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Published by METRON PUBLICATIONS Box 122, Princeton, NJ-08542, USA Copyright 1997 by Metron Publications. All rights reserved.
Q-CD vol. 13, A Fire Not Blown, Preface 2
PREFACE
In this work I have tried to develop some of the ideas that I put forward in my previous book Ka. The chief aim has been to apply my first work's electrical interpretation of ancient myths and cosmology to a particular area of the ancient Mediterranean world, then to quote further examples of religious practice and the relevant vocabulary from a wider area.There has inevitably been repetitions of examples and interpretations from my earlier work.
In my first book I gave about twenty cases of reversals of direction of writing, suggesting that something more than coincidence was involved. The present work contains more than eighty examples for consideration, and there are more possibilities which may justify mention at a later stage.
I am most grateful to a number of people for their help. I had useful discussions with the late Stephen Yates on Celtic and Gallic vocabulary, and with Amanda Farrar on drama and the dance. My daughter Susan gave me help in computing matters. Professor Alfred de Grazia once more has contributed the necessary Introduction and has continued to give me encouragement and assistance. My thanks go also to the staff of Metron Publications at Princeton.
H. Crosthwaite
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CONTENTS
Preface by the Author
Introduction by Alfred de Grazia: Linguistics as a Research Tool in Quantavolution
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Q-CD vol. 13, A Fire Not Blown, Introduction 4 INTRODUCTION
Some time ago, at a lecture, I made various remarks connecting catastrophes, electricity, and the sudden hologenesis of speech, which were heard by Hugh Crosthwaite, a Birmingham schoolmaster in classics and a musician. Perhaps I was expressing my opinion that originally an ecumenical language served primeval humans, based entirely at first upon connections perceived to exist in the sky and to transfer therefrom the objects experienced on earth. All language was in origin sacral and then became pragmatic in the sense of coping with the mundane artifacts of existence. A prime cause of humanization itself was catastrophe on a global scale, to be called quantavolution, and electrical forces dominated the quantavolutions as they enveloped and influenced humans. The same electromagnetic forces diminished with the passage of time between quantavolutions.
Mr. Crosthwaite proceeded incessantly to collect related words in several languages, and brought the whole into print upon my urging. The name of the book was KA. So large was the body of material that a second volume seemed to be in order -- a book that we have here, A Fire Not Blown.
From these his latest studies his readers and I will have derived a plethora of new meanings to old words and a way of looking at the origins of words. I cannot repeat here the hundreds of sharp little surprises in the work, but I shall try at the least to nominate in a few paragraphs at least one major point that is established by the Author in each chapter.
Practically all myth, and the Old Testament as well, referred continuously to sky events. That the Minotaur's name was Asterios, and that Theseus seized the monster by its hair, comet-like, is an instance, one of scores that are carried in this work skywards.
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Altogether the presence and activity of electromagnetism and charges in the earth (often represented by the great goddess Gaia), and in the sky and the interactions between the two, with mankind as mediator, victim, would-be controller, educe a lively electrical mythology of the earth, where beings such as snakes find themselves especially entrancing to men, who see them alive in the sky and in the earth and reacting simultaneously in both places on quantavolutionary occasions.
The vocabulary invested with the phenomenon of fire is demonstrably capable of distinguishing electrical from other fires, within individual languages and with trans-linguistic similarities.
The object of priestly study was theological electricity. Lightning, magnetism and piezoelectric effects were related in the ancient mind as divine fire.
Although Crete was a land of many peoples and dialects, it followed a consistent pattern of ritual settings, and these were akin to the Egyptians. Significantly, high places were known to attract electrical discharges, but on lowlands and on hills wells could be dug and filled with stones that may have come from more electrified sacral ground and been expected to enhance local electrical effects. Lanuguage correlations include proper names, and here it is shown, inter alia, that two kings of Crete are named Minos, one of the Old Bronze Age and one of the Iron Age, and likewise there is an ingenious Daedalus in Minoan times and the same much later as pioneer sculptor of realistic marble statues in Greece.
Katreus was the important successor to the king-god Minos of Crete, and his name is made up of the two components, the aura of divinity and watching for something, here the essential electromagnetism. Nomen est omen is to be borne in mind at all times in etymology. A linguistic root may never just that, but is always something behavioral, real, connected with the direst and most blessed activities of homo schizo.
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Once more, astronomy, electricity, gods, and bulls find a score of linguistic links, and several identities and their associated myths become clearer.
Linguistic evidence implicates Planet Venus, it would appear, in the bolts of Zeus (we know that Athene was the only God allowed to handle Jovian instruments) and in the highly controversial tablets that registered it as irregular over a period of time when quantavolutionary activity was occurring on Earth.
With respect to Ariadne, and to many another character in myth, a multiplicity of possible identities is encountered. And with this comes a plurality of linguistic attachments in and out of the individual culture. Then, notably, the main identity cluster is not the only one with electrical implications; others possess the same.
The Island of Naxos in the Cyclades was originally called Dia (possibly a reference to the dioi or divine Pelasgians who preceded the early Karians and Hellenes), then refounded (I might suggest a catastrophe as the occasion) by a King Naxos or as well Nakaso, close to the Greek for a big shot, hero or warrior king, anax, so to the tribe of giants of the Old Testament, Anakim.
Rulership -- kings and high elite -- is loaded with electrical trappings and obsessive practices. The ruler is expected to appease the gods by tending to fire and keep the home and altar fires burning.
Labyrinths and all manner of ways, including especially the Column of Fire that connects Earth with the gods and heavens, share word roots, for the humans who want ultimately to reach up and join the gods in the sky. And then to the ax, which has so rich a mythology; in the age of metals, the sparking of the ax reminded humans that copper and iron had fallen (or better
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descended as a gift) from the skies on occasion, reversing the labyrinthine path that men could hope to follow.
In the comparison of Hawara and Knosos is to be found a typical anomaly of dates, the two archaeologies exhibiting similar physical and psychic features. In them, one has occasion to understand the pillar or column as a construction. It is a commemoration of the pillar of electrical fire that connected the two major components of the system of Solaria Binaria and thereby all of the planets and minor bodies and electromagnetic fields with their transported materials.
Resurrection was strongly promoted by electrical inducements mediated by sympathetic magic. The human head was recognized as the seat of organic electrical phenomena.
The multitude of verbal connections of the direction North with religion, gods, rites, electrical phenomena, and physical history.
Futhermore, does salt in various languages, contain the belief that salt came from heaven, from el or al, or in Hebrew, melach, salt, from -- m -- plus heaven -- el).
It is to be noted that, by extension, certain universal rites not directly electrical or quantavolutional in origin, were connected with the original sacral sky and electricity, but then dithered into what appeared to be disoriented and haphazard superstitions.
The Hebrew word for life is almost identical with the Greek for blood, and so the Egyptian and the Latin. The connections are reasonable. By extension, when it came time to curse the memory of red Typhon, the comet or proto-planet that nearly destroyed the world, the Egyptians persecuted red-haired people as individuals and groups, threw a ruddy ass over a cliff, and sacrificed red bulls. One notes, thus, everywhere, the back-to-back connection of the reasonable and the fantastic. Language
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plays this game irrationally, pragmatically, intricately, interminably, and everywhere.
It may be reasonably put forth that rock platforms, especially white minerals of all kinds, as flooring, and white garments simulate the serene sky, and that the function of the rocks -- not all rocks, but especially adapted or amalgamated rocks -- was to stimulate electrical discharges between earth and atmosphere. Sites of altars and temples often centered upon nodes of lightning and piezolectricity. Split rocks, crevasses, metallized rock, and brazen thresholds are among the obvious electrified objects encountered or emplaced in the ancient environment.
The attention given universally to the behavior of birds may alert us to consider that the environment of ancient times affected birds as well as humans in ways little suspected nowadays. That is, it may be that the ancients were not asking too much of birds; it may be that the birds were in a position to tell them much more than they can tell us today.
Scores of words, hundreds, perhaps thousands, can be fitted into the Crosthwaite method of searching for the key concepts in their roots. The number and proportion will be finally known only after considerable research -- as with quairo (Latin), later quaero, I search, springing from more than one source, perhaps, but certainly reminding one of the endemic ka, and the Greek ku (ka) and airo, to raise), hence Araising the ka.
When I published my study hypothesizing absolute correlation between myth and reality in The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars, I understood it as a case to be made against the traditional theories advanced by the founders of the science of mythology (Fraser et al.) and the second generation (Freud, Jung et al.) which I would show to be critically vulnerable --vastly useful, of course -- for having denigrated the main issue, myth as reality-referential, capable of scaling from low to high historicity. Velikovsky, as an example of a Freudian theorist, turned from his master in part and became in a sense a Biblical
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literalist, because he failed to offer a theory. (Verily he had none, which serves to explain his strong appeal to Judeo-Christian and Muslim religious fundamentalists.) Other mythological literalists, too, have scored against conventional scientists, but quantavolution has had to distinguish itself from them basically by pursuing nominalist, empirical, scientific method.
Nonetheless, Velikovsky, a proud and stubborn character, opened and charted new pathways, some broad, many small, and, beyond this, he had the charisma and came at the proper moment, to excite a serious crowd following that kept his work and its critique on a high enough level of public discussion to revive, sometimes against his will, his many important and sometimes great predecessors. Crosthwaite's work has come many years after Velikovsky's work, and is much advanced over it and more specialized, reflecting the original electrical theory of Ralph Juergens and Earl Milton, among others, and extending the studies over many years performed by David Talbott, Ev Cochrane, and Dwardu Cardona, especially having to do with Saturnian mythology. Viewing what Crosthwaite has accomplished, one may hope for a continual increase in systematic empirical work in linguistic mythology.
There are critical and highly special issues that can be addressed. As an example, take the story of Kronos swallowing one by one the infants born to his wife, until she succeeded with a ruse in hiding baby Zeus, destined to be his successor, from him. Did the story arise by itself in the normal gradual evolution from a myriad of fireside chats? If so, how were the pieces originated and interwoven? Or did the tale require an original set of spectacles, real or apparent, and had the events attending the spectacles to be catastrophic, or might they have been impressively amusing?
In the end, I think, we shall discover electrical phenomena to be the sealing wax of the universe of theology, the means of consolidating the sacred and mundane spheres of life. They
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were the means of finding the gods. Consciously and unconsciously, priest-rulers and their groups embedded the divine in language, so that language flowered inexorably with its seed of reference coated by electrified sacrality, ramifying root and branch. Via language, the a fire not blown came to be in charge of important and ordinary human affairs.
Alfred de Grazia Island of Naxos, Greece,
27 July, 1997