"The entire mantle of the earth would shift in a matter of days, perhaps hours, changing the position of the north and south poles, causing worldwide disaster," a narrator proclaims. "Earthquakes would rock every continent, massive tsunamis would inundate coastal cities. It would be the ultimate planetary catastrophe."
The idea apparently originates with a 19th century Frenchman, Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, a priest-turned-archaeologist who got it from his study of ancient Mayan and Aztec texts.
Actually, no, the reporter on this piece got it wrong, Braasser de Bourbourg was not the source of this "crustal shift" nonsense. Here is a shorter history of the nonsense and how it became a nuage tenet:
http://dailygrail.com/blogs/epgrondine/2009/11/Crustal-shifts-wandering-planets-Niburu-shorter-history-some-bad-hypothesisHi -
As near as I know, a crustal shift has never happened, and can't, as the forces required are so large that the Earth would fragment. There is no wandering planet Niburu, nor have any of the planets changed their orbits.
The source for all of this nonsense seems to have been:
JOHANN RADLOF 1823
Who was a classical scholar who first came up with this nonsense. Phaethon=Planet X. (I received this information from Leroy Ellenberger, the work is that of Marinus Anthony van der Sluijs:
http://www.mythopedia.info/radlof.htm.)
Radlof's theory, embodied in a thin booklet printed in Gothic letters and published in 1823, essentially boils down to four strands of theory, all of which recur throughout the entire subsequent history of catastrophism.
The FIRST IDEA was that of the exploded planet: in 1802, Olbers had proposed that the recently discovered bodies Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta in the asteroid belt must have been the last remnants of a former giant planet that once orbited between Mars and Jupiter.
In this source planet, Radlof saw the original referent of the myths of Phaethon, Isaiah's 'morning star', Typhon, and others. [DATES SERIOUSLY WRONG.] The link with Phaethon was justified by reference to the following passage from Nonnus, in which Hermes addressed Phaethon as follows:
"Then you will shine in the sky like the Sun God next to Ares,
scattering that thick invisible darkness far away;
a miracle unheard of in the course of the ages"
If Phaethon really stood "next to Ares", Radlof naively argued, he could have been the missing planet, that formerly revolved between Mars and Jupiter.
THE SECOND COMPONENT of Radlof's theory, the mythical death of both Phaethon and Typhon at the hands of Zeus was then interpreted as
the disruption of the former planet. In keeping with Nonnus' statement that Zeus discharged a comet towards Typhon, Radlof supposed that THE FORMER PLANET 'PHAETHON' SPLINTERED TO PIECES AFTER COLLISION WITH A COMET:
"Perhaps this displacement happened as the result of a collision with what used to be called a dragon star or a comet"
Unperturbed by Nonnus' late date, Radlof then complained that Nonnus ought to have given more attention to the comet than he actually did:
"The moving power of that enormous water mountain that rose from the sea and moved forth over the Earth is obviously Jupiter's comet, and it is actually surprising that our poet allows him only a marginal role"
The THIRD ELEMENT of Radlof's theory is that the planets were on different orbits than today. Radlof uniquely speculated that THE PLANET VENUS WAS ONE OF THE FRAGMENTS OF THE EXPLODED PLANET, that settled into its present orbit in the immediate aftermath of the explosion, after some close encounters with Mars. These views were motivated by the desire to accommodate Varro's statement regarding Venus' changed appearance and possibly also Phaethon's links to Venus. In defence of the view that Venus had once been a constituent of a bigger planet, Radlof pointed to Venus' 'tiny size'. His bold ideas about the origins of Venus qualify Radlof as possibly the first modern 'planetary catastrophist' on record.
The explosion of the planet 'Phaethon' would also have had repercussions for our own planet. The FOURTH ELEMENT in Radlof's theory was THE TILTING OF THE ROTATIONAL AXIS OF THE EARTH, that had originally pointed towards the zenith:
"And the Aethiopians may indeed really have turned black on that occasion, because the hot zone ran over their heads when the Earth axis was disrupted by that event."
The tilted position of the Earth's axis with respect to its poles had already led old-Greek researchers to assume that our earthly star had been hurled from its former, straight position by some external body; in fact, Anaxagoras taught that the stars had originally revolved straight in the celestial firmament, so that the pole stood exactly on top of the zenith of the earth. The Earth's point of gravity must have been disrupted by the collisions of the two disturbed heavenly bodies Hesperus and Phaethon, and especially by the former's change of orbit and all subsequent radical changes in the internal equilibrium equations of the planets in our solar realm, and its former position with respect to the pole had to be altered twice.
FOR THE CONNECTION OF THE TILTING OF THE AXIS TO THE MYTH OF PHAETHON, RADLOF RELIED ON TWO ANCIENT PASSAGES IN WHICH PHAETHON'S FIRE DISTURBED ATLAS, STANDING AT THE POLE OF HEAVEN. THE
PASSAGES IN CASE CAME FROM OVID, FALSELY IDENTIFIED AS HESIOD, AND NONNUS:
"The fire already threatens the pole of heaven
And Atlas can hardly go on to carry the glowing firmament,
When Jupiter - with his lightning hurls the rider from his chariot
and with dreadful fire quenches the all-fire.
With burning hair Phaethon comes down from the high sky
like a star that seems to fall
and is absorbed, far from his home,
by the waves of the great Eridanus
… an entire day went by without sun."
"Even the axis of the sky is twisted by the swirling ether, and the bent Atlas can hardly continue to bear the circling pole of the stars … and all animals of the circle turn inimical towards each other; even the planets clash: Venus clashes with Jupiter, Mars with Saturn; and the Pleiad, thrown of its orbit, approaches Mercury, mixing its cognate light with that of the Pleiades"
Shrinking back from the extraordinary claim of a full-on disruption of all planetary orbits, Radlof hastened to add the following laconic remark to the latter part of Nonnus' quote:
"Whether those disturbances in the solar domain during the fall of that radiant earth star had really been so far-reaching or whether the poet rather painted it in the way it appeared to the eye, easily misled, that may the actual astronomer investigate for himself."
Quite apart from the shifting of the axis, the explosion of the planet 'Phaethon' wreaked more havoc on earth. Ahead of his time, Radlof speculated that the catastrophe caused by the comet impact must have incurred a bundle of disastrous events on earth, including THE FLOOD [of Noah], "great earthquakes" and "eruptions of fire". In a remarkable display of prescience, Radlof envisaged the 'cosmic winter' as a universal deposit of snow in the wake of the event. This prediction was based on Nonnus' report that an endless rain of snow covered the entire earth until the sky, "so that Thessaly's highest pinnacle of rocks and the tops of Parnassus, close to the clouds, swung in the icy flood". And the equivalent of a veil of darkness induced by the fall-out of cosmic debris was Solinus' account of an uninterrupted night holding sway over the earth for nine months during the flood of Ogyges.
Despite these accurate 'predictions', however, and for all its genius, Radlof's work is rather poorly documented by modern standards. No compelling evidence is brought into court at all for the identification of the mythical protagonist with the missing planet in the solar system. A major flaw is the unclarity regarding the dates and the exact number of catastrophes believed to have happened. RADLOF CITED CLASSICAL SOURCES DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN AT LEAST FOUR CATASTROPHES – THOSE OF OGYGES, INACHUS, DARDANUS, AND DEUCALION RESPECTIVELY, BESIDE THE FLOOD OF NOAH AND THE FALL OF PHAETHON – BUT FAILED TO ELUCIDATE HOW MANY OF THESE COULD HAVE BEEN IDENTICAL, and especially to which one the shattering of the planet Phaethon and the fall of Hesperus or Venus would belong. That said, however, Radlof definitely ranks among the pioneers of early catastrophism and may indeed be the first planetary catastrophist in modern scholarship. Immanuel Velikovsky would have done well to credit Radlof as such."
Radlof's nonsense was then picked up on by SAMPSON ARNOLD MACKEY, and passed to Rosicrucian Masons:
http://www.phoenixmasonry.org/the_light_...
From there the crustal shift nonsense was taken up by the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, who passed it to Blavatsky. It was also taken up by Augustus and Alice LePlongeon; Augustus was an insane Mayan scholar who had a peculiar history of Atlantis.
As Le Plongeon put it fairly concisely in his 1876 work "Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 years ago. Their relation to the sacred mysteries of Egypt, Greece, Chaldea and India. Free Masonry in times anterior to the Temple of Solomon": “I will endeavour to show you that the ancient sacred mysteries, the origin of Freemasonry consequently, date back from a period far more remote than the most sanguine students of its history ever imagined. I will try to trace their origin, step by step, to this continent which we inhabit - to America - from where Maya colonists transported their ancient religious rites and ceremonies not only to the banks of the Nile, but to those of the Euphrates, and the shores of the Indian Ocean, not less than 11,500 years ago."
Blavatsky and the LePlongeons met in New York City, where the nonsense was incorporated into "Theosophy", spread to A.M.O.R.C., but most importantly it was passed on to Lillian V. Bense, of Portland, Oregon, near Mt Shasta, who wrote "A Dweller on Two Planets".
Lillian V. Bense's success was picked up on by California con man Baird T. Spaulding, who falsely claimed to have visited India in 1897 and gained mystical wisdom there. His Life and "Teaching of the Masters of the Far East” (1924) and “India Tour Lessons” (1935-1936) enjoyed considerable successm, until his followers cornered him into taking them to India to meet with the masters.
Spaulding's con collapsed when the masters failed to show up, leaving the way open for two commercial writers, Robert D. Stelle and Howard John Zitko to go into the religion business, which they did by setting up the Lemurian Fellowship. They enjoyed considerable success, until money disputes came in the way. Following an investigation of Stelle and Zitko for bond fraud, Stelle took all of Zitko's writing.
The dispute between Stelle and Zitko left the ownership of their work open, and it was stolen by their student Richard Kieninger, who wrote "The Ultimate Frontier". David Hatcher Childress then used the materials Kieninger had gathered to write his books, and entered into a business partnership with Kieninger. But Kieninger was thrown out of the community that his followers had built for him (and which he then sold to them) for seducing their wives and teenage daughters.
David Hatcher Childress (with his half brother John Moss's assistance, and using the technical skills of Harry Osoff) now set up a computerized mailing list using Richard Kieninger's mailing list. Added to the mix was some novel "alternative" physics which had been gathered by Richard and David's former business partner Bill Donovan.
Richard Kieninger himself would go on to become involved with the Republic of Texas militia group.
The last time the Earth's crust was supposed to shift was the year 2000. It did not shift then, and it won't shift in 2012. Physics precludes it. Here is an alternative hypothesis, one whose truth is becoming more and more evident yearly: in the recent past the Earth has been hit by both comets and asteroids, and these impacts killed a lot of people.
Bottom line: In my opinion, what Radlof was trying to make sense of was ancient memories of these impacts.
Finally, as was posted here at the Daily Grail, the idea that 2012 marks some end time is European, not Mayan. Do you have an automobile accident every time your odometer rolls over?
I suppose in closing this I should mention these folks had and have a really strange ideas about Jesus, who he was, and what he did, and thus it is the source for "The DaVinci Code". As was mentioned by Dan Brown in his testimony in the plagiarism suit. So let's see: Jesus, Masons, Templars, Roman Catholic Church...
Given its lack of a real historical basis, does it matter what fiction an author come up with? Does it matter what fiction a movie maker uses for his disaster film?
Sometimes it does. A soul is a terrible thing to loose.
If anyone here at NAFPS wants a copy of my guide inside the nuage industry, simply PM me for one.
