Draft:Marinus Anthony van der Sluijs



Marinus Anthony (“Rens”) van der Sluijs is a Dutch linguist and author with a research focus on the history of science and comparative mythology. He obtained a Master’s (Drs.) degree in historical and comparative linguistics at Leiden University in 1999, specialising in the Indo-European and Semitic language families. Between 2009 and 2021 he was a Consulting Scholar at the Near Eastern department of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He has lived in the United Kingdom, Canada and South Korea at various times.

Much of his work involves the identification of natural phenomena in historical sources, with a bearing on the history of science. With Hisashi Hayakawa of Nagoya University (Japan) he analysed the oldest known written record of the aurora borealis. He traced the earliest mention of the earth’s rotation axis to Plato’s dialogues. In myth and symbolism he found a rich potential for naturalistic explanations. In various articles he argued that the zodiacal light appears in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgameš as Māšu, the twin mountain; that myths of a ‘gap in the sky’ often describe an aurora; and that the ‘eclipse dragon’ of astrology could have been an adaptation of the ourobóros or tail-biting serpent.

The history of planetary astronomy plays an important part in van der Sluijs’ research, especially the very earliest stages of that science. He has examined the simultaneous appearance of multiple morning stars in classical astronomy as well as ethnoastronomy. In collaboration with ancient historian Peter James he sought to explain why Babylonian astronomers described Saturn as a ‘night sun’ and speculated that the colour schemes of Mesopotamian ziggurats encoded a Babylonian theory of the order of the planets in space.

Van der Sluijs takes a special interest in catastrophism, again in the context of historical and mythological material. When a pair of British scientists suggested, in 2017, that the Biblical miracle of the sun standing still at Joshua’s behest alluded to a solar eclipse, van der Sluijs responded with a detailed repudiation and the alternative solution of a fragmenting bolide. A meteoric explanation is not new for the fragmentary West Semitic myth of Helel ben-Shahar, which is also referred to in Isaiah 14. 12-16, but van der Sluijs adduced the possibility of a crescent-shaped comet or meteorite to account for the god’s epithet ‘lord of the sickle’. For the Graeco-Roman theory of the Great Year he suggested possible Babylonian roots and involvement of comets. With Peter James, he compared the Greek myth of the ‘failed sun’ Phaethon to the Hurrian myth of ‘Silver’ as well as the Babylonian myth of Erra, postulating an impact event in southern Iraq around 2200 BC as the origin of these stories.

In a paper co-authored with plasma physicist Anthony L. Peratt, van der Sluijs made a case that the widespread mythical motif of the ourobóros or tail-biting serpent derives from a hypothetical display of ‘intense aurora’, on a greater order of magnitude than today’s northern and southern lights. The same event could have formed the inspiration for certain types of petroglyphs found around the world. (But see for a note of caution.) In self-published work van der Sluijs ponders how geomagnetic excursions would affect the aurora and, if happening within human memory, how these ‘excursion aurorae’ could have influenced myths and traditions. He argues that the Gothenburg excursion (13,000-11,000 BP) and the Solovki excursion (7000-4500 BP) could have been such occasions, while fully acknowledging that the very existence of these excursions remains as yet controversial.

Following an exhaustive survey, Rens and Peratt suggested that the ouroboros has a specific origin in time, in the 5th or 4th millennium BCE, and was ultimately based on globally independent observations of an intense aurora, with somewhat different characteristics than the familiar aurora. Specifically, the ouroboros could have represented an auroral oval seen as a whole, at a time when it was smaller and located closer to the equator than now. That could have been the case during geomagnetic excursions when the geomagnetic field weakens and the earth’s magnetic poles shift places. Tok Thompson and Gregory Allen Schrempp allow that this new idea might “mark a bold new interdisciplinary venture made possible by modern science”.

According to van der Sluijs, the Holy Grail as portrayed by Wolfram von Eschenbach was ultimately based on Tibetan traditions about the wish-granting jewel (cintāmaṇi). In the field of thanatology, he provided a detailed discussion of three near-death experiences (NDEs) from classical antiquity. His main contribution to comparative mythology might be the 6-volume series Traditional Cosmology (2011;2019), which documents the existence of a common substrate underlying the world’s creation myths by enumerating and illustrating more than 400 densely interrelated motifs.

For want of a better description, Rens coined the term Plasma Mythology some years ago. He is regarded as a pioneer in this field, and a dedicated page at plasmacosmology.net discusses his contributions to it. Rens also has a page at the prestigious IEEE.org which lists his co-authors on various papers. His many contributions to Thunderbolts.info can be viewed here, including his criticisms of the controversial Immanuel Velikovsky. Rens points out that although Veilkovsky documented his ideas with copious references, and gave the impression that the ideas themselves were the spontaneous fruits of his own creative mind, in truth almost every generation since the Enlightenment has had its own 'Velikovsky', advancing very similar ideas. Rens argues that virtually none of Velikovsky's core hypotheses were original.

Henrik Palmgren interviewed Rens for Red Ice radio in 2012. The interview focuses on the Dragon and Ouroboros in mythology, and specifically the role of plasma in these myths.