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The Saturn Myth: A Reinterpretation of Rites and Symbols Illuminating Some of the Dark Corners of Primordial Society
"In the earliest age recalled by the ancients, the planet – or proto-planet – came forth from the cosmic sea to establish dominion over the entire world. The planet-god ruled as the solitary, central light, worshipped as the god One – the only god in the beginning.
"Saturn's epoch left a memory of such impact that later generations esteemed the god as the Universal Monarch, the first and ideal king, during whose rule occurred the prehistoric leap from barbarism to civilization. Throughout Saturn's era of cosmic harmony, no seasonal vicissitudes threatened man with hunger or starvation, and men suffered neither labor nor war.
"Saturn 'came forth in overwhelming splendor. In the land, it became day.' This does not equate Saturn with the 'sun on the horizon.' It means that the coming forth of Saturn inaugurated the archaic day, which began at sunset. So long as the solar orb was visible, the fiery globe of Saturn remained subdued, unable to compete with the sheer light of the former body. But once the solar orb sank beneath the horizon, Saturn and its circle of secondary lights acquired a terrifying radiance."
from The Saturn Myth by David N. Talbott
"Saturn's epoch left a memory of such impact that later generations esteemed the god as the Universal Monarch, the first and ideal king, during whose rule occurred the prehistoric leap from barbarism to civilization. Throughout Saturn's era of cosmic harmony, no seasonal vicissitudes threatened man with hunger or starvation, and men suffered neither labor nor war.
"Saturn 'came forth in overwhelming splendor. In the land, it became day.' This does not equate Saturn with the 'sun on the horizon.' It means that the coming forth of Saturn inaugurated the archaic day, which began at sunset. So long as the solar orb was visible, the fiery globe of Saturn remained subdued, unable to compete with the sheer light of the former body. But once the solar orb sank beneath the horizon, Saturn and its circle of secondary lights acquired a terrifying radiance."
from The Saturn Myth by David N. Talbott
419 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1980
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About the author
David N. Talbott
2 books9 followersAbout the Author
David N. Talbott is an American, self-taught, comparative mythologist in the Velikovsky tradition. His work offers a radical point of view on the origin of ancient cultural themes and symbols, in which the planets Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and Venus play prime roles.
David N. Talbott is an American, self-taught, comparative mythologist in the Velikovsky tradition. His work offers a radical point of view on the origin of ancient cultural themes and symbols, in which the planets Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and Venus play prime roles.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 10, 2018
I'm a sucker for rationalist theories, and when someone can come up with something that unifies not just one, but many fields, I can't say I find it hard to fall right in. This book isn't for the 'scientifically' meek, the conservative pedant, nor those who find comfort in the 'certainty' which modern sciences pride themselves in proclaiming despite not having. To add as a note, I think the kind of theory put forth by Talbott is what one may rightly call a historical-materialist theory of mythology in the strongest form: myth is a record of real objects and events transfigured by a human mind trying to find reason in a catastrophic world. In this transfiguration much is lost and added, but the material origin is still there as the basic form which is embellished by culture. The issue is—according to Talbott—that we forgot the key to understand the myths; we forgot that they were not metaphorical.
This book is a systematic re-interpretative account of the ancient world myths connected to the planet-god Saturn through a thorough integration of empirical mythological record. Perhaps the most interesting aspects of the account is the unification of symbolism not merely on meaning, but also in the most unintelligible aspect: the symbols themselves. This unification itself rests on a unification of mythical forms and 'events', and this finally rests upon the unification of two major premises, both of which are substantiated by more mainstream mythologists which Talbott cites: 1) the coherence of the identity of 'Saturn' as recognized by multiple ancient cultures that were aware of each other, and 2) the incomprehensibility of the 'polar sun' which Saturn was described as.
Talbott's project is to take the ancients 'at their word', that is, taking the translation and interpretation of myths in a literal sense. If the ancients say with a more than less united voice that the "The Great God lives, fixed in the middle of the sky," and that Saturn was the 'greatest sun', that the sun did not rise or set, but that it 'grew bright and dimmed' in the same spot, then the challenge is to find the >reason< which makes intelligible these connections. The unifying concept is not to be found in conceiving the ancients as mere fantastical dreamers mistaking a world of altered consciousness as real, nor as erudite metaphysical sages using difficult metaphors, but instead as simply a historical planetary formation and order. A god unmoving atop the north pole in a sea of fire in the sky, a self-generated paradisal island, a holy city with four great rivers/roads, a set of heavenly hosts 'spoken' into existence, a god man creating the world through its dismembered body, a god king ruling over the cosmos, a mother that is a wife and daughter, a crown that is the goddess and girdle, a god that lives through its perpetual regeneration of living, dying, and being reborn by its own power. The polar configuration of Saturn, Venus, and Mars arises as the image of an ancient planetary system which can make sense of the seemingly wild imagination of the ancients and their irrational coupling of symbols and concepts as well as for their myths of world catastrophe as the gods 'battled'.
If Talbott's account is true, the world and sky we know is not what our ancient ancestors knew. Not only was the solar system different, we may not have been part of it at all. The polar configuration is undoubtedly the most unbelievable part of Talbott's account, for it goes against all we think we know. It is this difference against what we >think< we know, however, that is most telling in the desire to deny the very possibility of such a history. Anyone who is interested in science in the desire for truth knows we in fact know an incredibly little amount of what the world materially is and how it functions. No, this is not because only 4-6% of the so called universe is baryonic matter and the overwhelming rest is dark matter and energy, the problem of modern knowledge goes far deeper and much closer to home: we in fact know very little of what we claim to know about what we >do< observe. We do not 'fully' understand anything, not the ocean, not geology, not ecology, not sociology, and not chemistry nor physics. Much of our theories are ad hoc formulations to fit in with prior assumptions regardless of the lack of real explanatory power, often contradicting what is known in other sciences, often making unwarranted reductive and simplistic assumptions, often banking on one shot experiments which are impossible to properly control. We are Plato's cavemen trying to decipher the world through shadows cast on the wall in front of us.
That we do not know much of what we think we know is not an automatic vindication of Talbott's theory, but it is a reason not to dismiss it despite it being a rough model which is not yet possible to articulate in mathematics and a computer simulation. As Talbott says, the ancients were great architects who built with great precision and astronomers who used mathematics to predict with astounding accuracy, yet when it comes to their myths we are to believe they were all of a sudden spooked fools who merely concocted fairy tales and took them too seriously. I think that Talbott is at least right that we should give them quite a bit more credit than to think they did not mean to communicate things which were of world historical importance regardless of the embellishment they received as mythologies. What would we lose, after all, if we accepted this history? Only the foolish dream that the world is an eternal mechanism that can be perfectly predicted infinitely forward into the future and past. We would have to accept catastrophism, a name for the possibility that the past of the world is very likely irretrievable beyond our own memories of it. Perhaps the worst of it is the idea that we have lost simplicity when gravity no longer dominates the universal structures, yet what the common scientist and pop-science aficionado is not aware of is that we lost gravity since the revolution of telescopic astronomy caused the physics models to begin introducing new parameters to offset gravity when it became clear that it did not dominate the universe and could not explain it.
This book is a systematic re-interpretative account of the ancient world myths connected to the planet-god Saturn through a thorough integration of empirical mythological record. Perhaps the most interesting aspects of the account is the unification of symbolism not merely on meaning, but also in the most unintelligible aspect: the symbols themselves. This unification itself rests on a unification of mythical forms and 'events', and this finally rests upon the unification of two major premises, both of which are substantiated by more mainstream mythologists which Talbott cites: 1) the coherence of the identity of 'Saturn' as recognized by multiple ancient cultures that were aware of each other, and 2) the incomprehensibility of the 'polar sun' which Saturn was described as.
Talbott's project is to take the ancients 'at their word', that is, taking the translation and interpretation of myths in a literal sense. If the ancients say with a more than less united voice that the "The Great God lives, fixed in the middle of the sky," and that Saturn was the 'greatest sun', that the sun did not rise or set, but that it 'grew bright and dimmed' in the same spot, then the challenge is to find the >reason< which makes intelligible these connections. The unifying concept is not to be found in conceiving the ancients as mere fantastical dreamers mistaking a world of altered consciousness as real, nor as erudite metaphysical sages using difficult metaphors, but instead as simply a historical planetary formation and order. A god unmoving atop the north pole in a sea of fire in the sky, a self-generated paradisal island, a holy city with four great rivers/roads, a set of heavenly hosts 'spoken' into existence, a god man creating the world through its dismembered body, a god king ruling over the cosmos, a mother that is a wife and daughter, a crown that is the goddess and girdle, a god that lives through its perpetual regeneration of living, dying, and being reborn by its own power. The polar configuration of Saturn, Venus, and Mars arises as the image of an ancient planetary system which can make sense of the seemingly wild imagination of the ancients and their irrational coupling of symbols and concepts as well as for their myths of world catastrophe as the gods 'battled'.
If Talbott's account is true, the world and sky we know is not what our ancient ancestors knew. Not only was the solar system different, we may not have been part of it at all. The polar configuration is undoubtedly the most unbelievable part of Talbott's account, for it goes against all we think we know. It is this difference against what we >think< we know, however, that is most telling in the desire to deny the very possibility of such a history. Anyone who is interested in science in the desire for truth knows we in fact know an incredibly little amount of what the world materially is and how it functions. No, this is not because only 4-6% of the so called universe is baryonic matter and the overwhelming rest is dark matter and energy, the problem of modern knowledge goes far deeper and much closer to home: we in fact know very little of what we claim to know about what we >do< observe. We do not 'fully' understand anything, not the ocean, not geology, not ecology, not sociology, and not chemistry nor physics. Much of our theories are ad hoc formulations to fit in with prior assumptions regardless of the lack of real explanatory power, often contradicting what is known in other sciences, often making unwarranted reductive and simplistic assumptions, often banking on one shot experiments which are impossible to properly control. We are Plato's cavemen trying to decipher the world through shadows cast on the wall in front of us.
That we do not know much of what we think we know is not an automatic vindication of Talbott's theory, but it is a reason not to dismiss it despite it being a rough model which is not yet possible to articulate in mathematics and a computer simulation. As Talbott says, the ancients were great architects who built with great precision and astronomers who used mathematics to predict with astounding accuracy, yet when it comes to their myths we are to believe they were all of a sudden spooked fools who merely concocted fairy tales and took them too seriously. I think that Talbott is at least right that we should give them quite a bit more credit than to think they did not mean to communicate things which were of world historical importance regardless of the embellishment they received as mythologies. What would we lose, after all, if we accepted this history? Only the foolish dream that the world is an eternal mechanism that can be perfectly predicted infinitely forward into the future and past. We would have to accept catastrophism, a name for the possibility that the past of the world is very likely irretrievable beyond our own memories of it. Perhaps the worst of it is the idea that we have lost simplicity when gravity no longer dominates the universal structures, yet what the common scientist and pop-science aficionado is not aware of is that we lost gravity since the revolution of telescopic astronomy caused the physics models to begin introducing new parameters to offset gravity when it became clear that it did not dominate the universe and could not explain it.
January 9, 2022
Gives an excellent overview of a Saturnian cosmology at work in ancient mythology but I can't agree with Talbott's ultimate conclusion.
April 23, 2023
Wow, I've almost never encountered such a giant book of crap! I didn't finish this book; and I've waded through a lot of bad writing in previous reading! When I stop, it's because I can see no redemption of the book in further skimming and the author appears satisfied he's conveying some information/story to the readers. Instead there's nothing but a collection of obtuse mystical saying all supposedly in support of the idea there was a repositioning of Jupiter. If there's Anything technical to say, not one iota has been mentioned in the 1st 3rd of the book. It's like those UFO people showing you The Most Graining obscure indistinct photo/video of a supposed flying saucer/space-cigar; they are Always Uselessly indistinct BECAUSE if they actually showed something with detail they could move the debate of truth/bull-shit forward. This book is one of those UFO photos; there's nothing to see without a great imagination/belief that needs nothing but static to confirm.
December 28, 2024
The Saturn Myth: A Reinterpretation of Rites and Symbols Illuminating Some of the Dark Corners of Primordial Society by David N. Talbott is a remarkable classic from a visionary thinker in alternative history and mythology. I highly recommend this book to anyone curious about the deeper, symbolic layers of ancient cosmology and its impact on early civilizations. If you ever come across this book in a second-hand bookstore, it’s an invaluable addition to any collection.
What makes this book particularly intriguing is its exploration of the Electric Universe theory, offering a fascinating context for understanding ancient symbols and rites. Additionally, it serves as an excellent complement to the works of catastrophist pioneers such as Velikovsky and de Grazia, further enriching the discourse on planetary events and their influence on human culture. A thought-provoking and essential read for those drawn to unconventional perspectives on history and cosmology!
What makes this book particularly intriguing is its exploration of the Electric Universe theory, offering a fascinating context for understanding ancient symbols and rites. Additionally, it serves as an excellent complement to the works of catastrophist pioneers such as Velikovsky and de Grazia, further enriching the discourse on planetary events and their influence on human culture. A thought-provoking and essential read for those drawn to unconventional perspectives on history and cosmology!
February 9, 2013
This is the key to everything.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews