I’m sure you’ll agree that no scientific advance in history has taken place without questioning previous achievements, retaining what was accurate and rejecting what was false.
Science, the real thing, can only be built by constantly questioning what we have taken for granted, in order to explain the world around us with ever greater truth.
The driving force of true science is therefore a constant act of humility.
Pride makes him seize up and cling to hackneyed theses.
It’s a fact that every scientific breakthrough in our understanding of the world has almost always been accompanied by strong opposition from the scientific world in power at the time, for the simple and unfortunate reason that it challenged their authority, their power and their glory.
It’s the table of this little world that we’ll have to overturn together.
Jn this case, too, I could content myself with a single, well-known phrase:
“Science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul”.
Simply, with the posthumous permission of Rabelais, its author, I would like to change it to :
“Science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul, then science.
In fact, both are linked.
Perhaps you doubt that corporatism with the wrong mentality is destructive to science itself?
I know what you mean, so let’s take a look back at some of the reactions of the scientific world to the emergence of major discoveries by some of history’s greatest geniuses:
The reaction of scientific corporatism to new discoveries
Champollion
The essays in Volume 2 will deal extensively with Sumerian and Egyptian linguistics and etymology, since the analysis of these ancient languages is the foundation that has enabled me to decipher the entire symbolic world.
So, let’s take the example of Champollion and his relationship with the scientific world around him?
I found the biography of his life very instructive.
Today, he’s an icon for having been the first to decipher hieroglyphics.
And yet… has it always been this way?
Oh no, not at all!
Even though he obtained important positions very early on, his work was long derided by the experts who had preceded him in this field of analysis.
Had it not been for the support of his brother and a few men who believed in him and his work, he would probably not have achieved his now famous result.
And from the very beginning of his work, what was his stance and his observations in the face of the contemptuous corporatism of the experts of his time? :
Remember what he said when he delivered the inaugural lesson of his course:
“the natural tendency of the human mind is to judge events by their results. [menant] to praise a culpable enterprise […] crowned with success. […] This way of assessing the facts is a natural consequence of that cowardly and criminal complacency born of the forgetfulness of principles, which finds justice where it sees triumph. This servility has existed in all times and places…”.
What was he denouncing when he said this? Fundamentally, let those in the know, like the masses who follow them, judge a thought to be true not because it is, but because it enjoys worldly glory in the present.
Well, as for us, thanks to this series and this book, we’re going to follow in his footsteps, leaving behind the outdated flowerbeds of false pretenses.
We are going to follow in the footsteps of this illustrious spirit and those like him, and adopt the same posture, refusing the hegemony of imposture.
For we are going to lift the veil on the deepest mysteries of ancient Egypt, ancient Sumer and far beyond, and we’re going to do so with the help of linguistic science, basing our analysis of sacred symbolism on Sumerian and thus also on hieroglyphs, which obviously owe him a great deal.[1].
I’m convinced, moreover, that a mind as brilliant as his must certainly have seen, at least in part, what will be explained throughout this series of essays, for even if he lacked knowledge of Sumerian, his in-depth knowledge of hieroglyphics (as indeed of many other ancient languages) had certainly made him realize that beyond the deciphering of the written hieroglyphic language lay another dimension, sacred, symbolic, secret, for which the hieroglyphic language held (at least in part) the keys to its deciphering and understanding.
I base my opinion on his own words to his brother when, on a mission to Egypt from 1828 to 1829, he wrote to him:
« Thrown into the midst of Egypt’s monuments six months ago, I’m frightened by what I’m reading even more fluently than I dared imagine. JI have results (this between us) which are extremely embarrassing in many respects, and which will have to be kept under wraps”.
What had he discovered? Clearly, it wasn’t simply a matter of deciphering hieroglyphics, as he was already fluent in them.
No.
He had discovered something else, which this time must have touched on something deeper, the underlying essence conveyed by this language, teachings, a doctrine which, if it had been revealed, could have endangered him, as it also apparently touched on major interests of the society of his time, to the extent that he told his brother that this information should have been held in the strictest confidence. under the bushel.
But he died back in Paris just 3 years later…
As far as I’m concerned, I think the time has come to throw this information into the light, to let you read it with both eyes wide open, to say yes, no more and no less than he could have said if he’d had the time, if he’d also had the knowledge of Sumerian.
Like him, and like his time, we too will have to be prepared to face the wrath of many institutions, especially secular, scientific (but also religious) ones, which will see the revelation of these lines as a profound and existential threat, for they will call into question their interests, they will make wobbly their thrones founded on the knowledge they have monopolized to make them one-eyed kings in the kingdom of the blind, who, instead of helping them, have been cackling for ages over the masses’ ignorance of fundamental truths.
Copernic
Take the case of Copernicus, too.
Today, he is celebrated and recognized for having taken on board the ancient theories of the Greeks (and even the Latins).[2] and the Arabs and Persians[3]) of heliocentrism[4] (i.e. the fact that the Earth rotates around the Sun, that the Earth also rotates on itself[5]) and to have been the first to establish a complete system in 1530[6].
He did so in opposition to the predominant model of the time, that of Aristotle’s geocentric system of the 4th century B.C., according to which the entire universe revolved around the Earth at its center, and which had Ptolemy’s 2nd-century system for describing the movement of the stars.
Now, notice the obstacles he and his discovery faced:
It is often believed that the Church was his greatest adversary, but let’s at least acknowledge that, on this point, this is undoubtedly a mistake, for between the final drafting of his manuscript in 1530 and its printing on the day of his death in 1543, it must be admitted that his work was well received by the Church and the Pope of the time.[7].
In fact, the church never bothered him during his lifetime.
By his own admission, Copernicus kept his thoughts to himself for 36 years, probably more out of scientific rigor than any awareness of the dangers of publication. For Copernicus, in carrying out the observations and calculations that were to confirm his system, encountered insurmountable difficulties. Like all his predecessors, he had an initial weakness for uniform circular motion, but planetary motions are actually slightly elliptical. It was Kepler who made this discovery almost a century later (1609), thanks to Copernicus’ system. In the meantime, he never managed to perfectly reconcile reality with the false idea of circular motion.
Thus, Copernicus did not hold back publication of his work for fear of incurring the wrath of the Church.
In fact, he had other equally dangerous lightning bolts to watch out for.
The fact is, while 16th-century researchers and scientists accepted certain elements of the theory, they rejected the principle of heliocentrism.
Clearly, this new theory of the world was far from unanimous, as it ran counter to a tradition of thought among “scholars” dating back more than 2,000 years, and thus offended the common sense of the people who were subject to this belief.
When we speak of “scholars” here, we’re not just talking about church people.
For it was not until the end of the 17th and 18th centuries[8] for Europe’s scholarly community to recognize the validity of this (re)discovery, and the 18th and 19th centuries[9] for its recognition by the Church.
After all, it took three centuries for the scientific community to admit it was wrong!
Four for the Church.
Three centuries of a struggle for influence at the frontiers of academia, politics and religion.
But then the question arises: who were his most virulent detractors after his death?
The “men of science” or the Church?
Let’s take a look at who really started the hostilities against his new theory next…
Galileo
Galileo was convinced of the validity of Copernicus’ thesis, even if he didn’t immediately have formal proof.
Having perfected his astronomical telescope by observing the Moon’s phases, Galileo discovered, a few months after Thomas Harriot, that the Moon was not as perfect as Aristotelian theory would have it.
On January 7, 1610, Galileo made a breakthrough: he noticed three small stars next to Jupiter. After a few nights of observation, he discovered that there was a fourth, and that they accompanied the planet: Jupiter’s visible satellites.
This observation is fundamental, demonstrating for the first time that not all celestial bodies revolve around the Earth at the center of the universe.
This is obviously a fatal blow to the Aristotelians and their geocentric thesis.
It’s worth noting that 3 months later, he was a household name among the Italian people and courts,[10] but not only: he was also invited by Cardinal Maffeo Barberini (the future Pope Urban VIII) to present his discoveries at the Pontifical College in Rome and at the young Academy of the Lynceans. Galileo stayed in the pontifical capital for a full month, during which time he received such honors that he became the 6th member of the Academy, and all his works from that date onwards bore the Academy’s lynx on the frontispiece.
Famous with the people, the Italian courts and recognized by the Church…
Clearly, none of them were his real enemies.
But then, who?
The fact is, it was the proponents of geocentric theory who became Galileo’s bitter enemies; the attacks against him having begun as soon as the Sidereus Nuncius appeared.
They can’t afford to lose face, and don’t want to see their beliefs called into question.
But who are the supporters of the geocentric theory? They are neither more nor less than the men of science of the time, the “scientific scholars” of the day.
They’re his enemies.
Yes, you read that right, “men of science”.
For Galileo calls into question the basis of their beliefs, their authority, their glory, their pulpit, their social position, let’s say, their pittance.
It’s also interesting to read that Galileo also opposed them on method. Galileo’s methods were based on observation and experience, not on the authority of the proponents of geocentric theories who relied on the prestige of Aristotle.
With these “men of science”, it was: ” believe me, it’s true because I’m telling you, because I’m a recognized scholar. », or « because I recommend myself to a scholar more important than myself (in this case), Aristotle ».
And there, as they draped themselves haughtily in their long, luminous garments, everyone had to bow before them, looking at each other’s feet.
It was already the toga/white coat effect…
With Galileo, on the other hand, it’s simply: “This is the conclusion to which observation of the facts leads us.
It’s the right of Reason against the law of man’s ego, of reflection and questioning against the diploma.
It’s particularly enlightening to note that from the moment the men of science decide to attack Galileo, they will use one of the most vile means to silence him, namely to find an axis through which he can be judged a heretic by the Church, so that he can be put to death.
Indeed, while the Church welcomed Galileo and considered his heliocentric conception an attractive theory, Aristotle’s geocentric theory remained part of its dogma, by virtue of his (unfortunately still very) misinterpretation of certain biblical texts.
Although Cardinal Barberini and Rome had given him an excellent welcome, they did so on the basis of a principle of equivalence of hypotheses, whereby Galileo’s theory was to remain and be presented as a theory.
Galileo’s entire threat was to make him say that his theory was not a theory, but the only scientific truth, and that it should prevail over the Bible, which, according to them and the Church, taught geocentrism.
To this end, the men of science sought to pit the Dominicans and Jesuits against him, so that they would attack Galileo from the angle of religious erethism.
This angle of attack is eminently perverse, since it puts Galileo’s friends within the Church in a position of porta-faux, leading them to demand that he admit that his conclusions are only a new theory and not an established fact, in which case, despite their friendship, they will be obliged to take drastic measures against him.[11].
In his letter of 1615 to Christine de Lorraine, who was concerned about his possible religious heresy, Galileo rightly explained that there was no fundamental problem between his vision of the physical world and the Bible, but that the problem lay in the misinterpretation of the Bible by those who claimed to know it.
So he wrote to her: “If it happens that the authority of the Holy Scriptures appears in opposition to a manifest and certain reasonthis means that he who interprets Scripture does not understand it properly. It is not the meaning of Scripture that is opposed to the truth, but the meaning he wanted to give it; what is opposed to Scripture is not what is in it, but what he himself put in it, believing it to be his meaning”.
In this letter, Galileo reminds him that the heliocentric idea is not in itself new, since many ancient scientists and philosophers had asserted that the Sun was immobile and the Earth mobile, including Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, Heraclitus of Pontus, Philolaos, Plato’s master, Plato himself, Aristarchus of Samos, Hicetas and others, and that Seneca had said that it would be necessary to study to find out whether the Earth or the Sun was moving.
Galileo also recalls the stages of his discoveries and the opposition they provoked from teachers who based their teaching on Aristotelian knowledge.
These various points clearly show that the problem for Galileo did not stem from the Bible, nor from true science, which by its very nature had already addressed this question. Rather, it stemmed from the misinterpretation of the clerics of his day, who claimed to have correctly interpreted the Bible, and also from the bad faith of the scientists of his day, who opposed him out of pure dogmatism and corporatism, and not out of a rigorous scientific spirit.
Galileo refused to compromise, refusing to present his thesis as a hypothesis, inferior and subordinate to the prevailing geocentrism, while continuing to assert his adherence to Copernicus’ astronomy.
This led to the censorship of his work, ratified on February 25 and 26, 1616 by the Inquisition and Pope Paul V.
And it was because of this censorship of Galileo’s thesis, which placed his work within the framework of Copernicus’ worldview, that Copernicus’ landmark book, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, was also placed on the Catholic Church’s index of prohibited books (it remained so until 1835) unless it was corrected, i.e. the ten passages affirming the reality of the heliocentric model were removed or rewritten.
Although Galileo remained a fervent defender of the Copernican theory, despite this blacklisting, he was not personally harassed and was asked to teach his thesis as a hypothesis.
Later, he was again attacked by Jesuits, notably Orazio Grassi, but Galileo remained in favor with the new pope, his friend Cardinal Barberini, who encouraged him to publish Il Saggiatore (“The Essayist”), a work on atomistic philosophy that ridiculed (atomized!) Grassi.
He became the standard-bearer for Roman intellectual circles rebelling against the intellectual and scientific conformism imposed by the Jesuits.
It’s worth noting that, in the end, what sounded Galileo’s death knell and led him, in the eyes of the masses and posterity, to disavow his work and his deeply held convictions was, without a shadow of a doubt… his own presumption.
Indeed, commissioned in 1620 by his new friend Pope Urban VIII to write a Dialogue sur les deux grands systèmes du monde (Dialogue on the two great systems of the world), a work that was to present in a neutral manner the advantages and disadvantages of Ptolemy’s system and Copernicus’ system, Galileo, when he published it in 1632, Not only did he ostensibly mock Ptolemy’s geocentrism, mocking the proponents of geocentrism by portraying them as a simpleton character, the aptly named Simplicio, not only did he write in Italian rather than Latin in order to reach the widest possible audience, but he also, and above all, committed the blunder of misleading the Church by tricking it into granting him the imprimatur. In fact, since the pope trusted him, he obtained his preface and conclusion even before he had written the text.
Knowing that he was protected by Pope Urban VIII and the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand II de’ Medici, grandson of Christine de Lorraine, undoubtedly contributed to his feeling of impunity.
However, this attempt to force his way through was to make him unnecessarily vulnerable to the attacks of his enemies, whose anger was unleashed by Galileo’s celebrity, and caused him to lose some of the support he had previously enjoyed from Pope Urban VIII, who, feeling doubly betrayed by the misuse of his imprimatur and Galileo’s one-sided presentation of the two theories he had expressly asked him to be neutral, between the misuse of his imprimatur and Galileo’s one-sided presentation of the two theories he had expressly asked him to be neutral, could not but lead him to bring his friend Galileo before the commission of judges of the Holy Office in order to have him recant and have his latest work banned.
Even if Galileo complied, we can imagine the conversation between him and Urban VIII behind the scenes, with the latter pledging to commute his prison sentence if he would make a gesture of goodwill and publicly (but not personally and inwardly) disavow his work.
After his denial, the Pope immediately commuted Galileo’s sentence to house arrest. He has never been to prison, and continues to receive income from two ecclesiastical benefices granted to him by the Sovereign Pontiff. As for the second sanction, the recitation of the penitential psalms once a week for a year, it will be carried out by his Carmelite nun daughter…
So what can we learn from Galileo’s life story? Who were his greatest enemies?
What conclusion have you reached?
- the “men of science” of his time and…
- another man of science, knowing himself and his own presumption?!
What should we conclude about scientists [12] of our time ?
Do you believe that they have fundamentally, morally changed and become much better than those of past generations?
I let you think about the answer.
Newton
In line with the illustrious names we’ve just listed, illustrious both for their discoveries and for illustrating the similarly psychorigid and timeless dogmatism of the scientific academic world they had to face, let’s add the name of Newton.
Newton based his discoveries on the stones laid before him by Copernicus:
Copernicus’ system made it possible to measure the distances of each planet from the Sun, which was impossible in the Aristotelian geocentric system.
This would later enable Johannes Kepler to calculate the trajectories of these stars, and establish the laws of motion in the Solar System, which Isaac Newton would later use as the basis for his theory of gravity.
At the age of 29, he joined London’s Royal Society, where he met the influential Robert Boyle. He succeeded in perfecting a telescope with a spherical mirror free of chromatic aberration. The following year, he decided to widely publicize his work on light, making him famous in one fell swoop.
But notice what happens then: This celebrity made his discoveries the subject of much controversy and quarrelling, which he abhorred:
Robert Hooke, considered an expert in optics (in 1673, he built the telescope designed by James Gregory in 1663), expressed his interest, but fiercely criticized the treatise, pointing out the inadequacy of the demonstration. Newton responded with fury, claiming that Hooke had understood nothing of his work and that it was impossible for him to have reproduced his experiment in such a short time. It was a sure thing, and Hooke would later admit to him that he had spent only a few hours studying the article. (sic!!). The two men remained lifelong enemies. But Hooke was not alone in his criticism. Christian Huygens first praises his theory before finding a few flaws. But perhaps his most bitter dispute was with the English Jesuit Francis Hall.
So what is the real nature of the objectivity of his peers, studying the same field as him, in the scientific community of the time?
It’s close to zero, isn’t it?
And what are the consequences for Newton of all this jealousy and fruitless confrontation with his peers?
Tired of objections that took away his most precious possession (his study time), Newton withdrew from all public debate.
We also note that in 1677, the death of his teacher and mentor Isaac Barrow, that of his friend Henry Oldenburg (his only link with the scientific community) and the loss of all his work on color in the fire in his apartments severely affected him for several months. It would be twenty-five years before he published his theory of light again.
Still, it is extremely paradoxical to read and observe that while Newton is today considered one of the greatest geniuses and scientists in human history, At the same time, his link with the scientific community proved to be very tenuous during his lifetime, materializing only through his teacher and Henry Oldenburg, who officiated as a diplomat (and not a scientist) in his capacity as Secretary of the Royal Society, seeking to appease the ongoing ego-tensions between scientists:
Oldenburg established a vast network of scientific contacts throughout Europe, with whom he maintained regular correspondence. Unaffected by the enmities that inevitably arise behind the scenes at the Academy, “…” he continues to use every means at his disposal to thwart censorship to facilitate communication between researchers, and to use his diplomatic skills to ease tensions and defuse quarrels between scholars.
Clearly, the air was quite unbreathable between scientists.
So, if we’re surprised by the lack of support Newton received, we might say that he has a tormented, complex personality. He was reluctant to communicate his work, often publishing it several years after completion. He tends to withdraw into himself, lives alone and is a workaholic. Indeed, he sometimes forgets to sleep or eat. What’s more, his relationships with others are often problematic.
But that’s not enough to explain why he faces so much opposition and mistrust from his direct peers.
In fact, the one and only scientist who put his trust in Newton was Edmund Halley, an astronomer and engineer, who, by persuading Newton to share his conception of the Universe, put him on the map of scientific history.
In fact, it reads:
In 1687, with the financial support and encouragement of Edmond Halley, he published his major work: Philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica, (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy).
This work marks the beginning of the mathematization of physics.
Above all, he expounded his theory of universal attraction.
He established the three universal laws of motion, which remained unchanged and unimproved for over two centuries.
Isaac Newton was declared the “father of modern mechanics” thanks to the three laws of motion that bear his name and, stated as they are, are still taught today:
Inertia principle
Fundamental principle of dynamics
Principle of reciprocal actions
The simplicity and effectiveness of this theory had a powerful influence on other sciences in the 18th century, particularly the social sciences.
Now, once again, look at what happens after this entry into history:
At the time, however, while the book was well received in Britain, the reaction on the Continent was hostile.
Why this difference in reaction?
This strongly resembled a parochial quarrel between the European and English scientific communities, symptomatically illustrated by the controversy between the German Leibniz and the Englishman Newton over the paternity of infinitesimal calculus, a controversy that was settled in the latter’s favor by the Royal Academy (of which Newton had by then become president).
It has to be said, then, that while the minds may be extremely brilliant, the behavior and reactions are more akin to those of youngsters on a playground.
As for Newton’s recognition by his peers, it was eventually achieved, but it was clearly a long and arduous road.
What does all this tell us about the true objectivity of the scientific community?
I let you think about it
Report
For my part, I’ve only cited these few illustrious names here, but the list would undoubtedly be much longer of the great names, the truly scientific minds who had to fight against the established “scientific” establishment, in every way comparable to a sacred priesthood, to assert the merits of their new discoveries, threatening the professorships and privileges of their “superior peers”, who had to endure slander and vilification, sometimes for a lifetime, before finally gaining recognition, if not during their lifetime, at least during their death, and then… against all odds, erected into statues, exalted, elevated – without having asked for it – to the rank of luminaries or quasi-deities, in turn generating new waves of promotions of fervent priest-disciples whose thinking ends up becoming just as orthodox and uncompromising as that of their predecessors, The same people who, not so long ago, scoffed at, reviled and banished the originality of their master’s vision from the very same benches, before it became the new master theory of the surrounding universe.
And so it goes on, perpetuating the infernal vicious cycle of rejection of novelty and discovery, which, carried away by the kinetic energy of its own pride, crushes any hint of the emergence of Truth.
Fortunately, when common sense finally prevails, this infernal machinery grinds to a halt, allowing a few jolts of progress.
So far, I’ve cited examples of scientists who have had great difficulty in having the conclusions of their work accepted by their peers, which in itself attests to the monolithism of the scientific community, its obtuse corporatism often preventing it from analyzing the work of their colleagues with real objectivity.
I’d now like to take another example, a counter-example, but just as revealing: the case of Einstein.
Indeed, I believe that his case illustrates another key factor to be taken into account in encouraging us to take a step back from the assertions of the scientific community.
Einstein
Einstein’s case is a counter-example to the previous ones, in that when his work was published, he was immediately recognized by his peers.
In his case, in fact, even if he initially toiled to develop his thought in parallel with his married life and his not very exciting work, we can’t say that he was rejected by the scientific community of his time!
Quite the contrary.
On the other hand, what I find particularly interesting in his case is the fact that, for all his genius, he let himself be carried away, deceived by a cognitive bias, that of giving priority to the conclusions of his own work over scientific reality.
Why is that?
You may remember the controversy that arose between him and Niels Borh, the quantum physicist of the time?
Let’s review the nature of their disagreement, why Einstein can be said to have been wrong, and how this teaches us that even the most brilliant human minds are subject to cognitive biases and can “err on the side of pride”.
The nature of the dispute
As to the nature of their dispute, it should first be said that Einstein was no stranger to quantum physics – indeed, the contribution of his own work to the theory was remarkable (such as his explanation of the photoelectric effect). He therefore fully understood the fundamental implications of the theory Niels Bohr was working on.
Basically, what bothered Einstein was the fact that his worldview, derived from his study of the physical world, was deterministic, whereas Bohr’s and the quantum world he studied was probabilistic.
On the one hand, an infinitely large universe governed by laws and extremely precise constants, so that each particle and its movements are clearly defined, and on the other, an infinitely small universe, its underlying universe, governed by laws so that everything is random, governed by probabilities.
The paradox is obvious. These two worlds seemed incompatible.
To resolve this incompatibility, Einstein fundamentally chose to give priority to the deterministic vision of the infinitely large over the infinitely small.
His conviction was that since quantum physics was defined as probabilistic, unlike the physical world of the infinitely large that he had studied and analyzed more, it was bound to be incomplete. According to him, there had to be hidden variables, as yet undiscovered, which once discovered would bend quantum physics to the laws of the physical world, which he considered superior.
It’s up to quantum physicists to find out.
Quantum physics, with its strange laws, was thus for him a physics that was still incomplete and unfinished, and as soon as it was, it would irremediably harmonize with the results of his work, which, according to him, had a universal transverse character.
The first head-on clash between Einstein and Bohr came in October 1927, when they met for the first time as guests at the fifth Solvay Congress. While Einstein defended the provisional nature of quantum theory, Bohr, on the other hand, considered it to be a completed theory. At one point, Einstein, exasperated, threw the famous “Gott würfelt nicht” (“God doesn’t play dice”) at Niels Bohr, to which Niels Bohr replied: “Who are you, Albert Einstein, to tell God what to do?[13] »
Clearly, Einstein did not accept that his vision could be challenged.
Let’s look at another moment that highlights Einstein’s cognitive bias.
That moment came in 1935, when he published the famous “EPR” article (named after its authors Einstein, Podolski and Rosen), in the American journal Physical Review, with the title “Can quantum physics be considered to give a complete description of physical reality?
Together with his two collaborators, Einstein set out a thought experiment which, without challenging the predictions of quantum mechanics, allowed him to question its completeness and, by the same token, Bohr’s interpretation of quantum physics. He imagines two particles from the same volume (i.e. intricate) moving in opposite directions. One of them is subject to a constraint that forces it to react in a certain way. According to the fundamental principles of quantum physics, if one of the two particles is subjected to a constraint to make it react in a certain way, the other particle, whatever the distance separating them, will behave in exactly the same way. If, for Einstein, this phenomenon of entanglement still seems acceptable in the world of the infinitely small, it is no longer acceptable in this context, where it means that a signal is transmitted faster than the speed of light, which contradicts his theory of special relativity.
Basically, Einstein is saying that, as demonstrated by his theory of special relativity, nothing can go faster than the speed of light. And because that’s the result he’s found, nothing can contradict it… so if two particles communicate instantaneously, even if they’re separated by an almost infinite distance, for him there’s something fishy going on.
For Einstein, this contradiction demonstrates that quantum physics is indeed an incomplete theory, and that there are hidden variables (or characteristics) in quantum particles yet to be discovered. Variables that have predetermined the reaction of the particles, leading future observers to believe that they are capable of interacting despite being separated by a great distance.
Bohr categorically refutes the notion of hidden variables. For him, there can be no “predetermination” of the physical characteristics of a quantum particle, since it is only when the experimenter makes a measurement on a particle that the value of one of its physical characteristics (position, momentum, spin in the case of quantum entanglement, etc.) can be known.
Einstein also believed that a particle can only react to its environment, its relatively close frame of reference, but from his point of view it was impossible for it to interact with a particle located at the other end of the universe.
Bohr counters Einstein’s conviction by arguing that his thought experiment makes no logical sense, since in quantum physics the two particles must be considered as an indissociable whole, or as a single phenomenon, situated in the context of the same set or frame of reference.
In fact, Einstein wants to continue believing that quantum particles evolve within the context of the laws of classical physics, whereas Bohr maintains that they evolve in another referent apart, a referent underlying the physical world, with its own mode of communication.[14].
Clearly, for all his genius, Einstein seemed to cling to his deterministic worldview.
For him, nothing can go faster than the speed of light.
And nothing can communicate instantaneously, separated by an almost infinite distance.
These are limits he has observed in the physical world, the object of his field of investigation, and which he believes must be imposed on everyone and every world, including the underlying quantum world.
He refuses to admit that a world can exist that defies the laws of the physical world he has discovered.
To demonstrate this, he is prepared to bend quantum physics rather than let its results impose themselves on him and modify his own global vision of things.
Why do scientists know today that Einstein was wrong?
It is now common knowledge, thanks to experiments carried out by Alain Aspect (the 2022 French Nobel Prize winner in physics) in the early 1980s, on Bell’s inequalities[15]inequalities that would still be true if Einstein had been right.
In the experiments, however, they were systematically violated.
This demonstrates the principle of non-locality: particles don’t just react to the constraints of their environment.
So Einstein was wrong.
But what does all this have to teach us about the need to stand back from the assertions of even the most brilliant scientists?
Well, it’s a fact that even the most brilliant minds can err on the side of pride, and make their view, the result of their work, prevail over the reality of the world, to the point of overlooking the reality of a whole other world!
So, if such a great genius as Einstein committed such a massive error, shouldn’t we be cautious when scientists assert truths that they present to us as proven and immutable?
So what are we forced to conclude?
The scientific community: a corporatism of lay priests
All this brings home the fact that, quite often, the world of science, contrary to the objective scientific approach it prides itself on and should defend, because it’s made up of humans prone to moral failings, often behaves more like a veritable circle of guilty religious priests protecting each other.
Admittedly, just as every religion usually protects its dogma with an “elite” of dedicated priests, so the world of science is criss-crossed with dogmas, each with its own chapel and column of priests, even if they don’t move around like clerics, dressed up to impress the people, but rather with their hair down or in cap and sneaker mode.
The problem, then, is not science, nor the true scientific approach, nor the extraordinary intelligence of the scientific community, but the simple fact that true science requires a humble approach which, unfortunately, most of the men who take it on do not adopt.
By draping themselves in a scientific veil, brandishing their academic credentials in the face of the world, they subject society to an imposing propaganda and impose their vision of the world on the people, sometimes even mocking those who believe, those who have faith in God, those who don’t see the world as they do.
Even though they themselves behave like priests!
And yet, scientism, which many people claim to believe in, was originally a pure act of religious faith, in the same way as belief in a Creator God… :
because scientism is an act of faith
Indeed, let’s think about it.
There is no denying, in science, the fundamental principle that “Every effect has a cause” or the fact that “The whole cannot come from nothing”.
Yet everyone agrees that our universe was born from an unimaginable source of energy.
The preferred option, in line with current models, is that our universe, its laws and its constants were concentrated (or have been concentrated) in an infinitesimal point, just before the big bang and its expansion-inflation.
The problem for everyone is: where does this energy source come from?
This last question, posed as it is, is in absolute terms, for everyone, an absolute Mystery.[16].
But the fact is that, necessarily, the Source of this colossal energy exists, otherwise our universe simply wouldn’t exist.
Now, what do we call believing in something that we don’t understand, that is an absolute Mystery for us, but which imposes itself on us?
If not “Faith”?
Whether the believer calls this source God or the Supreme Being, or the atheist calls it super-powerful Chance or, what do I know, Mother Nature, the one who does things so well, the fact is that both, at this T, the original moment of the world’s foundation, are exercising the strict, identical, equivalent act of faith in an original source of our universe.
It’s a fact that no one can deny.
That’s where it all starts.
The scientific community is therefore fundamentally religious.
She just doesn’t put her faith in the same entity as the believer.
But it’s not the object of the act of faith that makes religion, it’s the act of faith itself!
This fact, this unspoken fact – for it is never stated in this way – justifies the claim that the scientific community is a religious community.
This also explains, in part, the same deviations of its own priesthood in the self-management of its theories as those we observe elsewhere in the priesthoods of (False) religion, in all its multiple ramifications.
The equivalence between the two communities is not only apparent from the outset, but also at the end of the road, since, fundamentally, just as the Papacy proclaimed itself infallible and, among other things, erected geocentrism to the rank of absolute truth, only to swallow its arrogance and eat its hat 4 centuries later, so the modern Pope, Einstein, had he been alive, would have been just as likely to eat his when our Nobel Prize in Physics was published.
Deaf, the scientific community is also mute and blind
The scientific community’s deafness to novelty and its underlying reasons were discussed at length.
As for the fact that it is mute, mute on the reason for the origin of the universe and of man, it itself recognizes that this is not its purpose, its mission, which consists solely in explaining how the world works.
In doing so, she herself admits that she is only concerned with the how and not the why.
It is therefore silent on the subject.
As for the fact that she is blind, we have to admit that too:
To date, it is accepted that scientists only have access to an understanding of around 5% of the visible universe, corresponding to the visible matter known as baryonic matter (made up of protons, neutrons and electrons).
It’s also thought to be made up of around 25% dark matter, which is still totally misunderstood and can be detected by its effect on the gravitational force, and the remaining 75% dark energy, which seems to be associated with the vacuum and explains the accelerated expansion of the universe.
With regard to what has been discovered so far, even though baryonic matter is its only possible field of analysis… the scientific world remains blind, as it is still unable to explain in a homogeneous way the different forces it has managed to identify within these 5%.
So he is still waiting to find a Theory of Everything capable of integrating and describing at the same time the four fundamental interactions he has found: the strong nuclear interaction (for the cohesion of the atomic nucleus), the electromagnetic interaction (light, electricity and magnetism, chemistry…), the weak interaction (beta reactivity and nuclear fusion) and the gravitational interaction (gravitation). The main problem, though not the only one, is the unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity theory, which describe phenomena at microscopic and macroscopic levels respectively.
Add to this, as noted above, the fact that the scientific world has yet to include the fields of consciousness and free will in its calculations, even though they do exist.
What would you say to a person with a visual capacity of only 5% and, what’s more, blurred, inharmonious and incomplete?
If not that he/she’s practically blind?
What does this tell you about the credibility of the claims made by many members of the scientific community?
Now, you might ask, but why, here and now, make such a virulent charge against scientists’ conception of themselves and their opinions?
Quite simply because it has far-reaching consequences for the field of investigation that will be the subject of this series:
Indeed, if we want to understand and unravel the mysteries of the past, we will have to admit several things:
- That the language and means of expression of prehistoric man was not the same as ours, that it was a language based on symbols.
- That the most archaic languages known, including Sumerian and Egyptian, were closely related to the Neolithic and Paleolithic civilizations that preceded them. They were their children.
So, to decipher Sumerian and Egyptian symbolic language is to decipher not only the mysteries of their civilizational areas, as well as those of the civilizations that succeeded them in their spiritual filiation, but also the language of prehistoric man, the language of their fathers, who had transmitted it to them, since, as we shall amply demonstrate, the sacred language used by the false original universal religion is perfectly timeless.
But what is the position of scientific corporatism in the field of prehistory?
It’s a sad state of affairs, and that’s why we’re going to have to work together to turn this table upside down:
The table of prehistoric scientists: archaeologists and paleontologists
The pervasive influence of scientistic thinking in the study of prehistory
Specialist reactions to mythological scenes and sacred sites
It has to be said that, almost systematically, when confronted with scenes of a mythological nature that clearly belong to the sacred sphere, the scientists who examine them are circumspect and admit to being totally at a loss.
To explain what their toolbox doesn’t allow them to understand, they then almost systematically take refuge behind what they’ve been taught about these “primitive” populations, knowing that these are undoubtedly emergent religious feelings or simple shaman rites linked to the fertility of harvests or hunting success.
The easy way out is just as palpable in the fact that megalithic monuments can at best only be conceived as tools for tracking the solstices and equinoxes in order to monitor harvests, with perhaps a sacred vocation, but all in all still very unclear.
This rhetoric is their universal refuge for giving the general public a sense of the symbolism of the figures, objects and ornamentation of the sacred sites of peoples who appeared before writing.
At no point do they consider another path, another way of looking at things, to give meaning to these symbols and make them speak.
However, it would be a good idea to start questioning ourselves, because, factually, the “modern” science of Prehistory, with this approach, has still not been able to explain any of the mysteries of the sites it has uncovered.
The reasons for this cognitive bias
There are several cumulative reasons for this cognitive bias, which prevents them from understanding what we’re talking about.
Let’s take a look at some of them:
Being innervated by evolutionary theory alone
It’s a sad fact, but if there’s one circle of thought totally gangrened by the one-track thinking of scientistic-evolutionist theory, it’s this one.
Proof of this is that if you study prehistory and are a paleontologist, archaeologist, ethnologist… if you don’t want to be excluded from this community and its publications, you’ll have to conform to its doxa, the scientistic-evolutionist dogma, which imposes a veritable diktat on the reading of prehistory and generates an eminently erroneous cognitive bias: that of considering the most archaic civilizations as necessarily the most infantile.
In their minds, in fact, primitive, which also has a primordial meaning, often carries only the sense of its negative connotation, and it is in this sense that they use it.
The omnipresent influence of scientistic thinking on the world of prehistory continues, despite the fact that the evidence is mounting to the contrary, to all too often lead us to believe that our distant ancestors were nothing more than backward people who were only gradually capable of a few feats (walking, building a fire, hunter-gatherer, then breeder-farmer) and whose primordial mythology or religion boiled down to the adoration of the elements of nature.
What misleads the general public in this respect is the fact that, spontaneously, we associate the technical progress to which a civilization has access with the cognitive faculties of its members, whereas, if we take the time to think about it for a few moments, the accumulation of technical progress, of information, is merely mechanical and necessarily improves progressively with time and the means of dissemination. The last civilization will then necessarily enjoy many technical advantages, but this does not mean that its members are more intelligent than the first. It just enjoys the results of their work!
And, in fact, the opposite is true, because cognition functions like a muscle in that it requires constant training, so it atrophies if we stop using it and replace it with technical means…
But this scientistic postulate has a hard life and continues to bias and impede our understanding of history.
For, if we take a brief look back, right from the start (please reread Antoine Comte) the postulate of scientism was indeed to stratify human evolution (as indeed individual evolution) in pyramidal form, by progressive evolutionary stages.
Since then, we’ve come a long way in the opposite direction. But even if it is now finally recognized, for example, that the cognitive capacities of so-called Paleolithic (Upper) and Neolithic man were very similar to our own, the fact remains that since the presupposition that our ancestors have evolved up to us has been hammered home as a matter of course, they are necessarily perceived in the collective unconscious as having been cognitively inferior to us from the outset, i.e. “not yet arrived at our level of intelligence and evolution”.
Admittedly, this is a gigantic form of collective flattery, since who, in the end, finds himself placed at the top of the pyramid, like the supreme culmination of the bushy tree of species evolution? The archetypal Elon Musk in his Tesla and his Mars-bound Starship rocket, at the top of the evolutionary pyramid, with the original black African at the very bottom, who discovered bipedalism by falling out of his tree.
We’ll see in the volume dedicated to religions how this scientistic evolutionist vision is, from every point of view, totally defeated today, both in terms of logic and scientific discoveries, and is therefore now worthy of total disavowal and rejection.
We’ll see just how unfounded this sclerosing, stratified, onanistic vision of sapiens-modern man and his civilization as the best that has been done to date, which forces the world to look at its own navel through the prism of its own eyes alone, is.
Be that as it may, despite all the recent discoveries to the contrary, due to a terrible inertia effect (the same as for global warming), the impact of this way of seeing things is still extremely powerful and pervasive, particularly in all so-called “scientific” circles of thought.
Rejection of the study of the metaphysics of consciousness and related sciences
We shall see in the book devoted exclusively to the analysis of religions that the advent of scientism has had the effect of absolutely revolutionary compared to previous ages (which were all based on Metaphysics[17] and yet interwoven with scientific research and Reason) to set aside everything related to metaphysics and the field of Consciousness, for the first time in human history.
It’s obvious that in such a context, the science of the symbol, which belongs to the pure field of consciousness and metaphysics, since it was its language vector, had little appeal and ended up becoming a science without relief.
This is undoubtedly the “original sin” of scientism, which had serious repercussions for the study of prehistory, depriving archaeology, which is in direct and permanent contact with the world of the sacred, of the right grid for reading its own discoveries.
hierarchization of the sciences, with pre-eminence given to one category over another
One of the consequences of this overturning of the sciences was a reversal of the importance of disciplines.
We’ll see again in the volume on religions how, little by little, scientific disciplines have been hierarchized by virtue of scientistic ideology, which for the first time placed the sciences it called exact (or hard) at the top of the list of disciplines deemed best from its point of view.[18] to which it attributed the capacity to solve all of humanity’s problems and ills in the long term, and placing the human and social sciences in the background.[19] which came to be known as inexact (or soft) science.
This obviously had the effect of depreciating them, even though scientific rigor is just as demanding as in the “first” ones.
incompetence in symbolic and cult science
The consequences of the influence of scientistic discourse were devastating for the sciences in relation to the sacred.
Because it has from the outset, if not eliminated, at least set aside the science of the symbolic from its field of investigation and analysis, from its keys to reading, it has deprived itself of the only real key that would enable it to understand and explain what it discovers.
This is what leads today’s scientific community to wander when it comes to interpreting prehistoric scenes and myths, since they simply no longer have any understanding or knowledge of the symbols, stories, myths and figures they are studying, and therefore have absolutely no way of understanding what it’s all about.
As far as I know, not a single archaeologist, ethnologist or paleontologist has an in-depth knowledge of the world of symbolism.
If that had been the case, he would have realized it a long time ago.
So, from every point of view, their hyperspecialization is just not right when it comes to correctly interpreting this type of site.
They don’t have the right reading key, the right tool for analysis.
To understand this, we can transpose it to a modern example:
If you were to commission someone to explain the Mona Lisa painting to you tomorrow, who would you choose: a plumber, a sociologist, an ethnologist, a spectral analysis specialist, an art historian or a specialist in symbolism?
It goes without saying that spectral analysis will shed light on the technical nature of the work, while art historians can shed light on the artist’s own cultural context at the time of creation. But since a painting is a symbol-laden image, only an expert in symbolism will be able to decipher what the artist subliminally intended to convey and say.
The other disciplines, meanwhile, are ill-suited to the task.
And yet… when prehistoric sites are discovered, it’s paleontologists, ethnologists, rock art historians… who travel. But lacking a symbolic understanding of what they’re observing, and despite their best intentions, when confronted with stories or scenes they haven’t mastered, they can naturally only consider them superficially for what they appear.
As a result, faced with these metaphysical traces that they are obliged to observe, but unable to decipher, the scientistic doctrine with which they are imbued immediately takes over and provides them not with the key to reading, but rather with the key to a way out to avoid facing up to their responsibilities, an escape route to try to get out of the impasse in which they find themselves:
This endless loophole is very simple and is almost, yes, always the same:
On the assumption that these creations are the fruit of the imagination of individuals in the process of cognitive evolution, interpretations of mythological stories and prehistoric scenes to be carried out are rather quickly sidestepped and considered to be, at the very least, the beginnings of the expression of a nascent, animistic, totemic religiosity, linked solely to a cult of fertility, the harvest or hunting.
Lack of dialogue and synergy between different scientific fields
In addition to the banning of symbolic science, it soon became impossible to build bridges between disciplines, especially as each discipline tended towards hyperspecialization.
In this regard, I invite you to (re)read the article published in the newspaper Le Monde in September 2022 with the particularly evocative title: ” the better a multidisciplinary researcher performs, the less likely he is to be accredited by his peers”. with as an introduction In an article in Le Monde, a group of 4 researchers show that academics whose work spans several disciplines are disadvantaged by their peers, as they are seen as a threat to the status quo of the disciplines…
In other words, everything has become so compartmentalized, so hyperspecialized, so protected that interdisciplinary dialogue has become impossible.
No wonder, then, that researchers are so short-sighted when they examine frescoes, burials and sacred sites and seek to explain their meaning.
The compartmentalized, pyramidal, hyperspecialized vision of science, eminently reductive because limited to a single field of expertise, which has structured their psyche, simply prevents them from doing so.
The hyperspecialization it generates inevitably creates a magnifying glass effect, or a “head in the handlebars” effect, as a result of which they can no longer see the Whole and therefore grasp it correctly.
Here again, it’s certainly not for lack of intelligence, since they are necessarily extremely brilliant in their speciality, but because they are simply not armed with the right expertise to explain their discoveries.
Many of our well-meaning scientists don’t take the time (or simply don’t have the time) to step outside the extremely focused framework of their discipline, to look elsewhere, to merge different fields of expertise, readings and outlooks to gain a more global vision.
This is extremely damaging, as it prevents them from grasping the deeper meaning of their own discoveries, which are often exceptional when you know exactly what they mean.
Lack of consideration between scientific fields bordering on contempt
It’s not uncommon to see a certain contempt between those who are supposed to work in the exact sciences and those who don’t, but also between inaccurate sciences, if one of them has been given primacy in the study of a given field by the scientistic hand.
Thus, the archaeologist will tend to look down on the mythologist, the symbol expert, the philologist or the linguist, because he feels he is superior to them, on the one hand because he has always been fully in line with the dominant scientistic thinking, and no doubt also because, on the other hand, his discipline has always enjoyed greater media coverage thanks to its discoveries.
The easy way to belittle a colleague’s work, then, is to use pejorative terms such as “mystic”, because he’s not working on concrete bones and stones, but on the immaterial, on thought. This is, of course, a nice way of calling him a charlatan, and a resolutely pejorative term for implicitly denying him any objectivity or scientific legitimacy.
Or, more gently, we might point out that his field of research is, I don’t know, too open to interpretation.
This then means forgetting three things:
That, according to the scientistic dogma that governs it, archaeology itself is part of the human sciences and not part of the so-called “exact” physical sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.)! Let’s face it, it’s a bit like the pot calling the kettle black…
Similar accusations were levelled at Champollion, who has since been exalted to the skies, since he took the trouble to justify himself in a letter to his brother dated April 7, 1818, reviewing his deciphering work: ” There’s no charlatanism or mysticism in my case; it’s all the result of a comparison, not a preconceived system. ».
When Champollion told M. Dacier on September 27, 1822 of his discovery of a system for deciphering hieroglyphics, he described it as follows:” It’s a complex system, a form of writing that’s at once figurative, symbolic and phonetic, in the same text, the same sentence, I’d almost say in the same word”.
So is Champollion symbolic, figurative, metaphysical, mystical? Or the language he studies and has to decipher?
The archaeologist must therefore understand that it is not the mythologist-“symbologist”-linguist who is mystical. It’s the archaic civilization uncovered by the archaeologist himself, who, no longer being archaeologist, no longer understands it.
Because, let’s face it, before the advent of scientism, all previous civilizations based their tree of knowledge on the roots of metaphysics. If the scientists of prehistory don’t resort to metaphysics, if they don’t try to see things as they saw them and not through the small end of the spyglass that they have ostensibly and stupidly turned upside down, they will never be able to understand them.
So we’re going to have to turn this spyglass back to its original meaning, and relearn how to think like our ancestors, adopt their point of view and not oursIn this way, we can stop trying to read the past through our recent reading grid.
The third thing to say is that all science, by its very nature, is relative, because science’s relationship to reality is guided by objectivity.
In other words, the scientific community normally always seeks to rid itself of subjectivity, basing itself on a verifiable foundation and always taking a critical view of its own productions.
Thus, a mythological scientist-“symbologist” who analyzes a site has strictly the same spirit and the same scientific approach as one who analyzes it from an archaeological point of view, since he too must seek to base his interpretation on verifiable and observable considerations.
In fact, it could even be said that analyzing the world of symbols and myths in order to minimize their subjectivity requires research work that is perhaps more extensive than that carried out in the so-called exact sciences. In physics, for example, a single well-conducted experiment can define an extremely precise and invariable mathematical law. On the other hand, determining the meaning of a symbol will require extensive knowledge of all its occurrences in all known myths, in order to discern its multiple facets and, once contextualized, to be able to say which one is specifically expressed in the myth under study. For a symbol is generally not as fixed as a particle in the physical world. Analogy is more like a quantum particle, because a symbol is often polysemous, it can have several meanings, several faces, and to be able to freeze it, to give it its true meaning in a given myth that we’re deciphering, we’ll have to take into account all its context, all the influences of the narrative it undergoes; So it’s often necessary to assemble a body of converging evidence, and not just one, to reduce the probability of making a mistake to zero, to annihilate all personal subjectivity and thus attest that the interpretation made is indeed the right one. As you’ve intuitively understood, for the mythologist/”symbologist”, this means a multi-faceted research effort that’s second to none in any other field of research. I believe that this essay, like the others to follow, will be a resounding demonstration of this.
While we await its completion, to get an idea of the research work involved in comparative myth analysis alone, it’s worth mentioning the visibly colossal work carried out by certain mythological researchers such as Jean-Yves Le Quellec and Yuri Berezkin. Their method, which was limited to a comparative analysis of myths in an attempt to identify their main theme, consisted in listing all known myths and then trying to reconstruct the myth family tree.
I’m tempted to say that even if this mountain of data gave birth to a mouse, since the result obtained is, as I’ll go into more detail in the appendix (of book2), just an archaic myth of the emergence from the earth or the primitive cave, it is nevertheless obvious that the constitution of this database of factual and verifiable data and of this tree required a considerable amount of work in data gathering, analysis and comparison.
Such research cannot be accused of lacking a scientific approach.
Having said that, I have to add that I’m flabbergasted to see that despite the outpouring of energy, the mass of data and notwithstanding the superabundant symbolism in all these myths combined, these researchers, like others before them, only come up with this extremely poor result.
The fact is, what they lack is the ability to decipher the language of symbols, for if we carry out a comparative analysis of myths without being able to decipher their symbolism, all we end up with are encrypted, undeciphered narratives, and the result is bound to be less than consistent.
That’s why I’ve devoted myself not only to an extensive comparative analysis of most of the known myths, but also and above all to deciphering them, translating their symbolic language, and seeking out the meanings of each symbol, all on a dual basis, on the one hand, thanks to linguistics, through the in-depth work of an etymologist based on Sumerian and hieroglyphics, and, on the other hand, by coupling it with the contributions of an understanding of symbols that is also made possible by the comparative analysis of the myths in which they are used.
Even if it’s very pretentious and “mythological” of me to say so (after all, maybe too much study of mythology rubs off! we’ll see…) it’s really this triple hat, “symbologist” – linguist – mythologist that, as you’ll see, has enabled my work to go far beyond anything yet discovered by my illustrious predecessors and peers.
A happy note to this sad observation
Even if I’ve painted a gloomy picture of archaeologists’ and paleontologists’ vision of the prehistoric world, I’d still be doing injustice to all the specialists who have spoken out against this prevailing muted thinking, having understood that the cave is clearly a place apart, a veritable sanctuary, a temple – in fact, the first of all known temples – and that as such, the rock carvings made there had a religious, sacred and, in many cases, mythological dimension.[20] with, moreover, an undeniable geographical and temporal universality attesting to a civilization itself developed and universal, which made it necessary to reconsider the pre-existing dogma, or, at the very least, to have to nuance it very strongly, even if without being able to explain what it was all about.
In the course of my research into rock signs, I’ve also had the opportunity to compare myself with the work carried out in the field of prehistoric semiology by André Leroi-Gourhan, George and Suzanne Sauvet and André Wlodarczyk, who were the first to identify rock signs as clearly being elements of language, thanks to their research, based in particular on the documentary collection produced by Abbé Breuil.
The in-depth work carried out by these archaeologists is absolutely essential, and without their data collection and analysis, without the material they have gathered and provided, it would have been strictly impossible for me to have a database from which to provide you with the keys to deciphering the rock language.
In fact, it’s a great pity that no one followed in their footsteps, even though they provided clues to the path ahead.
In the first part of the book, “Essai de sémiologie préhistorique ou la clef du déchiffrage des signes rupestres” (Essay on prehistoric semiology or the key to deciphering rock signs), I took their work as a starting point, so that everyone can understand what we’re dealing with here.
I’m also unable to mention by name all the scientists who have taken issue with an extremely simplistic, totemistic, animistic vision of prehistoric beliefs, but they’ll recognize themselves, and it’s up to the reader not to lump them all in with the others, because, as you’ll have gathered, in the face of accumulating evidence to the contrary of dogma, a number of specialists have nonetheless raised their voices and continue to do so.
We would like to thank them for their efforts, and hope that this series will (re)reinforce their objective scientific approach.
Conclusion on the scientific table
Well, now that we’ve got a few good reasons in mind to distance ourselves from the claims of scientific corporatism, and that we’re all ready, I hope, to turn their tables, together and with the help of some of them who’ll be joining us, let’s move on to the last but not least: that of false religion and its priests.
[1] Key book by Champollion: “Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens Égyptiens ou Recherches sur les éléments premiers de cette écriture sacrée, sur leurs diverses combinaisons, et sur les rapports de ce système avec les autres méthodes graphiques égyptiennes” (Précis of the hieroglyphic system of the ancient Egyptians or Research into the primary elements of this sacred script, their various combinations, and the relationship of this system with other Egyptian graphic methods).
[2] including Martianus Capella
[3] Al-biruni in the 10th century, Maragha school of the 13th and 14th centuries AD.
[4] from the Greek Aristarchus in the 3rd century AD.
[5] by Heraclides of Pontus and Ecphantus the Pythagorean from the 4th century AD.
[6] The manuscript of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) was completed around 1530.
[7] After his manuscript was completed around 1530, by 1533 Copernicus’ heliocentric hypothesis had already spread as far as Pope Clement VII, and several prelates urged Copernicus to publish it, including, in 1536, Cardinal-Archbishop of Capua Nikolaus von Schönberg, who encouraged him to communicate his research. Copies may already have been in circulation around 1540, or at least Georg Joachim Rheticus published a highly successful analysis in Danzig. Encouraged by this welcome, Copernicus even sent the Pope an autographed copy of the first version of his book. Copernicus, who was a canon, was never troubled by ecclesiastical authorities for his theories during his lifetime, even though his life’s work was not printed until his death in 1543 by a Lutheran printer in Nuremberg. It is said that Copernicus had the opportunity to handle a copy in the hours of his agony.
[8] As early as 1664, Copernican authors were removed from the Church’s Index, but it wasn’t until the end of the 17th century that most of Europe’s scientists were reconciled, thanks to Isaac Newton’s celestial mechanics. Apart from England, France, the Netherlands and Denmark, the rest of Europe maintained its anti-Copernican stance for another century. The first scientific proof of the Earth’s rotation around the Sun was produced in 1728 by James Bradley, with his explanation of the “aberration of light”.
[9] From 1741, under the influence of the Jesuit Roger Boscovich, Pope Benedict XIV gradually abandoned the geocentric system. In 1757, Boscovitch had the books by Copernicus and Galileo removed from the Index. Galileo was rehabilitated in 1784, but it wasn’t until 1822 that the Church definitively and completely accepted the idea that the Earth revolved around the Sun, with a decree approved by Pope Pius VII declaring permissible in Rome the printing and publication of works dealing with the mobility of the Earth and the immobility of the sky according to the common opinion of modern astronomers.
[10] When Galileo published the results of his first stellar observations in Venice on March 12, 1610, in the book Sidereus nuncius (The Celestial Messenger), he became a household name within a few weeks, and the Italian courts were full of talk about his astronomical observations and eager to meet the noble Florentine scientist.
[11] Once Galileo’s observations had been confirmed by the Roman College, the nature of the attacks changed. Lodovico delle Colombe attacks on the religious front, asking whether Galileo intends to interpret the Bible to make it fit his theories. At that time, and before the exegetical work of the 19th century, Psalm 93 (92) could be taken to imply a geocentric cosmology (in the line: “etenim firmavit orbem terrae qui non commovebitur”, literally “and indeed he has established the orb of the earth, which shall not be shaken”).
On November 2, 1612, the quarrel resumed. The Dominican Niccolo Lorini, professor of ecclesiastical history in Florence, delivers a sermon resolutely opposed to the theory of the Earth’s revolution around the Sun. Sermon of no particular consequence, but marks the beginning of religious attacks. Opponents use the biblical passage (Joshua 10:12-14) in which, at Joshua’s prayer, God stops the course of the Sun and Moon, as a theological weapon against Galileo.
On December 20, the Dominican Tommaso Caccini violently attacked Galileo in the church of Santa Maria Novella. On January 6, 1615, a Copernican, the Carmelite Paolo Foscarini, published a letter positively discussing the opinion of the Pythagoreans and Copernicus on the Earth’s mobility. He envisages the Copernican system as a physical reality. The controversy reached such a pitch that Cardinal Bellarmin, despite his support for Galileo, was forced to intervene on April 12. He wrote a letter to Foscarini in which, in the absence of any conclusive refutation of the geocentric system, he unequivocally condemned the heliocentric thesis. While recognizing the practical value of Copernicus’ system for astronomical calculation, he formally declares it unwise to set it up as a physical truth, according to what has been called the doctrine of equivalence of hypotheses.
[12] Note that I’m not talking about science, but about “men of science”. It’s obviously not the same thing.
[13] Already at this point, Einstein makes a mistake, as he fails to include consciousness and free will in the equation for merging these two seemingly opposing worlds (determinism vs. the world of all possibilities).
Indeed, the quantum world is the world where consciousness expresses itself, where free will is exercised, which makes it necessary that everything can potentially be everything and its opposite before the decision of a consciousness is exercised on it and causes it to freeze, to crystallize in the apparent world, the visible world, the physical world.
Without quantum probabilism, like malleable clay dough, there would be no room for the expression of a free and active consciousness forming with its fingers a finished and fixed object in the physical world.
In order to merge these two seemingly contradictory worlds, physical and quantum physicists will soon have to come to an agreement.
Of course, consciousness and free will are not mathematical facts, but the fact is that they do exist, and failure to take them into account can only lead to an erroneous Theory of Everything.
Having said that, this error/omission is still the work of the entire scientific world.
[14] Là encore, Einstein n’inclut pas la conscience, ou la pensée, dans l’équation.
For believers, the very fact of being able to pray to God, of being instantly heard by him even when he is at an almost infinite distance, in a dimension other than our own, invisible, attests in itself to the fact that there is indeed another mode of communication far faster than light, that of the spirit, and that this mode of communication operates in a reference frame, an underlying dimension, different from that of our physical world.
[15] The relations that measurements on entangled states would normally have to respect in the Einstein hypothesis of a local deterministic theory with hidden variables
[16] From the point of view of pure reason and without any other referent.
[17] The roots of the science tree of Descartes, the father of pure reason, of the Spirit of Enlightenment, were metaphysics. Physics was “only” the trunk.
[18] The exact sciences include: natural sciences: chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy, etc.; formal sciences: mathematics, computer science, geometry, logic, etc.
[19] The humanities and social sciences are a group of disciplines usually contrasted with the natural and environmental sciences, and with the so-called “exact” sciences, not only because of their specific epistemological status (it is difficult to define an objective and scientific method in this field), but above all because of their specific object of study: human cultures, their history, achievements, customs, representations and behaviors, concerning both individuals and societies. The humanities and social sciences mainly comprise the following disciplines: Anthropology; Archaeology; Geography and Demography; History; Linguistics and Semiotics; Memetics; Philosophy; Psychology, Ergonomics and Cognitics; Religious Studies; Economics; Political Science and Administrative Science; Sociology; Theory of Law.
[20] We’ll see that not all sites and paintings have a sacred mythological dimension. As in the case of Voodoo, which has moved a long way from the religious nerve centers of Sumer and Egypt, certain rock art sites, as a result of their spiritual and geographical distance, may well have fallen into a second-degree reading of the original representation, i.e., the expression of hunting magic rites, or even, at its first, basic level, of a simple representation of the surrounding fauna, having lost its deep original symbolism. In Volume 6, we’ll be taking a look at the criteria used to determine which sites fall into the third reading level. When it comes to hunting, for example, we’ll be looking at the initial and profound symbolism behind the depiction of hunting (particularly stag and doe hunting).
