This is a condensed excerpt from a longer conversation with Walter Cruttenden — director of the Binary Research Institute, author of Lost Star of Myth and Time, producer of the documentary The Great Year, and founder of CPAK, the Conference on Precession and Ancient Knowledge, now in its 14th year (September 25–27, Newport Beach, CA). The full episode’s video link is below and conference details with a coupon are linked at the bottom of this post.* Why history doesn’t add up Kenan: What do you think is the significance of uncovering this ancient history — why has this been your theme for nearly two decades? Walter: I believe it’s because our current theory of history is wrong. We live with this Darwinian paradigm that anything that came before us must be more primitive. John Anthony West used to talk about this at the conference — he called it a very limited view. It’s true that if you go back about 1,500 years, to the depths of the Dark Ages, things do get more primitive. But before that, you have very high cultures — Greece, ancient Persia, the Indus Valley, Egypt. All of these great cultures were in a declining phase leading up to the Dark Ages. So if anything, history seems to be more cyclical than linear. All around the world, the ancients held this same point of view — the Greeks talked about a “great year,” history moving in vast cycles with alternating dark and golden ages. We find the same thing in the Vedic culture — they call it the yuga cycle, but it’s the same thing: one procession of the equinox, the period it takes the sun to move through all twelve constellations of the zodiac. It’s a cycle, and I think because we misunderstand the physics of that celestial motion, it’s led to a misunderstanding of history itself. Evidence that doesn’t fit the textbook timeline Walter: History never quite made sense to me the way it was taught in school. I remember asking my teacher in sixth grade why they didn’t discover America before 1492 — there were boats, seafaring people going back to the Phoenicians. My teacher said, “Oh, the boats just weren’t big enough.” That was around 1960. A year or two later, there’s a big article in National Geographic — they’d found several ships buried on the Giza Plateau, outside the Great Pyramid. One of them, the solar boat of Khufu, is twice the length of Columbus’s largest ship. They date those boats to roughly 2500 BC — six or seven times as old as Columbus. A few other examples put this in context. We’re taught that geared devices were developed in the great clock-making era, the 1300s–1400s AD in Europe. We’re taught electric batteries were discovered by Volta around 1800 AD. We’re taught Copernicus gave us the heliocentric system in 1543. And since all of that made it into the textbooks, we’ve discovered batteries in Babylon at least 2,000 years earlier — just as strong as Volta’s first ones. We’ve found the Greek Antikythera device, a geared mechanism, in a shipwreck dated to at least 100 BC — almost 2,000 years before we’re supposed to have geared devices at all. And we’ve learned that Aristarchus of Samos proposed the heliocentric system around 400 BC — nearly 2,000 years before Copernicus. So it seems history is cyclical, not linear. We had these ideas, we lost them, and then we regained them. Once we really understand that there are seasons of consciousness — the way the Greeks broke the cycle into different ages — I think we can make sense of a lot of anomalous artifacts and let history make sense on a cohesive basis. Kenan: What I find compelling in what you’re describing is that you’re doing detective work — finding evidence of technologies we assume were invented once, that actually happened before. It reminds me of convergent evolution in biology — organs like the eye or the lung reappearing independently, in places with no common ancestor. It points to something like a repeating pattern, without needing a direct lineage to explain it. Walter: Exactly. You could argue there should have been a renaissance out of the Indus Valley culture — they had uniform building materials, underground sewers, indoor heating — many things that disappeared for thousands of years and then developed independently elsewhere. I think once you understand how consciousness differs across the different ages, it becomes a lot easier to put in context. The four ages Walter: I like the Greek terms because they’re easier for most Westerners to grasp than the Vedic ones. The Greeks break the cycle into the Iron, Bronze, Silver, and Golden Ages. The Iron Age — the “age of man” — is when mankind is only aware of what he can touch, feel, and see. That low age ended with the Renaissance; we fell into it, from the Bronze Age, around 1000 BC. In that age you have no real knowledge of molecules, atoms, electricity, magnetism — so you can’t build technologies that need a deeper knowledge of things. Everything is material, and people are oriented almost entirely toward the senses. The Bronze Age — the Dwapara Yuga in Vedic terms — is the “age of the hero.” Mankind starts to wake up, realizes there are finer forces at work, that he’s more than just a body, and takes on bigger projects. The two ages above that — the age of the demigods and the age of the gods — are harder for us to understand, since we’re only just entering the age of the hero again on our way back up out of the Dark Ages. Even Jesus said, “These things that I do you shall do also, and greater things” — trying to wake people up to their own potential. Yogananda said telepathy and clairvoyance will once again become common knowledge as we move back up. And when you look at civilizations that were, quite literally, plugged into the sky — the Giza pyramid plateau mirrors the Belt of Orion; you find the same kind of alignment with the large Mexican pyramids and some of the Chinese pyramids — you see a mankind with completely different values than we hold now. Understanding that history is cyclical, with distinct periods of consciousness, helps make sense of a lot of what otherwise looks anomalous. The physics behind the myth Kenan: We see this nesting of cycles everywhere — the 24-hour day, the seasons, the equinoxes — and it’s an easy intuition that it probably doesn’t end there. Is that intuition part of what got you started on this? Walter: Yes. I’d already seen this problem with history, and I was always fascinated with astronomy. While trying to make sense of history, I was reading Sri Yukteswar’s book, The Holy Science — he’s the guru of Paramahansa Yogananda, whose own book, Autobiography of a Yogi, was reportedly the only book on Steve Jobs’s iPad. Sri Yukteswar wrote that moons spin on their axis and, spinning, take some planet and go around it — which we know. And moons, with their planets, take a star and go around it — which is exactly what happens in our own solar system. And then he writes: “Our sun takes some star and goes around it.” At the end of that paragraph, he adds that this is what causes the backward motion of the equinoctial point — what we call the precession of the equinox, the ~50 arcseconds per year drift of the stars against a fixed point, completing a cycle roughly every 24,000 to 26,000 years. He wrote that in 1894 — a genuinely radical thought at the time. By then, the idea of axial precession was well established: Copernicus said it must be a wobbling axis, and Newton attributed that wobble to the combined gravitational pull of the sun and moon on the Earth. What Yukteswar was saying was completely different: that the slow drift of the stars isn’t primarily due to an axis wobbling — it’s due to the whole solar system moving through space. I’ve since written a number of papers on this, and I’m convinced that axial wobble accounts for only about one or two arcseconds of that yearly drift — and most of the fifty arcseconds we observe is due to the actual motion of our solar system, curving through space, likely around a binary companion. It might have sounded wild in Newton’s time, but it’s far less wild now — we’ve spent the last couple of decades discovering planets around other stars, many of them in binary or trinary systems. And once you see that our solar system’s own motion produces a great cycle — much like our smaller daily and yearly cycles, with their extremes of light and dark — and you apply that to history, history starts to make sense. There’s a reason for the rise and fall of ages. It’s not arbitrary. It’s driven by the same thing that drives every other cycle we know: celestial motion. Kenan: If history’s cycles are grounded in the cosmos itself — in physics and astronomy — it gives us more confidence in recognizing real patterns than relying on politics, or whoever happened to write the story down. It offers a bigger picture, and also a deeper kind of confidence, because it’s something we can actually measure. Building pockets of the Golden Age, right now Kenan: Do you think we can create pockets of these higher states, even if the cosmos as a whole isn’t there yet? Walter: Absolutely. Think about the day-night cycle, driven by the Earth’s rotation — we completely shift consciousness between the two. Nighttime is dark and cold, but do we just stumble around and freeze? No — through our cleverness, our expanding consciousness, we develop fire, then lanterns, then electric light — technologies that lift us out of the limitations of that cycle. The same is true of the yearly cycle and winter. The Great Year works the same way, just on a much larger scale — driven by our whole solar system moving around another point in space. When we’re far from that point, we’re in the low ages, and consciousness has a harder time being coherent. As we draw closer, coherence and virtue
