Drifting Stars: The End of the Golden Age

The Golden Age, Pietro da Cortona. Wikicommons.

Legends from cultures as diverse as the Greeks, Aztecs and Tibetans talk of a one-time Golden Age where the world was in perfect and blissful harmony. Thanks to cosmic or human agency, this came to an end and the world was condemned to strife and hardship, but with the hope that at some time in the distant future, the Golden Age could be restored. Adam and Eve’s eviction from the Garden of Eden is one of the most well-known variants.

                        The Garden of Eden

Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, in their epic book Hamlet’s Mill, have analysed these worldwide myths and linked them to a phenomenon called Precession of the Equinoxes. This is caused by a wobble in the earth’s axis, whereby it drifts in a 26,000-year cycle. From Earth we see this as a slow drift in the location of the Pole Star and also as a shift in the Zodiacal constellation housing the sun during any particular month. A vast number of myths, sacred buildings and cultural practices worldwide have been linked to the monitoring of and the attempt to control this drift.

The Egyptian Sphinx, believed to align to the rising of the constellation Leo, the lion, in its celestial position of c10,000BC.

Many of the myths are linked to a celestial mill, linked to the Milky Way and the cosmic axis, which ground out good fortune during the Golden Age but subsequently broke or became corrupted and ground out only hardship as linked to the present world. This links to the drift of the star Deneb, the ‘true’ pole star, from its axis as discussed last week and which forms the background to the story told in Broken Skies.

Churning the Milky Ocean, from a Vedic (Hindu) epic.

This drift would cause little effect on Earth. It was not suddenly wrenched from its true balance as the stories suggest, but simply drifts in its natural cycle just as it rotates and orbits the sun. But disorder in the heavens was linked to disorder on Earth: as above, as below.

And the stories do contain a grain of truth. Soon after the shift of Deneb (Benu in Broken Skies) from true, a vast comet is known to have smashed into Earth, causing vast floods, fires and toxic fallout which plunged the Earth back into the Ice Age, caused countless extinctions and left humans worldwide fighting for their survival. Just as the stories told.