Posted on June 4, 2012
Introducing Plasma Mythology
Plasma in the Lab and in Rock Art
The ancients were not just doodling when they spent millions of man-hours carving rock art forms around the world. They were reproducing dramatic plasma discharge forms seen in their spectacular sky.
At high energy levels, the current within a plasma circuit will develop instabilities that can be studied in the laboratory. The flow of charged particles generates electromagnetic forces that in turn affect the flow of particles. This feedback effect produces plasma behavior that is not linear and is often unexpected. Theoretical predictions must be frequently checked against laboratory observations. The non-linear behavior at low energies, such as the alternating light and dark segments in a gas-discharge tube, becomes even more complex. High energy discharges in plasma laboratories exhibit intricate structures, and these evolve through a sequence of quasi-stable forms with intermediate stages of violent transformation.
Peratt’s investigation of rock art led him to collect hundreds of thousands of digital photographs of petroglyphs (images scratched or pecked into rock) and pictographs (images painted on rock). He has classified them into 84 categories that correspond with the quasi-stable forms of the laboratory plasma discharges.
“Many petroglyphs, apparently recorded several millennia ago, have a plasma discharge or instability counterpart, some on a one-to-one or overlay basis. More striking is that the images recorded on rock are the only images found in extreme energy density experiments; no other morphology types or patterns are observed,” Peratt writes, “The inward rise on axis along with the upward folding of the outer edges of the carved lines and transition to edge curling, a phenomena [sic] recorded in intense electrical discharge radiographs, could not have been known to prehistoric man unless he witnessed the same event in the sky.”
Peratt and his assistants and collaborators also recorded the fields of view of the ancient artists and the locations of the images with GPS instruments. By plotting this data on computerized topographical maps, he can calculate where the various forms occurred in the Earth’s ancient plasmasphere (what astronomers call the magnetosphere).
Peratt surmised that a surge of power in the currents driving the auroras had set off the sequence of instabilities. The entire pre-historical sky around the globe would have appeared to come alive with a shimmering, shining “enhanced aurora” that stretched from pole to pole. It would have featured exactly those abstract figures and stick men and strange animal-like shapes that appear only in rock art and in high-energy plasma discharges. He contends that the ancient artists were witnesses to this “enhanced aurora” and that they recorded what they saw on the most durable “recording device” available—rock surfaces.
From the difference in scale between a laboratory spark and an auroral discharge, Peratt estimates that the ancient displays would have lasted “for at least a few centuries if not millennia.” Radiocarbon dating of material overlying some buried petroglyphs provides a time for the occurrence of the displays at 4 000 to 12 000 years ago.
The plasma universe
Space is not a vacuum punctuated by isolated bodies on perpetually stable courses, as defined by the law of gravity. Since the beginning of the Space Age, it has gradually been discovered that space consists for 99.99% of plasma and is threaded with electric filaments and magnetic fields spanning over many orders of magnitude. This new paradigm is known as plasma cosmology and was pioneered by the Swedish scientist, Hannes Alfvén (1908-1995). Plasma is a partially ionised gas regarded as the ‘fourth state of matter’, that responds with great sensitivity to changes in its magnetic fields and becomes visible to the human eye when it is pervaded by a sufficiently strong electrical current.
The solid rock, the oceans and the lower regions of the earth’s atmosphere belong to the minute segment of the cosmos that is not in the plasma state. Yet the earth itself is bathed in an electromagnetic environment. This consists of the magnetic shell that shields the planet from the enveloping solar wind and other external features impinging on it, such as Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) and, far less frequently, cometary intruders into the inner solar system. In addition, plasma penetrates and controls a range of terrestrial phenomena, such as the aurorae, lightning, fire, tornadoes and lava flows.
Historical sources
The term ‘historical information’ is a broad denominator including a great diversity of materials. ‘Traditional information‘ refers to any ideas or practices that were passed on collectively within one or more societies, often imbued with a sense of sacrality and veridicality. Myths and legends, rituals, religious and metaphysical notions, artefacts and iconography (such as petroglyphs, geoglyphs, designs on pottery and religious statuary), costume, architecture, ranging from stone circles and pyramids to stūpas and cathedrals, and ‘proto-scientific’ cosmologies and histories are replete with references to the natural world and its past. A second repository of data consists of historical records concerning observations of the sky, the atmosphere or the landscape, or historical events.
As far as the celestial aspect of nature is concerned, such historical sources have been the subject of disciplines variously labelled archaeoastronomy, cultural astronomy, the history of astronomy and the history of ideas or of religion, depending on geographical and chronological scope.
The study of historical information about the natural world is useful in a variety of ways. It is of interest in its own right, facilitating our understanding of past cultures and their outlook on the world. This is especially felt in cases where recent discoveries concerning the plasma universe shed fresh light on historical data that had previously been inscrutable. On a deeper level, a study of historical information about the natural world also helps to clarify the nature and origin of religion as a whole. Conversely, historical sources have much to contribute to modern science, as they can complement the scientific reconstruction of the past, specifically the recent history of planet Earth.
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| rayed curtain, aurora borealis (© Historic NWS Collection, NOAA Photo Library) |
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| the zodiacal light (© Dominic Cantin) |
axis mundi (© Jo Seong Hee) |
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| aurora borealis (© Ben-Zin 2002) |
corona, aurora borealis (Wikimedia Commons) |
lightning (Wikimedia Commons) |
A new theory of myth
Beginning with some of the classical philosophers, scholars have pondered the nature and origin of mythology for centuries. Yet while respectable disciplines such as geology, astronomy, physics, biology, archaeology and linguistics gradually matured, the subject of mythology continued to lack a consensus core of method and direction. Employing structural, historical and comparative methods of reconstruction akin to those applied in linguistics and evolutionary biology, it is possible to establish a theoretical foundation for ‘plasma mythology’ as a new direction in the discipline of comparative mythology.
Within the history of ideas, ‘plasma mythology’, with its emphasis on transient natural phenomena, can be seen as a modern successor to the ‘introspective’ and structuralist psychosociological models preferred during most of the 20th century, that were championed by thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Émile Durkheim, Georges Dumézil, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. The exploitation of cutting-edge scientific knowledge of geological, atmospheric and astronomical events as potentially the ultimate inspiration for numerous mythical themes can be regarded as a modern continuation of the old ‘nature school’ of mythology, which – beginning in the late 19thcentury and eventually supplanted by the ‘psychosociological’ theories – sought to invoke the behaviour of the sun, the moon, vegetal life, and so forth as the inspirational source of prominent mythical themes. Yet unlike the old school, the modern interdisciplinary approach –
| • | places far less emphasis on elaborate metaphors and the linguistic aspect of the names of mythical characters; |
| • | concentrates on short-lived, dramatic events instead of less ‘awe-inspiring’ spectacles such as the sunrise or the lunar cycle; |
| • | and benefits from the immensely improved state of geophysics, plasma physics, climatology, and related scientific disciplines. |
The impact of cutting-edge science on the humanities is most palpable in the field of astronomy. Before the Space Age, scientists still described the solar system as a relatively uneventful ‘vacuum’, in which only planets, asteroids and the occasional comet moved on fixed courses with Aristotelian or Ptolemaic precision. As a consequence, scholars in the humanities investigating the reflections of astronomical concepts in ancient traditions were very much restricted to this straightjacket. The modern understanding of the solar system as a highly complex web of combined gravitational and electromagnetic forces, in which the solar wind interacts with interplanetary space and planetary magnetospheres, injects a new lease of life into the obsolete pre-1950 understanding of the solar system, allowing theorists to account for a much greater variety of traditional observations at a higher level of intellectual satisfaction.
Verification
Unlike many previous theories of myth, the interdisciplinary connection with plasma science adds the invaluable benefit of testability: controlled laboratory experiments are capable of testing the theory by replicating the structures presented in myth and traditional art. Another test might consist in a comparison of the geographic distribution of specific mythical motifs to the way a hypothetical prototype in the sky would have appeared to terrestrial stargazers, allowing for latitude, longitude and altitude, local climates, the orbital motion of the earth and other objects possibly involved. This line of investigation might be referred to as mythogeography.
