THREE EXAMPLES
HERE ARE THREE EXAMPLES OF MY THINKING ON NOAH' S ARK, UFOS / ALIENS, AND ATLANTIS.
THEY ALL DEPEND ON AN ACCURATE KNOWLEDGE OF PRELITERATE MYTHS AND CULTURES IN ORDER TO CORRECTLY UNDERSTAND THEM.
1. NOAH'S ARK, FACT OR FICTION
2. ATLANTIS, WHAT WAS PLATO REALLY UP TO?
3. UFOS AND ALIEN VISTATIONS/ ABDUCTIONS
1. NOAH'S ARK, FACT OR FICTION
Summary:
If you are open to viewing it, however, as an Hebraic oral myth that was eventually incorporated into the Book of Moses, you're on the right path.
Unfortunately, however, here are the only things you can be sure of in the biblical story of Noah:
There was a preliterate man named Noah* who experienced a psychic vision telling him that a great flood **was about to occur because of God’s wrath. He built a craft to save himself and his family and a few farm animals and survived.
*(The name Noah comes from the verb ( nuah 1323) meaning rest, settle down. This was either the man’s name or a name adopted or given to him by others to honor his survival.) ** The entire world experienced massive flooding around 8000 B.C. as a result of a sudden retreat of the Ice Age causing the oceans to rise over 300 feet. This is one reason why there are hundreds of flood stories around the world.
In addition there is evidence of another great flood occurring in 5500 B.C. in the Middle-East resulting from the sudden creation of the Black Sea, and another huge flooding of the eastern Mediterranean in 6000 B.C. by a gigantic tsunami caused by an eruption of Mt. Aetna in Sicily.
There may have been many more caused by meteorites and eruptions that we don't know about yet. Exactly which flood is reflected in the many surviving flood stories is unclear.
This very skinny story about Noah's vision, boat and flood survival became the seed of the enlarged story that made its way over the millennia into the Book of Moses in the Bible.
OK, here's the detail :
The Biblical story about Noah's Ark is is an area alternative thinkers are constantly investigating in efforts to find remains of the ark.
Among the questions we have to answer are these: Did Noah exist, did the ark exist as described , and did the Flood take place as depicted?
If we want to understand the sources of the Biblical Noah, and how accurate that story is, we have to first understand that a number of flood/ark stories existed in other cultures. The scholarship is pretty tight on this.
There is also some dating that has been done by scholars which shows some of these flood stories predate that of Noah.
Or to be more specific, the creation dates of the written versions of these stories indicates that creation of one preceded the other, but this is meaningless and has nothing to do with how old each of these myths actually was.
This is because we also know that these stories existed as oral story poems for hundreds if not thousands of years before they were eventually transcribed into alphabetic writing somewhere around 1200BC, which is the approximate point in time that humans discovered alphabetic writing, although some like the Sumerians and Egyptians had a hieroglyphic written language as early as 3200 B.C.
At any rate, the oral story poem about Noah was eventually transcribed into Hebraic writing around 1200 BC, where it existed in "manuscript" form for about 400 years until it was entered into the Bible around 800 B.C., which is the time when
The answer is this: they can be highly accurate on a few matters and highly untrustworthy on most others.
This date is disputed by others, with some scientists placing the Flood at several earlier B.C. dates. Nevertheless, even using the 2300 B.C. date, this is a huge amount of time (2300 B.C. minus 1200 B.C. = 1100 years) for any culture to maintain a detailed, accurate story .
As an example of this, look how little we really know abut the 1200 AD Knights Templar, but it is mind boggling when we think about it being accomplished by a preliterate culture in which no written records exist.
Without going into the detailed thinking backing up my statements on how much oral poems can be trusted (which can be seen in my books listed at the end of this section) the answer is as follows for the Biblical Noah:
1) Here's the main rule that is never violated: all oral story poems are based on real physical or psychic events.
They were never imaginary fables, which are modern, literate inventions.
An actual massive flood event did take place somewhere in the middle eastern preliterate world. That can be taken as a fact.
Exactly, when and where is problematic, but there are several well-documented scientific theories about the occurrence of great floods in the eastern Mediterranean and I believe more will appear in time as we uncover instances of meteor collisions in the seas in the middle East.
Here is some scholarship on the meaning of Noah.
(The name Noah (
) comes from the verb 
( nuah 1323) meaning rest, settle down. HAW Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament reports that this root 'signifies not only absence of movement but being settled in a particular place [] with overtones of finality.)
Here an interesting situation arises. If we assume that the Hebrew root "nuah" preceded the date of the flood then either
a) the man Noah was given this name at his birth in prophetic recognition of the fact he would bring the human race to a "place of final rest".
or
b) the man who built the craft accepted (or adopted) the name in honor of the fact that he had brought humanity to a "place of final rest".
In either case, the name Noah would have been rigidly honored after the Flood.
The names of heroes are one of the few things in oral story poems that are always correct, because in oral cultures, honoring a hero meant repeating his name in song correctly and endlessly. Honor, which to us is expendable, was the highest virtue in an oral culture. It would be unthinkable to change the hero's name.
4. The general theme of an oral story poem always reflects the worldvision of that culture.
Like the hero's name, it never changes, nor is it arbitrary because it emerges from the collective unconscious of that culture via the creative act of poetry.
It is water's implied ability to create life as well as destroy it that gives the Noah story much of its unconscious power.
Let me put it this way: fire or comets or raging monsters would not have done the trick.
Such powerful story poems emerge when powerful events occur at a point in time when the collective unconscious of a culture has been searching for a way to express a yet to be born cultural truth.
It is an automatic, unconscious cultural response, which is the nature of these great preliterate story poems.
4) Here is something else that is never arbitrary : the nature or character of the hero.
Achilles is always courageous, Odysseus is always wily. It is no accident that Noah is depicted as obedient, a drunk , and not a deep thinker, i.e., he is a man driven by his instincts, his unconscious.
In this, Noah is a stand-in for God, the ultimate "unconscious" power, in the re-seeding of the earth. There is also an echo of Homer's mysterious , brooding, psychically-rooted "wine-dark sea" in the drunken Noah.
BUT:
5) Everything else in the story is subject to change. Everything.
Oral story poems were never consciously fashioned, as our TV dramas are. They emerged from the unconscious of individual poets in hundreds of songs that ebbed and flowed over hundreds of years. Like dreams they needed no prompting from the conscious mind, because they reflected unconscious cultural truths that needed to be sung of over and over.
So here's the run down on the Biblical Flood:
1) A flood event existed and triggered the initial story poem.
4) Here's the kicker: everything else was subject to change, usually through exaggeration. Colors, dimensions, times, minor characters, costume, habits, etc.
Tall tales were not invented by Paul Bunyan. Thus the dimensions of the craft, the number and type of animals, the family members, the duration of the flood, where it finally grounded, etc., were all subject to exaggeration and change.
It happened organically out of the poet's unconscious. and the collective unconscious of the culture. It's the nature of oral story poems to grow in this manner over hundreds of years.
Don't forget, there are no written records, none. A change that took place in a retelling may not even have been noticed. Or if it was, it was easily accepted because the culture was ready to hear it.
One last note. Whether the Hebrews adopted the Flood story from earlier cultures so as to flesh out their own "punishment /redemption" story poems , or if it originated with the Hebrews out of their own flood experience is anyone's guess. Here's why:
We have to remember that the Hebrews in their early preliterate stage were wanderers. They were herders and craftsmen. Here is some scholarship on that:
The term Hebrew means "to cross over a boundary". (ISBE, revised, Hebrew) Included in this thought is that a "Hebrew" would be one "who crossed over" or one who went from place to place, a nomad, a wanderer, an alien.
An oral world has few artistic boundaries, because oral story poems existed on the wind as poets and listeners came and went across vast areas.
It could be that one of the great oral flood stories originated with the Hebrews, or it could be they adopted one that described their cultural vision of destruction and redemption.
That adoption, however, would soon be forgotten. It would become theirs, because it expressed an unconscious cultural truth that needed expressing.
The transcriptions of those great oral poems are sometimes all we have of those ancient times, because outside of the art work and stone structures that have survived, there are no permanent records of what those preliterate cultures were like.
Some of those great story poems, because of their spiritual and cultural truths, were retold over hundreds and even thousands of years until they were thrown upon the shores of literacy and transcribed into writing.
We must always remember, however, that they were subject to the kind of changes I have been indicating.
Let the buyer beware.
In short, it is a work of art. It is as more about the interior world than the exterior world of the Hebrews.
Don't confuse this remarkable feat, however, with the preliterate myth of Noah.
They are two different things, created by different eruptions of the imagination.
No one will be reading or thinking about Johan 3000 years from now, in the same way as we have been reading and thinking about Noah for the past 3000 years.
Think about it