The Ancients and Imagination

[Frank Stalter]

What's everyone think of the cryptozoological end?

Creatures like unicorns, dragons and thunderbirds depicted in ancient art and stories? Do you think these are based on actual experiences, are they modern misinerpretations of ancient communications of known animals or vice versa? Or, are they 100% imagination?

I think the dragon mythology is simply them finding dinosaur skeletons and, not having developed the concept of extinction, just assumed that some of these animals were still alive somewhere.

Clearly a Stegosaurus carving. The winged dragons? Pteronodons could have had an influence and sort of hybrided into a larger land based dino.

 

[ProphetofOccam]

Clearly a Stegosaurus carving.

This particular image is most widely believed to be a young rhino. I tend to sway that way too. It appears to have ears. The "plates" appear to be stylizations that appear on other carvings of the same type. The creature is missing most of the components that make up a stegosaurus, with the exception of the "plates."

I can definitely get a stegosaurus out of that, though. Perhaps if it was conceived of by the viewing of bones, and it is meant to be something based on a stegosaurus, the absence of some of the necessary features could be due to the absence of an entire skeleton.

Some people do speculate that dragons and such could be the result of ancient peoples discovering dinosaur bones and assuming the creatures were still alive somewhere. It's a reasonable assertion.

I'm more of the mindset that the concept started with a "giant snake" concept and evolved from there. Giant snakes are pretty common in mythology, from the Norse myths to the Mayan myths. In those myths, giant snakes tended to be pretty important, often due to the destruction they were capable of causing. Adding wings to denote the capability for flight would be an inevitable addition to the design.

Other creatures seen as fearsome, strong, and respected/feared seem to contribute to the amalgam that is the modern dragon. Wolves, bears and wildcats for the cave-dwelling, four-legged, claw wielding aspects. Crocodiles contribute to this, as well; in addition, crocodiles contribute super tough flesh and the elongated muzzle (crocodile skulls were often touted as dragon skulls in the middle ages).

 

[stonehart]

I always thought of Krishna as a humanized Vishnu. An example of the miracle-man archetype. Basically the same idea as Superman or Jesus -- a godman with a softspot for the people. Is there a group of folks who argue that he was deified real person? That'd be neat to read. Or, were you just speaking generally?

Yes you are correct that the Krishna you read about now is a humanized version of Vishnu, but that was always the interesting aspect of study, to peel away the layers of myth and see what was inside.

And yes there is evidence to support investigation into Krishna being based on a real person. There is information out there so read if you have the time.

Anyway this is well off topic now so keep going with this thread it is getting interesting.

 

[ProphetofOccam]

Anyway this is well off topic now so keep going with this thread it is getting interesting.

Nah, I think it's pretty much the topic. It's all part of the greater discussion.

Out of curiosity, are you coming from a "skeptical" point-of-view, or a "believer" point-of-view? Do you think there's reason to believe that characters like krishna could be based on extraterrestrial individuals?

 

[stonehart]

Nah, I think it's pretty much the topic. It's all part of the greater discussion.

Out of curiosity, are you coming from a "skeptical" point-of-view, or a "believer" point-of-view? Do you think there's reason to believe that characters like krishna could be based on extraterrestrial individuals?

I would say I am neither.
I have a skeptical mindset yes, but only in so far as it is needed when dealing with this topic to avoid becoming a true believer which can become dogmatic you understand.
But having said that I am not such a skeptic that I rule every thing out out of hand because it wont fit my skeptic world view (its a fine line).

"All Great truths begin as blasphemies"

So I am open to ideas that have enough evidence to kick around and see what comes out if you get what I mean.

Now as for Krishna no I think he was probably a very good King (around 5000 years ago), that his people loved and over the years his memory became legend and got mixed up with the pantheon of Hindu Gods. The thing to remember with Hindu is it has a tendency not to throw old ideas out but absorb them and mutate them (this is what happened to Buddhism in India).

On the subject of AA, I am in two mindsets about it as I think on one hand people have a tendency to misinterpret imagery and place a modern mindset on things which was a trap my Professor of Anthropology used to beat into us we had to avoid. But in saying that the more study I did the more I came to understand that there was a mountain of information that simply did not fit into the current academic "accepted model".

So I have an open mind on this subject, and let us face it the universe is a very big place and it could indeed be possible that we have been visited at some point in history by an advanced non terrestrial civilization.

 

[ProphetofOccam]

But in saying that the more study I did the more I came to understand that there was a mountain of information that simply did not fit into the current academic "accepted model".

So I have an open mind on this subject, and let us face it the universe is a very big place and it could indeed be possible that we have been visited at some point in history by an advanced non terrestrial civilization.

That interests me. What were some of the bigger pieces of information you felt kind of threw the accepted model off?

 

[ProphetofOccam]

Just some of the more interesting Kachina I've heard be accused of representing space suites or alien morphology: Sipikne and Mudheads.

One of my aesthetically favourite guys is Nangasohu:

Outside of the Hindu religion, it's hard to find a rival for the color appreciation and imaginative design of the Hopi/Zuni pantheon. Perhaps that's why they choose to acclimate the kids into the religion in the coolest way of any religion -- action figures.

Again, does anyone else have a favourite pantheon, piece of art or ancient story that serves as either an example of the imaginations of the ancients, or as an example of ancient alien contact?

 

[Frank Stalter]

This particular image is most widely believed to be a young rhino. I tend to sway that way too. It appears to have ears. The "plates" appear to be stylizations that appear on other carvings of the same type. The creature is missing most of the components that make up a stegosaurus, with the exception of the "plates."

I can definitely get a stegosaurus out of that, though. Perhaps if it was conceived of by the viewing of bones, and it is meant to be something based on a stegosaurus, the absence of some of the necessary features could be due to the absence of an entire skeleton.

Some people do speculate that dragons and such could be the result of ancient peoples discovering dinosaur bones and assuming the creatures were still alive somewhere. It's a reasonable assertion.

Not finding complete dinosaur skeletons is usually the case, so it's easy to see how ancients used their imaginations to fill in the gaps. Stegosaurs did live in Cambodia though. I can see the rhino resemblance in the face, but the back plates are a compelling visual, no other creature that's ever lived on Earth I'm aware of had such an arrangement. Looking at how mythological creatures were often hybrids of two or more known creatures provides some more clues. Less ambiguous are more recent tales and illustrations of monsters from the high seas.

We know this critter exists, the size being only a little exaggerated, the aggression level very, very much so.

Same here . . . . dramatic license.

The list goes on . . . . manatees mistaken for mermaids. They do push things on AA and yeah, sometimes to the point of comedy. As much as I enjoy the show, I laugh at it a lot.

 

[Randall]

Bwaaa ha ha ha ha!!! LMFAO!

Typical response ... If you can't attack the person's argument attack the person's character ... but well played nevertheless. ... .

 

[stonehart]

That interests me. What were some of the bigger pieces of information you felt kind of threw the accepted model off?

I guess it was not any one thing that made me suspicious of the accepted model.

Strangely enough it was the Gilgamesh epic that started me thinking and the fact that flood myths abound in almost all cultures. Now I give no credence to the biblical flood as it is an obvious re telling of other myths badly edited into one, but the idea that so many peoples had a myth concerning this interested me. At the time it occurred to me, could it not be possible that these peoples had a cultural memory of the end of the last Ice age? I remember having coffee with one of the graduates in my department and discussing this subject (I was an undergraduate at the time), he took the common held theory that these myths are localized and do not point to a global event (this is the accepted academic line or it was at the time). Now it is reasonable to suggest that this is the case for the Gilgamesh story, pointing to a localized flood between the two rivers (Tigris and Euphrates), but I wondered if it was the case with all the myths and could it be possible that civilization is much older than we believe, and further more could there be the remains of settlements off the coast? I was laughed at for this idea and told it was fringe. Today in the Red Sea area and off the west coast of northern India there are indeed such settlements to be found.

I am far from the only person to have thought that the flood myths could be related to the rapid rise in sea level at the end of the last Ice Age but at the time I was doing my study (The 1990's) this was seen by most academics as a fringe idea.

Among other problems I noticed was the compartmentalization of cultures, for some reason we tend to suspend many of them in a vacuum as if they existed on their own with no contact with other much more distant ones at the time. This could not be further from the truth as we know for sure most were trading with each other and as such cultural ideas were spread around. A good example are Indian story's ending up in Europe. Nicotine and Cocaine in Egyptian Mummies as mentioned before is also rather interesting.


There is a long list indeed but I feel that many in the academic world are slowly moving to the idea that the roots of civilization are much older than once thought to be.

 

[stonehart]

 

[mike]

On the global flood scenario, i was listening to someone posit the effects of a massive meteor strike in the ocean, the effect being a mile high tsunami that circled the globe and then back again.

It seems fairly clear that the story of Noah’s Ark evolved from the Epic of Gilgamesh, with changes made to accommodate the different faith of its authors. But what was the Epic of Gilgamesh based on? Quite possibly a real flood. Recent discoveries made in 1993 on the voyage taken by the Aquanaut offer fairly concrete evidence of a flood, in the Black Sea, which would have taken place at about the time as the time indicated in the Epic of Gilgamesh. The aquanaut, a vessel being shared by a Russian team searching the Black Sea for fallout and an American team searching for the evidence of a flood, employed the a CHIRP (an echo-locator) and a coring pipe to gather information and even samples of the sediments at the bottom of the lake and their contents. Evidence all pointed to a flood. The echo-locator showed evidence that the basin of the Black Sea was originally exposed erosion from wind and streams, but was suddenly thoroughly covered by a uniform layer of sediment. This is best explained if there indeed was a rapid rise in sea level. The data retrieved by coring also supported this idea. Coring involved the obtaining of samples of up to three meters of sediments from the bottom of the sea, which could then be observed and evaluated. At the base of the sea, the same signs were present of land that was at one time exposed to air, including some phenomena only present in dry conditions, like cracked mud. Directly above this was evidence of some freshwater life. However, a little higher in the sediment, there was a sudden appearance of salt water creatures, including snails which came from the Mediterranean . Above this there was continued evidence of a sudden rise in water level, and the entry of salt water into the previously mostly empty basin. The flood waters would have come from an overflowing Mediterranean Sea, which would have been bloated by the flooding of the Atlantic which was in turn caused by the melting of the great glaciers from the previous ice age. The sudden breakdown of the land separating the Mediterranean from the Black Sea would have caused rapid flooding, the likes of which were unheard of in a majority of the world (Water would have been cascading in with the 200 times the force of Niagara Falls!). This flood would have had serious impacts on its witnesses, and the severity and unpredictability of the flood would have made it an occurrence outstanding of all others.

 

[stonehart]

On the global flood scenario, i was listening to someone posit the effects of a massive meteor strike in the ocean, the effect being a mile high tsunami that circled the globe and then back again.

Nice post Mike and thank you for that.

I did watch a documentary on the Black Sea expedition and thought at the time that it could be a better explanation for the Gilgamesh story than the localized flood between the two rivers.

 

[mike]

Yeah ive also seen a doco that uses sediment core samples to posit it was a one in 500 year river flooding, went into great detail about weather etc and made a good case.

Either way they are more rational and logical explanations for "the great flood" than god gets cranky and drowns his creations

 

[SRL+]

What's everyone think of the cryptozoological end?

Creatures like unicorns, dragons and thunderbirds depicted in ancient art and stories? Do you think these are based on actual experiences, are they modern misinerpretations of ancient communications of known animals or vice versa? Or, are they 100% imagination?

It’s amazing what a shaman, or tribesman may create, while on, or after having experienced their spirit world on psychotropics. However, the ancient Aborigines of Papua New Guinea were unable to differentiate either world, as they viewed both worlds as seamless, and as one.

Watson, B. 2007. Dreaming phenomena and palaeoart | Ben Watson - Academia.edu

 

[Randall]

It’s amazing what a shaman, or tribesman may create, while on, or after having experienced their spirit world on psychotropics. However, the ancient Aborigines of Papua New Guinea were unable to differentiate either world, as they viewed both worlds as seamless, and as one.

Sounds like Leary, Thomspon and a few others came from similar tribes.

 

[SRL+]

Perhaps, however, they didn’t eat their family members.., not that I can recall.

 

[Konrad Hartmann]

The episode of Ancient Aliens that sticks in my mind is the one where they discuss the animal-headed deities of ancient Egypt. The hair guy said that the ancient Egyptians must have been working from fact, because they were not capable of imagining such things. I have heard of creationists citing Beowulf in the following sequence of reasoning: Grendel was a dinosaur, therefore people saw dinosaurs in the middle ages, therefore humans and dinosaurs co-existed, therefore no evolution. But I also saw a crappy History channel program about the story of Beowulf, and they also went for the,'was Grendel a real monster' angle.

While there may be some archaeological evidence to suggest an encounter with something weird in various cultures, it doesn't make sense to say that humans are today capable of symbolism and creativity, but were not so capable in ancient times. It's interesting because in shows like AA, we see modern people encountering spiritually based material, but trying to make it fit into an extraterrestrial materialist interpretation. Meanwhile, the field of ufology takes on a belief-based paradigm, in which only confirmatory evidence is sought to re-affirm the faith in extraterrestrial visitation. I sometimes feel like a lot of ufology consists of a belief system growing into the slot left empty when moderns rejected numinous experience.

It might be true that some art was inspired by something weird (or ET), but what that something is is open to interpretation. Art may sometimes represent entities encountered by humans, but what if it is a two way relationship? That is, what if we are able to create beings based upon what we imagine? Or, if you can deal with the concept of ancestral memory or reincarnation, we are remembering something from another time or place. Over and over again, people report encounters with alien-type creatures and Sasquatches, yet the hard evidence remains missing. Recurring forms appear across regions and time. Perhaps, in art, we are able to express realities that defy our conceptions of reality.

As an aside, is anyone aware of a flood myth in any of the pre-Christian European mythologies? Are flood myths unique to Asian/Middle Eastern mythology?

 

[Mulvaney]

While there may be some archaeological evidence to suggest an encounter with something weird in various cultures, it doesn't make sense to say that humans are today capable of symbolism and creativity, but were not so capable in ancient times. It's interesting because in shows like AA, we see modern people encountering spiritually based material, but trying to make it fit into an extraterrestrial materialist interpretation. Meanwhile, the field of ufology takes on a belief-based paradigm, in which only confirmatory evidence is sought to re-affirm the faith in extraterrestrial visitation. I sometimes feel like a lot of ufology consists of a belief system growing into the slot left empty when moderns rejected numinous experience.

Our encounters with ufo phenomenon have always been just beyond the reach of our experience, into the realm of archetype and faith. We once met with angels, but as we rejected the numinous, we saw other creatures rooted in advanced technology. Othon came from Venus, and when that proved untenable, we reached ever further out into distant stars or dimensions.

The core of what we are experiencing today may or may not be similar to what the ancients saw and tried to convey. But the recent hysteria with the Mayan calendar proves how easy -- and perhaps how dangerous -- it is to project our ideas upon the past or to assume that we can know what the ancient cultures were trying to represent. It is easy to look at images that cultures left behind and see grays, astronauts, or dragons in their midst. But what the symbolism meant for them is an entirely different matter.

Still, although I am not a big fan of Ancient Aliens, it is sometimes fun just to sit back and wonder.

 

[ProphetofOccam]

Nicotine and Cocaine in Egyptian Mummies as mentioned before is also rather interesting.

You might like the show "America Unearthed" on H2. It covers a lot of stuff you seem to be interested in.