GM James Plaskett presents one of his coincidence
files.
Plaskett:
FIRST MOON VISIT
At 10:30 p.m. on August 7th 1996 I was recounting
to my wife the importance of the insight upon
why I had intuitively felt, in 1988, that there
was a relevance to the lunar announcement "The
Eagle has landed", even though I could not,
at that time, see its precise legitimacy to
these matters.
And then came the afore-mentioned epiphany.
As I was explaining to her what I now perceived
to be the relevance of those words on the moon,
a TV advertisement that we had playing in the
background reached the point where Neil Armstrong
was taking the first step on the moon and saying
"It's one small step for man".
This was an ad for Yellow Pages, and though
we had each seen it several times before there
had been no inkling when I raised the subject
that this ad would be shown whilst I was making
my exposition. Synchronicity and prophecy (2):
the moons of Mars.
Following the announcement of the discovery
of fossilised Martian bacteria on a meteorite
the subject came to the fore. On the morning
of August 10th 1996 I remarked to my wife that
I had once come across some Esoteric writings
asserting that one of the moons of Mars, Phobos,
is not a normal moon at all, but a large asteroid
which was captured by a previous Martian civilisation
and placed in orbit around the planet to correct
some problems associated with the orbit of Mars
itself.
However fantastic that sounded I reminded her
of the enduring enigma of Swift's precise descriptions
of the two moons of Mars in Gulliver's Travels,
observations which were found to be uncannily
accurate when astronomical checks ere made over
a century later.
She [Fiona Pitt-Kethley] replied that in her
book, "Journeys to the Underworld", she had
referred at one point to precisely this mystery,
and remarked that she would check just where
in the book she had done this.
At 11:20 p.m. on August 10th 1996 I was writing
up my original presentation of Example 22, and
had just drawn attention to The Times reference
to the oarfish "bleeding from its gills" (surely
significant apropos the sub-theme of Coming
up for air?). I was interrupted by my wife unexpectedly
notifying me that she had found the quote in
her book, and that it was not quite where she
had thought. It occurs on page 109, and I give
the two preceding pages because of their clear
relevance to the theme of prophecy:
The church of Ara Coeli is supposed to be the
site of the sibyl's prophecies relating to Christ
John, Patriarch of Antioch, gives this version
: Augustus wanted to know who would succeed
him, so he went to the sibyl. At first, she
gave no answer. Later, she told him that he
must leave because a Jewish child was born who
had subjugated the other gods and ordered the
temples to be forsaken. Then the Emperor had
an altar built on the Capitol with the words
Ara Primogeniti Dei - Altar of the First-born
of God.
The Western version of this tale is a shade
more elaborate. Augustus went to the Tiburtine
Sibyl to ask if he was a god. She asked for
three days to make her divinations. Then she
told the Emperor that a king had come to earth
in human form to judge the world. The Emperor
then saw a vision of a virgin standing on an
altar holding a child, and was told that the
virgin would conceive the redeemer of the world.
The spot where he had this vision is where Ara
Coeli now stands.
There are many other legends about the Capitoline
Hill at Rome. One of these places a Virgilian
work of magic there. This consisted of a house
full of images representing the various countries
of the world arranged round a statue of Rome.
When a nation was about to threaten war or revolt,its
image would turn its back or ring a bell,depending
on which version of the story you read. Others
make this a magic mirror in a tower, a kind
of camera oscura perhaps - for seeing what occurred
at a distance. The house, or tower, was supposed
to have collapsed at the birth of Jesus. The
same is sometimes said of the temple which preceded
the Ara Coeli church.
Early writers seem to have a great urge to fabricate
or quote anything that shows a great chance
in the world coinciding with the birth of Christ.
I suppose the Roman historian's love of prodigies
is carried on in this. Anyone would think that
early Christians didn't find the birth important
or authentic enough without outward omens. I
have a theory that a thoroughly prejudiced old
man sat down in his study prior to a well-deserved
martyrdom and invented the lot. Like the original
gospel that modern theologians believe lies
behind three of the present ones,this document
is of course lost. We just have a scattering
of the lines from it spattered across the pages
of Augustine, Salicetus, Lactantius, etc. So
what did this old man invent? A voice saying
that the god Pan is dead, various temples collapsing,
the oracles stopping, Vigil and all the homosexuals
dying. It would seem that the world became less
rich as it went into its AD phase.
For many years I believed that widespread early
Christian fiction about the oracles. Now I know
that an impeccable pre-Christian source disproves
it. Cicero states that Apollo had stopped making
verses by the time of Pyrrhus (third century
BC). He hints that the power of the places where
prophecies were given had faded with Man's credulity.
I think there may be a subtler reason. Cicero
also states that the whole song of the sibyl
was written in acrostics. The initials of lines
showed the prophecy covered. Eunapius writes
that the Pythian Oracle invented hexameters.
Plutarch tells us that early Delphic prophecies
were in verses. As time went on in Delphi,less
literate priestesses were employed. The oracles
then became prose The theory behind employing
uneducated women was that they couldn't have
the intelligence to fake it or half-remember
verses from school,instead of being just empty
vessels for the God's voice
If there is such a thing as inspiration, then
you need a good mind to be able to use it. You
must be trained. You have to be very smart to
be a poet or a prophet. You can see this best
perhaps by looking at the character studies
of them in the Old Testament. They're people
who're unafraid, or else able to face their
fears. They can cheek a king if the need arises.
The religious would say God inspired them. An
atheist might say that it was anger at what
was wrong with their times, I can see a parallel
to this cessation of true prophecy in the poetry
world - the decline into romanticism. Logic
and good grammar are not considered a necessary
part of poetry any longer.
Is it that hard to prophesy in the sense of
foretelling the future? In most cases you have
a 50 per cent chance of getting things right.
If you phrase things ambiguously enough, people
might not even know if you fail. A little elementary
logic might tell you the outcome of an election
- you could top up your record of right predictions
by making easy ones like that. Another thing
that helps is that there are a lot of occult-loving
men and women out there,wanting you to be right,
even if you write as obscurely as Nostradamus.
Of course, even if people go out of their way
to make things true that doesn't make a person
less a prophet. Jules Verne was right about
the name of the first rocket to get to the moon,
even if the Americans gave him a helping hand.
The mission could have failed, as a recent rocket-launch
did. I have to admit that the ability to foretell
the future exists. There is a vast body of evidence
on the subject. The daughter of Caecilia Metella
- she of the tomb - is one of many people recorded
as having had a prophetic dream. It's always
hard to tell the truth of such visions though,unless
they're well documented at the time. Some are
perhaps just people being wise after the event.
Other cases cannot be explained as easily. There
is, for instance, Swift's statement in Gulliver's
Travels about the satellites of the planet Mars,
Deimos and Phobos, he quotes correctly the times
they take to orbit, long before this was known
to scientists. There's no way that can have
been faked. No one could have known that Swift
had made a correct prophecy until after his
death. Interestingly, there are many such stories
connected with writers from the earliest times
on. A genius, like a king, attracts legends.
All of which seemed peculiarly apposite and
well - timed. The final paragraph of The Times
piece mentions that a video of the great oarfish's
last moments is being studied at The Scripps
Oceanographic Institute in America.
The day before The Times, like all the papers,
had extensive commentary upon the claimed discovery
of life on a meteorite from Mars. Commenting
upon the supposed origins of life on Earth it
was described how scientists believe that the
original primal soup produced amino acids,the
building blocks of proteins, and their simple
cousins, peptides.
"Until now, nobody has shown how a peptide can
copy itself." (Quite a major stumbling block
for Darwinists, I would have thought, but there
you go.) "By coincidence, scientists at the
Scripps Institute in La Jola, California, describe
in NATURE this week just such a self-replicating
peptide."
AND FINALLY ...! Whilst I was writing the word
"soup" in the above bit about The Times my wife
called me into the other room where Richard
Dawkins had just popped up for a couple of minutes
in a TV programme about consciousness where
he was propounding Darwinist explanations for
the very beginnings of both life and consciousness.
Do you agree or disagree with Plaskett's arguments?
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