Rens van der Sluijs at his best – go to www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2013/08/01/polar-wondering-2/
It begins with the recent movements of the geomagnetic pole – and estimated movement at a rate of 37 miles per annum. This, we may infer, is all part of popular media hype – which leads to some more doomsaying. Note how the movement of the geomagnetic pole popped up in all those doomsday scenarios associated with the comet last year (which turned out to be a fizzball). Reality is somewhat different, and Rens describes how the geomagnetic pole has moved on other occasions during the Holocene. Archaeologists. climatologists, and geophysicists have been studying records buried in the earth's crust for some time now, extracting measurements from baked clay materials, for example, and geological sediments. An especially active geomagnetic event occurred between 800 and 600BC, a range of dates Mike Baillie has associated with oddities in the past. It inclined by 10 degrees, towards the east (situated NE of Spitzbergen). The dipole magnetic latitude of Babylon was affected – at 40.8 degrees N as compared to 27 degrees in the modern world. Rens van der Sluijs says this implies a higher auroral incidence at Babylon and a greater variety of auroral shapes and forms. Cuneiform records actually mention a red glow in the sky around 600BC. Was this auroral activity in the skies over the Middle East during this period responsible for 'visions' – including the famous vision of the chariot as revealed by Ezekiel (a windstorm coming out of the north, an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light. The luminous structure of wheels, animal like creatures, and 'an expanse, sparkling like ice' together with the enthroned deity image are analogous, he says, with the polar aurora.
Be that as it may he seems to have homed on an interesting period as shortly before 800BC we have the strange activities associated with Elijah and Elisha – and something abnormal in the natural world led to the overthrow of the dynasty of Omri and Ahab. Prophetic visions, reducible to auroral phenomena, induced by ambient electromagnetic fields, may have fueled changes in prevailing cultural paradigms, a significant feature of the period, he says. Indeed, much has been written about this, including a very illuminating book that must be worth having a look at (I read it a few years ago), and that is Karen Armstrong's, The Great Transformation: the World of Buddha, Socrates, Confucius and Jeremiah, Random House (Atlantic Books), London:2006 ISBN 1903809754
The geomagnetic excursion roughly corresponds to the so called axial age, Rens notes, which was typified by spiritual revelations in Greece, as well as Confucianism and Daoism in China, Buddhism and Jainism in India, Zoroastrianism in Persia, and the Hebrew prophets and Greek philosophy. An absolutely brilliant piece of sleuthing by Rens – and may go some way to understand why there was such a see saw change in Biblical history at this point, with a swing towards the importance of the prophets and prophetic visions in general.
At www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2013/07/31/the-sun-man/ … Rens van der Sluijs turns his attention to Creation myth making and the first human. He suggests he was the first man to appear in the sky, associating them with Anthony Peratt's high energy density plasma instabilities and the 'squatting man' image.