“If you have had your attention directed to the novelties of thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.” (Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World)

My most recent book, The Case of the Turquoise Sun (2024), summarizes nearly a half-century’s worth of research into ancient myth and archaeoastronomy. We hold these truths to be self-evident:

The first gods were the planets, pure and simple.
Myths of Creation are best understood as eye-witness accounts describing singular cataclysmic events involving the respective planets moving in close proximity to Earth.
The earliest cosmogonic myths of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Vedic India, and Mesoamerica encode the “birth” of the Turquoise Sun, a Sun which is clearly distinguishable from the present sun.
The Queen of Heaven referenced in the Old Testament and in countless other ancient traditions around the globe is to be identified with the planet Venus.
The Warrior-Hero—represented by such familiar figures as Heracles, Gilgamesh, Samson, and Cuchulainn—is to be identified with the planet Mars.
The global myth of the hieros gamos, most familiar in Homer’s account of the torrid love affair between Aphrodite and Ares, describes a close conjunction (“marriage”) between Venus and Mars.
The origin of the primary institutions of human civilization—religion, drama, dance, music, philosophy, monumental architecture, New Year’s ritual, marriage, sports, etc.—is firmly rooted in, and ultimately inseparable from, the catastrophic events involving the respective planets.
The history of the solar system recounted in modern textbooks is utterly wrongheaded and divorced from reality.

The present web site offers a generous sampling of my published writings. Included are several chapters from Martian Metamorphoses: The Planet Mars in Ancient Myth and Religion and the companion volume The Many Faces of Venus: The Planet Venus in Ancient Myth and Religion. A number of recent, mostly-unpublished monographs are also featured below:

You will also find a number of presentations on my new video page.

Special thanks to Ian Tresman for his prodigious efforts and generosity in designing and hosting my website.

This site will be updated on a regular basis. Comments are welcome and will be addressed in a timely manner. (Last updated 9-19-2024). The author can be reached at ev.cochrane@gmail.com.

“The inertia of the human mind and its resistance to innovation are most clearly demonstrated not, as one might expect, by the ignorant mass — which is easily swayed once its imagination is caught — but by professionals with a vested interest in tradition and in the monopoly of learning. Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole, laboriously constructed intellectual edifice might collapse. The academic backwoodsmen have been the curse of genius from Aristarchus to Darwin and Freud; they stretch, a solid and hostile phalanx of pedantic mediocrities, across the centuries.” (Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers [New York, 1959], p. 427.)