The Astronomy of the Birth of Abraham (1953 B.C.)

Many astronomers have discovered that there was a grand conjunction of the five visible planets in the year 1953 B.C. - and this will not be repeated until the year 2040 A.D. Here is a quote from an astronomical newsletter (http://www.madisonastro.org/capskies/2000/2000_04/April2000.html):

"Just out of curiosity, what is the best planetary grouping ever? My reading and research have turned up two remarkable events. On the morning of February 24th, 1953 BC, all five naked eye planets were within 4 degrees of each other just before dawn. By March 2nd, the grouping wasn't as tight, but the crescent moon joined the show. History doesn't contain any record of anyone having observed this remarkable grouping, but it must have been breathtaking for anyone who was paying attention."

The other "best ever" planetary grouping hasn't happened yet, but odds are at least better that you'll live to see it. On the evening of September 8th, 2040, all five naked eye planets and the crescent moon will be in a grouping just 9 degrees wide low in the western sky. While not quite as tight as the 1953 BC event, it will be quite memorable. I've got it marked on my calendar. How about you?"

As it turns out, this astronomer was wrong - not in his calculations, but concerning the historical moment of 1953 B.C. Chronology is hard to calculate for ancient times, but a while ago I did research on the book of Jasher, a lost book of the Bible (which I covered in my previous blog - there is a link to an online version in my profile), which happens to contain a very accurate chronology. One thing I discovered in my calculations that it was in the year 1953 B.C. that Abraham was born - the father of the three main monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And guess what? The astrologers of Babylonia took notice of the grand conjunction in that year - I will quote the story in full:

1. And it was in the night that Abram was born, that all the servants of Terah, and all the wise men of Nimrod, and his conjurors came and ate and drank in the house of Terah, and they rejoiced with him on that night.
2. And when all the wise men and conjurors went out from the house of Terah, they lifted up their eyes toward heaven that night to look at the stars, and they saw, and behold one very large star came from the east and ran in the heavens, and he swallowed up the four stars from the four sides of the heavens.
3. And all the wise men of the king and his conjurors were astonished at the sight, and the sages understood this matter, and they knew its import.
4. And they said to each other, This only betokens the child that has been born to Terah this night, who will grow up and be fruitful, and multiply, and possess all the earth, he and his children for ever, and he and his seed will slay great kings, and inherit their lands. (Jasher 8:1-4)

I had calculated the year 1953 B.C. before I knew of the grand conjunction of that date. The star that swallows up the other four stars is Venus; the other four stars are Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The four were close together in the constellation of Aquarius, and any astronomy program will show that it was Venus which was the last planet to join the group. As this is a rare event, some world event is due to take place in the year 2040 A.D.

Later in the year of 1953 B.C., there was a triple conjunction between the planets of Jupiter and Saturn. Conjunctions between these two planets occur every 20 years, but triple conjunctions are rare - they occur every 973 years. And it seems that every other time this occurs it marks a significant event in history. In 7 B.C. there was a triple conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation of Pisces. Many consider this to be the "star of Bethlehem" that the three Magi sought out to find the baby Jesus. As king Herod slaughtered the children of Bethlehem hoping to kill Jesus before he had grown, so the story of Jasher describes how the king of Babylonia sought to kill Abram due to the presage of astrologers. There is much speculation on what exactly was the star of Bethlehem, but this parallel suggest this was it.

If we look at the event before 1953 B.C., we come to the year 3899 B.C. in which a triple conjunction occurred. Again, using the book of Jasher the chronology indicates that the "creation" of Adam occurred in the year 3901 B.C. - two years within this date. In the New Testament Jesus is known as the "second Adam", as he came to restore the spiritual nature to humanity.

If we look beyond the year 7 B.C., another triple conjunction occurred in the years 1940-41, with the central conjunction occurring on Oct. 20, 1940. Just out of curiosity, was anyone significant born on this particular date? This is where this line of thought gets a little strange. I did a lookup of famous people, and it just so happens that this was the birthdate of Robert Pinsky. Who is Robert Pinsky? According to the wikipedia:

Robert Pinsky (born October 20, 1940) is a leading American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 – 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (popularly known as the Poet Laureate of the United States).


So we have Adam, Abraham, Jesus, and now...Robert Pinsky, a poet? That just seems a little anti-climactic. The odd thing here is Robert Pinsky happens to be an Orthodox Jew - in the same family line as Adam, Abraham and Jesus. Here is a summary of critics' views on his poetry:

"Pinsky is often praised for "his grasp of traditional metrical forms and his ability to evoke timeless meaning within the strictures of contemporary idioms." Critics applaud, "his ability to imbue simple images—a Brownie troop square dance, cold weather, the music of Fats Waller—with underlying meaning to create order out of the accidental events people encounter in their lives." Commentators admire Pinsky's, "ambitiousness, his juxtaposition of the personal with the universal, the present with the past, the simple with the complex, and it has been noted that his intellectual style presents challenges to readers, obliging them to unravel the complexity behind the clarity of language and imagery."

About Robert Pinsky's first book of poems Robert Lowell wrote, "It is refreshing to find a poet who is intellectually interesting and technically first-rate. Robert Pinsky belongs to that rarest category of talent, a poet-critic." Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, William Pritchard called "Sadness and Happiness", "the best work by any younger poet within recent memory." Louis Martz wrote of Pinsky "the most exhilarating new poet that I have read since A. R. Ammons entered upon the scene. In his peculiar and original combination of abstract utterance and vivid image Pinsky points the way toward the future of poetry." "The Inferno of Dante" has been celebrated by Stephen Greenblatt as, "the premier modern text for English-language readers to experience Dante's power." Hugh Kenner has described Pinsky's ambition as "nothing less than the recovery for language of a whole domain of mute and familiar experience," (http://www.bu.edu/favoritepoem/contact/rp_bio.html, 2). "In his poems Pinsky talks, with democratic warmth and intimacy, to the common things of this world. His extraordinary poems remind us that he has always embodied the very ideal he proposes for what a poet can do," (Lloyd Schwarz, The Boston Phoenix). "Among the many writers who have come of age in our fin de siècle, none has succeeded more completely as a poet, critic and translator than Robert Pinsky," (James Longenbach, The Nation). (http://www.bu.edu/favoritepoem/contact/rp_bio.html, 2)

"Robert Pinsky's poetry is noted for its combination of vivid imagery and clear, discursive language that explores such themes as truth, the history of nations and individuals, and the transcendent aspects of simple acts. Pinsky strives to create an organized view of the world, often confronting and trying to explain the past to bring order to the present. Recurring subjects in his work include the Holocaust, religion, and childhood. Pinsky's moral tone and mastery of poetic meter often are compared to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English poets, and the insights conveyed in his analytical works on poetry have led critics to place him in the tradition of other poet-critics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden."

Time will only tell if this assessment is correct. If anyone else knows someone significant that was born on Oct. 19-20, 1940, or perhaps on another date close to the triple conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, I would like to know. The other two conjunctions were on Aug. 8, 1940, and Feb. 15, 1941. One wonders if the Holocaust that killed millions of Jews is a historical parallel to the slaughter of innocents in Bethlehem. If so, who is that individual that escaped?

The Hidden Origin of the Alphabet

Lately I was wondering about the origin of our alphabet - where did it come from? We all know our ABCs, which we take for granted. But the alphabet was a revolutionary invention, and put writing into the hands of the common people. We do know that the Greeks and the Romans derived their alphabet from the Phoenician alphabet in the land of Canaan, as shown in the following chart:

So, where did the Phoenicians obtain their script? It dates back to around 1000 B.C. According to the wikipedia:

"Phoenician uses a system of acrophony to name letters. The names of the letters are essentially the same as in its parental scripts, which are in turn derived from the word values of the original hieroglyph for each letter. The original word was translated from Egyptian into its equivalent form in the Semitic language, and then the initial sound of the translated word become the letter's value. However, some of the letter names were changed in Phoenician from the Proto-Canaanite script. This includes:

• gaml "throwing stick" to gimel "camel"

• digg "fish" to dalet "door"

• hll "jubilation" to he "window"

• ziqq "manacle" to zayin "weapon"

• na?š "snake" to nun "fish"

• pi?t "corner" to pe "mouth"

• šimš "sun" to šin "tooth"

The meanings given are of the letter names in Phoenician. The Phoenician letter names are not directly attested and were reconstructed by Theodor Nöldeke in 1904."

The alphabet is thus a Semitic invention - not only that, these Semites dwelled in Egypt and migrated to the land of Canaan. Sound familiar? Could it be that the alphabet originated from Moses, who led the Jews out of Egypt? If we look back even further, the Phoenician script, from which Aramaic and Hebrew were derived, dates back even further to a "Proto-Canaanite" script from about the 15th century B.C. One reconstruction proposes the following meanings for the characters:

1. [?] Al "Ox head" (A, E)
2. [b] Bet "Tent floorplan" (B, Bh)
3. [g] Gam "Foot" (G)
4. [d] Dal "Door" (D)
5. [h] Hey "Man with arms raised" (H, E)
6. [w] Waw "Tent peg" (W, O, U])
7. [z] Zan "Mattock" (Z)
8. [h] Chets "Tent wall" (Hh)
9. [t?] Thet "Basket" (Th)
10. [j] Yad "Arm and closed hand" (Y, I)
11. [k] Kaph "Open palm" (K, Kh)
12. [l] Lam "Shepherd staff " (L)
13. [m] Mem "Water" (M)
14. [n] Nun "Seed" (N)
15. [s] Sin "Thorn" (S)
16. [?] Ayin "Eye" (O)
17. [p] Pey "Mouth" (P, Ph)
18. [s?] Tsad "Man on his side" (Ts)
19. [q] Quph "Sun on the horizon" (Q)
20. [r] Rosh "Head of a man" (R)
21. [?] Shin "Two front teeth" (Sh)
22. [t] Taw "Crossed sticks" (T)
23. [?] Ghah "Rope of twisted fibers" (Gh)

So, where did the Proto-Canaanite alphabet come from? There are two scripts, both dating to the Middle Bronze Age (2000 - 1500 B.C.) - the Proto-Sinaitic script and the Wadi el-Hol script, found in the Sinai and Egypt respectively. It again points to a Semitic people which came from Egypt. According to the wikipedia:

"The Egyptian hieratic script was basically logographic, but used rebus and acrophony extensively. There was a complete set of uniliteral glyphs from at least 2700 BC — that is, the hieroglyphic script contained an alphabetic subsystem within it. But while logographic systems such as Egyptian and Old Sumerian are extremely time-consuming to learn, they are sometimes considered superior to alphabets when it comes to reading. For literate Egyptians, there was little advantage to whittling their script down to a pure alphabet. Purely uniliteral (alphabetic) writing was used mainly to transcribe foreign names.
However, from the 22^nd to 20^th centuries BC, central rule broke down. John Darnell found contemporary references to an Egyptian named Bebi, General of the Asiatics. They speculate that,

In the course of reunifying his fragmented realm, the reigning pharaoh attempted to pacify and employ roving bands of mercenaries who had come from outside Egypt to fight in the civil wars. The Egyptians were the quintessential bureaucrats, and under Bebi's command, there must have been a small army of scribes in the military whose job it was to keep track of these "Asiatics". Inventive scribes apparently came up with a kind of easy-to-learn Egyptian shorthand to enable the captured troops to record their names and other basic information.

In other words, it was a utilitarian invention for soldiers and merchants. The assumption is that they developed a Semitic script based on acrophony, where the first sound of the Semitic word for an Egyptian glyph became associated with that glyph. Just as the numerals 1, 2, 3, etc. changed names but retained their graphic forms as they passed from the Indians to the Arabs to the Europeans, so the names of the letters were translated as they passed from the Egyptians to the Semites. The name of the hieratic glyph for house changed from Egyptian pr to Canaanite bayt, and therefore the glyph came to stand for /b/ rather than /pr/. House and most of the other letters were not uniliteral glyphs in Egyptian: the Semitic alphabet is not derived from the Egyptian alphabet, but rather from the full set of hieratic hieroglyphs. In fact, some of the letters, such as ? H, may have been ideographic determiners (taxograms) only, and thus had no sound value in Egyptian."

So, the alphabet was invented with the collapse of the Old Kingdom. It seems like it was invented long before Moses, or before the Jews even entered Egypt. But not is all as it seems. The dating of the Exodus from Egypt is a controversial subject - many history books will point to the time of Ramesses in the New Kingdom (ca. 13th century B.C.), which many favor due to a late geographic place name in the Torah. Others favor the time when the Hyksos, the shepherd kings, were expelled from Egypt in the 16th century B.C. But strangely enough, scholars have ignored a lot of evidence that indicates that the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt occurred during the collapse of the Old Kingdom, the exact time when the alphabet was invented. There was historical evidence that I gathered from the book of Jasher, a work that did not make it into the Bible, but then I discovered that someone else had already stumbled upon this. He gathered years of research and composed the book, The Riddle of the Exodus. Among his findings:

1. The book of Jasher states that one of the Pharoahs of the Exodus reigned for 94 years. One of the last Pharoahs of the Old Kingdom, Pepi II, reigned for 94 years.

2. There is an ancient Egyptian monument that commemorates the drowning of Pharaoh's army in the sea.

3. The ravages of the Ten Plagues are described on a 3,000-year-old papyrus.

I have not read the book, but the chronology would fit in with the dating of the collapse of the walls of Jericho by archaeologists.What this theory opens up is the possibility that the alphabet was an invention of the Hebrews - and as the characters originated from Egyptian hieroglyphics, and was invented for commanding the military of a Semitic people, the evidence begins to point to Moses, a scribe and ruler who was trained in all the wisdom of ancient Egypt. So what do those alphabetic characters mean? Is there a reason for the order of the alphabet? Indeed there is - I have been recently researching this, and the evidence points to Moses as the inventor of the alphabet. But before I could do so, I wanted to cover the date of the Exodus - how it is much earlier in history than we think. In my next blog I will show the hidden symbolism contained in the ancient Hebrew alphabet.

Quantum Entanglement, and the Holographic Universe

In physics, it was once thought that all matter was composed of single point like units, known as atoms. The problem now is, the more we know about the atom, the more we discover about subatomic particles. Then Quantum physics came along, and it was discovered that there are no fundamental particles but rather wave-like probabilities. The current theories of physics revolve around "String Theory", which proposes that all matter is composed of vibrating "strings", some open-ended, others closed in a loop. What we are discovering is that the smaller we go, the more complicated things get. The bigger we go, the more simpler. This is the opposite of what many scientists had predicted.

In the 18th century Emanuel Swedenborg saw what the nature of the universe was - all was revealed to him in trance-like visions, where his breathing came to a stop. Here is what he said concerning the nature of matter:

"Many avow that there is a single substance which is also the first, from which are all things, but what that substance is, is not known. The belief is that it is so simple nothing is more so, and that it can be likened to a point without dimensions, and that dimensional forms arose out of an infinite number of such points. But this is a fallacy, springing from an idea of space. To such an idea there seems to be such a least thing. The truth is that the simpler and purer a thing is, the more replete it is and the more complete. This is why the more interiorly a thing is examined, the more wonderful, perfect, and well formed are the things seen in it, and in the first substance the most wonderful, perfect and fully formed of all. For the first substance is from the spiritual sun, which, as we said, is from the Lord and in which He is. That sun is therefore the sole substance and, not being in space, is all in all, and is in the greatest and least things of the created universe." (Angelic Wisdom concerning the Divine, from Divine Providence, n. 6)

At the center of everything, is a Spiritual Sun from which all things were created. This is the light that everyone sees after they die, and has been reported from Near Death experiences. The smaller we go, the more inward we go, and the more we reach the Infinite. God is not "up there", he is "inside" all that is. One of my favorite books was the Tao of Physics, which compared statements of Quantum physicists with those of eastern mystics. They were both encountering the same thing: the mind of God.

In the book, The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot, both the universe and the human mind are likened to a hologram. A hologram is an image that is formed from the interference of two reflecting laser beams. When a three dimensional image is divided, we end up with two smaller images of the same thing. That is what science is discovering: the more we divide something, the more we see that the smallest of things is in fact a reflection of the universe: all that is, is a hologram, everything is reflecting the oneness of Being. A hologram is turning into something that best reflects how thoughts are stored in the brain: everywhere. The human mind, and the universe, share the same property. According to Swedenborg, all that is is the image of a form of a Divine Human, and we are a small microcosm of that form.

From http://www.crystalinks.com/holographic.html:

"In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.
Aspect's experiment is related to the EPR Experiment, a consicousness experiment which had been devised by Albert Einstein, and his colleagues, Poldlsky and Rosen, in order to disprove Quantum Mechanics on the basis of the Pauli Exclusion Principle contradicting Special Relativity.
Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.
Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.
University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram."

The two particles are not communicating faster than the speed of light, but in fact probably exist in a dimension that is outside space and time, and what we perceive as separate may in fact be a bilocation of the same thing, in two differents spots in space. Science is getting closer to the idea of proving "The Butterfly Effect" - actions we take, especially acts of Love, will have a ripple effect that are reflected in the people who surround us, even those we have never met.