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This incredible book, published by Kronos Press in 2000, is hardbound with 300+ pages packed with relevant information you would have a hard time finding anywhere else. Since it is heavy with insights, you must put this book down, but you must pick it up again. The author, one of the world's great scholars and thinkers with a nose for truth, will delight you with his organized mind, range of knowledge, and surprising perspectives. He asks astounding questions and suggests haunting answers which will help us greatly to understand mankind, ourselves, and the "human condition". With decades of learning in Linguistics, Anthropology, Catastrophism, etc., he has a unique way of looking deeply into the human psyche, both ancient and modern.
Writing before he concluded that Saturn was the astral body referenced by the ancients, the author simply refers to it as "Aster", but those familiar with the Saturnian Reconstruction of ancient times will have no difficulty in making the connection. Wescott takes what the ancients tell us seriously, and through his educated eyes, we can take a look at the prehistoric world and compare it to our own.
Predicting the Past is a solid complement and further undergirding to the scenario unfolded in God Star, and is a "must read".
Roger William Wescott, 1925-2002
Roger Williams Wescott, born in Philadelphia in 1925, graduated summa cum laude and first in his class from Princeton in 1945. After receiving his Ph.D. in Linguistics there in 1948, he held a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. Following anthropological field-work in Nigeria, he founded and directed the African Language Program at Michigan State University. In addition to his academic duties, Professor Wescott has also directed radio programs and made various network television appearances.
Of his 600 publications, 40 are books (including The Divine Animal: An Exploration of Human Potentiality, Funk and Wagnalls, 1960, and Sound and Sense: Linguistic Essays on Phonosemic Subjects, Jupiter Press, 1980). Wescott also serves as co-editor of the Journals Futurics, Forum Linguisticum, and Mother Tongue, and is a past president of The Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States. Among his listings are Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in Educational Futuristics, and The World's Who's Who of Authors.
From 1966 through 1991, Wescott served as Professor of Linguistics in the Humanities Divison of the Graduate School and Professor of Anthropology in the Social Science Division of the college of Liberal Arts at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. He also founded Drew's Anthropology Department and chaired it for 12 years. He was the Director of Drew's Linguistic Program for 13 years.
During the spring semester of 1980, in Asia, Africa, and Europe, Wescott taught Folklore and Comparative Religion aboard the S. S. Universe, a"floating college" sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh. In 1980-81, he served as the Presidential Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Colorado School of Mines. In 1982 and 1983, he served as a forensic linguist in New Jersey state courts.
From 1985 to 1988, Wescott hosted a state-wide New Jersey cable television program titled "Other Views." In 1988-89, he became the First holder of The Endowed Chair of Excellenc in Humanities at the University of Tennessee. From 1989 through 1991, he served as the Director of Drew's Behavioral Science Program. From 1988 to 1966, he served as First Vice-President of the International Organization for Unification of Terminological Neologisms; and, from 1992 to 1995, as President of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations. He presently serves as Vice-President of the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory and First Vice-President of the World Bank of International Terms.
Foreword by Richard Heinberg
Preface
Prehistory and Progress
General considerations
Chapter 1 Aster and Disaster (An
Introduction)
Polemic Context
Varieties of Exclusionism
Uniformism and Catastrophism
Eonism
Isolationism
Quantalism
Velikovskians and Meta-Velikovskians
Polystratic Fossils and Pleochroic Radio-Haloes
Logic and Proof
Subjectivity and Objectivity
Nature-shock, Culture-shock, and Future-shock
Behavioral versus Physical Evidence
Esclusionary and Exploitive Behavior
Linguistic Reinterpretations
Further Reinterpretations
Chapter 2 Quantalist Interpretation
of Myths
Interpreting Myths
Re-Defining Myth
Responses to Myth
Myths, Legends, and Folktales
Myth and Ritual
The De-Sacralization of Myth
Riddles, Proverbs, and Ethics
Universal Mythic Themes
Chapter 3 The Golden Age
Aurealism
The World Axis
The World Mountain
The Aureal Environment
The Noble Savage
The Matriarchal Tradition
Chapter 4 The Fallen World
The Usage of the English Word "Fall"
Who or What Fell?
Who or What Precipitated the Fall?
The Folklore of the Fall
Verbal Echoes of the Fall
Internalizations of the Fall
Chapter 5 Catagenica Causes and Consequences of the Fall
Geological Catagenica
Paleontological Catagenica
Hedrological Catagenica
Botanical Catagenica
Animal Catagenica
Human Biomedical Catagenica
Ecological Catagenica
Artifactual Catagenica
Economic Catagenica
Social Catagenica
Emotional Catagenica
Intellectual Catagenica
Chapter 6 The Rule of Correspondence
As Above, So Below
As Without, So Within
AS at Length, So in Brief
As Before, So to Come
As in Front, So Behind
As on the Right, So on the Left
As by Nature, So by Nurture
As with Beasts, So with men
As the Female, So the Male
As in Body, So in Mind
As in Waking, So in Dreams
Chapter 7 Split Living
Astronomical Splits
Meteorological Splits
Calendric Splits
Physiological Splits
Psychological Splits
Intellectual Splits
Ecological Splits
Social Splits
Institutional Splits
Expressive Splits
Ideological Splits
Splits Reviewed
Chapter 8 Recapitulations of the Past
Aster Recapitulated
The World Mountain Recapitulated
The World Axis Recapitulated
The Golden Age Recapitulated
Catastrophe Recapitulated
Involuntary Recapitulations
Voluntary Recapitulations
Chapter 9 Prospects for a Troubled Species
Futurism as Revivalism
Sobering Reminders
Remedies for Terrestrial Ills
Aurealite Atavism
The Extraterrestrial Habitat
Cracks in the Uniformist Monolith
Paleocatastrophism vs. Cenocatastrophism
Alternative Therapies for a Collective Malady
Promotive Medicine?
Ethical Considerations
The Nice, the Nasty, and the Natural
Love and substitutes for Love
Through Unnature to Nature
Appendix I Selected Sayings of Heraclitus
Appendix II Aeonic Apothegms
A Glossary of Neologisms
Select Bibliography of Books Consulted
Encyclopedias Most Frequently Consulted
Index
by Richard Heinberg
Is the present condition of the world the result of eons of peaceful evolution? Or has Earth been shaped and reshaped by wrenching catastrophes—at least some of which were recent and widespread enough to have deeply traumatized all of humankind?
Did early human societies develop gradually in uneventful natural surroundings, moving incrementally from savagery to civilization? Or did horrific cataclysms forcibly conclude a long period of primitive harmony and precipitate our "fall" into history?
Most scholars during the last century-and-a-half have regarded these questions as settled once and for all. Ever since Darwin, the great majority of historians, anthropologists, and geologists have assumed that the doctrine of gradual evolution was proven beyond need for further discussion. Only the intellectually atavistic Christian fundamentalists, adhering to a literalistic interpretation of the Biblical tales of Adam and Noah, stood in the way of complete unanimity.
Or so it seemed. There were, however, some notable exceptions. Ignatius Donnelly (at the end of the nineteenth century) and Immanuel Velikovsky (during the second half of the twentieth) wrote immensely popular and erudite books pointing out that the catastrophist mythic tradition is not confined to the Bible, but is common as well to the Native Americans, Australian aborigines, Pacific islanders, Asiatic nomads—in fact, to nearly every cultural group whose ideas about the distant past have been recorded. Further—and this was an unforgivable sin in the eyes of the academic establishment—Donnelly and Velikovsky both claimed that mythic tales of battles in the sky accompanied by earthquakes, floods, and fires were recollections of real events, in whose light human history becomes comprehensible. Despite their wide readership, or perhaps because of it, Donnelly and Velikovsky were vilified and ridiculed by the scientific intelligentsia of their respective eras.
Today, the tide has turned somewhat. Now school children are taught that the extinction of the dinosaurs was due to the crashing to Earth of a comet or asteroid sixty million years ago. Astronomers Victor Clube, Bill Napier, Duncan Steel, and John Lewis have written books about how asteroid and comet impacts destroyed past civilizations and threaten our present one. And Mike Baillie, an expert in the field of dendrochronology (the use of tree rings to establish archaeological and geological dates), has written, in his book Exodus to Arthur: Catastrophic Encounters With Comets, that tree-ring data show steep environmental downturns within historical times, and that these events seem to be tied to celestial phenomena:
"...at 2345 BC, 1628 BC, 1159 BC and AD 536, perhaps also at 207 BC and 44 BC, the earth experienced the effects of close-pass comets, or cosmic swarms of cometary debris. Terrifying apparitions were seen in the sky that were associated with optical, and possibly aural, effects. Fireballs and associated atmospheric detonations gave rise to frightening noise, earthquakes and tsunamis. People experiencing these phenomena identified them with the attributes of various deities."
This is an immense shift from the mainstream scientific consensus of 1950, when critics of Velikov sky's Worlds in Collision argued that the only catastrophes likely to have occurred on Earth during the past few million years were ones that were geographically localized (like the floods and earthquakes that still menace human populations) and unrelated to celestial phenomena.
While neocatastrophism has become acceptable—even fashionable—among astronomers, the implications that flow from this shift have yet to filter down to most historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and psychologists, who still assume a static Earth history. Further, it would be wrong to say that neocatastrophists like Clube and Baillie fully embrace the ideas of Velikovsky. Today's catastrophists are arrayed across a spectrum, ranging from the more cautious, and therefore more academically acceptable, theorists like John Lewis, to the more radical, and thus more academically marginalized, Velikovskian writers like David Talbott—who is in many respects more extreme in his views than Velikovsky himself.
Among the neocatastrophists and paradisalists, Roger Wescott stands out as perhaps the most radical of all. An unabashed Velikovskian throughout several decades, he has had time fully to absorb the intellectual and existential shock that accompanies the realization that we live on an accident-prone globe. And he has had the courage and imagination to extend Velikovsky's method beyond the discussion of celestial catastrophes to the realm of the pre-catastrophic world.
What is of more interest for readers is that he brings to the discussion a remarkable set of scholarly attainments and abilities. As an anthropologist and linguist, Wescott is better equipped to deal with the mythological evidence than are any of the current crop of neocatastrophist astronomers, and he is likewise better able to sift and interpret the evidence of cultural and psychological post-catastrophic effects on human beings. And as an ethologist, he has grounds on which to speculate about possible changes in animal behavior resulting from celestial-terrestrial cataclysms.
In applying these abilities, Wescott begins and ends by taking ancients seriously. This is an attitude far rarer among present-day scholars than one might think. Cultures around the world preserved legends of a time when humans and animals spoke the same language, when people had miraculous powers, and when there was no death. What if such tales contain a core of literal truth? This is a train of thought that, in the hands of many a naive or fanatical writer, has led to results that are pathetic or comical. Wescott, on the other hand, because of his wondrous learnedness and extraordinary ability as a writer, makes the journey entertaining, informative, and enlightening—even when the destination seems too far for most minds to reach. The wonder is not that he dares to go where others fear to tread; it is that he travels with such wit and style that we are carried along despite ourselves.
Over a decade ago, while researching and writing my own book, Memories and Visions of Paradise: Exploring the Universal Myth of a Lost Golden Age, I found Wescott's ideas (which I gleaned both from his writings and from several memorable conversations with him) profoundly encouraging in the truest sense of the term. I was an academic outsider with no advanced degrees or institutional affiliations, and was presenting views that I knew to be highly unorthodox. My tendency was to pull my punches, to hesitate, and to hedge. Wescott, in contrast, had achieved full academic honors—he is a former Rhodes scholar and was Professor and Chairman of the Anthropology department at Drew University; his views were (and still are) even more radical than mine: yet he expressed them with neither apology nor impudence. His intellectual stance was never defensive nor aggressive, but instead always confident and playful. My book—for which he wrote the Foreword—turned out much better than it would have had it not been for his inspiration.
This present work is the summation of Roger Wescott's thoughts regarding mythology, human prehistory, and catastrophism. It is an extraordinary book in many respects. Not only are its ideas incendiary: they are also educative. It is safe to say that almost every reader will learn something from each page. It is a truism that we live in an age of specialization; hyperspecialization is perhaps the more apt word. Wescott, who is a polymath of an order exceedingly rare in any era—and especially in our time of electronically mediated mediocrity—effortlessly commands knowledge gleaned from a dozen disciplines, and passes it along in a lighthearted and generous spirit. Promoters and defenders of minority viewpoints (denigratingly called cranks or crackpots; admiringly known as geniuses or pioneers) often exhibit a dour evangelical fervor. In contrast, Wescott's imagination and humor sparkle through every sentence. Writers—on any subject! — should study this book carefully: it contains a fascinating abundance of knowledge about the origins and development of language, and similarly exhibits a wealth of wisdom in its use of words.
Beyond its considerable value for enlightenment, entertainment, and education, this book is also—and perhaps primarily—a tool of therapy. Wescott is, in every possible sense, reminding us of something we have lost and forgotten. If the recovery of lost memory is helpful to individual trauma victims, it is even more essential to humankind collectively. We are, as one social critic has put it, "sleepwalking through history"—rushing toward ecocidal oblivion in obedience to unconscious compulsions whose roots are forgotten and unexamined. We strain to create a consumerist pseudo-paradise while treating nature as our enemy. Are we, at least in part, acting on ancient fears and longings seeded when the suddenly unchained forces of nature obliterated a genuine Golden Age of peace and plenty?
As a cultural archaeologist, Wescott unearths and reassembles shards of memory that still persist in our languages, institutions, and myths. What is more, he surveys our prospects for revivifying at least some portion of our primordial wholeness.
Even readers who cannot fully accept the author's reconstruction of planetary history will benefit intellectually and spiritually from reading this book. The historical truth of Earth's past is still in the process of reconstruction; the latest evidence is still only suggestive. Yet the general trend of the new evidence and the thinking it is inspiring is clear: mythic traditions of World Ages and celestially-provoked global cataclysms are based in fact. For many decades, our academic leaders held the assumption that myths were pure invention. By rejecting our ancestors' recollections and warnings, we were perhaps cutting ourselves even further adrift from the intergenerational moorings that help keep cultures stable and sustainable. Perhaps now, for the sake not just of scientific investigation but of cultural survival, we need to consider much more seriously the contrasting view—that the paradisal and catastrophist traditions are basically true.
There is no exponent of that view more brilliant, gracious, and witty than Roger Wescott, and no book argues it more entertainingly and convincingly than this one.
Richard Heinberg
Core Faculty, Program on Ecology, Culture, and Sustainable Community
New College of California (Santa Rosa)
March 2000
The title of this book is Predicting the Past. Though admittedly paradoxical, it is not intended to be a Zen Buddhist riddle. There are at least three senses in which one may—and perhaps must—predict the past. The first and most obvious of these is that, in seeking to reconstruct the unrecorded past, one inevitably anticipates what still unearthed evidence may reveal and how future scholars may interpret this evidence when revising earlier reconstructions of that past.
The second sense in which the past must be predicted, rather than simply recalled, has to do with the polarity of past and future. For two decades, I taught undergraduate courses in a department of anthropology. One, usually offered in the fall, was entitled "Prehistory." Another, usually offered in the spring, was titled "Our Future." Initially, I had expected these two courses to be so divergent in both method and subject matter that they would have little in common. But I soon found that they were congruent in method as well as complementary in chronology. For, in each case, the uncertain outweighs the certain and gaps in knowledge must be filled in largely by extrapolation. In dealing with the future, the extrapolation involved is from observed current trends to anticipated future developments. In dealing with the prehistoric past, the extrapolation is from fragmentary skeletal and artifactual remains to the protracted blanks that stretched between them.
A third sense in which the past may be predictable has to do with the hypothesized reversibility of time. It is not only in science fiction, as exemplified by H.G. Wells' Time Machine, that time is conceived of as capable of running backward. Since 1933, astrophysicists have accepted Paul Dirac's postulation of anti-matter, a substance in which there is held to be a reversal not only of the electrical polarity of proton and electron but also a concomitant reversal of the direction of time, which, in an anti-material world, theoretically runs from future to past rather than, as in our material world, from past to future. As most futurists acknowledge, one of the hall-marks of our century has been the increasing convergence of science fact and science fiction and the consequently growing difficulty of distinguishing one from the other.
PREHISTORY AND PROGRESS
While I was teaching the prehistory course mentioned above, I became increasingly dissatisfied with the prehistory texts available for class-room use. Nearly all of them pictured the human past as a long but predominantly successful effort to control the non-human environment, culminating in our undisputed mastery of this planet. What none of these sources explained was why, if our past was one of such steady and reassuring progress, our species as a whole exhibits such insecurity. For, instead of the calm confidence which one might expect of so favored a group, humanity at large seems to me to display a high level of anxiety, mistrust, and readiness to engage in destructive violence in response to collective stress. At the very least, our species appears to manifest a chronic hedonic deficit—a lack of basic satisfaction with its overall situation. Such malaise suggests that human beings are more than just hard to please. It suggests that they are haunted by a hidden history, one involving a menace considerably greater than that of occasional attacks by predatory carnivores larger and swifter than themselves.
GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS
Because I am now well into my retirement years, this may prove to be the last book that I will write. If so, it will necessarily come close to representing a life-time's reflection on the human condition. It also offers me the opportunity to write in the manner that best facilitates such reflection, without concern for occupational demands or professional expectations.
Consequently, this volume, though conceptually complex and sometimes technical, will be relatively free of scholarly apparatus, particularly references. Many writers, especially if they have a professorial background, seem to believe that scholarly references validate their assertions. Actually, such references demonstrate only what could readily be guessed: that other writers have thought as they think and have put those thoughts into print. References, as I see them, have a function that is more illustrative of a climate of opinion than probative or conclusive. References (including some that were included in earlier drafts of some chapters) will therefore be omitted.
In their place, the reader will find (1) a glossary of recently coined terms, (2) bibliographies of select sources, and (3) appendices of aphorisms epitomizing the views more discursively set forth in the main text.
My intellectual debts in the writing of this work are too many to be acknowledged in full. Foremost among them, of course, is my conceptual obligation to Immanuel Velikovsky, who went further, I think, than any catastrophist or quantalist before or since to make sense of the seemingly senseless behavior of human beings as we know them and to present credible reasons for our unreason.
But I must also make it clear how heavily I have relied on a number of innovative scholarly organizations with a quantalistic orientation and a transdisciplinary range. Chief among these are The Society for Historical Research in New York, Kronia Communications in Portland, Oregon. The Canadian Society for Interdisciplinary Studies in Montreal and Toronto, and The Society for Interdisciplinary Studies at several locations in England. And I am greatly indebted to the publishers, and contributors of the following periodical journals (most of which were first issued in the 1970's but are no longer published): Pensée, Portland, Oregon; KRONOS, Wynnewood, Pennsylvania; Catastrophism and Ancient History, Los Angeles, California; the S.I.S. Review, Chronology and Catastrophism Workshop, and the Chronology and Catastrophism Review, all three issued by the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies in England; and AEON, Ames, Iowa.
Predicting the Past $38.00
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