Ancient Arkaim: The Stonehenge of Russia

Ancient Arkaim: The Stonehenge of Russia

An archaeological expedition led by the University of Chelyabinsk in 1987 discovered an ancient fortified settlement in the Southern Urals of Russia dating back to two or three thousands of years BC. The fortress, called Arkaim ( Ar-ka means sky and Im means Earth), is known as the Russian Stonehenge and is believed to be even older than Stonehenge itself.

RAPA NUI STAR LORE

The official dating of the arrival of the first humans at Rapa Nui – between 700 CE and 1100 CE – is not based on any genetic data but exclusively on archaeological evidence. If Dr Schoch’s analysis of the island is even slightly correct, it is also based on selective archaeological evidence, whilst ignoring the sedimentation around the moai and lack of granite quarries, as either of these would push the date back quite significantly. Another example of this selective evidence would be the reliance on a change from palm to grassland around 1200 CE – contiguous with the presumed first arrival of the Polynesians – whilst ignoring the same palm-to-grassland change that occurs at 450 BCE.

It may be the case that 100 CE was indeed when the first people arrived at Rapa Nui. The hypothesis that Polynesian cultures were the most likely to retain elements of the Sunda and Sahul cosmologies remains in play. It is, however, considerably strengthened if it transpires the islands have been, or were once, occupied significantly earlier. The reason for this is Rapa Nuian star lore is astoundingly similar to the emergence of star lore with the first ‘civilisations’ of the Near East and Indian subcontinent. It has the highest degree of ritual overlap out of anywhere in the Pacific which could be explained by using an earlier date of first settlement, contemporaneous with the proposed influence on points west, after which point in time the Rapa Nuians remained in the most splendid of isolations out of anywhere in Polynesia. We shall return to this suggestion following an analysis of their star lore.

Rapa Nui provides the best example in the Pacific of the use of astronomy and star lore for reasons other than navigation. It was home to a powerful priesthood who used their knowledge of observation of the stars to set a yearly calendar of ritual and domestic activities. Most of the information regarding the sacred astronomy of this priesthood was collected in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, probably the very last time any of these practices remained in living memory, and sometimes only as remembrances of tales told by grandparents. In fact, a lot of the star lore lay forgotten in dusty boxes in the Royal Geographic Society until 1983, when the unpublished field notes of ethnographer Katherine Routledge’s 1914–1919 studies were located. She managed to find two elderly inhabitants who could allegedly read some of the mysterious rongorongo script, although their description of the meanings differs markedly.

Carved onto wooden tablets and seemingly kept in the majority of Rapa Nui homes, this script was only first discovered by Europeans in the 1860s, at which point missionary zeal led to the fiery destruction of most of them. Now only a few dozen remain and many of these are scattered across western museum collections. These tablets are a couple of centuries old and likely copies of earlier tablets or carvings.

Currently undeciphered, the rongorongo glyphs repeat in a way that leads some researchers to suggest they are or were sacred chants. But, as we shall see, there is a good case to be made for suggesting these are depictions of stars and sky phenomena. One interpretation does not preclude the other, of course. Indeed, it seems likely they are sacred chants of star lore, which is not at all without precedent across Polynesia.

Some of the symbols are very similar to glyphs found on other Pacific islands, particularly in Hawaii and Micronesia. Quite suggestively, there is also a stylistic overlap with the also undeciphered Indus script. If these similarities are anything other than accidental, then they may well point to a shared origin, perhaps even a Sundaland one. Even more intriguingly, Dr Schoch sees similarities with both the Nazca Lines and carvings found at Göbekli Tepe. For all of these to have a common origin, we are indeed back in the early days of Southeast Asian colonisation, which is the last time the ancestors of all these cultures were in the one place.

Returning to Katherine Routledge, she was told there were several classes of astronomer priests, each trained to and then tasked with recording the movements of specific asterisms, principally Orion, the Pleiades and Sirius/Canis Major from certain ahu, or sacred platforms. Although the earliest interpretation of these ahu were that they were aligned to solstices and equinoxes (western antiquarians having a tendency to overemphasise the sun), it turns out that those that do have sky alignments are better matches for the rising of specific constellations. And it is those with stellar alignments that are the best constructed out of all the ahu. Caves and natural rocks were also used as observation points. One promontory on the Poike Peninsula is called Papa ui hetu’u, ‘the rock for star-gazing.’ Near to the promontory was a rock Routledge identified as having a cup hole ‘star map’ of the Pleiades. Cup holes are common in megalithic sites across Western Europe and also feature on the tops of the T-shaped pillars at Göbekli Tepe.

Like we find in Western Polynesia, the Eastern Polynesian year began with the rising of the Pleiades, called Matariki. However in the east, they are more explicit about what this entails. During Matariki, the gods descended from the skyworld, ao, to mingle with humans in the realm of the living, called kainga.

Matariki inaugurated the ‘bountiful season,’ called Hora Nui. Beginning at this point and proceeding through the year, the ritual marking of the annual cycle was called ‘the Work of the Gods.’ This calendar was lunar, rather than solar, which is another overlap with early Indian culture. In order of importance, the preeminent asterisms and constellations should be familiar by now.

Orion

Orion has three separate names in Rapanui star lore. They are Tautoru, the Three Handsome Ones, which are the belt stars; E tui, ‘The Expelled,’ which is the constellation itself; and Tau ahu, ‘Beautiful Firebrand,’ the name for Rigel and the wife of one of the belt stars. Along with the Pleiades, Orion’s Belt was the most important asterism.

Immediately following the first lunar month of Hora Nui, marked by the Pleiades’ arrival into the sky, was the lunar month of Ruti, where Orion’s Belt was high in the sky and rituals were held to honour the chiefs and ancestors. The next three months deal principally with the location of the Pleiades and Orion’s Belt in the sky and their relationship to Mars, Canopus and other important stellar objects. The month of Tara Hau, when the Pleiades disappeared beneath the horizon, signalled a time of calamity for man until the next Matariki festival in several months’ time. Again, this is curiously redolent of Ancient Egypt.

Other Important Stars

Other stars, planets and constellations of significance recur. Chief among them are Sirius, Te pou o te rangi, the Post of the Sky; Canopus, Po roroa, the Great Darkness, used in conjunction with Orion’s Belt to time the planting season; Mars, Matamea, Red Eye, observed from Routledge’s observatory on Poike and probably considered a bad omen. Vega, Antares, Alpha Centauri, Beta Centauri, Venus and Aldebaran were all named, tracked and calendarised in the ‘Work of the Gods.’

Other Ritual Activity

Turmeric, which is native to southeast India, was made into a body paint called renga during the Matariki festival. Offerings of turmeric were also made to the high chief. If this is not an historical development – which is unlikely – then we are left to wonder how a member of the Indian ginger family ended up on the most isolated island on earth, more than half a world away.

Rapa Nui’s astronomer-priests were known as tohunga. The exact same word in Maori means expert or wise man, equivalent to the Hawaiian kahuna. In New Zealand there were tohunga specialising in navigation, medicine, stars, canoe building and so on. On Rapa Nui, it was the tohunga who read the sacred chants of the rongorongo script. According to what Katherine Routledge was told, these tohunga lived in circular stone towers called tupa. The majority of these tupa are clustered in the northern part of the island, where we also find ‘the rock for star-gazing’ and plenty of ahu. A 2010 Explorers Club Flag Expedition to Rapa Nui found that all but one of these tupa had entranceways that were oriented to a star or asterism in some way involved in the ‘Work of the Gods.’ It may be that measurements were taken when the stars appeared in the doorway or it may even have been a way of drawing down a particular asterism into its tower. Again we immediately think of Egypt.

GATHERING UP THE STARS

What are we to make of Rapa Nui, then? It is apparently the last island in Polynesia to have been colonised, as recently as only a thousand or fifteen hundred years ago. Yet it has geological, archaeological and potentially ritual evidence to suggest activity in much earlier times. Rapa Nui may have been an outpost of the Nusantao Maritime Trading Network that arose immediately after the end of the Ice Age. Or it may have even been a holy island that was not permanently occupied and used as a sacred or holy site, both before and after this point. Perhaps it was a combination of sacred site and sailing stop-off point, never permanently occupied and visited at intervals determined by the stars and the seasons, such as was the case with Göbekli Tepe. One of the names for the island means ‘navel of the world,’ hinting it may have had a ritual value far in excess of its comparatively meagre resource value.

If such a scenario is accurate, it provides a ‘solve’ for the otherwise incongruous data suggesting both very early and very late occupation: it was a site that was used and known during a time when the sea levels were much lower, then it was abandoned or the original inhabitants died out. Then it was recolonised by the descendants of these first occupiers in the first millennium CE and some of the remaining megalithic infrastructure, such as the basalt moai, were repurposed.

Whatever the scenario, the island is the most challenging and most rewarding place to look for where, in the words of Dr Oppenheimer survivors of a sunken landmass may have ‘retained their original culture with the least dilution.’

Right across Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia we have the demonstrable continuity of Gondwana star lore being developed into a highly sophisticated form of Laurasian astronomical knowledge used for navigation and the precise measurement of a ritual year. We find the Gondwana/Laurasia crossover of star lore in the same part of the world – Sunda and Sahul land – where linguistic evidence records the first rise in cultural complexity since we left Africa, which also seems to have stepped, pyramidal hills built before the end of the Ice Age. This part of the world also has genetic, archaeological and potentially linguistic links to the ‘first cilivisations’ of Harappa, Sumer and Egypt, as well as probably South America (although we are now heading in the opposite direction).

Over the last one hundred and fifty years, historians have looked for singular, linear answers: cities started here. The people next door learned from them and then built cities. Pyramids started there and then their neighbours copied the form. This linearity simply does not match what we now know about early human population movements or the ‘overlap analysis’ of world mythology that points to much, much older shared origins of specific gods and cosmologies. This book does not suggest that all culture and civilisation came from the scattered survivors of Sundaland, setting out in ships to become the world’s wisdom teachers. It seems increasingly clear that early communities across Eurasia had hugely sophisticated cosmologies and even architectural capacities by the end of the Ice Age, the original elements of which they may have brought with them as human populations moved up into Eurasia and Europe from South Asia during a brief warm period as the mtDNA evidence suggests. Instead, this book suggests that survivors of the sinking of Sunda and Sahul brought technological and magical techniques with them to populations across central and western Asia that were already in situ and likely even had vaguely recognisable pantheons and practices. It is also fairly likely that the Sunda survivors knew of these scattered communities if the evidence for transoceanic and transcontinental trade is considered.

Moving from Wendy Doniger’s microscope back to her telescope, we find in the star lore of the Pacific a concept of divine kingship descending from the night sky, the magic of immortality and human origin associated with particular asterisms and the belief that actions or architecture ‘below’ are in some way aligned with that which is ‘above.’

Even more than that, we have specific asterisms such as Orion and even god names that recur in both description and magical function for the next five thousand years. We can now posit that creating a map or replica with specific points in the night sky, a concept we see executed throughout dynastic Egypt and continuing into the hermetic traditions of the Classical Age, seems to be a very long-lived one. The development of this star map with ever more precision is, I believe, the ‘wisdom of the sages come down to us from a time before the Flood,’ as it is commonly described. It grew in a highly specific incubator: the interactions with the spirit world conducted by a culture or cultures of highly proficient open ocean navigators for whom precision was a literal matter of life and death. And the proof of their supreme competence is the very fact of the existence of their descendants living on every piece of habitable land in the Pacific, an ocean which covers half our planet’s surface.

It must have been quite an event to set these ancient Argonauts on such a journey.

Ancient dolphin-like ichthyosaurs may have been wiped out by climate change

Ichthyosaurs became extinct roughly 90 million years ago in the Late Cretaceous period
Andrey Atuchin

By Rachel Sullivan

Climate change sealed the fate of ichthyosaurs, marine reptiles that ruled the oceans for 157 million years, suggests an analysis of fossils. 

The dolphin-like animals died out some 30 million years before the mass dinosaur extinction at the end of the Cretaceous 66 million years ago.

Vertebrate palaeontologist Dr Valentin Fischer, who led the research, published today in Nature Communications, said that the extinction of ichthyosaurs, which were extremely well adapted to oceanic life, was a long-standing enigma.

A number of hypotheses have previously been proposed to explain the ancient marine reptiles disappearance, including increased competition from other marine reptiles and fish and the decline of their main food source, squid-like belemnites, said Dr Fischer of the University of Oxford.

Over time, these pressures would have reduced species diversity, allowing relatively minor events to tip them into extinction.

"These theories were at odds with the recent understanding of the ichthyosaur fossil record, which suggests they were actually quite diverse prior to their extinction," he said.
"We wanted to analyse this extinction thoroughly and look for possible alternative drivers."
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Analysis of teeth and newly discovered fossils

The researchers analysed teeth from museum collections as well as a number of newly discovered fossils from Russia.

They then correlated their results with geological evidence of sea surface temperatures and other environmental indicators to estimate ichthyosaur diversity over a 150-million year period.

"We found they were in fact very diverse during the last part of their reign; their extinction was thus a profound, rather abrupt event in the history of a successful group," said Dr Fischer.

Instead, their demise was associated with strong fluctuations in sea levels and temperatures during what is known as the Cenomanian stage of the upper Cretaceous period, 100 million to 94 million years ago.

"It seems that a large part of the marine biosphere was affected by an event or a series of rapid events that profoundly modified marine ecosystems," he added.

"These events coincided with profound climatic changes: fast-moving continents, intense volcanism, ice-free poles and episodes of anoxia (lack of oxygen) on the sea floor."

During this turbulent period, Dr Fischer said ichthyosaurs failed to take advantage of the novel opportunities presented by their rapidly changing world, by evolving new species.

Changes in food availability, migratory routes, competitors, or the lack of safe birthing places may all have contributed to their downfall.

"Some groups evolved to take advantage of these new, highly fluctuating conditions while others, like ichthyosaurs, did not."
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'Sampling incomplete in geography and time'

But Australian ichthyosaur researcher Dr Benjamin Kear was cautious about the study's conclusion, which was based on the description of various new ichthyosaur species, mainly from European deposits.

"While this taxonomic proliferation does infer periods of higher diversity, it is restricted by the relatively small area of globally explored outcrops, especially in the southern hemisphere," said Dr Kear, who is currently the curator of vertebrate palaeontology at Uppsala University's Museum of Evolution.

"This means that our sampling is very incomplete, both in terms of geography and time — which limits clarity of the results.

"Having said that, this research opens an exciting new line of inquiry that will fuel further investigations into the ichthyosaur extinctions and the emergence of modern marine predators such as sharks and bony fish during the Cretaceous," said Dr Kear, who was not involved in the study.

Fionn MacCumhail, the leader of the Fianna.

Diarmuid and Grainne. ( Jim Fitzpatrick )

Fionn appears in another legend called The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne . In this story, however, Fionn is not its protagonist, but its antagonist. In this tale, Gráinne, the most beautiful woman in Ireland, and the daughter of Cormac MacAirt, the High King of Ireland, was betrothed to the aging Fionn.

However, the princess fell in love with Diarmuid, one of the Fianna, when she first saw him. During the wedding feast, Gráinne drugged the entire party, with the exception of Diarmuid, and confessed her love for him. Diarmuid, however, was loyal to his leader, and did not reciprocate her love. Gráinne then put a spell on Diarmuid to make him fall in love with her and the pair ran away. When Fionn realized what had happened, he pursued the pair all over Ireland.

In one version of the legend, Diarmuid and Gráinne came across the heath of Ben Bulben, where the pair was confronted by a giant boar, the only creature that could harm Diarmuid. The warrior fought with the beast to protect Gráinne, and though he managed to kill it, was mortally wounded by it as well.

In another version of the legend, Fionn gave up the chase eventually, and allowed the pair to settle down. Years later, Fionn invited Diarmuid to a boar hunt at Ben Bulben, where the warrior was fatally wounded by a boar. The only way that Diarmuid could be saved was for him to drink water from Fionn’s cupped hands. Although the Fianna begged Fionn to save Diarmuid, he refused to do so, and only changed his mind when his son, Oisin, threatened to fight him. By then, however, Diarmuid had died.

Mysterious Viking Sword Made With Technology From the Future?

By Tara MacIsaac, Epoch Times


The Viking sword Ulfberht was made of metal so pure it baffled archaeologists. It was thought the technology to forge such metal was not invented for another 800 or more years, during the Industrial Revolution.

About 170 Ulfberhts have been found, dating from 800 to 1,000 A.D. A NOVA, National Geographic documentary titled “Secrets of the Viking Sword”, first aired in 2012, took a look at the enigmatic sword’s metallurgic composition.

In the process of forging iron, the ore must be heated to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit to liquify, allowing the blacksmith to remove the impurities (called “slag”). Carbon is also mixed in to make the brittle iron stronger. Medieval technology did not allow iron to be heated to such a high temperature, thus the slag was removed by pounding it out, a far less effective method.

The Ulfberht, however, has almost no slag, and it has a carbon content three times that of other metals from the time. It was made of a metal called “crucible steel.”

It was thought that the furnaces invented during the industrial revolution were the first tools for heating iron to this extent.

Modern blacksmith Richard Furrer of Wisconsin spoke to NOVA about the difficulties of making such a sword. Furrer is described in the documentary as one of the few people on the planet who has the skills needed to try to reproduce the Ulfberht.

“To do it right, it is the most complicated thing I know how to make,” he said.

He commented on how the Ulfberht maker would have been regarded as possessing magical powers. “To be able to make a weapon from dirt is a pretty powerful thing,” he said. But, to make a weapon that could bend without breaking, stay so sharp, and weigh so little would be regarded as supernatural.

Furrer spent days of continuous, painstaking work forging a similar sword. He used medieval technology, though he used it in a way never before suspected. The tiniest flaw or mistake could have turned the sword into a piece of scrap metal. He seemed to declare his success at the end with more relief than joy.

It is possible that the material and the know-how came from the Middle East. The Volga trade route between the Viking settlements and the Middle East opened at the same time the first Ulfberhts appeared and closed when the last Ulfberhts were produced.

The article, ‘Mysterious Viking Sword Made with Technology from the Future’ was originally published on The Epoch Times,

Book of Soyga

The Book of Soyga, also titled Aldaraia, is a 16th-century Latin treatise on magic, one copy of which is known to have been possessed by the Elizabethan scholar John Dee. After Dee's death, the book was thought to be lost until 1994 when two manuscripts were located in the British Library (Sloane MS. 8) and the Bodleian Library (Bodley MS. 908), under the title Aldaraia sive Soyga vocor, by Dee scholar Deborah Harkness. The Sloane 8 version is also described as Tractatus Astrologico Magicus, though both versions differ only slightly.

Elizabethan scholar John Dee.

Jim Reeds notes that the Bodley 908 MS consists of 197 leaves including Liber Aldaraia (95 leaves), Liber Radiorum (65 leaves), and Liber decimus septimus (2 leaves), as well as a number of shorter and unnamed works totaling approximately ten leaves. The final 18 leaves of the MS contain 36 tables of letters. The Sloane 8 MS consists of 147 leaves, mostly identical to the Bodley MS, with the exception that the tables of letters appear on 36 leaves, and the Liber Radiorum is presented in a two leaf summarized version.

Amongst the incantations and instructions on magic, astrology, demonology, lists of conjunctions, lunar mansions, and names and genealogies of angels, the book contains 36 large squares of letters which Dee was unable to decipher. Otherwise unknown medieval magical treatises are cited, including works known as liber E, liber Os, liber dignus, liber Sipal, and liber Munob.

Jim Reeds, in his short work John Dee and the Magic Tables in the Book of Soyga, notes a proclivity to record words backwards in the MS, citing as examples Lapis reversed as Sipal, Bonum reversed as Munob, and the title of the MS, Soyga, as Agyos, literis transvectis, revealing a practice which sought to obscure some of the works cited. 'Soyga' is ‘Agios’ (Greek for "Holy") spelled backwards.

Reeds writes:

    The Book of Soyga's preoccupation with letters, alphabet arithmetic, Hebrew-like backwards writing, and so on, is of course characteristic of the new Cabalistic magic which became popular in the sixteenth century, exemplified by the great compilation of Agrippa of Nettesheim (1486-1535), and borrowing authority both from the Renaissance humanist interest in the Kabbala expressed by such figures as Pico and Reuchlin and from the supposed Biblical antiquity of the Kabbalah."

Of the square tables that obsessed Dee, Reeds continued, "Although... not themselves a characteristic feature of the traditional Kabbalah, they had by Agrippa's time become an integral part of the Christian magical Cabala.

In 1556, Dee proposed the founding of a national English library to Queen Mary, but his plan was not implemented. In consequence, Dee amassed the largest library in England at the time using his personal funds, consisting of at least 3,000 printed volumes and a large number of manuscripts. The library was pilfered during Dee's six-year trip to the European Continent between 1583 and 1589, and Dee was forced to sell many more volumes upon his return due to penury. After his death in 1608 or 1609, the still-considerable remnants of the vaunted library were ransacked until nothing remained.

During Dee's long trip to the Continent, he sought to supernaturally contact angels through the services of a scryer, Edward Kelley. On the subject of the Book of Soyga, Dee claimed to have questioned the angel Uriel about the significance of the book and asked for guidance. The reply that Dee received was that the book had been revealed to Adam in Paradise by angels, and could be interpreted by the archangel Michael.

After Harkness rediscovered the two copies of the book, Jim Reeds uncovered the mathematical formula used to construct the tables (starting with the seed word given for each table), and identified errors of various types made by the manuscripts' scribes. He showed that a subset of the errors were common to the two copies, suggesting that they were derived from a common ancestor which contained that subset of errors (and thus was presumably itself a copy of another work).

Although Reeds deciphered the construction algorithm and the code words used in crafting the tables, the actual contents and significance of the tables remain mysterious. He writes, "The treatise in the Book of Soyga which discusses the tables, Liber Radiorum, has a series of paragraphs mentioning the code words for twenty-three of the tables, together with number sequences which stand in unknown relation to the words."

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John Dee had been expecting a minor spirit from the great hierarchy of the heavens, and here he had before him an archangel, one who apparently had a direct line to Enoch and perhaps the Adamic language Enoch had recorded. His reaction was immediately to ask Uriel about the "Book of Soyga."

The Book of Soyga was particularly precious to Dee. His only mention of it before now was in a diary entry made earlier that year, where he reports having the volume fumigated to protect it from mildew.

 In 1583, the book went missing from Dee's library, but he managed to recover it a decade later. Following Dee's death, it passed into the collection of the duke of Lauderdale, but then this slippery text went missing once more. It was finally rediscovered in 1994 by the Dee scholar Deborah Harkness, who found it in both the Bodleian and British Libraries, but cataloged under an alternative title mentioned by Dee, Aldaraia. Both copies are anonymous sixteenth-century manuscript versions of a (presumably) lost original. It seems likely that the British Library copy was the one owned by Dee, the very work that was now in his study and the focus of his intense curiosity.

The book is full of lists and tables. There are lists of spirit names, of astrological conjunctions, of spells and invocations-the very sort of cabalistic codes that had filled Trithemius's Steganographia.

Dee's first question to Uriel, communicated via Talbot, was an anxious inquiry about the status of this work. "Is my Book of Soyga of any excellency?" he asked.

"That book was revealed to Adam in paradise by the good Angels of God,” Uriel replied. A revelation, and not just to Adam. Dee must have now dared to think that this book was of divine importance--perhaps a copy of the Book of Enoch mentioned by the Ethiopian priest to Postel. Perhaps its tables and lists were a coded version of the very language Adam had been given by God.

“Will you give me any instructions, how I may read those tables of Soyga?" Dee asked Uriel.

"I can," Uriel replies, tantalizingly. "But only Michael can interpret that book.”

Dee was desperate, but had probably expected the reply, as it was Michael he had previously attempted to contact in this stone through Saul. "What may I, or must I do, to have the sight and presence of Michael, that blessed angel?" Dee asked. "Summon and invoke our presence with sincerity and humility," Uriel replied, with what to Dee must have been maddening serenity.

"Michael is the angel who lights your way. And these things are revealed in virtue and truth, not by force.”

At that point, the conversation was interrupted by Talbot reporting the appearance of a new vision in the stone, a triangular talisman engraved in gold. Worn on the chest, Uriel promised, this device would protect its bearer "at every place and time and occasion."

There, the session ended. Dee spent the afternoon musing on what he had experienced. It was evidently a kind of communion that was very different from any he had experienced with his previous skryers. There was something compelling, convincing about the spirit this Talbot had summoned that morning. At five o'clock in the afternoon, the two of them were in Dee's study again. After saying their prayers, Talbot managed to summon Uriel back to the stone. Dee pressed to know more about the Book of Soyga. "Peace," Uriel replied, "you must use Michael." "I know of no means or order to use in the invocating of Michael,” Dee replied.

Uriel was obligingly specific in reply. He and Talbot must recite certain psalms, which will deliver them before the "seat and Majesty of God." They did as instructed, and a "rich chair" appeared briefly in the stone. "There must be conjunction of minds in prayer, betwixt you two, to God continually," Uriel added. "It is the will of God that you should jointly have the knowledge of his angels together. You had attained unto the sight of Michael but for the imperfection of Saul. Be of good comfort." In other words, Dee's failure to discover the secret of Soyga in the past had been Saul's fault. If he now stuck with Talbot, all would be imminently revealed.