January 18, 2012
To be posted on nobabies.net
Joseph Sanders
Louisiana state archeologist, retired
P.O. Box 44247
Baton Rouge, LA 70804
ltgov@crt.la.gov
Dear Joseph Sanders:
This is just for fun. You may find there is a campfire story in it.
A couple of days ago a tree mysteriously burned down in Longwood, Florida. Here we are on the eve of the Mayan apocalypse. (If there are no zombies, there are going to be a lot of disappointed people.) The Mayan calendar ends this year. And by coincidence the tree was planted at the beginning of the Mayan Long Count, now ending. The tree was planted when that count began. Nobody but me seems to notice. It’s just a meaningless coincidence.
For another coincidence, the Gregorian calendar, which we have used for centuries, also will end. At least plans will be made to drop it. From then on time will not be measured in days and years. The experts will be able to say, “The time is, by definition, what my clock says.” The change will at first be imperceptible. They add a leap second about once a year to reconcile clock time with the slowing of the earth’s rotation. When they stop doing that, there will be no astronomical standard. Odd, isn’t it. They invested so much money into jerking us around with daylight saving time to keep daybreak kind of close to the same time throughout the year, and now just like that they are dropping the whole concept of time and day.
The explanation involves dark mutters of the words, “Ancient code.” In other words, evidently nobody understands the computer program that inserts the leap second. By throwing up their hands, the experts are confessing that they are no longer engineers. They are priests, faithfully continuing a ritual for which the meaning has been lost. After all, who could possibly understand ancient code? And when it becomes corrupted, as all mortal things must, who could fix it? So they have given up. The thing is that the leap second is a refinement of – let us all say reverently – code that is even more ancient. They won’t be able to fix that either.
When the Julian calendar was replaced by the Gregorian, there were riots. The official word was that people thought the jump of a few days (the leap years that had been missed since the Julian calendar was adopted) meant days had been taken from people’s lives. I rather suspect it was because rents fell due sooner. But this time there is little interest. I am not worried about the Mayan calendar, but I am a bit worried about the Gregorian.
I said the tree was planted. Hmm. Could it be that it was deliberately placed where it might have a long life? Ridiculous, of course, as everything else in this letter is.
A few more meaningless coincidences. The parallel 30o north is in trine with the South Pole. The South Pole is stranger than the North Pole because the South Pole is underlain by land. The North Pole is not, as is true of most of the surface of the earth. That parallel goes through more land than any other. The meridian that goes through the most land is 30o east. They intersect at the apex of the Nile delta. If you then go west, the place that is in trine with that spot in Egypt turns out to be in Louisiana.
Why do I say “trine” rather than 120o? They mean the same thing, but the “trine” term comes from ancient Babylonian astrology. I’m not sure it’s 3,500 years old, but it is certainly 2,000 and almost certainly 3,000.
If you take the three points I have designated and complete the rough tetrahedron (It’s not perfect because the parallel is not a great circle so distance along it are less than along the meridian.) the fourth corner lies in roughly the middle of the great trench system of the Pacific. This is a deep gouge in the abyssal plain (I would have said abysmal, but who am I?) of the ocean. We are told – with a straight face; it always comes with a straight face – that the trench system is a “subduction zone” where two tectonic plates collide one riding over the other, such is happening so conspicuously where the plate of the Indian subcontinent is being crammed under a plate of Asia, thus throwing up the Himalayas, which begin with a huge escarpment. India is big, but not as big as the Pacific, so of course there has to be an even bigger escarpment along the subduction zone there. Only there isn’t. So like the burned tree, it is a mystery.
All of these things occurred with no human agency, so of course they are not part of a real pattern, just random chance. In fact nobody has even noticed the pattern. Maybe. That is not to say there is no human activity associated with them. If you draw a great circle from Cairo in Egypt to say New Orleans (both being the apex of the delta of an enormous river) the line goes, more or less, through Athens, Rome, Genoa, the Midi (where the Cabala was written, Brittany, Stonehenge, Oak Island, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Charlotte, Atlanta and New Orleans and continues through Mexico City and I think a little island out there in the Pacific. In the other direction it goes through Saudi Mt. Sinai, Medina, Mecca and winds up with a little island in the Arabian Sea, about at the antipode of that island in the pacific. (At this point, if you are telling it by a campfire you must say, “Coincidence, of course,” in a tone of voice that suggests it isn’t.)
It is not just modern cities that decorate this great circle. If you look at a map of the distribution of Rh negative blood in the Old World, you see that there is more in the northwest of Europe and to a certain extent in the south of Africa and very little in the Far East. But looking a little closer you can imagine a chain of increased Rh type over the neighbors starting in the Sudan, traced through the Mediterranean, particularly the Berbers, though Basque country, coming over the north of Ireland and Scotland and winding up in Bergen in Norway. Similarly a Stonehenge type monument has been found in Sudan, there are of course the pyramids at Cairo, extensive megalithic architecture on Malta, of course Brittany, Stonehenge we mentioned, Wales, Scotland and the Faro Island pointing at Bergen. This time there might, just might, be a correlation. The people who brought the blood type built the stones.
And there was a great flurry of activity from these energetic folks just about, that’s right, 3,500 years ago, the Pyramids, Malta, Brittany and the beginning of Stonehenge marking roughly the start of the long count.
I showed this to a friend who happened to be an expert of Ley lines. (I cannot use his name without permission, which I don’t have.) He said, “Ah, but your line must go through the mounds in the Midwest.” It doesn’t.
There are those who say there are harbors along the east coast of the US that are below the surface. They must be so ancient the sea level has changed. There is one at the south tip of this county, which I hope to verify some day. If you take that at as true – or even if you don’t; an error can provide just as good a meaningless coincidence as a fact – then these master builders may have made their way as far as Mexico City, which also has pyramids. And the headdress of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh was a cobra and a vulture; the Aztecs made much of their feathered serpent god.
That raises the question of whether there was any activity near those trenches in the Pacific. Japan would be the place to look. They used to say that since the aboriginal inhabitants of Japan (the Ainu, last seen on the northern island of Hokkaido) were full bearded, round eyed, pale, robust people with brown wavy hair they might be Caucasian. That is now denied by the geneticists. (“What you see doesn’t matter. What I see is truth.” And we have to believe our shamans.) But I just read yesterday (so I have a reference Mark Ravina The Last Samurai published by Wiley 2004 Hoboken page 80) that as recently as 150 years ago way down at the southwester tip of Japan on the island of Amami Ōshima they still practiced old fashioned European Neolithic Cult of the Dead rituals. Did you notice the accent on the “O” ? That means the sound is unchanged but the vowel is prolonged. Seems odd, but the Romans did the same thing. Wrong millennium of course.
So it all stood. Now I read (Andre Lawler America’s Lost City SCIENCE vol. 334 no. 6063 December 23, 2011 page 1618) that the FIRST mound was built in Louisiana, so close to the great circle as makes no nevermind, at the same time as the tree was planted and the great monuments were being built on the other side of the Atlantic. Say it ain’t so. This is threatening to go from funny, ha-ha to funny, peculiar.
I shall post this on my web site. Or course you are cordially invited to make any remark you’d like me to post. But generally my purpose on that site is very serious and I am always begging experts for input, which rarely comes. You, however, may consider yourself under no pressure. Even if this issue were important to me I can see no way at all to pursue the matter.
Except, of course, on a creepy night around a campfire.
Linton Herbert
There have been 40,829 visitors so far.