An Eagle in Mid-Heaven

AN EAGLE IN MID-HEAVEN A New Approach to the Riddle of the Book of Revelation Graeme Coffin Copyright: Graeme Coffin May 15, 2016 In the province of Ancasmarca, which is five leagues from Cuzco, in the Antisuyu division, the Indians have the following fable. They say that a month before the flood came, their llamas displayed much sadness, eating no food in the daytime, and watching the stars at night. At last the shepherd who had charge of them asked what ailed them, and they said that the conjunction of stars showed that the world would be destroyed by water. What they say is as follows. In ancient times the world was in danger of disappearing. A male llama, who was pastured on a hill with excellent fodder, knew that Mother Sea had decided to overflow, to fall down like a waterfall. This llama became very sad; he kept crying out “in, in” and didn’t eat. The llama’s master, very angry, hit him with an ear of maize. “Eat, dog” he said, “you are lying about on the best pastures.” Then the llama, speaking as if he were a man, told the shepherd “Pay very close attention, and remember what I am going to tell you: five days from now the great ocean will be here and the whole world will be flooded”. And the shepherd was stricken with fear; he believed the llama Two versions of the Inca flood myth1 Then I looked, and I heard an eagle calling with a loud cry as it flew in mid- heaven: “Woe, woe, woe to the inhabitants of the earth when the trumpets sound which the three last angels must now blow!” -Revelation, 8:13 1 As recorded in Sullivan, The Secret of the Incas https://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/books/the-secret- of-the-incas/9780517888513-item.html at pp. 15-16 of paperback edition - 2 - The sky over Patmos, looking straight up, 8828 B.C.E. Reproduced from SkySafari 4 Pro planetarium software. - 3 - For Leonard, who made this happen. Quotations from Revelation are extracted from the New Revised Standard Version Bible (unless otherwise indicated) - 4 - Prelude - The Hoover Dam In 1935, a Norwegian-born, naturalized American sculptor named Oskar J.W. Hansen faced an interesting challenge. He’d been commissioned to design the spectacular statuary and artwork that now decorates the Hoover Dam, the Boulder Dam back then, and he wanted it to be more than just decorative. He wanted to leave a message, one that could be understood into the indefinite future. The massive dam, it was known, would stand for a very long time. Properly maintained, it was theoretically possible it would last pretty much forever, and who knew, it might still be standing there, twice as ancient in its time as the Great Pyramids are to us, still being tended by people with whom we might have very little in common. Even untended, so long as the Colorado doesn’t start sloshing over the top and eroding it away, it might still be standing in 5,000 years, to be discovered sitting there, stopping up a canyon in a barren desert, by a possibly nonplussed team of future archaeologists. A lot can change in a few thousand years. A lot can get lost. The long-distant admirers of the mysterious dam likely wouldn’t share our language, our calendar, or our history, and they might not even know, any more, what civilization could have built it. Its architects might be the stuff of legend, dimly remembered, or utterly lost to history. Surely one of the first things they’d want to know, when stumbling over this monument of a lost civilization, would be how long it had been there. Hansen wanted to embed something in the dam that would allow them, whoever and whenever they were, to calculate exactly when the structure was completed. It would do no good to leave a plaque that stated “Erected by the United States of America, and dedicated September 30, 1935” – that wouldn’t mean a whole hell of a lot to anyone, any more than Egyptian hieroglyphs did to us before we found the Rosetta Stone. Even if they could translate it, and make sense of our numbers, what the heck is a “September”? What was “1935”? One thousand, nine hundred and thirty-five years, one supposes, but years since – what? So how do you talk to people of the distant future about time, as measured by their reckoning and methods, not yours? How do you make it possible to fix our date of September 30, 1935 on their calendar, whatever it is? You’d need to reference some sort of universal, perpetual clock, one shared by, and accessible to, everyone throughout all of history. Yes, and incredibly there is such a clock. Its gears turn in the sky over our heads, owing to a wobble in our planet’s rotational axis that gives rise to an observable phenomenon known as the precession of the equinoxes. We don’t perceive it in everyday casual star-gazing, but slowly over time – agonizingly slowly – this wobble causes the relative positions of the stars to change, as viewed at any - 5 - given time, from any given point on the Earth’s surface. When you stare up at the sky from your back yard next year, the stars won’t quite inhabit the same spots where they seemed fixed on the same date a year earlier. This won’t be readily apparent, because the changes are so small and gradual - it takes about 72 years for precession to shift the astral positions as much as one degree - but it happens, and any civilization with a reasonable understanding of astronomy will know it, and know how long it takes. The astronomers of Western civilization have known it since the second century B.C.E., when a scholar in Rhodes named Hipparchus first worked it out. Hansen knew it, too. If you ever visit the Hoover Dam, you’ll see the monument he erected in the dam’s dedication plaza, and at the base of that monument, embedded in the terrazzo floor, is a star map that depicts the sky as it appeared overhead at the moment of President Roosevelt's dedication of the dam. Thousands of years from now, all any curious person needs is a little astronomical know-how, and the ability to look up, look down, and do the math. 2 2 http://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/history/essays/artwork.html - 6 - This All Started… I’ve been sitting on this for about 20 years. It’s May of 2016 as I write this. It was sometime during the winter of 1998 when I sat in front of a much less capable computer, running a program called Planetarium Pro, and playing a hunch. Planetarium Pro was a star-gazing program for amateur astronomers, and provided the user with a rather sophisticated ability to call up a picture of the night sky over numerous pre- programmed locations on the Earth’s surface. It was possible to select the desired vertical viewing angle (elevation), direction of view (azimuth), and zoom or wide angle picture; crucially, it also allowed you a wide latitude to select a time. It was possible to look at the stars over Perth, Australia as they will appear on June 30 in the year 2500; it was possible to dial the clock back to 1776, or 1066, and far beyond in either direction. Apps you can download for free can do that nowadays, but to me, then, it seemed almost miraculous. I was looking at a virtual sky from the perspective of Athens, Greece, at about 8,800 B.C.E., and I was looking straight up at the vault of the heavens, the zenith, like somebody lying on his back under the stars. Adjusting the “click speed”, I accelerated the rotation of the heavens, so that one-minute increments passed by in tenths of a second; the stars rolled by on the screen. Before long, I saw what I was looking for. The constellation Aquila, the eagle, rotated into view, moved steadily towards the centre of the screen, and passed through the zenith. On a starry night in Greece 11,000 years ago, anyone who looked straight overhead at the right time of night would have seen the eagle situated perfectly in mid-heaven, something that never happens at that latitude today. I guess at that point it became inevitable that I would write this book. This is an investigation into the final and most controversial book of the Christian Bible, the Book of Revelation. An inquiry into Revelation is nothing new, but I think I’ve found something new to say (not quite so completely new as I’d long believed, sadly), and if even a small portion of the assertions made in this essay are accurate, much of what we know about the history of human civilization is due for a bit of a revision, just as others before me have insisted. Seems crazy, I know. Some un-credentialed relative nobody, endowed of no particular gifts that anyone’s seen fit to mention, figured out something that’s eluded everybody else for close to 2,000 years? Improbable. Maybe a little less improbable when you understand that I didn’t suss this all out by myself; I took what I think are some momentous discoveries others made, things I could never have worked out on my own, and applied them to the Apocalypse of John.

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