The outline for Velikovsky's revised chronology was published in 1945 as a booklet, Theses for the Reconstruction of Ancient History. Later, a more detailed account of about half of this work would be published as a full book form, covering the period from the Exodus to the time of the pharaoh Akhnaton. 89
Implications of Catastrophism
For Velikovsky this was only a beginning. The Exodus had been synchronized with the collapse of the Middle Kingdom at around 1450 b.c. However else the plagues and other disruptions attending these events might have been interpreted at the time, the most likely explanation was that they coincided with a period of natural disasters. This invited the questions, how widespread were they? and what caused them? Starting with the regions adjoining Egypt and Israel, Velikovsky began investigating the histories and received mythologies of other ancient cultures for indications of parallel events. It became apparent that the phenomenon had affected not just the entire Middle East but places far remote from it as well. In fact, it showed signs of being nothing less than a global catastrophe. Further, it hadn't been the first time such a thing had happened, and neither was it the last. 90
The first affliction that the Bible describes as befalling the Egyptians was the rivers turning to blood and there being blood throughout the land, both of which Ipuwer echoed. Babylonian myth tells of the land being covered by the blood of the slain heavenly monster, Tiamat. Likewise, those of the Asiatic Tartars and the Central American Maya relate sagas of the world turning red, while the Finns say it was sprinkled with pink milk.
Then came "hail." The word chosen by the earlier translators was one that we associate with icy pellets and cold rains, but this might be because they could imagine little else falling from the sky. The original Hebrew word, barad, means hot rocks. Ipuwer describes falling stones and fire, which in a day, he says, turned all the fields to wastelands. Similar accounts of red-hot stones falling in torrents, frequently accompanied by crashing thunder and showers of a blazing, sticky substance that ran along the ground causing widespread death and destruction, appear in Buddhist texts on world cycles, Siberian legends, and tales handed down in places as far apart as Mexico and Siberia. The same kind of story can be told relating days of darkness so intense that people were unable to move from the spot they were at, worldwide hurricanes that swept away towns and forests, and earthquakes devastating entire regions.
According to Velikovsky, the familiar interpretation of the tenth plague as the smiting by the Angel of Death of the Egyptian "firstborn" (Hebrew bkhor), which of course would require some supernatural agency, arises from a corruption of bchor, which means "chosen," or high-born. 91 Hence the reason why the Israelites fared better was probably that as slaves they lived in dwellings made of reeds and clay, whereas the brick and stone houses of the Egyptians were more susceptible to collapse by earthquake. Eminently reasonable in my opinion.
Finally, there are suggestions that the "parting of the waters" during the pursuit by the Egyptians could have been the local aspect of a tidal disruption of global dimensions. Chinese annals tell of a time when the world was in flames, after which the water of the oceans was piled to enormous heights and swept across the continent to fill the valleys between the mountains, taking decades to drain away. The traditions of the people of Peru hold that after five days of darkness the ocean left the shore and broke over the land with a terrible din, changing the appearance of the surface permanently. The Choctaw Indians of Oklahoma (not their original habitat) relate a time when the world was plunged in darkness until light appeared in the north; but the light turned out to be mountain-high waves of water rapidly approaching.
Venus and the Cosmic Connection
Repeatedly, these calamities were attributed to a malicious deity—almost invariably a goddess—coming to wreak havoc upon the Earth. Although the actual names naturally varied, the deity involved turned out time and time again to be the one that cultures worldwide associated with the object we know today as the planet Venus. But they didn't talk about it as if it were a planet; they described it as a comet. A Chinese text describes Venus as spanning the heavens, rivaling the Sun in brightness. Mexican astronomers referred to it as "the star that smokes," while on the opposite side of the world the same theme is found in the Hindu Vedas, the Hebrew Talmud, and the Egyptian description of Sekhmet. The Aztecs called Venus the "heart" of Quetzlcoatl, which in turn means "plumed serpent," with feathers that signify fire. The serpent or dragon is one of the most common figures used in the ancient world to signify "comet," examples being the Greek Typhon, Egyptian Set, Babylonian Tiamat, Hindu Vrta, all of whom raged across the sky and brought destruction upon the world.
The word "comet" comes from the Greek coma, meaning hair, and among ancient astronomers referred to a star with hair, or a beard. The same appellation was given to Venus. One of the Mexican names for Venus was "the mane"; the Peruvian name, chaska, means "wavy-haired"; the Arabs call Venus "the one with hair." One of the most vivid comet images is the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, recognized universally as representing Venus. Ishtar is described as being "the bright torch of heaven," "clothed in fire," and the "fearful dragon," while her heavenly manifestation is known as the "bearded star."
Another widespread association of Venus was with the figure of a cow or a bull, still recalled in many religious rites and cults today. If Venus did indeed once possess a cometary coma, the illuminated portions would at times be seen as a gigantic crescent in the same way as the crescent forms of planets and of the Moon, especially during close approaches to Earth. The curving shapes sprouting from the body of the comet would be suggestive of a bull's head and horns.
Velikovsky discovered that the Hindu records from before the second millennium b.c. spoke of four visible planets, not five, omitting Venus. The Babylonians, who were also meticulous in their observations, likewise made no mention of Venus in their tables of planets. In Greek mythology, Venus was the goddess Pallas Athene, unique among the deities in being born during the time of human history and not present, like all the other gods, from the beginning. The hymn dedicated to her by Homer describes Pallas Athene as being born from the head of Zeus, i.e., Jupiter. And once again mythologies of other peoples, too, carry accounts of the birth of their deity that corresponds to Venus, but not Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Mercury, or any of the other gods.
In Greek legend, Athene was attacked by a monster, Pallas-Typhon, whom she fought and killed. Likewise, the newborn Egyptian Horus battled with the serpent-monster, Seth, as did the Hindu Vishnu, also a newcomer to the celestial family, born of the many-armed Shiva. Horus was originally the Egyptian name for Jupiter, apparently transferred to the new object that became supreme in the sky—possibly due to some initial confusion as to which was which. The same thing happened in the Babylonian version, where Ishtar was originally Jupiter and became Venus, Jupiter being renamed Marduk.
Many ancient traditions divide the history of the world into a series of ages each ending in calamity, the birth of the new age being attended by altered appearances of the heavens. Early astronomers diligently recorded the motions of celestial bodies, looking for changes that might signal coming destruction and the end of the current age. The times following the above happenings saw repeated allusions to the motion of the Sun and the stars being reversed, and north and south changing place. Both the Ipuwer and the Ermitage papyruses speak of the land turning upside down and south becoming north. Herodotus, in his visit to Egypt in the second half of the fifth century b.c., was told by priests about a former era when the Sun rose where it now sets and set where it now rises. Plato and Seneca wrote about the same thing. The architect of Hatshepsut's tomb included a stone panel from an earlier age showing the celestial constellations upside down. Similar accounts are found in the Hebrew Talmud and the Islamic Koran; with the Chinese, whose zodiac signs also have the strange property of proceeding in a retrograde direction; and in the written or oral myths of Greeks, Syrians, Aztec, Maya, Mexican Indians, Greenland E
skimos, and tribes of western Brazil and the Indian Ocean Andaman Islands, to name a few.
Velikovsky's conclusion, then, was that Venus is not billions of years old as believed according to orthodox theory, but a young object ejected from Jupiter within the span of recorded human history. In the course of evolving into the planet that we see today it had passed close enough to bring death, terror, and destruction on an immense scale, and disturbed the motion of the Earth itself. This carried the impertinent suggestion that the ancients might not have been so facile as to spend lifetimes inventing fairytales and building imposing monuments to them, but might actually have known what they were talking about and had something important to say; that the "mythologies" dismissed by the authorities of today as fanciful fictions could in fact have been attempts by nontechnical people to describe events that they actually witnessed. This would mean, of course, that the comforting picture of a safe and secure Solar System acting out its predictable cycles with minor variations, arrived at by projecting back today's quiescent conditions, was wrong; the Solar System could be a very violent and unpredictable place indeed. But Velikovsky had already shown from his historical revisions what he thought of conventionally accepted pictures of things if what appeared to be the facts indicated otherwise.
What first suggested a cosmic connection was a passage that Velikovsky came across in the Book of Joshua, describing what sounded like an intense meteorite shower causing widespread destruction before the famous incident where the Sun "stood still." (The meteorites killed more of the enemy than Joshua's soldiers did.) This led to the discovery of the wider pattern of cataclysms associated with Venus and suggested the possibility that the events at the time of the Exodus, fifty-two years previously, might have been an early instance of the same thing. Velikovsky's eventual conclusion was that Venus had come close to Earth on both occasions, although the second encounter was farther away and less violent. Maya records also tell of a time of destruction coming fifty years after an earlier, greater catastrophe. Interestingly, their account talks about the night being abnormally long.
Thereafter, priests and astronomers everywhere followed the movements of Venus relentlessly for signs of its returning again. Whole temples and cults were devoted to worshiping and appeasing the deity that it was taken to be, invariably regarded as violent and wrathful. A fifty-year cycle between times of hardship and destruction is recounted in the traditions and records of cultures the world over. The natives of pre-Columbian Mexico observed a ceremony of congregating every fifty-two years to await a catastrophe, fearful that the Sun would fail to rise again. They watched for the appearance of Venus, and when the world didn't end, celebrated with bonfires and sacrifices the new period of grace that had been granted. The Israelite festival of the Jubilee was proclaimed every fifty years as a time for leaving the land fallow, releasing slaves, and returning land to the original owners as a sign of repentance in preparation for the Day of Atonement.
The Universal War God: Mars
This pattern continued for something like seven centuries. Then a striking change took place in the order of precedence the ancients gave to their celestial gods: Venus ceased being the most feared object in the heavens, the destroyer and bringer of chaos, and was replaced in this role by Mars, universally acclaimed as the war god.
Mars had not figured as a significant figure in the celestial pantheon before the eighth century b.c. It was known, of course, and its motions tabled, but it seems generally to have been considered a minor player. Then, suddenly, it achieved prominence. This was not a period shrouded in the distant past, but a time when observations and written records had become more refined and extensive. Mythologies abound with accounts of battles between Venus and Mars, one of the most well known being Homer's Iliad, in which heavenly deities influenced the fortunes of the combatants in the ten-year siege of Troy, Athene siding with the Greeks, while the Trojans were backed by Ares, the Greek name for Mars. Interestingly, this practically mirrors the situation on the other side of the world in the wars between the Aztecs and the Toltecs, where Mars rooted for the former, and Venus, the latter. (Once again this questions conventional chronology, making the American civilizations much older than is generally held. Of which, more later.)
Following these encounters, Mars continued to menace Earth periodically for about ninety years, bringing earthquakes, floods, and times of desolation, though never with a ferocity rivaling the first two visits of Venus. This was the age of prophets, who developed reputations for knowing when hard times were ahead; it could also be the source of the astrological belief in celestial events portending disasters and affecting lives down on Earth—it would be a peculiar notion to arise today, with the planets being insignificant pinpoints. The prophet Amos predicted destruction that arrived in 747 b.c., but didn't live to see it because he seized the opportunity to link the event to morality and warn people to mend their ways, so they killed him. Amos's cue might have been an encounter that conceivably took place in 776 b.c., the year the Olympic games were founded—possibly in commemoration of it.
Isaiah, Joel, and Micah all had their turns until 687 b.c., which marked the final Mars approach. This was the year in which the army of Sennacherib was "smote" in the night, while preparing to attack Jerusalem, by something usually translated as "blast" that left 185,000 dead in the morning. Velikovsky guesses at an interplanetary electrical discharge. The Hebrew Talmud and Midrash date this event as the first night of the Passover, which would make it March 23. Chinese sources ascribed to Confucius, and also Chinese annals referring to the tenth year of the Wu Dynasty under Emperor Kwei pinpoint this date as a time when "the five planets went out of their courses. In the night, stars fell like rain. The Earth shook." 92
Before this time, the calendars of the Chinese, Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, Hindus, Chaldeans, Assyrians, and Hebrews, as well as the Incas of Peru and the Mayas of the Yucatan had all shown a year of 360 days. The modern year of 365 1/4 days was introduced subsequently. Following this final event, Mars and Venus retreated to take up their stations as we know them today. And the gods, their anger, and their caprices faded from being a vivid and terrifying reality in human affairs, to a realm regarded these days as imaginative fancy and superstition.
Worlds in Collision
The End of Everything You Thought You Knew
After something like ten years of research into the subject, Velikovsky's account was published as Worlds in Collision, which appeared in 1950. Its essential thesis can now be summarized in modern terms as follows.
Some time before the middle of the second millennium b.c., a white-hot, fiery object was ejected from Jupiter. For an indeterminate period, possibly centuries, it moved as a giant comet on a highly elongated orbit that passed close around the Sun and intersected the orbit of the Earth. Eventually, around 1450 b.c., it emerged from perihelion—the point of closest approach to the Sun—on a path that brought it to an encounter with Earth.
Approaching tail-first, it engulfed the Earth in the outer regions of its millions-of-miles-long coma, from which a rain of caustic, asphyxiating dust filtered down through the atmosphere, turning red the landscape everywhere, and choking rivers and lakes with dead fish. As the Earth moved deeper into the tail, this intensified into rains of red-hot gravel and meteorites, destroying crops, livestock, and towns, and laying waste whole regions. Hydrocarbon gases torn from Jupiter's atmosphere, unable to ignite in the oxygen-free space environment, mixed with Earth's atmosphere to form explosive mixtures that fell as flaming naphtha, causing fires that burned for years and smoke that darkened the entire surface. Unburned petroleum sank into the ground in enormous quantities forming broad swathes across the planet.
As the two bodies closed under their mutual gravitational grip, volcanoes, earthquakes, tectonic upheavals, and hurricane-force winds rent the Earth's surface, while the oceans piled up into huge tides that surged across continents. Through the pall of dust and smoke, the comet loomed with the appearance of
a monstrous dragon spitting fire in the form of electrical discharges between its head and writhing coma arms of charged plasma, and then down upon the surface of the Earth itself as the magnetospheres of the two bodies met. The forces of mutual gyration eventually tore the intruder away to retreat back toward the outer Solar System, in the process of which the Earth turned over to emerge with inverted poles, and its orbit and spin perturbed. Velikovsky speculated that given the electrically active condition of the ionized plasma enveloping and still forming much of the bulk of the incandescent proto-planet, electromagnetic forces probably played a significant part in this.
Having thus interacted, the Earth and Venus moved in a resonant pattern that brought them into proximity again every fifty years or so, though with the closeness of the encounters reducing. This continued for about seven hundred years until Venus's still-eccentric orbit brought it close to Mars, which in those days was nearer to Earth. Here, Mars and Venus exchanged roles. Venus receded to become no-longer threatening, while Mars was diverted into an Earth-encounter that changed Earth's motion again and commenced another series of destructive interactions until Mars finally settled into the orbit it describes today. The close approaches of Earth and Mars every fifteen years, the similar tilts of their axes, and the almost identical lengths of their days could, Velikovsky suggests, be remnants of the period of repeated interaction between them.
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