David Talbott
David Talbott | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | October 28, 1942 Oregon, United States |
| Residence | Portland, OR, United States |
| Nationality | USA |
| Known for | Solar System, Cosmology, Electric Universe, The Saturn Model |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Comparative Mythology, Author, Founder of the Thunderbolts Project |
David N. Talbott (born October 28, 1942) is an American self-taught comparative mythologist whose work offers a radical new vantage point on the origin of ancient cultural themes, myths and symbols. Working in the tradition of Immanuel Velikovsky, his research has been the primary catalyst behind the "Saturn Model" of recent planetary history, and is the subject of the feature documentary Remembering the End of the World. He is the author of The Saturn Myth and co-author (with Wallace Thornhill) of Thunderbolts of the Gods and The Electric Universe. Talbott is the founder and director of The Thunderbolts Project.
Education
Talbott was raised in Oregon and earned his B.S. from Portland State University, where he majored in education and political science.
Scientific History
Talbott's interest in ancient catastrophe grew out of the controversy surrounding Immanuel Velikovsky, author of Worlds in Collision. In 1970, together with his brother Stephen L. Talbott as editor, he revived the student magazine Pensée. Late in 1971 the brothers decided to devote a feature issue to Velikovsky's ideas; the response was so great that it grew, between 1972 and 1974, into a landmark ten-issue series titled Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered, reaching a circulation of between 10,000 and 20,000 subscribers and bringing renewed scholarly attention to Velikovsky's work.
Beginning in 1971, and motivated in part by Velikovsky's then-unpublished manuscript In the Beginning, Talbott set out to test the Velikovskian thesis through the systematic comparison of the world's oldest myths, symbols and sacred images. This decades-long research became the foundation of the Saturn Model (or "Saturn theory"). Talbott concluded that the planet Saturn once dominated the ancient sky, that Earth and its neighboring planets moved together in a close-knit "Polar Configuration," and that the catastrophic break-up of this arrangement at the end of the mythical Golden Age provoked the myth-making epoch of human history. His first full statement of these ideas appeared in The Saturn Myth (Doubleday, 1980).
In 1988 Talbott founded the journal Aeon: A Journal of Myth and Science, a forum for interdisciplinary studies of ancient catastrophe in which much of his later work appeared.
A turning point came in the 1990s through his collaboration with the Australian physicist Wallace Thornhill. Thornhill persuaded Talbott that the celestial configurations reconstructed from ancient testimony — the towering columns, radiant "eyes," and thunderbolt weapons of the gods — were the signatures of intense electrical discharge in plasma. This synthesis of comparative mythology with plasma physics and the Electric Universe model became the shared platform for their subsequent books, films and conferences.
The Thunderbolts Project
Talbott is the founder and director of The Thunderbolts Project (thunderbolts.info), an interdisciplinary collaboration promoting the Electric Universe and Saturn Model hypotheses. Through the project he has organized and headlined the annual Electric Universe conferences, delivering keynote addresses such as EU2012 in Las Vegas and speaking at EU2013 ("The Tipping Point") and EU2014 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he previewed later episodes of his Symbols of an Alien Sky documentary series.
Films
- 2005 - Thunderbolts of the Gods
- 2006 - Remembering the End of the World
- 2009 - Symbols of an Alien Sky (Episode 1)
- 2012 - Symbols of an Alien Sky: The Lightning-Scarred Planet Mars (Episode 2)
- 2013 - Symbols of an Alien Sky: The Electric Comet (Episode 3)
Abstracts
- 2012 - "Remembering the Great Comet" (Read in full)
- 2011 - "Considering the Electric Sun" (Read in full)
- 2011 - "Electric Events on Mars" (Read in full)
- 2011 - "The Plasma Universe of Hannes Alfv" (Read in full)
Books
- 2007 - "The Electric Universe" (Read in full)
- 2005 - "Thunderbolts of the Gods" (Read in full)
- 1980 - The Saturn Myth: A Reinterpretation of Rites and Symbols Illuminating Some of the Dark Corners of Primordial Society (Doubleday & Co.)
Media
- 2011 - The Future of Science under an Electric Universe Paradigm (Video Lecture)