Tuesday, February 23, 2021

The purpose of my "Holmes Behind the Veil" trilogy

GIPHY
At long last, I wish to relate here the over-arching concept that has informed the writing from the start of my “Holmes Behind the Veil” series trilogy (aside from the obvious bringing together of characters conceived by H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle): These three books were written so that Sherlock Holmes meets Jesus, Mary, and God. Of course, these encounters have

ramifications and consequences, and that is why the three books add up to 900 pages. (900 is the accurate page count if adding the three MX books together. But, indeed, if one were to bind all three books together in a special-edition fine omnibus trilogy volume titled Sherlock Holmes in the Fullness of Time, the page count would be 571.) Beyond this threefold (Trinity-like) thematic foundation, the books are like my three children who each have their own personalities, aspirations, and purpose



Book 1, Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World, intends two things: (1) to bring together the Great Detective and Jesus Christ, and (2) to suggest what might have happened if Jesus had had some dealings with yogis.


The intension of Book 2, The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life, is threefold: (1) to broach the idea that the birthplace of the human race, the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, needs to be better recognized and honored; (2) to bring together the iconic detective and the mother of Jesus; and (3) to write my own “lost city/lost race” novel, a genre that is dear to my heart.


Book 3, The Sussex Beekeeper at the Dawn of Time, was conceived (1) to cause the detective to circuitously cross paths with God (insofar as I’d already had him encounter Jesus and meet Mary); (2) to offer some important notions regarding solar eclipses; (3) illustrate the curious, illusive, exceedingly patient, peculiar, frustrating, sometimes painful, sometimes gleeful, seemingly malicious, seemingly benevolent, roundabout, and thoroughly mysterious manner in which Fate can work; and (4) all in the context of a condensed-in-time, planet-encircling secret project the likes of which only God could bring to fruition (a project even more secret and more enormous than The Manhattan Project).


Nicholas' transplant had never been

attempted before. In the subsequent

news flurry, to retain our anonymity,

we gave Nicholas the press name of

"Baby James". Later, both being writers,

we wrote his life story from our

together point of view.
 
In the course of writing these books, begun on September 10, 1983 and continuing for 30 years, my son Nicholas Lawrence Miller was born on February 15, 1985. That evening, we had Chinese and my fortune cookie read, "You are the guiding star of his existence." Call it what you will, but I saw it as a good omen and I was pleased.  We lost him 18 1/2 months later.   That was August 31, 1986. This was devastating, of course, and it's miraculous that we reached the other side of our grief so as to continue our lives. Nicholas was the first toddler recipient of another's heart. His surgery had required us to move to southern California from northern California, which would have been inconceivable accept for these circumstances. Inspired by Nicholas' spirit and courage through all he endured, Jayne embarked on a career in organ transplantation, at which she excelled, became renowned, and made a real difference before she retired. I always saw myself as a magazine editor, a goal that would likely never have been attained in northern California, but before long, once we settled into our new home in southern California, I became editor-in-chief of the No. 1 technical trade publication in a fascinating field at which I thrived for 20 years until I retired, likewise making a difference. One day a couple of years back, Jayne and I were remembering the day of Nicholas' birth, and I mentioned that message in the fortune cookie, "You are the guiding star of his existence." And then it hit us both. Looking back on our lives, we realized that none of it would have occurred if it hadn't been for Nicholas and all the things that happened, the cumulative effect of which helped his parents succeed in our respective careers and make a difference. We looked at one another and realized with happiness and sadness, surprise and excitement that it wasn't me who was the guiding star of his existence. He was the guiding star of our existence. All of which illustrates for me, at least, the curious, illusive, exceedingly patient, roundabout, and thoroughly mysterious nature of Fate.

Formal Notice: All images, quotations, and video/audio clips used in this blog and in its individual posts are used either with permissions from the copyright holders or through exercise of the doctrine of Fair Use as described in U.S. copyright law, or are in the public domain. If any true copyright holder (whether person[s] or organization) wishes an image or quotation or clip to be removed from this blog and/or its individual posts, please send a note with a clear request and explanation to eely84232@mypacks.net and your request will be gladly complied with as quickly as practical.



Thursday, November 2, 2017

Post 1: Introducing My Five Standards of Pastiche


Recently I mentioned to my publisher that I felt it was important to alert prospective readers of my “Holmes Behind the Veil” trilogy as to what to expect.  He said, “I think the best way to ensure people ‘get’ your books is to have an interesting and informative blog which introduces and explains the books.”
Clearly I’ve taken him up on that idea. I call this blog Thomas Kent Miller’s Lighthouse because, like a lighthouse, I hope it will alert readers that they are approaching uncharted seas and hazardous shoals. For example fin de siècle authority Mark Valentine says of one of the books, using expressions not exactly typical of book reviews, “we must regard the book as like a curious crystal, which reveals some new dimension as each facet is caught in the light of our understanding.”

In my first posts, I will describe the five fundamental principles I steadfastly used over 30 years while crafting the books. I’ll briefly list them all out here, then use the remainder of this post to explain the first. Then I’ll shed light on the others in more detail in follow-on posts:

(1) My books draw as much from H. Rider Haggard as they do from Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes.

(2) The literary conventions of pastiches, such as front matter, framing devices, pseudo-prefaces, footnotes, and so forth have an uttermost prominent place in my work. 

(3)  My stories are intended to illustrate the curious, illusive, exceedingly patient, ironic, and roundabout manner in which Fate can sometimes work. 

(4)  It’s my intent to convey a sense of my conviction that there is in reality an attentive, deliberate consciousness “behind the veil” and that the key to knowing, or relating to, that consciousness is G.K. Chesterton’s remark: “There is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss.” 

(5)  Insofar as Holmes was never recognized or identified by the principal characters of Book One, early on I decided to take that idea of anonymity and run with it, increasing his anonymity with each successive book, thereby intensifying the irony, so that by Book 3 even some die-hard Holmes gamers might not recognize him.

H. Rider Haggard

Prior to 1973, except for the vaguest of  after-the-fact memories of seeing one or two of his books in my high school library, I was not really aware that somebody named H. Rider Haggard had ever existed. But it was in December 1973, when I was 28, that I chanced to read Haggard’s The People of the Mist (1894). Ironically, the author’s name on the Ballantine Original Adult Fantasy (AKA the “Unicorn’s Head”) meant nothing to me. It was the cover art by Dean Ellis that spoke to me, saying, “Take me off the shelf and look at me carefully.” It was this cover art and the pointed back cover blurb, both redolent of a favorite subject of mine, lost cities and lost races, that persuaded me to buy the book.


Cover by Dean Ellis
This was my first encounter with Haggard, and it affected me deeply; there was a mysterious something permeating that novel that I found refreshing and illuminating. After reading a few more of his books, I finally put my finger on the quality that had so excited me. It was that Haggard successfully made Fate a character in many of his books. It seemed to me that his stories did not come alive due to characterizations or plot developments so much as they did to turnings of Fate.


That said, while a century ago virtually any civilized person in Europe, Asia, and the Americas would have instantly recognized the name of the then-best-selling author H. Rider Haggard, the passage of time takes its due of sad tolls, and Haggard’s notability and notoriety have faded dramatically, unlike his dear friend Rudyard Kipling who maintains a certain relevance: Note that only last year Walt Disney Pictures spent $175 million to remake Kipling’s Jungle Book, succeeding in grossing $1 billion!

When H. Rider Haggard is referenced by today’s literary authorities of adventure and fantasy fiction spanning from 1885 to 1925, he is identified as the author of King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She: A History (1887), both enormous worldwide best sellers in their day, and, indeed, never going out of print to this day and filmed many times. Usually these authorities paint explanations of Haggard in broad strokes, for example, Mike Ashley says that Haggard was “one of the greatest adventure writers who ever lived”; the late author and genre editor Lin Carter said he was the “unchallenged master of the adventure romance”; and Otto Penzler of the Mysterious Press sums up the matter with “The name of no writer is more closely or affectionately connected to adventure fiction than that of Sir Henry Rider Haggard.”

However, when I pulled down that paperback in 1973, I didn’t know any of this, and the more I read Haggard’s works and learned about him and the era in which he wrote, I came to understand that he was not a mere Victorian hack adventure writer, as those descriptions above might lead one to believe. I learned that there was much more driving his fiction than adventure for adventures’ sake. At the root of Haggard and his fiction was a more or less consistent cosmic view that permeates all his writing. I go into detail about this in an essay written for the UK literary journal Wormwood in the Spring of 2013, and which is reprinted as an appendix in Book 2 of the “Holmes Behind the Veil” series. Suffice it to say now that in 1983 when I embarked on my first Sherlock Holmes pastiche, H. Rider Haggard had already been uppermost in my mind for a decade. I remembered a conversation with an acquaintance a year or two earlier that speculated whether Jesus could have been influenced by yogis. I liked the idea, and after some research, learned that there's a strong tradition that Jesus with his brother Thomas (the disciple) traveled to Tibet. That seemed like a great jumping off point. But I was immediately faced with a problem: Since there could be no Watson in Tibet, who would be the narrator of the story, whereupon I remembered that H. Rider Haggard had sent his heroes of She: An Adventure, Horace Holly and Leo Vincey, off to central Asia around the same time in search for the new incarnation of She. Thus, I had Leo Vincey do Watson’s job, and the rest fell into place.

Yet, despite this easy solution, another problem instantly popped up before I’d even set down one word:  Neither Haggard nor any of his 60+ books were uppermost in the minds of readers in the mid-1980s, and I wondered if a certain amount of biographical, literary, or even historical background would be necessary to acclimate readers as they picked up what would eventually become Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World. But I decided two things at that juncture: That I should give readers the benefit of the doubt and if concerns sprang up, I would cross those roads when I got to them.

In due course, the book was completed and attained some success for both myself and its distributor Borgo Press. I had so much fun merging the two sagas, making an effort to get the details right, that when it came time to do a second Holmes pastiche, it was a no brainer that this time Holmes would encounter Haggard’s other great and iconic series character, Allan Quatermain. Determining how that would happen was not as easy. All told, it would take me from 1988 to 2002 to write that prequel, as it turned out to be.

The first book in the series is already released and is available from all good bookstores including Amazon USA,  Barnes and Noble, and Amazon UK.


Next: In my next post, # 2, I’ll explain my decision to use the totally untraditional approach of focusing on front matter to move the story and plot of the two subsequent books forward.


Formal Notice: All images, quotations, and video/audio clips used in this blog and in its individual posts are used either with permissions from the copyright holders or through exercise of the doctrine of Fair Use as described in U.S. copyright law, or are in the public domain. If any true copyright holder (whether person[s] or organization) wishes an image or quotation or clip to be removed from this blog and/or its individual posts, please send a note with a clear request and explanation to eely84232@mypacks.net and your request will be gladly complied with as quickly as practical.

Monday, September 18, 2017

13: What the “Holmes Behind the Veil” Trilogy Series Is All About



GIPHY
At long last, I wish to relate here the over-arching concept that has informed the writing from the start of my “Holmes Behind the Veil” series trilogy (aside from the obvious bringing together of characters conceived by H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle): These three books were written so that Sherlock Holmes meets Jesus, Mary, and God. Of course, these encounters have ramifications and consequences, and that is why the three books add up to 900 pages. (900 is the accurate page count if adding the three MX books together. But, indeed, if one were to bind all three books together in a special-edition fine omnibus trilogy volume titled Sherlock Holmes in the Fullness of Time,  the page count would be 571.)
 
 Beyond this threefold thematic foundation, the books are like my three children who each have their own personalities, aspirations, and purpose.

Book 1, Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World, intends two things: (1) to bring together the Great Detective and Jesus Christ, and (2) to suggest what might have happened if Jesus had had some dealings with yogis.


The intension of Book 2, The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life, is threefold: (1) to broach the idea that the birthplace of the human race, the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, needs to be better recognized and honored; (2) to bring together the iconic detective and the mother of Jesus; and (3) to write my own “lost city/lost race” novel, a genre that is dear to my heart.


Book 3, The Sussex Beekeeper at the Dawn of Time, was conceived (1) to cause the detective to circuitously cross paths with God (insofar as I’d already had him encounter Jesus and meet Mary); (2) to offer some important notions regarding solar eclipses; (3) illustrate the curious, illusive, exceedingly patient, peculiar, frustrating, sometimes painful, sometimes gleeful, seemingly malicious, seemingly benevolent, roundabout, and thoroughly mysterious manner in which Fate can work; and (4) all in the context of a condensed-in-time, planet-encircling secret project the likes of which only God could bring to fruition (a project even more secret and more enormous than The Manhattan Project).


Nicholas' transplant had never been

attempted before. In the subsequent

news flurry, to retain our anonymity,

we gave Nicholas the press name of

"Baby James". Later, both being writers,

we wrote his life story from our

together point of view.
In the course of writing these books, begun on September 10, 1983 and continuing for 30 years, my son Nicholas Lawrence Miller was born on February 15, 1985. That evening, we had Chinese and my fortune cookie read, "You are the guiding star of his existence." Call it what you will, but I saw it as a good omen and I was pleased.  We lost him 18 1/2 months later.   That was August 31, 1986. This was devastating, of course, and it's miraculous that we reached the other side of our grief so as to continue our lives. Nicholas was the first toddler recipient of another's heart. His surgery had required us to move to southern California from northern California, which would have been inconceivable accept for these circumstances. Inspired by Nicholas' spirit and courage through all he endured, Jayne embarked on a career in organ transplantation, at which she excelled, became renowned, and made a real difference before she retired. I always saw myself as a magazine editor, a goal that would likely never have been attained in northern California, but before long, once we settled into our new home in southern California, I became editor-in-chief of the No. 1 technical trade publication in a fascinating field at which I thrived for 20 years until I retired, likewise making a difference. One day a couple of years back, Jayne and I were remembering the day of Nicholas' birth, and I mentioned that message in the fortune cookie, "You are the guiding star of his existence." And then it hit us both. Looking back on our lives, we realized that none of it would have occurred if it hadn't been for Nicholas and all the things that happened, the cumulative effect of which helped his parents succeed in our respective careers and make a difference. We looked at one another and realized with happiness and sadness, surprise and excitement that it wasn't me who was the guiding star of his existence. He was the guiding star of our existence. All of which illustrates for me, at least, the curious, illusive, exceedingly patient, roundabout, and thoroughly mysterious nature of Fate.

Formal Notice: All images, quotations, and video/audio clips used in this blog and in its individual posts are used either with permissions from the copyright holders or through exercise of the doctrine of Fair Use as described in U.S. copyright law, or are in the public domain. If any true copyright holder (whether person[s] or organization) wishes an image or quotation or clip to be removed from this blog and/or its individual posts, please send a note with a clear request and explanation to eely84232@mypacks.net and your request will be gladly complied with as quickly as practical.



Saturday, September 16, 2017

12: The Special Setting of The Sussex Beekeeper at the Dawn of Time



The Lighthouse
of Alexandria (GIPHY)
As I said in Post 7, as far back as I can remember, I’ve always been enchanted by lost cities, giant secret projects and the like. In other words, little secrets don’t interest me. Neither do fuzzy secrets like conspiracies.

Book 3 of the "Holmes Behind the Veil" trilogy series, The Sussex Beekeeper at the Dawn of Time, features an especially large secret project. And it's entirely likely that it was Richard Halliburton's Complete Book of Marvels (1941) that seeded my interest in huge engineering projects.
 
Note: All of the below text summarizes the sort of "giant secret project" that I long wanted to create. Of course, that project may serve its vital function in the book—but it was also created so that I could visit it!  However, ironically, the large facility at which Quatermain and Hans are detained for weeks on the west coast of Africa, while it is the control center of the project, it is only the merest tip of something so astoundingly immense that it can only be inferred in the course of the story. This blog post, then, actually gives me the opportunity, finally, to in fact and in toto describe the original real projects that inspired my story and which I emulate in my story, at least in terms of pure immensity of infrastructure. In the story itself, there is no practical way to describe any of this other than, as I say, infer its enormous existence through footnotes and the like. Also, readers of this blog will take away some awareness of the astonishing nature of the hubris involved in building the telescope and of the almost unfathomable degree of irony with which the novel concludes.

Giant projects, of course, have been around since the advent of humans, everything from Stonehenge through the Apollo Project to send humans to the moon.  In between was the construction of the Panama Canal, America’s Transcontinental Railroad, the Suez Canal, the Great Eastern, Hoover Dam, and countless other projects, both exotic and prosaic, old and new, on virtually every continent that pop up at the simplest query of any Internet search engine. There is something inherently romantic about the ability of humans to organize and pursue such enormous projects to completion. But, to the best of my knowledge, none of these was secret, and most took a considerable amount of time.

              ..........Click on these images to enlarge.
Two views of the plutonium plant in Hanford, 
Washington, with a workforce of 45,000.
Some housing for Hanford's workforce.
The altered priorities of war, however, change everything, including the necessity of many activities being prosecuted with rapidity and in secret. That said, it may or may not be common knowledge that the Manhattan Project, the U.S.’s Second World War bid to crash-build an atomic weapon, probably holds the record for the most vast, most secret, most vital, fastest engineering project in all human history. On September 17, 1942, U.S. Army General Leslie Groves was ordered to build an atomic bomb before the Nazis did. At that moment in time, all that existed was a growing palpable excitement as physicists learned of the potential of the atom, lots of equations (most derived from Einstein's E=mc2), much concerned extrapolation about how far along their German colleagues were, and a few experiments done in university labs. Since our best intelligence at the time showed that Hitler was well ahead of us, Groves was given a blank check with the entire unquestioned power, wealth, and resources of the USA at his disposal and, for all practical purposes, at his informed whim. It turns out that physicists in those days were an undisciplined lot, so one of the first things Groves did was install Robert Oppenhiemer to keep the scientists focused—easier said than done, as a good many of them were Nobel Prize winners!

The Uranium 235 plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee,
 with a workforce of 24,000.
Housing for some of Oakridge's workforce.
Two years and ten months later, on July 16, 1945, the Trinity bomb detonated in New Mexico. In between, there had sprung into being—literally from nothing, from an arid wilderness, a woodland valley, and a desert plateau, respectively—the plutonium plant in Hanford, Washington, with a workforce of 45,000; the Uranium 235 plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, with a workforce of 24,000; and the bomb development facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico, with tens of thousands more. To me this is living proof that humans can do anything once they set their minds to it.
The road to Los Alamos.
At the end of the road.
Thus, when I began what would become Book 3, The Sussex Beekeeper at the Dawn of Time, I needed Quatermain to stumble onto a super secret project something like the Manhattan Project in Africa. When I got through appending some of my other interests to this core concept, what resulted was the building on two continents in less than two years time of a giant way-before-its-time telescope for reasons transcending mere astronomy. 
 .
The telescope that Quatermain and Hans, his Hottentot (now termed “Khoisan”) companion since childhood, discover in 1873 is a vast world-girdling interferometer radio telescope that was built under the auspices of Pope Pius IX by James Maxwell, considered the greatest scientist then alive, and Impey Barbicane, the genius engineer who built the mammoth cannon that sent a projectile to the moon a decade earlier as described in Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon

Click image to enlarge and enhance.
Drawing by Elizabeth Davies
(Foreground) One of the four gargantuan bowls that comprise the telescope.  Note the four full factories along the circumference and the two locomotives on the far left. (Background) The distant second bowl of exactly the same character and proportions. These two were built on the west coat of Africa on the border of Liberia and Sierra Leone. Two more identical bowls were simultaneously being built on the west coast of South America along the coast of Ecuador. The concept of these bowls for use in radio astronomy was later rediscovered and used to construct the far smaller Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico (below right).


Arecibo Observatory, Puerto Rico
These three conceived of, designed, and built the telescope to “listen in” on the still-dying nova that was presumed to be the Star of Bethlehem and that has long faded from sight in the constellation of Aquila. They coordinated the efforts of more than 100,000 scientists, technicians, and laborers on the west coasts of both Africa and South America, which efforts included the mining and smelting of unthinkable quantities of silver ore. 

Of course, this whole gargantuan enterprise required prodigious amounts of power, and again these passionate masterminds conceived and contrived the damming of rivers in mountain valleys on both continents, as well as inventing and building two unprecedented 300-mile-long gravity-powered aqueducts and undreamt-of hydroelectric plants that, again, would not see the light of another day until October 1934 when the City of San Francisco's mammoth Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct System became operational. 

 Click on image to enlarge.

(Top left) Hetch Hetchy Valley before the Tuolumne River was dammed (landscape painting in the style of Alfred Bierstadt, artist unknown). (Bottom left) Hetch Hetchy Reservoir today. (Top right) O'Shaughnessy Dam, which blocked the river and created the reservoir. (Middle right) The water’s long journey from the reservoir to San Francisco is almost entirely downhill, providing the energy to run the generators (top inset) that create electricity that is transmitted to the city through these power lines that cross much of the state (bottom inset). (Bottom right) The journey across the state as shown here was preceded in 1873 by equivalent mega engineering projects on the west coasts of Africa and South America. Special photo juxtapositions by Thomas Kent Miller; copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.


Before then it was necessary for San Francisco (as our telescope team had already equivalently accomplished twice over in 1873!) to dam the Tuolumne River in the Hetch Hetchy Valley in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, thereby diverting and transporting the river's fresh clean drinking water (which I happily drank for the first 40 years of my life from the local catch reservoir named Crystal Springs!), as well as transmitting the resultant electricity to power the city, clear across the breadth of the state of California. The difference here is that the telescope builders constructed their electricity generating plants, along with the concomitant construction of an unending array of towers to transport the electricity hundreds of miles, for the sole purpose of collecting electricity to power its super-telescope. The water being of little use to them, they simply let it pour into the sea.  

Drawing by Elizabeth Davies
Oh ... BTW, there were also a couple of high-speed submarines built for the project so that the two facilities on two continents could rapidly communicate, before the first Africa-to-South America telegraph cable was finally laid on the Atlantic Ocean just in time to turn on the telescope. But the subs are a whole 'nother story.


Formal Notice: All images, quotations, and video/audio clips used in this blog and in its individual posts are used either with permissions from the copyright holders or through exercise of the doctrine of Fair Use as described in U.S. copyright law, or are in the public domain. If any true copyright holder (whether person[s] or organization) wishes an image or quotation or clip to be removed from this blog and/or its individual posts, please send a note with a clear request and explanation to eely84232@mypacks.net and your request will be gladly complied with as quickly as practical.


Tuesday, August 22, 2017

11: P.S. to Post 10—The Sussex Beekeeper's Take on the Message to Hans


Don’t take my word on anything I suggest in Post 10; here are some thoughts on the same matter in the actual words of a certain “Sussex Beekeeper” that were transcribed in 1906 into the margins of Lady Luna Holmes Ragnall's 1884 diary, which came into my hands by a most circuitous and convoluted path: 

The Sussex Beekeeper's words:   “Having just
read the interesting new paper by a certain A. Einstein and now Quatermain’s memoir with Hans’ mentioning eclipses brings to mind certain matters that had once piqued my interest concurrent with my interest in the Cornish and Chaldean languages, both preoccupations of which came to a head during the excursion W and I took onto the Cornish moors, but ultimately came to naught as the distractions at that time were piling one onto another. 

"The region where we were staying was one of those Celtic lands that are dotted with stone monuments and rings that had in centuries or millennia past sprung up all over that charming land. I was then just beginning to see a glimmer of purpose in the erections that [possibly] dealt with eclipses, a purpose that stimulated me to venture down avenues of which I’d heretofore paid little attention. In connection with the longitude and latitude of these constructions, I couldn’t help but notice that on or near December 21 and June 21 certain of the stones lined up in thought-provoking ways. This led me later to peruse all manner of almanacs and volumes in the British Library, and certain facts took shape that directly pertained to the stones. 

"For one thing, [various] eclipses of the sun occur roughly every 18 months in some part of our world. Naturally these experiences affect humans of all walks of life, often by exciting some of the more primitive emotions such as fear and awe. This reaction is partly a consequence of a remarkable coincidence. The diameter of the moon happens to be 1/400 of the diameter of the sun. But the moon’s proximity to the earth is 1/400 of the earth’s distance to the sun. The result of this, during a [total] solar eclipse, is that the disc of the moon perfectly covers the disc of the sun—causing any number of atmospheric effects: strange glowings in the resultant darkness, cold, wind, and so on. 

"What must stone-age man have thought of this extraordinary intrusion? Furthermore, I concluded then (an opinion that hasn’t changed) that Stonehenge and its brethren were built and conceived as instruments with the primary purpose of predicting the occurrence of eclipses. The builders of these ancient observatories most certainly made all their calculations under the assumption that both the sun and moon revolved around the earth as even I would have assumed had not W set me straight on the matter! This is only a natural conclusion because, for all major purposes, the sun and moon do appear to behave in just that fashion. 

"Now it happens that one of those obvious facts of life that most people entirely take for granted, never thinking of, is the equivalent sizes of the sun and moon! Nevertheless, this illusion of apparent equivalence of size owes nothing to physical or universal laws; there is no simple definable, materialistic explanation for the relative placements of the sun and moon—no discernible cause. It is merely a coincidence! Yet, it is just this coincidence that causes such an awesome eerie spectacle that stone-age man was inspired to engineer and build their vast calculators.

Photo by John Johnson. Copyright © John Johnson.
"Considering the incalculable import that the equivalent solar-lunar magnitudes have had on our Western culture and civilization, it would be ludicrous to deny that this exceptional coincidence has meaning! One need only to look at the ratio of measurements to become aware of the remarkable relationship that presumably blind chance has provided:

       Sun’s Diameter               :          Moon’s Diameter
Sun’s Distance from Earth        Moon’s Distance from Earth

      865,400 Miles                :                  2,160 Miles 
   92,956,500 Miles                              239,000 Miles

           .0090                          :                     .0090

In other words, a pretty damn peculiar one to one ratio! Hans’ mysterious voice seemed to know what it was talking about? I wonder!”


Formal Notice: All images, quotations, and video/audio clips used in this blog and in its individual posts are used either with permissions from the copyright holders or through exercise of the doctrine of Fair Use as described in U.S. copyright law, or are in the public domain. If any true copyright holder (whether person[s] or organization) wishes an image or quotation or clip to be removed from this blog and/or its individual posts, please send a note with a clear request and explanation to eely84232@mypacks.net and your request will be gladly complied with as quickly as practical.

10: The August 21, 2017 Solar Eclipse & The Sussex Beekeeper at the Dawn of Time

The occurrence of our recent total solar eclipse (the real deal pictured below) with all the attendant excitement reminds me of the theme of The Sussex Beekeeper at the Dawn of Time, Book 3 of MX's "Holmes Behind the Veil" series. The whole point of the book, indeed at the very heart of the book, is an analysis by Sherlock Holmes of the meaning of total solar eclipses. What follows are, first, a few items that support my hypothesis dealing with solar and lunar matters, and, second, a dramatic scenario from the book that is intended to demonstrate Sherlock Holmes' hypothesis along with his reasoning [found in Post 11] that supports his conclusions .

Photo by John Johnson/copyright © 2017 by John Johnson.
Recall that in 1965 Gerald S. Hawkins published his book titled Stonehenge Decoded, and in 1972 renowned cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle published From Stonehenge to Modern Cosmology.

Hawkins used science, mathematics, and archeology to determine that the stones of Stonehenge are configured in a manner that could allow its designers to determine the occurrence of future solar eclipses. In other words, Hawkins strongly suspected that Stonehenge was built to be an observatory to keep track of the movements of the sun and moon for the principal purpose of knowing—knowing, not predicting—when solar eclipses would occur.

Hoyle used the same disciplines to build on Hawkins’ work by proposing scenarios, from a cosmologist’s view, illustrating why it might have been so important 5 thousand years ago to determine the occurrence of solar eclipses. Aside from the obvious fear factor, he pointed out the existence of nodes (invisible moving points in the sky), the substance and awareness of which the designers of Stonehenge would have positively needed to know and incorporate into their calculations for accuracy's sake when aligning their observatory’s titan stone blocks.

All this is important to the theme of The Sussex Beekeeper at the Dawn of Time because literature’s prototype rugged African explorer Allan Quatermain and Hans, his Hottentot (now termed “Khoisan”) companion since childhood, stumble upon in 1873 a vast secret way-before-its-time interferometer radio telescope that was built in months by Pope Pius IX, scientist James Maxwell, and engineer Impey Barbicane to “listen in” on a dying nova in the constellation of Aquila (see Post No. 12 for more of this plot point's backstory).

Despite all that expertise, time and money, the telescope utterly fails in its purpose. Instead it accidentally tunes into the Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR) left over from the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago. But the sounds of static, hissing, and popping heard through the the telescope's laboratory equipment mean nothing to those great minds of 1873, and the enterprise was deemed an irrevocable failure, resulting in the immediate destruction of the telescope and its infrastructure. [Note that the CBR was rediscovered, also accidentally, in the 1960s by Wilson and Penzias, which earned them the Nobel Prize in Physics.]


 
Until 2016, this was the only known drawing of Hans, by Hookway Cowles for the 1958 Macdonald reprint of The Ivory Child. Apparently, artists utterly ignored the character during his original appearances in six H. Rider Haggard novels from 1912 to 1926.


Yet, from a different perspective, the radio telescope functioned perfectly. It so happens that the static-like sound that was heard over the equipment in the telescope’s laboratory had elements distinctly similar to Hans’ native click language Khoi (which some etymologists conclude is not far removed from the original language spoken by early humans tens of thousands of years ago). Thus it happens that Hans alone hears and understands a message sent from the dawn of the universe some 14 billion years ago and made audible by this titanic “failed” telescope.

Through this fiction and literary device, the novel proposes that all this effort of building the telescope and its failure were intended by the "attentive, deliberate consciousness 'behind the veil'" that I espouse in my five principles (see  Principle 4: Elfin Coincidence) in order to deliver that message to Hans, who would of course be in the right place at the right time, and that the message buried in the CBR, which was vital enough to go to all this trouble, can be summarized as follows:

(1)  Total solar eclipses are, of course, the consequence of the earth's moon and the sun being coincidentally exactly the same relative sizes in our skies, and the probability of such an exact duplication in sizes—given their totally separate and unrelated diameters and distances from the earth—is exceedingly, even awesomely, remote in astronomical terms.*

(2)  And this circumstance of coincident identical relative sizes of the sun and moon is a long-standing fact of terrestrial reality due to that "attentive, deliberate consciousness 'behind the veil'" beginning the task 4-5 billion years ago, deliberately setting things up so that those two orbs would, after a very long while, eventually be seen to march across our skies by our remote ancestors, with the moon incredibly but regularly and perfectly blotting out the sun as a consequence….

(3)  In order to scare early Homo sapiens half to death to the extent that they strove to learn more about these terrifying occurrences through problem-solving….

(4)  Which resulted in the conception of and the building of Stonehenge and similar prehistoric observatories and calculators over much of the world….

(Counter clockwise from top) Stonehenge as it appears today (wikipedia/searchoflife.com) plus two artists' conceptions of how it may have looked 4.5 thousand years ago. (stone-circles.org.uk/ancient-origins.net)  Click on the image to enlarge. 
(5)  Which in turn further resulted in Homo sapiens developing cognitive skills that have held us in good stead ever since.

Naturally, for any of this to “work” as I’ve outlined, an "attentive, deliberate consciousness 'behind the veil'" must be presupposed.

All of the above is meant to share my simple for-me incontestable awareness that while the fabric of the enormous universe with all its stars and galaxies and enormous spaces seems to be materially devoid of consciousness, nonetheless there is something, somehow, somewhere that is able to take the time out of its busy schedule to both prod me to return to school [see blog post 4] and to situate the sun and moon in such a way as to kick start human intellectual and cultural development. I am calling that “something, somehow, somewhere”  an “attentive, deliberate consciousness 'behind the veil'” for want of anything better for the time being.

My novel is complex and convoluted and is intended to stimulate thinking in many arenas, but the concepts enumerated above are always at the foundation of my story, at the root of my privileged discovery of yet another previously unknown and exciting aspect of the Great Detective's life. 

I conclude this article by giving the father of "ratiocination," Edgar Allan Poe, the last word, an observation that touches on all of the above and also the postscript remarks [see below] by the Sussex Beekeeper in equal measure:

"There are few persons, even amongst the calmest thinkers, who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling half-credence in the supernatural, by coincidences of so seemingly marvellous a character that, as mere coincidences, the intellect has been unable to receive them." 
—“The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”

[Yet ordinarily, modern inhabitants of this earth never consider this coincidence, always and utterly taking for granted the sun and moon and their movements, which is a foible or quality of modern life that mystery author G.K. Chesterton neatly sums up: "There is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss." I think we can accept as a given that the people of Stonehenge and those that preceded that structure by tens of thousands of years were very aware of the movements of the sun, moon, and stars because, at the very least, the firmament constituted their ceiling, but also because their prehistoric situations demanded that they stay attuned to conditions that we are never aware of, never think about, and utterly take for granted.]
The End 
Of this blog post’s essay. 



There is, however, a postscript from the Sussex Beekeeper himself! Just click here or on the text below to read the Beekeeper's views.




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