East & West

Our planet rotates from west to east. Has it always done so?

In this rotation from west to east, the sun is seen to rise in the east and set in the west. Was the east the primeval and only place of the sunrise? There is testimony from all parts of the world that the side which is now turned toward the evening once faced the morning.

In the second book of his history, Herodotus relates his conversations with Egyptian priests on his visit to Egypt some time during the second half of the fifth century before the present era. Concluding the history of their people, the priests told him that the period following their first king covered three hundred and forty-one generations, and Herodotus calculated that, three generations being equal to a century, the whole period was over eleven thousand years. The priests asserted that within historical ages and since Egypt became a kingdom, “four times in this period (so they told me) the sun rose contrary to his wont; twice he rose where he now sets, and twice he set where he now rises.”¹

This passage has been the subject of exhaustive commentaries, the authors of which tried to invent every possible explanation of the phenomenon, but failed to consider the meaning which was plainly stated by the priests of Egypt, and their efforts through the centuries have remained fruitless.

The famous chronologist of the sixteenth century, Joseph Scaliger, weighed the question whether the Sothis period, or time reckoning by years of 365 days which, when compared with the Julian calendar, accumulated an error of a full year in 1,461 years, was hinted at by this passage in Herodotus, and remarked: “Sed hoc non fuerit occasum et orientem mutate” (“No reversal of sunrise and sunset takes place in a Sothis period”).²

Did the words of the priests to Herodotus refer to the slow change in the direction of the terrestrial axis during a period of approximately 25,800 years, which is brought about by its spinning or by the slow movement of the equinoctical points of the terrestrial orbit (precession of the equinoxes)? So thought Alexander von Humboldt of “the famous passage of the second book of Herodotus which so strained the sagacity of the commentators.”³

But this also is a violation of the meaning of the words of the priests, for during the period of spinning, orient and occident do not exchange places.

One may doubt the trustworthiness of the priests’ statements, or of Egyptian tradition in general, or attack Herodotus for ignorance of the natural sciences,⁴ but there is no way to reconcile the passage with present-day natural science. It remains “a very remarkable passage of Herodotus that has become the despair of commentators.”⁵

Pomponius Mela, a Latin author of the first century, wrote: “The Egyptians pride themselves on being the most ancient people in the world.

In their authentic annals … one may read that since they have been in existence, the course of the stars has changed direction four times, and that the sun has set twice in the part of the sky where it rises today.”⁶

It should not be deduced that Mela’s only source for this statement was Herodotus. Mela refers explicitly to Egyptian written sources. He mentions the reversal in the movement of the stars as well as of the sun; if he had copied Herodotus, he would probably not have mentioned the reversal in the movement of the stars (“sidera”). At a time when the movement of the sun, planets, and stars was not yet regarded as the result of the movement of the earth, the change in the direction of the sun was not necessarily connected in Mela’s mind with a similar change in the movement of all heavenly bodies.⁷

If, in Mela’s time, there were Egyptian historical records which referred to the rising of the sun in the west, we ought to investigate the old Egyptian literary sources extant today.

The Magical Papyrus Harris speaks of a cosmic upheaval of fire and water when “the south becomes north, and the Earth turns over.”⁸

In the Papyrus Ipuwer it is similarly stated that “the land turns round [over] as does a potter’s wheel” and the “Earth turned upside down.”⁹ This papyrus bewails the terrible devastation wrought by the upheaval of nature.

In the Ermitage Papyrus (Leningrad, 1116b recto) also, reference is made to a catastrophe that turned the “land upside down; happens that which never (yet) had happened.”¹⁰ It is assumed that at that time – in the second millennium – people were not aware of the daily rotation of the earth, and believed that the firmament with its luminaries turned around the earth; therefore, the expression, “the earth turned over,” does not refer to the daily rotation of the globe.

Nor do these descriptions in the papyri of Leiden and Leningrad leave room for a figurative explanation of the sentence, especially if we consider the text of the Papyrus Harris – the turning over of the earth is accompanied by the interchange of the south and north poles.

“Harakhte” is the Egyptian name for the western sun. As there is but one sun in the sky, it is supposed that Harakhte means the sun at its setting. But why should the sun at its setting be regarded as a deity different from the morning sun? The identity of the rising and the setting sun is seen by everyone. The inscriptions do not leave any room for misunderstanding: “Harakhte, he riseth in the west.”¹¹

The texts found in the pyramids say that the luminary “ceased to live in the occident, and shines, a new one, in the orient.”¹²

After the reversal of direction, whenever it may have occurred, the words “west” and “sunrise” were no longer synonyms, and it was necessary to clarify references by adding: “the west which is at the sunsetting.” It was not mere tautology, as the translator of this text thought.¹³

Inasmuch as the hieroglyphics were deciphered in the nineteenth century, it would be only reasonable to expect that since then the commentaries on Herodotus and Mela would have been written after consulting the Egyptian texts.

In the tomb of Senmut, the architect of Queen Hatshepsut, a panel on the ceiling shows the celestial sphere with the signs of the zodiac and other constellations in “a reversed orientation” of the southern sky.¹⁴

The end of the Middle Kingdom antedated the time of Queen Hatshepsut by several centuries. The astronomical ceiling presenting a reversed orientation must have been a venerated chart, made obsolete a number of centuries earlier.

“A characteristic feature of the Senmut ceiling is the astronomically objectionable orientation of the southern panel.” The center of this panel is occupied by the Orion-Sirius group, in which Orion appears west of Sirius instead of east. “The orientation of the southern panel is such that the person in the tomb looking at it has to lift his head and face north, not south.” “With the reversed orientation of the south panel, Orion, the most conspicuous constellation of the southern sky, appeared to be moving eastward, i.e., in the wrong direction.”¹⁵

The real meaning of “the irrational orientation of the southern panel” and the “reversed position of Orion” appears to be this: the southern panel shows the sky of Egypt as it was before the celestial sphere interchanged north and south, east and west. The northern panel shows the sky of Egypt as it was on some night of the year in the time of Senmut.

Was there no autochthonous tradition in Greece about the reversals of the revolution of the sun and stars?

Plato wrote in his dialogue, The Statesman (Politicus): “I mean the change in the rising and the setting of the sun and the other heavenly bodies, how in those times they used to set in the quarter where they now rise, and used to rise where they now set … the god at the time of the quarrel, you recall, changed all that to the present system as a testimony in favor of Atreus.” Then he proceeded: “At certain periods the universe has its present circular motion, and at other periods it revolves in the reverse direction. … Of all the changes which take place in the heavens this reversal is the greatest and most complete.”¹⁶

Plato continued his dialogue, using the above passage as the introduction to a fantastic philosophical essay on the reversal of time. This minimizes the value of the quoted passage despite the categorical form of his statement.

The reversal of the movement of the sun in the sky was not a peaceful event; it was an act of wrath and destruction. Plato wrote in Politicus:

“There is at that time great destruction of animals in general, and only a small part of the human race survives.”

The reversal of the movement of the sun was referred to by many Greek authors before and after Plato. According to a short fragment of a historical drama by Sophocles (Atreus), the sun rises in the east only since its course was reversed. “Zeus … changed the course of the sun, causing it to rise in the east and not in the west.”¹⁷Euripides wrote in Electra: “Then in his anger arose Zeus, turning the stars’ feet back on the fire-fretted way; yea, and the sun’s car splendour-burning, and the misty eyes of the morning grey. And the flash of his chariot-wheels back-flying flushed crimson the face of the fading day. …

The sun … turned backward … with the scourge of his wrath in affliction repaying mortals.”¹⁸

Many authors in later centuries realized that the story of Atreus described some event in nature. But it could not have been an eclipse. Strabo was mistaken when he tried to rationalize the story by saying that Atreus was an early astronomer who “discovered that the sun revolves in a direction opposite to the movement of the heavens.”¹⁹ During the night the stars move from east to west two minutes faster than the sun which moves in the same direction during the day.²⁰

Even in poetical language such a phenomenon would not have been described as follows: “And the sun-car’s winged speed from the ghastly strife turned back, changing his westering track through the heavens unto where blush-burning dawn rose,” as Euripides wrote in another work of his.²¹

Seneca knew more than his older contemporary Strabo. In his drama Thyestes, he gave a powerful description of what happened when the sun turned backward in the morning sky, which reveals much profound knowledge of natural phenomena. When the sun reversed its course and blotted out the day in mid-Olympus (noon), and the sinking sun beheld Aurora, the people, smitten with fear, asked: “Have we of all mankind been deemed deserving that heaven, its poles uptorn, should overwhelm us? In our time has the last day come?”²²

The early Greek philosophers, and especially Pythagoras, would have known about the reversal of the revolution of the sky, if it actually occurred, but as Pythagoras and his school kept their knowledge secret, we must depend upon the authors who wrote about the Pythagoreans. Aristotle says that the Pythagoreans differed between the right- and the left-hand motion of the sky (“the side from which the stars rise” is heaven’s right, “and where they set its left”²³), and in Plato we find: “A direction from left to right – and that will be from west to east.”²⁴ The present sun moves in the opposite direction.In the language of a symbolic and philosophical astronomy, probably of Pythagorean origin, Plato describes in Timaeus the effects of a collision of the earth “overtaken by a tempest of winds” with “alien fire from without, or a solid lump of earth,” or waters of “the immense flood which foamed in and streamed out”: the terrestrial globe engages in all motions, “forwards and backwards, and again to right and to left, and upwards and downwards, wandering every way in all the six directions.”²⁵

As the result of such a collision, described in a not easily understandable text which represents the earth as possessing a soul, there was a “violent shaking of the revolutions of the Soul,” “a total blocking of the course of the same,” “shaking of the course of the other,” which “produced all manner of twistings, and caused in their circles fractures and disruptures of every possible kind, with the result that, as they [the earth and the “perpetually flowing stream”?] barely held together one with another, they moved indeed but more irrationally, being at one time reversed, at another oblique, and again upside down.”²⁶ In Plato’s terminology, “revolution of the same” is from east to west, and “revolution of the other” is from west to east.²⁷ In The Statesman, Plato put this symbolic language into very simple terms, speaking of the reversal of the quarters in which the sun rises and sets.

I shall return later to some other Greek references to the sun setting in the east.²⁸

Caius Julius Solinus, a Latin author of the third century of the present era, wrote of the people living on the southern borders of Egypt: “The inhabitants of this country say that they have it from their ancestors that the sun now sets where it formerly rose.”²⁹

The traditions of peoples agree in synchronizing the changes in the movement of the sun with great catastrophes which terminated world ages.

The changes in the movement of the sun in each successive age make the use by many peoples of the term “sun” for “age” understandable.

“The Chinese say that it is only since a new order of things has come about that the stars move from east to west.”³⁰ “The signs of the Chinese zodiac have the strange peculiarity of proceeding in a retrograde direction, that is, against the course of the sun.”³¹In the Syrian city Ugarit (Ras-Shamra) was found a poem dedicated to the planet-goddess Anat, who “massacred the population of the Levant” and who “exchanged the two dawns and the position of the stars.”²

The hieroglyphics of the Mexicans describe four movements of the sun, “nahui ollin tonatiuh”. “The Indian authors translate ‘ollin’ by ‘motion of the sun.’ When they find the number ‘nahu’ added, they render ‘nahui ollin’ by the words ‘sun (tonatiuh) in his four motions.’”³³ These “four motions” refer “to four prehistoric suns” or “world ages,” with shifting cardinal points.³⁴

The sun that moves toward the east, contrary to the present sun, is called by the Indians “Teotl Lexco”.³⁵ The people of Mexico symbolized the changing direction of the sun’s movement as a heavenly ball game, accompanied by upheavals and earthquakes on the earth.³⁶

The reversal of east and west, if combined with the reversal of north and south, would turn the constellations of the north into constellations of the south, and show them in reversed order, as in the chart of the southern sky on the ceiling of Senmut’s tomb. The stars of the north would become stars of the south; this is what seems to he described by the Mexicans as the “driving away of the four hundred southern stars.”³⁷

The Eskimos of Greenland told missionaries that in an ancient time the earth turned over and the people who lived then became antipodes.⁸

Hebrew sources on the present problem are numerous.³⁹ In Tractate Sanhedrin of the Talmud it is said: “Seven days before the deluge, the Holy One changed the primeval order and the sun rose in the west and set in the east.”⁴⁰

“Tevel” is the Hebrew name for the world in which the sun rose in the west.⁴¹ “Arabot” is the name of the sky where the rising point was in the west.⁴²

Hai Gaon, the rabbinical authority who flourished between 939 and 1038, in his Responses refers to the cosmic changes in which the sun rose in the west and set in the east.³

The Koran speaks of the Lord “of two easts and of two wests,”⁴⁴ a sentence which presented much difficulty to the exegetes. Averrhoes, theArab philosopher of the twelfth century, wrote about the eastward and westward movements of the sun.⁵

References to the reversal of the movement of the sun that have been gathered here do not refer to one and the same time: the Deluge, the end of the Middle Kingdom, the days of the Argive tyrants, were separated by many centuries. The tradition heard by Herodotus in Egypt speaks of four reversals. Later in this book and again in the book that will deal with earlier catastrophes, I shall return to this subject. At this point, I leave historical and literary evidence on the reversal of earth’s cardinal points for the testimony of the natural sciences on the reversal of the magnetic poles of the earth.

The Reversed Polarity of the Earth

A thunderbolt, on striking a magnet, reverses the poles of the magnet.

The terrestrial globe is a huge magnet. A short circuit between it and another celestial body could result in the north and south magnetic poles of the earth exchanging places.

It is possible to detect in the geological records of the earth the orientation of the terrestrial magnetic field in past ages. “When lava cools and freezes following a volcanic outburst, it takes up a permanent magnetization dependent upon the orientation of the Earth’s magnetic field at the time. This, because of small capacity for magnetization in the Earth’s magnetic field after freezing, may remain practically constant. If this assumption be correct, the direction of the originally acquired permanent magnetization can be determined by tests in the laboratory, provided that every detail of the orientation of the mass tested is carefully noted and marked when it is removed.⁶

We would expect to find a full reversal of magnetic direction. Although repeated heating of lava and rocks can change the picture, there must have remained rocks with inverted polarity. Another author writes:
“Examination of magnetization of some igneous rocks reveals that they are polarized oppositely from the prevailing present direction of the local magnetic field and many of the older rocks are less strongly magnetized than more recent ones. On the assumption that the magnetization of the rocks occurred when the magma cooled and that the rocks have held theirpresent positions since that time, this would indicate that the polarity of the Earth has been completely reversed within recent geological times.”⁷

Because the physical facts seemed entirely inconsistent with every cosmological theory, the author of the above passage was cautious not to draw further conclusions from them.

The reversed polarity of lava indicates that in recent geological times the magnetic poles of the globe were reversed; when they had a very different orientation, abundant flows of lava took place.

Additional problems, and of a large scope, are: whether the position of the magnetic poles has anything to do with the direction of rotation of the globe, and whether there is an interdependence in the direction of the magnetic poles of the sun and of the planets.

The Quarters of the World Displaced The traditions gathered in the section before last refer to various epochs; actually, Herodotus and Mela say that according to Egyptian annals, the reversal of the west and east recurred: the sun rose in the west, then in the east, once more in the west, and again in the east.

Was the cosmic catastrophe that terminated a world age in the days of the fall of the Middle Kingdom and of the Exodus one of these occasions, and did the earth change the direction of its rotation at that time? If we cannot assert this much, we can at least maintain that the earth did not remain on the same orbit, nor did its poles stay in their places, nor was the direction of the axis the same as before. The position of the globe and its course were not settled when the earth first came into contact with the onrushing comet; in Plato’s terms, already partly quoted, the motion of the earth was changed by “blocking of the course” and went through “shaking of the revolutions” with “disruptures of every possible kind,” so that the position of the earth became “at one time reversed, at another oblique, and again upside down,”and it wandered “every way in all six directions.”

The Talmud and other ancient rabbinical sources tell of great disturbances in the solar movement at the time of the Exodus and the Passage of the Sea and the Lawgiving.⁴⁸ In old Midrashim it is repeatedly narrated that four times the sun was forced out of its course in the few weeks between the day of the Exodus and the day of the Lawgiving.⁴⁹The prolonged darkness (and the prolonged day in the Far East) and the earthshock (i.e., the ninth and the tenth plagues) and the world conflagration were the result of one of these disturbances in the motion of the earth. A few days later, if we follow the biblical narration, immediately before the hurricane changed its direction, “the pillar of cloud went from before their faces and stood behind them”; this means that the column of fire and smoke turned about and appeared from the opposite direction. Mountainous tides uncovered the bottom of the sea; a spark sprang between two celestial bodies; and “at the turning of the morning,”⁵⁰ the tides fell in a cataclysmic avalanche.

The Midrashim speak of a disturbance in the solar movement on the day of the Passage: the sun did not proceed on its course.⁵¹ On that day, according to the Psalms (76:8), “the earth feared and was still.” It is possible that Amos (8:8-9) is reviving the memory of this event when he mentions the “flood of Egypt,” at the time “the earth was cast out of the sea, and dry land was swallowed by the sea,” and “the sun was brought down at noon,” although, as I show later on, Amos might have referred to a cosmic catastrophe of a more recent date.

Also, the day of the Lawgiving, when the worlds collided again, was, according to numerous rabbinical sources, a day of unusual length: the motion of the sun was disturbed.²

On this occasion, and generally in the days and months following the Passage, the gloom, the heavy and charged clouds, the lightning, and the hurricanes, aside from the devastation by earthquake and flood, made observation very difficult, if not impossible. “They walk on in darkness: all the foundations of the earth are out of course” (Psalms 82:5) is a metaphor used by the Psalmist.

The Papyrus Ipuwer, which says that “the earth turned over like a potter’s wheel” and “the earth is upside down,” was written by an eyewitness of the plagues and the Exodus.⁵³ The change is described also in the words of another papyrus (Harris) which I have quoted once before:

“The south becomes north, and the earth turns over.”

Whether there was a complete reversal of the cardinal points as a result of the cosmic catastrophe of the days of the Exodus, or only a substantial shift, is a problem not solved here. The answer was not apparent even tocontemporaries, at least for a number of decades. In the gloom that endured for a generation, observations were impossible, and very difficult when the light began to break through.

The Kalevala relates that “dreaded shades” enveloped the earth, and “the sun occasionally steps from his accustomed path.”⁵⁴ Then Ukko-Jupiter struck fire from the sun to light a new sun and a new moon, and a new world age began.

In Völuspa (Poetic Edda) of the Icelanders we read:

No knowledge she [the sun] had where her home should be, The moon knew not what was his, The stars knew not where their
stations were.

Then the gods set order among the heavenly bodies.

The Aztecs related: “There had been no sun in existence for many years…. [The chiefs] began to peer through the gloom in all directions for the expected light, and to make bets as to what part of heaven he [the sun] should first appear in. Some said ‘Here,’ and some said ‘There’; but when the sun rose, they were all proved wrong, for not one of them had fixed upon the east.”⁵

Similarly, the Mayan legend tells that “it was not known from where the new sun would appear.” “They looked in all directions, but they were unable to say where the sun would rise. Some thought it would take place in the north and their glances were turned in that direction. Others thought it would be in the south. Actually, their guesses included all directions because the dawn shone all around. Some, however, fixed their attention on the orient, and maintained that the sun would come from there. It was their opinion that proved to be correct.”⁶

According to the Compendium of Wong-shi-Shing (1526 – 1590), it was in the “age after the chaos, when heaven and earth had just separated, that is, when the great mass of cloud just lifted from the earth,” that the heaven showed its face.⁷

In the Midrashim it is said that during the wandering in the desert the Israelites did not see the face of the sun because of the clouds. They were also unable to orient themselves on their march.⁵⁸The expression repeatedly used in the Books of Numbers and Joshua, “the east, to the sunrising,”⁵⁹ is not tautology, but a definition, which, by the way, testifies to the ancient origin of the literary materials that served as sources for these books; it is an expression that has its counterpart in the Egyptian “the west which is at the sun-setting.”

The cosmological allegory of the Greeks has Zeus, rushing on his way to engage Typhon in combat, steal Europa (Erev, the evening land) and carry her to the west. Arabia (also Erev) kept its name, “the evening land,”⁰

though it lies to the east of the centers of civilization – Egypt, Palestine, Greece. Eusebius, one of the Fathers of the Church, assigned the Zeus- Europa episode to the time of Moses and the Deucalion Flood, and Augustine wrote that Europa was carried by the king of Crete to his island in the west, “betwixt the departure of Israel out of Egypt and the death of Joshua.”¹

The Greeks, like other peoples, spoke of the reversal of the quarters of the earth and not merely in allegories but in literal terms.

The reversal of the earth’s rotation, referred to in the written and oral sources of many peoples, suggests the relation of one of these events to the cataclysm of the day of the Exodus. Like the quoted passage from Visuddhi-Magga, the Buddhist text, and the cited tradition of the Cashinaua tribe in western Brazil, the versions of the tribes and peoples of all five continents include the same elements, familiar to us from the Book of Exodus: lightning and “the bursting of heaven,” which caused the earth to be turned “upside down,” or “heaven and earth to change places.” On the Andaman Islands the natives are afraid that a natural catastrophe will cause the world to turn over.⁶² In Greenland also the Eskimos fear that the earth will turn over.³

Curiously enough, the cause of such perturbation is revealed in beliefs like that of the people of Flanders in Belgium. Thus we read: “In Menin (Flanders) the peasants say, on seeing a comet: ‘The sky is going to fall; the earth is turning over!’”⁶⁴

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