Age of Libra

I. The Age Itself

The fourth age is the age in which the sky becomes useful.

The Age of Libra runs from –15,330 to –13,170, a span of 2,160 years, following immediately upon the Age of Scorpio. It is the age to which the Genesis account assigns what is, on the conventional reading, one of the more puzzling operations in the creation sequence: the making of the sun, the moon, and the stars. The puzzle is straightforward to state. Light has already appeared on Day 1, when Elohim saw the light that it was good. Plants have already been created on Day 3, and photosynthetic plants require solar radiation to exist. If the sun is not made until Day 4, how did the plants of Day 3 photosynthesize? The question has troubled commentators for thousands of years, and the conventional answers — that Day 1's light is some primordial, non-solar luminescence; that Day 4's "making" is not a genuine creation but a clarification of function already implicit; that the text is not meant to be read sequentially in this respect — all require a certain amount of interpretive gymnastics.

The Raëlian reading dissolves the puzzle. The sun and the stars were not created on Day 4. They had been there, doing what they do, for billions of years before the Elohim arrived. The moon is a more complicated case, to which this chapter will return in its own section. What happens on Day 4 is not a cosmological creation but a functional integration: the heavenly bodies become, in the Elohim's project, what the text calls me'orot — lights, luminaries — and specifically the lights "for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years." The sun that had been measured during the Age of Capricorn, whose radiation had been declared "good" at the opening of the creation account, now becomes a calendrical instrument. The constellations, which had been rotating overhead since before the Elohim arrived, are named, mapped, and incorporated into the working vocabulary of the project. Day 4 is the day the scientists formalize their relationship to the sky.

This reading is consistent with, and indeed required by, the continuity principle introduced in the previous chapter. The biological program that began in Scorpio does not pause while the scientists turn their attention to astronomy. The work of refining cellular synthesis techniques, of producing more complex plant forms, of slowly building up the foundation of a terrestrial ecosystem, continues uninterrupted throughout Libra. What Libra adds is not a replacement for the biological work but a support activity essential to it. The life the scientists are continuing to design will have to be adapted to the specific rotational, orbital, and seasonal rhythms of this planet. To do that adaptation well, the scientists must understand those rhythms in detail. Libra is the age in which that understanding is systematized.

II. The Verses

The Genesis text for Day 4 runs from verse 14 through verse 19, and it deserves to be quoted at length because it is more specific about function than the days that preceded it.

Vayomer Elohim yehi me'orot birqia ha'shamayim lehavdil bein ha'yom u'vein ha'laylah, ve'hayu le'otot u'le'mo'adim u'le'yamim ve'shanim. "And Elohim said: Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years." The verse continues with a functional purpose: ve'hayu li'me'orot birqia ha'shamayim le'ha'ir al ha'aretz, vayehi khen. "And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth; and it was so."

Four things are being named: otot (signs), mo'adim (seasons or appointed times), yamim (days), and shanim (years). The vocabulary is precise. Otot are signs — not decorative symbols, but indicators, markers, things that indicate something. Mo'adim are appointed times — specifically, in biblical Hebrew, the festivals and ritual appointments that a community keeps, though more generally any time that is marked out and held in common. Yamim are days in the terrestrial sense — the rotational unit of this planet. Shanim are years — the orbital unit.

The Raëlian source reads this passage as a direct statement of what the scientists needed the sky for. "By observing the stars and the sun they could measure the duration of the days, the months and the years on Earth. This helped them regulate their life on the new planet — so different from their own where days and years did not have the same duration. Research in astronomy enabled them to locate themselves precisely and to understand the Earth better." This is a compressed but specific description of an astronomical research program whose purpose is calibration: working out what a day is on this planet, what a year is, how they relate, what the lunar cycle looks like, what the stellar background does over time. For a civilization arriving from a planet with different rotational and orbital parameters, this calibration is not optional. It is fundamental.

The passage continues with what sounds, on the conventional reading, like a redundant specification: Vaya'as Elohim et shnei ha'me'orot ha'gedolim, et ha'ma'or ha'gadol le'memshelet ha'yom, ve'et ha'ma'or ha'katon le'memshelet ha'laylah, ve'et ha'kochavim. "And Elohim made the two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; and also the stars." The two great lights — the sun and the moon — are given functions: the sun rules the day, the moon rules the night. This is sometimes read as a polemic against Mesopotamian religious systems in which the sun and moon were worshipped as gods, with Genesis demoting them to mere functionaries. The Raëlian reading does not contest the polemic but adds a more technical dimension: "ruling" here means regulating, establishing the dominant periodicity of the terrestrial day and the terrestrial night respectively. The sun's period regulates the daylight cycle. The moon's period — more complex, because the moon's apparent position depends on its orbital motion combined with the earth's rotation — regulates the night cycle and the longer monthly period that neither the day nor the year captures.

The final two verses of Day 4 record the setting-in-place of the lights and the approval. Vayiten otam Elohim birqia ha'shamayim le'ha'ir al ha'aretz, ve'li'mshol ba'yom u'va'laylah u'le'havdil bein ha'or u'vein ha'hoshekh, vayar Elohim ki tov. "And Elohim set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness; and Elohim saw that it was good." Vayehi erev vayehi voker yom revi'i. "And there was evening, and there was morning: a fourth day."

The verb in "Elohim set them" — vayiten, "gave" or "placed" — is interesting. It is not the same verb used for the earlier creation acts. The sun and the moon and the stars are not being brought into being; they are being placed into a function. The Hebrew preserves, in its verb choice, the distinction that the Raëlian reading makes explicit: these celestial bodies are not new, but their functional role in the Elohim's project is.

III. What Astronomy Was For

The scientists' astronomical work in Libra was, on the reading this corpus adopts, instrumental rather than contemplative. It served the project. It is worth spelling out what it served, because the details reveal something about what the Elohim were doing that might otherwise be missed.

Consider first the problem of calibration to local time. The Elohim had arrived from a world whose rotational period, orbital period, and axial tilt were different from Earth's. Their biology — the biology of their own bodies — was adapted to their home planet's rhythms. Their circadian cycles, their metabolic schedules, their reproductive timing, their sleep patterns, all of these were tuned to a day-length and a year-length that were not Earth's. Operating on Earth required adaptation. Some of this adaptation could be handled by environmental control within the bases: artificial lighting on their native schedule, interior climates matched to their native conditions. But personnel had to go outside the bases, and when they did, they needed to function on terrestrial time. Knowing precisely what terrestrial time was — down to the second, the hour, the day, the month, the year — was therefore a prerequisite for operating on the surface of the planet at all. The astronomy of Libra produced this knowledge.

Consider second the problem of calibrating the biology to local time. The plants of Scorpio were already responsive to daily and seasonal cycles, because the Scorpio teams had presumably modeled these cycles from the measurements made in Capricorn and had designed the plants accordingly. But the full set of parameters — the exact relationship between the rotational period and the orbital period, the precise axial tilt and its consequences for seasonal variation at different latitudes, the lunar influence on tidal patterns, the precessional motion that would shift the stellar background over the course of the project — required longer observation than the preparatory ages had afforded. Libra is the age in which those parameters are nailed down to high precision, and the biological program is recalibrated accordingly. Plants bred in early Scorpio, on provisional parameters, can be refined in late Libra on definitive ones. The animals that will appear in the next age are already being designed during Libra using the refined calendrical data. Every subsequent organism benefits from the astronomical work done in this age.

Consider third the problem of navigation. Interstellar travel requires a stable reference frame, and for the Elohim operating between their home world and Earth, the most natural reference frame is astronomical. They need to know, to high precision, the positions of stars as seen from both endpoints, the lines of sight between them, the transit corridors. A spacecraft leaving Earth for the home world has to aim at a precise point in the sky, and the target of that aim shifts continuously as the Earth orbits the sun and rotates on its axis. Knowing exactly where to aim, at any moment, is an astronomical problem. Libra is the age in which the necessary catalogues and procedures are developed.

Consider fourth the problem of long-term orientation. The precessional motion of the Earth's axis — the slow wobble that produces the 2,160-year shift of the vernal equinox through the zodiac — has a period of approximately 25,920 years. For a project that will last several such ages, the scientists need to understand this motion precisely, because it changes the observable sky in ways that have practical consequences. Their navigation references will drift. Their seasonal calibrations will need periodic adjustment. The positions of their satellites relative to the stellar background will shift. All of this is manageable, but only if it is understood, and understanding it requires the kind of sustained observation that only a long-duration project can afford. Libra is the age in which the precession itself — the phenomenon that gives the entire Wheel of Heaven its structure — is characterized in sufficient detail to be used as a chronometer for the project's own duration.

None of this is extravagant speculation. All of it follows directly from the combination of three facts that the source supplies: that the scientists came from elsewhere, that they were conducting a project of multi-millennial duration, and that they cared about doing the biology properly. An astronomy sufficient to serve these purposes is not optional. It is required. Libra is the age in which it is conducted at scale.

IV. The Observation Infrastructure

To do astronomy of the kind the preceding section describes, one needs observatories. The source does not describe them in detail. It is worth considering what must have been in place.

An observatory for a calibration project of this scope is not a single instrument at a single location. It is a distributed network. The scientists needed measurements taken at multiple latitudes, because latitudinal variation in solar elevation and in polar-star positions is itself a key parameter. They needed measurements taken over long periods, because the phenomena they were characterizing — the orbital year, the precessional cycle, the lunar nodal cycle — operate on timescales that require decades or centuries of observation to pin down. They needed measurements coordinated across the network, so that events at one site could be correlated with events at another. And they needed data archives — records maintained over many generations, in formats that successive cohorts of observers could read and extend.

The geography in which this network was deployed was not the geography we know. The supercontinent that had been raised during the Age of Sagittarius was, at this stage of its existence, a young landmass whose topography bore little resemblance to the continents we inhabit now. The major mountain ranges of the modern world — the Himalayas, the Andes, the Alps, the Rockies — are all products of tectonic processes that postdate this age by a substantial margin, and most of them are products of the continental drift that will follow the breakup of the supercontinent in a much later event this corpus will address in its proper place. The Libra-era supercontinent had mountains, but they were the older, more eroded kind — craton interiors, volcanic uplands, the slow-grown features of a relatively quiescent continental surface. The peaks were probably modest by modern standards. The named ranges that will later become culturally famous as sacred mountains and as the dwellings of gods had not yet formed.

The observatory sites, therefore, were somewhere other than where later tradition would place them. The Elohim established their bases at whatever combination of latitude, elevation, atmospheric clarity, and geological stability the available geography offered. The selection would have been done during the Capricorn survey, when the scientists were evaluating the planet as a whole, and the selected sites would have been optimal for the geography that then existed. We do not know where these sites were. The continental drift that followed the breakup of the supercontinent has moved and reshaped whatever surface features the Libra-era observatories sat upon, and any physical remains of the original installations have had more than fifteen thousand years in which to be buried, eroded, submerged, or transported by tectonic motion to locations that bear no obvious relation to their original positions.

The absence of modern-style high peaks imposes a constraint worth naming. Ground-based astronomy benefits from elevation because atmospheric turbulence degrades observational precision, and reducing the column of atmosphere between the instrument and its target is a straightforward way to improve the data. A civilization whose home world had high peaks, or whose prior astronomical practice had relied on them, would have felt the relative flatness of the Libra-era supercontinent as a limitation. It is likely, therefore, that the ground-based component of the Libra astronomical network relied more heavily on instrumental sophistication than on geographic elevation, and that the orbital component — the satellites placed during the Capricorn survey, which would have continued to operate through Libra — carried a larger fraction of the observational load than might otherwise have been the case. This is a reasonable inference from the combination of two known features of the project: that the scientists had interstellar-grade instrumentation available to them, and that the topography they were working with was not ideal for traditional ground-based astronomy. They adapted.

The astronomical knowledge developed during Libra was preserved, on the Wheel of Heaven reading, by successive generations of scientists working within the sustained program, and some of it was eventually transmitted to the humans who would be created in the Age of Leo. Whatever physical observatories existed during Libra are, in our time, gone. What survived, in fragmentary form, is the knowledge itself — the stellar catalogues, the understanding of precession, the calendrical systems that would later appear in the astronomical traditions of certain ancient civilizations. The connection between those later traditions and the original Libra work is not a matter of the survival of specific sites or specific instruments. It is a matter of the survival of the underlying astronomical understanding, transmitted through intermediaries whose own chapters lie ahead in this corpus.

A Note on the Moon

The preceding sections have treated the sun, the moon, and the stars as though their presence above the Earth during the Age of Libra were equally uncontroversial. For the sun and the stars, this is reasonable: these are objects older than the Earth itself, and their presence during the creation sequence is not in serious question. For the moon, the case is different, and it is worth registering the difference explicitly rather than letting it pass.

The moon is, by any reasonable accounting, anomalous. Its size relative to its primary is unusually large for a planetary satellite, so large that the Earth-moon system is sometimes described in astronomical literature as a double planet rather than a planet with a moon. Its orbit is almost perfectly circular, which is unusual. Its angular diameter as seen from Earth is, to a precision that has struck many observers as striking, equal to the angular diameter of the sun — which is the mathematical condition required for total solar eclipses of the kind this planet uniquely experiences. Its density is lower than that of the Earth, suggesting a different composition or a different internal structure, and in some analyses of the Apollo-era seismic data, the moon has appeared to ring in ways that would be more consistent with a partly hollow body than with a fully solid one. The gravitational mapping of the lunar surface in the late 1960s, carried out by Muller and Sjogren at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, identified mass concentrations beneath the large circular maria that have never been fully accounted for; the same mapping identified at least one pronounced negative mass concentration — a region where the subsurface density appears to be substantially lower than the surrounding rock, suggesting either a void or a cavity whose origin is unknown. None of these observations, taken individually, requires an unconventional explanation. Taken together, they constitute a pattern that the standard giant-impact hypothesis for the moon's origin has not fully resolved.

There is, alongside the physical anomaly literature, a mythological one. Several ancient traditions preserve the memory of a time when the Earth had no moon. The most well-documented of these is Greek. The pre-Hellenic inhabitants of Arcadia, the Pelasgians, were known by a specific epithet: Proselenoi, from pro ("before") and Selene ("the moon") — "those who were before the moon." The term is not obscure. It is attested by Hippys of Rhegium in the fifth century BCE, by Aristotle, by Apollonius of Rhodes, by Eudoxos of Cnidus, by Plutarch, by Hippolytus, by Ovid, by Statius, and by the satirist Lucian — who thought the claim ridiculous but recorded it anyway. The Pelasgians held, as part of their cultural identity, that they had inhabited Arcadia before there was a moon in the sky. Democritus and Anaxagoras taught the same thing. The claim appears in widely separated classical sources, across several centuries, treated consistently as a preserved tradition rather than as an invention.

The memory is not unique to Greece. Some Andean traditions preserve a similar structure, as do certain Siberian cosmological fragments, and — according to sources treated more cautiously by mainstream scholarship — some Central and South American indigenous accounts. The overlap is not proof of anything; parallel traditions can arise from parallel imagination. But the Arcadian memory in particular is not the kind of thing a pre-scientific culture would invent without reason. A culture that had always seen the moon would not describe itself as pre-moon. The claim implies a remembered distinction.

Taken together — the physical anomalies of the moon, and the mythological memory of its absence — a speculative reading becomes available: that the moon's arrival at its current position was itself an event, separable from the formation of the Earth, and that this event occurred within the span of human cultural memory rather than in the geologically deep past assumed by the giant-impact hypothesis. On such a reading, the moon would not have been present throughout the preparatory ages of this corpus. It would have arrived — or been placed — at some point whose dating this corpus is not equipped to specify, but which may well fall within the creation sequence itself, possibly in Libra or shortly after, as part of the astronomical and tidal configuration the Elohim were establishing for the long-term stability of the terrestrial environment.

This is speculation, clearly labeled. The source material does not confirm it. The corpus takes the classical Raëlian account as canonical, and that account does not address the moon's origin. But the observation is worth registering, because the Proselenoi memory — preserved across so many classical sources with such consistency — is not the kind of detail a serious reader of ancient traditions can in good conscience ignore. The moon may have always been there. It may not have been. The question remains open, and the Wheel of Heaven will return to it in a later chapter.

V. Parallel Work: The Quiet Building of the Ground

Running alongside the astronomical work, as the continuity principle requires, the biological program continued at its own pace. It is worth dwelling on what this parallel work looked like, because the conventional reading of Genesis — in which each day's work is a discrete operation completed within that day — produces the wrong picture of what Libra was.

Libra was not a pause in the biological program. It was an age in which the biological program ran in parallel with a significant new program — the astronomy — and in which both programs informed each other. And the biological program, during Libra, was mostly concerned with the slow, unglamorous, foundational work that had to be completed before any of the more visible biological operations of the subsequent ages could proceed.

Consider what a supercontinent covered in the plants of Scorpio actually is, from an ecological standpoint. It is a landscape in which photosynthesis is occurring at planetary scale, producing oxygen and organic carbon. But it is not yet a landscape in which the organic carbon is being recycled. Plants grow. Plants die. Plant material accumulates. In the absence of decomposers, this material would simply pile up, locking the carbon it contains into inert biomass that the rest of the system could not use. For a functional biosphere, the recycling apparatus has to be in place. The decomposers have to exist.

The decomposer community is not a small or incidental part of a biosphere. It is, by biomass and by metabolic throughput, one of the largest and most complex biological communities on any planet that has one. It consists of saprotrophic fungi, whose hyphal networks permeate soils and dead plant matter and whose extracellular enzymes break down lignin and cellulose that nothing else can digest. It consists of bacterial communities of bewildering diversity, specialists in every stage of decomposition from the first breakdown of fresh tissue to the final mineralization of organic residues. It consists of protozoa, which regulate the bacterial populations and transfer nutrients up the trophic ladder. It consists of nematodes — microscopic roundworms — which are present in enormous numbers in any functional soil and which perform a variety of ecological roles from direct decomposition to predation on smaller organisms. It consists of annelids — the earthworms and their relatives — whose burrowing and ingestion of soil material mechanically restructures the ground, mixes organic matter into mineral soil, and produces the substrate that supports further biological activity. And it consists of the early arthropods — insects, mites, springtails, and others — whose role in breaking down larger debris and in circulating nutrients is essential to the functioning of any terrestrial ecosystem.

None of this existed at the beginning of Libra. All of it had to be created. The scientists had to design, synthesize, test, and deploy every category of decomposer organism, in the correct order, at the correct scale, in the correct geographic distribution, to produce a functional decomposition ecosystem beneath the plant cover that already existed above it. And they had to design these organisms not as isolated species but as members of functional communities, in which the output of one organism became the input of another, in which the symbiotic relationships — the mycorrhizal associations between fungal hyphae and plant roots, the gut symbioses between termites and cellulose-digesting bacteria, the nitrogen-fixing bacterial associations with legume roots — were established in advance and worked from the first introduction.

The building of the soil itself was a consequence of this work. At the beginning of Libra, the supercontinent's surface was largely bare rock and sediment, with a thin layer of plant material accumulating above it. By the end of Libra, it was soil — living soil, structured soil, soil that contained humus and mineral particles in complex aggregate structures, soil that retained water and nutrients, soil that could support the larger and more demanding plants of the later ecosystem and the animals that would eventually feed on them. Humus does not form quickly. Even under ideal conditions and with a full decomposer community present, the production of soil from the breakdown of plant material takes centuries. To produce the depth and richness of soil required to support a continental ecosystem, at planetary scale, requires more time than a single human lifespan can encompass. The 2,160 years of Libra, combined with the parallel work that had been underway since early Scorpio, were barely sufficient.

This is the unglamorous work of Libra. It is not described in Genesis because Genesis has no vocabulary for it — the biblical text gives only the visible milestones, and the building of soil and the establishment of decomposer communities are invisible by design. But they were happening, continuously, throughout Libra, in the same laboratories and under the same teams that were conducting the astronomical calibration work. By the end of the age, the supercontinent was not just green. It was alive, in the deeper sense that the ground itself had become biological — populated at every scale from the microbial to the invertebrate, recycling its own nutrients, building its own fertility, preparing itself to support the sensing and moving organisms that the next age would introduce.

The factional teams introduced in the Scorpio chapter continue to operate through Libra. Some teams are more focused on the astronomical program; others remain focused on the biological; most do both, as the disciplinary separation that our own civilization has come to take for granted is not present in the Elohim's practice. The convocations continue. The results are compared. The program is coordinated. The long rhythm of the project, begun in Capricorn and continued through Sagittarius and Scorpio, continues through Libra without discontinuity.

VI. The Text and Its Signals

One feature of the Day 4 account deserves remark, and it is a feature that the Raëlian reading explains with particular ease.

The Genesis text for Day 4 is unusually specific about function. The days before and after it describe operations — the earth brought forth grass, the waters brought forth creatures — in language that foregrounds the outputs. Day 4 foregrounds the uses: le'havdil, to divide; le'otot u'le'mo'adim u'le'yamim ve'shanim, for signs and seasons and days and years; le'ha'ir al ha'aretz, to give light upon the earth; li'mshol, to rule. The verbs are all purposive. The text seems to be telling us not what was made, but what what was there was made for. On the conventional reading, this is peculiar — if Day 4 is the day the sun and moon are created, why would the text emphasize their functions rather than their making? On the Raëlian reading, the peculiarity dissolves. Day 4 is not the day the sun and moon are created; it is the day they are put to use. The text emphasizes function because function is what the day is about.

A further detail worth noting: the Hebrew text specifies that the lights are birqia ha'shamayim, "in the firmament of the heavens" — using the same word, raqia, that was introduced in the atmospheric work of Day 2. This is consistent. The raqia of Day 2 was the cleared atmospheric band between the surface waters and the cloud layer above. The lights of Day 4 are placed in this cleared band, which is to say, they are visible through it, from the surface. Before the atmospheric work of Sagittarius, the sun and the stars would not have been visible from the surface through the dense cloud cover. After the atmospheric work, they are. The text preserves, in its choice of preposition and its reuse of the earlier term, the logic that the astronomical integration of Day 4 was made possible by the atmospheric preparation of Day 2. The lights become functional on Day 4 because Day 2 made them observable from below.

Finally, the approval at the end of Day 4 — vayar Elohim ki tov — is the formulaic one. No doubled approval here. The astronomical integration, substantial though it was, did not rise to the level that required the doubled formula seen on Day 3. This is consistent with the reading that Day 3's doubling reflected the combination of two major operations (continental completion and biological beginning), whereas Day 4 is one large operation of a single type. The grammar of the text continues to behave as the Raëlian reading predicts.

VII. What Libra Is

It is worth stating plainly what the Age of Libra is within the larger sequence, before the chapter closes.

Libra is the age of astronomical integration. It is the age in which the scientists complete the calibration work that the preparatory ages had begun, and in which the sky above this planet becomes a fully integrated part of their project — for timekeeping, for navigation, for biological calibration, and for long-term orientation across the full duration of the program that remains ahead of them. The work is not contemplative. It is instrumental. The Elohim were not star-gazers in the sense of aesthetic appreciation, though they were surely capable of that. They were operators who needed their instruments calibrated, and the sky is an instrument they could not do without.

Libra is also the age in which the functional character of the base sites becomes fully apparent. Observatory sites, selected during the Capricorn survey for reasons of latitude, elevation, and atmospheric clarity, become working astronomical stations during Libra. The specific locations of these sites on the original supercontinent are not recoverable to us, because the continental drift that followed the supercontinent's breakup has erased or relocated whatever physical markers they left behind. But the astronomical knowledge developed at them survived in fragmentary form, transmitted through later generations, and will eventually appear in the traditions of the ancient human cultures that are yet to come.

Libra is, equally, the age in which the biological program continues its slow and foundational work. Plants diversify. Decomposers are introduced. Fungi spread their hyphal networks. Earthworms and the first arthropods begin the long work of restructuring the soil. Humus accumulates. The ground of the continent becomes, over two thousand years, a living medium capable of supporting the larger life forms that the subsequent ages will introduce. This work is not dramatic. It is not recorded in Genesis, which has no vocabulary for the microbial and invertebrate substrate of a biosphere. But it is happening, continuously, across every hectare of the supercontinent, and without it nothing that comes after would be possible. Libra is the age of the ground.

The next age is the age in which the first animal life appears — in the oceans, in the air, and on the land. It is the age of fish, of birds, and of a category of large terrestrial creatures that the source calls dragons and that modern science calls dinosaurs. The connection between those last two groups is, on the Wheel of Heaven reading, not incidental: modern paleontology has established a genuine ancestral relationship between dinosaurs and birds, such that birds are properly understood as the surviving branch of the dinosaur lineage. The source's placement of birds and dinosaurs in the same creative age is consistent with this finding, and we will return to it. That age is the Age of Virgo, and it is the subject of the chapter that follows.