Thabit ibn Qurra (AD 836-901, and also born in Harran), would have had little patience with loaded terms like "star idolatry" which seek to place the "paganism" of the Sabians on a lower level than the deadly, and often bigoted, narrow-minded and unscientific clerical monotheism of religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Thabit was well aware that, underlying the ancient Sabian practices misunderstood by these young religions as "star idolatry," were indeed exact sciences of great benefit to mankind, and thus he wrote: 'Who else have civilized the world, and built the cities, if not the nobles and kings of Paganism? Who else have set in order the harbors and rivers? And who else have taught the hidden wisdom? To whom else has the Deity revealed itself, given oracles, and told about the future, if not the famous men among the Pagans? The Pagans have made known all this. They have discovered the art of healing the soul; they have also made known the art of healing the body. They have filled the earth with settled forms of government, and with wisdom, which is the highest good. Without Paganism the world would be empty and miserable.

Very often these luminous designs, rich in data, take the form of geometry. I speak from experience, having participated in more than seventy ayahuasca sessions since 2003, continuing to work with the brew for the valuable lessons it teaches me long after Supernatural was researched, written, and published. Here's part of my account of the first time I drank ayahuasca in the Amazon: I raise the cup to my lips again. About two thirds of the measure that the shaman poured for me still remains, and now I drain it in one draught. The concentrated bittersweet foretaste, followed instantly by the aftertaste of rot and medicine, hits me like a punch in the stomach…. Feeling slightly apprehensive, I thank the shaman and wander back to my place on the floor…. Time passes but I don't keep track of it. I've improvized a pillow from a rolled-up sleeping bag and I now find I'm swamped by a powerful feeling of weariness. My muscles involuntarily relax, I close my eyes, and without fanfare a parade of visions suddenly begins, visions that are at once geometrical and alive, visions of lights unlike any light I've ever seen — dark lights, a pulsing, swirling field of the deepest luminescent violets, of reds emerging out of night, of unearthly textures and colors, of solar systems revolving, of spiral galaxies on the move. Visions of nets and strange ladder-like structures. Visions in which I seem to see multiple square screens stacked side by side and on top of each other to form immense patterns of windows arranged in great banks. Though they manifest without sound in what seems to be a pristine and limitless vacuum, the images possess a most peculiar and particular quality. They feel like a drum-roll — as though their real function is to announce the arrival of something else.13 Other notes I made following my ayahuasca sessions in the Amazon refer to a "geometrical pulse,"14 to "a recurrence of the geometrical patterns,"15 to "a background of shifting geometrical patterns,"16 and

if evidence supports established theories then that evidence will be accepted. But if evidence undermines established theories, then that evidence must be rejected.

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Since my first research visit to Malta in November 1999 I've learned that objects — and even places — of archaeological importance can and do disappear here in mysterious ways. For example, ancient remains of an estimated 7000 people were found in the Hypogeum of Hal Saflieni, buried in a matrix of red earth, when it was excavated by Sir Themistocles Zammit at the beginning of the twentieth century. Today only six skulls are left, stashed out of public view in two plastic crates in the cavernous vaults of Malta's National Museum of Archaeology. Nobody has the faintest idea what has happened to all the rest of the bones. They've just 'vanished', according to officials at the Museum.
And the six skulls? After much pressure and protest I have been allowed to see them only this morning and they are — I must confess — extremely and unsettlingly odd. They are weirdly elongated — dolichocephalic is the technical term but this is dolichocephalism of the most extreme form. And one of the skulls, though that of an adult, is entirely lacking in the fossa median — the clearly-visible 'join' that runs along the top of the head where two plates of bone are separated in infancy (thus facilitating the process of birth) but later join together in adulthood. I should be paying attention to the fantastic views and seascapes unfolding beneath the helicopter but I keep on wondering: what would people with skulls like that have looked like during life? How could they have survived birth and grown to adulthood? And did the other skulls from the Hypogeum — the lost skulls, the lost bones — also show the same distinctive peculiarity?

A 24,000-year sequence recorded in a marine core from the Santa Barbara Basin, off the coast of California, exhibits the highest peak in biomass burning precisely at the onset of the Younger Dryas. ... This anomalously high peak correlates with intense biomass burning documented from the nearby Channel Islands. ... The peak also coincides with the extinction of pygmy mammoths on the islands and with the beginning of an apparent 600-800-year gap in the archaeological record, suggesting a sudden collapse in island human populations.

Consider this account from the Ojibwa, a Native American people: The star with the long, wide tail is going to destroy the world some day when it comes low again. That's the comet called Long-Tailed Heavenly Climbing Star. It came down here once, thousands of years ago. Just like the sun. It had radiation and burning heat in its tail. The comet burned everything to the ground. There wasn't a thing left. Indian people were here before that happened, living on the earth. But things were wrong; a lot of people had abandoned the spiritual path. The holy spirit warned them a long time before the comet came. Medicine men told everyone to prepare. Things were wrong with nature on the earth … Then that comet went through here. It had a long, wide tail and it burned up everything. It flew so low the tail scorched the earth … The comet made a different world. After that survival was hard work. The weather was colder than before

No, the problem at Göbekli Tepe is the pristine, sudden appearance, like Athena springing full-grown and fully armed from the brow of Zeus, of what appears to be an already seasoned civilization so accomplished that it “invents” both agriculture and monumental architecture at the apparent moment of its birth.

This ability to zoom in at very high resolution on a time window just 21 years wide and almost 13,000 years in the past comes to us courtesy of an amazing scientific resource consisting of ice cores from Greenland. Extracted with tubular drills that can reach depths of more than 3 kilometers, these cores preserve an unbroken 100,000-year record of any environmental and climatic events anywhere around the globe that affected the Greenland ice cap. What they show, and what Allen is referring to, is a mysterious spike in the metallic element platinum — 'a 21-year interval with elevated platinum,' as he puts it now — 'so we know that was the length of the impact event because there's very little way, once platinum falls on the ice sheet, that it can move around. It's pretty well locked in place.

An Ojibwa tradition seems relevant. It speaks of a comet that 'burned up the earth' in the remote past and that is destined to return:
'The star with the long, wide tail is going to destroy the world some day when it comes low again. That's the comet called Long-Tailed Heavenly Climbing Star. It came down here once, thousands of years ago. Just like the sun. It had radiation and burning heat in its tail ...
Indian people were here before that happened, living on the earth. But things were wrong with nature on the earth, and a lot of people had abandoned the spiritual path. The Holy Spirit warned them a long time before the comet came. Medicine men told everyone to prepare. ... The comet burnt everything to the ground. There wasn't a thing left ...
There is a prophecy that the comet will destroy the earth again. But it's a restoration. The greatest blessing this island [Turtle Island/America] will ever have. People don't listen to their spiritual guidance today. There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars when the comet comes down again.

It may be that DMT makes us able to perceive what the physicist call "dark matter" - the 95 per cent of the universe's mass that is known to exist but that at present remains invisible to our senses and instruments.

The suspicion that European travellers in the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century may from time to time have stumbled across charts and maps containing the remnants of a lost geography (perhaps even the maps of Marinus of Tyre, said to have been superior to those of Ptolemy) is intriguingly enhanced by the first of Alfonso de Albuquerque's two letters. It introduces a 'piece of a map' that Albuquerque has acquired in his travels in the Indian Ocean and that he is sending to King Manuel. The fragment, he explains, is not the original but was 'traced' by Francisco Rodrigues from: 'a large map of a Javanese pilot, containing the Cape of Good Hope, Portugal and the land of Brazil, the Red Sea and the Sea of Persia, the Clove islands [effectively a world map, therefore], the navigation of the Chinese and the Gores [an unidentified people, thought by some to be the Japanese, or the inhabitants of Taiwan and the Ryukyu archipelago] with their rhumbs and direct routes followed by the ships, and the hinterland, and how the kingdoms border on each other. It seems to me, Sir, that this was the best thing I have ever seen, and Your Highness will be very pleased to see it; it had the names in Javanese writing, but I had with me a Javanese who could read and write.

We're in the hands of real magicians here, and real magicians know that with symbols. with the right symbols, with the right questions. they can lead you into initiating yourself. Provided, that is, you are a person who asks questions. And, if you are, then the minute you start asking questions about the pyramids you begin to stumble into a whole series of answers which lead you to other questions, and then more answers until finally you initiate yourself… ~Robert Bauval

There were also greatly increased rates of sedimentation37 and an abrupt temperature increase of 6–10 degrees Centigrade in the surface waters of the Atlantic Ocean.38