All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 20, 2017 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:08:49
Edition 311 - David Mathisen

This time... US researcher David Mathisen who believes many myths, legends and sacred textsare influenced by the cosmos....

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes, and this is the return of the unexplained.
Thank you very much for your kind emails.
Keep them coming, the great guest suggestions and the points you make about the show and the stories you tell me.
Don't forget, if you want to get in touch with me, then send me an email through the website, theunexplained.tv, the website designed and maintained by Adam from Creative Hotspot.
Send me an email through the link there and I'll get on it.
And as I've said before here, you know that a lot of the mainstream media ignores your communications.
I certainly don't.
I'm going to do some shout-outs and also address some of your points in the next edition, if that's okay.
Just to mention one email, though, that came into my inbox this morning from Leslie in New York.
Leslie did not like the interview that I did with Andrew Basciago and made some points about it.
And Leslie, thank you for that.
I mean, it's good to get feedback, whether it's good or bad, whatever it is.
But I would like to know specifically the areas in that interview where you think that it came off track.
Just because it would help me, I'm going to go back through it on the basis of your email.
You know, unlike a lot of the mainstream media, I do do quality control.
So I'm listening to what you say.
If you can tell me, you don't have to tell me chapter and verse, all of the points, but let me know, and then we can take it from there.
Thank you.
If you'd like to make a donation to this show, by the way, to help it continue, you can also do that through the website, theunexplained.tv.
And thank you very much for your support, moral and otherwise, for my cause here.
You know, we're trying to be an independent voice in a world of mush and fog, if that is a reasonable analogy to make.
Now, I've always said when doing this show that we try and mix it up a bit.
And I try and put on here people who are not only well-known, people who are well-known perhaps in ufology or ghost hunting or electronic voice phenomena, reverse speech, whatever it may be.
We put on the big names.
Of course we do.
Everybody from Linda Moulton, How Graham Hancock, some people who are award-winning professors in their field like Michiu Kaku.
We have those people, but also some people that you may not have heard, and we see where their thoughts are taking them.
One such is a man called David Matheson, and he's the guest on this edition.
I have no idea how this is going to go, so I need your thoughts on it once we've done it.
He has written a series of books, and the reason that I've got him on is just that the premise of the books is fascinating.
I haven't heard very many people doing this kind of thing, suggesting that the legends and myths and scriptures that so many people have lived by for so many generations and generations may all have a common thread and be celestially guided and have links with the stars.
Now that is a very simplistic way of putting what the man is about to say.
I don't know anything about him.
He made contact with me.
I think it might be intriguing, but let's see where we go.
So David Matheson is the guest on this edition of The Unexplained.
We have more big-name guests coming up on the show very soon here at The Unexplained.
Linda Moulton, how due to remain or due to return to the show, and many, many others.
So stay right here.
Keep this spot on the dial, as they used to say.
In the days when, of course, there were radio dials.
Now, of course, we just have mice and web addresses and various bookmarks.
Okay, let's get to the guest in the U.S. now, David Matheson.
David, thank you for coming on the show.
I was telling my listener just before we started that this show has included some people, if you're aware of it, who are internationally famous, accomplished in their field, like Michio Kak, who we had on here, and various people like that.
I only say that because one of the things I hope makes this show different from the others is that I like also to put on people who my listeners may not have heard of.
And with the best will in the world, and I hope you take this in the spirit it's intended, that probably for now includes you.
Yeah?
Yeah, thanks, Howard.
And it's a privilege to be here.
I think you're a fantastic interviewer.
And I have heard some of your other interviews with guests.
And some of them have been really fantastic.
Some guests that I've heard on multiple shows.
And I thought that you were able to bring out some things that I didn't hear on other shows.
So yeah, I may not be familiar to too many of your guests, but actually I can see the sales of my books.
And actually, I do have some readers and followers in England and the rest of the islands there.
And so I think I'm maybe getting a little bit more people over there who know about things that I'm writing about.
And if we can do anything to help here, you know, that's the whole idea, really.
It's to put ideas out there.
What intrigued me about you, and you know, these days I don't often interview people who put themselves up to be interviewed because sometimes I've done that in the past and it hasn't been the best quality of show and listeners have quickly pointed that out.
But the premise of what you're doing is fascinating to me.
I don't quite understand it, so you're going to have to lead me through it.
The idea that a lot of the legends and myths and scriptures that so many people have lived by for generations are in some way celestially connected is where you're coming from, I think.
That's right.
And I'm not the first person to assert this by any means, but I would argue that after many years of looking into the question that all of the myths are based upon the motions of the heavenly bodies,
the sun, the moon, the constellations play a leading role, other things like the Milky Way, which isn't really a constellation, it's the actual galaxy that we're seeing from the side, and the heavenly cycles.
So we can get into that, but the interesting thing is that I did take the scriptures of the Bible literally.
You know, that's actually not uncommon in the United States and other places, and certainly that influenced England for centuries very deeply.
And I took them literally and was very comfortable Taking them literally.
I wasn't going around looking for the idea that the stories in the Bible might also be based upon the stars.
Of course, a lot of people have run into flack and hostility over the years by daring to claim, especially in the United States for reasons that I can understand because people's beliefs they hold dear, but for suggesting that perhaps the stories that they have taken literally may be a metaphor for something else, I think, is difficult territory to get into.
That's right.
And like I said, it was not something I was looking for, and I actually kind of resisted it when I first started to see the evidence.
But it's interesting that you talk about people taking flack over that.
There was actually a very influential pastor or theologian in England named Robert Taylor, who was born in 1784.
He lived from 1784 to 1844.
And he actually preached in England, in London, I believe, somewhere.
But he also became convinced that all the stories of the Bible are based on the celestial motions in the constellations.
And he's one of the clearest articulators of this idea that I've found.
I've found that this idea goes all the way back.
You can find even references to it in Plato and Macrobius, who were ancient philosophers.
But Robert Taylor in England actually ended up spending about three years in prison for teaching this.
I think he was defrocked.
He was, you know, he lost his job as a regular preacher and became kind of an outcast.
And his sermons were collected after his death and published in 1851.
Well, these days, you know, we treat contrary views a little easy, depending on where you happen to be.
But, you know, it's never been an easy path to take.
It is actually quite fascinating, I think, to see the connections between the ancient myths and the stars.
And that's where I began.
You know, the constellations and the Greek myths are actually, there's some, you know, awareness of the fact that, hey, you know, the story of Perseus, who encounters Medusa and the Gorgons, you know, or Gorgons.
Well, there's a constellation called Perseus, and he rescues Andromeda.
And there's a constellation called Andromeda right next to Perseus, in fact.
But you're saying that those constellations influenced the stories that we got.
And, of course, the conventional wisdom is that the stories, the unfolding of real events in history, influence the naming of the constellations.
So you got it the other way around.
Exactly.
That is a very perceptive insight, Howard, because most people believe that the planets are named after the gods, right?
Jupiter or, you know, the constellations even were told, oh, after this happened, then the gods hung Hercules in the heavens so that he could be seen by everybody for ages to come.
But the flip side of that, or my argument would be that actually these stories are all embodiments of what's going on in the heavens.
And they're actually a very sophisticated metaphor.
And just to touch on, just briefly to close this thought, your point that some people would be very resistant to the idea that the Bible might also be in this same category, there's a famous quotation that I like to use.
It's from someone named Alvin Boyd Cume, but he said, these stories are actually a thousand times more precious as myth than as literal history.
That's a bit of a touchy subject, but we could get into what I believe he means there, because I'm not saying that these stories are not true.
I would argue that they were made to convey profound truths, but to try and force them to say, well, they're only true if they're literal history.
I don't believe that they're actually true in a literal sense, as in they had to happen in a literal sense to someone thousands of years ago in order for them to be relevant to our lives.
And in fact, they may be more relevant to our lives if they are metaphor as opposed to if they're literal.
But we'll actually, you know, with my very small brain capacity, it seems to me that if what you are hinting at, and we'll go more deeply into this, David, is correct, then it may make the interpretation of things like the Bible even more profound because it would suggest that there is indeed a hidden hand behind everything.
Well, it certainly would suggest that they're all connected, which is not really the way that they've historically turned out.
You know, they kind of tend to divide people.
Well, do you believe this literally or don't you?
If you don't, then you're on that side of the group.
And if you do, you're on this side of the group.
And also, unfortunately, throughout history, there have been people who have said, hey, wait a minute, you believe that.
Let me come over there and correct your belief system to believing in this one.
When in fact, they're all based upon, I mean, you say, if what I'm asserting is correct.
And I'm completely comfortable talking about, you know, fielding all the objections that can be offered because I've studied this now for so long that I'm completely convinced that the evidence is overwhelming, that all the myths around the world are based on the same system.
And that does have incredible ramifications because how did a story in New Zealand, Aotearoa, from the Maori people, how could that be based on the same system that the story of the judgment of Solomon in the Old Testament of the Bible?
How could those two stories be connected?
Or a story from Australia or from Africa?
But I've found abundant evidence that they're all using the same system.
And we could talk about the ramifications of that.
But like you said, it suggests some pretty, it's got some pretty amazing ramifications.
Some sort of, like you said, hidden hand, or there's something about our ancient history.
This suggests some things about our ancient history, just things that like people like Graham Hancock talk about, or you had Robert Schock on, which I thought was a fantastic interview, talking about ancient civilizations or lost civilizations even before ancient Egypt.
Because this system was fully mature by the time of the earliest writings that we have from ancient Egypt, like the pyramid texts, or the earliest writings that we have from Mesopotamia, like the Gilgamesh cycle that's found on all those ancient clay tablets that were discovered not until the 1800s, really.
Those are very ancient, and yet this system is already in place and in operation in the Gilgamesh stories.
And it actually makes them, helps them make a lot more sense because sometimes in the myths we encounter something that's really strange, like Gilgamesh kills this bull and throws the haunch of the bull in the face of the goddess Ishtar.
And you say, what?
That's kind of weird.
I don't even understand what that's all about.
And there's even things in the Bible that probably don't get preached on that often that are weird or distasteful or unpleasant or very graphically violent.
And you say, wow, I think I'll just skip right over that one because it's really kind of difficult.
This general pledges that he'll sacrifice the first thing that comes to greet him when he comes back from his battles.
And the first thing that comes to greet him turns out to be his daughter.
And he sacrifices her.
And you say, what?
That is bizarre.
That's in the book of Judges.
Or that seems a little harsh.
Or, you know, don't you think he could back out of that rash vow that he made?
Nope, doesn't seem to.
Why is that in the Bible?
Well, it turns out if it's based on the constellations, it makes perfect sense why it's in there.
And it actually has a spiritual message for us.
But if it's literal, it just becomes horrible.
So anyway.
I've got to say, look, when I was at university, I studied politics and I understood a lot about the political system of the United States by the end of it and the political system of Russia by the end of it, our own UK political system.
I also understood a lot about the psychology of politics.
What I found really difficult was philosophy and, you know, Plato, for example, who you mentioned, used to give me a headache.
So I am struggling at the moment to understand how a constellation in the heavens can be back-engineered or back-interpreted to tell a story or a myth or a legend from an era down here.
How does that work?
Right.
That's a very good question.
And, you know, I could give you a few of the myths and show you how they connect to the stars.
And we can get into that if there's time.
That's great.
I think it's best done by example, isn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah, it sure is.
But before I do that, I'll try and address your question in part by saying I believe it's a very coherent system.
It's like a language.
And so the different aspects of the cycle are, I believe, being used to convey certain arguments about the nature of the universe.
I mean, what does philosophy study?
Why are we here?
Who are we?
What is this life that we find ourselves in?
And is there a system of right and wrong?
I think, you know, people want to believe that the ultimate end of all things is good.
And so wrong will be outed and punished in the end and good will triumph.
Right.
So those are all these deep questions that things like religion and philosophy and faith are addressing.
And how do we treat other people?
And it does get into, you know, it does have ramifications for how we organize our society politically, economically, and those sorts of things.
So when I start talking about this, if I just start talking about the myths and their connections to the stars, a natural question would be, well, why?
Why would you are you telling me that all the stories in the Bible or all the stories in the Norse myths or the Greek myths are based on the constellations?
That's fascinating to some people, but it's perplexing.
Like, why would they do that?
And what I was saying is that I believe it is a, you know, I've had to struggle with that because, as I said, I at first took the Bible literally and was very happy to do so.
But the entire metaphor, I believe, is like, it's like a language or it's like a system.
I use the American author Herman Melville, who wrote Moby Dick.
He was struggling with really big questions and he wanted to find a really big canvas with which to kind of grapple with these ideas.
Is there predestination?
Is there not predestination?
If it's predestination, what's the point of all this?
Or, you know, all these kinds of things that he was writing about.
And he wanted a really big canvas in order to grapple with these really big questions.
And he looked out and he found the biggest canvas that he could find, which was the mighty ocean and life at sea on a sailing ship and pursuing these whales.
And if you read Moby Dick, and some people find it kind of tedious, but it's actually, I think, fascinating because he'll get into, okay, let's talk about the rope that is used when we're out hunting whales.
I'm not saying that I condone hunting whales, but anyway, he would talk about the rope in minute detail.
And then at the end of the chapter, he'd always turn the corner and say, now, actually, this rope, this is just like our life.
We're all in the whale boat, and the rope is there, and it can wrap around our leg at any moment and pull us into the deep.
And you go, whoa, I didn't see that coming.
And what he's doing is in every single scene, he's getting into these gory details of hunting whales.
And then he'll turn the corner and say, this is actually a great metaphor for human life or whatever.
Of course, prophets and authors have done this for as long as there've been people on this planet who've been able to communicate.
If you think of just one tiny example from my studies when I was at school, Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift, that was a metaphor for political systems.
You can read it as a kid, a book to be a story about a giant.
And as an adult, you can see exactly what he's getting at.
It's a wonderful satire.
And I actually had a, I went to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and I actually studied literature there, among a lot of other things.
But I had a wonderful professor and Gulliver's Travels, a wonderful professor of English literature who was a great mentor for me and big influence on me.
And Gulliver's Travels is one of his favorites, you know, and some of the lesser known parts, like the Winnums and the Yahoos.
And Brodenmeg, I think that's the problem.
Yeah, exactly.
It's a wonderful, wonderful, that's a great example.
So what these stories are doing with the heavenly cycles, if I were to assert that they're all based on the stars and the motions of the heavens, we're all familiar with the fact that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
And that's a function, of course, of the Earth spinning on its axis.
That's why it's light there where you are, and it's just dawning here where I am because I'm on the other half of the globe.
But that function of our spinning, that creates a daily cycle of the stars, including the sun, popping up in the east and then sinking down in the west.
And the stars in the night sky do the same thing.
And I believe that one thing that that motion was used for is if you think of the sun soaring up into the heavens, it's free from earth.
It's up in the ether.
And then after a while, the turning of the earth causes it to sink down into the, whether if you're in the west, like I am on the west coast, you'll see it sink down into the ocean.
Or if you're in the middle of land, you'll see it sink down into some hills or some trees.
Well, that could be used as a metaphor for the idea that, well, the human soul soars up into the spirit realm or heaven or free of the body.
And then it plunges down into the lower elements of earth or water, just like our bodies are made of, the Bible tells us, right, clay, not just the Bible.
Prometheus made human beings out of clay in the Greek myths as well, a combination of the lower elements, earth and water.
But then Prometheus brought a spark.
He got into big trouble for doing that, but he brought a divine spark from the heavenly, you know, the heavenly realm.
He brought it down and put it into his creation.
So we're like a, we're this lower, we're entrapped in this lower realm, just like the sun is or the stars are when they sink down in the west.
We're encased in this physical body of, you know, clay or the lower elements, water and earth.
But we also have this aspect of the higher element, this divine spark or the soul, the spirit that has come down for a time into the lower realms and we're traveling through the lower realms.
So the stars and their motions could be used as a metaphor for traveling through the upper realms and then sinking down and plowing through the lower realms.
I don't actually believe that the ancients thought that the earth was flat and that the sun went down underneath, but we could argue the reasons why, but it's a beautiful metaphor.
You've got the sun soaring through the heavens.
That's like the Egyptian god Horus, the sun god, who's a falcon.
Then you have the sun that's plowing through the underworld, the nether regions.
It's got to get back from the western horizon back to the eastern horizon, and it does that underground or down in the underworld.
And you've got a sun god of the underworld as well.
That's Osiris, the god of the dead.
He's like the sun when he's buried in the ground, but he's going to pop back up again later.
He's going to return.
He sleeps for a time in the underworld.
And we have mythical characters like Osiris who sleep for a time in a watery realm.
Even King Arthur, what happens to him at the end of the Arthurian tales?
He has to go to sleep under the water.
The Lady of the Lake charms him into this mystical underground cavern where he's sleeping.
But we're told, you know, someday when England really needs him, he's going to come back.
Well, there's lots of things.
We'd like to hope so anyway.
And that's a pattern that we find around the world.
Kronos goes to sleep in the mythical realm of Ogidja under the waves somewhere.
And actually, Odysseus, when he's on the island in the beginning of the Odyssey, he's on the island of Ogidja.
He's separated from his family for a long time, but he's going to come back.
It's going to be the return of the king.
You know, Odysseus is the returning hero from the Trojan War that takes the longest time to get home, 10 years.
But we have this pattern of being plunged down into this underwater realm for a period of time, but coming back eventually.
And that is, I believe, figured in the stars.
They plunge down into the lower realm, and then they pop back up into the upper realm.
So this can become a metaphor for all kinds of ways of understanding the universe.
I believe with all these ancient myths, whether it's from ancient India or ancient Scandinavia or ancient Africa, have this worldview that, you know, this physical world that we see is not really the whole entire picture.
There is this invisible realm.
They call it the dream time.
And the Aboriginal people talk about the dream time or the spirit realm.
So David, what we're saying then is that the chroniclers of what we've been told may have been real events through the years, and some people have claimed they're stories.
Actually, whether they were real events or whether they were stories, you are saying that the people who actually scripted this down were guided by natural cycles.
Now, I can understand that when you're talking about the rising and setting Of the sun.
But when you're talking about a complex story from Greek mythology, how on earth do you make those celestial tie-ins?
How does that work?
That's a real headache-inducing task, isn't it?
Well, it is until you start to learn the language.
It's just like any other learning any other language.
I believe that these stories can be shown to be speaking a celestial language.
And I became fascinated and actually a little bit obsessed with kind of understanding that language when I read some of the different assertions down through the decades and centuries that they're based on.
There's a book called Hamlet's Mill that was pretty influential.
It was published in 1969.
And they allude to this, although they don't really lay out the language extremely clearly.
But I really got fascinated by that assertion and said, wow, I'd like to start to decipher this.
So you mentioned the Greek myths.
So for instance, I don't know if you want to pick a Greek myth or I can just suggest one.
My sister was big on Greek myths.
I'm not, but guide me.
Great.
Well, you know, I mentioned the story of Perseus in the Gorgon.
So Perseus is actually a constellation that you can see.
So that's actually a bit of an easy one.
We'll just spend a second or two there because Perseus, the hero, he gets winged boots given to him by the god Hermes, and he gets a special shield loaned to him by the goddess Athena in order to go off and do this quest to bring back the head of Medusa.
That's what he has to do.
His mother is being pursued by this evil king.
She's this beautiful but single woman that's being pursued by this king.
And Perseus is now strong enough to kind of defend his mother.
And the king says, oh, listen, you think you're such a hero.
Why don't you go bring back the head of Medusa?
And he knows that Medusa turns people to stone, anyone who looks at her.
But anyway, we have a constellation named Perseus.
And if you even go back to the ancient Greek pottery, you can see depictions of Perseus.
And he's carrying a special type of a curved blade, very distinctive curved knife that he uses to cut off the head of the Gorgon, which is a bit gruesome, but a lot of these myths are.
But in the sky, you can see Perseus actually, one of his hands is very curled.
And the outlining of the constellation actually makes a big difference.
So people might say, well, you know, I could look at the stars and see whatever I want to see.
That's a valid counter-argument.
What I would say is, this is a bit of a, let me just take a quick tangent, but it's important to the discussion.
The way you outline the constellations is very important.
And there was a famous author named H.A. Ray, who's mostly famous for writing children's stories.
He wrote, along with his wife Margaret Ray, the Curious George Stories that you're probably familiar with.
Very famous worldwide, Curious George.
Well, H.A. Ray also wrote these books about the stars and how to outline the constellations because he was frustrated with the way in the 1800s you'd have these very flowery drawings with lots of detail that didn't really match up with the stars at all.
Then in the early 1900s, they kind of went into a modernistic way of connecting the stars in kind of geometric patterns that didn't really resemble anything that you could remember or find in the sky.
And he said, neither of these are very useful.
Let me suggest a different way.
And the way he outlines those stars, I don't know, Howard, if he was inspired by the gods or if he was privy to some sort of ancient knowledge, he never really said.
But his way of outlining the constellations turns out to open the door to these connections in a big way and actually to match up with ancient Greek pottery or ancient artwork from Egypt.
If you look at the constellations the way H.A. Ray outlines them, then you can begin to see how they connect to the Bible or to the myth of Perseus.
So the way he outlines Perseus, one of the hands is curled over.
If you look at the Perseus constellation in, say, Wikipedia or some of the apps, even on an iPhone, the outlining won't always be the HA Ray system.
But his system is very good and also appears to match up with the pottery or the ancient depictions from ancient artists.
So for instance, the constellation Hercules is a very large constellation.
It's visible at night right now in the hours before midnight, but it's usually outlined in a way that's completely unlike a human figure.
But the way H.A. Ray outlines Hercules is very much like a powerful human figure carrying a large club or other weapon, brandishing it over his head with a deep knee bend.
And it turns out that in the ancient Greek pottery, Hercules is often depicted with his deep knee bend when he's wrestling somebody or even when he's not wrestling somebody, he'll often have this deep knee bend.
And it's to show you that that's connected to the constellation Hercules.
So there's a story in Greek myth where Hercules and Apollo get into an argument over the temple of Delphi.
I think you pronounce it in England.
I think it's more often pronounced probably Delphi.
Well, these days people say both, I think.
Pronunciations, I think they're very rapidly becoming the same, both sides of the pond.
But I get where you're coming from.
Pardon my California accent, but anyway, the Delphi, you know, the priestess at Delphi sat upon this tripod and she went into a trance.
And then the smoke actually, this is a great myth actually to talk about.
So the temple at Delphi used to have this great serpent.
It was actually a female serpent named Python.
And Apollo comes down and drives the serpent into a crack in the ground with his powerful arrows.
You know, he was an archer god, just like his twin sister Artemis.
And he drives Python into the fissure in the ground.
He shoots all these arrows, and Python is mortally wounded, and she ends up crawling into a cave, and then the odors or the gases from the body of this ancient dragon seep up through the cracks.
And then the priestess, who was actually called the Pythia or the Pythia after Python, would sit in a tripod, according to the legend, over the crack and over this ancient canyon or something where the Python went.
And the smoke would come up and these fumes would put her into a trance.
And she would give out these great pronouncements or these mystic, cryptic pronouncements from the gods.
Well, anyway, she would sit on a tripod.
She's always depicted, or in some of these ancient artwork on pottery, she's depicted, she'll have an outstretched arm or she'll be holding a little branch in her hand.
And there's a constellation right nearby the Milky Way called Virgo, very famous constellation, a little bit difficult to pick out in the sky, but it has an extended arm.
And anyway, right next to Virgo, not far away, is this constellation Ophiuchus, which is the serpent-bearer.
I believe that is the tripod of Delphi.
It's a tall, kind of narrow, it almost looks like a tombstone of a constellation.
I believe that's the tripod, and it functions as a tripod in other myths as well, including in the Odyssey.
But in between, so that tripod is right next to the Milky Way.
The brightest part of the Milky Way goes right up next to Ophiuchus, not too far from Virgo.
A little bit above, directly above Ophiuchus, is the constellation Hercules.
And then down on the brightest part of the Milky Way on either side of it is Scorpio on one side, Sagittarius on the other side.
Well, Scorpio, I believe, is the corpse of Python that Sagittarius, the bowman, he's got a bow.
He plays the role of Apollo, or Apollo corresponds to Sagittarius.
Sagittarius slays Scorpio, Python, in this particular myth, the smoke rising up from Scorpio.
Remember I said the brightest part of the Milky Way rises up between Sagittarius and Scorpio.
That is the Milky Way is often a pillar of smoke.
Could also be a pillar of fire.
You may be familiar with in the book of Exodus, the Hebrews leaving Egypt cross the Red Sea and they follow a pillar of smoke by day, pillar of fire by night.
Anyway, that's all can be shown to correspond to this region of the sky as well, the crossing of the Red Sea.
But anyway, back to that.
So what you have here is a kind of template that you think you can more or less universally apply.
But if it was to become science, if you were to turn this into a science, though, you would have to be able to repeat that and prove it in every case.
And I guess because a lot of this is so nebulous, it's very hard to do that.
That's right.
That's a great point.
It has to have...
So, yeah, I've published...
The most recent one, Volume 3, is Star Myths of the Bible.
That's 766 pages.
volume two is about the Greek, the Greek myths.
That's, uh, I forget how many pages, something like 600 or, uh, uh, I'm up to almost 1,000 blog posts at this point on my blog.
And I've published some videos about this.
But you're right.
There has to be one good test of a theory.
If you're talking about, hey, there's this pattern, it should have predictive power.
It should have predictive power.
In other words, if I'm, I liken this system to kind of like ruins in the jungle.
You know, I believe all these ancient myths, it's almost like we've kind of forgotten the language.
And the book, Hamlet's Mill, that I referenced earlier says, it's almost like an ancient ruin of some giant machine that's so vast it spreads around the globe, but it just peeks out here and there.
It's kind of like, they say, one of those Chinese mist paintings that they're so famous from China or Japan, where there's most of the painting is actually mist and just you just see here and there a little rooftop or a little patch of bamboo or something and it's evocative.
It's a great image that they use.
But what I was going to say is if it's like ruins in the jungle and they're peeking out here and there and you study these ruins and different explorers from previous decades have come back and said, hey, there's something there.
I'm not really sure what it is, but it looks really ancient.
If you stare at the map and you kind of plot all these pictures and you say, wait a minute, I think I know what it is.
This was an ancient granary, or this was an ancient living complex or whatever you say the pattern is, then you should be able to say, well, wait a minute, if there's a door here on this side, then we should be able to go into the jungle and find the, there should be a door on the other side and it should be right about here.
And if you trudge through the jungle and clear away the vines and then suddenly you say, oh my goodness, look at these stones right here.
There's the door lintel or there's the door, there's the threshold.
I found the door just where I said it would be.
that would be a pretty good demonstration that you might have found the pattern.
There was even Have you been able to do that in the cases that you've looked at?
So yes, I have.
And now it's kind of hard to prove because I say, you know, well, I was looking at this story and I figured it should be something to do with a sheet because the sons of Noah are walking backwards of the sheet.
And I thought about it.
Next morning I woke up and I said, I know what it is.
It's the great square of Pegasus.
But I have been able to do that in some cases.
Like I said, it's kind of hard to prove because I'm one of the only people doing this.
But the amount of evidence that I've found and put down in writing, I believe, is pretty conclusive.
And as I was going to say, let me just finish up my little story about the temple at Delphi.
And there's a story about Apollo.
And I'll give you another predictive thing that kind of helps To prove the point, Apollo and Hercules.
Hercules gets into this argument with Apollo over the Temple of Delphi, and Hercules decides to walk off with the tripod.
And so there's all these ancient artwork showing Hercules and Apollo.
It's not even a super well-known myth, but there's ancient artwork.
Hercules and Apollo wrestling over this tripod or having kind of a tug of war with the tripod.
Hercules on one end, walking off with the tripod, Apollo trying to hold it from the other end.
Well, the constellation Hercules is directly above the constellation Ophiuchus, which looks like a tripod.
And Hercules is actually reaching down with one hand towards the constellation Ophiuchus, especially if you look at the way H.A. Ray outlines it.
And Sagittarius is there at the other end of Ophiuchus.
And there's the Milky Way rising up.
That's the smoke.
Anyway, those three constellations, Hercules, Ophiuchus, and Sagittarius, line up right with the ancient pottery.
So I have actually gone to museums, like there's a Museum of Fine Art in Boston, which is a wonderful museum.
You can spend weeks in there and never see all of it, where I have seen pottery that I didn't even know before.
I haven't seen pictures of this particular pottery on the web.
But when I saw the pottery in person, oh my goodness, look at Dionysus.
He lines right up with the constellation.
I've already written this book, and I've said that he's this constellation, and there he is in this pottery, or I've said that Hercules lines up with this outline, the way H.A. Ray outlines it.
And look at this pottery that I didn't even know about, Hercules wrestling with Proteus, and he's got this deep knee bend.
It's very distinctive.
You can see it.
I took a picture of it.
And so, you know, I've already published that this constellation lines up with this or this mythical figure lines up with this constellation.
And then here's a piece of pottery that I didn't even know about.
And you can take a picture of it and line it right up with that constellation.
So there is, I believe, overwhelming evidence, an awful lot of evidence.
I believe it's conclusive, but it's certainly intriguing, the amount of evidence, whether you think it's conclusive or not.
So if we follow what you're saying, this is either the hidden hand that is giving us an imprint of everything in the stars, or the chroniclers of the things that happened, or the writers of stories that depict things that didn't happen, were all being guided by the stars.
If you look at it that way, then that's a very bleak outlook, isn't it, for all of us?
Because the amazing, wonderful, magical things that we've been told happened are just representations that somebody has written down of something they've looked up in the sky and seen.
Is that what you're trying to tell us?
Well, I'm certainly not trying to give anyone a bleak outlook because I believe this actually becomes a very uplifting and beautiful interpretation because I believe that the ancient myths are actually all true and you can still go out and see them to this day.
I mean, you can still see Hercules or you can still see Abraham and Sarah.
You know, Sarah never grows old.
She's always beautiful in the story.
You know, even when she's 80 years old, these different kings are pursuing her.
She's still there in the sky.
But what I would say is that these stories are all true.
They're true in the heavens, but they all actually are about you and me.
So you're actually the star of the story.
Like Samson, Samson is a great story from the Bible.
He happens to be one of these figures with terrible judgment who gets into all kinds of trouble, particularly with women, you know, with Delilah.
Of course, basically cuts off his hair, but he actually has trouble with a couple different women before he finally winds up with Delilah.
First, he meets a woman that his parents don't approve of.
And of course, without his hair, he loses his power.
That's what we were taught at school.
That's right.
And it's actually, okay, so it lines up with the stars as well and with the sun, the motions of the sun through the different constellations.
The story of Samson, actually, you may remember what Samson said.
But he actually, first he goes down to meet this young woman that his parents are like, why do you have to choose a woman from over there?
Isn't there anyone in our people that you can find attractive?
And anyway, he says, no, I want to go meet this woman in Timnath.
And he goes down and he encounters a lion on the way down to the woman.
Then he slays the lion with his bare hands, just like Hercules does.
Then he comes back and finds a beehive later, or a swarm of bees have made honey in the carcass of the lion.
Anyway, then he turns that into a riddle.
The reason I like to bring up Samson is later on he gets into an argument.
He's angry with his wife.
Well, he comes up with this riddle about slaying the lion and finding something to eat in the carcass later on, the honey.
And he says, out of the eater came something sweet.
Out of the lion came something to eat.
And he puts that as a riddle.
And actually, it's kind of interesting that the Bible includes Samson making a riddle out of this because it's like, hey, would you like to try and figure this out?
Because really in the sky, Virgo, the virgin, comes after Leo, the lion, in the zodiac cycle.
Just like when Samson is going down to meet this woman, the sun is actually going down towards Virgo is where we cross the fall equinox.
We're coming up to the fall equinox right now, coming down from the highest part of the year at the summer solstice, which is in between Gemini and Cancer in this particular epoch.
But it goes down through Leo, the lion, and then it comes to Virgo anyway.
It's a riddle for us to figure out, but actually, it's really About our journey as well.
We are like Samson, whether we're a man or a woman.
We are like something that has come down from this other realm, and we've had our hair shorn off, so to speak.
And when his hair is shorn off in the Bible, it says he became just as other ordinary men.
But then it says, but his hair began to grow back.
Just a couple verses later, it says, his hair began to grow back.
And what I believe these stories are talking about is our own journey, just like the stars come down to the western horizon and sink down into the western horizon.
We've come down into this body for a reason, but we're not supposed to forget that we have this spiritual component.
And actually, that spiritual, our awareness or our integration with the spiritual aspect is supposed to increase, just like our hair growing back.
Samson is a famous example of bad judgment.
We're not supposed to be like Samson, but he's always basically just kind of thinking about sex or using his great strength to defeat his enemies.
Well, we ourselves have a physical body, but that's not all we're supposed to, we're not supposed to just categorize people by their physical body.
That would actually be bleak, like you said.
But actually, every single person has this spiritual aspect.
We know that, or at least a sense that about ourselves.
We reject when someone just judges us based on, oh, you're so skinny or you're so weak or you're so old or you're so this or that ethnicity.
That's obviously horrible to be treated like that or to be told you're just a, you know, you're just a physical brute.
You know, I'm going to just brutalize you and treat you like a, as if all that matters about you is your body.
We actually recoil from that because we know we have this connection to something that's infinite.
Anyway, that's what I believe that the stars, that these myths are actually trying to depict for us, this vision of the universe that actually has an invisible component to it, a spiritual component to it.
And actually, you know, some people today might say, oh, that's nice for previous generations, but nowadays we're modern.
But really, actually, quantum physics and all these most modern theoretical physicists are kind of realizing, it's kind of strange, but it seems like molecules pop into one state or another out of this condition of superposition or this condition of pure potentiality.
This like Schrodinger's cat, you know, this molecule can either be in this box or that box.
And once I look in there, then it suddenly either is there or isn't there.
But before I look, it's kind of in both places in potential state.
Well, the realm of potentiality, this quantum realm of pure potential, that's like the realm of the gods.
The gods are like pure potential, but they manifest into this realm.
The gods work out their will through human beings.
You kind of see that in the Greek myths.
Odysseus has to do all these things.
The gods and goddesses, especially Athena, helps him, but he actually has to do it.
Anyway, I believe they're showing us this picture of a, this is the way your life really is.
You really actually do have a connection to kind of a higher self.
So are we living in a matrix then, David?
You know, to put it into a context that is really bang up to date and that everybody is talking about right now, it seems to me what you're saying is that this is a matrix.
Well, it may be that that's what the ancient myths were depicting.
You can say, well, I don't believe any of that, but it's remarkable how around the world, the same sort of pattern of, you know, like the Buddhist tradition or the Hindu tradition says things like,
you know, you shouldn't get too caught up in the condition of this life because it's temporary and you're going to, you may be back here again in a different form in reincarnation.
But it is, you have this higher self.
Like in the Bhagavad Gita, you know, it's interesting because I was going to say one of the takeaways from this is actually all these people in the 60s went off to India to find something that they felt was missing.
You know, it's like, well, I'm not getting, you know, the Bible doesn't really do it for me.
I got to go to India and see what the Bhagavad Gita says or the Mahabharata.
They're actually all, I believe, saying the same thing, including the Bible.
We just lose this message when we have to force it into, oh, Samson was this guy who lived 2,000 years ago or 3,000 years ago, and he was super strong.
Well, what does that have to do with me?
I can't kill a lion with my bare hands.
I can't knock down pillars, you know, with my arms.
I'm not Samson, so that's great for him.
It doesn't have much to do with my life.
Actually, the story of Samson is about you.
The story of the Bhagavad Gita, where Arjun, spelled Arjuna, but I think they usually pronounce it Arjun, is talking with Krishna.
He's about to get into this big battle, but he doesn't want to go.
And Krishna says, oh, come on, come on out here to the middle of the battlefield and let's just sit down and talk.
And Krishna is this divine charioteer.
And he talks to Arjun and he says, listen, Arjun, you have to do this.
You have to go into this battlefield.
But what I want you to do is I want you to do what's right without attachment to the results.
And he says that over and over.
I believe that battlefield is not a literal battle of Kurukshetra.
It's not the literal battle of the Trojan War, the Trojans against the Greeks.
It's actually the same cycle that we're talking about.
It's a celestial cycle.
The Trojan War can be shown to be based on the celestial cycles.
The Greeks are the upper half of the zodiac, the Trojans are the lower half of the zodiac.
And Achilles and Hector really manifest that.
And the same thing with the Battle of Kurukshetra in the Humma Bharat.
That Bhagavad Gita is part of that whole epic.
It's an ancient Indian epic written in Sanskrit.
And Arjun getting cold feet before this battle, that battle is our human life.
It's this struggle, this interplay between spiritual and physical, between all these things that we wrestle with down here in this struggle of this human life.
But Arjun has a divine charioteer, Krishna, who actually holds the reins of his chariot and guides his chariot throughout the battle.
And Krishna, of course, is a deity or a deity.
He's a God.
He's the Lord Krishna.
Well, these ancient myths often have a higher self, or they show you that, you know what, you actually have a higher self.
You're not you.
You're not even your mind.
You're not even your thoughts.
The Upanishads of ancient India say, you know, the thoughts, your mind are actually like the reins.
The horses are kind of like your emotions, your lusts, your physical body or your emotions can run away with you.
So your mind is like the reins that can kind of control them.
But who's holding the reins?
Well, the higher self, the Lord Krishna.
You're not even your mind.
You've got a higher self that you can actually get in touch with.
And you actually see this, I believe, in the Bible when doubting Thomas, everyone knows, or many, most people know the story of doubting Thomas.
You know, after the resurrection, he doesn't happen to be there when Jesus shows up or the risen Christ shows up to all the disciples.
And then Thomas says, well, he hears about this and says, well, I won't believe unless what?
Seeing is believing.
Right, unless I put my, I got to see it myself.
I got to put my hands.
I won't believe unless I put my hands in the wounds.
And there's this dramatic confrontation where Jesus appears to Thomas.
And Thomas puts his fingers in the holes in his hands and he touches the, Jesus says, here, touch my side.
And Thomas says, my Lord and my God.
Well, Thomas is called Didimus.
And there's actually a scriptural reference in the Gospels where he's called Didimus, which means the twin.
Thomas is the twin.
Well, who's he the twin of?
It turns out he's the lower self.
Jesus is the higher self.
Jesus is his twin.
We see that actually in some of the Gnostic texts where it didn't make it into the canonical scriptures.
But we don't have to look just at the Thomas-Jesus twinning.
There are twins throughout all kinds of myths.
There's the twins of Gemini and the sons of Zeus, Castor and Pollux.
One of them is immortal.
One of them is immortal.
One of them, Castor, is killed in battle and Pollux or Polydeuces is immortal.
And Zeus says, listen, if you want to go save your brother, you can go down to Hades and bring him back up for half of the year.
You can share your immortality with him.
All right.
Now, there's an important point that comes out of all of this.
And I've let you talk because it's fascinating, the deductions that you are drawing.
So many people, I know some people, you know, around my own life, they are searching for meaning and they're investigating philosophies and they're veering from religions to various guides of various kinds.
They're trying out everything to try and get an answer to the question, what the hell is it all about?
You're saying there's no point in doing that because it all has common roots.
Well, that's a very interesting way of putting it.
And I would say you're right.
Every single myth, I believe, is using this same or every single tradition from all, I believe all the different cultures of our planet on every single inhabited continent and all the islands across the Pacific.
We haven't even gotten into the stories of Maui, can be shown to be using this same system.
That's got huge implications for human history.
But it also, as you said, means that the Odyssey can be your Bible.
The Bible can be your Bible.
The Bhagavad Gita can be, quote unquote, your Bible.
What I'm saying is, like you're talking about your friends or people you know who are searching, you can find this ancient wisdom in any tradition around the world.
But I believe the reason why so many people from, quote, the West feel the need or feel something that speaks to them much more strongly when they go to the traditions of Native American traditions or ancient India or Buddhism is because in the West, we've been forced or we've been told for centuries, hey, this is all literal.
You have to take this literally.
That actually externalizes a lot of these messages.
And when you externalize the message, not only do you, if they're speaking a celestial metaphor language and you try and force them to speak a literal terrestrial historical language, then it stands to reason you might distort the message.
And I believe it actually does distort the message.
If we externalize the story of Samson or the story of Solomon, then it's about some king.
Solomon, oh, he was so wise, has nothing to do with me because I'm not Solomon.
Actually, Solomon is about you.
Samson is about you.
Jesus and Thomas, that's about you.
It's not about Thomas who lived thousands of years ago.
But a lot of people who preach in the traditional way would say exactly what you're saying.
These writings are here as a guide for you.
Otherwise, what's the point of them?
They're here as a guide for your life.
So you're saying the same thing that they're saying.
Great, great objection.
Great point to help me clarify My point a little bit better.
I agree with them when they say that.
I would just say, so do you believe then that Thomas was actually a constellation and didn't actually live on earth?
At which point they would probably say, No, please take that heretical thought and don't mention it again.
Because next thing you're going to say is, Do you believe that Jesus was not a physical literal person?
I would say, well, no.
Paul says pretty plainly, Christ in you, the hope of glory.
You know, anyway.
Well, then, of course, you are getting into deeply, hotly contested theological territory.
We're running out of time, but the point that I would make finally, and just keen to hear what you think about this, if this system, and you called it a system, is pretty well universally applicable, it will be applicable to things that are being theorized and said today.
Is it?
Oh, yes.
I think that we're continuing to discover things about the human mind, about the way we think, about the way it seems like decisions can be, you know, as they try and figure out, well, where is that thought coming from?
Where does consciousness reside?
Wait a minute, it doesn't even seem to be residing in the brain here.
We have this the view that we're getting more and more as we as the progress of physics gets into these quantum physics, which now that's been around for about 100 years, quantum physics.
But we're discovering things about the universe.
You can go online and find physics professors from Stanford or Harvard talking about, is this universe a simulation or a matrix, like you said?
You can find physics, theoretical physicists kind of grappling with this idea.
I believe that these ancient texts, these ancient scriptures that were given to humanity, like I was talking about Herman Melville looking for a metaphor, they are from something, some ancient culture or from some divine source.
I don't know.
I don't know where they came from, but it is incredibly sophisticated.
The worldview that they offer actually matches up with things that we're discovering to this day.
I believe that whoever gave these stories to humanity had to know the, it had to be incredibly spiritually sophisticated.
They had to know where they were going before they put together the metaphor.
It's kind of like in the karate kid, Mr. Miyagi had to know karate before he could reach around and look around in his yard and say, now how can I teach this kid karate?
Okay, I know, wax the car.
Well, he didn't start with wax the car and then say, hey, whoa, actually, that motion would be great for karate.
No, he already knew that motion.
Then he came up with a metaphor.
He already knew paint the fence.
He already knew the motion he was after.
And then he said, hey, paint the fence and do it this way.
So it's a little bit like the storylines of great TV shows and soap operas of our time.
You know, back in the 80s, everybody was transfixed between the good and evil struggle of J.R. Ewing and Clef Barnes.
Of course, there were both shades of grey in both of those characters.
But, you know, if you look back at television 20, 30 years before that, the same drama would have been playing out between characters of different names, not set in Dallas.
So it's the, I mean, maybe that's trivializing what you're doing, but it sounds to me as if the imprint in your theory is always there.
So the story is universal.
And maybe there's a message for mankind if we accept that these stories are universal and that there is more that unites us than divides us.
There's a big message in that, just as we wrap this up.
I would totally agree.
I think that's one of the big takeaways.
This really unites humanity.
These are a precious inheritance that was given to really every culture.
Every culture has these ancient myths.
And the fact that they seem to be, you know, Samson kills a bunch of enemies with the jawbone of a donkey.
Well, we actually find heroes in South Africa using a jawbone as a weapon.
Even Maui, the hero Maui in Polynesia, uses a jawbone as a weapon.
So it would be hard to argue that that just popped up kind of abstractly.
I believe they're all connected.
I believe that it unites us, and I believe that it actually has something very hopeful for our life.
It's actually, you're the star.
These stories are about you.
These stories, we can go to them.
And once we start to understand their language, I believe we can find that kind of meaning that you were talking about where you talk about friends who are searching here and there.
I believe that knowing the language that they're speaking will help us to understand the profound message that they're trying to convey to us.
So in the last 60 seconds here, where do you take this thing?
Now that you've got to this point with this research that you put, as you say, a lot of your time into, what do you do with it?
Yeah, it's a great question.
Well, I believe that there are some people who are really searching for this.
I'm not going out trying to bludgeon people over the head with this.
So if somebody's happy believing that the Bible is literal, as long as they're not using that to excuse, you know, oppressing somebody else, I'm perfectly happy if someone's found meaning in it.
But I think there are some people who are looking for this, who maybe they had some kind of upbringing where it was very negative, but they're still kind of worried, oh, am I going to go to hell?
I left this tradition and my whole family won't speak to me.
And let's cut to the chase here.
You can't definitively say that it isn't all literal and true, and neither can I. Neither of us can.
We can only postulate and we can only speculate and theorize on the basis of what we observe.
Right.
Well, what I'm offering is, look, here's a whole bunch of evidence that the myths of the world are based on this system.
And if you're, there's some people who are just really Hungry for this.
So I'm putting it out there for people who are looking for it.
And I would like to try and get it to people who need it in a positive way.
I'm not trying to use it in a negative way.
So when you ask, you know, kind of where do I go from here?
I'm continuing to investigate this and write books about more and more myth cycles.
You know, you could really delve into, you could write hundreds of books just on the connections to Genesis alone.
But anyway, I'm trying to continue to learn more about this system and how to apply it.
All right.
The one thing I think we all need at the moment with the world being such an unstable place is something that would give us a template for the future or at least some kind of steer as to which way everything's going.
A lot of people are very uncertain right now, but that is another topic for another time.
David, good to talk with you.
If people want to read about you, I know you've got two websites, haven't you?
Right.
Well, so my main website is called starmythworld.com.
And really, that's the, I do also have this long-running blog that's called the Matheson Corollary.
That was the name of my first book.
But that blog is also incorporated into starmythworld.com.
But I keep them both running because, well, for one thing, the search function on the Google blog site is just fantastic.
So the blog is fully searchable.
So if you feel like typing in the name of some constellation or some particular god or goddess from a certain myth or biblical character, you can search the blog to find out if I've written about it.
And the website, starmythworld.com, it's short for star myths of the world, has connections to my books, to videos.
I'm actually going to be starting a little series where I do some teaching online.
If you want to do a live video conversation with me, I'm setting up kind of like college classes, like the Department of Celestial Mythology, where I'll teach some of this online with visual.
It's really helpful to see the visual.
Yeah, so it's all there on the Star Myth World website.
All right, last point.
What impels you to keep doing this?
Great question, Howard.
I don't think I could not do it.
I'm not really sure why.
Maybe this is something in a previous life that I was looking for, but I just find it fascinating.
You know, I was a literature major at West Point.
Like I mentioned, I also have a master's degree in literature later on.
So I've always loved stories and how they apply to our lives.
I've always loved the myths, and I've always loved the stars.
So ever since I was a child, I've loved the stars.
So I think that's probably what impells me to do it.
And the fact of the matter is, who wants to be doing the research that everybody else is doing?
You know, some people have got to go out there and do something different, and you're doing that.
David, thank you very much, and have a great California day.
Thanks so much, Howard.
It's been a pleasure to talk to you and your listening audience.
David Matheson, your thoughts about him, welcome, of course.
Go to my website, theonexplain.tv.
Send me an email about anything to do with the show, about this edition or any edition or some suggestions, thoughts on the way that I do the show, and I will address them here.
We are, I hope, truly reactive and interactive, which you cannot say for a lot of the mainstream media these days.
And it seems the more it consolidates and the bigger it gets, the worse that gets.
But that is another topic, as they say, for another time when I can expound my views, perhaps.
Thank you to Adam at Creative Hotspot for his hard work on the show.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
This has been The Unexplained.
And until next we meet here.
Please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection