Fig. 18.1
Religion has probably spawned more eccentric literature than any other field of human study, and indeed, in the course of this book, we have seen several instances of what might be called “religious zeal”– in association with the Flat Earth doctrine in Chapter 2, for example, or with the Biblical UFOs in Chapter 5, or again with the Great Pyramid in Chapter 6. Though religious Independent Thought is fascinating in itself, most such literature does not come within the scope of this book, insofar as it is not of a scientific nature. This is a pity, as it is difficult to resist a book with a delicious title like Did the Virgin Mary live and die in England? written by Victor Dunstan and published, amid much controversy, in 1985; or a book with a wonderful title like LOUIS NAPOLEON – THE DESTINED MONARCH OF THE WORLD: foreshown in Prophecy to confirm a seven years’ Covenant with the Jews about, or soon after 1864–5, & (after the Resurrection & the translation of the Wise Virgins has taken place 2 years & from 4 to 6 weeks after the Covenant,) subsequently to become completely supreme over England & most of America, & all Christendom, & fiercely to persecute Christians during the latter half of the 7 years, until he finally perishes at the descent of Christ at the Battle of Armageddon, about or soon after 1872–3, by the Reverend Michael Paget Baxter, first published in 1866; or again, a website like http://www.666truth.org/history/who-is-the-antichrist/666-antichrist-myths/articletype/articleview/articleid/901/pageid/914/666-antichrist-myths-and-folklore which demonstrates, at least to its own satisfaction, that Ronald Reagan was the prophesied Beast of the Book of Revelation (his full name, Ronald Wilson Reagan, has 6 letters in each of the three names for a start!)
But there is one branch of religious eccentricity which does merit a place in this book insofar as it has an astronomical basis, and it is the theory that Jesus Christ never really existed, and was, in effect, nothing but a solar myth, his life story being based on the yearly passage of the Sun through the signs of the zodiac!
Thus Christ is the Sun (of Righteousness), the 12 signs of the zodiac being associated with his 12 disciples on the one hand, and symbolising the events of his life on the other. Scorpio is a fitting symbol of Judas Iscariot, whilst Virgo is the Virgin Mary, Sagittarius is Pontius Pilate, Aries, the Ram, is Jesus as the Lamb of God, and – our personal favourite – Aquarius, the man with the watering pot, is John the Baptist! The cycle of the seasons as the Sun completes its circuit of the zodiac becomes Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection. Thus the Sun (Christ) dies at the winter solstice, 22nd December, but then is resurrected three days later on 25th December, Christmas Day, when Christ is born in Bethlehem, attended by the Three Wise Men, who are none other than the three stars of Orion’s Belt and who were guided there by the Star of Bethlehem – the star Sirius, to which Orion’s belt points, of course!
This theory has a long and complex history. One of its earliest appearances was in post-revolutionary France, in the form of a book, subsequently translated into English, The Origin of All Religious Worship by Charles-François Dupuis. In Germany the theory was taken up by Arthur Drews (pronounced Drefs) in a book, again subsequently translated into English, The Christ Myth, first published in 1910. In England, the theory was taken up by J.M. Robertson in books like Christianity and Mythology, first published in 1900, and by Edward Carpenter in his book The Origins of Pagan and Christian Beliefs published in 1920. The theory still has its champions, both in book form and on the internet – Malik H. Jabbar, for example, in his series of four books under the general title of The Astrological Foundation of the Christ Myth, all available at the time of writing, with an associated website at http://www.thechristmyth.com/. Also of interest, and active at the time of writing (January 2013), are the websites http://www.stellarhousepublishing.com/jesussunexcerpt.html and http://jesusastrotheology.com.
Not that devout Christians have taken all this lying down. Thus Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare published his book The Historical Christ in 1914, and H.G. Wood published his book Did Christ Really Live? in 1938. There is much, too, on the internet – see, for example, http://www.tektonics.org/jesusexisthub.php, and on the solar myth theory in particular, http://www.jstor.org/pss/536766. But perhaps the most amusing refutation of the solar myth theory was that published in a pamphlet, in 1827, by one Jean-Baptiste Peres. In it, Peres “proved” that Napoleon Bonaparte had never existed either and was, in fact, another solar myth! After all, his name, Napoleon, incorporated that of Apollo, the Sun God (in fact, his full name, “Napoleon Bonaparte” means “the true Apollo of Light”, though we won’t go into details here), and his mother’s name, Letizia, was similar to that of Apollo’s mother, Leto. Plus he had 12 active marshals corresponding to the 12 signs of the zodiac!
The Star of Bethlehem has been the subject of much speculation, some of it gloriously wild-eyed. We saw an excellent example back in Chapter 5, in the form of Barry H. Downing’s theory that the Star was an extra-terrestrial spaceship keeping an eye on messianic human affairs!
Rather more down to earth is the theory that the Star of Bethlehem was a blazing comet, and indeed the artist Giotto depicted it thus in his painting “The Adoration of the Magi”, now in the Cappella degli Scrovegni in Padua. One very interesting theory in the comet field, proposed by Nikos Kokkinos in his essay “Crucifixion in AD 36: The Keystone for Dating the Birth of Jesus” published in the book Chronos, Kairos, Christos – Nativity and Chronological Studies presented to Jack Finegan, edited by Jerry Vardaman and E.M. Yamauchi (1989), relates the Star of Bethlehem to an appearance of what we now know as Halley’s Comet, in 12 BC. This is an early date for the birth of Christ, but Mr Kokkinos argues quite persuasively that Christ was crucified in 36 AD, and that he was nearly fifty years old at his death (John 8.57), not in his early thirties as is commonly supposed (on the basis of Luke 3.23). Incidentally, it is sometimes argued that the Star of Bethlehem could not have been a comet, since comets were generally held to presage doom and gloom. This is generally true, but Mr Kokkinos does produce several instances of comets being held to portend the birth of the great and the good.
One of the most persistent theories of the Star of Bethlehem began with the astronomer Johannes Kepler in 1603. Basically it proposes that the ‘Star’ was a symbolically/astrologically significant triple conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation of Pisces in 7 BC. The conjunctions of 7 BC took place on or close to 29th May, 29th September and 4th December. It is suggested that the Wise Men saw the first and/or second conjunctions, realised their significance, and set out for the Holy Land on account of them, arriving in Bethlehem for the conjunction of 4th December. (At this point readers should note that – assuming that Christ really existed, and that he wasn’t simply a solar myth run riot – not only is his year of birth uncertain, but his date of birth is too. The commonly held belief that Christ was born on 25th December of 1 AD is now widely reckoned to be a combination of pious, but erroneous, counting up of years, combined with a deliberate Christian adaptation of the date of the Roman pagan festival of “Dies Natalis Solis Invicti” – “the Birthday of the Unconquerable Sun” – effectively the winter solstice.)
This basic conjunction theory of the Star of Bethlehem has been variously embellished. According to astronomer Dr Percy Seymour, writing in his book The Birth of Christ – Exploding the Myth (1998), Christ was born at sunset on 15th September 7 BC, for not only did a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn take place on that day in Pisces (according to his calculations, at any rate), but also the Sun was in Virgo then (hence Christ as the Son of a Virgin etc.) Furthermore, this planetary–solar configuration sparked off the Northern Lights, hence the “glory of the Lord” which “shone round about” the shepherds in Luke 2.9. Dr Seymour also thought that the planetary conjunction in Pisces explained the famous use of the Fish as a Christian symbol.
Some even more peculiar twists to the tale are to be found in Adrian G. Gilbert’s book Magi – the Quest for a Secret Tradition (1996). He again has Jupiter and Saturn in conjunction in Pisces, but his calculations lead him to deduce that Christ was born on 29th July 7 BC at the time of the heliacal rising of the star Sirius (= Mary, in her symbolic role as “Star of the Sea”) with the Sun (= Christ) in the constellation of Leo (= the Lion of Judah). Mr Gilbert argues that in the traditional nativity scene, not only is Mary the star Sirius, but Joseph is the constellation of Orion; the Three Kings are the planets Jupiter, Saturn and Mercury; and the Three Shepherds (Mr Gilbert seems quite sure there were three) are the stars Capella, Castor and Pollux. (By our reckoning this would make two of the shepherds twins, but neither the Bible nor Mr Gilbert mentions this, so we won’t pursue it either.) As for the animals traditionally present at the nativity, the ox is clearly Taurus and the ram is clearly Aries. (Yes, we know the traditional animals were an ox and an ass, but you try finding an ass in the zodiac!) As if that weren’t enough, Mr Gilbert has the constellation of Orion symbolic not only of St Joseph but also of John the Baptist (who was apparently a reincarnation of Elijah), with the seven veils of Salome symbolic of the seven planets, and the platter on which John’s head was delivered to Salome symbolic of the Moon’s disc!
There is one problem with the conjunction theory, though, and it was explained by the Reverend C. Pritchard in an article entitled “On the Conjunctions of the Planets Jupiter and Saturn, in the Years BC 7, BC 66 and AD 54”, which was published in Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1857. Rev. Pritchard made the interesting point that since the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in Pisces in 66 BC was more spectacular than that of 7 BC, it ought arguably to have aroused more messianic interest than the conjunctions held to have accompanied the actual birth of Christ in 7 BC. In short, why didn’t the fathers of the Three Wise Men set out for the Holy Land in 66 BC if such conjunctions were so significant? No-one seems to have answered this question to date.
But let us now move to a different field altogether – exactly how much does the Sun affect our lives? Insofar as it is the source of all the Earth’s light and heat, the obvious answer is very much indeed, even to the effects that it has on our general mood. But what of some of the lesser and more controversial effects? It is, for example, a fact that the solar wind generated by sunspots affects the transmission and reception of radio waves on Earth. More controversial is the theory, mentioned briefly in Chapter 6, that revolutions here on Earth are correlated with intense sunspot activity. The idea is not that sunspots cause revolutions as such, but that if social conditions are unstable at a time of maximum sunspot activity, then the side-effects of the solar wind at such times can “tip the balance” of war and revolution.
The idea seems to have come into prominence at about the time of the First World War and the Russian Revolution of 1917. Thus the Russian Alexander Tchijevsky looked at the period from 500 BC to 1922 AD and reckoned that about 80% of wars, revolutions and periods of civil unrest were associated with sunspot maxima. In the West, William James Sidis, writing in (of all places) the Journal of Abnormal Psychology in 1918, concentrated on revolutions during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He compiled a list of 33 revolts, “of which seventeen occurred nearer the minimum of sunspots than the maximum, and sixteen occurred nearer the maximum.” Even Mr Sidis had to admit that “this looks unsatisfactory at first sight”, but then he happened to notice that the revolts closer to sunspot minima occurred in warm countries, whilst those closer to sunspot maxima occurred in cold countries.… Interest in the subject still continues on today’s internet – see, for example, the website of feminist and libertarian Carol Moore, who predicted the fall of the Iron Curtain on the basis of sunpots (http://www.carolmoore.net/articles/sunspot-cycle.html) and the website http://universalastrologer.com/articles/sun-spots.html which tells us that Tony Blair was born at a time of low sunspot activity whereas George Bush was born at a time of high sunspot activity. (Interestingly, Hitler was born at a time of no sunspot activity at all.)
Moving from the Sun to the Moon, now, there is great amount of controversy about exactly how much the Moon affects us here on Earth. Few people dispute that it causes the tides, but much more controversial is the notion that it affects the mentally ill – the word “lunatic” preserves this belief, of course, as does the image of the werewolf howling at the Moon. Arnold L. Lieber’s book The Lunar Effect, published in 1978, and which was updated and republished under the title How the Moon affects You in 1996, is devoted entirely to this field.
According to Dr Lieber, just as the Moon causes the tides on the Earth, so also it causes biological tides in the human body (which consists largely of water, of course). Not only that, Dr Lieber believes that the Moon also influences the Earth’s magnetic field, which in its turn influences the working of our bodies in more subtle ways. Thus not only is mental illness really influenced by the Moon, but aggression (including murder and suicide) and epilepsy are as well, not to mention the incidence of heart attacks and the human birth rate. Dr Lieber also quotes a Russian scientist who has a theory that the Moon has more than a little to do with disappearances of ships and planes within the Bermuda Triangle.
Now here’s a question; are we affected by radiation from the Pole Star? Both of the present authors have to admit that the possibility has never occurred to them, but it did to Frances Barbara Burton, who in 1845 wrote a rather strange book called Elective Polarity: the Universal Agent. Her most startling conclusion was that the Earth’s fossil record is a testimony to the magnetic influences of the star Vega at those times when it has been the Earth’s pole star!
Let us explain. The Earth rotates on its axis once every day, but, like a spinning top, its axis of spin itself rotates, performing a gyratory circuit of the heavens once in every 25,000 years or so. One result of this is the so-called precession of the equinoxes, but more important here is that the North Pole of the sky – the point about which the northern sky appears to rotate – changes with time. At the present day the North Pole of the sky happens to be close to the relatively dim star Polaris in Ursa Major, but it has not always been thus, and 12,500 years ago it was close to the much brighter star Vega in the constellation of Lyra. According to Miss Burton, we today are used to the relatively weak magnetic influences of Polaris channelling, almost imperceptibly, into our magnetic north pole, and so we can have no conception of what it must be like when “the glowing splendour” of the star Vega “diffuses its powerful vitalities throughout this planet.” Rock strata become folded, creatures like the dinosaurs are mutated, climates are changed and the Aurora Borealis goes berserk. Thus it comes about that we find fossil sea-creatures high up in the mountains, and fossils of tropical animals in the frozen wastes of the north, and all because of Vega.
Quite how all this works exactly is not terribly clear. For readers who are puzzling over what Miss Burton might mean by the “elective polarity” in the title of her book, here is how she explains it:
By Elective Polarity is therefore understood effluvial impetuses of ineffable activity, which circulate throughout all organizations; each emanation whereof, comprising certain elementary or magnetic properties, in accordance with the angular and polaric diversities inherent in its classification, and its activity being determined, as before stated, by the proportional polaric obliquity and angular acuteness, of its circulating qualities. Because from the infinite variety in the elements which excite polaric effluviums, the ACTIVITY of elective polarity must be correspondingly diversified:– and countless must be the circulating impetuses, everywhere propelling polarities within, and around one another, throughout the universal confluence. Impetuses, – multiform in activity; – which extract – modify – interchange – propel – and transfuse, countless renovatory effluxes – essences – elixirs, &c, &c, around the mighty Laboratory of Space:– and these, again and again, remodifying themselves, into fresh and fresh diversities of polaric impetuses; – consequently, into fresh and fresh remodifications of renovatory properties.
In a nutshell, then, by some means unfathomable to all but Miss Burton, the magnetic effluxes of Vega, when it was the pole star, caused extraordinary “organic convulsions” here on the Earth, the results of which are traceable through the geological record, and in particular, through fossils.
Incidentally, Miss Burton didn’t think much of Sir Isaac Newton. If he’d stuck to algebra, she said, all might have been well, but his attempts to sort out astronomy were lamentable. “One might as well look at Jupiter through a microscope,” she wrote, “as study astronomy under Sir Isaac Newton’s auspices.” We rather doubt that she would have been any more impressed with Albert Einstein.…
So, if the Pole Star affects us without our knowing it, what about the rotation of the Earth? Surely the Earth cannot rotate on its axis as fast as astronomers claim, and it not have some effect on us?
A book which set out to show exactly this was Arabella Kenealy’s The Human Gyroscope: A Consideration of the Gyroscopic Rotation of the Earth as Mechanism of the Evolution of Terrestrial Living Forms; explaining the Phenomenon of Sex; its Origin and Development and its Significance in the Evolutionary Process, first published in 1934. Despite the promise of its extended title, it is not the most riveting of reads, and not the clearest either.
The gist of Miss Kenealy’s theory is that the spinning of the Earth generates an upward centrifugal force in opposition to the downward centripetal force of gravity. If you watch a potter as he shapes a pot on his wheel, you will see that the pot grows upwards on account of the spinning of the wheel. The spinning of the Earth operates in much the same way as the spinning of the potter’s wheel. Thus the mighty oak is thrust ever upwards by the centrifugal force of the spinning Earth, at the same time as its roots are drawn ever downwards by centripetal gravity. Again, the giraffe’s long neck is a centrifugal phenomenon, whereas the kangaroo’s long tail is a centripetal one. Again, it is a fact that in northern latitudes, where the spin of the Earth generates lower centrifugal force, one finds primitive lumbering animals like the seal and the walrus, whereas in lower latitudes, where the centrifugal force is greater, one finds the cradle of the human race: Homo sapiens became an erect biped in Africa, remember! The evolution of man owes much to the spinning Earth. Indeed, according to Miss Kenealy, the human skeleton shows the very centrifugal and gravitational force-patterns of the Earth in much the same way as iron filings show the force-patterns of the Earth’s magnetic field!
In addition to the simple effects of centrifugal force, Miss Kenealy also believed that the law of the conservation of angular momentum implied that the spin of the Earth imparted gyroscopic momentum to everything living on its surface, and that organisms – and in particular, Man – were influenced by it. As she saw it, the human skull is “a highly specialised bony and muscular gyroscopic mechanism”, and of the brain she wrote:
That the brain has been shapen by centrifugal motion of rotation is indicated by the central hollow spaces, or ventricles – corresponding to the interior cavities of the trunk and its hollow organs, and those of the long bones. Its convoluted outer surface indicates centrifugal and expansile developmental impulsions, resisted by a reactionary centripetalising and contractile impulse. Akin to the similar shapings of the Earth’s crust by the dual impulsions of her own rotations, causing folds and crinkles; mountains, valleys, in its surface.
According to Miss Kenealy, the act of walking works via a gyroscopic balancing act, involving “the concentreing trend of the negative left leg”, and as for dancing, why, the rotatory movements of a couple on a dance floor are akin to the Earth’s rotation in the plane of the ecliptic! We reproduce Miss Kenealy’s frontispiece as our Fig. 18.1 in the hope that it clarifies at least some of these novel ideas.
Fig. 18.1
More than this, the human body operates in three pairs of opposing directions, each having male/female connotations. Thus we have downwards gravity which is male, opposed by upwards centrifugal force which is female; we have sideways right, which is male, opposed to sideways left, which is female; and we have the forwards direction, which is male, opposed by the backwards direction, which is female. Quite how all this, combined with the potter’s wheel effect and the conservation of angular momentum, leads to the origin of the sexes, via “the cumulative shapings of rotation” with its “levitative vertical impulse” and its “kinetic horizontal impetus”, is far from clear – at least to us – but it was all as clear as day to Miss Kenealy, who had very firm ideas on the natural gyroscopic order of things: that men should be men, and women should know their rightful evolutionary place. Yes, women could use their brains and skills, but they should not aspire to be men, and they should not forget that first and foremost nature intended them to be mothers. The title of her Chapter 13 (“Feminist Doctrine diametrically opposed to Civilised Progress”) will give readers a good idea of her views!
Miss Kenealy was far from happy that in her day there were so many “male-faced, grim-jawed” feminist “sex-intergrades” around, and so many “weedy” men who had been given inferiority complexes by them. The natural gyroscopic order of things was being disrupted by girls doing too much sport at school – so much so that some girls had even been heard to say, “I loathe going home for the hols. There’s no hockey or lacrosse there!” The inevitable result was the athletic distortion of the natural female frame:
Such raw-boned un-feminine frames, prominent noses, and big hands and feet, of many of them, resulting from their strenuous training, have earned for our unfortunate, excellently-meaning Girl-Guides, their cruel title of ‘Girl-Guys.’
The natural order of things is that masculine men breed feminine daughters and feminine women breed masculine sons – interfere with that, as the Feminists have done, and it is not surprising that there are increasing numbers of “sex-intergrades” of one sort or another – feminine men as well as masculine women; women who must hide their masculinity under layers of make-up; and women in whom the traditional womanly qualities of “reserve, modesty and dignity” are sadly lacking. Even savages instinctively wear a loin cloth, Miss Kenealy points out, but some women, in their urge to become successful and famous, are content to appear half naked in the newspapers, or in films at the cinema! And when it comes to “the degrading cult of Nudism” – which involves both men and women, of course, but alike perverted from traditional standards of decency – this is no more than a reversion to a primitive form of sexual Bolshevism, “to that state of polyp-colony in which man began as a unit, subconscious and unaware of itself as an entity”! As for “the hideous promiscuousness of prostitution”, Miss Kenealy writes:
Natural history shows us many degenerate and loathly forms of inherently female parasites: tape-worm with tenacious suckers gripping to its living host and sapping his resources; mosquito sucking blood, and injecting poison; hook worm, fluke and others; subsisting all by similar repulsive methods. But none are so loathly as the parasite woman-prostitute who to live easily lives bestially; trafficking her body as a common sewer for the excreta of lust and vice – drunken, perverted, debased; broadcasting her pestiferous diseases wholesale to blast the lives of babes. Subject of much false and soppy sentiment, she is the anti-Christ of Evolution.
We will leave readers to discover for themselves Miss Kenealy’s proposals for a Parliament for Women; her views on terrorism; her “continual telepathic communication” with her fiancé of many years before (“a splendid specimen of vigorous manhood”, needless to say) who was killed in a riding accident, and whose death she saw in a vision “as though seen through the wrong end of a telescope”; and her view of X-rays as “a form of ‘black magic’, and a violation of natural law”. The Human Gyroscope is a very strange read, and well worth the considerable effort of reading it.
It is not very often that one comes across a never-before-seen piece of Independent Thought, something truly original and with no apparent antecedents, but such is T.J. O’Connor’s little book High Vision first published in 1981. In a nutshell, Mr O’Connor’s theory is that the Earth doesn’t orbit around the Sun at all, but moves around a circle to one side of the Sun. To be more precise, the Earth moves around a circle of circumference 9,083,250 miles (this being 365 times the equatorial circumference of the Earth) once a year, and the centre of this circle moves around the Sun once every 25,800 years, this being what is known to orthodox astronomers as the precession of the equinoxes. Fig. 18.2 should make this clear.
Fig. 18.2
Mr O’Connor was an Irish building contractor who lived in County Cork. In his youth he had spent much time walking at night in the Slieve Mish Mountains, where he could see and study the night sky more clearly than any city-bound astronomer. It was during these youthful excursions that he first noticed that the full moon is always south, never north, at midnight. Thus it follows that the Sun must always be to the north at midnight., and this can only happen, according to Mr O’Connor, if the Earth moves round a circle entirely to the south (and thus on one side of) the Sun. Now we must confess that we do not fully understand some of Mr O’Connor’s reasoning, but he does seem to argue that the Sun really rises in the north, and that the belief that it rises in the east is a sort of delusion arising from a confusion of earthly north-south-east-west with ecliptic north-south-east-west. By the same token, of course, the Sun really sets in the north as well.… But whatever, the revelation that the Earth did not move around the Sun, but around a small circle to one side of it, led to Mr O’Connor to explain the precession of the equinoxes without resorting, as orthodox astronomers do, to having the Earth behaving like a child’s spinning top that is gradually falling over: all was explained much more simply by having the centre of the circular orbit of the Earth itself slowly orbit around the Sun once every 25,800 years. So in fact, the Earth does go around the Sun, but once every 25,800 years, not once a year as we are all apt to suppose! Once one has grasped this concept (plus its corollary that the Ice Ages are merely precessional ‘winters’), it becomes child’s play to grasp the notion that starlight has two components: the glow which surrounds the star, and the light of the star itself as seen directly. This leads Mr O’Connor to pose the interesting question: “if an observer stood on Jupiter would he then see its starlight in between himself and the sun?” We have to confess that we do not even understand the question, let alone Mr O’Connor’s answer to it!
Alas, Mr O’Connor’s book High Vision, and its sequel, published in 1993, Beloved Planet (which acknowledges the help and assistance of, among others, a member of the Kinsale Golf Club, the Third Order of Franciscans, and the staff and customers of the Blackrock Castle Pub, Cork), appear to be largely forgotten today. At least, no trace of them can be found on the internet, in any shape or form, and that, we feel, is a great pity.
Another theory which seems to have been largely forgotten is the Theory Of Everything (TOE) proposed by R.J. Gault in his book The Big Balance, published in 1998. Discarding the Big Bang Theory as blatantly incorrect (if it was correct, Mr Gault argues, it would surely have been mentioned in the Bible!), the Big Balance Theory proposes that magnetic fields formed first of all in space, and that they proceeded to form the material universe (a theory which, Mr Gault believes, is mentioned in the Bible, as we shall see presently.) Thus, in Mr Gault’s view, “it is not planets that have magnetic fields, but magnetic fields that have planets.” Furthermore there is a fault in Newton’s Law of Gravity – there has to be, because if Newton was correct the Moon would have fallen onto the Earth long ago. Since it hasn’t, something must be holding it up, and according to Mr Gault it stays up there because it occupies a neutral zone in the Earth’s magnetic field, a zone in which positive and negative magnetic polarities are balanced. Likewise, the planets don’t crash down into the Sun because they are balanced in the neutral zones of the Sun’s magnetic field. Indeed, the planets orbit the Sun in a plane which is the zone of magnetic balance between the north and south magnetic poles of the solar system.
Mr Gault also tackles the knotty problem of why the Earth spins on its axis, and this too is a matter of balance. If a person faces a fire too long, they turn away from it to avoid overheating, and this is exactly what the Earth does, to achieve a temperature balance, in respect of the Sun:
When a planet receives too much heat on one of its sides, that hot side immediately begins to back away from the excess heat, and conversely, the side which is sitting in the cold shaded position begins, of its own volition, to move in towards the heat of the Sun. The outcome of this effect is that the planet “spins”…
Again, the last Ice Age and the current phenomenon of global warming are extreme swings of a sort of temperature pendulum, and the Earth is seeking a balance point, exactly as a swinging pendulum does, somewhat akin to the equinoxes, which are the balance points of the Earth’s annual orbit around the Sun.
The interplay of positive and negative polarities or extremes, and in particular their states of balance, explains many things, on a terrestrial as well as astronomical scale (which is why Mr Gault’s theory is a TOE). It explains sex, for example: the male is positive and the female negative, “and in a desperate urge to magnetically balance themselves” the two sexes feel “a great need to join up with their opposite numbers”. It explains the origins of the need for “a balanced diet” and why the mentally ill are indeed “unbalanced”; it explains memory (“an attempt by the brain to balance itself magnetically”); it explains why revenge is indeed “to redress the balance” and why the figure of Justice holds balanced scales; it explains the popularity of quiz shows on TV (the balancing-up of positive questions with negative answers); it explains bird migration and why people like going on holiday (to balance themselves up); and it explains the origins of the Christian Cross, which can be seen as consisting of a positive (+) sign united with a negative (−) sign, the two together (+−), united, and thus in a state of balance! “The secret of life,” Mr Gault calmly announces on p. 102, “is, quite simply, balance.” And unlike the Big Bang Theory, this theory, which unites Religion and Science, is mentioned in the Bible, in Proverbs 11.1: “Unbalance is abomination unto the Lord, but balance is his delight.” (Actually this seems to be Mr Gault’s paraphrase of the verse, but we’ll let that pass.…)
Another of Mr Gault’s revelations is that the planets do not move around the Sun in ellipses at all. Because the Sun is moving through space and taking the planets with it, each planet traces out a wave, and it is their wave patterns “which actually cause the ellipses as they etch their way sideways through space.” Indeed, Mr Gault believes that “our Solar System was initially created by a ‘Big Wave’ pattern, and not due to a ‘Big Bang’.” From here it is but a short step to the idea that “a Balancing Wave Pattern is the universal modus operandi of all life systems.” There are waves everywhere – water waves, sound waves, crime waves and microwaves to name but a few. Speaking of waves, Mr Gault points out that it is quite a coincidence that he was born in the Waverley Hospital, Ballymena, in Northern Ireland (“So, I must have been meant, from birth, to find all these truths.”)
Yet another of Mr Gault’s revelations concerns our Sun. “I do not believe that our solar system was only meant to be lit on one side,” he writes, and he is not happy that the Sun is a sort of concentrated spotlight – a ‘fist’ of light in the sky – that strikes us with sunburn and skin cancer, and causes hurricanes and typhoons. Not only that, but “our Sun causes the ‘colour problem’ on Earth by creating different skin colour pigments, to counterbalance its uneven onslaughts, creating light skins near the North Pole and, conversely, dark skins on the Equator.” Now, if the Sun were to be rollered out evenly around the sky, it would bathe the whole world in a gentle uniform light. There would be no shadows, no night, no sunburn, no drought, no hurricanes and no racism – this last, of course, because everyone would then have the same even-toned skin colour half way between the present extremes of black and white! In this idyllic world there would be no more pain, misery or suffering; human beings would cease to age, wither and die; and, if we understand Mr Gault correctly, we would no longer need “to go to the toilet”! Furthermore, with the Sun spread out round the sky like this, its gravitational pull would be spread out too, and we wouldn’t all feel quite so heavy! Mr Gault writes:
I believe that the Sun is really meant to embrace and cuddle us, like the many other star systems known as Planetary Nebulae, which exist alongside us in space, who have already changed into a more balanced shape and “cuddle” their planets in a diffuse halo of light and warmth. Our Earth should not be unevenly lit, and I wish that our Solar System could, like many other star systems before us, be turned into a beautiful diffuse halo, when the Earth would become, what it was always meant to be, a balanced Planetary Nebula. If the Sun corrected itself, then the Earth, in response, would also perfect itself.
But this is not just wishful thinking. Mr Gault thinks it will really happen, and he knows exactly why – comets! Comets sweep in from the so-called Oort Cloud which surrounds the solar system, gather up some of the Sun’s heat as they wing their way round the Sun (solar prominences help in this by throwing some heat up into space), then take it back to the Oort Cloud. Eventually, then the Oort Cloud will become the smoothed-out Sun! Exactly when this is going to happen is not clear, but when it does the Earth will become a veritable Garden of Eden – or Garden of Even – bathed in the smoothed-out light of a wrap-around Sun.