New Wine in Old Wineskins
Is the current solar cycle trying to wake humanity up?
“And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. For the wine would burst the wineskins, and the wine and the skins would both be lost. New wine calls for new wineskins.”
—Mark 2:22, New Living Translation
We aren’t just living through a time of crisis, the time of the Great Dying post-pandemic, but a time of revelation. A time when new wine is being poured into old wineskins and the old skins are bursting. When long-held, too-long taught misconceptions or outright lies are finally being exposed for what they are. For some this revelation will be too much. They may already be ill or physically weak, or spiritually unprepared to accept such great changes in understanding. “Some of us will always stay behind,” David Bowie sang. [1] “Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left,” said the King James Version. [2]
With the Sun in one of its [3] most vigorous Maximums in awhile, it seems we’re being flooded with more than just Coronal Mass Ejections, solar flares and fierce proton winds. Not only is our planet’s global electric circuit being given an extra jolt, so are we. Light has always been a symbol of knowledge, illumination, enlightenment. In the Sun’s partnership with Gaia, Mother Water, they form a perfect marriage. Each provides what the other lacks. This is the great lost message of being in relationship with the Other in a dimorphic species. Too much now, the focus is on what a person gives up in relationship, how their needs aren’t fully met, instead of on what they give, how the sum of their contributions makes a greater whole. How many times do we have to learn that only serving the Self leads to disaster and misery? Wisdom the Ancients had yet we somehow lack in the black light of our so-called “Enlightenment.”
What if the Ancients intuitively catapulted over the whole obstacle course of Reason and landed right on the central point? That the Universe is conscious, the stars are conscious, the Sun is conscious, the Earth is conscious. To many of the Ancients, this appeared to them as gods and goddesses. So when the sky cracked with lightning or a solar geomagnetic pulse (EMP), people saw gods dancing in rage, creation or destruction. With the implicit assumption that deities do indeed exist. Another way of saying it: that there was a larger consciousness than themselves out there that was owed some reverence and respect. We can now explain how these physical phenomena manifest, but to the Ancients it was the why that mattered. Was it something they did? Or failed to do? And who was behaving in this way, and why? I’m not saying we should return to this way of thinking. But neither can we go on deceiving ourselves that the only consciousness in the Universe exists in our skulls.
Could this be the “light” the Sun is earnestly trying to send us? According to Michael Tellinger, the pine cone symbol seen on ancient Sumerian or Akkadian relief carvings of godlike kings with long beards and wings appears all over the world in iconography. [4] The documentary I watched even shows a large carving of a pine cone housed in the Vatican! Tellinger sees the pine cones as visual metaphors for the pineal gland, that gland seen by many as the key to knowledge or wisdom, even enlightenment.
What is also shared by many of these monumental carvings around the world are the “handbags.” This symbol, according to Dr. Robert Schoch, has even turned up on the so-called “Vulture stele” at Gobleki Tepe. Could a handbag be another visual metaphor for the divine gifts of civilization? In the ancient Mesopotamian myth tales, a consistent theme is that these gifts were taught to the people by a godlike race:
“In Mesopotamian, Iranian, and Egyptian myths, gods create civilization ex nihilo and gave it to humans, sometimes through special human or semihuman interlocutors. The arts and sciences they create are almost always beneficial, and their point of origin is usually associated with cities, not with peoples.” [5]
In this case I’ve always thought that the godlike appearance, the giantism described (not so glowingly given their behaviour) in the Bible, the Nephilim, is a metaphor for greatness of spirit and knowledge. To people who may still have been herders and hunters, someone who could build a bridge, a water pump or a temple—and also read and write—would indeed be godlike. Others speculate that these are the mythic prediluvian race Plato associated with Atlantis—his recollection tracing their cataclysm right to the end of the Younger Dryas cooling period—9,000 years before his own day. Dr. Schoch says this places it almost exactly at the end of that transitional climate event, when the Ice Age finally well and truly ended. Whether it was literally Atlantis or not doesn’t really matter. Dr. Schoch accepts that for such technology as the building of Gobleki Tepe to exist at the very end of the last ice age, sophisticated arts of civilization must already long have been in existence.
No account of Atlantis would be complete without its component of divine retribution for a litany of sins. Dr. Schoch argues for a massive solar electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that caused a sudden—in some places almost instantaneous—melting of glaciers, releasing millions upon millions of tons of water across the landscape. Randall Carlson has made a career of explaining how American landscape features like the Washington “scablands” with its glacial erratics and the Grand Canyon itself are physical evidence of a sudden, catastrophic impact of freshly released water. In his view, and some others within the scientific community, the cataclysm is said to be unleashed by a comet impact on an ice sheet. But other scientists, according to Dr. Schoch’s research, dispute this theory. Either way, the “catastrophist” explanation does seem more plausible than the mainstream “gradualist” concept of glacial melting. These and other features in the northern hemisphere do seem to bear the marks and gouges of a massive force.
So much of science seems to have been about proving by rational means what was already common knowledge in most of the world’s ancient religions. So now we learn through geophysics and astrophysics that, indeed, periods of increased sunspot activity and the plasma storms buffeting the Earth cause spikes in earthquake and volcanic activity. Dr. Schoch postulates that there was indeed a well-established high culture—a civilization even before the end of the last Ice Age c. 9700 BCE.
Gobleki Tepe has been a standing rebuttal to the standard narrative of so-called history claiming that civilization and all its arts only began some 5,000 years ago at most. Now we have living rock in Turkiye that gives the lie to that notion of history. As it does to any stereotype of a grunting Neanderthal clad in animal skins barely able to figure out how to make a bow and arrow to survive. Yet here, when this was supposed to be happening, we have people building monumental stoneworks that reflect a knowledge of astronomy, lithography, sculpture and other arts and sciences. With three-dimensional animals carved into granite pillars that obviously had to be planned—envisioned first—from the rough block.
And I haven’t yet touched the fact that the architectural relationships on ancient and medieval monumental architecture around the world—the Egyptian pyramids, Angkor Wat, Tenochtitlan, Stonehenge, Newgrange, Chartres et al—ALL reflect the Golden Ratio, the Fibonacci spiral equation, and other interlaced Russian dolls of sacred geometry. ALL are placed with specific astrological and equinoctial alignments. These were people who were far closer to gods than apes. Yet themselves knew their place in the Universe.
For something old and worn out to not only get out of the way but contribute its energy to something new, it must often first be destroyed. There’s archaeological evidence of temples being ritually destroyed or simply abandoned. Jesus used the analogy of old wineskins, how unfit they are for new wine. It’s a basic principle of the Universe that from creation comes destruction, from destruction creation. This dance is going on throughout space all the time—neutron stars exploding, black holes imploding. But always, new life is birthed from Thanatos. (The ancient Greek archetype for the death impulse, in contrast to eros, the life impulse.) A Phoenix rises inevitably from the ashes. As the Sun reaches the end of a Grand Solar Maximum—eight or nine individual Solar Maximums or roughly a century [6]—is its hyper-charged light trying to activate our pineal gland, prompt us to rise to the next stage of consciousness? Listen to Dr. Schoch, who is far from a New Age mystic:
“Mental functioning and psychic ability are affected by electromagnetic fields. … Could occasional periods of intense plasma phenomena on Earth act to alternatively accelerate, or decelerate, organismal change, both physical and mental? Might powerful plasma phenomena act as a switching mechanism, causing biological and mental changes?” —Dr. Robert Schoch [7]
During Solar Cycle 25, the Sun has been spitting out massive flares that have had an effect on Jupiter and Venus but not once has a plasma cannon of cataclysmic power struck Earth directly. Why is this? It’s as if the Sun doesn’t want to strike Earth a blow that could cause decades or even centuries of backward, grueling darkness. Though, Lord knows, it’s happened plenty of times before in Earth’s eons-old geological history. And not so long ago, with the medieval Little Ice Age. Granted, according to geophysicist and “space weatherman” Stefan Burns, Solar Cycle 25 isn’t a record-breaking one compared to others, for example Cycle 19, peaking in 1959–60. Burns calls Cycle 25 a middling one, more vigorous than Cycle 24 but not quite as outsized as Cycle 23. Yet Burns explains that there isn’t a strict one-to-one relationship between the size and number of solar flares and their potential impact on Earth in solar storms and its geomagnetic impacts on the planet. Even a solar maximum cycling down into its minimum phase can spit out a flare that causes havoc.
But all this begs the question: Is the Sun indeed conscious? And if so, is He sending us a message: Pay attention! With barely a shrug, I can knock you back a thousand years. Lucky for us—for now, at least—He doesn’t want to just now. Could it be the Sun is bursting our old wineskins so they can be filled with the new wine of enlightenment? Could that kitschy old 60s song, “Age of Aquarius,” have intuitively hit upon the truth, that we are indeed entering a new age, rebounding from the black abyss of depravity we’ve fallen into in the waning days of the Kali Yuga?
And will we wake up in time? Drink this new wine of the holy spirit and ascend to a new level? As we’ve seen throughout history, often our artists have a kind of prescience to glimpse what’s coming. Thus, it’s fitting to end (begin) with a lyric from David Bowie:
Everything has changed
For in truth, it’s the beginning of nothing
And nothing has changed, everything has changed
For in truth, it’s the beginning of an end
And nothing has changed, everything has changed [8]
[1] David Bowie, “Slip Away,” from Heathen, produced by David Bowie and Tony Visconti, 2002; https://genius.com/David-bowie-slip-away-lyrics
[2] Matthew 24:40: “Two men will be working together in the field; one will be taken, the other left,” according to the New Living Translation;
[3] I use the male gender to describe the solar deity because it most often appears in mythology this way, though there are of course female exceptions. Keep in mind that the Earth and water are almost always pictured as feminine. This makes perfect sense, and a perfect marriage. As with a male and female human, without either sperm or egg, human life cannot continue. No sun, no water, no life.
[4] “So THIS is what they’ve been protecting…” The Pyramids Something Unbelievable,” Anonymous Official, time stamp: 39:18, YouTube:
I do not endorse all the ideas in this video but it nicely integrates sacred geometry into ancient monumental structures around the world.
[5] McCants, William F., “Gifts of the Gods: The Origins of Civilization in Ancient Near Eastern and Greek Mythology,” Princeton Scholarship Online, November 2011; https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691151489.003.0002
[6] Carpineti, Dr. Alfredo, “Obscure 100-Year Solar Cycle May Have Hit Minimum – Expect More Activity For Decades To Come,” IFL Science, April 19, 2025. The Grand Solar Maximum is known in scientific circles as the Centennial Gleissberg Cycle. https://www.iflscience.com/obscure-100-year-solar-cycle-may-have-hit-minimum-expect-more-activity-for-decades-to-come-78872?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
[7] Schoch, Dr. Robert with Catherine Ulissey, Forgotten Civilization: New Discoveries on the Solar-induced Dark Age (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2012; 2021 revised and expanded ed.), p. 222.
[8] David Bowie, “Sunday,” from Heathen, produced by David Bowie and Tony Visconti, 2002; https://genius.com/David-bowie-sunday-lyrics