Happy Rosh Hashanah !!...Shana Tova Umetukah ! ... Listen to the Shofar !

It is you who will be found at my feet.

so be it then ,but be warned for what's standing behind and within me,
my message is of the highest love , if u cannot handle it
i surtainly hope u will be able to rise to the incoming energies ,
and when the time is at hand ,
ill be waiting for that apology from you

greeting to you all in the love and light of our one infinite creator ,
love you all dearly
i seek no war

The concept of monotheism has deep roots in Western Civilization, reaching as far back in time as the New Kingdom of ancient Egypt, well before the formation of the ancient state of Israel or the advent of Christianity. There, an odd-looking, untraditional and ultimately unfathomable pharaoh named Akhenaten imposed on his people a belief-system centering around a single deity, the aten or sun-disk. Famous also for his capital city Akhetaten (modern el-Amarna) and his strikingly beautiful wife Nefertiti, Akhenaten's revolution in religion was short-lived, and the extent of its influence even within Egypt is hard to gauge, though it seems slight. Nevertheless, it's possible that aten worship inspired or in some way sparked the development of monotheism later among the ancient Israelites.

During his reign, the Pharaoh Akhenaten was able to abolish the complex pantheon of the ancient Egyptian religion and replace it with a single god, the Aten, who had no image or form. Seizing on the striking similarities between the religious vision of this "heretic" pharaoh and the teachings of Moses, Sigmund Freud was the first to argue that Moses was in fact an Egyptian. Now Ahmed Osman, using recent archaeological discoveries and historical documents, contends that Akhenaten and Moses were one and the same man.

In a stunning retelling of the Exodus story, Osman details the events of Moses/Akhenaten's life: how he was brought up by Israelite relatives, ruled Egypt for seventeen years, angered many of his subjects by replacing the traditional Egyptian pantheon with worship of the Aten, and was forced to abdicate the throne. Retreating to the Sinai with his Egyptian and Israelite supporters, he died out of the sight of his followers, presumably at the hands of Seti I, after an unsuccessful attempt to regain his throne.
Osman reveals the Egyptian components in the monotheism preached by Moses as well as his use of Egyptian royal ritual and Egyptian religious expression. He shows that even the Ten Commandments betray the direct influence of Spell 125 in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Moses and Akhenaten provides a radical challenge to long-standing beliefs concerning the origin of Semitic religion and the puzzle of Akhenaten's deviation from ancient Egyptian tradition. In fact, Osman's discovery is that many major Old Testament figures are Egyptian origin.

The idea of Akhenaten as the pioneer of a monotheistic religion that later became Judaism has been considered by various scholars. One of the first to mention this was Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, in his book Moses and Monotheism. Freud argued that Moses had been an Atenist priest forced to leave Egypt with his followers after Akhenaten's death. Freud argued that Akhenaten was striving to promote monotheism, something that the biblical Moses was able to achieve. Following his book, the concept entered popular consciousness and serious research.

Other scholars and mainstream Egyptologists point out that there are direct connections between early Judaism and other Semitic religious traditions.............cont.

Yom Kippur is October 8th, and Amazingly when both planets leave Virgos womb

Not the 8th and not both at one time.

10/4/2011 virgo births venus
10/9/2011 virgo births mercury
10/17/2011 virgo births sun
11/11/2011 virgo births saturn

Haille, thats the spirit ! That is a beautiful psalm ! So tob. Shalom and peace to you my God fearing friend.

Psalm 130:7 – … put your hope in the LORD, for with the LORD is unfailing love and with him is full redemption.

Psalm 147:11 – the LORD delights in those who fear him, who put their hope in his unfailing love.

You are an imposter and we will have our battle and I will have my Victory.

Yes my friend, I understand. I dont talk about my personal life on this forum. But I do believe that Children and Parenthood is the two most greatest things on earth

The only people I hate are those that harm little kids in a mean spirited or sexually abusive way or via deprivation (like food etc)

I believe in reasonable discipline and parental led punishment for training a child and can relate it to Gods love.

Thank you friend, Those are the exact dates, I meant by the 8th, both Venus and Mercury will be out of her womb

Then Sun, then Saturn, yes, that will be awesome !

WOW!Apollo, I knew that the Book had Astronomical knowledge all in it! I read a book called Witness of the Stars by E.W. Bullinger. In it he explains that Messias story is written in the very constellations/ Mazeroth.

Psalm 19 The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.

The Hidden Life in Freemasonry

It is by the use of those perfectly natural but super-normal faculties that much of the information given in this book has been obtained. Anyone who, having developed such sight, watches a Masonic ceremony, will see that a very great deal more is being done than is expressed in the mere words of the ritual, beautiful and dignified as they often are. Of course, I fully understand that all this may well seem fantastically impossible to those who have not studied the subject at first-hand; I can but affirm that this is a clear and definite reality to me, and that by long and careful research, extending over more than forty years, I am absolutely certain of the existence and reliability of this method of investigation.
Quoting: C. W. Leadbeater 33°

[link to www.anandgholap.net]

they remote view
to a degree

Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), the noted English scientist and mathematician, wrote many works that would now be classified as occult studies.

These occult works explored chronology, alchemy, and Biblical interpretation (especially of the Apocalypse).

Newton's scientific work may have been of lesser personal importance to him, as he placed emphasis on rediscovering the occult wisdom of the ancients. In this sense, some have commented that the common reference a "Newtonian Worldview" as being purely mechanistic is somewhat inaccurate. After purchasing and studying Newton's alchemical works in 1942, economist John Maynard Keynes, for example, opined that "Newton was not the first of the age of reason, he was the last of the magicians

In 1791, Luigi Galvani published his discovery of bioelectricity, demonstrating that electricity was the medium by which nerve cells passed signals to the muscles.
Alessandro Volta's battery, or voltaic pile, of 1800, made from alternating layers of zinc and copper, provided scientists with a more reliable source of electrical energy than the electrostatic machines previously used. The recognition of electromagnetism, the unity of electric and magnetic phenomena, is due to Hans Christian Ørsted and André-Marie Ampère in 1819-1820; Michael Faraday invented the electric motor in 1821, and Georg Ohm mathematically analysed the electrical circuit in 1827. Electricity and magnetism (and light) were definitively linked by James Clerk Maxwell, in particular in his "On Physical Lines of Force" in 1861 and 1862

Aether in Greek mythology, is one of the Protogenoi, the first-born elementals. He is the personification of the upper sky, space, and heaven, and is the elemental god of the "Bright, Glowing, Upper Air." He is the pure upper air that the gods breathe, as opposed to the normal air that mortals breathe

The etheric plane (see also Etheric body) is a term introduced into Theosophy by Charles Webster Leadbeater and Annie Besant to represent one of the planes of existence in neo-Theosophical and Rosicrucian cosmology. It represents the fourth[higher] subplane of the physical plane (a hyperplane), the lower three being the states of solid, liquid, and gaseous matter. The idea was popularised in books by Alice Bailey, Rudolf Steiner, Walter John Kilner and others. The term aether (also written as "ether") was adopted from ancient Greek philosophy and science into Victorian physics (see Luminiferous aether) and utilised by Madame Blavatsky to correspond to akasha, the fifth element (quintessence) of Hindu metaphysics.

The Greek word aither derives from an Indo-European root aith- ("burn, shine"). Blavatsky also related the idea to the Hindu Prana principle , the vital, life-sustaining force of living beings, present in all natural processes of the universe. Prana was first expounded in the Upanishads, where it is part of the worldly, physical realm, sustaining the body and the mind. Blavatsky also tended to use the word "astral" indiscrimininately for these supposed subtle physical phenomena.

Leadbeater and Besant (Adyar School of Theosophy), and later Alice Bailey, though, in formalising Theosophical cosmology around 1913, conceived that the etheric plane constituted four higher subplanes of the physical plane. According to the Theosophist Geoffrey A. Farthing, Leadbeater used the term, because of its resonance in the physical sciences, to describe his clairvoyant investigations of sub-atomic physics.

The majority of modern physicists, in spite of acknowledging the phenomena known as vacuum energy and the existence of other unsolved problems in physics that baffle the current standard theories, continue to maintain that there is no need to imagine that a medium for propagation of electromagnetic waves exists (see also aether theories). However, there has been a number of physicists in western countries whose research, currently considered fringe and controversial among the mainstream scientific community, shows evidence of the existence of the dynamic aether possessing a fluid crystal-like structure and permeating all space, in an apparent accordance with recent experiments and as formerly outlined by Theosophical and Rosicrucian esoteric schools; also their work attempt to provide solutions to tap this energy source that regulates quantum activity for the generation of pollution-free power and other technological applications

How would we describe a force, equal to 121 million billion billion billion billion newton, that drives each quanta of space-time and mediates each of the forces that holds the Universe together? The Gforce is omniscient in that it is enormously powerful and encompasses the entire physical Universe. The Gforce is non-material in nature, and yet gives rise to all physical existence. The Gforce produces the space-time (Aether) in which we live. Further evidence gathered from the neurosciences show that conductance is a direct measurement of emotions, and conductance is also shown to be a quality of the Aether. Thus there is a physics link to suggest the Aether is involved with certain aspects of mind, if not all aspects of mind. Some people might notice the striking resemblance between the omniscient, non-material, and mind-like quality of Aether and compare it to the similar description often ascribed to a Creator God of the physical Universe.

Getting down to the heart of the matter, either God exists, or God does not exist. If God truly does exist and God is the Creator of the physical Universe, then God must be represented in quantum physics. In our book, "Secrets of the Aether," we scientifically explore the connection between God and quantum physics. The discovery of the Gforce is certain to become one of the important arguments for Intelligent Design as it provides solid evidence for God.

from pesn:

Apparently, there's a lot more where this came from, and once that energy technology has been delivered to the public, the inventor has other technologies that the Orion Project will begin to develop and bring forward. Greer said, "We're dealing with someone who has a track record of thirty years of building these technologies; and being under contract with top secret programs; and has actually built things to the level of things dematerializing, teleporting, and space-time alteration. We're talking really advanced stuff." Greer says that in the military secret ops, such projects are referred to as WSFM which stands for "Weird Science and Freakin' Magic."

Dr. Steven Greer: The real story about the end of NASA's shuttle program

Thread: Dr. Steven Greer: The real story about the end of NASA's shuttle program

In Greek mythology, Cronus or Kronos was the leader and the youngest of the first generation of Titans, divine descendants of Gaia, the earth, and Uranus, the sky. He overthrew his father and ruled during the mythological Golden Age, until he was overthrown by his own son, Zeus and imprisoned in Tartarus.

Perhaps it will seem a bit strange that an ancient god identified as the creator would be so intimately associated with the idea of kingship, or remembered as having ruled on earth during the Golden Age.

There is a fascinating paradox here. In the earliest traditions, as we've already noted, the Universal Monarch is a celestial power through and through. He is, in fact, the central light of heaven. But as we've also noted, in the course of time the creator-king's domain is progressively localized and the god takes on an increasingly human countenance as the "first king" of the particular nation telling the story.

In certain lands such as ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, we are able to observe the process over many centuries. In the earliest memories, the Egyptian Ra and Sumerian An rule the sky. But later chroniclers in both lands depict them as terrestrial rulers. This localization of the creator-king is simply one part of a larger evolutionary process. As the myths evolve over many centuries, the gods and heroes are brought down to earth, one nation after another claiming these divine powers as ancestors. And how could it be otherwise? Remember that all sacred activity within the respective cultures arose from the same collective links to the past, the same memories of the primeval age.

"The further we go back in history," observed Carl Jung, "the more evident does the king's divinity become..." And when you trace the royal lineage backwards, you eventually confront the radiant figure at the head of the line. Since the story of this creator-king is as old as the myth of the Golden Age: it is older than the institution of kingship!

Historians have always claimed that the myths of celestial kings were nothing more than images of local kings and kingship rites projected onto the sky. But comparative analysis will demonstrate that the reverse is true. The memory of the creator-king came first, and it was this remarkable memory which provided the mythical aura supporting and legitimizing kings the world over.

Who, then--or what--was the source of this worldwide theme, this universally-remembered and profoundly charismatic power behind the rule of kings?

In exploring ancient images of the Universal Monarch, we must now enter the realm of classical thought. Our own civilization owes its greatest debt to Greek and Latin poets, philosophers and historians, who received and interpreted countless mythical traditions of nations throughout the Mediterranean and beyond, often drawing on literary sources that were later lost and are now unavailable to us.

According to the Greek poet Hesiod, the present age is but a shadow of a former epoch--called the Golden Age of Kronos.

"First of all," Hesiod writes, "the deathless gods who dwell on Olympus made a golden race of mortal men who lived in the time of Kronos, when he was reigning in heaven. And they lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: Miserable age rested not on them. . . The fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint."

Kronos was the father of beginnings; in the words of the Orphic poet--the "Lord of the World, First Father." But this harmonious and peaceful epoch, founded by the god-king, gave way to world-ending disaster and devastating wars of the gods (the Clash of the Titans).

In honor of the Age of Kronos, the Greeks celebrated an annual festival called the Kronia, during which the celebrants symbolically renewed the epoch of peace and plenty. Each year, according to Lucius Accius, the Greeks held large feasts throughout the towns and countryside, reversing the normal social order, exchanging gifts, enjoying merrymaking free from the normal restraints, with each man waiting on his slaves In this way the Kronia festival symbolically transported the celebrants back in time to a mythic period before law and cultural constraints, when Kronos first ruled the world.

Plato writes in his often-studied work, The Statesman, that man formerly lived in a paradise, under the rule of the creator himself. But the mortal realm, Plato declared, was later separated from the creator, and that was the cause of the evils descending upon the world.

So the Greeks, in accord with the universal tradition, remembered the age of Kronos as the *model* for later generation. In The Laws, Plato writes that “we must do all we can to imitate the life which is said to have existed in the days of Kronos...both in private and public life."

In the third century B.C. the neoplatonist Porphyry, drawing on the work of the Greek philosopher Dicaearchus, offered a simple explanation for the human yearning for paradise. The source of this yearning is the memory of the Age of Kronos, he wrote, when men "lived a life of leisure, without care or toil, and also--if the doctrine of the most eminent medical men is to be accepted--without disease...And there were no wars or feuds between them. Consequently, this manner of life of theirs naturally came to be longed for by men of later times."

Like his many counterparts in the ancient world, Kronos was the acknowledged prototype of kings, his rule in heaven providing the standards for rule on earth.

Every Greek king thus bore the universal burden of royalty, for the Greeks applied exactly the same test of the just or good ruler as did other peoples. Homer, most famous of the Greek poets, announced as the ideal "a blameless king whose fame goes up to the wide heaven, maintaining right, and the black earth bears wheat and barley and the trees are laden with fruit...and the people prosper." It was the duty of the king, as the First Father's successor, to renew the Golden Age.

One additional aspect of the Kronos image draws our attention. It seems that the former ruler of the sky entered later traditions as a renowned terrestrial king. For in later times it was claimed that Kronos had actually dwelt on earth. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, for example, in remembering the Golden Age, was emphatic on the point: "Kronos ruled on this very earth," he insisted. The same idea was proclaimed in Orphic tradition.

The correspondence with the global myth and its evolution over time (as the gods were brought down to earth), is indeed remarkable.

But the Greek myth of Kronos brings us to a critical juncture. For this celestial power is identified, and the identity leads inexorably to a series of far-reaching discoveries.

All Greek astronomical traditions agreed that Kronos was the planet Saturn. What is now the sixth planet from the Sun stands at the center of the Greek paradise myth. Kronos, the planet Saturn, ruled the heavens for a period, presiding over the Golden Age, then departed as the heavens fell into confusion.

How did it happen that a remote planet, now a bare speck in the sky, found its way into such an improbable, yet deeply-rooted memory? Our own names for the planets came from the Romans who gave the outermost visible planet the name Saturn.

Latin poets, philosophers, and historians, including Ovid, Virgil, and Seneca, preserved an archaic legend about Saturn. In unison they insisted that long, long ago the now-distant star had ruled as god-king, founding an ancient kingdom, a paradise on earth.

The Chronicler Virgil remembered "the life golden Saturn lived on earth, while yet none had heard the clarion blare, none the sword-blades ring."

Saturn, the poet proclaimed, "gathered together the unruly race, scattered over mountain heights, and gave them laws, and chose that the land be called Latium...Under his reign were the golden ages men tell of, in such perfect peace he ruled the nations..."

The Latin naturalist Seneca repeated the idea more than once: "No wars the nations knew, no trumpets threatening blasts...and the glad Earth herself willingly laid bare her fruitful breast, a mother happy and safe amid such duteous nurslings.

But perhaps the most eloquent expressions came from the poet and historian Ovid:

"The first millennium was the age of gold . . .No brass-lipped trumpets called, nor clanging swords...and seasons traveled through the years of peace. The innocent earth learned neither spade nor plough; she gave her riches as fruit hangs from the tree...Springtide the single season of the year."

What the Greeks called the Kronia, celebrating the fortunate era of Kronos, the Romans termed the Saturnalia, a symbolic renewal of the Saturnia regna or reign of the great god Saturn. As in the Greek festival, the rules of social standing and obligation were temporarily suspended, with all things reverting to the primeval state, as master and slave took their place at one table.

In remarkable agreement with the myths of other peoples, the Romans regarded Saturn as the model and source of cherished national customs. Tracing their ancestry and national identity to this very god-king, the chroniclers claimed that, in an earlier time, the Latins deemed themselves "Saturnians". "Be not unaware, Virgil writes, "that the Latins are Saturn's race, righteous not by bond or laws, but self-controlled of their own free will and by the custom of their ancient god."

Nothing symbolized this ancient tie to Saturn more dramatically than the mythical ancestry of kings. It was for a very clear purpose that the chroniclers exerted themselves on the subject, announcing that the early Latin kings were part of an unbroken line leading back through mythical history straight to the god-king Saturn. From the mythical king Latinus the line led upward to Faunus, then to Picus. As Virgil puts it, "Faunus' sire was Picus, and he boasts thee, O Saturn, as his father; thou art first founder of the line. To him by heaven's decree was no son or male descent, cut off..."

Since the line of descent was unbroken, Virgil could insist that Augustus Caesar himself be honored as the son of a god, destined to repeat the accomplishments of the founding king--

"Here is Caesar, and all Iulus' seed, destined to pass beneath the sky's mighty vault. This, this is he whom thou so oft hearest promised to thee, Augustus Caesar, son of a god, who shall again set up the Golden Age amid the fields where Saturn once reigned."

Just as we have observed among other peoples, Roman mythology preserved the myth of Saturn on two levels. On the one hand, there was the tradition of the celestial Saturn ruling in the sky. "When ancient Saturn had his kingdom in the sky," Virgil wrote, "the deep earth held lucre all in its dark embrace."

But the same god was also localized by the Romans as the legendary first king of Latium--a glaring contradiction the chroniclers overcame by asserting that, after the celestial ruler's exile or flight, he had taken up residence in Latium. "I remember how Saturn was received in this land," Ovid wrote. "He had been driven by Jupiter from the celestial realms. From that time the folk long retained the name of Saturnian."

At every level, the Roman memory of Saturn resonates with a global tradition of the Universal Monarch. In the very fashion we have observed in other lands, we see the god entering local history as the primeval founding king, ruling an ancestral kingdom. And with the same result: that the nation telling the story then claimed to have descended from the god-king himself.

The message couldn't be more clear. Long after the mythical age of the gods, every ancient culture continued to honor the great luminary remembered as the king of the world.

The Babylonians were apparently the first to develop systematic observations of the planets, and they recorded the celestial motions with considerable skill. But in laying the foundations of later astronomy, they also preserved a crucial link with the past. Again and again they asserted a claim that could only appear preposterous to the modern translator. They declared that distant planets were the great gods of former times.

As we noted earlier, Sumerian myths say that the rites and standards of "kingship" descended from the central luminary An, founder of the Golden Age. In Babylonian myth the Sumerian An appears as Anu, first in the line of gods and kings. And as cuneiform experts began to decipher archaic tablets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the specialists on Babylonian astronomy began to notice curious associations of the god Anu with the planet Saturn. The connection was stated most bluntly by the renowned expert on Babylonian astronomy, Peter Jensen, in Die Kosmologie der Babylonier: Anu was Saturn.

What makes this identity stand out is the degree to which one nation after another repeated the same connection. It's an interesting fact,not often noticed, that the ancient Hebrews regarded their race as having been "Saturnian" in the beginning, when they lived under the rule of the creator El. That is, the Hebrews honored the same ancestral tie to Saturn as did the Romans.

Indeed, the consistency with which early astronomies identity Saturn as the former creator-king is extraordinary. The Zoroastrians of ancient Persia knew Saturn as the heaven-sustaining Zurvan, "the King and Lord of the Long Dominion." The Iranian god-king Yima, a transcript of the Hindu Yama, founder of the Golden Age, was also linked to Saturn. The Chinese mythical emperor Huang-ti, first in a great dynasty of kings and mythical founder of the Taoist religion, was identified astronomically as the planet Saturn. Even the Tahitians recall of the god Fetu-tea, the planet Saturn, that he "was the King."

Many ancient nations commemorated the era before the fall, the harmonious condition of the "first time," by designating one day of the week as a holy day, the Sabbath. But is it significant that originally the Hebrew Sabbath, the seventh day of the week, was the day of Saturn? So was the seventh and most sacred day of the Babylonian and Phoenician weeks. For the Romans this commemorative day was Saturni dies, "Saturn's day." The same day passed into the Anglo-Saxon calendar as the "day of Seater [Saturn]," which, became our own Saturday.

When scholars today look back at this esoteric connection of the Sabbath and Saturn, they see little more than an oddity of minor significance. That is because historians as a whole have missed the ancient link of Saturn to kingship, to the origins of civilization, and to the roots of ancient myth and symbol.

But there is an even more significant aspect of the Saturn mystery.

Here is a remarkable fact: though numerous figures of the Universal Monarch are translated conventionally as the "sun" god, the celestial power invoked by the world's first religions is not the body we call sun today. In fact the star-worshippers specifically distinguished it from our Sun by calling it the best sun, the primeval sun, the central sun.

As if to underscore the mystery, consider the symbolism which the Dogon tribe of Africa attribute to the planet Saturn. They depict the planet with a simple pictograph that is used around the world to describe the primeval “sun” god--a small circle inside a much larger circle. Seen in isolation this little oddity is meaningless. But what do the more general patterns--the archetypes--have to tell us?

Natives of Mexico recall that prior to the present age, an exemplary sun ruled the world, but this was not the sun of today. His name was Quetzalcoatl. The Maya maintained essentially the same idea, calling the primeval sun god Huracan. The Incas of Peru spoke of a former sun superior to the present sun. To the ancient Egyptians, the sun god Atum-Ra, the model ruler, reigned over the fortunate era for a time, then retired from the world. The Sumerian An, ruling with "terrifying splendor," was the dominating luminary of the sky, but not our sun. Later the god departed to a more remote domain.

When it comes to the well-known sun gods of early man, nothing in the mytho-astronomical record seems to have unnerved the experts. Nor should is surprise us that scholars today have no doubt that the Greek Helios, Latin Sol, Assyrian Shamash, or Egyptian Ra, were the Sun pure and simple. In Egypt, countless hymns to the god Ra extol him as the divine power opening the "day." "The lords of all lands. . . praise Ra when he riseth at the beginning of each day." Ra is the "great Light who shinest in the heavens. . . Thou art glorious by reason of thy splendors. . ."

In the same way, Assyrian and Babylonian texts depict the god Shamash as the supreme light of the sky. Such images would seem to leave no question as to the solar character of these gods.

Yet a dilemma arise. During the past century several authorities noticed that Greek and Latin astronomical texts show a mysterious confusion of the "Sun"--Greek Helios, Latin Sol--with the outermost planet, Saturn. Though the designation seems bizarre, the expression "star of Helios" or "star of Sol" was applied to Saturn! Of the Babylonian star-worshippers the chronicler Diodorus writes: "To the one we call Saturn they give a special name, 'Sun-Star.'"

Similarly, the Greek historian Nonnus gives Kronos as the Arab name of the "sun," though Kronos meant only Saturn and no other celestial body. Hyginus, in listing the planets, names first Jupiter, then the planet "of Sol, others say of Saturn." A Greek ostrakon, cited by the eminent classicist Franz Boll, identifies the Egyptian sun god Ra, not with our sun, but with the planet Saturn. This repeated confusion of the Sun and Saturn seems to make no sense at all. Can you imagine any difficulty in separating the two bodies, or distinguishing the one from the other?

One fact beyond dispute is that the word Helios did become the Greek word for our Sun, just as the Latin Sol gave his name to our Sun. The same can be said for the older Shamash and Ra: the names of these gods became the names for the solar orb. But that's where the connection with our Sun ends and the mystery of Saturn, the Universal Monarch, begins.

In seeking to explain the curious confusion of the sun and Saturn, late nineteenth century linguists came up with a simple explanation: The confusion, they said, was the result of the similarity of the Greek name Helios to the Greek rendering of the Phoenician god El, a god identified with Kronos, the planet Saturn. So it was all just a misunderstanding of language.

But this explanation could not survive more than a few decades. For as the leading expert Franz Boll soon pointed out, the identification of the "sun" god as Saturn was more widespread and more archaic than previously acknowledged.

In the Epinomis of Plato (who lived in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.), there is an enumeration of the planets, which, as customarily translated, entails this unstartling statement: "There remain, then, three stars (planets), one of which is preeminent among them for slowness, and some call him after Kronos."

Yet according to Boll the original reading is not Kronos but Helios--which is to say that earlier texts gave the name Helios to Saturn. But later copyists, who could not believe that Helios was anything other than the sun, "corrected" the reading to "Kronos."

Moreover, as Boll discovered, this practice of "correcting" the name of Saturn, from Helios to Kronos, was quite common among later copyists. Based on his reading of more archaic Greek manuscripts, Boll drew a startling conclusion: the sun god Helios and the planet-god Saturn were "one and the same god."

Now if this only seems to accentuate the puzzle, there is more. Hindu astronomical lore deemed the planet Saturn as Arka, the star "of the sun." And certain wise men of India often asserted that the "true sun" Brahma, the central light of heaven, was none other than Saturn. This in turn, reminds us of a rarely-noted teaching of the alchemists, preservers of so many ancient mysteries. The planet Saturn, they recalled, was not just a planet; it was "the best sun.” Such language--true sun, best sun--is strangely reminiscent of that language used by native Americans when describing a prior sun, or superior sun, who had presided over the era of peace and plenty