructed on the edge of large villages in which the inhabitants would go to pray to their gods." I presume these are what Caesar witnessed, not what the Romans instigated. Public 'churches' and private places of "worship" were present too. "Some were sited in their own enclosures, but all were separate from the rest of the village." I am surprised that such buildings, if built by the natives, were present as I had previously thought that religious sites were simply that, sites, maybe with a stone or tree as mentioned earlier. "The intellectual elite were divided into Bards, Druids and Vates... Druids were also teachers, healers and judges, physicians and historians, astronomers and astrologers, seers and magicians, poets and musicians. And they kept the all important [Coligny] calendar around which ancient society was organised." The authors then go on to say how it much have been the Druids who constructed Stonehenge in the second Millennium BC and that they also 'knew the shape and size of the world' as noted by the historian Pomponius Mela (10-75AD). But were these things actually developed by the Druids or was their knowledge inherited from others. It is mentioned earlier on that the Romans had a high level of respect for the druids, maybe for both their level of knowledge, their influence over the more common people of Albion but at the same time they maybe realised that removing this influence would aid their efforts to invade and diminish attacks on themselves. p.113 "During the last 2,000 years, however, respect for the mighty Druids has been slowly, continually and deliberately under minded principally by the forces of the Christian church." But only the Christian church? What about the Catholic church which is usually more widely known for its underhand tactics when it comes to suppressions? And why have these suppressions continued for so long? I was under the impression that the Druids were essentially ousted once Britain became Romanised, why were there such efforts to continually ensure no such Druidistic ways of life or seeing the world would make a come back? The conspiracy theorist in me is lead to think that the Church recognises that there is something in this Druidistic belief system, a knowledge of this something that they want to reserve for themselves and keep within their inner sanctum and not let back our into the wider world, a knowledge to be kept from the common intellectual. "Originally, the Magi were the wise men and priestly caste of ancient Persia and their alleged powers over the supernatural gave us the word magic. In essence, the Magi were the equivalent of the Druids of Europe." They suffered at the same hand of the Romans as the Druids, earlier in fact. Was the belief system of the Magi the same as the Druids and if so, where did it come from or was it just something that developed naturally over centuries or millennia? p.146 "Those first two engagements were mere skirmishes and the large Roman force had not yet broken the spirit of the British warriors who still confronted their enemies from a distance, yelling obscenities and profanities which the Roman legions would never have understood"... this sounds like the familiar noise of drunken yobs on many a high street in modern day Britain (the Roman force being the police in this case)! p.161 "[Ostorius'] first campaign took the Roman legions to north Wales, a part of the country inhabited by the Decangi tribe..." p.163 More on Wales... "By the year AD47, Caratacus had become the general in command of those tribes which still opposed Rome and he set up his headquarters in the territory of the Ordovices in Wales, where he hoped to be out of reach of the Roman legions." p.176 "At the time Boadicea struck at Colchester, the Governor, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, was encamped 240 miles away in Anglesey [(North Wales)] with both the Fourteenth and the Twentieth Legions." p.186/7 I found it interesting to read that "...the idea that the Romans came to Britain and constructed towns, cities, superb buildings and a wonderfully efficient road system for the benefit of the local citizens of Albion was far from the truth. Indeed, the occupying Roman legions didn't, in fact, undertake any work for the local population, not even defence works... The only buildings constructed by the Romans were for their own occupation... the famous roads... were only built to speed the movement of Roman troops." p.189-191 "The state Roman objective was to persuade Britons to move from their scattered dwellings, become educated in Roman ways and take part in public life, which in Roman terms was a city-based concept." This to me is like the current British forces in Iraq. "...village life... had dominated the [British] country from the first settlements centuries before. Roman philosophers believed that man's bodily and animal existence might be satisfied by country life but his spiritual needs could only be satisfied by the town." For me, both are satisfied by the country and I find little to be spiritual in towns and cities. The same was felt by Thor Heyerdahl (see above) who went to live on a remote island - he also found it was western civilisation that was inflicted, with a negative impact, on these areas. However in this book the authors go on to say that "the town was [what raises] man above the beasts of the field." Man has this constant urge to separate himself from nature, by becoming 'civilised' as if there is something wrong with being at one with nature. However "None of these towns or cities were bustling affairs filled with throngs of people, for much of the space inside the walls was open and most of the buildings had ample spaces between them... only a small proportion of the population moved into these towns..." Unlike today where all towns and cities are overcrowded... although much of the countryside doesn't fair much better due to overpopulation. p.209/210 The Roman population is greatly to blame for the overpopulation that followed their invasions because "the arrival of the Roman legions... put a halt to further invasions and inter-tribal warfare..." which was apparently common before and was how population numbers stayed constant. Population numbers increased at such a rate that there wasn't enough food and "infanticide became a stark reality... it was their only form of birth control." Interestingly "the killing of infant boys and girls appears o have been carried out with the full knowledge, permission and understanding of the mothers who accepted that... they were simply unable to care for all their children... young women were permitted to keep their first three or four babies and after that their newborn offspring were taken from them... the sacrifice of babies to the gods was considered an honourable event..." So what changed? I suspect changing religions with Christianity becoming widespread in later years after the Romans were 'ousted'... thus the blame of today's population crisis could be blamed on inflexible religious beliefs. I personally think, like the Chinese, only one child per couple should be permitted until population numbers come down to more 'sustainable' levels, and by sustainable I mean at a level where we are no longer a burden on this planet. I would even go as far as saying that where adults lack no self-control/respect for this planet by bearing more offspring then their allotted quota, infanticide should be used... alternatively they can sacrifice themselves to spare their newborn child. p.210 During Roman times "there was a dramatic upsurge of imported goods... and this caused a horrendous trade imbalance, the first of many that have continued to the present day." p.213 "Rome
ruled Britain for 400 years..." My previous basic understanding of
the control of Rome over Britain was a positive one, an
understanding largely gained from watching such television
documentaries as Time Team... "look at this wonderful Roman
artefact"... "what an amazing feat of Roman engineering" but after
reading this book I am left feeling that the Roman's invaded and it
wasn't all for the better. They brought civilisation which I have my
issues with, they enforced their way of life, their beliefs,
something that still happens to this day. This caused the beginnings
of mass importation and overpopulation... two things that are now
ruining the whole planet. |
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Notes: p.56 "The crucial point about this explanation of the Second Law is that it shows how the irreversibility of time can come about through the operation of mechanical laws which have no preferred direction in time. Picture a movie of two billiard balls coming together, colliding, and moving apart. Played in reverse, the movie would not look at all odd... But the coalescence of a droplet of ink [does]..." p.68 Ball quotes the precocious mathematical genius a few times and I find reading these interesting: "Condorcet was aware that population growth could eventually overwhelm available resources and threaten the stability of civilization, and he had a simple remedy - birth control. Malthus did not think it would be so easy. He reckoned that the 'passions of mankind' put population outside the control of governments, whether they sought either to encourage or to limit its rise. It was, he believed, a 'law of nature' that the populace would multiply exponentially, while society could not increase the means of feeding itself at the same rate. Thus nations must succumb sooner or later to overcrowding, misery, poor health and social unrest." p.70 Thomas Jefferson who wrote the American Declaration of Independence, "his vision of a free and happy nation was that of a man in love Newtonian mechanics and the ideals of the Enlightenment, one who believed that humans are compelled towards happiness just as apples are pulled by gravity towards the earth." I think that sums up my outlook! p.78 Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874) a Belgian astronomer, is also talked about. His "social physics became founded on the concept of the 'average man' (l'homme moyen), whose dimensions and physical features and also moral and aesthetic attributes represented a perfect mean to which all should aspire. To be great was to be average ...an individual who epitomized in himself, at a given time, all the qualities of the average man, would represent at once all the greatness, beauty and goodness of that being." Ball describes this as a "disturbing worship of uniformity" and Quetelet goes on to say that "deviations more or less great from the mean have constituted ... ugliness in body as well as vice in morals and a state of sickness with regard to the constitution." I think we all thrive to be different but at the same time try and conform to a uniformity within society, we don't want to stand out... and thus we become sheep. p.80 "Awareness of Quetelet's work was promoted in Britain by one of the most avid proponents of a law-bound social physics, Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-62). Like many adherents of Comte's positivist philosophy, Buckle wanted to fortify the world of human affairs against the meddling influence of governments... like Adam Smith, he argued actively... for the need for people to be allowed to govern themselves." I wonder if our country was not overpopulated that this would be viable - I certainly believe that because of over-population it would not be possible to just scrap the current law and bureaucratic system that keeps society in check. Even though we all know the difference between right and wrong, we still do things for our own gain, even if that leads to the suffering of others. I believe overpopulation is a cause of this. Looking at the history of England and the Roman empire (from how I visualised it after reading The Roman World by Martin Goodman) and how the governing a society came about, it was for the benefit of the government - charge people taxes so they can fund the government and its schemes (from simply providing those who had put themselves in charge with a lavish lifestyle to funding wars which were themselves used to expand an empire and thus impose their tax system to a wider 'audience'. In the world of Robin Hood (at least how it has been portrayed on screen) those in charge (the Sheriff of Nottingham) would bully those living in his county "pay me taxes, keep me happy and I wont attack your village", playground bullying tactics of "give me your lunch money" which can include some other form of incentive such as "I'll protect you from your next worse enemy". p.106/7 Back to particle physics and Ball explains that an individual particle can be either part of a solid, liquid or gas, but only in its collective form will its state be revealed. Throughout the book these physical situations are related to society, so the same is try of people - you need to look at society as a whole to understand what's going, pulling one person off the street to understand them will not tell you much about the world. p.119 Another key topic of the book is phase transitions. What's happening when a solid object turns into a liquid or a liquid into a gas. These phase transitions happen in society too, such as when moving traffic on a busy motorway suddenly jams. Ball states also that the beginning of the universe was a phase transition... and "a phase transition is a sudden, global change in behaviour arising from the interactions of many constituent particles. Typically these interactions are short-range, local ones." p.184 Back to the topic of overpopulation within society "disturbed by the grotesque overcrowding within and around the city walls [of London], Elizabeth I prohibit 'any new buildings of any house or tenement within three miles from any of the gates of the said city of London'. Did this stem the city's outward sprawl, a process accretion that had long since burst the bounds of the encircling stone walls? You might as soon try to contain a wildfire." "In 1787 Henry Kett compared the expansion of London to an epidemic". But wasn't it what I call 'the powers that be' that caused the overcrowding? Overpopulation is caused by births outweighing deaths. People are encouraged to procreate - through the mass-media advertising, TV programs, films, musical topics and the world of celebrities - having sex is promoted and encouraged, we are brainwashed to think think this and thus it becomes engrained into our subconscious "this is normal" and we struggle to base our lives on anything else. Governments want to be seen to be doing the right thing and make a token gesture of promoting better education and the concept of "safe sex". I believe promoting the concept of "no sex" would be a step in the right direction. This bias from 'the powers that be' is because they don't want population growth to plateau or decline. p.189 Looking at two cities with different planning laws, the urban sprawl is very similar, thus "planning seems to have no effect on [the] law of growth" A further concern to this is that the Green Belt policy implemented in the 1960s. "Gene Stanley [argues] 'that the lawmakers do what they want to do, but people will live where they want to live." Just because an 'imposed law' tells us to live a certain way/defines what is acceptable, would removing that law have any effect? Although, obviously, laws or their punishments of nonconformity do provide an incentive to a point. "Get caught carrying a knife and you risk having a criminal record which could affect your ability to get a job"... but surely the incentive for not carrying a knife should be promoted as "carry a knife and you might find yourself using it and taking someone's life... value all life". p.191 "The US economist Herbert Simon points out that an absence of central planning does not necessarily mean that all cities are poorly 'designed'. On the contrary, they are (or at any rate, they once were [became overpopulated and urban planning waved its dictatorship] often remarkably effective..." "'To my students a pattern implied a planner in whose mind it had been conceived and by whose hand it had been implemented. The idea that a city could acquire its pattern as naturally as a snowflake was foreign to them. They reacted to it as many Christian fundamentalists responded to Darwin: no design without a Designer!'" I do website design and contrary to how other designers build a website I prefer to let a website develop, starting off simple and gradually amending the design and layout to incorporate new pages and sections, pages and sections that cant be foreseen at the birth of a website. p.193 "Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne, He travels the fastest who travels alone. - Rudyard Kipling (1890)" p.197 "James Lighthill (1924-98), one of the great twentieth-century experts on the physics of fluid flow... was anything but average in his driving habits. He was a persistent speeding offender, but would explain in court that as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge (the chair once occupied by Newton) he was fully aware both of the laws of mechanics and of his social duty not to waste energy. As a result, he told the hapless judges, he felt obliged to desist from breaking when going downhill. It seems that this defence was occasionally successful." If I get done for speeding I am so going to use this point! p.218 More on driving and "Helbing and Huberman say that their model [on traffic] also reveals how American lane rules, which allow drivers to travel at any speed in any lane, can make roads more efficient that European rules, under which the lanes are graded from slow to fast... reducing the capacity of the [motorway] by up to 25 per cent." p.220 "If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion - George Bernard Shaw" p.288 Adam Smith (1723-90) "pointed out, profits are always being eroded: by rising wages, and by the force of competition, which pulls the market price of goods down towards the cost of producing them. The only way a company can maintain a profit is by expanding." It would seem that the expansion of an empire (geographically or in population numbers) works towards the same end. Marx said of the companies must then "constantly bid for additional labour. This increase in demand of labour means that workers can ask for higher wages, which bites back into the capitalists' profit margins. To escape this cycle, Marx assumed the factory owners would do what he saw them doing all about him: introduce labour-saving machinery." "But here's the catch... workers can produce goods worth more than a subsistence wage. This 'surplus labour' is the source of the capitalists' profits. Machines, however, do not offer surplus labour - in a competitive market, industrialists will have to buy them at a cost equal to the value of the goods they can generate. So mechanisation renders workers unemployed..." "The result is an economic recession: wages are low and unemployment is rife." Exactly what we see today - thus the recession, while many blame it on the bank's tactics, was in fact inevitable and caused by mechanisation (because wages can't go any lower than the inflicted minimum wage). Further to this minimum wage, I believe it provides a means for people to compare there self-worth. No one wants to think of themselves as only being worth the lowest value (that of the minimum wage) so they refuse to take such jobs... and even prefer to claim unemployment benefit, especially if they were previously employed in a job that paid higher than minimum wage. Even young people who have only finished high school education and have no previous employment experience have this inbuilt principle (maybe picking it up from their parents). For some reason it seems to pay the government to provide its society an unemployment benefit rather then make job for those out of work in the public sector... even cutting positions during the recession. I also believe unemployment adds to overpopulation, not just because those that are unemployed aren't giving anything back financially, but because couples who are at home with nothing else better to do other than procreate. p.275 "...it is sheer folly to imagine that the market can be engineered to iron out blips on timescales of days or weeks, or perhaps even longer. Yet many governments continue to believe that this kind of manipulation is both possible and desirable. Most probably it is wasteful of resources, if not positively harmful to the economy." I believe the same is the case the the governments meddling with society and further to a waste of resources this is going to be the outcome of the governments efforts to end the recession. This is because efforts to end the recession early are futile - the recession is the natural occurrence, a natural cycle that the economy is going through due to the way it operates. Money should not be thrown at the recession, it would be better to ignore that it is happening and instead use this downturn as a stop-gap to change the way the economy operates and encourage it to operate greener. Jobs should be provided to all so that everyone has a purpose, how much these jobs pay in money should be made immaterial. "Keynes feared that, left to itself, the economic system might spiral into a decline which would ultimately leave it frozen, unable to bounce back through the normal business cycle." But it was the normal business cycle that was the case in our recession, thus it should not be encourage to return to how it was, it should be guided to a new path. p.326 "What makes [people] happy? That depends on the [person]. Each of them pursues two goals: money and leisure. Unfortunately, in Axtell's world one can't have both at the same time, because money is made only through hard work. Money and leisure are conflicting demands... some settle for low wages if it means they can do a lot of lounging about." p.335 "The piece-rate systems of car factories were abandoned because they destroyed social relationships in the workplace... and established a working environment in which no one cared about the quality of the product."
p.383 "...many psychologists and
sociologists have exercised themselves over how we make decisions,
society is geared largely towards removing that need. Many social norms
exist simply so that we no longer have to think about other options
[(like shaking hands with out right hand)].... [some agreements are]
endorsed by law, of course; in general, though, laws simply consecrate
pre-existing social norms." |
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Because some of my reviews on books have increasingly included vast notes and quotations, I would like to point out that I do recognise that these books are protected by the Copyright act. I put my views online to share with other internet browsers in the hope that little snippets of information may be useful and my views interesting. I have always included links to the online retailer Amazon and encourage anyone that finds any title particularly interesting (thanks to what I have to say) to either buy a copy or borrow one from their local library. |
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p.56/9
"It was just eight days into the voyage from the Canaries that the
compasses of the fleet went haywire, at least in nautical terms" Here I
started to read between the lines and was thinking 'Bermuda Triangle'!
However, the author assures us that "what in fact had happened is that
the ships had sailed to a point on the earth where one can see the
normal diurnal rotation of the North Star, a phenomenon not visible from
Mediterranean latitudes." Shame! Although, I went to the lengths of back
tracking though the book and worked out where the fleet were across the
Atlantic on any given day. At eight days they were only 500 miles from
the Canaries, then just 250 miles further the "crew kept finding signs
of land" and it is at this approximate point that there are what look
like, according to Google Maps satellite imagery, low lying land/'land'
that doesn't quite break the surface.