{"id":53200,"date":"2024-07-03T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2024-07-03T07:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thunderbolts.info\/wp\/?p=53200"},"modified":"2024-07-07T04:05:34","modified_gmt":"2024-07-07T11:05:34","slug":"burning-questions-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thunderbolts.info\/wp\/2024\/07\/03\/burning-questions-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Burning Questions"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Tonatiuh,<\/a>

Tonatiuh, the Aztec Sun god, who wavered upon his first rising until bloody sacrifices were made. From the Codex Telleriano-Remensis (16th Century).<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Original Post July 3, 2014<\/i><\/p>\n

If folk memory is anything to go by, global warming in its most dreaded form is a thing of the past.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The universality of flood myths is widely known, but fewer people are aware that traditions of unbearable heat, often leading to a devastating\u00a0Weltbrand<\/em>, are just as ubiquitous. Although many reports do not identify the cause of the steep rise in temperature or the wildfire associated with the \u2018age of myth\u2019, others persistently attribute it to a group of phenomena we may conveniently call \u2018anomalous suns\u2019.<\/p>\n

Generally, the sources trace the erstwhile emission of relentless heat to four solar properties, singly or combined, all of which seem equally bizarre when applied to the quotidian sun.<\/p>\n

Firstly, many accounts impute a\u00a0greater intensity<\/em>\u00a0to the sun\u2019s radiation at this time. The Yao (south of Lake Malawi) told of such an incident: \u201cThe sun gave way to fierceness, and said, \u2018Let me shine and destroy people\u2019.\u201d The Chukchi (northeastern Siberia) told of a series of violent natural events, in one of which \u201cSun \u2026 scorches the people.\u201d Referring to a long time ago, the Klallam (Washington State) said that \u201cthe sun \u2026 was much hotter then than now. \u2026 it has not been so hot on the earth since.\u201d According to the Cherokee (originally along the Tennessee), the sun \u2013 traversing the path she follows today \u2013 used to kill many people in spite:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Sun lived on the other side of the sky vault, but her daughter lived in the middle of the sky, directly above the earth \u2026 Now, the Sun hated the people on the earth, because they could never look straight at her without screwing up their faces. \u2026 The Sun was jealous and planned to kill all the people, so every day when she got near her daughter\u2019s house she sent down such sultry rays that there was a great fever and the people died by hundreds, until everyone had lost some friend and there was fear that no one would be left.\u201d<\/p>\n

And as stated by the Huichol (central Mexico), the sun afforded little pleasure when it was first launched into the sky by \u201cthe people\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the Sun radiated his light and heat over the world, all the nocturnal animals \u2026 became very angry, and shot arrows at him. His heat was great, and his glaring rays blinded the nocturnal animals; and with eyes closed they retired into caves, water-pools, and trees.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some cultures harboured doubt about the identity of the radiant oppressor, casting it as a false sun or an early form of the sun. The Okanagon people (British Columbia) related with respect to an early \u2018experimental\u2019 sun: \u201cSomebody proposed that Quilquil\u0101\u0301ken, the red-headed woodpecker, should be put in the heavens for a sun. He was accordingly put up, but was found to be too hot; and objections being made, he was taken down again\u201d. And the Quich\u00e9 Maya (Guatemala) remembered the unbridled heat of the sun upon its first rising in the east:<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd then the face of the earth was dried out by the sun. The sun was like a person when he revealed himself. His face was hot, so he dried out the face of the earth. \u2026 And when the sun had risen just a short distance he was like a person, and his heat was unbearable. Since he revealed himself only when he was born, it is only his reflection that now remains. As they put it in the ancient text, \/ \u2018The visible sun is not the real one.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Secondly, the excessive heat is often attributed to the sun\u2019s markedly\u00a0lower position<\/em>\u00a0in the sky, in line with the common belief that the sky as a whole used to be much lower than it is today. Some societies recalled this condition wistfully. For example, the Tohono O\u2019odham (southwestern Arizona) averred with respect to the \u201cprimeval days\u201d: \u201cAt that time the sun was nearer to the earth than now, the seasons were equal, and there was no necessity for clothing to guard against the inclemency of the weather.\u201d And the Shipibo-Conibo (Peruvian Amazonia) told with respect to the antediluvian period: \u2018The sun stood so close above the earth that one could cook food by placing it in the sunlight.\u2019<\/p>\n

The dominant sentiment was negative, however. The Cherokee stated: \u201cWhen the earth was dry and the animals came down, it was still dark, so they got the sun and set it in a track to go every day across the island from east to west, just overhead. It was too hot this way\u201d. The Din\u00e9 (Four Corners Region) relay that the first \u201cpeople\u201d created the sun with a crystal that \u201clighted into a blaze\u201d: \u201cThe people retreated far back on account of the great heat, which continued increasing. The men from the four points found the heat so intense that they arose, but they could hardly stand, as the heavens were so close to them.\u201d When Atseatsine \u201celevated the sun a short distance it tipped a little and burned vegetation and scorched the people, for it was still too near. \u2026 it continued to burn everything. \u2026 the people are suffering and all is burning\u201d. The Keres (Santa Ana and Santo Domingo, New Mexico) and Hopi (northeastern Arizona) passed on the following tradition: \u201cWhen Sun was first placed in the sky, he came too close to the earth and scorched it\u201d. And the Ute (primarily Utah and Colorado) remembered a time of erratic daylight before the institution of the day and night, the seasons and the years, when Ta-vi, \u201cthe sun-god\u201d, was fickle: \u201cIn that long ago, \u2026 the sun roamed the earth at will. When he came too near with his fierce heat the people were scorched \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Thirdly, the torridity may sometimes be blamed on the sun remaining\u00a0stationary<\/em>\u00a0in the sky. For example, according to the indigenous people of the Andaman Islands the first people had \u201cuninterruptedly enjoyed \u2026 the privilege of daylight\u201d, but \u201cthe sun, one day, burned so fiercely as to cause great distress\u201d.<\/p>\n

And fourthly,\u00a0multiple simultaneous<\/em>\u00a0suns, including the present sun, were often held accountable for the discomfort, culminating in a world-embracing blaze. The Yaghan (Tierra del Fuego, South America) believed that the current sun is the benevolent son of a former one, \u201cthe senior sun-man, who was a truculent old man and who caused the first world conflagration by making the ocean boil and by setting the world ablaze in a primordial fire.\u201d According to a variant account, \u201cpowerful T\u00e1ruwalem appeared quite suddenly in the east and set fire to the entire region. \u2026 At that time the whole world burned up all at once, and later everything cooled off again.\u201d Again, the Ngarinyin (Kimberleys, northwest Australia) informed that, before \u201cthe little sun has made her journey from the east to the west to give the world day and night\u201d, this one and her larger mother used to dwell permanently in the east, causing excessive heat:<\/p>\n

\u201cLong, long ago, in the East, behind the world, there lived two suns. A big fat mother sun and a little daughter sun. They lived in hollow logs. They came out to give the world light, but they shone so fiercely and for so long that everything began to burn up. The ground became scorched. The rivers dried up \u2026 The animals began to die of thirst.\u201d<\/p>\n

Providing yet another twist in the bewildering kaleidoscope of myth, one of the suns was often thought to have been or become the moon. For example, legends of the Bunun (originally of central Taiwan) \u201csay that there were once two suns in the sky. The heat was unbearable\u201d and one of the two was subsequently turned into the moon. Among the Atayal (northern Taiwan), too, it \u201cwas believed that in the ancient time, two suns circled around in the sky, and there was no separation between day and night. One of the suns was much larger than the one we see today, and it caused the weather to be extremely hot. \u2026 the plants started to shrivel and the rivers started to dry up which made agricultural crops impossible to grow. The people on earth suffered greatly.\u201d Eventually, the \u201cbigger sun\u201d was changed into the moon. And the Twana (Washington State) blamed a past lethal outburst of heat on the moon, which had been intended by the creator, Dokibatt, \u201cto be the sun\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the morning it rose, but it shone too hot and caused the water to boil, killing the fish and also many animals on land, and did much damage generally, so then he made the sun as it now is to rule the day, and condemned the moon to shine at night.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still other traditions feature a larger number of torches or \u2018suns\u2019 striking the world. A well-known Chinese myth, for instance, has it that ten suns used to take turns to travel across the sky, while the others rested on a cosmic tree; yet on one fateful day during the reign of emperor Y\u00e1o (fl. 23rd century BCE), all ten appeared at once, thereby causing a drought and threatening all life upon the earth. A parallel tradition circulated in Mongolia: \u201cOnce upon a time there rose seven suns in the universe, and it was exposed to a burning drought. The earth was heated fiercely, the streams and rivers evaporated, the plants and trees were parched. People and living beings suffered from intolerable heat, and horses and animals were tormented by painful thirst. It was dreadfully difficult to live or even survive.\u201d The Batak (Sumatra) similarly commemorated the appearance of eight suns, which partly dried up the sea.<\/p>\n

Just like the global deluge, the sweltering heat and the flames seem to have resulted in mass deaths, driving many a species to extinction. In Berossus\u2019 rendition of the Babylonian creation myth, the heroic god Marduk, hailed as \u201cthe sun, the sunlight of the gods\u201d, separated heaven and earth. The primordial \u201cmonsters\u201d, \u201cwondrous beings with peculiar forms\u201d, \u201ccould not endure the strength of the light and were destroyed.\u201d The Quich\u00e9 reflected: \u201cPerhaps we would have no relief from the voracious animals today \u2013 the puma, jaguar, rattlesnake, fer-de-lance \u2013 and perhaps it wouldn\u2019t even be our day today, if the original animals hadn\u2019t been turned to stone by the sun when he came up.\u201d The Shuswap (Kamloops area, British Columbia) claimed that the period when \u201cthe earth was very cold\u201d and \u201cpeople suffered much, and constantly shivered\u201d ended when the Chinook wind was released from \u201ca large round bag hanging on a post\u201d in the land of the sun in the south: \u201cAt last the heat became so intense that the country took fire \u2026 Thus the earth burned up for a long distance north, and many trees and people were destroyed. \u2026 soon the Chinook wind commenced to blow, and, the snow and ice melting under its influence, the people felt the cold no more.\u201d And, as shown in the above survey, the proto-sun killed \u201cmany animals on land\u201d (Twana), \u201cplanned to kill all the people\u201d (Cherokee), angered \u201call the nocturnal animals\u201d (Huichol), made many \u201canimals \u2026 die of thirst\u201d (Ngarinyin), and \u201ctormented by painful thirst\u201d all \u201cliving beings\u201d (Mongolia).<\/p>\n

The crisis ended in sundry manners, varying from tale to tale. Whereas in some the combustion of the world simply ran its course, others relate that the intensity, the proximity, the inertia or the multiplicity of the luminary was remedied by the\u00a0shooting of superfluous suns<\/a>, snaring the sun, putting it into motion, driving it away or launching a replacement.<\/p>\n

These densely interlocking traditions present a daunting intellectual challenge. The actual sun may once have shone too fiercely for human comfort, but can hardly account for memories of a sun that was much too close, multiple suns, a motionless sun and other events preceding the institution of day and night, or the shooting and noosing of suns. Exploding and possibly impacting fireballs are likely behind some of the myths, but only in cases where the event is short-lived, no celestial lights remain stationary and the cycle of day and night is already in place. Where the scorching heat is produced during a period of primaeval darkness or erratic intervals of light for a time exceeding hours, perhaps by a fixed object perceived as an early avatar of the modern sun, the reference may have been to a different light source altogether.<\/p>\n

Anthony Peratt\u2019s hypothesis of an intense-auroral z-pinch features a set of \u2018plasmoids\u2019 contained within the hollow sheaths of a sustained plasma column, which emitted exceedingly bright synchrotron radiation light. Although only one, two or three of these were generally observed at a time, a full set of nine may in rare instances have been made out. The stack of plasmoids would typically remain stationary relative to the earth\u2019s surface.<\/p>\n

Empirical support for such a scenario may come in the form of geophysical and palaeontological evidence for intense, but localised wildfires with significant increases in biomass burning, episodes of mass extinction and radioactive hotspots. As it happens, all three are characteristic for the tail end of the Pleistocene epoch, especially during and towards the end of the Aller\u00f8d climatic oscillation.<\/p>\n

Scientists sustain a heated debate on the possible causes of these events. Exploding bolides or impacts are among the contenders, but have come under fire. An alternative, Paul LaViolette\u2019s scenario of a series of energetic solar proton events, remains viable and resonates with Peratt\u2019s postulate of an intense solar outburst as the mechanism that provoked the \u2018intense aurora\u2019. Perhaps the sun was responsible for this prehistoric spell of cosmogenic global warming after all \u2013 albeit through the medium of transient atmospheric plasmoids. Playing with fire? Or nothing to make light of?<\/p>\n

Rens Van Der Sluijs<\/p>\n

Mythopedia.info<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Original Post July 3, 2014 If folk memory is anything to go by, global warming in its most dreaded form is a thing of the past. The universality of flood myths is widely known, but fewer people are aware that traditions of unbearable heat, often leading to a devastating\u00a0Weltbrand,…<\/p>\n

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