THOTH
                     -A Catastrophics Newsletter-

                            VOL I, No. 24
                          October 20, 1997

EDITOR:  Michael Armstrong
PUBLISHER:  Brian Stewart
 
                              CONTENTS:

VELIKOVSKY'S COMET VENUS (8)..................David Talbott
TODAY ON GALILEO
        and comments by ......................Wal Thornhill
BLOBS IN SPACE: THE LEGACY OF A NOVA PRESS RELEASE
        and comments by ......................Wal Thornhill
        -----------------------------------------------

Quote of the day:

O noble spirit!  O beauty simple and true!  Goddess whose 
worship is of reason and wisdom, whose temple is an eternal 
call to conscience and sincerity . . .
                Ernest Renan,  "Priere sur l' Acropole"
        -----------------------------------------------


                   VELIKOVSKY'S COMET VENUS (8)
              By David Talbott (dtalbott@teleport.com)

[EDITOR'S NOTE:  This continues Talbott's series of articles 
on the myth of the comet Venus.]


                    VENUS AND COSMIC UPHEAVAL

Across Mesoamerica Venus was celebrated as the radiant heart 
and soul of the great cultural hero whom the Aztecs called 
Quetzalcoatl.  Yet enigmatically, the appearances of the 
star after periods of absence stirred extraordinary fear. 
The noted archaeoastronomer, Anthony Aveni, observes:
 
   Evidently, the reappearance of Venus in different 
   quarters after a prolonged absence carried various evil 
   connotations for the people of Yucatan....Obviously, they 
   were deeply concerned about where and when Venus might 
   appear to reverse their fortunes.

Expressions of this fear will be found at all levels of the 
culture.  There is the general association with death, as 
noted by Thompson and others, but also the more specific 
association with the death of kings.  Thus the Mayan date 
name of Venus, Hun Ahau was a day of "death" and "darkness." 
But more specifically, the same day among the Aztecs 
signified the death of Quetzalcoatl and the transformation 
of his "heart-soul" into Venus.

"There seems to be no doubt that unlucky days were 
associated with the heliacal rise of Venus (its first 
appearance as morning star, after a period of absence), each 
to be regarded with appropriate ritual," Aveni writes.

The fear engendered by the heliacal rising of Venus was 
noted centuries  ago by one of the earliest European 
chroniclers, Sahagun:

   And when it (Venus) newly emerged, much fear came over 
   them; all were frightened.  Everywhere the outlets and 
   openings of [houses] were closed up.  It was said that 
   perchance [the light] might bring a cause of sickness, 
   something evil when it came to emerge.

In response to the new and bright appearance of Venus, kings 
called for sacrifices of captives to please the gods, for it 
seems that the planet's appearance could invite great 
calamities--from the outbreak of war to famine and flood.  
Could this be a key to understanding the mysteries of Venus-
portents?  As will become clear, the perils of Venus 
are the perils of the COMET in the global lexicon.

We have already noted that, throughout the ancient world, 
the comet portended the death of great kings.  But 
interestingly, the heliacal rising of Venus conveyed the 
same celestial message, as reported by Brundage.

   It is curious that the Mesoamerican peoples thought of 
   the morning star so consistently as malign.  He was to 
   them, whether they were Aztec or Mayan, the very father 
   of calamity.  The dates of his heliacal rising were 
   forecast so that the dooms ahead could be adequately read 
   and prepared for...Significantly, his malice could also 
   be directed at rulers, for if he arose on the trecana 
   opened by one-reed, then great lords sickened and died.

Thus, the Anales de Quahtitlan, a chronicle from the Mexican 
highlands (colonial times), describes the perils of the 
"piercing rays" of Venus.  On the day One Reed, (the day of 
Quetzalcoatl's birth, and the day of the same god-king's 
death), the rising of Venus is deadly: "It shoots the 
kings," the texts say.   Notice here that an underlying  
logic is at work, running from the specific to the general, 
from the archetype to the symbol.  Quetzalcoatl died at a 
critical moment in cosmic history, a moment signified by 
both the end and the beginning of the time-reckoning cycle, 
mythically the end of one world age and the beginning of 
another.  In the calendar system and in the sacred rites, 
the cyclical principle established by the life and death of 
Quetzalcoatl is both repeated and generalized: as above, so 
below; as before, so again.  Hence, kings will die on the 
day One Reed, the day that Quetzalcoatl's heart-soul 
departed to become the planet Venus.

What, then, is the significance of the fact that the 
symbolism of Venus replicates so precisely the global 
symbolism of the comet?  The new appearance of Venus as 
morning star is a moment of great peril for the kingdom (the 
"world"), as is the appearance of the comet.  It harkens 
back to the death of the god-king, as does the comet.  It is 
the heart-soul of the god-king rising in the sky, as is the 
comet.  Is this, then, just another "coincidence" to add to 
all of the others previously noted?  The further one 
descends into the various cultural levels at which the fear 
was expressed, the more clear becomes the equation:  the 
fear of Venus' rising was, in every way, identical to the 
fear instilled by the arrival of a COMET.

                 VENUS AND THE END OF THE WORLD

Immanuel Velikovsky, in developing the theme of cometary 
disaster, noticed that one ancient culture after another 
spoke of former catastrophes so devastating that the "world" 
came to an end.  This collective memory, in turn, seems to 
have given rise to the general notion of recurring cycles, 
or world ages.  While Velikovsky noticed surprising 
parallels among far-flung nations, including the Babylonians, 
Greeks, Hebrews, Chinese, and Polynesians, he 
was particularly fascinated with the Mexican ideas:

   An old tradition, and a very persistent one, of world 
   ages that went down in cosmic catastrophes was found in 
   the Americas among the Incas, the Aztecs, and the Mayas.
   A major part of stone inscriptions found in Yucatan refer 
   to world catastrophes.  "The most ancient of these 
   fragments [katuns, or calendar stones of Yucatan] refer, 
   in general, to great catastrophes which, at intervals and 
   repeatedly, convulsed the American continent, and of 
   which all nations of this continent have preserved a more 
   or less distinct memory."   Codices of Mexico and Indian 
   authors who composed the annals of their past give a 
   prominent place to the tradition of world catastrophes 
   that decimated humankind and changed the face of the 
   earth.

   In the chronicles of the Mexican kingdom it is said: "The 
   ancients knew that before the present sky and earth were 
   formed, man was already created and life had manifested 
   itself four times."

To Velikovsky, this language sounded remarkably close to 
that of the Greeks and other ancient peoples, who similarly 
recounted the passing of former ages and destruction by 
water, fire, wind or flood.  For some nations, he said, the 
transition from one age to another meant a new "sun" in the 
sky.

   An oft-repeated occurrence in the traditions of the world 
   ages is the advent of a new sun in the sky at the 
   beginnings of every age.  The word "sun" is substituted 
   for the word "age" in the cosmogonic traditions of many 
   peoples all over the world.

   The Mayas counted their ages by the names of their 
   consecutive suns.  These were called Water Sun, 
   Earthquake Sun, Hurricane Sun, Fire Sun.  "These suns 
   mark the epochs to which are attributed the various 
   catastrophes the world has suffered."

   "The nations of Culhua or Mexico," Humboldt quoted 
   Gómara, the Spanish writer of the sixteenth century, 
   "believe according to their hieroglyphic paintings, that, 
   previous to the sun which now enlightens them, four had 
   already been successively extinguished.  These four suns 
   are as many ages, in which our species has been 
   annihilated by inundations, by earthquakes, by a general 
   conflagration, and by the effect of destroying tempests."  
   ...Symbols of the successive suns are painted on the pre-
   Columbian literary documents of Mexico.

   "Cinco soles que son edades," or "five suns that are 
   epochs," wrote Gómara in his description of the conquest 
   of Mexico.

To Velikovsky, the idea of former "world ages" or "suns" 
belonged to a collective memory of upheaval and world-
changing shifts in the order of the solar system.  The earth 
was disturbed in its rotation, its axis tilted, the path of 
its revolution around the sun changed, and vast nations were 
devastated.  Then, from the ensuing chaos, the world was 
born anew under an altered celestial order.

                              CALENDAR

Sacred astronomy throughout Mesoamerica was particularly 
conscious of the heliacal rising of Venus, the planet's 
first annual pre-dawn appearance (beginning its phase of 
greatest brilliance due to its proximity to the Earth).  
According to Aveni, this first appearance as Morning Star 
"was probably the most important single event in Maya 
astronomy."

One of the extraordinary "coincidences" of Venus' present 
behavior is the resonance of its observed cycle with our 
year of 365 1/4 days.  Like clockwork, due to the 
synchronous movements of Venus and Earth we noted earlier, 
Venus first appears as morning star on the same calendar day 
every eight years, and during that span of time it rises 
heliacally a total of five times.
 
This synchronous relationship of Earth and Venus is 
reflected in the Mesoamerican calendar rites.  Many 
centuries ago, a sacred calendar system was perfected within 
a cultural environment that is not yet clear to 
archaeoastronomers.  The original system is unknown.  What 
we do know is that at the time of the Spanish invasion, all 
of the primary Mesoamerican cultures shared a common 
calendar structure, an outgrowth of the unidentified 
"original system," in which the Venus-cycle played a crucial 
role, but not one that appears fully comprehensible to the 
scholars seeking to understand it.
  
The calendar combined two time-keeping systems: one based on 
the familiar solar year, which was divided into 18 "months" 
of 20 days, to which five "unlucky" days were added at the 
end of the year, rounding out a 365-day year.  In their 
veintena festivals, the Aztecs celebrated the end of each 
20-day cycle of the solar year, making sacrifices and 
offerings to the gods in the hope that the sun and stars 
would continue their orderly movement across the heavens.

The other calendar was based on a 260-day cycle whose 
original meaning is still being debated.  Enigmatically, 
this ritual calendar appears to have no self-evident logic 
in terms of the natural cycles one would expect to find 
reflected in calendar phases.  And yet, for ritual reasons, 
the sacred 260-day calendar dominated the solar calendar. 
This, Robert and Peter Markman tell us, was "a sacred 
calendar tied directly to no single cycle observable in the 
world of nature."  Rather, "it embodied and celebrated the 
essence of cyclicity abstracted from its occurrence in 
natural phenomena.  This was the calendar used for prophecy 
and divination since in its workings it allowed man his 
closest approach to the world of spirit."   How, then, did 
it connect mankind with the world of the gods?

The 260-day ritual calendar combined two different 
sequences, one a series of 20 days-signs, the other a 
sequence of 13 day-numbers, so that there were a total of 
260 combinations of the two sequences to complete a sacred 
calendrical period.  Since each day and each number had its 
own gods and associations, every day in the 260-day cycle 
had a different ritual significance.  The Markmans write-- 

   Understanding calendrical lore allowed a special group of 
   priests to understand the implications of the signs of 
   the calendar and to divine the future...  These periods 
   could determine the augury of each of the days, since the 
   essence of the day (kin among the Maya) was itself the 
   prophecy (also kin).

Possibly, the authors say, there was a connection of the 
260-day cycle with Venus: "The interval between the 
appearance of Venus as morning and evening star is close to 
260 days."

The mystery is heightened by another fact that rarely 
receives attention: in the Maya calendrical ritual the 
listed movements of Venus do not accord with the planet's 
observed movements today.  The synodical revolution of Venus 
divides into four periods:

1) after inferior conjunction Venus appears as Morning Star 
for an average of 263 days;

2) during superior conjunction the planet disappears for an 
average of 50 days;

3) the planet reappears as Evening Star for an average of 263 days;

4) Venus then disappears again for 8 days during inferior conjunction; 
after which it reappears as Morning Star, to 
complete the synodical period.

But these are not the values in the Maya Venus cycles, which 
seem to follow an unfamiliar logic of their own.  The 
considerable discrepancy is emphasized by Aveni--

   They assigned an eight day period to the disappearance at 
   inferior conjunction, which is close to that observed 
   today.  But, peculiarly, their manuscripts recorded a 
   disappearance interval of 90 days at superior 
   conjunction, nearly double the true value.  Furthermore,
   they assigned unequal values to the intervals as morning 
   and evening star: 250 and 236 days, respectively.  In 
   fact, the true intervals are equivalent at approximately 
   263 days.  Since we know that the Maya were careful and 
   exacting timekeepers, there may have been ritualistic 
   reasons for these changes which overrode the 
   observations.

It seems as if another anomaly rears its head: the ancient 
Mesoamerican astronomers, so admired for their accurate 
record keeping of Venus' motions, do not have Venus moving 
on its present course.  Yet Aveni assures us that the Maya 
developed the observational precision and reasoning power to 
predict eclipses and to determine "the length of the Venus 
year and the lunar month to accuracies of less than a day in 
several centuries."   Thus, the calendar discrepancy, to say 
the least, should draw one's attention!

In considering this mystery, we well to remember 
Velikovsky's admonition on the subject of recurring 
anomalies--the true key to discovery. It is a fact that the 
recorded anomalous motions of Venus in the ritual calendar-
a calendar originating in an undefined period preceding any 
of the known cultural variants--has a significant and more 
ancient Near Eastern parallel.  As Velikovksy himself 
observed almost 45 years ago, the Babylonian astronomers, in 
the famous Venus tablets of Ammizaduga, recorded extensive 
observations of Venus' movements.  Like their Mesoamerican 
counterparts, these founders of astronomy were revered for 
their observational skills and mathematical accuracy.  
Nevertheless, the Ammizaduga records of Venus' appearances 
and disappearances are filled with "errors" suggesting that 
(in the minds of the stargazers, at least) Venus did not 
move on its present visual path.

And speaking of recurring anomalies, the seemingly 
preposterous 90-day disappearance of Venus at superior 
conjunction may prove to be more of a headache for orthodox 
archaeoastronomers than they have bargained for.  In the 
"erroneous" Babylonian records of Venus, one encounters a 
90-day disappearance as well!  Aveni reports--

   It is curious that the Babylonians also counted a three-
   month disappearance interval, indicating that the planet 
   would move approximately one-fourth of the way around its 
   cycle in the tropical year.

While an anomalous variance in the movement of Venus may 
frustrate mainstream investigators, for anyone believing 
that Velikovsky's comet participated in Earth-disturbing 
events as recently as a few thousand years ago, the 
troublesome records of Venus' motions are more likely to 
bring a bemused smile.  Following the great cometary 
catastrophe recorded in the myths, nothing would seem more 
reasonable to the Velikovskian researcher than a 
transitional period-perhaps millennia--in which Venus did 
not move on its present path as seen from the earth.

The larger issue, of course, is that posed by the very 
existence of the sacred 260-day calendar.  How could it be 
that a calendar with no firm basis in an observed natural 
cycle could have had such a broad cultural influence?  Even 
as late as 1940, the ethnologist J.S. Lincoln was able to 
confirm that the Ixil peoples of northwest Guatemala 
continued to use this calendar.  Ethnologist J.A.  
Remington, living among the Quiché and Cakchiquel peoples of 
the Guatemala highlands, found that the 260-day cycle was 
still practiced for purposes of forecasting, with this 
"unnatural" calendar still dominating the time-keeping 
rituals.

When it comes to ancient calendars, one of the possibilities 
that should be considered--but never is considered--is that 
of a shifting length of the year.  Velikovsky argued, for 
example, that in former times a calendar of 360 days 
prevailed throughout much of the ancient world, and that the 
five added days (called "nothing days" by the Aztecs) came 
only after a disruption of the earth's motions.  Though I 
have some doubt about this, there is no reason in the world 
to exclude such possibilities in advance of serious 
consideration.

But whether or not calendar changes are indicated, one can 
be certain that the 260-day ritual calendar bore an 
extremely significant relationship to the myth of collapsing 
world ages, as we shall see.
           --------------------------------------------

                     TODAY ON GALILEO--JPL NEWS RELEASE
                       Wednesday, 17 September 1997

Galileo turns its attention to Jupiter today, the fifth 
calendar day of the encounter. The first set of encounter 
commands are completed and the second set, transmitted to 
the spacecraft on Monday, begins to execute today. A few 
residual observations of Callisto and observations of Io 
and Ganymede complete the observation schedule.

The observation plans for Jupiter during this encounter 
period include a more or less standard set of observations: 
brightside and darkside maps, North-East-West-South maps, 
North-South strips, hot spot observations, regional and 
thermal maps. These observations are complimented by a 
set of observations that concentrate on the north polar 
region of Jupiter's atmosphere, including aurora and regions 
known as haze zones. These haze zones, as their name 
suggests, are regions of hazy clouds that are associated 
with and driven by the production of aurora on Jupiter. The 
observations of these regions will be coordinated among all 
of the remote sensing instruments for a complete 
understanding of the processes involved in the production of 
these hazy cloud regions. 

<snip>

[Wal Thornhill comments]:
My suggestion, made some years ago, that cloudiness and 
weather in general, was partly driven by electrical 
discharges INTO the ionosphere seems to be receiving 
confirmation from another planet.  I wish them luck in their 
attempts for a "complete understanding of the processes 
involved" based on their electrically sterile solar system.
        ----------------------------------------------

                    
                      ABOUT THOSE "BLOBS IN SPACE"
                   Wal Thornhill (walt@netinfo.com.au)
                       
I received the attached press release from the Space 
Telescope Science Office of Public Outreach.

It is yet another nail in the coffin of conventional 
astronomy - note well the sub-heading "Back to the Drawing 
Board" - AGAIN!

One of the basic premises of The Electric Universe was that 
the work of the late Dr CER Bruce of the UK Electrical 
Research Association, and his disciple Eric Crew, is correct 
and that a nova explosion is a stellar or planet-wide 
electric discharge resulting in the expulsion of matter from 
the parent body in a "blob", or series of blobs. The speed 
of the initial gaseous discharge (2,000 to 3,000 kilometers 
per second), falls in the middle of the range calculated by 
Bruce.

The Hubble telescope has now confirmed the electric model of 
a nova and discredited the standard explosive model!

You will notice the number of special conditions required of 
the exploding star under conventional theory. None apply to 
the electric discharge model.  All that is required is a 
build-up of charge between two bodies, or a single body and 
its galactic environment, until breakdown of the plasma 
occurs. The periodicity of the recurrent nova T Pyxidis is 
evidence for two bodies being involved in recurring close 
approaches. It will be of particular interest to find out 
how the blobs are moving since expulsion.

Remember as you read the last part of the release, which 
attempts to explain a nova, that there are no such things as 
neutron stars or black holes.

Wal Thornhill
          -------------------------------------

                BLOBS IN SPACE: THE LEGACY OF A NOVA
                PRESS RELEASE NO.:  STScI-PR97-29

Nova eruptions by dying stars were thought to be simple, 
predictable acts of violence. Astronomers could point a 
telescope at the most recently exploded novae and see an 
expanding bubble of gaseous debris around each star. 
Scientists using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, however, 
were surprised to find that some nova outbursts may not 
produce smooth shells of gas, but thousands of gaseous 
blobs, each the size of our solar system.

Astronomers acquired this new information by focusing the 
Hubble telescope's cameras on the recurrent nova T Pyxidis, 
which erupts about every 20 years. Images from ground-based 
telescopes show a smooth shell of gas surrounding the nova. 
But closer inspection by the Hubble telescope reveals that 
the shell is not smooth at all, but a collection of more 
than 2,000 gaseous blobs packed into an area that is one 
light-year across. Resembling shrapnel from a shotgun blast, 
the blobs may have been produced by the nova explosion, the 
subsequent expansion of gaseous debris, or collisions 
between fast- and slow-moving gas from several eruptions.

Back to the Drawing Board

This new evidence suggests that astronomers may have to 
rewrite their theory of nova eruptions and accompanying 
debris.

"Based on these observations, our previously standard view 
of what nova shells should look like may be fundamentally 
wrong," says Michael M. Shara, of the Space Telescope 
Science Institute in Baltimore, Md. "The view is that a nova 
explosion is the same in all directions, with debris 
traveling at the same speed, so that a fairly smooth cloud 
is formed. Instead, we've found this myriad of individual 
knots [blobs]. This observation suggests that shells of 
other novae do the same thing, as recently ejected 
material plows into older, fossil material from previous
explosions."

Stellar Detectives

Shara and his colleagues collected this new information from 
four observations taken by the Hubble telescope's Wide Field 
and Planetary Camera 2 during a 20-month period from 1994 to 
1995.  Their results appeared in the July issue of the 
Astronomical Journal. The scientists selected T Pyxidis 
because of its closeness to Earth and its long track record 
of outbursts. T Pyxidis is 6,000 light-years away in the dim 
southern constellation Pyxis, the Mariner's Compass. Within 
the last 110 years, T Pyxidis has been very active, erupting 
in 1966, 1944, 1920, 1902, and 1890.

The nova's active record lured Shara to its debris trail 
more than a decade ago. His pre-Hubble spectral studies in 
1985 using ground-based telescopes showed that the 
apparently smooth shell was expanding at the rate of 780,000 
mph (350 kilometers per second). His recent Hubble 
observations, however, surprisingly reveal that the material 
has slowed down considerably since 1985. In fact, the debris 
is barely moving at all. Images taken months apart show no 
measurable expansion of the debris. Shara determined that 
the knots must be moving slower than 90,000 mph (40 
kilometers per second). This may seem fast, but actually the 
gaseous debris was racing through space almost 100 times 
faster when it was first blown off the nova.

Waves of Violence

Ground-based and Hubble telescope observations have allowed 
Shara to reconstruct a sequence of a T Pyxidis blast. When 
the nova erupts, it flings waves of gaseous material at 
progressively slower speeds: the first wave of hot gas flies 
through space at 4.5 to 6.7 million mph (2,000 to 3,000 
kilometers per second), the last at 446,000 to 670,000 mph 
(200 to 300 kilometers per second).

About a few weeks after this eruption, the first waves of 
speedy debris collide with slow-moving fossil material from 
the previous outburst, possibly forming the gaseous blobs. 
Shara observed, for example, fast-moving gas from the 1966 
eruption plowing into slow-moving material from the 1944 
detonation. As the speedy, newly ejected material slams into 
the older, plodding debris, it heats up, glows brilliantly, 
and slows almost to a halt. (This explains the tremendous 
difference in the material's speed between the 1985 and the 
1994-95 observations.) Eventually, the bright material fades 
as it cools down. This collision scenario is like 
cannonballs zipping through a furnace, heating up and glowing, 
then cooling and fading. Images of a few blobs 
brightening and fading over several months were captured by 
the Hubble telescope.

Stellar "Tree Rings"

The blobs are distributed in eight concentric circles around 
the exploding star, producing a pattern similar to tree 
rings. Just as tree rings furnish scientists with 
information about a tree's life, so the circles of debris 
around T Pyxidis provide astronomers with a history of this 
prolific nova.

"We think that we're seeing the collision between pairs of 
eruptions all the way back to a successive pair generated in 
the early 1800's," Shara explains. "But we are seeing only 
the inner, brightest part of the ejected material; there are 
probably many more knots out there that are too faint for 
even the Hubble telescope to detect without the nova's 
future cooperation."

Fortunately, the central star is due for another explosion. 
Shara is scheduled to take observations with the Hubble 
telescope within a few days of the next eruption so that he 
can map the faint, ancient outer debris field, which will be 
illuminated by the nova's next bright flash. The debris map 
will show if the recurrent nova has been regularly active 
for the past thousand years or more, or if its eruptions 
occur in cycles. It also might offer clues to explain why 
some novae produce no visible shells at all.

Vampire Star

Nova explosions are extremely powerful, equal to a blast of 
100 billion billion tons of dynamite. All this punch comes 
from dying, faint, low-mass stars that have exhausted their 
hydrogen fuel. Called white dwarfs, these stars have puffed 
away most of their mass until only their cores are left.

A nova erupts when a white dwarf has siphoned enough 
hydrogen off a companion star to trigger a thermonuclear 
runaway. As hydrogen builds up on the surface of a white 
dwarf, it becomes hotter and denser until it detonates like 
a colossal hydrogen bomb, leading to a million-fold increase 
in brightness in one day. This tremendous flash of light 
prompted astronomers to call these objects novae - Latin for 
"new" - because they abruptly appeared in the sky. A nova 
quickly begins to fade in several days or weeks as the hydrogen 
is exhausted and blown into space.

Most novae spend 10,000 to 100,000 years collecting enough 
hydrogen from their companions to ignite an explosion. But 
T Pyxidis detonates several times a century. This nova has 
such a penchant for outbursts, astronomers believe, because 
its underlying star is about as massive as a white dwarf can 
get. A more massive white dwarf would collapse under the 
crushing force of gravity and become a neutron star or a 
black hole. Because of its high mass, T Pyxidis only needs 
to drain one part in 10 million of its companion's hydrogen 
(roughly the mass of our moon) to start an eruption. (The 
companion is a red dwarf, a small, cool, faint star.) This 
can be done in a mere 20 years or so, leading to the 
fascinating structure the Hubble telescope has now revealed.

Research team members are:  Robert Williams, Dave Zurek
(Space Telescope Science Institute); Roberto Gilmozzi,
(European Southern Observatory); and Dina Prialnik
(Tel Aviv University).

                            * * * * *

The Space Telescope Science Institute is operated by the 
Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. 
(AURA) for NASA, under contract with the Goddard Space 
Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD.  The Hubble Space Telescope is 
a project of international cooperation between NASA and the 
European Space Agency (ESA).

EDITOR'S NOTE:
Photos, captions and press release text are available via 
the World Wide Web at:
 http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/PR/97/29.html 

and via links in
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/Latest.html or
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/Pictures.html
        ----------------------------------------------

PLEASE VISIT THE KRONIA COMMUNICATIONS WEBSITE--
     
          http://www.kronia.com/~kronia/

Other suggested Web site URL's for more information about 
Catastrophics:

http://www.ames.net/aeon/
http://www.knowledge.co.uk/xxx/cat/sis/
http://www.flash.net/~cjransom/
http://www.knowledge.co.uk/xxx/cat/velikovskian/
http://www.access.digex.net/~medved/Catastrophism.html
http://www.grazian-archive.com/
http://www.tcel.com/~mike/paper.html

Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered, 10 Pensee Journals may be 
ordered at the I-net address below:
http://nt.e-z.net/mikamar/default.html
        -----------------------------------------------

The THOTH electronic newsletter is an outgrowth of 
scientific and scholarly discussions in the emerging field 
of astral catastrophics. Our initial focus will be on a 
reconstruction of ancient astral myths and symbols in 
relation to a new theory of planetary history.  Serious 
readers must allow some time for these radically different 
ideas to be fleshed out and for the relevant background to 
be developed.  The general tenor of the ideas and 
information presented in THOTH is supported by the editor 
and publisher, but there will always be plenty of room for 
differences of interpretation.

We welcome your comments and responses.

New readers are referred to earlier installments in issues 
of THOTH posted on the Kronia website listed above.  Go to 
the THOTH page and click on the image titled "Thoth: the 
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Michael Armstrong
Mikamar Publishing
mikamar@e-z.net